Epilogue: The Afterlife of the Life of the Flesh

Abstract

Recovering the specific morphologies of the “life of the flesh” described and enacted in Shakespeare’s theater is a contribution to historical phenomenology, to our understanding of the experience of living in early modern England and of encountering the sovereign power of the nation-state at the moment of its birth. Yet it is also a utopian resource, helping us to rethink and reimagine some of the most basic assumptions of political modernity, including the relationship between persons, bodies, and the political community and the possibilities for resistance to state power.1 The specific ways in which the life of the flesh appears in this book are essentially and inescapably caught up with a historically specific experience of being subjected to the sovereign power of the new political form of the nation-state. At the same time, the structural opening that Shakespeare’s plays identify—a mode of resistance that uses subjection to sovereign power against itself to energize new forms of life together, founded on a new experience of the bodily self—carries a lesson that applies in other times and places. Shakespeare’s vision is not unprecedented or radically eccentric, and analogues to the early modern life of the flesh that I have examined in this book can also be triggered by crises within very different structures of sovereign power in very different historical contexts, albeit in ways that reflect the historically variable ways in which sovereign power seizes its subjects.