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Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. xii + 277.
In her previous books - After Oedipus (Cornell, 1993) and Afterlives of the Saints (Stanford, 1 996) - Julia Reinhard Lupton has juxtaposed early modern literature and religious thought with contemporary theoretical concerns. In a similar vein, and building on her religious interests in Afterlives, Citizen-Saints tackles neoliberal aspirations of universal citizenship and a modern interest in political theology, a topic tfrat has recently been taken up by Deborah Shuger and Oliver Arnold, among others. Drawing on what she terms the "messianic materialism" (5) of Walter Benjamin's The Origin of the German Tragic Drama (1927), Lupton tracks citizenship's "attempt to rezone the complex landscape of religious, etfrnic, sexual, and economic differences in terms of formal equality and due process" (10). As we might expect, the results are not always pretty. Beginning with St. Paul's defense of his rights as a Roman citizen in the process of revising the covenant of circumcision as a foundational idea for die new religion of Christianity, citizenship is baptized in blood and sacrifice.
Lupton's "citizen-saint" encompasses the modalities of civic naturalization, religious fellowship, executive states of emergency, and what Heidegger calls "mere life," or extra-political and extra-social existence. She offers readings of St. Paul, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Twelfth Night, and The Tempest, as well as chapters on The Jew of Malta...