코리얼라누스 그리고 셰익스피어의 정치신학

Abstract

Among the Shakespeare’s late dramatic corpora, Coriolanus has been received as a timeless metaphor of class conflicts between social classes. New historicism, in particular, Annabel Patterson’s work has successfully demonstrated that the subtext of Coriolanus is the 1607 peasants’ revolt in Midlands, not far from Shakespeare’s hometown in Warwickshire. This sort of reading, however, systematically silences the play’s Roman political cast which fully engages the question of the sovereignty. The present essay in this light surveys Shakespeare’s Coriolanus in terms of political theology which offers basic understandings of the sovereignty and the rise of modern state. In the play, Coriolanus is a threat to the Roman republic since despite his will to sovereign authority, he hates the common plebeians and ignores their voices. Thus Shakespeare structures the tension of the play around the conflict between the singular sovereignty represented by Coriolanus and fragmented voices of the “multitude.” Critics such as James Kuzner and Ineke Murakami have analyzed this political structure based on the Agambenian concept of homo sacer and have argued that insofar as the sovereign life is a presence located outside of the common and exceptional to the constitutional authority, following the same logic, the sovereign himself could be also reduced to a bare life. Indeed, in the play Coriolanus becomes a type of homo sacer and is murdered as a bare life in the end. Yet this sort of formulaic reading focuses solely on Coriolanus—the homo sacer as he is at once the sovereign and bare life—and tends to ignore another rich field of discussion--the revolutionary and irrepressible “multitude” depicted in the tragedy, which Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt have theorized as the liberating force. The Shakespearean representation of the "multitude" becomes the major focus of this essay. Moreover, by re-casting the play in terms of the “plague narrative,” teeming with metaphors of illnesses and contagions, this essay focuses on the mechanism of the “immunity” operating in the play. The concept of immunity explains the paradoxical presence of Coriolanus who is simultaneously the protective force of the Roman society (against the invasions from the enemy outside) and the contagious source of it (as he refuges to be part of the res publica, the commonwealth).