Shakespeare's Anti-Politics: Sovereign Power and the Life of the Flesh |
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Author:
| Gil, Daniel Juan |
Series title: | Palgrave Shakespeare Studies |
ISBN: | 978-1-299-82811-7 |
Publication Date: | Jan 2013 |
Publisher: | Palgrave Macmillan
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Book Format: | Ebook |
List Price: | USD $80.00 |
Book Description:
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Rejecting arguments that Shakespeare is either an absolutist or a partisan of civic republican values, this book argues that Shakespeare is essentially anti-political, dissecting the nature of the nation-state and charting a surprising form of resistance to it. For Shakespeare, the nation-state is essentially and inescapably a vehicle of sovereign power, seizing the bodily lives of its subjects to impose regulated subjectivities, roles and identities, including a collective national...
More DescriptionRejecting arguments that Shakespeare is either an absolutist or a partisan of civic republican values, this book argues that Shakespeare is essentially anti-political, dissecting the nature of the nation-state and charting a surprising form of resistance to it. For Shakespeare, the nation-state is essentially and inescapably a vehicle of sovereign power, seizing the bodily lives of its subjects to impose regulated subjectivities, roles and identities, including a collective national identity. Shakespeare does not imagine directly opposing sovereign power; rather, he imagines using sovereign power against itself to engineer new forms of selfhood and relationality that escape the orbit of the nation-state. It is the new experiences of selfhood and relationality that flourish in the shadows of sovereign power that Gil terms 'the life of the flesh, ' and he argues that one place where the life of the flesh appears especially prominently is in a non-intimate experience of sexuality.