Ernst kantorowicz, Richard II, Political Theology and Psychoanalysis

Abstract

This paper investigates first how the recent discourse of Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies is correlated with the recent discourse on political theology and its attention on sovereignty, unfolded with Carl Schmitt, Water Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben. Then, it examines how Kantorowicz’s sovereignty he traces through the interpretation of Shakespeare’s Richard II with the focus on Richard’s deposition is associated with the psychoanalytic interpretation of subjectivity of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Thus, this paper bridges between the political theology and the psychoanalysis. It shows that the sovereignty Kantorowicz and Shakespeare represents through the fall of Richard resembles ‘the flesh’ or ‘the monstrous creature’ that Eric Santner terms in defining the psychoanalytic subject, and Freud’ and Lacan’s ‘libido’, ‘lamella’, ‘jouissance’ and ‘death-drive’. Besides, this paper argues that Kantorowicz’s sovereignty of Richard and the psychoanalytic subject is nearer to Lacan’s feminine subjectivity than to his masculine subjectivity. Withdrawing a little from the main interest in the dynamic between Richard and Bolingbroke both in the (new) historicist and the character criticism, it reexamines the female characters in this play, the duchess of Gloucester, the duchess of York and Queen Isabel. The female characters, generally silenced and remaining as minor characters, nevertheless, present the alternative political perspective toward the male-centered politics constituted by blood and family. In this aspect, the female characters function as providing the looking-awry view(gaze as Lacan’s term) contrasted with the traditional, conservative, linear, and centric view, to the front facade of Richard and Bolingbroke. Especially, Isabel who is conscious of this looking awry view and thus feels the ‘nameless woe’, not only embodies the feminine subjectivity but also presages Richard’s sovereignty as seen in his shattering of the mirror.