Violence and Grace: Exceptional Life between Shakespeare and Modernity

In Violence and Grace, Nichole Miller establishes a conceptual link between early modern English drama and twentieth-century political theology, both of which emerge from the experience of political crisis. Even as philosophers from Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Walter Benjamin to Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil drew upon sixteenth- and seventeenth-century dramatic representations of the nation-state to analyze the political phenomena of late modernity, Miller contends that they effaced the gendered and sexual dimensions of power and “exceptional life” so crucial to these plays. Miller’s analyses accordingly undertake to retrieve for political theology the relations between gender, sexuality, and the political aesthetics of violence on the early modern stage, addressing the plays of Marlowe, Middleton, and especially Shakespeare. In doing so, she compellingly expands our understanding of drama’s continuing theoretical impact.