In Shakespeare’s Anti-Politics, Daniel Juan Gil argues that Shakespeare’s plays pit republican possibilities against absolutist forces in order to expose the core of unmitigated and arbitrary force at the heart of all sovereign formations, including liberal ones. Such exposure, although often brutal and horrific, can nonetheless generate emancipatory effects, by reducing persons to their being as flesh capable of new forms of sociality.
Gil’s chapter on Julius Caesar helpfully adjudicates between the failed republicanism of the conspirators and the sovereign ambitions of Caesar in order to show how both sides “share a deep commitment to the public-making power of political forms” (24). Against this vision Gil argues that Marc Antony wages a war against “politics as such” (25) by refusing a civic economy in which private pleasures or prior identifications must be sacrificed for the public good.
In Measure for Measure, Gil elegantly maps a chiastic exchange in which Angelo uses sovereign power to put the common law to work, while the duke must hide under civic-republican cover in order to reassert equity. The play’s themes of sexuality for sale dramatize the “life of the flesh” that roils up both as the object of biopolitical control and as a counterforce for libertine experiment.
In Othello, the mercenary Moor, his services contracted by Venice during a state of emergency, manifests the state’s constitutive reliance on violence to found its community and enforce its interests. In Gil’s astute reading, the otherness of the Moor is not a marker of ethnic and religious difference, as in the dominant culturalist readings, but rather a visible isolation of the barbarism of power at work in every state formation. Gil provides especially compelling readings of the choreography of the multitude in the two riot scenes, and he brilliantly reads Iago as playing a cognitive theory of emotions against a humoral one.
Finally, in King Lear, Gil helpfully establishes the hostility of the common law to torture in order to show how the play’s Artaudian theater of cruelty uses state violence to make bodies manifest themselves as flesh. Gil reads the mock trial scene in the Q text as a staging of the Chancery Court’s ability to correct the common law, and he reads the recognition scene between Cordelia and Lear as the construction of an “alternative sociability” in which kinship roles have been reinvented as something other than normative and necessary.
The strength of the book lies in the clarity of Gil’s basic thesis and the consistency with which it is applied. Yet this reader hungers for some qualification of key terms like “raw sovereign power” (helpfully nuanced in the Lear chapter, but assumed as a distinct ontology in most instances of the term’s deployment). Gil suggests that I idealize civil society and the possibility of social norms that develop outside of sovereign power. I would like to respond by asserting that there are many circumstances in which the state’s control over various forms of public and semipublic life is imperfect or under attack. These include situations in which sovereignty in its modern sense is not yet in place (the worlds depicted in Homer’s Odyssey and the book of Judges, for example), or when civil war, often preceded by intellectual dissent and collective organizing, leads to social experiment and constitutional change. How does Gil’s blunt application of Schmitt and Agamben account for self-regulating bodies incorporated into the body politic (such as the liberties originally under ecclesiastical control, or the Jewish communities of the ancien régime, or the guilds and corporations that constituted cities in the medieval and Renaissance periods)? Gil tends to associate norms with the coercive interests of the state, yet I would argue that the comedies in particular explore the extent to which norms stretch and flex in response to the real actions of exploratory persons and emerging collectives.
Wherever one falls on debates about the viability of civil society and the virtues of personhood, Shakespeare’s Anti-Politics contributes to ongoing discussions about the sources and metaphors of sovereignty and the occasions for embodied speech exercised in the special medium of drama.
