Shakespearean Genealogies of Power

Shakespearean Genealogies of Power proposes a new view on Shakespeares 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, Shakespeares 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 Shakespeares plays its speculative instruments.