Argues that Shakespeare is anti-political, dissecting the nature of the nation-state and charting a surprising form of resistance to it, using sovereign power against itself to engineer new forms of selfhood and relationality that escape the orbit of the nation-state. It is these new experiences that the book terms 'the life of the flesh'.

Acknowledgements Introduction 1. The Historical Conditions of Possibility of the Life of the Flesh: Absolutism, Civic Republicanism and 'Bare Life' in Julius Caesar 2. The Life of the Condemned: The Autonomous Legal System and the Community of the Flesh in Measure for Measure 3. Unsettling the Civic Republican Order: The Face of Sovereign Power and the Fate of the Citizen in Othello 4. Life Outside the Law: Torture and the Flesh in King Lear Epilogue: The Afterlife of the Life of the Flesh Bibliography Index

Daniel Juan Gil is the author of Before Intimacy: Asocial Sexuality in Early Modern England. He has written widely on cultural sociology, sexuality, religion, and the body, and his articles have appeared in prominent journals including ELH, Shakespeare Quarterly, Borrowers and Lenders and Common Knowledge.