Curséd Be Hamlet

“The question is, exactly what does the father represent? You could say, well, there’s the father that you have: a human being, a Man among Men. 

But then there’s the Father as such, and that’s The Spirit of The Father. 

Insofar as you have a father, you have both at the same time: you have the personal father, a Man among other Men—just like anyone other’s father—but insofar as that man is YOUR father, that means that he’s something DIFFERENT than just another person. 

What he is, is the incarnation of the Spirit of The Father. To disrespect that carelessly… 

Noah makes a mistake, right? He produces wine and gets himself drunk. You might say, well, if he’s sprawled out there for everyone to see, it’s hardly Ham’s fault, if he stumbles across him. But the book is laying out a danger. The danger is that, well, maybe you catch your father at his most vulnerable moment, and if you’re disrespectful, then you transgress against the Spirit of The Father. 

And if you transgress against The SPIRIT of the Father and lose respect for The Spirit of The Father, then that is likely to transform you into a SLAVE.”

http://shakespeare.mit.edu/hamlet/hamlet.1.4.html

“ That’s a very interesting idea. I think it’s particularly germane to our current cultural situation. I think that we’re constantly pushed to see the nakedness of our Father, so to speak, because of the intense criticism that’s directed towards our culture—the patriarchal culture. We’re constantly exposing its weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and, let’s say, its nakedness. There’s nothing wrong with criticism, but the purpose of criticism is to separate the wheat from the chaff: it’s not to burn everything to the ground. It’s to say, well, we’re going to carefully look at this; we’re going to carefully differentiate; we’re going to keep what’s good, and we’re going to move away from what’s bad. 

The criticism isn’t to identify everything that’s bad: it’s to separate what’s good from what’s bad, so that you can retain what’s good and move towards it. To be careless of that is deadly. You’re inhabited by the spirit of the Father, right? Insofar as you’re a cultural construction, which, of course, is something that the postmodern neo-Marxists are absolutely emphatic about: you’re a cultural construction. Insofar as you’re a cultural construction, then you’re inhabited by the spirit of the Father. To be disrespectful towards that means to undermine the very structure that makes up a good portion of what you are, insofar as you’re a socialized, cultural entity. If you pull the foundation out from underneath that, what do you have left? You can hardly manage on your own. It’s just not possible. You’re a cultural creation. “

http://shakespeare.mit.edu/hamlet/hamlet.1.5.html