What is it to read a text, to embark on the work of history, and to find ourselves reflected there? To read, to interpret, is always, as Judge so persuasively argues throughout his book, a work of desire; the attempt to burrow down to the bedrock of cold hard facts always thwarted by the insistence of fantasy, which fills out the gap between us and the lost object of history with a vision of our own making. To read is, then, perhaps always to reveal ourselves; to interpret always to confess. Just as the Christian quest for the historical Jesus so fundamental to emergent European understandings of race, nation and history across the 19^th and 20^th centuries foundered on the realisation that its protagonists kept turning up precisely the historical Jesus that they wanted to find, so too Judge suggests with the quest for the historical Duleep Singh; and so too, I suspect with the suggestions I’m about to make and the questions I’m going to ask about Prophetic Maharaja.

The historian Thomas Laqueur suggests a connection between three interconnected moral panics over the long eighteenth century in Europe: one concerning masturbation, one concerning women’s propensity for excessive novel reading, and one concerning the financialization of markets and property, the dissolution of solid forms of property into the intangible and speculative circulation of credit and debt. These three questions – gender and sexuality, property relations, and communication technologies circulate throughout the book, intersecting in various ways, and – as is proper for a book so insistent on the impossibility of reaching back behind the mythical and fantastical imaginaries of history to the hard core of the Real – I want to ask some vulgarly Marxist questions about them.

The European distinctions between public and private spheres, outward actions and inner thoughts and beliefs emerged in part out of an enormous transformation of the gendered order of European life, the public sphere of politics and paid labour coming to be coded as masculine and the private sphere of religion, spirituality, home life and unpaid labour coming to be coded as feminine. In eighteenth century Britain, this order was called into question by white women making claims for full citizenship with explicit reference to empire. Around fifty years before the birth of Duleep Singh, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the foundational text of white feminism, arguing that by being denied full rights of citizenship and property ownership, British women were – like “oriental despots” and enslaved Africans, forced into positions of passivity and luxury, forced to exercise power through manipulation and seduction rather than through rational argument. In 1888, two years after Duleep Singh tried and failed to return to the Punjab, Josephine Butler campaigned for the Indian Contagious Diseases act, arguing that the horrors of the British Army’s treatment of Indian sex workers might provoke rebellion, ‘especially in the Punjab’, and making the case for middle class white women’s emancipation so that they might more effectively work for the moral purification of the British Empire. These questions of gender, race and citizenship circulate throughout Prophetic Maharaja. Judge depicts Duleep Singh’s conversion or reversion back to Sikhism as a masculinising move, in which Singh secured his Sikh identity through arranged marriages for his daughters and chastised other princes for their effeminizing trust in British justice. As Judge writes, ‘In Duleep Singh’s rhetoric, the key to liberating the mother country lay in cultivating the boundaries of the masculine Sikh self while warding off effeminacy’. I want to push him to say a little more about how we might think the question of gender, particularly in terms of its ordering of the distinction between public and private, in relation to the material organisations of gender, production and the household in this period.

The figure of the sovereign subject which shows up repeatedly throughout the book is a masculine subject, but is also, crucially, a property-owning subject. As Judge argues, Singh drew on this notion of the property owning subject to challenge his exile, demanding that the British recognise both his rights as a private property owner, and also the freedom which was his possession by right as a British citizen. Yet the incommensurability of Sikh and British economic practices emerges repeatedly as a point of conflict and differentiation. The bazaar recurs as a site where imperial categorization is fractured and seditious rumours spread, and Sikh practices of gift-giving are at the heart both of Singh’s attempt to re-claim a Sikh identity and, it seems to me, of the different conceptions of community Judge finds at work in the text: on the one hand, the Christian model of community understood in terms of enclosure and possession, and on the other, the Sikh model of community understood in terms of halemi raj, ‘constituted by “the recognition of others without subjecting”’. Sikh practice, Judge suggests, undermines imperial notions of the self by ‘allowing the community to reestablish debts within itself, dissolving the contours of the self’. As Singh sought to re-establish his standing as Sikh, Judge argues, ‘the monetary amount he donated to produce karah prasad was central in cultivating relationships with the sangat, and in this process, Singh ‘foregrounded the thing itself rather than the relations it produces’ to understand the pahul ceremony, making it clear that he did not want his money to be used to buy ‘the white sugar sold in bags’. Here, Judge suggests, ‘we are left with the ambiguous nature of the commodity form that ties together a community irreducible to the logic of market exchange of autonomous individuals.’ I have two questions here: first, I wanted to ask for a little expansion on the role of sugar in this narrative: am I right to suspect that it is not incidental that this is a product so fundamental both to British imperial expansion and, via its connection with the slave trade, to the private property form as such? Second I want to ask, again, whether we might see this complex interplay of notions of community, obligation and exchange in relation to the material ordering of property, production and the household at this moment in history?

The question of public and private, of inner and outer selves, emerges at various points in the book as a question connected to technologies of communication. Judge points to Caroline Walker Bynum’s work on the emergence of ‘the individual’ in twelfth century Europe, and this emergence was in part the product of new technologies and the new forms of social life they produced and/or enabled. The 12^th century saw the proliferation of literacy, of texts in the vernacular, and of new literary forms, as well as the emergence of new forms of bureaucratic administration built on new techniques of accounting, law, and financial exchange. The later emergence of the modern nation state was, as Benedict Anderson has argued, tied in with the new forms of communication made possible by the printing press and the newspaper. The emergence of spiritualism was tied, as Jeffrey Sconce has shown, to the invention of the telegraph. All of these technologies, along with more ancient forms of communication such as rumour and gossip, show up at different points in the text, and questions of reading and interpretation often seem central to the complex negotiations of Singh and his collaborators with imperial powers. Rumours and documents are circulated in secret, the British intervene in the public sphere because the masses are seen as incapable of rational discourse, and the press seek and fail to control the narratives they publish. It seems to me that one thing going on here is that the complexity and internal conflicts which Judge identifies in both as both imperial powers and Sikh communities relate to Singh is mirrored in the complex ecology of communication technologies at play in this period, but I’d like to hear Judge’s thoughts on what attention to this technological strand which runs through the book might draw out.

And finally, I want to return to that most materialist of practices, to psychoanalysis. One reading of Judge’s historiographical approach might suggest that the work of history is itself a form of analytic practice, the hard matter of historical detail inseparable from the subjectivity we bring to it, tradition and archive the other side of the Möbius strip of the desire which makes us who we are. The quest for the historical Jesus was always, at least in some way, the quest for the meaning of Jesus, and in my own work I’ve suggested that the Christian tradition can be understood as constituted by an ongoing set of disagreements about how to answer this question. But reflecting on Prophetic Maharaja I’ve wondered if this is still too simplistic. Joshua Ramey has described divination as “a tradition-bound mode of taking chance seriously”, a definition which seems to me also to encompass the practice of psychoanalysis. Might this also work as an account of the vision of the writing of history that Judge presents us: a tradition bound mode of taking chance seriously, of reading what has been handed down to us in stories or rumours or telegrams or archives, what we have found and what we have stumbled upon, as a way to grapple with the question of who we are which is, of course, the question: what do we want?

This is a guest post by Samaah Jaffer. Samaah is a PhD Candidate in Religious Studies at Yale University.

Rajbir Singh Judge’s Prophetic Maharaja has arrived “in the face of unyielding violence and a political horizon drenched in loss”—and, how could it not. Over the past few months, and the months which preceded it, I have been trying to think about what we might, or should do with the accumulation of unyielding and uncontainable loss, and more specifically with the grief that enshrouds it. Wrested, as we are, by multiple, ongoing, and anticipated catastrophes, the desire for an ethical intervention is severely heightened. What are we meant to do as bombs continue to be dropped, people continue to be starved and disappeared, and movement, speech, and assembly continue to be suppressed? What might we do as we inhabit the tribulation that is existence itself? Under such conditions, there is a strong desire to look to other times in an effort to return to a prior status quo, albeit no less afflicted, or, at the very least, to mourn those who have been martyred, and the irreversible dissolution of the pretenses we held, about ourselves and the world we live in.

Rajbir warns that as “troubles increase we find continuous calls for more historicization rather than its end—concerned reminders that we need alternative genealogies, new methodologies, and better archival reading practices in order to finally create a generative history where we previously found impediments.” (16) Refusing such historicist demands, Prophetic Maharaja contends with the creative potential of loss and desire, which, as Rajbir notes, are often entrapped in tragic narratives of the past. Sitting with the movements and individuals that surround Duleep Singh, we encounter impossibility and failure—of narrative, history, and the restoration of the Khalsa Raj—as generative. Instead of working to uncover, or capture more or better history, Rajbir suggests, and enacts through the book, a “rekindling without repair,” which refuses to theorize loss, but rather, to dwell “in the various rhythms of loss.” (13)

Rajbir reads mourning and melancholia, through the psychoanalytic tradition, as two ways historians might respond to loss. Mourning, Rajbir teaches us, “is the project for historians.” It enacts what David Scott calls “reparative remembering” and, according to Sigmund Freud “normalizes the relations to loss.” Drawing on Michel de Certeau and Jacques Lacan, Rajbir suggests:

Historians first posit the past as past but repair our relation to the past by disinterring the dead and bringing them into the present […stabilizing] the present’s relation to the past. This movement of reparative remembering performs […] funerary rites […] This has been a goal of many scholars focused on the Khalsa Raj, Duleep Singh, and the Sikh tradition: to properly bury Duleep Singh, to mourn his lost sovereignty by situating and stitching the man into his time. Such a move suppresses the enigmatic questions raised by death. (15)

While history, which “offers mourning in the present, a proper burial through the conquest of time,” aims to stabilize and metabolize the lost object—settling the past and repairing our relation to it—melancholia “can function as an appropriation and preservation of loss itself, in which the ego defends against loss while reinscribing the very object it ‘lost.’” (16-17) While careful not to delimit mourning and melancholia along normal and pathological lines, or to romanticize loss as a site of political possibility, or to collapse melancholia and fetishism, Rajbir suggests melancholia “enables us to witness creative relations to loss,” and that “the relation to loss marked by the fetish could also index a promise.” (17) He clarifies:

Following this reading, a frozen and static Sikh community did not internalize Duleep Singh. Instead, in melancholic and fetishistic incorporation, the very constitution of discrete subjects and objects are challenged as we are forced to grapple with the production of meaning as contradictions and anxieties appear constantly. This persistent grappling provides the opportunity to foreground reciprocity without capture. (19)

Ultimately, by grasping and ungrasping Duleep Singh, Rajbir foregrounds a Sikh “ethics of remembering” as a practice that does not require a central, stable lost object. He argues:

Sikhs cultivated an ethics of remembering and association around sovereignty that does not seek to settle relationships with the Khalsa Raj by forgetting it or turning it into a lost object, thereby creating a melancholic afterlife. (20)

It is by attending to the death of the subaltern and subaltern studies, and through the concept of tradition as developed by Talal Asad, Rajbir articulates and enacts this ethics of remembering.

