Shakespeare's Anti-Politics

Sovereign Power and the Life of the Flesh

D. Gil

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137275004
• eBook ISBN: 9781137275011
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Argues that Shakespeare is anti-political, dissecting the nature of the nation-state and charting a surprising form of resistance to it, using sovereign power against itself to engineer new forms of selfhood and relationality that escape the orbit of the nation-state. It is these new experiences that the book terms 'the life of the flesh'.

1

The Historical Conditions of Possibility of the Life of the Flesh: Absolutism, Civic Republicanism, and “Bare Life” in Julius Caesar

Julius Caesar appears to stage a conflict between a political tyrant and a public of civic-minded men who do not want power but only want to hold power accountable from the outside. In fact, the play’s agenda is much more unsettling. Julius Caesar provides an especially clear model of the central discursive conflict that pervades the early modern political field, a conflict between two competing theories of the state and state power, one monarchist and the other civic republican, and both equally committed to expanding the sovereign power of the nation-state. Shakespeare stages this conflict not in order to side with one or the other theory of sovereignty (as some critics have thought), but in order to evacuate the institutional structures of the early modern state of their legitimacy. In Shakespeare’s theatrical treatment, the friction between these two competing theories of sovereignty throws off bodies that have escaped from any state-mediated, politically legible form of “public” life. It is in such de-mobilized, de-commissioned, or de-politicized bodies that the play identifies a transformative experience of a collective life of the flesh, a formation that is eminently at home in the medium of theater.

Shakespeare’s representation of Brutus’s rebellion is sometimes taken as a symptom of the existence of a nascent, early modern “public sphere” capable of criticizing state power from the outside. In his classic study The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jürgen Habermas argues that a public sphere relies on private connections between people who come together outside of the institutions of state power. Focusing on eighteenth-century England, Habermas describes a critical public sphere that is founded on an extra-state civil society that allows private individuals to come together as private individuals and to subject the operations of the state to reasoned criticism from the outside.¹

A better point of entry into Shakespeare’s political project is, in fact, offered by Agamben’s critique of the very idea of a civil society that lies outside of state power. In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben argues that all political power is “bio-political,” in that it seeks to organize and structure the basic, biological infrastructure of human life. Revisiting the notion of civil society from this “bio-political” standpoint, Agamben suggests that civil society is not an autonomous social development, but a product of state power’s penetration and shaping of social life:

It is almost as if, starting from a certain point, every decisive political event were double-sided: the spaces, the liberties, and the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of individuals’ lives within the state order, thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power from which they wanted to liberate themselves. […] The fact is that one and the same affirmation of bare life leads, in bourgeois democracy, to a primacy of the private over the public and of individual liberties over collective obligations and yet becomes, in totalitarian states, the decisive political criterion and the exemplary realm of sovereign decisions. (121–2)

Agamben points to the state underpinning of what appears, in liberal political theory, as an extra-state realm of liberty that is anchored in private life. The paradox to which Agamben points is that this extra-state private realm liberates itself from the state only by demanding from the state a charter of rights and privileges that imbricates private life ever more fully in the political order. In effect, Agamben launches a broad attack on any liberal theory that posits a social life preexisting state power and that provides a standpoint from which state power can be criticized from the outside; for Agamben, the very appearance of such an extra-state social life is itself a manifestation of a state power that defines and structures a social life that seems like a non-state realm endowed with liberty vis-à-vis the state. In place of a “public sphere” conceived of as a social formation that precedes the exercise of state power and can critique state power from the outside, Agamben suggests that any public sphere is, in fact, a product of state power, depending on the state’s ability to organize social space. From this standpoint, any civil society rooted in a supposedly non-state realm of private life and any critical “public sphere” founded on it remain captured by a state framework that they silently affirm, even if they also allow for critical detachment from particular state policies.

