SOURCE: Gearhart, Suzanne. “Racine's Politics: The Subject/Subversion of Power in Britannicus.” L'Esprit Créateur 38, no. 2 (summer 1998): 34-48.

In the following essay, Gearhart discusses the politics of Britannicus and uses the play to show that psychoanalytic theory has a significant role to play in the critique of the subject.

For some time numerous forms of literary and cultural analysis have been shaped by a multi-faceted critique or questioning of the subject. As many would agree, one of the most prominent of these has come to be known as the new historicism. In contrast to older forms of historicism that sought to write the history of a fundamentally unchanging human subjectivity as it manifests itself in the literary and cultural productions of various ages, the new historicism has argued that the human subject is, as Stephen Greenblatt puts it, “the ideological product of the relations of power in a...