 “Following Talal Asad,” Rajbir writes: “disjuncture and displacement should not be understood as oppositional to tradition, since tradition itself is a series of simultaneously affirming and displacing contestations within a historically continuous argument between assumed narrators and audience.” (119). Like rumors, the temporality of tradition “allows for the working through of coherence without demanding historical intelligibility.” (140) The Sikh tradition, which refuses totality, does not therefore become “the site to memorialize loss—incorporating loss,” but instead, as the text reveals, remains in a struggle both within itself and against the limits of the colonial state. (144). Such struggle, Rajbir demonstrates, was palpable in reform movements, specifically the Singh Sabha, which refused to separate the spiritual and the temporal.

Asad famously concludes “The Idea of the Anthropology of Islam” by stating that to “write about a tradition is to be in a certain narrative relation to it, a relation that will vary according to whether one supports or opposes the tradition, or regards it as morally neutral.” While there will never be “such a thing as a universally acceptable account of a living tradition,” he argues that declarations of moral neutrality “are no guarantee of political innocence.” The ethics of remembering enacted throughout Prophetic Maharaja unsettles the aspiration to moral neutrality that the work of historians often attempts. Rajbir’s account of loss and sovereignty reads as a deliberately political approach that, by refusing closure, is neither indifferent to the survival of the Sikh tradition, nor to those who keep it alive.

The method by which Rajbir attends to the movements that emerge and mobilize around Duleep Singh, has given me a lot to consider as I think about a different narrative of failed resistance, based on a contested claim to communal sovereignty, most often “emplotted as a tragedy.” (12) The seventh-century uprising led by Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, culminated in his martyrdom in Karbala, alongside members of his family, a handful of close supporters, and the imprisonment of those who were not killed. The narrative crystallization of Karbala has rendered it as the paradigmatic encounter of good and evil, oppressed and oppressor, truth and justice. Parallels have been drawn between Karbala and “contestation[s] of various forms of hegemony,” including the asymmetrical violence of colonial occupation and dispossession, from Palestine to Kashmir.

 In Reliving Karbala: Martyrdom in South Asian Memory, Syed Akbar Hyder differentiates between three, albeit not perfectly demarcated, “communities of interpretation”—the commemoration of the Twelver Shia, the celebration of the Sufis through qawwali, and the emulation of twentieth-century socioreligious reformers. “Commemoration” is most clearly distinguished by its various mourning rituals, which are repeated annually during the months of Muharram and Safar, and at other times throughout the year. Parts of these rituals resemble funerary rites—a mnemonic performance, staged with replica coffins and tombs, to remind us of those who were left unshrouded and unburied in Karbala

While Duleep Singh was not a shahīd in the conventional sense, the formation of communities around his claim to sovereignty, the injustice of his predicament, the repetitive and varied invocations of his narrative, name, and image, the conviction that his actions were subordinate to hukam, or divine will and intervention, and the coalescence of a tradition around him that refuses closure, ring familiar with various visions of Karbala. The merits of grieving for the martyrs of Karbala are extolled as a practice of the Quranic prophets, from Adam onwards, who are said to have preemptively mourned and experienced a part of the pain and tribulation of Karbala. Yet, the insistence on remembering and grieving the loss that took place at Karbala has been pathologized as a cult of mourning and variously read as the source of a “schizophrenic and categorical split between a politics of despair and an aesthetic of formal emancipation” and a “stubborn fidelity to a lost cause.” While the accounts of Karbala can be and are contested on historicist terms—subject to questions of how can we really know what happened when extant written sources only appear centuries after the battle itself—the tradition demonstrates that historicity is not the point.

Ali Shariati notably differentiated between Red Shiism, the revolutionary tradition of martyrdom, and Black or Safavid Shiism, which displaced its freedom-seeking prior form, recasting Shiism as a religion of mourning. He argued that mourning for Hussein and his family was akin to cooperating with Yazid, the Umayyad ruler who ordered his assassination, as it announces the end of the martyr’s task, ultimately the end of their story. Far from advocating for a suspension of grief over Karbala, Shariati insisted on interrupting the cycle of “everlasting mourning” by responding to the invitation of the martyr to bear witness to what their lives and deaths tell us about the truth of this world. Yet, his conception of historical truth is not one that mourns and enacts a burial as a reparative measure, with the historian as a practitioner of orthopedics (180), but instead relies on the work of martyrdom to perform the resuscitative gesture as the “heart of history.” He states: “In the same way that the heart gives blood to the body, a martyr gives it to history […] to the dry dead and motionless corpse of society.”

Over the past year and a half, the incessant obliteration of Palestinian life has drawn renewed attention to the figure of the shahīd as well as the potentialities of mourning. The work of mourning, as Jacques Derrida accounts, is a perilous endeavor, bound by a sense of duty to converse with the dead, yet always open to the possibility of bad faith, delusion, denial, narcissism, self-interest, and political calculation. For those of us removed from immediate proximity to the catastrophe and those it has claimed, the desire to remember and mourn is further accompanied by the failure of comprehension, or apprehension of what we claim to be “witnessing.” Historicist repair is impossible, as its fundamental claims “that justice is rooted in evidence, that truth leads to action, and that seeing is believing” do not stand. In “Can the Palestinian Mourn?” Abdaljawad Omar responds to Judith Butler’s invocation of mourning as a “departure strategy from the logic and cycles of violence, a space where cycles of retribution may be interrupted, and a new ethical relationship may be inaugurated though a recognition of shared suffering and vulnerability,” by emphasizing that mourning is not possible for Palestinians in Palestine.

He writes:

The Palestinian collective endures within a temporal chasm, wherein the durée—essential to the rites of mourning—is systematically arrogated and denied. This denial of chronal refuge, this impediment to commence the formal rites of mourning, even as uncompleted work, enunciates a collective state of perpetual deferral of mourning. This condition is formed and shaped through historical contingencies as Palestinians navigate the attrition of their physical space—the killings, the politics of postmortem incarceration and defilement, the carceral system of mass confinement, and the Palestinian subjectivity entangled within a temporal suspension—a “deferral” is formed within a chronology knotted by the magnitude and recurrence of loss, where Palestinians are barred from mourning, but also refuse to start the work of detaching themselves from the object of their loss.

Omar further argues that Palestinians remain in a “collective state of perpetual deferral of mourning” and that “to grieve” under the conditions of asymmetric power that render it impossible, “is to engage in a betrayal of sorts.” In Prophetic Maharaja, Rajbir’s orientation towards loss similarly regards efforts to repair, settle, heal, and detach from the object of loss as the unethical method of secular history, insisting instead on an ethics of remembering that persistently grapples with the impossibility of closure.

By way of conclusion, Rajbir asks: “What does it mean to be ‘coeval with the dead’ who are neither buried nor present? […] Is it possible to rethink another relation to death itself, a different rapport with the Other?” (182-3) Thinking with the unburied dead in Gaza, of bodies denied and awaiting funerary rites, Omnia El Shakry, asks us to consider burial not merely as, quoting Hans Ruin, “laying to rest and storing away” but as a starting point of a set of practices and rituals of caring for the dead, including the act of writing history as an encounter with the dead in the liminal space of the barzakh. Just as Rajbir refuses to properly bury Duleep Singh or “render him in the past or subjunctive tense,” in fidelity to a living tradition and Sikh relations to his sovereignty, El Shakry’s approach suggests an alternative ethical relation through which we may inhabit space and time alongside the dead—an opening, perhaps, to ask the “enigmatic questions raised by death” that are otherwise suppressed by history, and to listen for a response. (135, 15)

In a lecture on “The Sects” of Islam, Ignaz Goldziher cites A. F. Badshah Husain, saying: “In paradise we will mourn for Husayn. It is the condition of Muslim existence,” and “Mourning for Husayn is the token of Islam. It is impossible for a Shi’i not to weep. His heart is a living tomb, the true tomb for the head of the beheaded martyr.” In this expression, grieving enacts a burial not in the past, but within those who remember, and while it may resemble melancholic incorporation and fixation, here, the shahīd is not dead. As the Quranic injunction instructs, we are not meant to think that “those who are killed in God’s way are dead; they are alive, though you do not realize it.” (2:154) Through this opening, and Rajbir’s invitation to refuse the historical rendering of lifelessness, we might begin to consider the possibilities of relating to, learning with, and caring for those unjustly buried in the past—inconclusively and without closure.

In his introduction to this book event, SherAli makes reference to a formulation of Talal Asad that I have found to be haunting as a regulative ideal: “Life is essentially itself.” The truth of this is what makes friendship appear across the symbolic register, but also requires attention to the ways that each term—life, being, essence, itself—may be captured within the colonial frame and betray friendship that remains impossible. For me, this brings to mind a guilty pleasure of mine, romantic comedies. Specifically, romantic comedies that take interracial relationships as their focus. In those films there is often a scene where the two protagonists come face to face with the reality of trying to love each other in a world where their racial identity matters and structures how they might live. For example, in the (admittedly middling) 2023 film You People, Ezra (Jonah Hill) and Amira (Lauren London) fall in love and are able to inhabit that space together joyfully and erotically. That is until they make their relationship known to their respective Jewish and Black communities. Once they make their love visible within the community—casting their love as subject to what the community is able see—they confront the reality that who they “really” are is not unmoored from how they inhabit the world within the symbolic register. That they love each other in a way immanent only to themselves is no less true than the reality that they must face being racialized within the world that imposes distance and transcendence to their experience. 

Reference to such a middle-brow film might seem strange in the context of engagement with such a rich text as Rajbir Singh Judge’s Prophetic Maharaja, but what is common despite the low and high-quality of the two is a kind of yearning for the impossible while having to contend with the reality of loss, and rumors of even greater losses. The abyss between a shared life that is only immanent to itself and life that can only be communicated through the symbolic might be another way to describe loss. Attention to this gap might be another name for mourning and melancholia. Rajbir’s book—which flows between the historical and deeply theoretical, all while deftly dealing with the imposing demands of a historico-disciplinary institutional machine—offers no simple nostalgia for a lost sovereignty, nor a kind of defense of a future sovereignty to-come. In a line that is undeniable in its understated desire, and draws me in for that reason, Rajbir writes, “I am ambivalent about loss, affirming and denying it, resisting it and acknowledging it, working through it and against it, and interrogating its nature, its ground or presuppositions, its form and its failures. […] the book does not provide a theorization of loss but dwells in the various rhythms of loss (13, emphasis mine).” 

Part of what has been lost, I take Rajbir to be teaching us, is even the ability to see what has been lost clearly. What is the rhythm that emerges when the Sikh community is drawn toward the possibility of a lost sovereignty when the language of that loss is irreparably changed by the presupposition of “a Christian paradigm (8)”? Might we even say the language is “infected” or is this too much? Does that notion of infection not itself presuppose a Christian paradigm of biopolitics? Instead, maybe we can say the rhythm is now inflected, but still the rhythms that were are now no longer. They are new, which is perhaps something to mourn, but can the loss even be related to when this new beat, this new notion, remains stuck in our head? Ambivalence becomes a powerful stance here.

