Conclusion: Lear’s Shadow, Office Today

Distributions of power are primarily maintained not through force, but through culture. The ‘absorptive capacities’ of Auschwitz would not have been tested were it not for the accomplices, who—in the face of industrial murder—told themselves that “obedience is a virtue”. In Hannah Arendt’s reporting on the banality of evil, exemplified by Adolf Eichmann—towards which Agamben’s work on instrumental office quietly points—Arendt ultimately grasps for Shakespeare: “Eichmann was not Iago, and not Macbeth.” But King Lear’s opaque officer shows that motiveless, dutiful murder was not without a Shakespearean precedent. There is much more to examine in Shakespeare—Coriolanus, to name one, screams for attention. The same may be said for Renaissance politicians like Francis Bacon. But the lack of critical attention to Cordelia’s hangman demonstrates that modern audiences—thoroughly wised-up to the divine right of kings—are innocent to the ethical anaesthesia of office. Modernity reflects not the rejection but the proliferation of this paradigm, as the fiduciary duties of company directors show. Ecocriticism, postcolonialism, and critical legal studies must therefore urgently reckon with office and duty on the scale they demand.