I envisaged this talk as a mini book launch for Shakespeare’s Political Spirit: Negative Theology and the Disruption of Power.  Unfortunately, a cyberattack at Cambridge University Press has delayed publication, so it will be a book ‘preview’ instead.  The book looks to the creative potential of experiences of failure, haunting, estrangement, impasse, or dream in Shakespeare. It draws on the tradition of negative theology and subsequent philosophies of the negative (Hegel, Kierkegaard, Benjamin, Adorno, Derrida, Badiou) in order to establish a negative political theology that challenges the official political theology that sacralises power.In this talk, I will focus on the way Hamlet is thrown into a state of uncertainty about the eternal.  His famed “delay” is a response to the thought of eternity: he is given “pause” by imagining “what dreams may come / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil”.  The eternal is the “rub”.  I tackle this obscure rub by turning to Soren Kierkegaard, who references Hamlet’s soliloquy in his Philosophical Fragments.  To be “born again” into the eternal, according to Kierkegaard, one must “become nothing and yet … not [be] annihilated”.  I suggest that Hamlet’s struggle with the eternal opens him to an expansive view of humanity – and politics – that goes beyond Claudius’s will to power or Laertes’s customary honour.  He negates Denmark’s violent, dynastic politics and instead seeks what would seem to be impossible within a revenge tragedy: the incalculable.  The eternal here suggests an imaginary perspective that alienates or negates our current preoccupations and political economies.