This relation to loss is what I think allows Rajbir something unique and rare in academic work today, especially academic work in the so-called Western academy that often relegates work like this to “area studies” or even to the discipline of history itself, sold as it is amongst a million different cultures where stories can be heard and understood. The nefarious nature of Christian-secular hegemony also creates spaces within the Western academy where borders are policed in the name of fighting for some form of recovery, where seemingly “provincial” concepts get recast into and for Western academia. Rajbir’s book moves with a kind of beloved ambivalence between concepts of European origin and those of Sikh tradition. He passes across these borders seemingly without anxiety, precisely because this ambiguous relationship to loss undermines claims that some final or complete knowledge of Duleep Singh will be found anywhere. What the Punjab and Europe share in common is not an understanding of sovereignty, but that they “appear to have ‘failed’ (13)”. Failure is common across the divide, across the traditions, across lives lived essentially as themselves. 

I find that there’s something enjoyable, even if is not reparative, in knowing that even if the colonists think they’ve won, my god, how they have failed! How much they have lost! I realize that Rajbir’s book is not about the colonizers, but given my own relationship to colonialism, I did find myself thinking of them. I don’t know if this is failure and I can accept it if it is. But I was drawn in particular to the concept of “rumor” in the book, a form of knowledge that is totally lost on the colonizers. I think rumor identifies another resource that works on loss (like mourning and melancholia) and is truly a philosophical concept. I was drawn at first to the way that rumor is described by Rajbir as exceeding what the colonizers’ can understand, what they can know. For example, in the chapter following “Rumor,” we find the British consular agent in Pondicherry reporting on the rumored increase in supporters of Sindhanwalia (who was working to restore the Maharajah to the throne) with the admission, “what this means I do not know (156).”  

Rumor is a kind of knowledge, but without clear or secure meaning. Rajbir connects such an understanding of rumor to gossip, “Rumor and gossip contest the tightknit relationships between public and private, outer and inner, world and home, central to both colonial rule and nationalist thought (117).” Agamben turns to gossip as a philosophical idea in his book on St. Paul, The Time That Remains. He doesn’t fully flesh out the idea, but I find his description as fascinating as it is dense: 

This does not mean that gossip cannot be interesting; on the contrary, to the extent that it entertains a nontrivial relation to truth that eludes the problem of verification and falsification and claims to be closer to truth than factual adequation, gossip is certainly a form of art. The peculiarity of its epistemological status lies in the fact that in itself it accounts for the possibility of an error that does not entirely undermine the definition of truth. Intelligent gossip therefore interests us independently of its verifiable character. That said, to treat gossip as though it were information is truly an unforgivable apaideusia [lack of refinement] (Agamben, p. 8).

Gossip does not have to be accurate in order for it to be closer to truth than fact is. Yet, the truth gossip is close to is still far from being information. When Agamben tells us that it is inelegant to treat gossip in this way, we can extend the argument logically to see that treating information as if it were truth is equally as ignoble. This confusion of truth and information, even a fear of gossip and rumor, is at play when the colonial occupiers work to categorize and track individuals as information amongst the Sikh community. 

Is rumor, as Rajbir describes and traces it, distinct from Agamben’s philosophical gossip? If gossip in Agamben’s text brings to mind catty scholars leaning in over drinks to share what they heard, rumor has a distinctly more insurgent character. Rajbir builds upon Ranajit Guha’s argument that, “As a spoken utterance, rumor, […] was central in creating rebellion in the colonial era, since rumor spread more urgently and dynamically than the written word (118).” Fanon, who appears elsewhere in this text, might also be instructive here, writing in the “On Violence” chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, 

Colonized peoples are not alone. Despite the efforts of colonialism, their frontiers remain permeable to news and rumors. They discover that violence is atmospheric, it breaks out sporadically, and here and there sweeps away the colonial regime. The success of this violence plays not only an informative role but also an operative one (Fanon, p. 30).

Rumor is insurgent because its relation to law in the political realm shares something with gossip’s relation to truth in the metaphysical realm. Colonial violence is presented as law which hides its identity as violence through the myth of meaning. Colonialism’s conception of the law is mythic in structure because law presents itself as the meaning of violence. The way that rumors can spread, both anonymously and without the requirement that the speaker or the hearer believe in the rumor, reveals the underlying disjuncture of law and truth. The distinction that Walter Benjamin finds in his “Critique of Violence” is that between law, taken to be universal, and justice, which is always particular. 

Rajbir’s conception of rumor again returns us to the question of the community and tradition that runs throughout his book and is both a place of dwelling with loss and what is lost. In the discussion of rumor we see Rajbir repeating a structure that flows out of the his stated relationship to loss. On the one side, the community and tradition are real and operative, “Though open to improvisation, rumor remains grounded in local credibility, within the parameters of tradition” (119). Rumor is not universal, and when the British attempt to turn it into information, they will necessarily miss what it has said, may say, and is saying. The particularity of the community is what allows rumor to remain rumor, to let it speak truth without turning it into a dead letter of information or law.

On the other side, though, rumor “is not simply about local credibility or precoded political thinking, but about disjuncture and displacement, which both creates and restricts possibility for political struggle (ibid, emphasis mine).” Rumor, and the insurgent violence that may emerge from it, is not a simple matter of the community’s moral affirmation or condemnation. The truth that this tradition—any tradition—is itself not secure, complete, or finished, is understood in rumor. Rumors tell us that this tradition is no more sovereign than the colonizer is or the rule that was lost was. What is particular is also displaced, particularity requires displacement or else it is simply captured and circumscribed by law. 

I suspect some readers of Rajbir may find his ideas of loss too melancholy, even rumor lacks something of the healthy mind real strivers have. Too melancholy too those concepts that flow out of his dwelling in that loss, both within failed European traditions and in the failure of Duleep Singh. Of course, heart to heart, I do not find them too much. For those who listen and can move to it, there is something beautiful in the rhythms of loss that Rajbir plays out for us. A reminder that the colonial borders repeated in the university between academic disciplines are not real, even if they are deadly (sometimes for our bodies, sometimes for our spirits). Yet, the rhythms of loss allow for movement anyway. A little ambiguity about any of the claims that, once lost, we can be found, allows for a wild theoretical freedom still controlled like a dancer pushing the boundaries of the body while the rhythm keeps that body in time. 

When scholars and intellectuals refuse loss, what is it that they are so scared of? When reading Rajbir on rumor, I was surprised to find myself quoting Matthew 24:6, “And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed, for this must take place, but the end is not yet.” So much loss, and yet I still cannot fully get rid of this tradition, which I suppose I could claim, however tenuously, even if it does not claim me. What are they so scared to lose, when the reason the loss hurts so much is that it is never fully lost, there’s no certainty in the loss to remain lost? Are you scared that when you get what you want you’ll still be lost? Rajbir says of the colonizers, “They refused to consider the possibility of rumor outside of the certainty of their law (137).” I have heard a rumor that two people fell in love, that friendships were formed, despite the world they live in, and rumor says that they’re totally fucked, but they might just make it. Though, I do not know what this means. 

The resonances between my own work and Rajbir’s felt obvious on the surface. We both work with 19th century figures and materials that are routinely routed toward historicist and redemptionist ends. The sense of an impossibility of recuperating what has been lost and refusing to simply repeat a narrative of fulfillment drives both of our analyses. While working with different histories of loss and narratives of redemption, the resemblance between the Western forms of statecraft and social order that have produced discourses of racial classification and their juristic and imperial enforcement means Rajbir’s work has significant implications for thinking and rethinking something like 19th century black internationalism.

When I first began reading Prophetic Maharaja and about Duleep Singh, sometimes called the black prince, I immediately thought of W.E.B. Du Bois’ novel Dark Princess. Written in the years of Du Bois’ waning influence in America, the novel follows the African American protagonist Matthew Towns, who, exiled in Berlin, finds himself introduced into an international movement for the darker peoples of the world against European imperialism. Through his relationship and repeated rescue by the Princess Kautilya, the Maharanee of Bwodpur and Sindrabad who is his love object, Towns staves off a crisis of faith in the radical democratic vision of a global socialist movement animated by solidarity amongst people of color and Europe’s internal revolutionary forces. The novel ends with Towns and Princess Kautilya welcoming their son, fulfilling the need to provide a ruler to Bwodpur and Sindrabad and staving off England’s rule. Instead, they renew Indian autonomy against the ever encroaching forces of the white Western world and empower those once enslaved with a singular and global historical contribution to the revolution against empire. Crowning him the Maharaja of Bwodpur, “Messenger and Messiah to all the Darker Worlds,” Princess Kautilya and Towns’ child represents, not only the hope and possibility of an Indian nationalist vision, but also an internationalist sign of the future overthrow of the forces that have captured African Americans and all other darker peoples and workers of the world, condenses the messianic and the message in the figure of the child ruler.

Rajbir’s Prophetic Maharaja takes up the kinds of messianic messages generated in Du Bois’ novel by considering the impossible figure of Duleep Singh, a former child ruler, as the hopes for a restored Khalsa Raj circulate around his unstable form. The weight of possibility placed on Duleep Singh can often lead to anxieties that drive a quest for the fulfillment of dreams more than staying with the texture and effects of the dreams themselves. Reading Rajbir’s work at this point in my own writing of a book manuscript was also, at turns anxiety producing, deeply challenging, compelling, and always tinged with the excitement of uncertainty. This uncertainty, I take as an effect of Rajbir’s approach to narrating the figure of Duleep Singh in terms that depart from the strictures and reassurances of the salvation that so often and uncritically underwrites thickly descriptive histories. Rather than the engorgement of an alternative and recuperative history, Rajbir’s book takes knowledge’s inadequacy to its object as a point of departure for a different question: “How do we drive at the impossible Duleep Singh–a Duleep Singh we can never arrive at?” (183)

Rather than attempting to arrive at a settled and known sense of Singh, this uncertain terrain, too, becomes an unexpected means of revelation through Rajbir’s examination of loss, not as a known and accomplished fact, but as dynamic effect of the work that constitutes a living community. If the messiah is also the messenger and his figure circulates as the message and in the messages generated around his body, what is it that he communicates? What is it that he stimulates even as what is communicated exceeds his sovereignty and self? I was very struck by Rajbir’s examination of the prophetic’s effects on the fashioning of publicity and the press, for instance. He shows how loss, sovereignty, dreams, and history converge and deform colonial logics as “aspects of the community that had been presumed lost, such as the Khalsa Raj and Duleep Singh, continually erupted into public discourse”(66).

What Rajbir brings to the fore, here, is how the unexpected reappearance of what was presumed lost staves off the success of a recuperative act, fulfilling a salvific quest for fulfillment through the recovery of what was. Instead, what is revealed in the secret that the impossible Duleep Singh makes visible is that “there is no secret to be revealed” (87). Rajbir contrasts this lack of a secret revelation with readings of what the instability of meaning circulating around Duleep Singh reveals. In part, the revelation generated by his instability is the work by which “Colonial administrators regulated the public by creating a typology of racial difference” producing the possibility for the revelation of the secret that is “essential because it functions as a presupposition that sustains the entire order of things” (58). But, a distinct difference to the secret’s function in colonial societies lies in its establishment of the public as lacking in the judgement that would set up an exchange of trust and legitimation to circulate between the public and imperial rule. Instead, the distrust that structures the colonial relation depends on the denial of knowledge to the colonized public. Rajbir’s deft insights here expose the production of concealment and revelation as an effect of the colonial state’s censure of publicity in order to manage the threat of disorderly knowledge.

