Poética das ruínas e da memória

Reviewed by: The Tears of Sovereignty: Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama by Philip Lorenz Matthew Scully Philip Lorenz. The Tears of Sovereignty: Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama. NY: Fordham U P, 2013. 288pages. Philip Lorenz’s The Tears of Sovereignty offers a comparative framework of sovereignty by focusing on this concept as represented on the English and Spanish stages in the works of William Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, and Calderón de la Barca. Throughout his consideration, Lorenz amalgamates and deploys various theories of sovereignty, including those by Francisco Suárez, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, and Jacques Derrida, in an effort to more fully grasp this elusive concept. The Tears of Sovereignty is an impressive study not only for its comprehensive range and lucid arguments but also for the structure of those arguments. Sovereignty poses a number of theoretical and methodological problems, for, as Lorenz notes, the concept “is nothing” in itself, yet at the same time, “works” and “continues to work itself out through its tropes” (200, 239, 162). Lorenz’s five chapters between the introduction and concluding “After-Image” proceed to consider five manifestations of these tropes: “Each chapter pursues the staging of a different sovereignty ‘event,’ from the concept’s collapse (‘tears’), through its reanimation (‘transplant’), resistance, transformation (cifras y estampas), and return (‘wrinkles’)” (25). As Lorenz argues, “Sovereignty is troped, or it is not at all,” and in his study he aims to follow its tropic movements (25). Lorenz’s opening chapter, “Breakdown: Analogy and Ontotheology in Richard II,” begins on what is perhaps the most familiar ground. Lorenz inaugurates his approach by engaging Ernst Kantorowicz’s foundational study of sovereignty, The King’s Two Bodies, and its example par excellence of Richard II. Rather than repeat Kantorowicz, however, Lorenz prefaces his reading of Richard II with a lengthy theoretical frame centered on the relation between analogy and ontology, especially in the context of medieval philosophy, in which analogy was understood “as a structure for conceiving of being itself” (36). Typical theorists of sovereignty and analogy emerge in this chapter, but Lorenz returns to Francisco Suárez’s work, a return that recurs throughout the study in what becomes one of the most compelling and productive engagements of Lorenz’s project. Suárez, prefiguring modern theorists such as Giorgio Agamben, “attempts to read sovereignty from its ontological base […] up. Analogy is one of the most important of these grounding structures” (41). Lorenz reads Richard II as a staging of the fall and reinterpretation of sovereignty by considering the play’s staging of the fall of analogy (41–58). By the play’s close, “Sovereignty […] is no longer located in one place or one body. Rather, it is dispersed – in mediation itself” (57). In other words, sovereignty ceases to be understood according to a vertical logic of analogy in which the king’s body draws its power and justification from its link with God. Instead, sovereignty is understood as radiating along horizontal lines, which in Lorenz’s reading implies that this concept gains its power “from an immanent source within creatures themselves” rather than a transcendental or divine source (58). [End Page 1238] As suggested by the following chapter, “Reanimation: The Logic of Transfer in Measure for Measure,” Lorenz’s arguments throughout the book are substantially interrelated. Measure for Measure provides Lorenz an example by which to see sovereignty’s logic of transfer, or “transplant,” in place of analogy. Without the transcendental, vertical organization of analogy, power emerges in Measure for Measure through metaphoric transfer, or substitution, of a body for the “absent sovereign” of the play (67). For Lorenz, the problem of Measure for Measure is one of embodiment, the lack of a sovereign body: “The body is always sovereignty’s pre-condition” (84). Sovereignty “desires to have the body that it is not” and realizes a sense of embodiment through the movement of metaphoric substitution of a body in place of its lack (90). In chapter three, “Resistance: Waiting for Power in Fuenteovejuna,” Lorenz offers a reading of Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna and its representation of collective resistance to sovereign power that challenges the “transplant” solution elaborated by Measure for...

El presente artículo es una reflexión filosófica sobre las fronteras entre el Hombre y el Animal a la luz de la obra de tres filósofos contemporáneos: Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida y Gilles Deleuze. En primer lugar, trataremos de definir el “humanismo metafísico” y sus dispositivos de producción de lo humano, especialmente en torno a aquello que Agamben denomina “Máquina Antropológica”, artilugio que definiremos como un “juego de espejos”. A continuación, trataremos de presentar dos posibles vías de escape de esta maquinaria y del antropocentrismo que comporta. La primera correrá a cargo de algunas propuestas de Jacques Derrida, en torno a la deconstrucción del sujeto humanista y de la relación con la alteridad animal. La segunda nos conducirá a la noción “devenir-animal” de Deleuze y Guattari. Ambas ideas nos permitirán subvertir la metafísica antropocéntrica que ha legitimado buena parte de la violencia contra la alteridad.

