Candied Cleopatra: The Cute Aesthetics of Shakespeare’s Political Theology

Abstract

This essay brokers an unlikely connection between Sianne Ngai’s “weak” aesthetic category of the cute and Carl Schmitt’s aesthetics of political theology through a reading of the soft, sticky, diminutive, melting object world of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra . Like Ngai, Schmitt’s early work fixes the origins of the sappy and romantic aesthetics of commodity culture in the nineteenth century with industrialization, “materialism,” and “economic thinking.” Schmitt associates these developments with the rise of liberalism and the end of the decisionist state embodied in the Hobbesian sovereign, whose political power was accompanied by the “strong” aesthetic category of the sublime. However, in his post-war writing, Schmitt locates the origin of the soft aesthetics of object culture much earlier, in Hobbes’ theory of state: since Hobbes envisions the Leviathan as both a juridical person and an artefact manufactured through covenant or contract, rendering the sovereign an object like any other. This theoretical move which opens towards a political theology of cuteness fashioned in early modern political theory and explored in literary treatments of sovereignty. This essay argues that, like Hobbes’ Leviathan as it appears in Schmitt’s later work, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra bridges the gap between the sublime heights of political-theological authority and the emergent category of the commodity, charting the inevitable cutification of political myth.