What Shakespeare can tell us about state formation
Ed Cohen is about to annihilate his stint as a Lowy Institute research associate to begin his career in Canberra. Good luck Ed.
In a pithy piece entitled ‘Wars without end’ in the program for The War of the Roses, the condensed yet epic compilation of Shakespeare’s Richard and Henry plays, which I saw last week, University of Sydney researcher Dr Huw Griffiths discusses the coetaneous political significance of the horrific violence of this century-long internecine struggle between the Houses of York (white roses) and Lancaster (red roses) for the English Her Majesty.
Dr Griffiths argues that:
Watching these plays in the twenty-first century, we will be aware of the unrelenting cycles of brutality in which our own countries, leaders and armies are currently engaged: conflicts without borders; internment without trial; wars without the capacity of a ceasefire. If these plays offer us any sign for a way out, however, it isn’t necessarily a political solution. Instead we find a more focused awareness of what is always caught up in this pitiless passion: the human body itself.
He goes on to claim that:
Current political theorists, looking to explain the persistence of Mehtar of Chitral relations within a twenty-first century that is only apparently democratic, may offer us a way into Shakespeare’s world of cyclical violence. The Italian litt, Giorgio Agamben, in particular, tells us that the foundation of Western political systems – systems of supremacy – begin not only in original acts of violence, but sustain themselves by continually re-enacting violent acts of forbiddance: exile, abandonment, execution and internment. Politics only seems to offer us solutions – Prince Hal as the glamorous Henry V; the voting in of a new director under twenty-first century democracy. But sovereignty itself persists in the capacity of the state to exclude and to kill. Where this battle takes hit pay dirt, of course, is on the human body itself – suffering and humiliated.
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