The irruptive, disruptive, ordering, and disordering circulation of the impossible figure of Duleep Singh also extends to his name. The press’s threat resided in its ability to “[expose] excitable forms of belief to the danger of an impossible unity through the name Duleep Singh” (70). The contestations of colonial racial classification that Duleep Singh’s name makes possible depend on an eroticism that exceeds imperial orderings of race and belonging to go about the work of fashioning a dynamic and uncertain mode of oneness. Sikh’s gathering around, under, and against the name of Duleep Singh generate possibilities that, even in their not coming to fruition, refuse the anticipatory assumptions of knowing on which colonial logics depend. In this way, “the public emerges as a knot unable to be adjudicated into historical form” (87).

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That historical form so often serves as a way of resolving the knots that undermine colonial logics is reflected in the pressures of history that attempt to measure the “success” of an idea, a movement, a cultural product, in terms of its historical accuracy or faithfulness to a historical form. In recounting the reception of Du Bois’ Dark Princess, for instance, Claudia Tate highlights the mixture of defense, criticism, embarrassment, and incomprehension that Du Bois’ romance—which is routinely identified as a “historical novel”—engendered:

The reviewer for Hampton Institute’s The Southern Workman defends Dark Princess against claims that it is unrealistic by identifying its problem as the search for “the plan of emancipation.” The reviewer adds, the problem “is not, however, solved; but is discussed from many angles” (336). Allison Davis’s review in The Crisis argues that Du Bois “has raised the dead weight of our stolid depression by propaganda at once eloquent and sane.” He further adds that Dark Princess “must be evaluated” for its “spiritual influence in Negro life,” for its “propagandic purpose” (339). Despite the efforts of these sympathetic critics to efface the novel’s eroticism and to recast the work in the more favorable light of racial propaganda, privately, they seem to have regarded Dark Princess as a dirty old man’s fantasy that should never have been published.

Reviews of Du Bois’ novel routinely set the spiritual against the material, the idealism of propaganda against historical fact, the eroticism of fantasy against the sober chastity of reality, and the stability of policy against the quest for a “plan of emancipation.” Rajbir’s challenge to the historicist presumptions that underwrite distinctions between the political and religious would teach us well, here, and have implications for all of us interested in the study of race, religion, and politics.

I first read Dark Princess when I was maybe 18 or 19, having had it recommended to me by my sometimes conspiracy theorizing oldest brother who had stumbled across it in the public library. I was totally taken by the book, pushing through even the many moments I did not understand because something about its eroticism and mythic sensibility, its internationalism and religiosity, stirred up a drive in me to see the novel through. Upon the novel’s end, I remember feeling in a haze. I could not put into words what the novel was “about,” nor what I was “taking” from it. I could probably recount some plot points and significant events, describe the key players and the protagonist and his love object. But the thing I’ve carried with me most from this book, over the nearly 2 decades since I first read it was the impression of a vision, almost a fever dream, and a sense of possibility that could never be foreseen in advance or fully articulated and encapsulated in words. The novel was certainly historical, and Du Bois’ place in black history gave gravity to it, but what the novel actually does, by refusing to be a realistic historical representation of black internationalism actually offers a more powerful counter to the strictures of a imperialist binaries.

I felt, upon reaching the novel’s last page, that I had been shown something about the possibility of an internationalist sense of black life, culture, and literature that exceeded the standard narration of black possibility, built on redemptive logics of reproductive futurity, that I had inherited. Having been exposed to this unstable and open sense of possibility, I was relieved of some of the pressure of following the redemptive Americanist narrative of our great overcomings from slavery to freedom. If Du Bois, one of the most prominent black leaders of the late 19th-20th century, could produce an at times irrational and affecting, didactic and poetic, political romance predicated on the mythic work that makes an international solidarity of darker peoples of the world possible, then perhaps what I thought I knew about black culture, black history, black romance, needed to be upended. Yes, this was a romance. Yes, it was an ostensibly historical novel. Still, what it amounted to with its inadequacies and incoherences held a salvific satisfaction at bay.

Upon reaching the final pages of Rajbir’s book, I felt that his treatment of Duleep Singh reminded me of the feeling of a fever dream that Du Bois’ novel stirred up in me. The lack of a salvific satisfaction, which is not identical to the lack of eroticism. Rajbir highlight’s prophecy’s ability to reroute our staid senses of sovereignty into a much more critical but also creative and curious direction. Rather than treat the dreams and myths and prophecies stirred up by the figure of Duleep Singh as irrational forms in conflict with political forms, Rajbir makes clear what Cedric Robinson, in his Terms of Order shows, which is the fundamentally mixed-paradigms that serve as the basis of human fashionings of order and authority. Indeed, these mixed-paradigms are central to the ongoing work of learning that undermines colonial certainty. As Rajbir notes, this also can have the effect of taking the pressure off those of us attempting to write in the wake of these stories of loss and stories of history. Approaching the messianic and the messenger as sites of learning, we may find that

[i]n our learning there might be no need to conclude, which means that there is no need to convince, to produce a final conviction about our loss in the carceral operation of history that arrests a community, a tradition, and the very questioning of sovereignty. (185)

Repeating the announcement of a knowledge that exceeds our words, Rajbir’s reminder of our freedom from the need to conclude, convince, or produce a final conviction, offers a lesson in learning to stay with the uncertainty as a way of staying with the singularity and totality of what is at once a tradition and a dynamic and open-ended effect of communities in, across, and against time.

For many years, I have been using my Amazon Wish List as a vast “to-read” list — including recommendations, books of which I’ve read interesting reviews, books I want to remember for my research, etc., etc. (I very rarely actually buy the book from Amazon; instead, I’m free-riding on their easily accessible database of virtually every book ever published.). Over time, the list became so unwieldy as to be useless, and this year I resolved to attack the problem from two directions. First, I would go through the list and be honest with myself about whether I would actually read certain titles (or groups of titles on topics I have lost interest in). Second, and more interestingly, since I am between research projects, I wanted to use my ample commute time to actually read a good chunk of them by fully leveraging my access to interlibrary loan.

The result has been an enjoyable semester of miscellaneous reading that is often pegged to certain times of my life or certain friends. It was so nice to get off the treadmill of work-oriented reading that I even resisted writing up a blog post, because it would potentially make it “feel like work.” But as an aid to my own memory, I present the list here:

• Susan Stewart, The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture — this was a good way to consolidate memories of my trip to Rome, overlaying what I had seen with its broader historical significance.
• Shabbir Akhtar, The New Testament in Muslim Eyes: Paul’s Letter to the Galatians — this is related to a long-planned article on Paul and the Qur’an; I found it to be extremely strange and borderline unreadable, to be honest.
• Robert O. McDonald, Works Like a Charm: Incentive Rhetoric and the Economization of Everyday Life — I already blogged about this one.
• Jiwei Ci, Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution: From Utopianism to Hedonism — I’ve read a lot on Soviet Communism but comparatively little on China, and a review article on Ci’s work in NLR made this seem like a good starting point. It was pretty bracing, presenting Mao’s career as marked by magical thinking and a weird secular eschatology.
• John Rieder, Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System — an effortlessly authoritative overview of science fiction studies, through the lens of the ways that commercial culture transforms the meaning and function of “genre” compared to classical models.
• Seth Benardete, Achilles and Hector: The Homeric Hero — this was recommended to me way back when I was first prepping Shimer’s senior capstone sequence. I probably should have read it back then!
• Seth Benardete, The Bow and the Lyre: A Platonic Reading of the Odyssey — This wasn’t a “recommendation,” but I figured I enjoyed Achilles and Homer so much I would check this one out. It gave me a lot to think about for particular details of the Odyssey, but I’m not sure I understand the overarching argument about how Homer is somehow Platonic in approach (such as it is discernible in his almost Gillian Rose-like severe style).
• Zdravko Planinc, Plato through Homer: Poetry and Philosophy in the Cosmological Dialogues — This was a recommendation from my summer seminar on Plato and Homer; it similarly gave me a lot of insights for future teaching.
• Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners — my friend Bruce Rosenstock, who passed away in 2023, recommended this to me way back when I was working on Awkwardness. Since I didn’t have reliable library access at the time and wasn’t planning on making it a scholarly book, I left the recommendation aside — but picking it up semi-at-random now, I enjoyed the morbidly fascinating tidbits of medieval manners, as well as the introduction in which he uses his own sociological method to account for why the sociology of his time sucked.
• Erving Goffman, Stigma: The Management of Spoiled Identity — another Bruce recommendation from the Awkwardness days. This is remarkable for the author’s matter-of-factness about the negative valence of certain traits in the context of mandatory “normality.” I was also struck by how his discussion of affinity groups, complete with publications, for most stigmatized identities anticipates the explosion of similar groups in online settings.

For the summer, I’m going to need to shift gears back toward class prep and research for most of my reading, so this is where I leave this particular project. I think I’m going to make an effort to do something similar every few years, though. Undirected reading is really important for keeping one’s mind fresh and nimble.

This post is by LL Hodges, a writer, historian and professor based in Los Angeles. They focus on queer history and questions of memory, loss and time.

It was the Monday in November after the daylight saving time ended. Riding my bike home in the City of Quartz after work suddenly meant navigating a setting sun. I was unprepared. So, I rode on the concrete sidewalk portion of the bridge over the Los Angeles River instead of on the road. That’s when the sign came into view. From the corner of my eye, I saw bright red and yellow and stopped pedaling. Cars sped behind me as I turned to look. Had this always been there? And so it was that during the reminder of time’s construction, rolled back an hour and plunged into darkness, I saw— perched on a rooftop and written in neon—Concrete is Fluid.

I’d had the pleasure of reading the introduction to Rajbir Singh Judge’s book Prophetic Maharaja by then. Ideas of loss, mourning, and grasping perseverated. Not to mention the claim: “One could say that mourning is the project for historians (Judge 15).” Full disclosure: I am a historian. This means many things. For starters, I should believe in determinate negations and aufheben (truthfully, I shouldn’t even know what that is since I was trained in the U.S. and not supposed to learn theory). I’m supposed to take out my thread and needle to repair our current/past loss, progressing society forward with each suture. I build narratives across space. Doesn’t concrete do the same? Isn’t it an example of how “success is grasped through a frozen hold on time” (Judge, 16). 

As a kid I used to dial a number on our house telephone and, at the tone, hear what the time would be. But on that evening of all evenings, just after the state exercised its power over time, my mind was left malleable. Concrete. Space. Time. As a trained historian, I want to eschew the prickliness that disrupts teleology promise (Arondekar, For the Record, 17). Yet the time-change lingered in unfixed aches that day as it worked itself through my unadjusted body. I could not ignore it. I started to lose my grasp on history. Queerness has a way of ungrasping.