With the collapse of the bipolar system of global rivalry that dominated world politics after the Second World War, and in an age that is seeing the return of "ethnic cleansing" and "identity politics," the question of violence, in all of its multiple ramifications, imposes itself with renewed urgency. Rather than concentrating on the socioeconomic or political backgrounds of these historical changes, the contributors to this volume rethink the concept of violence, both in itself and in relation to the formation and transformation of identities, whether individual or collective, political or cultural, religious or secular. In particular, they subject the notion of self-determination to stringent scrutiny: is it to be understood as a value that excludes violence, in principle if not always in practice? Or is its relation to violence more complex and, perhaps, more sinister? Reconsideration of the concepts, the practice, and even the critique of violence requires an exploration of the implications and limitations of the more familiar interpretations of the terms that have dominated in the history of Western thought. To this end, the nineteen contributors address the concept of violence from a variety of perspectives in relation to different forms of cultural representation, and not in Western culture alone; in literature and the arts, as well as in society and politics; in philosophical discourse, psychoanalytic theory, and so-called juridical ideology, as well as in colonial and post-colonial practices and power relations. The contributors are Giorgio Agamben, Ali Behdad, Cathy Caruth, Jacques Derrida, Michael Dillon, Peter Fenves, Stathis Gourgouris, Werner Hamacher, Beatrice Hanssen, Anselm Haverkamp, Marian Hobson, Peggy Kamuf, M. B. Pranger, Susan M. Shell, Peter van der Veer, Hent de Vries, Cornelia Vismann, and Samuel Weber.

This essay applies the concept homo sacer, as put forth by Giorgio Agamben, to the social perception of translators and interpreters when they intervene in situations of violent conflict. Examples are drawn from history, from contemporary events (including the investigation of Guantánamo ‘linguists’), from nonfictional writing (such as Daoud Hari’s The Translator), and from fiction (for example, Mia Couto’s Last Flight of the Flamingo). Real and fictional ‘case studies’ agree on the parlous status of the translator. The homo sacer is a literal out-law, that is, someone who is neither punished nor protected by the law. The concept owes much to that of the pharmakos as analyzed by Jacques Derrida, and both philosophers (Agamben and Derrida) claim to be reviving concepts from the classical world, among them the necessity of logos to the polis as posited by Aristotle. The article argues that by the nature of their profession, translators and interpreters in situations of conflict do not belong fully to any of the languages they are translating into and out of; to the non-bilinguals who hired them they seem to be speaking with a forked tongue and in cipher, abandoning logos in favour of mere phoné (voice) and hence moving outside the law of the polis.

Captive Thinking, Thinking Capture Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture, by Rey Chow. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. 186 pp. $23.95 paperback. $84.95 hardcover.What if entanglement, attachment, and captivity were understood not as obstacles to freedom to be overcome but as categories of agency and critical thought? What would a mode of thinking that did not belong to itself, that dwelled in passivity rather than attempting to act, look like? masochism best describes unifying gesture of Rey Chow's Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture, a collection of essays that explore, across a wide spectrum of phenomena and media, epistemological and erotic implications of being on receiving end of historical structures that capture and dominate. Chow cautions against any kind of intellectual move that would attempt to give critic upper hand over his or her object, whether it be an artwork or a historical constellation. Rather, as Chow argues, one must take states of captivity, servitude, and entanglement as being constitutive of thinking.Entanglements, as Chow writes in her introduction, imply the linkages and enmeshments that keep things apart; voidings and uncoverings that hold things (12). essays in volume assemble a multitude of cross-disciplinary motifsfigures culled from philosophy, literature, film, and visual art-that are held together by precisely this sense of a fragile and shared differentiation, by meetings that are not necessarily defined by proximity or affinity (1). book offers a critique of what Chow sees as a tendency in contemporary theoretical thinking to equate reflexivity with critical distance that, according to her, effaces sensuous captivation in name of laying bare device (16). In first chapter, When Reflexivity Becomes Porn, Chow argues that Brechtian gesture of distanciation becomes in contemporary culture a normalized state of cool detachment. Critical distance, or impulse to estrange spectator from embodied fellow feelings such as pity and fear in order to reveal workings of medium as such is, in Chow's view, comparable to pornography (30). Obsessed with unobstructed visibility, both porn and aesthetic reflexivity dwell in shocking disconnect between spectacle and spectatorship, between extreme staging of trauma and nonchalance of audience reaction (ibid.). Chow's point is that in its desire to visualize structures of mediation, Brechtian reflexivity attempts to occupy an active and scoptic position, to see rather than be seen, to act rather than to be acted upon. In chapters 2, 4, and 5, Chow identifies similar dynamics at work in key figures of contemporary thought: Jacques Ranciere's discourse on aesthetic democratization, Giorgio Agamben's concept of bare life, and Jacques Derrida's valorization of forgiveness. Chow demonstrates that in each instance agency of victim qua victim is effaced through an undue emphasis on, respectively, unmarked beholder, sovereign, and/or one who forgives. Chow instead envisions a mode of thinking that would be enmeshed with victim. While Ranciere could only understand Emma Bovary's death as an act of murder by Flaubert, her author, what would it mean, Chow asks, to see her suicide as self-authored?To this end, Entanglements examines a series of literary, visual, and philosophical figures that, in Chow's view, demand a different kind of thinking, one that resides on passive side of uneven relationships. A most poignant example occurs in second chapter, On Captivation, where Chow supplements Ranciere's conception of art as that which challenges distinction between art and nonart with anthropologist Alfred Gell's example of animal trap as both art and artifact. The trap is, to all appearances, opposite of freedom, observes Chow, but its absolute closure is assumed only from perspective of hunter (42). …

