Unsettling the Civic Republican Order: The Face of Sovereign Power and the Fate of the Citizen in Othello

Abstract

Whereas in Chapters 1 and 2 I analyzed the way raw sovereign power unsettles the “public sphere” and the legal sphere, respectively, in Chapter 3 I focus on how raw sovereign power unsettles the nominally civic republican political order represented in Othello. As a political ideal, civic republicanism exercised a deep fascination for many early modern English intellectuals because it seemed to offer a basis for political order other than the arbitrary will of the sovereign. In the plays I have examined thus far, civic republicanism acts as a kind of acid that unsettles an absolutist order and by doing so opens the door to a life of the flesh. In Othello, by contrast, Shakespeare imagines a nominally civic republican order only to show that it is subtended by a suppressed version of the same absolutist power that the absolutist order explicitly celebrates. As Shakespeare depicts Venice, the civic republican order assumes political subjects (“citizens”) with stable socio-symbolic identities who are capable of carrying out their duty to the state. However, the play reveals the reliance of these civic republican subjects on an exceptional person, namely, Othello, who embodies raw sovereignty and answers to no one. The play explores how an encounter with raw sovereign power generates fleshly bodies that can be reassembled into new configurations, creating clusters of bodies that are theatrically separated from state-imposed social norms of interpersonal bonding.