Concrete is not solid. This became clear, freeing even. Thus, the idea conjured queerness. It brought the orbits of Jean Genet and Gerry Bibby together with Gayatri Spivak and Anjali Arondekar and Rajbir Singh Judge. These orbits aligned or even crashed in the space of my brain. Is this a fair collision? It is in this post. And not to worry, the event did not signify an end or a conclusion. I am still floating in that space.

In the writer Jean Genet’s only film, Un Chant d’Amour, the queer desires of men in prison exceed their concrete walls of confinement. The film revels in its homoeroticism, but that isn’t my concern here. Instead, I pull out two themes that recall the discourses of Duleep Singh’s public and hidden transcripts (Judge 30). Publicly, there is a swinging of flowers. Privately, there is a blowing of cigarette smoke. 

The film opens as a guard walking to work sees two arms hanging outside of the barred prison windows. From one window an arm swings a string with a bouquet of flowers tied at the end. The waiting hand of the next window over tries to grasp the bouquet. He misses. Again, the bouquet pendulum swings, again a miss. Loss becomes continuous. This opening, like the opening to Prophetic Maharaja, asks the viewer to sit with Spivak’s idea of “simultaneously grasping and ungrasping,” as Rajbir reconceptualizes it (25). We are not asked to grasp and hold on. In this book Rajbir asks of us to keep grasping. I cannot think of a more intellectually caring call to arms. Be wary of redemption, keep letting go.

What might this mean for an archive? Rajbir turns to Arondekar for “an archival approach that articulates against the guarantee of recovery” (Judge 60). I turn back to Genet’s afterlives. In 2010 and then again in 2023, the artist Gerry Bibby performed an ode to Genet. Once called Un Chant. Grotto Giganta: stalactite/stalagmite (2010) and later Un Chant/A Shoe/Achoo. We’re gonna have a Good Time: For BP (2023), Bibby’s performance centered on the swinging bouquet. Rather than swung between two hands, a bouquet swung back and forth above a photocopy machine. Bibby tried continuously to capture a photocopy of the bouquet, all while reading the technical manual to the copy machine out loud. These fleeting moments of desired intimacy evaded capture, despite the drone of technical, administrative operation. 

Then, like Rajbir, I, too, turn to Arondekar, imagining the copy machine spewing attempt after attempt. “What if the recuperative gesture returns us to a space of absence? How then does one restore absence itself? Put simply, can an empty archive also be full?” (Arondekar, For the Record, 1). Subverted, the question echoes: Can a full archive also be empty? Yes. “The colonial archive is thus most empty precisely when it is most full” (Arondekar, For the Record, 12). This is Bibby’s archive of photocopies gathering in the machine’s receptacle. A full archive moves towards what Rajbir explains as the colonial politics of “securing the world” (2), one that creates a “carceral register” (20). 

A pile of paper can easily become an archive. “The carceral operation of history” (185), however, is not without its difficulties. The frustrations of the colonial apparatus, of mechanical administration and bureaucratic systems is the site of queerness constituted against capture or redemption. The machine does capture something, but only the right-before-vanishing.

Here, Dhurm Singh transitions us, in a slippery way, from the outside of concrete to the inside. A man with good intentions and lucky timing. As Rajbir writes, he was “both meager and many, lacking and copious, absent and present, Dhurm Singh had arrived at his destination and disappeared” (85). Could a poesis be at play here? This suspension, to be empirically determined but lost, to live on the edge of the limits of the state, slips through time. Like the failed photocopy of the bouquet, Dhurm Singh appears as a sort of blur. In this blur he avoids becoming objectified and overdetermined as an archival subject. In these current times of heightened surveillance, there is a way of being here that I find inviting. With AI object recognition technologies trying to “secure the world,” how might we endeavor to live in blur.

Now within the prison walls, there is another kind of grasping at play. In Genet’s film, two men in neighboring cells share cigarette smoke through a hole in the concrete wall between them. The act arouses them, frustrates them.

We should not be surprised by such little holes. Prophetic Maharaja reveals the tears and the holes of the carceral operation, to show, for example, how everyday practices like taking amrit render the colonial order “a sieve” (105). Like a sieve, the concrete wall allows for movement. The smoke moves like rumor, dissident and uncapturable, as irreducible as air. Sometimes the man ignores it, sometimes he inhales it. Desire itself becomes unfixed and free within concrete.

Genet’s film ends with the hand firmly grasping of the bouquet. Maybe affection is allowed to be secured. But Bibby’s performance, ends without a clear photocopy, leaving a lingering suspension, exceeding placement. This feels more apt to Rajbir’s work.

Prophetic Maharaja rejects a neat conclusion into the future, instead asking for the present act of learning. Specifically, it asks of us “to learn without closure” (185). But its opening challenge moves further, “to learn…without end, without satisfaction, and open to the possibility of failure” (26). What might it mean to have a failed history? Not a history of failure, not a failed historian, but a history that reneges on The Promise?

Recall that mourning is the project of historians. In our desire to secure the present through interpretations of the past, we are tied to the future. The secure past works to secure the future. They are inseparable for many. I might go as far as to say that to the extent that we spend our time in the past, we are stuck in the future. Perhaps this is why, after discussing research on the past, a historian is liable to face the question: “So, what do you think will happen?” The common historian answers, “Well, I study the past, so I can’t see into the future. But…” and continues. Orthopedics, indeed. 

Yet Prophetic Maharaja asks us to avoid satisfaction. What, then, if there is something satisfying in the lack of satisfaction? 

By now the sky was dark purple and reaching for black. The city’s skyscrapers glowed in the distance as the Los Angeles River trickled down its concrete banks below. The neon sign continues its challenge: Concrete is Fluid. I looked this up later and found it part of the artist Lauren Bon’s greater project to hack the LA River’s infrastructure. It seems possible. But of course, concrete is also solid. It builds and it traps.

In Los Angeles, the weight of concrete has its own character. According to Mike Davis, who spoke with a piece of concrete in his hand at the 1998 Critical Resistance conference , the substance used to hold promise, but now seems sinister. Now it holds “the stink” of, among nefarious things, claustrophobia. I think back to the pile of photocopies growing during Un Chant, of the historian wading through piles of documents. Davis opened by saying the Romans invented concrete, thus evoking empire. If one could trace the development of concrete, would they find it paired with the development of the archive?

I looked down at my watch and realized the time. My watch is powered with help of a quartz, a component of concrete. This moment both could not have happened on any other day and continuously happens ever since. I turned and rode my bike home. 

This is a guest post by SherAli Tareen, Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College.

At its core Rajbir Singh Judge’s dazzling monograph Prophetic Maharaja presents an argument for “dwelling in loss” rather than seeking the enticing yet entrapping desires for restoration, recovery, and healing. By writing a “historical narrative that refuses to historicize,” Judge pushes his readers to examine notions of sovereignty and history that the practice of dwelling might make available. Conceptually, through the example of Duleep Singh (d. 1893) and the politics his life and memory make possible, the book seeks to interrupt dominant scholarly notions of historicism and colonial logics of religion and sovereignty, that reappear in varied apparitions in contemporary scholarship as well. It is very rare for a monograph, and even rarer for a first monograph, to offer an example of close and patient reading that rattles deeply held and deeply prized normative assumptions of one’s field of intervention. Judge achieves precisely that. And he does so in multiple ways and registers.

In Panjab Studies, there is a pervasive trend of excavating a redemptive narrative of a Panjabi cosmopolitan ethos that might offer the fantasy of traversing and transcending the alleged juggernaut of religious convictions that according to this view stifle such “cosmopolitan” pasts and futures. The Sikh tradition, under the calculus of this desire for “Panjabiyyat” or “Panjabiness” can either work as a quintessentially hybrid religion that naturally inheres pluralism or as a model for a colonial infested discursive machine that can only be repaired through the prophylactic of secular baptism. Judge entertains none such fantasy. In fact, Prophetic Maharaja conducts a devastating indictment of the politico-conceptual coherence as well as the desirability of the secular quest for Panjabiyyat by presenting a reading of Duleep Singh’s quest for sovereignty that does not seek to resolve, recover, overcome, or redeem any restorative project of liberal redemption and goodness.

Through an analysis both painstakingly layered and theoretically vivacious, Judge masterfully walks his reader through a terrain of political theology populated by visions of sovereignty neither liberal nor secular, but rather nestled in the refusal to exercise the sovereign decision to historicize, humanize, and heal any alleged ruptures of history. Judge’s analysis of Duleep Singh’s attunement to the loss and possibility of sovereignty propels the reader to confront and wrestle with a grammar of life that is not driven by or available for secular projects of dividing that life into binaries like religion and culture, state and society, plural harmony and exclusivist bigotry. Life, Judge teaches us, taking a cue from anthropologist Talal Asad, is “essentially itself.”

One of the great lessons of this book that I found particularly striking and productive concerns its theorization of loss and its simultaneous recognition that loss escapes and exceeds any neat theorization. Judge is at his most brilliant and intellectually courageous during moments in this book when he meditates on the aporias of his own encounter with the conceptual constitution of his project. And remarkably, and again in a rare achievement, these are precisely the moments when his argument is most piercing and compelling. His discussion of loss is a great example of this. As Judge writes very early in the book (in its Introduction), signposting an analytical attitude and conviction he sustains throughout the monograph: “rather than provide a new theorization of loss-which cements a relation to loss-this book endeavors to reckon with the powerful resources that work on loss, such as mourning and melancholia, and what they have already provided.” Judge continues, in a flash of utter brilliance, “I contend with loss instead of transcending it through recovery [emphasis mine]…I do not tie a thread throughout the text that provides an adequate answer to loss because there might not be any answer to it. In this sense the book does not provide a theorization of loss but dwells in the various rhythms of loss. My goal is not to recognize loss and provide it taxonomic space but to sit with losses as they appear, disappear, and reappear throughout the text” (p. 13). This mini paragraph I have just cited represents a moment of tremendous significance in the study of South Asian History and Religion. Note, in the interest of careless readers who will rush towards the inconsiderate gesture, all too pervasive among historians of a certain ilk, to dismiss or undermine careful theoretical interventions as Judge’s here as convoluted high theory. Note particularly that dwelling, in Judge’s account, as both an analytical concept and as a mode and practice of life, is anything but passive inactivity. Exactly to the contrary, dwelling represents that aggressive commitment to a politico-conceptual ethic of refusing to repair and overcome loss through secular gestures of managing and healing the violence of history.