Throughout history, Jewish notions of justice, hope and redemption have inspired political visions within as well as beyond the Jewish tradition. In the past century, examples can be drawn from Ernst Bloch to Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida. Also in the present politico-philosophical debate, a number of prominent voices draw explicitly on Jewish sources in their attempts to formulate radical visions. This article engages with one of the more influential figures in this respect, Giorgio Agamben. Although Agamben offers a highly original and constructive reading of Jewish notions of justice, hope and redemption, it will nevertheless be argued that he fails to do justice to an essential element in Jewish conceptions of liberation. In consistently posing ‘law’ as the counterpole to liberation, Agamben disregards the extent to which law, in the Jewish tradition, is constitutive of justice, hope and redemption. Moreover, in equating ‘law’ with coercion and oppression he also fails to recognize the progressive force of the politico-juridical system, which is the target of his critique.

Judging by the quantity and quality of reviews it received, a second reprint a year after its publication, and the innumerable readings its author gave over the past three years in New York and elsewhere, Robert Viscusi's Astoria has become a text that literature has to reckon with. To begin with, the novel adds formidable ammunition to the battery of responses fired against Gay Talese's provocative yet timely article: Where Are the Italian American Novelists?(1) The mere implication that there might not be any such novelist requires that we consider whether it is indeed true, and if so why. Immediately we go back over critical terrain. We read various hypotheses that may help us approach the text of Astoria, get an idea or feel for the history and context, before we try to navigate it. Scholars have argued that, on the basis of sociological and historical reconstructions of an alleged literature, it typically takes three generations for a writer of immigrant origins to emerge and finally initiate the creative/political labor of construing a past, a tradition, a language, and ultimately recognition by the Establishment or the avatars of the National Literature or a Mainstream (whatever these may mean at any point in time). Moreover, Richard Gambino, Gay Talese and Fred Gardaphe, among others, have given personal accounts of the complex processes of assimilation, self-negation, invisibility, which writers go through before they can gain access to the language of the tribe, or the Canon. Or the Department of English. Of course, a cogent argument can be made that ethnicity in literature is not necessarily bad, containing elements that transcend regionalisms and ideological constructions of what's the right cultural identity and what is not (D'Alfonso 1996). It will always remain, in the background, precisely because it is literature, a question of language: Any new language entails, if I may put it so, its set of burdens on the minority writer. Obviously this weight is rarely felt in a conscious manner; it is present, nonetheless, and no writer can ever exempt of carrying that weight. Every word an ethnic writer positions on a piece of paper is therefore laden with ideology, whether he or she likes it or not. Art for art's sake is as poor an excuse as is the one which propagates the superiority of one culture over another. (D'Alfonso 1996: 59) As we shall see, this argument is also central to Astoria's cultural unconscious, its sub-text, or subtle allegorizing. Moreover, it is now widely accepted that a contemporary critical approach to texts or topics can reveal how this literature, these implicitly or explicitly Italian-American Writers, can disclose imaginary and critical loci from which to re-view our very traditions, relying on the positioning at the margin to exercise a cultural/political critique through a novel. Some exemplary readings by Boelhower, Loriggio, Cavaioli and Gardaphe, among others, attest to the rich critical and semiological terrains that writers can pinpoint and depict. Elsewhere, I have argued that being at the margin, on a borderline situation, may be a fantastic locus from which to scan and analyze our shiftless contemporary society (Carravetta). Moreover, in what we might call the high circles of critical and philosophical reflection, of a Continental flavor, many writings by Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Franco Rella, Giorgio Agamben and Julia Kristeva deal precisely with the ontological status of being/living in-between, or of belonging-to-no one, and with the perplexities ushered by having to construct such belonging through literature, with language.(2) And this even before we reach the very issue of what is or might be an ethnically or nationality marked literature. Nevertheless, a sort of underlying actual social dynamics has been identified. …

