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Abstract
This article argues for a feminist reinterpretation of the ‘radical Machiavelli’ tradition which pushes Machiavelli's performative theory of power towards emancipation. I base my argument on a rereading of Niccolò Machiavelli's Mandragola, whose historical use of the mandrake legend, I claim, symptomatizes historically gendered forms of labour expropriation characteristic of early modern capitalism. Against the background of that historical contextualisation, I then argue against James Martel's interpretation of Machiavelli's theory of open secrets, as one that remains unable to extend to Lucrezia the democratic insights that he identifies in Callimaco and Ligurio's textual conspiracies. Dialectically relocating the political heroism of this play in Lucrezia's performance, I conclude, Machiavelli's comedy becomes nevertheless useful for a subaltern theory of democratic action.
Contributor Notes
Andrés Fabián Henao Castro is assistant professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and the current post-doctoral fellow at the Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory at the University of Bologna. His research deals with the relationships between ancient and contemporary political theory, via the prisms of decolonial theory, performance philosophy, and poststructuralism. His current book manuscript criticises the theoretical reception of Sophocles’ tragedy, Antigone, in democratic theory, queer theory, and the theory of biopolitics by foregrounding the settler colonial logics of capitalist accumulation by which subject-positions are aesthetically distributed in the play and its theoretical reception. His research has been published in Theory & Event, La Deleuziana, Theatre Survey, Contemporary Political Theory, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, among others. E-mail: Andres.HenaoCastro@umb.edu