Dwelling in loss, instead of activating the secular instinct of historicizing, humanizing, and supposedly transcending loss makes possible a horizon of the political that comes to live with rather than attempt to overcome the aporias of life. Judge’s invitation to his readers to “sit with losses as they appear, disappear, and reappear” in the passage of a text or in the passage of history is I believe a profound call for suspending sovereign confidence in compensating for loss and treating the wound of historical contingency through the fantasy of historicist rigor, of returning life to its immanent materiality. What sort of politics and possibilities of sovereignty might become available by dwelling in loss, by sitting with rather than treating with the prophylactic of secular historicism the vertigo of historical conjunctures such as the one involving the loss, renewal, and diffusion of Duleep Singh’s aspiration for sovereignty? In asking and addressing this question, Judge successfully offers pathways for recognizing and exploring the political power and philosophical sophistication of imaginaries of sovereignty, like Duleep Singh’s, that are otherwise conveniently though perniciously catalogued as sorry tragedies of a colonized subject. Making Duleep Singh’s example speak back to and interrupt the alleged tragedy of his quest for sovereignty, Judge undertakes a critically important endeavor of decolonizing both colonial and contemporary secularist models of South Asian history populating the Western academy. This forum brings together outstanding scholars, conducting theoretically cutting edge critiques of secular power from multiple disciplinary perspectives, to engage, wrestle with, and celebrate a book with major ramifications and consequences in the study of religion, history, philosophy, and South Asia. The Prophetic Maharaja is in many ways a model and master seminar in bringing together invasive attention to the particularity of an archive and theoretical reflection that paves as well as shifts the terrain of multiple fields of knowledge simultaneously.

SherAli Tareen is Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College and currently a Patricia Crone member in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton NJ for the academic year 2024-25. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award in the Analytical-Descriptive Studies category. His second book is Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023) which was selected as a finalist for the 2024 American Academy of Religion Book Award in the Textual Studies category.

Rajbir Singh Judge is Assistant Professor in History at California State University, Long Beach. Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia was published in 2024, and over the next few weeks we have a series of contributors who’ll be offering their reflections, followed by a response from Rajbir. I’ll update this post with links to the other posts as they’re published:

Introduction by SherAli Tareen

LL Hodges, ‘Claustrophobic Archive‘

Amaryah Armstrong, ‘Black Internationalism, the Black Prince, and the Pressures of History‘

APS, ‘”What this means I do not know”: Loss and Rumours of Loss‘

Samaah Jaffer, ‘The Contention of Mourning‘

Marika Rose, ‘A Matter of Fantasy‘

Satbir Singh, ‘Dandy (de)livery‘

Basit Iqbal, ‘Non-redemptive Narration‘

Response by Rajbir 

There’s something about Trump that draws comparisons with Communism. The one I’ve heard most is the Cultural Revolution, where Chairman Mao incited a rebellion against the state he ostensibly led, with the Great Leap Forward (rapid economic transformation through absurd magical thinking) as a close second. Mao does not exhaust the field, however. There is a rich vein of ironic parallels to be found in the career of Mikhail Gorbachev. Here I am drawing on Vladislav M. Zubok’s Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union, which I discussed at greater length here.

There are any number of parallels that immediately leap to mind — such as their strange trust in their country’s historical enemies (Reagan for Gorbachev, Putin for Trump), their tendency to indulge in personal projects instead of governing (writing Marxist theory for Gorbachev, golfing for Trump) or even the fact that both have a bizarre visual feature on their head (the birthmark and the combover, respectively).

More informative, though, are the parallel dynamics of their careers. The first is that both shocked the political establishment with their radicalism. In both cases, establishment figures assumed they would be a fresh outsider face (Trump as a political novice, Gorbachev as the first Soviet leader born after the Russian Revolution) who could be controlled. In fact, in the case of Gorbachev it was likely that the need to control him didn’t even occur to most of the relevant power brokers, since he had previously been such a “go along to get along” kind of guy. But both Gorbachev and Trump 2.0 moved much faster and made much bigger changes than anyone was anticipating. In Gorbachev’s case, the establishment was too blindsided to do much of anything prior to the abortive coup attempt (famous for the Soviet TV station’s decision to play Swan Lake on repeat for the duration rather than report on events), and this time around it doesn’t seem like much of anyone with institutional power is making serious plans to counter Trump.

The nature of those rapid changes also bears comparison. Perhaps most notably, Gorbachev’s decision to simply leave the Eastern Bloc countries to their own devices was as shocking to Soviet insiders as Trump’s omni-trade war has been to their American counterparts. This decision is representative of a broader trend — their rapid changes tended to be strangely self-undermining. Gorbachev seems to have believed he would gain some moral authority and shed an economic burden by abandoning the Warsaw Pact, just as Trump claims to be righting a major wrong in the world trade system by fighting back against our allies’ supposed parasitism. In practice, though, both moves seriously undercut the sources of the respective superpower’s sway on global events.

The same was true domestically. Gorbachev styled himself as a new Lenin, instituting a renewed revolution to fully actualize socialism in its ideal form — including an eventual transition to democracy. Ironically, though, he ruled more purely dictatorially than most post-Stalin Soviet leaders, even as he continually undercut the sources of his own power. Key to his plan to democratize the Soviet Union was the ambition of reenvigorating the individual republics and their local “soviets” — moves that wound up stoking nationalistic fervor that had mostly lain dormant, which (shockingly!) proved to be counter to Gorbachev’s socialist goals. And though this analogy is admittedly a bit strained, both also made changes to the “official” history of their countries that hurt their legitimacy — Gorbachev by belatedly admitting the truth that the Baltic states had been annexed by force (morally good, tactically stupid) and Trump by hamfistedly imposing a white supremacist narrative to counter the scourge of “woke” (morally evil, also tactically stupid).

Similarly, the attempted reform of the Soviet economy took on a DOGE-like “move fast and break things” tone, as the few people who still had some idea how the planning system worked were sidelined and the functioning systems were gummed up. The attempt to make the constituent republics “real” again also had the effect of severely disrupting supply chains, similar to Trump’s antics. Contrary to the hagiography by which Gorbachev wisely oversaw the inevitable dissolution of the Soviet Union, the events of his rule were chaotic and unpredictable to almost everyone involved, due to the unique combination of naivety and recklessness he brought to the table.

In summary, both were aspiring revolutionary dictators, aiming to revive an idealized heroic national past, and both relentlessly destroyed the state capacity necessary to carry out their stated goals. Both responded to economic discontent by heedlessly making things even worse. Both abandoned allies and cozied up to long-time enemies who did not actually have their nation’s interests at heart.

Where the parallel begins to break down is that Gorbachev’s intentional stoking of intra-Union nationalism wound up creating independent power centers that ultimately dissolved his country out from under him. A few months into the Trump administration, we don’t seem to be very far down that road — though arbitrarily witholding federal funding to “blue” states could do for state-level identification what Trump’s abominable threats have done to Canadian nationalism. Maybe Gavin Newsom will turn out to be America’s Boris Yeltsin, withdrawing the single biggest constituent unit from a tottering federal structure (though of course California is proportionally nowhere near as dominant as the Russian “Republic” was within the USSR).

And of course, for most Western readers, the parallel rankles because Trump is bad and Gorbachev was good. Personally, I’m not so sure that dissolving a major world power, permanently racheting down the life prospects of everyone in the successor nations, and abandoning a major region of the world to what amounts to mafia rule was an unalloyed good. If the choice were between the continued existence of the USSR and the constituent republics becoming nice, normal, prosperous liberal democracies, obviously the latter outcome holds considerable appeal — but it is not remotely what happened, nor is there really any reason to imagine that option was on the table. Meanwhile, judging from the early days of Trump’s second term, the world may well regard the dissolution of the United States with relief by the time he’s done.

If that sounds impossible to you, well, the dissolution of the Soviet Union would have sounded impossible to everyone in the early 80s — from Gorbachev and Reagan all the way on down. A superpower doesn’t just destroy itself! That would be crazy! But sometimes crazy things happen. We unfortunately seem to be living through one example — hence the value of thinking through a previous case.

[Editor’s note: While preparing for my frequent course “Deals With the Devil,” which centers on the Faust theme, I discovered that one of my favorite filmmakers, Éric Rohmer, wrote a doctoral dissertation on F.W. Murnau’s silent film Faust. To force myself to read it, I put it on my syllabus, hoping that it would set up an exercise where my students could build connections between the Faust theme and a major work not obviously based upon it, in this case, My Night at Maud’s. As you will see, it turned out that much of the material in the book was not directly relevant to the course, but Rohmer does have some good stray observations about Murnau’s reworking of the Faust theme and his relationship to Goethe in particular. I share the text of the handout I will be distributing to my class in case anyone might find it interesting or useful. My translated excerpts below are drawn from Éric Rohmer, L’organisation de l’espace dans le Faust de Murnau (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1977). Page numbers refer to this edition.]

Éric Rohmer (1920-2010) was a French filmmaker associated with the New Wave movement pioneered by directors like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. Like Godard and Truffaut, Rohmer actually started out as a film critic and scholar, and he did his doctoral dissertation on Murnau’s silent film adaptation of Faust (1926). As a film critic and aspiring filmmaker himself, Rohmer is much less interested in the plot of the film than in Murnau’s cinematic technique. In fact, he believes that the familiarity of the plot was what allowed Murnau to be so innovative in the way he presented it—all his attention was focused on technique rather than narrative. Nevertheless, Rohmer does make some very insightful remarks about how the film functions as an adaptation of Goethe’s Faust. Here I will provide an overview of Rohmer’s work and a translation of those passages. My hope is that this will help us to make connections between the Faust theme and Rohmer’s film My Night at Maud’s (1969).

Rohmer opens the book with the claim that “Of all filmmakers, F.W. Murnau is perhaps the one who knew how to organize the space of his films in the most rigorous and inventive way” (9). He defines three different kinds of space that a film can create. The first is the pictorial space, which talks about the way that individual shots or frames are composed. The second is architectural space, which refers to the way a film creates the illusion of a “real world” that the characters are moving through. The third is filmic space, which refers to the way that the film creates a sensation of movement.

The main chapters of the book go through these versions of space one by one. In the first chapter, on pictorial space, Rohmer claims that most filmmakers of Murnau’s time were inspired by photography, but Murnau preferred to use painting as a model. Rohmer goes through many individual painters he believes inspired Murnau’s broad style, including Rembrandt, Caravaggio, and Vermeer. He also mentions several specific paintings that he sees as models for particular scenes and refers, in broader terms, to the way that illustrations of Goethe’s Faust may have influenced him as well. This chapter basically does not discuss the plot at all and hence does not include any substantial passages relevant to our class discussion.

