SHAKESPEARE VE EGEMENLİK: MACBETH’İN BİYOPOLİTİK BİR OKUMASI

Abstract

Biopolitics has brought new perspectives on power relations in society with the conceptualization of Michelle Foucault. Although the history of the concept goes back to the past, biopolitics has been used to analyze the power and social power relations in many areas from body control to population politics, thanks to Foucault. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has carried the concept of biopolitics to another point and contributed to the concept of biopolitics with his studies on sovereignty. Unlike Foucault, who claims that biopolitics is a modern thought, Agamben traces biopolitics in ancient texts. In his book Homo Sacer, Agamben allows us to reflect on the limits of sovereignty with the concept of bare life. Agamben searches for the holy man who can be killed but not sacrificed in Roman Law and makes analyzes on social power relations and sovereignty through this concept. In this article, it is aimed to make a biopolitical reading of William Shakespeare's play Macbeth, based on Agamben's analysis of the Homo Sacer. As Macbeth kills King Duncan and becomes king himself, his struggle with the ghost of sovereignty begins. While this article seeks the reasons for Macbeth's inability to legitimize his power as the possessor of sovereignty and power in Elizabethan political theology and ideological structure, it reveals, in a biopolitical reading, that Macbeth has fallen into the position of the Homo Sacer, who cannot be sacrificed but is legitimate to be killed, that the sovereign is not above sovereignty, and that the king's mystical existence is separated from bodily existence. It is intended to analyze that with the killing of the king, Macbeth seeks to retain sovereignty while trying to cope with the pain of breaking the sacred order as an object of the dominant ideology. In this article, the reason why Macbeth's sovereignty cannot be legitimized is discussed based on the argument that power has a productive rather than an oppressive nature, while examining how his position has transformed into the Homo Sacer in Agamben's theory.