“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” wrote the Weimar Republic and later Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, at the beginning of his Political Theology in 1922. “Not all the water in the rough, rude sea can wash the balm off from an anointed king,” proclaims Shakespeare’s King Richard II, asserting his lawful kingship even as he is deposed by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke in the play that another German jurist, Ernst Kantorowicz, used to mount a post-war critique of Schmitt’s arguments. Throughout his canon, Shakespeare demonstrates fascination with the sovereign and the basis of sovereignty, particularly as it emerges in extremis, in conditions of emergency or exception, querying from whence sovereignty derives, and how it is (re)established once consensus about its locations and norms is lost.
In this course we will consider five plays by Shakespeare, Richard II, Henry IV, Parts One and Two, Measure for Measure and King Lear, in relation to two problems of modern and post-modern political theory: political theology and bio-politics as they are developed in the writings of Schmitt and Kantorowicz, as well Schmitt’s recent exponent, Giorgio Agamben, and Michel Foucault. What is the role of divine authority, metaphysics, custom and human agency in establishing a right to rule? What is the sovereign the sovereign of? What limitations, claims, and affordances does human embodiment impose or confer on the sovereign? How do formal choices in dramatic representation inflect ideas about the sovereignty?
The term in which we undertake this exploration will coincide with the run-up to a US election which many feel could bring the international liberal order into a state of exception. What better time to take a long view of sovereignty?
Assignments will be one seminar presentation to be written up as a formal short paper and a longer (approximately 15-20 page) research paper.
