Speaking of The Nothing and The Nothing that Speaks

A conversation between Shakespeare’s King Lear and Heidegger’s What is Metaphysics?

Referat Paper

John Ossa
ID. 336207832

Tel Aviv University

Department of English and American Studies

Shakespearean Tragedy- Yearly MA Seminar

Dr. Noam Reisner

September 18, 2016

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In his well-known work Being and Time, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger stated

that perhaps our most human condition consisted in being born to die; or, in other words, in

being for death. It is not that we, as human beings, are simply addressed to meet death as

empty fatality (the mere end of existence,) but yes that we are all involved in facing death

as the limiting extreme on the other side of being born. As a matter of fact, according to his

thought, “once we are born we are old enough to die” (229). Existence comes then to be

regarded as the happening between two defined momenta: origin and destination. What

unfolds in between is the frame of time to be explored and comprehended. Heidegger will

immediately explain how “our being (our existence) is constantly oscillating between two

nothings: “the first, when we were not; the last, when we won’t longer be” (230). As being

addressed to death, we may certainly find reasons to grasp the meaning of having had a

starting point, but also to strive comprehending the tensional thread connecting us to our

end. Our goal would therefore be aimed at consciously transiting that oscillation between

‘nothings’. It was 1927 when Heidegger wrote these claims.

Three centuries before, and being staged by The King’s Men Company, around

December 1606, Shakespeare’s King Lear somehow anticipated the same Heideggerian

situation. Not many lines after the opening of the play, the character of King Lear reflected

upon the limiting condition of time:

Meantime we shall express our darker purpose.

……………………..; and ‘tis our fast intent

To shake all cares and business from our age,

Conferring them on younger strengths, while we

Unburdened crawl toward death. (1.1. 35; 37-40)

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Lear is certainly acknowledging how being addressed to death is an inevitable stage of

living; and to face it one needs to consciously be disposed. The passage of existence itself

has been heavy enough to the extent of wishing to be ‘unburdened’, in order to at least

crawl, because walking straight has already become a hard task. More than a rational

comprehension of death as a common phenomenon and as the limit situation of existence,

Shakespeare, through Lear, portrays the weariness of interiority, framing this question in

the realm of feelings. Sensitivity here is unavoidably linked to thinking. It is the sensation

of contingency and brevity to provide the speaker with this kind of awareness that,

nevertheless obvious, still creates commotion and restlessness. Lear seems to remain with

open empty hands once the kingdom is divided. Only when the sensation of having nothing

starts its visit, the questioning about existence seems to emerge.

Starting this paper with these two considerations (to some point mirroring one

another,) intends to arouse a conversation between Heidegger and Shakespeare which I

found provocative and pertinent around the issue of ‘the nothing’, being it its gravitating

axe. The problem of death, both as an ontological question and a dramatic exploration,

marks only the station of departure. Much has been written about the issue of ‘nothing’ or

‘nothingness’ in Shakespeare’s King Lear. My purpose here rather relies on retrieving

Heidegger’s and Shakespeare’s voices and let them speak about the intricacies of existential

matter. Even if Being and Time was presented at the beginning because of its relevance for

the question on death, Heidegger’s speaking work, however, will be his inaugural lecture at

Freiburg University on July 24th, 1929: What is Metaphysics?, where he more directly

addresses the ontological reflection about ‘the nothing’.

Defining ‘nothing’ is not pertinent nor desirable here, even if the composing

circumstances of this conversation might well help shape an idea. This paper rather seeks to
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at least portray how the tragic subject displayed by Shakespeare in King Lear meets the

subject in crisis suggested by Heidegger, through four specific approaches: death, the

affection to our senses, the questionings around identity and, eventually, the state of

‘nothingness’ itself.

Emptiness has to do with ‘nothingness’, in terms of non-possession, non-existence

(materially speaking). With his kingdom divided and distributed Lear remains in kind of

dispossession which allows in him a sense of void. The play will gradually draw Lear’s

process of diminishing, deterioration, emptying and reduction to the most basic stage of

humanity, to finally meet death enveloped in kind of existential nonsense. Both

Shakespeare’s and Heidegger’s idea certainly do not revolve around making sense or

finding reasons, but in maintaining the wondering condition above all. When the subject

stops his self- inquiries, there precisely starts the lost of his most transcendental condition.

