Shakespearean Genealogies of Power

A Whispering of Nothing in Hamlet, Richard II, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, and The Winter’s Tale

Anselm Haverkamp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136890505
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

Shakespearean Genealogies of Power proposes a new view on Shakespeare's involvement with the legal sphere: as a visible space between the spheres of politics and law and well able to negotiate legal and political, even constitutional concerns, Shakespeare's theatre opened up a new perspective on normativity. His plays reflect, even create, "history" in a new sense on the premises of the older conceptions of historical and legal exemplarity: examples, cases, and instances are to be reflected rather than treated as straightforwardly didactic or salvific. Thus, what comes to be recognized, reflected and acknowledged has a disowning, alienating effect, whose enduring aftermath rather than its theatrical immediacy counts and remains effective. In Shakespeare, the law gets hold of its normativity as the problematic efficacy of unsolved – or rarely ever completely solved – problems: on the stage of the theatre, the law has to cope with a mortgage of history rather than with its own success story. The exemplary interplay of critical cultural and legal theory in the twentieth-century – between Carl Schmitt and Hans Kelsen, Walter Benjamin and Ernst Kantorowicz, Hans Blumenberg and Giorgio Agamben, Robert Cover and Niklas Luhmann – found in Shakespeare's plays its speculative instruments.

Names, Words, and Things

Abraham, Nicolas 11, 15, 29, 30, 136n, 138n

Adelman, Janet 61, 138n

Adorno, Theodor W. 105, 142n, 160n

Aegidius Romanus/Giles of Rome 154n

Aeschylus 54

Agamben, Giorgio 4–5, 49, 50, 53–6, 58, 69, 109, 115, 144n–7n, 150n, 151n, 154n–5n, 160n

Alexander, Peter 136n

allegory:

ironic 42–3, 113, 163n;

juridical 49;

of latency 116;

mythic 91;

neoplatonic 92;

philosophical 44;

political 55, 76;

of skepticism 97;

of the stage 98;

temporal 89, 103, 125, 159n;

typological 70

ambiguity 22, 42, 45, 70, 83, 96, 101, 106, 144n

anamorphosis 20, 27, 29, 45, 132n, 135n, 139n

Andrew, Edward 162n

Anton, Herbert 157n

Arc, Joan of 13

Arendt, Hannah 161n Aristotle 10, 42, 92, 98, 110, 130n, 143n

Arnold, Oliver 62, 150n

Artaud, Antonin 3, 76, 88, 130n

Augustine 48, 60–2, 64, 71, 92–100, 103, 105, 145n, 148n, 158n

Augustus 62–70, 109, 148n, 151n

Austin, John L. 112, 126, 158n, 162n–6n

Axton, Marie 34, 140n

Bacon, Francis 3, 23, 41, 137n, 142n, 154n, 159n

Badiou, Alain 148n, 159n

Baker, John Hamilton 124, 164n–5n

Balke, Friedrich 149n

Barber, C.L...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• The Argument
• Tailpieces
• Notes
• Names, Words, and Things