Love's Hologram: Shakespeare, Ricoeur, and the Equivocations of Erotic Identity

Holograms are three-dimensional visual records capable of transmitting peculiar and arresting special effects. A number of Shakespeare's sonnets reveal particular holographic effects, in which scenes of looking and speaking are enhanced by the lyric “I's” creation of distorted composite images. These holograms of self and other provide visual signals which correspond to Paul Ricoeur's philosophy of “oneself as another.” The crisis of selfhood prompted by entanglement with the other— something established in both Shakespeare's poetry and Ricoeur's philosophy—is explored and clarified by reading these holographic sonnets through the application of three basic tenets: (1) the dialectic of idem-self and ipse-self, (2) temporality as a primary trait of the self, and (3) the dialectic of possession and dispossession. The implications of such a reading are wide-ranging, affecting how we understand the peculiar interiority of the sonnets as well as the radical challenge of Ricoeur's thinking.