Shakespearean Genealogies of Power

<p><em>Shakespearean Genealogies of Power</em> 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.</p>