What seems paradoxical is that getting into the transcendental entails having consciously

passed by the accidental, or, better said, the contingent. Heidegger states that “the

transcendence of the being is held out into the nothing, because being, itself, is essentially

finite. Being and the nothing do belong together.” (94)1

Witnessing Lear upon his death is letting ourselves be impacted by the very sense of

finitude and contingency at its most. Lear is now emptier and wearier. He has lost

everything and so walks into death:

And my poor fool is hanged. No, no, no life!

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life

And thou not breath at all? O thou’lt come no more,

1
From this quotation onwards, paging corresponds to Heidegger’s “What is Metaphysics?”
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Never, never, never, never, never.

[to Edgar]Pray you undo this button. Thank you, sir.

O, o, o, o.

Do you see this? Look on her: look, her lips,

Look there, look there! He dies. (5.3.304-9)

Lear appears here representing all possible deaths. Solitude and lack of support arrive when

losing his closest referential friend, the Fool, who connected him to his conscience and to a

world without malice. Now Lear feels stranded, being far from his most noble personal

component. Together with the Fool, and of enormous pain, comes the death of Cordelia,

several lines before (5.3.258). He actually addresses to her, like provoking a dialog which

won’t take place, revealing now the impossibility to speak, and to interact again with his

previous distant daughter, representing this way the death of the word, the death of

communication that allows existence. And with that, the death of affection and healthy

family ties. No roots are left. No descendants will come. No continuity is offered. It is the

death of the future as well. Lear just gets to desperately utter painful laments: “Never,

never, never, never, never” (307) and “O, o, o, o” (308) showing his tearing into pieces.

Self unity is no longer present. Cordelia’s lips are shut forever. Not for granted Shakespeare

provided this name for the only rescuing Lear’s daughter, related to emotions and feelings.

No words from ‘Corda=Heart’ will be pronounced again; that is, the world of sensitivity

has also found its end, leaving the subject at the mercy of pure rationality. She was the one

to save him from death (4.7.45), but Lear prefers to clearly walk towards that end, even if

loyalty and faithfulness were to redeem his deteriorated status. And finally, the death of

sight, the impossibility to see, which Lear remarks with his desperate insistence in

‘Looking’: First ‘on her’, then on ‘her lips’ and to close, on ‘there’. ‘There’ might well be
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considered as the horizon of death, the incoming end getting closer. Lear points at those

directions. And then he dies. Before this ultimate stage there is no other action than

surrendering existence, or in Heidegger’s words, “standing before the vertiginous edges of

the unknown, where the nothing is revealing itself” (95).

All in all, Lear does not arrive to his second ‘nothing’ completely unaware. He has

been stepping clearly through different stages of the process. Going backwards with the

play, in 4.6.128-9, he speaks of wiping his hand that “smells of mortality”; which is to say,

of finitude, of no longer power and majesty. It is the hand of a simple man who even if

aware of his royal possession now he has touched the fibers of his real human condition by

descending from the assumptions of immortal strength and will, and rather relying on the

naked truth of human life’s futile dimension.

Gloucester’s speech, earlier on in the play, also helps this consciousness of

temporary stability and how human machinery has turned out to be instrumental for death.

Intentions are therefore distorted, corrupting what could have been lively safe and sound:

“Machinations, hollowness, treachery and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our

graves” (1.2. 113-4). By the end of the play he also touches that sense of finitude and

deterioration, as the logical result of having been engaged in that dehumanizing spiral.

Blind and helpless, he can only exclaim before Edgar’s reviving intentions of lending him a

helping hand: “No further, sir; a man may rot even here” (5.2.8). The verb used is strong

enough like declaring life’s terminality. Getting rotted is speaking of a process of

deterioration, of losing one’s self dignity and identity (elements to be retrieved later in this

paper) that nevertheless is liable to be solved in Edgar’s words, like trying to pull out his

father from his prostration into sorrow and grief: “What, in ill thoughts again? Men must

endure […] Ripeness is all” (5.2.9;11). First he proposes questioning, shaking the subject in
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misfortune, and right after backs up his calling by affirming possibility (or denying

nothingness), with lucid hopeful terms to give new relevance: ‘endure’ and ‘ripeness’.

Gloucester’s and Edgar’s dialog in this scene represents the tension between life and death,

that according to Heidegger we may better define as “the tension between finitude and

transcendence” (93).

