“Untimely Ripp'd”: On Natality, Sovereignty and Unbearable Life

Abstract

This essay is a set of notes towards a new history of political theology that seeks to focus on the concept of “unbearable life”. To begin with a hypothesis that I will cash out in more detail in the essay, unbearable life is not life that can be killed with impunity because it is not deemed worthy of life—such as Agamben's Homo Sacer—but rather life that does not need to be killed because it is not permitted to “live” in the first place. For a certain tradition of political theology—which can be traced from Augustine to Schmitt—the challenge of rule becomes to foreclose the birth of species of life which, by the bare fact of their coming into the world, would constitute a challenge to the sovereign biopolitical command over what constitutes life and death. By abjecting certain forms of life of the very possibility of existence—by rendering them unbearable life—I further want to contend that political theology does not thereby find it possible to exclude them altogether but rather only to consign them to other ontological domains (myth, poetry, eschatology) and to other forms of species-existence: the beast, the spectre, the monster, the demonic, the machinic. If political theology seeks to repress the promise and the threat of unbearable life, however, we will see that the repressed returns to haunt it in its very interiority—and even in the increasingly unbearable figure of the sovereign himself. In the essay, I will try to exemplify this larger argument via a reading of Shakespeare's Macbeth.