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This essay compares the politics of life explicated by Roberto Esposito and Hannah Arendt within the framework provided by Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Set in Italy, the birth place of modern reflections on both civic virtue and the constituent power of the multitude, Shakespeare's early comedy can be invited to broker a marriage between Esposito's philosophy of the impersonal as an instance of affirmative biopolitics and Arendt's recreation of the bios politikos as that which separates from animal life through the distinctive yet daemonic character of human speech. I read The Taming of the Shrew as a critical allegory of the domestication and disavowal, but also the brilliant retooling, of Arendtian philosophy in contemporary Italian thought.

Janet Adelman (1941–2010) was a major force of innovation in the field of Shakespeare studies and Renaissance literature. Her book Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, ''Hamlet'' to ''The Tempest'' (1992) remains one of the most cited works of psychoanalytic feminist criticismof Shakespeare. As professor at the University of California, Berkeley, from1968 to 2007, Adelman had a shaping influence on several generations of undergraduate and graduate students. Blood Relations, the finalmonograph in her illustrious career, extends Adelman's groundbreaking studies of gender, psyche, and culture in Renaissance drama into problems of religion and ethnicity, combining historicism with psychoanalysis, feminism, and race theory in order to craft a nuanced account of the hermeneutic and political world of Shakespeare's England.

If recent discussions of Schmitt in these pages have made a broad case for the centrality of culture for his thinking, the current issue both specifies and generalizes this approach. The specificity derives from our focus on one key text by Schmitt that is often passed over but is in fact crucial for understanding his work. The generality is a result of the breathtaking sweep of issues that this text opens up for the contributors to this issue: the relation of sovereignty to popular will, the ontological status of modernity, the role of myth in society, the representational structure of... [Excerpt provided by TELOS]. Adapted from the source document.

Political theology is a distinctly modern problem, one that takes shape in some of the most important theoretical writings of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But its origins stem from the early modern period, in medieval iconographies of sacred kinship and the critique of traditional sovereignty mounted by Hobbes and Spinoza. In this book, Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton assemble established and emerging scholars in early modern studies to examine the role played by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature and thought in modern conceptions of political theology. Politic