Getting back to Lear’s interventions, we have two of them to provide us with a last

consideration in approaching death. They have to do with death related to silence. Even if

slightly mentioned above, here, specifically, they give account of a more dangerous state of

nothingness: a world exhibiting oblivion, indifference and abandon. Lear also perceives it

as a fruitless world expressing sterility: “I know when one is dead and when one lives;

She’s dead as earth” (5.3.258). Shakespeare make this simile perfectly fit and shakes

accustomed comprehensions of earth. How can earth be synonym of death when it is

usually regarded as the living origin? That is the interesting question posed through Lear,

insofar it speaks of impossibility. Sterility is a sign of no offspring, and therefore of no

future. An earth as such cannot be sowed neither obviously harvested. Fruitlessness means

here nothingness. Together with that, a non speaking world is added to this situation. When

asking for his Fool, Lear gets no answer and adds: “Ho, I think the world’s asleep” (1.4.47).

Right from the first act Lear is aware of how wondering about life supposes a response. He

could strive for it, but it seems no one is ready to utter an answer. There is only silence

associated to sleep which is commonly understood as a kind of ‘death’. Therefore, a

dangerous silence which means absence of joy, taste, irony, questioning, embodied in the

persona of the Fool, starts to be shaped. It might lead to the very end. If he is absent it

means that also innocence, simplicity and honesty are absent as well. Here we are not

speaking of the silence for reflection and contemplation, as Heidegger might have wished
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for –in order to grasp hints of the importance of meeting ‘the nothing’,– but rather a

desolating and alienating silence responsible of superficiality and unawareness, creating a

sense of anxiety and despair. According to Heidegger anxiety “robs us from speech: all

utterance falls silent, giving way to a compulsive talk in order to fill with being; and then

getting to know what the nothing is about results once again postponed” (87).

To get acquainted with ‘the authentic nothing’ there should be created a space of

admiration-contemplation and of careful listening. A denying silence has already occupied

the terrain of a nourishing silence. Getting to our second approach, the deterioration of

senses, we find a passage where Lear, in order to rescue his daughter Cordelia from the

possibility of remaining isolated, poor, unmarried and dismissed, compels her to pronounce

a word of decision. She instead returns with: “Nothing, my lord” (1.1.87). The following

questions of Lear point at the need to break the unauthentic silence, opening new quests.

Lear responds his way: “Nothing?” (1.1.88) and she insists: “Nothing” (1.1.89). These three

‘nothings’ in a row are not written by Shakespeare without a purpose. It makes the

spectator hear ‘nothing’ as a recurring voice, or as if an echo would be reverberating,

remarking a clear centrality. This reiterative move is reinforced by another Lear’s assertion:

“How, nothing will come of nothing. Speak again” (1.1.90) Once again we are before a

tension which is sought and desired: speaking with a cause, after digesting silence, which

drives to considering ‘the being’ after experiencing ‘the nothing’ (the third approach we

will commit to). The tension is thus created –at least initially– by repetition. Repeating

means being conscious, paying attention to what is remarkable. Cordelia will eventually

speak; what matters though is watching her traversing the crisis of questioning herself. The

answer ‘nothing’ is not empty itself, to the extent that it could also mean comfort with ‘the
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nothing’, insofar that comfort is part of a process of insight and deepening into

consciousness.

Secondly, and other than the repetition, the ontological quest remains open with the implicit

interrogative in Lear’s affirmation: the question about the origin that does not address the

already created but the state of non-existence or, at least, of non-materiality (non-physical

representation). From ‘nothing’ either emerges only ‘nothing’ as a logical response. Lear

seems not to affirm a logical impossibility –which makes this passage even more

interesting– but rather a clear statement. If ‘the nothing’ is the outcome, be it welcomed (to

Heidegger’s mind, at least). ‘Nothing’ will be transformed in Cordelia’s lips into an

expression of emotional truth, which also interests Shakespeare who, nevertheless, keeps

the tension with ‘the nothing’ related to speech. Cordelia’s state of nothingness will then be

represented by her silence during three acts, whereas Lear –ever present– will endure

dialectical challenges between speaking-non speaking, seeing-non seeing, among others.

