The Sublime Arc of Caesarism: Caesar, Shakespeare, and Radical Politics
Abstract. This essay uses the controversy surrounding the 2017 staging of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar at Shakespeare in the Park as a launching point to explore the legacy of Caesarism as a political concept that attempts to reconcile popular sovereignty and dictatorship through the self-identity of ruler and the identity of the ruled. Drawing on descriptions of the importance of the name and signifier of Caesar from Lucan, Lefort, Laclau, and Lyotard, it develops a discourse analysis of the Caesarist phenomenon within the context of the 20th Century explications by Max Weber and Antonio Gramsci. This assessment of the “ideal name” and “floating signifier” of Caesarism and Bonapartism, as they pertain to popular sovereignty and the politics of subjectivity, is assessed in light of the Kantian idea of the sublime and a spectral existence of sovereignty. A subsequent definition is provided of Caesarism addressing the subject-oriented politics of personalized, mythically-rooted and symbolic authority.
Keywords: Caesar; Shakespeare; populism; history; Trump