Desire - Jonathan Hall

Jonathan Hall

"Mercantilism and Desire in The Comedy of Errors," in Anxious Pleasures: Shakespearean Comedy and the Nation-State, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995, pp. 39-52.

Here, Hall investigates Shakespeare 's mercantile metaphors of desire and their relation to the construction of personal identity in The Comedy of Errors.

The advent of mercantile capitalism should not be understood as a purely "economic" transition, if by that term we mean the severely delimited and specialized set of theories and practices characteristic of the epoch of bourgeois hegemony. The later "science" of political economy tends (naturally, as it now seems to us) to obscure its own basis in an alienation of the practices of monetary power and rationalized administration from all other social interrelations and cultural practices. It is constituted as an impersonal science precisely through a "forgetting" of its nonetheless persistent and real connections with the politics of the everyday, that is interpersonal relations...
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