"The god called Nothingness", Büchner, Shakespeare and Original Sin

This chapter presents two passages that resonate with Shakespeare. Robespierre's haunting broadly echoes the bloodstained hands motif in Macbeth. Simon's abuse of his wife echoes Hamlet's abuse of Ophelia in the nunnery scene. At one end of the spectrum, we find the citation shaping its host text: the relation here would be tuitional or doctrinal. At the other end, the host text absorbs the citation and transforms it: the relation here would be intuitive and dialectical. Thinking is nothing but its own mirror, consciousness cloudily reflected back as unconscious. Wittingly or not, the passage reproduces traditional theological doctrine in respect of the teeming multiplicity of mental sinfulness. Buchner's obsessive disinterring from Shakespeare's text of the kindred themes of original sin and the theatrum mundi arises from authentic "existence categories". They carry no hint of ideological back-formations of the kind associated with the apostle of reaction, Joseph de Maistre.