Arendt in Italy: Or, the Taming of the Shrew

Abstract

This essay compares the politics of life explicated by Roberto Esposito and Hannah Arendt within the framework provided by Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Set in Italy, the birth place of modern reflections on both civic virtue and the constituent power of the multitude, Shakespeare’s early comedy can be invited to broker a marriage between Esposito’s philosophy of the impersonal as an instance of affirmative biopolitics and Arendt’s recreation of the bios politikos as that which separates from animal life through the distinctive yet daemonic character of human speech. I read The Taming of the Shrew as a critical allegory of the domestication and disavowal, but also the brilliant retooling, of Arendtian philosophy in contemporary Italian thought.