In fact, Shakespeare is quite aware of the fact that seemingly extra-state zones of private life or critical public spheres are themselves products of the structuration of social life by the nation-state, just as Agamben argues. However, Agamben’s account of state power as essentially bio-political, as always seeking to structure and organize an ambiguous realm of what Agamben calls “bare life,” turns out to offer a powerful point of entry into an early modern discourse that bypasses the symbiotic dyad of nation-state and state-mediated civil society.² In one form or another, the early modern state’s effort to organize the infrastructure of social life is the central concern of much early modern culture. My argument in this book is that theatrically staged crises in the early modern nation-state’s grasp on “everyday life” makes “bare life” visible as such, not as a politically hegemonized form of “civil society,” but as the basic, historically conditioned biological infrastructure of human life. In Shakespeare’s theatrical work, “bare life” dissolves out of political structures; once bare life becomes visible, it becomes the basis for an alternative form of being-together that I call the life of the flesh. Bringing this life of the flesh to the stage is Shakespeare’s real aim in Julius Caesar, and the resistance movement that Brutus leads is merely the means to that end.

To describe the life of the flesh that is built on bodies that have ceased to be functionally subordinated to the political structures of the nation-state, Shakespeare turns to the contested domain of the passions and humors, which he treats neither as privileged signs of an inner self (as modern psychology does) nor as merely bodily imbalances; rather, he treats humors and passions as defining bodily states that open and close the body to other, humorally or passionately inflamed bodies in recurring patterns. For Shakespeare, in other words, humoral discourse can be used to define a grammar of pre- or extra-social connections between bodies that arise when politically ordered social webs break down.³ Looked at in this way, the humors and passions provide a discourse for describing recurring, historically conditioned matrices of relationship that constitute a level of social life “beneath” the interplay of state power and institutionalized civil society.

I. Two Forms of Public Life and Two Forms of Resistance

Julius Caesar does two things at the same time: on the one hand, it registers and theorizes the emerging political framework of the nation-state and its role in defining and structuring social life; on the other hand, however, it reveals a deep-seated impulse to break with this emerging political framework and shift to an alternative life rooted in de-politicized, de-mobilized bodies, a life of the flesh. This is precisely how Marc Antony’s rebellion must be understood, a rebellion not for Caesar or against Brutus (conceived as rival political positions) but against politics as such, against any state form that defines social life and demands agonizing personal sacrifices in the name of public goods. Marc Antony aims to bypass the nation-state form altogether by shifting to a mode of interpersonal bonding that defines connections between bodies (via emotions conceived as fluids) that colonize and replace any functional, politically mediated public life. Antony’s rebellion harnesses the political friction between Caesar and the conspirators to cut beneath politics, as it were, to an emotional terrain that provides the terms for connections between bodies that escape from the gravity of the rising nation-state and of the civil society that the state spawns. From the standpoint of the nascent political field of the nation-state, Antony’s oppositional discourse looks irrational, non-pragmatic, or anti-social. But from a standpoint outside this political field, such radical opposition is not anti-social so much as it is anti-systemic, a break from the emerging, modern vision of the nation-state as a fundamental condition of social life.⁴

We can summarize the political field that Shakespeare sketches in Julius Caesar by saying that this field is organized around the competing discursive poles of absolutism and elite civic republicanism, each of which generates a specific (state-mediated) form of “public life.” Caesar is accused of wanting to become a tyrant, but within the terms of early modern political discourse his reliance on a potent blend of charismatic popularity and canny manipulation of aristocratic elites makes him look very much like an absolute monarch. In order to secure his grip on the state, Caesar brings into existence an abstract public of more or less formally interchangeable individuals who encounter the state as a spectacle that they either applaud or deride. The conspirators are not more public-minded than Caesar’s citizens, only differently public, and with a different relationship to state power. The familiar interpretation of Julius Caesar is that Brutus and the conspirators represent a kind of nascent public sphere that is outside of the state and that checks the dictatorial state power that Caesar represents. In fact, however, the conspirators do not see themselves as operating outside the state at all, only as embodying a different relationship to the state than either Caesar or the public citizenry Caesar conjures up. As against Caesar’s popular absolutism, Brutus and the conspirators view the exercise of state power as an opportunity for their own ethical self-perfection. For the conspirators, possessing state power allows aristocratic elites like themselves to pursue ethical perfection and virtue by providing opportunities for its exercise; this public of virtue-seeking elites, in turn, allows the state to preserve its integrity through time. For Brutus and the conspirators, a public of patrician elites seeking to maximize their honor constitutes the state, and they use this vision to try to de-legitimize the popular public that Caesar has forced into the political field. Yet the fact that Caesar and the conspirators take rival versions of political publicity into account from the start attests to the fact that their differences are essentially local variations within a single political field; what Caesar and the conspirators share is a deep commitment to the public-making power of political forms that structure a nationalized social life. It is precisely this commitment that Antony will transcend.