In the second chapter, on architectural space, Rohmer does a detailed study of the layout and décor of the various spaces that appear in the film. This chapter includes some analysis that is so detailed that it may border on the insane—for instance, at one point he provides a chart listing and categorizing every single object that appears on screen (80-82). He also includes sketches where he tries to reconstruct the layout of Faust’s study (67), Gretchen’s house (71), and Martha’s house (72). More relevant to our discussion is his inventory of the scenes from Goethe that Murnau excluded or modified, which leads to an analysis of Mephistopheles as a character:

Now let us precisely determine, while examining each scene in detail, the places that are in Goethe and those that have been modified. Auerbach’s tavern disappears, but it is in a tavern that we see Mephistopheles provoke Valentine and engage in a feat of sorcery, here more terrifying than burlesque: the flame shooting out of the wine. If the character of Mephistopheles retains all the comic force of his literary model (without going beyond it, except perhaps in Martha’s house), Murnau wanted, however, to preserve the seriousness of the wonders he shows us, whereas Goethe tinged the legacy of the Volksbuch [a term for the original Faust legend] with derision. The demon is not presented to us, as in the play, in the form of a poodle; it is Faust himself who evokes him, just as in the legend; and the sinister monk who emerges, though sarcastic, cannot provoke in us the slightest chuckle. Murnau will equally avoid showing us the gallery of animals that is the witch’s kitchen (Hexenküche); it is in his study that Faust’s rejuvination is carried out. Walpurgis Night, which inspired painters and musicians, has also disappeared, but I do not see how a cinematographic translation of that satiric-philosophical interlude could be given, except in a spirit of Goya-esque masquerade, which is quite far from Murnau. (60-61)

Rohmer then takes a step back to think about Murnau’s relationship to Goethe more broadly:

If Murnau and Kyser [the writer of the screenplay] ultimately remain so faithful to Goethe, despite their apparent desire to distance themselves from him and return to the sources of the myth (“an old German legend,” as the credits say), it is perhaps also the case that the play carried the seed of its cinematographic transcription. It is true that the settings of the scenes, in this philosophical drama that was made above all to be read, even if they do not play a truly active role, assert their presence more forcefully than in many works better conceived for staging: that of Shakespeare, for example, or the Greek tragedies. The “tragedy” of Faust is indeed more cinematographic than theatrical, in its first and second parts. We never find in it a banal waiting room, an anonymous place, but always a well-defined place, which makes up an integral part of the old myth and of what Goethe himself forged, in the same way as the names of characters or the epoch when the story unfolds—which no one would dare change. (61)

Later in the chapter, after his reconstruction of the various sets and his listing of all the objects, Rohmer reflects further on the idea that everything in the film has a very defined purpose:

In Murnau, the same thing holds for clothing as for objects: it is never a means, a tool, a weapon for getting what one wants or seducing someone. We are in a world made of relationships of force, not of persuasion. Not of a lover’s courtship: the woman does not play the flirt, the man does not play the rake. In this universe of pure desire, there is room only for predator and prey: whether he uses the fascination of his looks or pure violence, it is all the same. Each being is for the other a vampire or a victim. Each knows what he is after from his counterpart, or what he fears. Deception is impossible. There is no need to strut about: one passes immediately to action, which is to say to assault or its simulation. The love scenes are conceived as battles where now the man, now the woman is attacking or attacked, pursuing or pursued. Thus, for example, the scene in Martha’s garden… (86).

This concreteness holds especially for costumes:

To a change in clothing there almost always corresponds a profound transformation of one’s being, and Faust, with its theme of rejuvenation, puts out in the open a theme that is elsewhere latent [in Murnau’s other films]. Moreover, the transition is not forcefully abrupt. It would be more fair to speak sometimes of blossoming or blooming. In the famous scene with the jewelry, reduced by the filmmaker to a simple necklace, or in the one where Valentin offers a shawl to his sister, the two faces of Gretchen are revealed, today a reserved young girl, tomorrow a woman and a lover. The fact of wearing such and such clothes is not for Murnau a social act, but a natural phenomenon of evolution, of growth or decline. (87-88)

In the third and final chapter, Murnau analyzes the idea of filmic space or the creation of motion. Here he emphasizes Murnau’s use of sudden appearances, which leads to another massive table listing and categorizing every example (96ff.). This chapter also includes a long section where he provides multiple abstract sketches of different scenes to trace the direction of the main movements (125ff.). He discusses the overall pattern of motion in the film as a kind of strategy, which is sometimes apparently violated by the actors. In this context, he talks about individual performances, particularly those of Emil Jannings (Mephistopheles), Yvette Guilbert (Martha), and Camilla Horn (Gretchen):

Certainly one can say that Emil Jannings and Yvette Guilbert “go too far.” It is certain that the gestures of these two actors, especially in the scene where they meet, appear indifferent to the general dynamic of the film’s strategy. They are gestures that bear a significance without reference to the global conception of the mise en scène. Their direction owes nothing to their inscription in the space of the film… But one must not confuse the direction of the film and what is proper to each filmed element…. This mode of expression is the responsibility of the characters…. It is not Yvette Guilbert, nor Jannings who “goes too far,” but Martha and Mephistopheles…. This comic verve, though due in part to the personal rapport of the actors and though apparently foreign to the general spirit of the mise en scène, is ultimately integrated successfully into the film’s modelling and its motor scheme….

By opposite means, Murnau obtains with an unknown, Camilla Horn, in the role of Gretchen, the same result…. Did he lead his actress to find some of these poses and gestures herself, or did he suggest them right from the start? It is of little importance whether he uses one or the other method. The fact is that he succeeded there as well in perfectly marrying what came from him and what he owed to the actress, giving us the impression of cutting her to the quick, of forging a new being who would be, from birth, “Murnauian”… This second nature which she is granted renders her always absolutely “natural.” (108-110)

In the footnotes to this chapter, Rohmer also returns to the notion that the Faust legend is more intrinsically cinematic than theatrical. Here he quotes Goethe’s version of the wager, where Faust defies Mephistopheles to give him happiness so great that he will declare, “Beautiful moment, please do not pass away”:

It is an idea more cinematographic than theatrical, because tragic theater, whether Greek or Shakespearean, puts the accent on the impossibility of innocence, not of happiness, having in view action rather than contemplation. The feeling of the incompleteness of the moment, associated with that of is fullness, we find in a vague way in almost all films, in the guise, most often, of a “sentimental” optimism, in search of one of those “suspensions”… that the screen is well suited to achieve by its magic and that of the soundtrack. In this sense, the “happy ending” of Murnau’s Faust appears to be more in line with the typical mythology of the cinema than with the ambiguous conclusions of the first and second parts of Goethe’s Faust. (123)

 

There are a number of candidates for “the book that predicted Trump,” from Octavia Butler’s eerily prescient near-future dystopia that purported to “Make America Great Again” to Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind. I have occasionally quipped that Creepiness is the book that truly deserves the title. There is a moment of truth there — I do argue that the creepiness trend was in large part about the breakdown of white masculinity — but it was mostly just a joke about the almost overwhelming creepiness of Trump himself. More recently, though, it has dawned on me that another book in the series may deserve some prophetic credit, namely Why We Love Sociopaths. Or rather, it seems to have initially dawned on Aaron Bady, who tweeted about it a few times, and that prompted me to realize that Trump fits my cultural diagnosis in that book in a way that is, dare I say it, almost creepy.

My argument in Why We Love Sociopaths is that the remarkable prevelance of sociopathic characters in 2000s television was a symptom of a broken cultural contract. With the decline of the Fordist order and the rise of neoliberalism, one long-standing narrative about social mobility and merit had been discarded without being replaced by a plausible alternative. This situation gave rise to a growing sense that the only reliable means to get ahead in the system is to cheat. Certainly we can read Trump 2.0, and especially the seeming public indifference to his flagrant violation of laws and constitutional structures, as an extreme outgrowth of that basic tendency.

I organized my account around three types of sociopaths, all of which seem in retrospect to capture the Trump phenomenon in some way. The first category was the Schemer, which I mainly associated with cartoon shows where the characters are attempting to get away with mischief for its own sake. My key example was Eric Cartman from South Park, the strangely charismatic and resourceful child who periodically comes close to taking over the United States and even the world. Though Trump obviously lacks Cartman’s discipline and focus, there is something of the childish schemer in Trump — though that element is less prevalent in the embittered end-state we are now witnessing.

The second was the Climber, who stops at nothing to climb the social ladder. My key examples here was Don Draper from Mad Men. Here the connection to Trump is admittedly more distant, since my analysis was focused on meritocrats of the Obama type, who I argue should not be counted on to challenge the basic terms of the system that enabled their rise. Yet I do start out with an analysis of reality television, which I present as a “dumbed-down” version of the same basic worldview we see in prestige dramas like Mad Men and The Wire, and so I want to claim partial credit due to Trump’s association with reality TV.

The final sociopathic archetype was the Enforcer, the lawman who breaks the law in order to save it. My key example here was Jack Bauer of 24, who murders and tortures his way to stopping terrorist attacks that only see seems to have the insight to predict. Trump himself has identified unambiguously with this category, in his infamous quote (attributed to Napoleon) claiming that it is impossible to violate the law in service of your country. Clearly he is counting on his fellow citizens to decide that it doesn’t matter if he follows the legal niceties as long as he gets things done — nor is there any way to deny that the system as constituted on January 19, 2024, was basically incapable of delivering any meaningful results in a way that would be legible to the public.

Not only does Trump fit, in some way, into all of these categories, but his appeal depends on his ability to pivot among them. His status as a Cartman-esque provocateur gives people license to dismiss his scarier or more nonsensical declarations as mere bluster; his reputation as a (sort of) self-made businessman is key to his appeal; and his promise to “get things done” by any means necessary both emboldens his supporters and cows his enemies into submission. You can’t hold all three of these images together simultaneously, but they often combine in a kind of one-two punch. Cartman Trump seems most useful for such strategies. For instance, the existence of Climber Trump allows people to use the Cartman Trump to dismiss his destructive economic plans as bluster, while the frightening ambitions of Jack Bauer Trump can be rendered more palatable by reference to Cartman Trump. But on the less jovial side, it is precisely the Climber Trump that renders him plausible to many as a Jack Bauer figure who won’t be beholden to political restraints.

While in my conclusion I do offer up the feeble hope that, in a broken system, we might all benefit from being more sociopathic — a counterintuitive soundbite that was for a time picked up by Slavoj Žižek in his public lectures — my overall assessment of this trend is negative. It does offer a diagnostic of our broken system, sometimes even (in the case of The Wire in particular) a remarkably insightful one, and I admit up front that I enjoyed many of these shows (including South Park and some reality TV).

But its dominance of the entertainment field was, I believed, socially corrosive, and I think events have proven me correct. Trump 2.0 is not just politics as entertainment, which is bad enough, but it’s politics as 2000s entertainment, it’s politics as designed by people who watched way too much South Park, 24, and reality TV. I’m not making this up. Literal Republicans say as much, about themselves. Ross Douthat wrote a famous column on the rise of “South Park Republicans,” motivated primarily by a brash anti-PC attitude rather than any positive ideology. Supreme Court Justice Scalia — supposedly “the smart one” — literally cited 24 in an opinion, and the current conservative supermajority are all intellectual heirs of Scalia. As for the influence of reality TV, Trump’s trajectory speaks for itself, and clearly neither J.D. Vance nor any of Trump 2.0’s luminaries are “here to make friends.”

Obviously sociopath TV is not the only cause of Trump — nor am I saying as much. I’m saying the trend itself arose as a symptom of social breakdown, which it then helped to exacerbate. The one thing my diagnosis excludes is social media, for which I can perhaps be forgiven since I was writing in 2012 (and the book was after all about TV). But I think that many of the attitudes inculcated by South Park, reality TV, and 24 — the reflexive anti-PC “provocativeness,” the endless zero-sum competition for “clout,” and the ambient menace of violent fantasies — have shaped the social media field as well.

