The Historical Conditions of Possibility of the Life of the Flesh: Absolutism, Civic Republicanism, and “Bare Life” in Julius Caesar

Abstract

Julius Caesar appears to stage a conflict between a political tyrant and a public of civic-minded men who do not want power but only want to hold power accountable from the outside. In fact, the play’s agenda is much more unsettling. Julius Caesar provides an especially clear model of the central discursive conflict that pervades the early modern political field, a conflict between two competing theories of the state and state power, one monarchist and the other civic republican, and both equally committed to expanding the sovereign power of the nation-state. Shakespeare stages this conflict not in order to side with one or the other theory of sovereignty (as some critics have thought), but in order to evacuate the institutional structures of the early modern state of their legitimacy. In Shakespeare’s theatrical treatment, the friction between these two competing theories of sovereignty throws off bodies that have escaped from any state-mediated, politically legible form of “public” life. It is in such de-mobilized, de-commissioned, or de-politicized bodies that the play identifies a transformative experience of a collective life of the flesh, a formation that is eminently at home in the medium of theater.