In 3.2.37-8, for example, Lear himself decides not to speak: “No, I will be the

pattern of all patience, I will say nothing”. After experiencing a physical storm, Lear now

faces an internal storm: that of elaborating his own process of emptying and reduction,

asking of him a complete different attitude. If formerly a vehement speaker, who decided to

take forward “darker purposes” and endeavor a battle, now it appears a quieter and

reflective subject. Together with Heidegger, what can be said here is that only “detaching

from public superficies of existence, we get next to the nothing. This is what could be

called nihilation, wherefrom negation springs and not otherwise” (91). We are gradually

getting next to what ‘the nothing’ itself might mean or simply suggest. For now, part of that

process of ‘nihilation’ (leading to non-existence) is to understand another sign of

nothingness, which is blindness. Shakespeare draws it in several ways through the play.
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Synchronically speaking, the process of detaching goes together with the unfolding of the

plot. If Heidegger means ‘making obscurity’ or ‘shadowing’ the already known and the

possible constructed categories, in order to transcend to a more illuminated stage (Being

and Time 230), Shakespeare connects to it, initially through Gloucester, who now blind,

reveals another way of seeing, that is, another way of accessing reality: “I have no way, and

therefore want no eyes: I stumbled when I saw” (4.1.20-1). Before a world of corruption

and despair, the internal world overcomes and invites an inward motion. Right there it

occurs the quest for ‘the nothing’, because –as Heidegger points– “only in this particular

darkness produced by nihilation the original openness of beings arises” (90). But also in the

closing, Shakespeare unfolds this affirmation at the very final lines, relating ‘seeing’ to a

process of ‘awareness’, on the one hand, but on the other, a process of ‘problematizing’

existence. Whoever is capable to see becomes entitled to experience the vertigo of touching

reality and, at the same time, of grasping what darkness –as a clear sign of nothingness– is

about. Here the closing lines in words of Edgar:

The weight of this sad time we must obey,

Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

The oldest hath borne most; we that are young

Shall never see so much, nor live so long. (5.3.322-5)

Both capacities are now associated: speaking-hearing and seeing, calling for authenticity

and prudency. Rushing in thought and speech is a sign of lightness and superficiality. Too

much seeing is sign of too much awareness, which is dangerous insofar it causes trouble.

Whoever wanted to lead a regular existence must not pay attention to silences and shadows

requested, in order to clarify, learn and process. Shakespeare’s tragic subjects are always

signed in this frame, when daring to access the surroundings of ‘nothing’ as a space of
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confrontation and legitimacy. Lear, as it is obvious, does not escape himself from this

condition:

…… A man may see how this world goes

With no eyes. Look with thine ears. (4.6.146-7)

Better hearing than sight-witnessing, even if according to what Shakespeare expresses

through Lear, words could be as harmless as images. Seeing means always going beyond

and getting involved as far as reality is more accessible and, therefore, the observer might

be exposed to an overwhelming flux of visual impacts, perhaps not being capable to digest

their intention and meaning; on the one hand because of their own density, and on the other,

because the subject’s own incapacity of integrating the elements received. When the

opposite takes place, a whole process of internal commotion is liable to happen.

In the middle of shadowing, establishing chiaroscuros, contrasting the external and

the internal experience, Lear dares now to formulate questions, but not any kind of

questions. They are inquiries about existential matters. How did Shakespeare arrive to this?

By driving Lear to a state of crisis. Very early in the play, by experiencing the first touches

of dispossession and loneliness, Lear gets into the realm of ‘nothingness’ by asking about

his identity. Our third approach gets open. Lear travels from the most external circles,

gathering together whatever elements possible for finding a suitable answer:

Does any here know me? Why, this is not Lear.

Does Lear walk thus, speak thus? Where are his eyes?

Either his notion weakens, or his discernings are

lethargied – Ha! Sleeping or waking? Sure ‘tis not

so. Who is it than can tell me who I am? (1.4. 217-21).

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The opening and closing questions of this important Lear’s intervention are no other than

urgent cries. They are the voice of a man not much in despair but what Heidegger calls “the

necessary dread” (88). It does not mean anxiety in terms of anguish or discomfort, nor even

despair or fear. It is rather the result of touching ‘the nothing’ as it comes revealed. No

external agent can answer. They can only provide approximations which would not be fair

with the subject’s true identity. Their answers would be mere opinions and as such they

would not pay justice to legitimate knowledge. They would be judgments, and in that case

the subject would become an object, losing his dignity and his autonomy. These are the

questions of the modern subject in quest of identity, now embodied in Lear; questions

permeated by the also crisis of the modern subject who, with Shakespeare’s magnifying

glass, become actors of the world’s unfolding scenario. As actors they (we all) are exposed

to dread, to the fear of failing, of not fulfilling expectations or of disappointing the

audience. Lear becomes subject-object of doubt, even getting to questioning his senses and

his thinking (the debate of Modernity between knowing by reasoning or experiencing), not

totally capable to get to a synthesis. This is the divided man that Heidegger approaches and

pretends to heal, by unifying his ways of accessing to himself and to the world, by

consciously transiting the fields of ‘nothingness’, those to illuminate true identity.

