MODERN ECSTASY: LA LINGUA DEL PERTURBANTE NEL MACBETH

The wounding of the king’s body brings about an uncanny magic cataclysm in nature as well as in the very heart of the collectivity: witchcraft is precisely the manifestation of this communal magic frenzy. Wounding the sovereign body is then a ritual-magical action aiming at de-secrating (i.e. undoing) the archetypal sacred deed (literally: sacri-ficium) by which the king has been consecrated: as we shall see, this magic ritual of desecration takes the form of a reversed childbirth. Hence, the role and function of blood imagery in Macbeth’s dramaturgy as well as the emphasis on the Caesarean section (the ghostly figure of the man «out of his morther’s womb untimely ripped» – i. e. Macduff). Does the unspeakable fragility of the sovereign body consist in the fact of its being «born of woman» – a fact that political theology methodically removes and dissimulates beneath the abstractions of its allegorical algebra? Why does magical thinking re-enact on the stage of Macbeth the childbirth taboo? To what purpose does Shakespearean poetry remind Modernity of this repressed event?