This talk responds to our historical moment, one defined by a state of chronic crisis and the rise or return of constitutional dictatorships and authoritarian, if not fascistic regimes, for which the state of exception is becoming an increasingly normalised technique of government. This situation calls for a philosophy, and specifically a critique, of crisis. One of my claims will be that when philosophy tries to think its own present, it does so through the schema (if not always the concept) of crisis, which it inherits from ancient medicine and/or tragedy. I will turn to Hamlet as a case study, and to Carl Schmitt’s “modern” and “sovereigntist” reading of Shakespeare’s play. For Schmitt, Hamlet reveals the essence of the political understood as the decision regarding the state of exception. Drawing on the thoughts of W. Benjamin, E. Levinas, and J. Derrida, I will end my talk by trying to rescue an altogether different conception of the exception, rooted not in sovereignty, or the excess of the iustitium in relation to the ius commune, but in justice as the haunting presence of the oppressed.