Hamlet is bereft of his desire, cannot act, and all the objects that surround him are degraded and rendered fungible: women are whores; stepfathers are liars; mothers are criminals; the world is rotten and putrefying.

My impressions of this text were very up and down, mostly down. That response wedges open a question as to what were my expectations. Most simply, I went to the text for Simon Critchley. He has been brilliant https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11538399-the-faith-of-the-faithless but has recently disappointed me, his pop ruminations on mortality proved rather annoying. So Critchley and his wife Jamieson Webster, a psychoanalyst, penned this swarm of brief essays on Hamlet. Too coy to be simply analytical, instead Stay, Illusion! scampers about from approach to approach, fingering the pulse of Nietzsche, Carl Schmitt, Freud and Lacan for their takes on Prince of Denmark and fomenting a crackle and foam of hogwash. Do weed further Hamlet theorizing? Should married couples collaborate on authorship? Why the FUCK, was Derrida's Spectres of Marx not mentioned?

There is a later echo devoted to Joyce and Bataille, but the damage had already been inflicted. Ophelia is the hero of the play, akin to Antigone but more pungent and sexual. Politics do matter critically/contextually, as a free association between Gertrude and Mary Queen of Scots couldn't be allowed to hatch on stage. I'm curious what Melville would've though of that explanation.