The lycanthropic ambivalence within the biopolitical operations of the state power in Jo Nesbø’s Macbeth

Abstract

Although lycanthropy is a medical term and a psychological phenomenon, depicted in myths and literature as the metamorphosis of divine or human beings into various animals, the political theory has viewed it as a space to explore the biopolitical strategies of assimilation or exclusion in a sovereign state. This research focuses on Jo Nesbø’s Macbeth (2018), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play which addresses the anxieties about being human at a time when humanism has been deeply challenged. Informed by Agamben views on the ‘wolf-man’ and homo sacer, together with Derrida’s shrewd insights on ‘political bestiary’ which conveys the shared ‘outlaw’ status of the beast and the sovereign, this study explores Nesbø’s Macbeth in relation to Shakespeare’s infinite complexities to reveal the lycanthrope, a liminal being, who is pushed to the threshold of community to live permanently under threat of expulsion and annihilation or who transforms into a beast to survive in the contemporary political climate.