The “mad (king) [crowned with flowers]” (4.6.80. Staging direction) who enters to

perform the last two scenes of act 4 and the whole act 5, who had torn his clothes in act 3

(3.4.107), is still capable to recognize sparks of identity, to visualize between miseries and

deterioration his royal dignity, his once capacity of ruling and his still disposition for

making decisions: “They cannot touch me for coining. I am the King himself” (4.6.83-4).

And Shakespeare capitalizes ‘King’, not only because of the title itself, but stressing Lear’s

self perception in recovery, underlining his royalty who he does not refuse or forgets. It
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constitutes him. This King, though, in almost total emptiness is –very likely because of that

precise condition– to formulate deep questions that in fortune, abundance, soundness and

stability might not have been able to even elaborate: “Where have I been? Where I am?”

(4.7.52) and, together with 1.4.21: “Who can tell me who I am?”, to extend it more

universally, as a result of crossing ‘nothingness’: “Is man no more than this?” (3.4.101).The

questions about origin, situation and position of the subject are the questions of the here

(hic) and now (nunc) where existence is unfolded. Lear is now at this point. Only the

question of the nothing, as Heidegger remarks, “put us questioners in question” (95). Only

in the revelation of ‘the nothing’ which is the basis of wonder, does every question arise:

the question for the ‘who’, the ‘why’, the ‘where’, the ‘how’. The remaining question,

perhaps the core of this whole approach, is unavoidably Heidegger’s closing question of his

lecture: “why are there beings at all and why not rather nothing?” (96).

At the beginning of his lecture Heidegger wondered also about where to seek ‘the

nothing’ (85). Is it possible to seek something from which we do not have any referents?

Not that we have none, but at least not physically evident since ‘the nothing’ is only a

construction of our understanding in order, precisely, to comprehend reality and ourselves

within it. Here we arrive to our fourth and final approach. Through Shakespeare’s

Gloucester we are set before to this helping assertion:

“The quality of nothing

Hath no such need to hide itself” (1.2. 34-5);

which in Heidegger’s words would mean that ‘the nothing’ is self-evident and it simply

unfolds, being revealed before us when we get to deprive ourselves from restrictions and

prejudices (What is Metaphysics? 94). Lear has gone through that journey. Together with
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his Fool they sustain kind of a small debate around the possibility of ‘the nothing’. In order

to access to a different wisdom and to more real possibilities of moving forward, the Fool

poetically advices Lear to practice ‘leaving’, ‘abandoning’, his usual structures of showing,

throwing, knowing, owing, trowing (believing), going (1.4.115-25). To that Lear responds:

“This is nothing, fool” (1.4.126). Nothing because either the argument is futile, or, on the

contrary, all of those actions are part of a set of elements to be disregarded as accessing to

the actual freedom of touching ‘the nothing’. And then it comes the tiny debate: “Can you

make no use of nothing, nuncle?” (1.4.127-8). The fool confidently calls Lear ‘nuncle’

(uncle), even tying more their relation and inviting him to wonder about the possible

contrast. Lear answers: “Why no, boy; nothing can be made out of nothing” (1.4.130), as if

opening at least two possible interpretations: either he remarks the factual impossibility of

something being generated from nothing or he rather holds onto the idea that ‘nothing’ is

the clear product of the process of experiencing ‘nothingness’. In the first case, ‘nothing’

cannot be regarded as ‘something’ (Heidegger, What is Metaphysics? 83), which is an

ontological impossibility, but yes as an option. Being so, the second case takes place and

‘the nothing’ can be comprehended as “an act of our discursive reason” (Ibid 85) in order to

allow in us a narrative of comprehending what existence is about; or, in other words, to

shed light upon the already mentioned ‘sailing’ between two ‘nothings’.

Shakespeare also drives us, once more through Lear himself, to this space of nothingness,

here in a final confrontation with nature (the factual being), and producing a real deep

insight:

When the rain came to wet me once and the

wind to make me chatter, when the thunder would not

peace at my bidding, there I found’em, there I smelt

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‘em out. Go to, they are not men o’their words: they

Told me I was everything; ‘tis a lie. I am not ague-proof. (4.6.100-4)

Rain, wind and thunder are natural manifestations of unease and troubling. They speak of

obvious meteorological phenomena, but they function here as clear metaphors of being

exposed to external twists and influences. Lear appears again helpless and exposed. He is

naked before reality, left to its mercy, subject-object of constant change. In such a situation

finding ‘the nothing’ may seem not possible, but it rather is. Right because he is defenseless

he can get to questions about humanity, in the middle of ‘chatting’ and ‘bidding’.