The conspirators cannot understand themselves and their exercise of virtue at all outside the exercise of state power that Caesar threatens to take away from them. Cassius experiences a loss of political power as a diminution of self, because for him the state is a vehicle to develop and exercise his own virtue. In his initial temptation speech, Cassius reminds Brutus that “I was born free as Caesar, so were you” (1.2.99) and complains that they have both become Caesar’s “underlings”:

Why, man, he does bestride the narrow world

Like a Colossus, and we petty men

Walk under his huge legs, and peep about

To find ourselves dishonorable graves.

Men sometime were masters of their fates.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

But in ourselves, that we are underlings. (1.2.136–142)

Cassius sees state power as synonymous with the aristocrats’ freedom to exercise their virtue and to act as “masters of their fates” by pursuing honor rather than being condemned to “dishonorable graves.” For Cassius, the fundamental problem is not that Caesar wants too much state power, but that he organizes state power on a footing that deprives aristocrats like himself and Brutus of an opportunity to use the state to advance their own honor. When Brutus invokes the discourse of the “general good” (as when he tells Cassius that if what he has to say has anything to do with “the general good/ [then] Set honor in one eye and death in the other,/ And I will look on both indifferently” [1.2.87–89]), he refers to the very limited public of elite patricians that is (in its own eyes) fundamentally constituted by, and constitutive of, the state.

For the conspirators, the flip side of the elite, civic republican, virtue-maximizing “public” that defines the state is the life of the plebeians, which the conspirators conceive of as a state-regulated, economic formation that has no proper role in the public life of the state. The play begins with Murellus and Flavius, the tribunes of the people but ideological soulmates of the conspirators, complaining that the workers are swarming onto the streets to celebrate Caesar. Part of Murellus and Flavius’s complaint is that the political allegiance of the people is fickle, since they once loved Pompey as they now love Caesar:

Many a time and oft

Have you climbed up to walls and battlements,

To towers and windows, yea to chimney tops,

Your infants in your arms, and there have sat

The livelong day with patient expectation

To see great Pompey pass the streets of Rome. (1.1.37–42)

Beyond accusing the people of fickleness, what Murellus and Flavius really object to is the workers’ leaving behind their defined roles in the extra-political, economic realm and asserting for themselves a role in “public life”:

Hence, home, you idle creatures, get you home!

Is this a holiday? What, know you not,

Being mechanical, you ought not to walk

Upon a laboring day without the sign

Of your profession? Speak, what trade art thou? (1.1.1–5)

Once they exit the non-political, economic realm (marked by wearing the “sign/ Of your profession”), the plebeians can only appear to Murellus and Flavius as the amorphous “bare life” of people swarming over the architecture of Rome with “infants in your arms.” Flavius promises to “drive away the vulgar from the streets” and tells Murellus: “So do you too where you perceive them thick” (1.1.69–71). From the perspective of the tribunes of the people, when the people swell out over the channels of their prescribed economic roles, they appear as a tide of raw, teeming life. For Flavius and Murellus, Rome is defined by a kind of quasi-racial class warfare; they and the conspirators see the sta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Historical Conditions of Possibility of the Life of the Flesh: Absolutism, Civic Republicanism, and “Bare Life” in Julius Caesar
• 2 The Life of the Condemned: The Autonomous Legal System and the Community of the Flesh in Measure for Measure
• 3 Unsettling the Civic Republican Order: The Face of Sovereign Power and the Fate of the Citizen in Othello
• 4 Life Outside the Law: Torture and the Flesh in King Lear
• Epilogue: The Afterlife of the Life of the Flesh
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index