Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life (review)

[Erratum]

The first thing to say about this extraordinary book is that Julia Lupton does not do her Thinking with Shakespeare alone. Hannah Arendt masterminds the project, and is joined by those across the millennia with whom she did her thinking: among them, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Carl Schmitt, and Walter Benjamin. Then, too, there are those in this century who have continued Arendt’s lines of thought, like Giorgio Agamben and Eric Santner, as well as several Shakespeareans.¹

What makes it possible to put so many transhistorical heads together, as if in a single think tank? It is their shared concern with the founding problem of political philosophy: what has been termed “living well,” “being-in-the-world,” “human commonality,” or, as by Arendt, “the human condition.” Lupton risks pushing history aside in order to see what this classic problem looks like from where she stands today, with the Western tradition of political and theological thought behind her, a future of possibilities on the horizon ahead, and Shakespeare by her side.

The book consists of an introduction and an epilogue, with seven rich and complex essays, all but the last (on St. Paul) centered on a single Shakespeare play. The book’s subtitle names what links the freestanding essays together: Politics and Life. But the politics it designates looks quite different from the sovereign or disciplinary power of Foucauldian new historicism or the ideological false consciousness of Marxist cultural materialism. Politics and Life signals the ancient Greek distinction between zoē and bios, between natural life and political life, between life in the home (oikos) and life in the political sphere (polis). For Arendt, this distinction collapsed in the transition from classical political philosophy to modern liberalism. With the rise of capitalist labor and consumerism, economic oikos had absorbed its sometime political overlord; the life of bodily need (and luxury) had consumed the life of thought, and with it, to Arendt’s great regret, the highest human aspirations—for the good life, action, virtue, and freedom. Readers of Foucault and Agamben will be familiar with the term for this formation: biopolitics, a form of governance which maintains its sovereignty by regulating the lived life (and death) of its subjects, whether in the interest of their well-being, as in the socialist model of the welfare state, or to their utter detriment, as in Agamben’s nomos of the concentration camp.

In this epochal leap from Aristotelean political philosophy to Agambian biopolitics, where does Shakespeare fit in? Here history does matter for Lupton—not the nitty-gritty particulars of early modern England, but rather the sweeping history of Western thought (what German intellectual historians term Begriffsgeschichte, “conceptual history”). This history cannot do without the concept of secularization, the process that accounts for the shift from medieval to modern, signaled by the separation of Church from State. In Lupton’s other books, this transition takes multiple forms: from saint to citizen, from holy covenant to electoral vote, from religious and ethnic diversity to the universalizing categories of citizenship, from medieval political theology to modern democratic liberalism. In this book as well, Shakespeare is situated right on the brink of this transition. She looks to him, therefore, for a prehistory of liberalism, before its priorities had hardened into its modern constitutional and institutional forms. His stage serves as an arena of passage from creaturely existence to political action in the form of public and formal speech acts, like Kate’s declaration of obedience, Hermione’s public self-defense, Timon’s raving broadcasts, and Prospero’s acknowledgment of liability.

In a field long preoccupied with questions of race, class, and gender, Lupton’s recurring themes might look quite strange: election, consent, rights, citizenship, gifts, hospitality, parenting. But the more familiar categories have not dropped from view; they have been recast, often joltingly so, to educe their rethinking. Thus, gender returns under the rubric of husbandry; class features in discussions...