Shakespeare’s Anti-Politics: Sovereign Power and the Life of the Flesh by Daniel Juan Gil (review)

Gil’s brilliant new book rejects the idea that Shakespeare’s relation to politics revolves around whether Shakespeare’s political leanings seem to be absolutist, republican, or somewhere in between. In his view of Shakespeare, state forms become indistinct. Gil claims that Shakespeare’s thought actually resembles Giorgio Agamben’s in that the differences between absolutism and republicanism are less important than a fundamental similarity. “Shakespeare uses his plays,” Gil argues, “to reveal that all state forms are by their nature vehicles of a sovereign power that seizes the bodily lives of its subjects” as well as “to explore the phenomenological experience of utter subjection to sovereign power” (1). For Shakespeare, republics and tyrannies both reduce subjects to what Gil, borrowing from Agamben, identifies as “bare life” (10). To cite just one example: though critics sometimes read Julius Caesar as an attempt to draw distinctions between monarchist and civic republican theories of state in order to elevate the latter over the former, Caesar and the conspirators share “a deep commitment to the public-making power of political forms that structure a nationalized social life” (24).

Gil’s claim is, as far as I can tell, undeniable, and it makes Shakespeare sound pessimistic about politics. But he argues that Shakespeare is relatively optimistic about anti-politics, about resistance that seeks neither to reform the state nor to replace one state form with another. Once Shakespeare’s characters recognize their utter exposure to sovereign power, they are opened to transformations of self and of connections with others. Before the moment of this recognition, characters regard themselves as having clearly delineated social identities (Lear as king and father, Othello as general and husband). However, upon recognizing the state’s power to reduce human life to bare life—to strip selves of the very identity that the state also supposedly helps secure, and to expose selves to an unlimited capacity to be killed—they also can enter into what Gil calls the “life of the flesh” (9). An experience of extreme vulnerability but also of intense connectedness, this “luminous fleshliness” (9) is beyond fabricated social identity yet not quite “natural” in that it actually depends on the self’s exposure to sovereign power. Gil sees the life of the flesh at work in Mark Antony’s wish to be stabbed with swords covered in Caesar’s blood (a wish driven by “the fantasy of a transformed relation to the other by means of a direct experience of the body and its fluids” [16]); in the cannibalistic inter-corporeality figured by prostitution in Measure for Measure; in the riots of Othello; and in the wilderness of King Lear.

This fleshliness, Gil contends, is distinctly theatrical, defined by moments when figures onstage seem less like clearly defined characters in an imagined world than like anonymous bodies in motion onstage. This contention—that frequently we find a tension between the identities of characters in the imagined world of Shakespeare’s plays and their fleshly existence as bodies onstage—reappears often in Gil’s book and merits our attention. Gil’s exploration of this tension leads to bold, fascinating claims about characters, about Shakespeare’s plays, and about the potential value of anti-politics. Three examples should help illustrate this. When Angelo “attempts a sexual assault of Isabella” in Measure for Measure, “‘no’ really does mean no” at the level of the narrative in the play’s imagined world; “at the level of the bodies themselves,” by contrast, “a very different interpersonal grammar becomes visible, one that connects the flesh of Angelo and Isabella when no social connection between them as state-sanctioned persons is possible at all” (60). Isabella knows that she is subject to sovereign power as invested in Angelo, but, as Gil points out, “it is hard to miss the erotic response she highlights” in answering him.

In Angelo and Isabella...