ABSTRACT
Shakespearean Genealogies of Power proposes a new view on Shakespeare’s involvement with the legal sphere: as a visible space between the spheres of politics and law and well able to negotiate legal and political, even constitutional concerns, Shakespeare’s theatre opened up a new perspective on normativity. His plays reflect, even create, "history" in a new sense on the premises of the older conceptions of historical and legal exemplarity: examples, cases, and instances are to be reflected rather than treated as straightforwardly didactic or salvific. Thus, what comes to be recognized, reflected and acknowledged has a disowning, alienating effect, whose enduring aftermath rather than its theatrical immediacy counts and remains effective. In Shakespeare, the law gets hold of its normativity as the problematic efficacy of unsolved – or rarely ever completely solved – problems: on the stage of the theatre, the law has to cope with a mortgage of history rather than with its own success story. The exemplary interplay of critical cultural and legal theory in the twentieth-century – between Carl Schmitt and Hans Kelsen, Walter Benjamin and Ernst Kantorowicz, Hans Blumenberg and Giorgio Agamben, Robert Cover and Niklas Luhmann – found in Shakespeare’s plays its speculative instruments.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part |106 pages
The Argument
chapter Chapter 1|9 pages
Perpetuum Mobile: Shakespeare's Perpetual Renaissance
chapter Chapter 2|22 pages
The Ghost of History: Hamlet and the Politics of Paternity
chapter Chapter 3|7 pages
Lethe's Wharf: Wild Justice, the Purgatorial Supplement
chapter Chapter 4|10 pages
Richard II, Bracton, and the End of Political Theology
chapter Chapter 5|16 pages
The Death of a Shifter: Jupiterian History in Julius Caesar
chapter Chapter 6|14 pages
The Future of Violence: Machiavelli and Macbeth
chapter Chapter 7|20 pages
A Whispering of Nothing: The Winter's Tale
part |22 pages
Tailpieces