In the final sessions of the first year of his seminar on The Beast & the Sovereign, Jacques Derrida takes up the question of modernity as the epoch of biopolitics. In a remarkable close reading, he critiques Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on the threshold of biopo litical modernity, both in terms of conceptual content and, especially in the latter’s case, style. He takes as a prominent example the revolutionary transformation from princely menagerie to public zoological garden, as well as Carl Hagenbeck’s subsequent “revolution” in zoo design, which inaugurate, he suggests, not a new biopolitical apparatus of power/ knowledge, but only a different form of the same fundamental structure of sovereign power over the objectified beast. The stakes of Derrida’s ar gument are as significant as its history is burdened. It returns to elements of the longstanding polemic between Foucault and Derrida over madness and history, complicated here by Derrida’s reproach of Agamben’s own, more recent cruel admiration of Foucault. It engages with the question of historical thresholds, regarding both the development of biopower and the history of the menagerie. If we read the Eleventh Session on zoological gardens together with the Twelfth on biopolitical thresholds, their implications for contemporary thinking about human-animal relations become clearer. I will suggest, contra Derrida, that the modern history of zoological gardens does indeed cross important thresholds of biopolitical novelty. While he is no doubt right to insist on the persistence of a human sovereignty that reigns over beasts, his argumentation obscures the emergence, specificity and significance of biopolitical care. Being able to understand and critique contemporary relations of power between humans and animals requires genealogical attention to the particularity of this dispositif. Derrida’s lectures on the beast and the sovereign are erudite and provocative, if incessantly recursive. As he explains in the summary provided for the Ecole’s yearbook, his aim was:

En este artículo ofrecemos un análisis filosófico político de un caso “ejemplar” de criminalización de la solidaridad hacia migrantes y refugiados en la actualidad: el caso de Carola Rackete, capitana del Sea Watch 3, que en 2019 protagonizó un salvataje enel Mediterráneo. Con base en desarrollos teórico-conceptuales de autores centrales de la filosofía contemporánea como Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Étienne Balibar y Jacques Derrida, buscamos abordar las contradicciones ético-políticas que conllevan hoy las prácticas de solidaridad hacia personas en situación de movilidad internacional. El manuscrito se encuentra divido en cuatro secciones: en la primera, analizamos el nivel jurídico del caso; en la segunda, abordamos la lucha jurídico-política en torno a la definición de “lugar seguro” y el problema del “tráfico de fronteras”; en la tercera, indagamos la cuestión de la personalización de las acciones solidarias como estrategia de despolitización del campo humanitario; y, en la cuarta, insistimos en la necesidad de reposicionar el alcance político del derecho humanitario hoy.

Richard III is the only Shakespearean character to invoke Saint Paul (and the villainous king does so five times). The anomaly has been noted as a side topic but this essay shows that Shakespeare's rendering of Pauline subjectivity informs the play as a whole. This understanding of Richard has only become visible in our own Pauline moment. As Gil Anidjar puts it, current critical thought is in a “moment of the renewed reception of Paul”, albeit an “insufficiently acknowledged” moment. Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Slavoj Žižek have all recently addressed the relationship between Paul's paradoxically active (through love) submission to God's Grace and our current problematics of subjectivity without necessarily insinuating a specific Christian belief. Badiou's work, in particular, allows us to see anew or, perhaps, for the first time, the paradoxical “charisma” of this notorious sovereign.

Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture

To the extent that European critical theory influenced the American legal academy, it has tended to be Michel Foucault and, more recently, Giorgio Agamben, who have affected discussions of the connection between law and politics and the power dynamics at the heart of the juridical. Jacques Derrida’s essay “The Force of Law” spawned some commentary, but Derrida’s work largely entered legal circles due to its emphasis on the indeterminacy of language and its inversion of binaries, which legal scholars took as a source for ideology critique. The aim of this essay is to suggest what Derrida’s later forays into law and politics might contribute to thinking in American legal theory beyond what can be derived from Foucault and his inheritors. The key differences, I contend, pertain to time. In particular, Derrida’s writings lead us to reconsider the timing of the relation between the subject and the law, whether that subject is declaring independence or awaiting death. Four temporally inflected terms — decision, declaration, deferral, and event—bear a particular weight in Derrida’s discussions of the juridico-political and furnish the focal points for this essay.

This article examines the deconstruction of anthropocentrism in Mulk Raj Anand’s The Parrot in the Cage through a Posthumanist perspective. Drawing on the theoretical insights of Charles Darwin, Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben, this paper interrogates the conventional human/nonhuman dichotomy and advocates for a symbiotic relationship between them. Humans and nonhuman beings are often positioned in conflicting relationships, leading to domination, exploitation, consumption, and even extinction. From wild to tamed, aquatic to terrestrial, small to large, and strong to weak, nonhuman beings are compelled to exist in a state of perpetual defense, while humans, by contrast, exert aggressive control over them. The notion that humans possess inherent privileges over nonhuman entities is a construct of human culture, and the ongoing struggle between them emerges as a self-destructive conflict. Since all organisms rely on interdependent relationships for survival, symbiosis becomes an ecological and ethical necessity. This study, therefore, highlights the inherent proximity between humans and nonhumans despite their differences and advocates for a reconceptualization of their relationship. By re-examining and redrawing the boundaries between human and animal nature, the article seeks to foster a more sustainable and non-hierarchical understanding of life forms.

Reviewed by: The Incarnation of Language: Joyce, Proust and a Philosophy of the Flesh Scarlett Baron (bio) The Incarnation of Language: Joyce, Proust and a Philosophy of the Flesh, by Michael O'Sullivan. New York: Continuum Press, 2008. 184 pp. $120.00. In 2008, Sarah Tribout-Joseph published Proust and Joyce in Dialogue.1 The title of Michael O'Sullivan's second book, The Incarnation of Language: Joyce, Proust and a Philosophy of the Flesh, which came off the press in the same year, might seem to adumbrate an exploration of broadly similar literary terrain. But such is not the case: O'Sullivan's study constitutes a markedly different kind of endeavor. This is clear from even the briefest of glances at these two works' respective opening gambits. While Tribout-Joseph's inquiries begin with an account of James Joyce's and Marcel Proust's much mythologized meeting in Paris in 1922, O'Sullivan's first sentence hones in on the theological and philosophical concerns at the heart of his investigation. "The Incarnation story," he declares, "is a compelling one" (1), before launching into a dense exposition of some of the links between various exegeses of the Biblical narrative and twentieth-century phenomenology. O'Sullivan's study comprises four chapters: "Phenomenology and Incarnation," "Joyce and the Incarnation of Language," "Proust and the Incarnation of Language," and "Incarnation and Impotence: Joyce, Proust and Desire." The book is in some ways a continuation of musings presented in O'Sullivan's first book, Michel Henry: Incarnation, Barbarism and Belief (chapter 1 incorporates sections from this earlier monograph).2 It is apparent from the titles of O'Sullivan's texts, with their predilection for the enumeration of abstract nouns, that his studies are ambitious in their breadth and subject-matter and that they are forthrightly theoretical in their critical proclivities. Even among the scholarly literary-critical community, theoretically inclined works have a reputation for difficulty verging on impenetrability, and this study is not one to assuage the doubts of skeptics. Every page is packed with highly conceptual jargon. Working definitions of terms and phrases drawn from specialized corners of theology, phenomenology, and literary criticism are not provided.3 As a result, the book's semantic fabric is a slippery, often inscrutable, surface, and O'Sullivan's meaning can, at times, be bafflingly elusive. This state of affairs is not helped by the fact that his own voice is systematically muted by frequent references to, and quotations from, a wide array [End Page 161] of pronouncements by other thinkers. Names and inverted commas swarm the text, filling every interstice in which an original argument might unfold. Michel Henry, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl, Emmanuel Levinas, Luce Irigaray, Paul Ricoeur, Hent de Vries, Julia Kristeva, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière: these are just some of the names whose authority is invoked in the introduction alone. O'Sullivan's study takes religious images in Joyce's and Proust's works as points of departure for his consideration of a vast range of abstruse philosophical musings on the connections between word and flesh, rightly claiming that "Joyce and Proust share a devotional attention to the artistic process that draws them to the concepts of incarnation and transubstantiation as motifs for artistic endeavour" (5). He examines ways in which the oeuvres of these two canonical modernists may be said to perform phenomenological incarnations of their own. Such a project speaks to some of the longstanding interests of Joycean scholarship, which has long been fascinated by the author's use of epiphany, incarnation, and transubstantiation as images for artistic practice. But precisely because interest in such themes runs high, readers from this particular section of the audience risk disappointment since any real examination of the details and implications of Joyce's treatment of such matters is substantially occluded by the mode of the broad-ranging overview that is adopted here. O'Sullivan's book offers frustratingly little in the way of close reading, and Joyce's and Proust's works, when mentioned at all, are surveyed as though from a great distance and through many mediating lenses. Because O'Sullivan spends little time...

