At a certain point in its evolution, this book was a project on distraction, perhaps even a history of distraction, beginning from a perception of the persistence and the equivocalness of that psychological category in Shakespeare. Associated with madness—the familiar early modern usage of the term—distraction is also, for Shakespeare, what saves, unbinding the self from solipsistic closure on the one hand and object fixation on the other. The indeterminate character of that state—salvific, but only insofar as it is without object or aim; a betwixt-and-between moment that is also a habitable condition—lead to the intuition...

Depending on what term one chooses for the era, and thus, perhaps, on critical affiliation, the phrase “political aestheticsin the time of Shakespeare” will seem either redundant or merely nonsensical. A pleonasm insofar as the Renaissance—to retain that term for the period—is itself an aesthetic formation, founded as it is onimitatio.In Jacob Burckhardt’s HegelianKulturgeschichte,through which the era dialectically constitutes itself as universal form by way of a negation and absorption of the past, the Renaissance becomes itself by becoming an image. Just as the state is realized “as a work of art,” so...

In their introduction toRenaissance Florence: A Social History,the editors offer a reflection on their own methodological moment, a crossroads that can be taken to represent the promise of a new era of Renaissance cultural studies:

We are poised at an exciting moment in the history of our disciplines when we can with profit consider the ways in which the two heretoforedistinct academic fields have learned from one another and whetherwe should be moving toward a single academic enterprise, or whether there is still more that can be learned from maintaining the distinctions in training and approach between history...

At this point we turn from painting to literature, and from Quattrocento Italy to post-Reformation England. A leap across faiths, but not a leap of faith, I believe, as there are continuities across media with regard to the autonomy of the work as work. Whereas the “incarnationist” focus of the previous chapter draws from an obvious theological context, I now turn to questions of state in a less mediated way. The confessional crises of the later era if anything bring the problem of society’s deontologized condition more starkly into view; with that the artwork’s phenomenalizing vocation becomes more outright. Among...

Thus far, my consideration of Shakespearean aesthetics has focused on a pivotal moment that can be read in relation to one of the contexts—the revenge genre—from and against which it can be said to arise. I turn now toOthelloto suggest, in part, how the logic of the aesthetic underpins Shakespeare’s conception of the literary work more broadly. This will entail tracing elements or motifs that recur throughout his oeuvre: the psychic phenomenon of distraction, the structuring operation of the vanishing point. But in turning to this particular play—Shakespeare’s domestic tragedy—I also mean to bring...

The Winter’s Taledescribes sovereignty in its absolutist moment, that is, in the historical interim between medieval suzerainty, the organic conception to which works such asGorbuducandKing Learpay retrospective ideological homage, and the rationalized state form. Which is also to say it reveals sovereignty in the context of the modern signifying universe we’ve seen articulated inOthello.That assertion will seem counterintuitive. For Jean Bodin, the great theorist of absolutism, nothing defines sovereignty more explicitly than its nonsubstitutable character; the sovereign is the indivisible figure in whose place no one can stand.¹ And yet, the very fact...

Sovereign authority, autonomy, and aesthetic formation most obviously converge in the island kingdom ofThe Tempest.If that kingdom is a fragile one—the domain of an exiled ruler, and a closed space nevertheless reverberate with voices from who knows where—that is because it engages autonomy precisely as a problem. A correlative to the play’s self-consciously unitary form, the heightened sense of boundedness implied by the island world of the drama is sign enough that, what ever its concerns with genealogy and descent, the play conceives sovereignty within the newly formalized and relational space of the jus publicum Europaeum....

I have been describing a genealogy of the aesthetic understood as a response to the politicization of space in the early modern era, a solution to the problem of grounds that also radicalizes that problem. I now want to cross the historical divide of war and regicide to pick up the fate of political aesthetics in relation to a new dispensation. Hobbes’sLeviathanexplicitly turns away from conscience to the passions and interests—above all, self-interest—and to the formal, contractual state as governing terms.¹ The institution of the political as neutral, scientific, even geometrical system might seem to suggest...