Suffering Ecstasy: Othello And The Drama Of Displacement

Summary

‘When we lose certain people, or when we are dispossessed from a place, or a community,’ writes Judith Butler in Precarious Life, ‘we may simply feel that we are undergoing something temporary, that mourning will be over and some restoration of prior order will be achieved.’² But it is in this process of loss, she proposes, that ‘something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others’; we find that we are ‘attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure’, and that we are thus ‘not only constituted by our relations but also dispossessed by them’.³ The dangerous potentialities Butler describes ring through Othello, where social vulnerability is rife and fears of loss and dispossession run high. Read one way, this is a tragedy about being or feeling like an outsider, whether a racial other in Venetian high society like Othello, or a social outsider like Iago, whose very name, as Marianne Novy notes, ‘suggests he is an outsider to Venice’.⁴ Read another way, it is a drama of displacement, in which the anxiety of losing one’s place is a central concern; ‘I am worth no worse a place’, Iago laments as he reveals how Othello turned down his ‘personal suit’ to be made lieutenant, promoting another outsider, ‘one Michael Cassio, a Florentine’ (1.1.11, 9, 19) to the post instead.