A Crack in the Shell: Reading a Few Lines from King Lear

The article takes up the theme of Agamben’s violence without a form of justice and reads Shakespeare’s tragedy as spanned between Cordelia’s “nothing” at the start of the play and Lear’s “never” at its end. It also approaches a question of the relationship between, in Rousseau’s word, “l’homme naturel” and “citoyen.” Lear’s push towards a position of being “unaccommodated” suggests a move away from the organization of life previously holding its rule over men towards a marginal, peripheral zone with uncertain rules where man has to risk his own decisions rather than merely follow the custom.