Religion & Literature 192 tion of the human-made commonalities between theatrical and religious narrative, masques, and musical deceptions is rather a cause for cautious celebration” (189). Her reading of The Winter’s Tale, in which she suggests that the potentially deceptive qualities of music are the same qualities that allow it to function as a means of healing, is particularly persuasive. Staging Harmony is admirable both in its historical scope and its meticulous attention to detail. The readings of the individual plays are impressively nuanced. Brokaw is particularly sensitive to the ways in which parody can prove unstable, particularly when music is involved. She frequently reminds the reader that even a mocking send-up of the liturgy, for instance, may recall to some listeners the moving power of the original. Throughout, Brokaw draws on previous scholarship and a wide range of historical materials to cast new light on how early modern audiences might have responded to musical performance in the theater. This book will be of particular value to readers interested in the drama, music, and religious controversies of the 16th century. Erin Minear William & Mary Violence and Grace: Exceptional Life between Shakespeare and Modernity Nichole E. Miller Northwestern University Press, 2014. x + 245 pp. $79.95 cloth, $34.95 paperback. Nichole E. Miller’s Violence and Grace: Exceptional Life between Shakespeare and Modernity is an important recent contribution to a now well-established body of scholarship that stages encounters between early modern drama and twentieth-century political, and especially politico-theological, thought. Moderns including Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Kantorowicz themselves turned to early modern texts to articulate genealogies of their own historical moment and of the problem of political theology, understood variously as an inherent religious dimension of political authority, as a historical and conceptual crisis that arises when theological legitimation of political power no longer appears convincing, or, more broadly, as the analogies, exchanges, and oppositions that at once bind together and pull apart religious and political life. In part as a result of their unorthodox theses and in part because they often seemed to subordinate textual commentary BOOK REVIEWS 193 to argumentation of a different kind, to larger claims about modernity as such, works like Schmitt’s Political Theology, Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama, and Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies have long occupied some middle ground between early modern studies, on the one hand, and theory, on the other. In recent years, however, early modernists such as Julia Reinhard Lupton, Victoria Kahn, Christopher Pye and others have in different ways reclaimed them for their field. As Miller points out, such efforts are always most successful when they seek out and attend to the “productive excess” (3) of encounters between early modern and modern texts: if reading Shakespeare and his contemporaries through the lens of modern politico-theological thought allows us to arrive at unexpected insights about the plays, then early modern texts in turn throw new light on modern thought, illuminating aspects of political theology that the latter may have distorted or left out. Miller’s book identifies one such zone of partial exclusion: she is concerned with “exceptional,”—that is, extra-political—life, with dramatic characters “suspended outside or above what Aristotle defines as the essentially ‘political’ form of life as that of a man among men, a citizen among citizens” (3). According to Aristotle, life apart from political community is either less or more than human, either the life of a beast or that of a god. It belongs either to the outcast who is stripped of citizenship or to the sovereign who transcends the state. Exceptional or bare life is of course already important in Benjamin and later becomes central in Giorgio Agamben’s work. Jacques Derrida, too, engages the Aristotelian distinction between forms of exceptional life, arguing that it ultimately threatens to collapse: the sovereign is always also bestial, and the beast is always also sovereign. According to Derrida, efforts to maintain the distinction between the two rely not least on hierarchies of sexual difference, that is, on figuring the sovereign as masculine and the bestial as feminine. Miller follows this line of thought, aiming in this...