Zombie Sovereignty

Why does the Restoration matter? In an age when the early modern, the long eighteenth-century, and even the Anthropocene mark off time, what difference does the Restoration make? What does it make visible? In my 13 years on the masthead at Restoration, this question was always with me, implicitly or explicitly. Restoration studies recently had to make the case for its existence to the MLA, a case that was resoundingly successful in part because of the conversations that the journal has hosted over the last 39 years. But the way we think and talk about what happened in the thick of this moment's representational politics has become both more fraught and more fruitful since the journal's origins in 1977. During that time, the journal and the larger field moved from a literary and aesthetic remit to a more historiographic approach to literary history that deploys the tension between our supertitle and subtitle, "English Literary History 1660-1700." Key to that shift in perspective is the understanding that the styles, discursive modes, genres, and literary cultures "Restoration" conjures are necessarily tied to the historical trauma that the term names. The Restoration made an empty promise about monarchy, namely, that it could live again, patched over with legislative statements of its unbroken authority like the Act of Oblivion. To call the sovereign's body back (whether from the dead or from France) is already to admit that it is animated by political demand, not divine right.

The semiotic upheavals of the Restoration generated new literary forms, vocabularies, and styles, which provide us with the material for genealogies of political modernity and liberalism. The cry "The King is dead," followed by a beat that lasted for 11 years, shattered the illusion of royal continuity. Once the belated "long live the king" finally rang out in 1660, it was clear to all that monarchy had dropped its line. Exposed as but a poor player on the national stage, newly dependent on "the symbolic forms expressing the fact that it is in truth governing," the "crowns and coronations…that mark the center as center," (Geertz 153) kingly sovereignty was both split out from a more modern political sovereignty and united to it. Sovereignty, in other words, was now undead, doomed to signify through the beheading of Charles I, the foundational trauma of the newly political unconscious, and the replicating body of Charles II.¹ Asserting the centrality of sovereignty to Restoration studies might seem too obvious. During the 2016 ASECS session that originally hosted this conversation, Lucinda Cole observed that her Renaissance colleagues had declared themselves, informally, to be "over" sovereignty. Perhaps the term has not had the exhausting or exhaustive impact in Restoration studies that it may have had for earlier early modern scholars, but it presents as unavoidable after 1649 and nothing short of a national obsession after 1660. Modern political sovereignty depends simultaneously on the re-membered image of the kingly sovereign and on sovereignty reimagined as "the prosthetic state…a formation that gathers random elements into its orbit and guarantees coherence under the sign of power" (Aravamudan 461). While one might rightly be "over" Agamben, it seems premature to think that we are "over" sovereignty, then or now. What I am calling "zombie sovereignty" partakes more of the George Romero adaptation than in West Indian folklore, though its origins are tied to West Africa through the slave trade and the history of the corporation. In what ways, then, might the trace of zombie sovereignty, neither fully dead nor alive, at once a particular body and a viral threat, persist as an absent presence in the modern liberal political imaginary, especially in the Restoration's most direct descendants, the U.K. and the U.S.?

The King's Body Problem

Like Ricoeur's account of the "eikon" of memory, Charles II was the presence of an absent thing, the "thing remembered" (7). And, as in Ricoeur's formulation, that act of re-membering the king's body generated an image. From Eikon Basilike to the frontispiece of Hobbes's Leviathan to the water pageants of the Restoration to the iconic portrait...