Abstract
In Shakespeare’s Othello everything is “suspect” and “deceptive”, and this makes our comprehension constantly limited, never definitive. The essay focuses on the meaning that the “word” acquires in relation to “truth” and “knowledge” in the play. Othello can be defined as a “staging of the tragedy of the word”: the hero succumbs because he cannot interpret the meaning of words and is consequently unable to know the world. What makes Othello blind is not only Iago’s linguistic dexterity but his own relationship with words: words form a wall between Othello and reality, rendering reality unintelligible. As the essay explains, only through narration does the story acquire a sense, not an absolute and definitive sense – the Sense –, but a sense that narration itself must always and again reconquer to prevent non-sense from triumphing definitively.