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.
Haverkamp
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Weitere Infos & Material
1. Perpetuum Mobile: Shakespeare’s Perpetual Renaissance 2. The Ghost of History: Hamlet’s Politics of Paternity 3. Lethe’s Wharf: Wild Justice, the Purgatorial Supplement 4. Richard II, Bracton, and the End of Political Theology 5. The Death of a Shifter: Jupiterian History in Julius Caesar 6. The Future of Violence: Macbeth and Machiavelli 7. The Whispering of Nothing: The Winter’s Tale 8. But Mercy is Above: Shylock’s Pun of a Pound 9. Habeas Corpus: The Law’s Desire to Have the Body
Anselm Haverkamp is Professor of English at New York University. He is also a Professor of Literature and Philosophy in Berlin and Munich, and has held visiting appointments at Yale University, the EHESS in Paris, and the Cardozo Law School in New York.
