Rejecting arguments that Shakespeare is either an absolutist or a partisan of civic republican values, this book argues that Shakespeare is essentially anti-political, dissecting the nature of the nation-state and charting a surprising form of resistance to it. For Shakespeare, the nation-state is essentially and inescapably a vehicle of sovereign power, seizing the bodily lives of its subjects to impose regulated subjectivities, roles and identities, including a collective national identity. Shakespeare does not imagine directly opposing sovereign power; rather, he imagines using sovereign power against itself to engineer new forms of selfhood and relationality that escape the orbit of the nation-state. It is the new experiences of selfhood and relationality that flourish in the shadows of sovereign power that Gil terms 'the life of the flesh, ' and he argues that one place where the life of the flesh appears especially prominently is in a non-intimate experience of sexuality.

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'.