Heidegger would reaffirm this situation by saying that “our existence always deals with the

issue of being among beings” (86). Lear deals with that situation but he immediately passes

to questioning that ‘being among beings’ by doubting of speech. Here the reflective critical

silence is requested and Lear gets to it to even question what he regarded as true: “They

told me I was everything”. Who told him so? The answer is: All of the discourses we are

capable to build. This is what later would be called meta-discourses or meta-narratives.

Singular speakers for Lear, they do represent here the whole compound of social, political,

economical discourses among others. They are the voice of systems constructed telling man

to be the center of cosmos, telling man to be the ruler of ‘the being’ and telling man to rely

only in his will to power. Those discourses, though, did not tell him to endeavor the journey

to solitude, emptiness and obscurity. That would have been illogic and irrational. Lear finds

it was all a lie. The common speeches are to highlight man’s tendency to the eternal, man’s

tension towards remaining and proclaiming himself immortal. Lear finds out that he is

being exposed to changes, that he is growing older and weaker and that he experiences

deterioration and weariness.

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All of this together leads him to conclude that he is not ‘everything’, but, in the end, he is

also ‘nothing’. Paraphrasing Shakespeare it would rather be: “I tell myself I am nothing”.

Such an expression can only emerge from having found ‘the nothing’ while experiencing it,

not while composing discourses around it.

Heidegger states, according to this, that “we need to get to attunment (standing in

awe) before the nothing itself; and it happens in the mood of anxiety, which is not

anxiousness at all. It means anxiety for, and not anxiety of” (86. Italics and brackets are

mine in order to clarify). Identifying with ‘the nothing’ is therefore the result of a process

of being thirsty of questioning and available enough to embrace crisis. This might mean

restlessness instead of solace and comfort. Experiencing contingency is experiencing the

factual, the concrete actuality of human condition. Death, the convulsion of senses, the

impacts on our identity and or quest for constantly comprehending our journey ‘between

nothings’ arte the active components of a dialog that pretends driving us towards

transcendence (away from the immediacy of the factual). Through that dialog even the

three-voice reaction of Kent, Edgar and Albany (speakers of the contingent world) to Lear’s

statement (already transcendental): “She is death as earth”, can even scrape an answer.

They were to say:

Kent Is this the promised end?

Edgar Or image of that horror?

Albany Fall and cease (5.3.261).

The short dialog has been deliberately shaped in one only line split into three interventions

and even as a drawing of descending shape. They are all parts of the same statement: a

statement of despair and desolation. When standing before ‘nothingness’, in this case, with

the impact of death, other type of questions spring. Kent’s question, although profound,
 John Ossa 16

entails obscurity; not that of contrasting and getting into convenient crisis, but that of

staying with the immediate and concrete. No rewards are expected: only fading away seems

to be the arrival point. As Heidegger pointed out in Being and Time (quoted at the

beginning), we certainly are ‘beings for death’, but no ‘beings of death’. ‘Being for’ means

questioning and striving for comprehension (Verstehen in German, which goes beyond

mere rational differentiation and understanding, and rather means a more existential

disposition: to be open). Edgar will represent himself those who rely on the external layers

of human composition, whereas Albany will reaffirm the ‘being of death’ instead. We are

certainly more than travelers between ‘two nothings’, once we decide to confer weight to

the experience of ‘nothingness’; and that decision is not that deliberate but the result of a

continuous process of acknowledgment and integration of one’s self into a narrative of

crisis where the subject, even if experiencing the tragic component of life, in its more

dramatic sense, has always something to tell, breaking all possible senseless blindness and

silence. At the end, in words of Shakespeare through Lear:

When we are born we cry that we are come

to this great stage of fools (4.6. 178-9).

With this delightful meta-theatrical insight the ‘promised end’ finds a purpose: not that of

being the brutal fact of deceasing and disappearing, but that of becoming a proper scenario,

full of contrasts and commotions, where we, as aware actors are to rather stage folly instead

of sanity and who are to proclaim that death has not the ultimate word.
 John Ossa 17

Works Cited

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. A Translation of Sein und Zeit. Translated by Joan

Stambaugh. New York: State University of New York Press, 1996: 229-231. Print.

_____________. What is Metaphysics? Ed. William Mc Neill. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1988: 82-96. Print.

Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Ed. R.A. Foakes. London: Bloomsbury Arden

Shakespeare, 1997. Print.