I’m not sure how much credit I really deserve for this prediction, since the fact of having written the book didn’t help me to predict either Trump’s success in the primaries nor his Electoral College technicality. But then, like most sane people, I had not up till that point given Donald Trump — who was little more than a vapid media phenomenon — much thought. If I had, perhaps I would have seen how well the cultural trends I diagnosed in Sociopaths converged in him. The cost, though, is that I would have squandered some of those precious remaining years and months before I was forced to spend so much of my time and energy thinking about one of the most worthless human beings ever to live. I stand behind that trade-off, even if I had no way of knowing I was making it. And if it turns out that my little book about TV trends, properly contextualized, could have prevented Trump’s rise — all I can do is apologize.

From mid-April to early May we’ll be hosting the next AUFS book event on Rajbir Singh Judge’s recent book Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia. Rajbir is Assistant Professor in History at California State University, Long Beach, and the book explores loss and the limits of history by considering Maharaja Duleep Singh and his struggle during the 1880s to reestablish Sikh rule, the lost Khalsa Raj, in Punjab. Do get your own copy of the book and join us to talk about it. The event is currently scheduled to run as follows:

15th April: Introduction by SherAli Tareen

17th April: Marika Rose

21st April: LL Hodges

23rd April: Amaryah Armstrong

25th April: Basit Iqbal

28th April: APS

30th April: Samaah Jaffer

2nd May: Satbir Singh

5th May:  Response by Rajbir 

This is the text of an address I (Marika) gave recently as part of the KU Leuven annual Thomas Feast on the theme of theology, art, and decolonisation.

For several years now I’ve been haunted by a piece by Étienne Balibar about the relationship between politics and knowledge in the university. Balibar wrote that, ‘We realise now that our ruling class is no longer a bourgeoisie in the historical sense of the world. It does not have a project of intellectual hegemony, nor an artistic point of honour. It needs (or so it thinks) only cost-benefit analyses, ‘cognitive’ educational programs, and committees of experts. That is why, with the help of the pandemic and the internet revolution, the same ruling class is preparing the demise of the social sciences, humanities, and even the theoretical sciences. To accelerate the process, why not have the victim become the culprit (‘Islamo-leftist’, ‘activism’, ‘ideology’…)? It will make things easier.’[1]

It’s a strange time to be reflecting on the relationship between theology, art and decolonisation, as both theology and the arts are struggling for survival in a global war waged ‘on wokeness’ – which is to say, on the side of white supremacy. When things that we love – or that we depend on for our salaries, stipends, or future job prospects – are threatened, it can be tempting simply to knuckle down, to try to cling to what we still have for as long as we can. But I want to suggest that we take our cue from Cedric Robinson, who writes in Black Marxism that his goal in writing the book was not simply ‘a question of outrage or concern for Black survival’ but ‘a matter of comprehension.’[2] How can we understand the relationship between theology, art, and empire?

Two things are often missing from contemporary attempts to grapple with this question, which are frequently both too abstract and not abstract enough. Our conversations often get stuck at the level of theological and artistic content – questions of who or what is represented or talked about. What this misses is both the very particular and material question of the institutions and resources which make theological and artistic expression possible, and then the more abstract question of theological and artistic form. So I want to spend some time sketching out some thoughts on these two areas.

Both the arts and academic theology in the Western world take their shape in large part from the huge social transformations which took place within Europe over the late medieval and early modern period along with the emergence of slavery, colonialism, and racism. I’m going to focus here on the role of universities, both because that’s what I know most intimately and because that’s where we currently are, but the other institutions on which theology and the arts rely – churches, galleries, concert halls, philanthropic and government funding bodies  – were also transformed with or emerged out of these same processes. Universities were born from Christian Europe’s encounters with its others, out of the wealth of cultural, scientific, and philosophical materials which became available in the wake of the fracturing of Andalusia; out of European encounters with the Arab and Ottoman worlds through the Crusades; and from the age of European discovery, conquest, and slavery. They emerged in ways which reflected the needs of growing European nations for clerical and economic administration of emergent European nation states and empires, for legal and theological justifications for new forms of property and dispossession and, connected to all of this, for new frameworks of nation, race and history within which all of these could take place; frameworks created and sustained by theology, art, and culture.

I’ve come to think that theology, art, and the institutions in which these are done, can be best understood in terms of social reproduction. For the most part, that is, theology and the arts tend to function both to repeat and to re-inscribe the hierarchical ordering of the societies which produce them, along with the spiritual and aesthetic values which sustain these hierarchies; and also to rework these values as the societies which they organise encounter new challenges. As Sylvia Wynter suggests, we see within the Western world a gradual shift from ideas about racial hierarchy which were justified in the late medieval period on theological grounds, to a justification of racial order through reason – the predominant frame of the 16^th through to the 18^th centuries  – followed by a hierarchy in which evolutionary and economic success come to measure eugenic perfection from the 19^th century onwards; the belief that economic success indicates not only intelligence but also racial superiority.[3]

Universities exist both to reproduce the forms of knowledge which justify and re-make interconnected distinctions of race, class, and gender and also to reproduce the people who will in turn re-make the world which relies on these distinctions. The crisis we find ourselves in, then, can be understood as the result of the ongoing shifts by which racial and colonial order remake themselves. The second part of the twentieth century can perhaps best be grasped through the framework of neo-colonialism globally and multiracialism in the imperial core: a form of racial order in which, as Denise Ferreira da Silva argues, white Westerners invite non-white people to enter into the supposedly secular sphere of universal values and human rights, both failing to recognise the particularity of our own sense of what is universally human, and relying implicitly on the figure of the inhuman, fanatical or unassimilable other: the barbaric and homophobic Hamas fighter; the misogynistic, violent, immigrant; the drug addicted and welfare-dependent black mother.

Much of what passes for decolonisation in this period, then, can be better described as diversification. The West allows for formal desegregation and decolonisation, welcoming diversity into its ranks precisely in order to maintain its imperial power. We see this reflected in the paradoxes of contemporary theological and artistic institutions: the galleries showing work by black artists with the help of funding from oil companies; universities who refuse to take down statues honouring slave-owners whilst advertising their diversity schemes, running workshops on decolonising the curriculum next door to departments partnering with arms companies; or working to widen access whilst closing off our students’ future possibilities by delivering them into debt. This conjuncture has created challenges for those of us seeking to confront the historical entanglement of theology and the arts with racism and colonial violence. The university is asking us to talk about these things, but not too much; as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney wrote twelve years ago of the subversive intellectual: ‘the university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings.[4]’

And of course, all too often we choose not to confront our institutions but to hold back; to limit what we say and do for the sake of our jobs, our connections, or our future employment prospects. To live in the university is to be formed by its systems and structures in ways that I do not think we are very good at reckoning with, and so it is often our undergraduate students who are able to see with the clearest eyes and speak with the bravest voices. I think we’ve seen very clearly in the wake of October 7^th the limits of the neoliberal university’s commitment to decolonisation. The violence with which universities have shut down even the mildest demands for disinvestment from the machinery of destruction throughout the ongoing genocide of Palestinians has been revealing. I wonder whether we will look back on these protests as a turning point: the absolute failure of liberal institutions to defend free speech, the capitulation to pressure from donors and governments perhaps the death knell for the Western commitment to the multicultural ideals of diversity, equality and inclusion; and perhaps for the university as such.

What comes next of course, looks to be worse. What does it mean to confront the possibility that, as Balibar suggests the golden age of the university is over? The destruction of the university may look like what is currently taking place in the US, where an attempt is underway to systematically dismantle both universities and the arts, or in the UK, where instead of the wrecking ball of Elon Musk’s DOGE, a purportedly left wing government is overseeing the gradual death by starvation of both the university and the arts sectors. What does it mean to recognise that these changes are happening not, whatever politicians, consultants, or vice chancellors claim, out of economic necessity, but out of a groundless insistence, a kind of pure faith in the superfluity of the arts and humanities?

Let’s talk about abstraction. Jacob Taubes suggests that the fundamental shift which takes place between the medieval and the modern world can be understood, if not explained, in terms of the shift from Ptolemaic to Copernican cosmology.[5] Medieval Europeans understood themselves as part of the great chain of being, a cosmic order reflected not just in the ranked ordering of humans and other creatures but in the very universe itself, a hierarchy both literal and figurative leading from the chthonic darkness below the earth up to the celestial spheres and the heavenly beings.[6] This cosmic and metaphysical order gave both theology and art a firm anchor in the universe.

To speak of God, to make art, was to reflect an order of goodness, truth and beauty in which what was said and done on earth corresponded in a very real sense to what was done in heaven. The Catholic Church was right, Taubes says, to see in Copernicus not just a new scientific theory but an existential threat to the metaphysics which grounded both ecclesial authority and artistic representation. After Copernicus, unable to ground spiritual or ecclesial authority in the external order of the universe, Taubes suggests, both philosophy and theology turned inwards: a shift which we see both in the Kantian turn to human categories and in the ongoing struggle of Christian theology to reconcile the now antithetical poles of God and human being.

 This turn inwards is reflected too, I want to suggest, in an inwards turn which we can see in both Catholic and Protestant piety: a new emphasis on inwardness, on intention over action, on self-examination; a proliferation of new mysticisms of internal ascent leading not from heaven to earth but up the stairways of the interior castle to the darkness of God. But art, too, is unmoored, and comes to find its bearings within the individual mind and imagination. Stephen Prickett connects this process both to the spread of literacy and the newly emergent European divide between the public and the private spheres, suggesting that this internalisation of imagination and speculation is seen first in the newly emergent art form of the novel, but appears also in the visual arts and in poetry in tendencies towards realism, idealism, and perspectivalism.[7] Along similar lines, Victoria Nelson has traced the transposition of ancient ideas about underworlds into what she calls ‘psychotopography’, the literary and visual depiction of the underworld as an image of the inner depths of the mind and imagination; an allegorical rather than analogically artistic vision which, she argues, shapes the emergence of the grotesque, the fantastical, and the science fictional in artistic representations in the West.[8]

But these transformations are also racial transformations. As Willie Jennings writes, the emergence of racial slavery and European empire is characterised by a forcible deracination of enslaved and colonised people; the destruction of their relationships with one another and with their particular places and contexts in order to place them instead within a racial scale which runs not from heaven to hell but from white to black.[9] This racial logic is also a logic of property. Enslaved people, Jennings argues, are relocated both into Christian identity and also into ‘the market’. New European notions of the interior self are themselves tied to new orders of property. Balibar finds in John Locke the first full expression of the notion of self-consciousness; a notion which, he suggests, cannot be separated from Locke’s understanding of personhood as property.[10] It’s the opening up of inner space which makes it possible for Locke to understand personhood as self-possession, and this relationship of self-possession which in turn opens up new forms of possessive relation to the external world. It is this understanding of personhood which allows Locke to claim ownership not only of the ore dug up by his own hands, but also of the grass that his horse has eaten, and the turf cut by his servant. It is this interiority, this self-possession which, Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano argue, smuggles ‘a racial anthropology of the human’ into the very heart of Western ideas of personhood, the self-conscious, rational, imaginative and self-possessed person contrasted with racialised non-persons, understood to be lacking in self-consciousness, irrational, and trapped outside of history in the realm of nature.[11]

The racial frame within which this new interiority is mapped is also a historical frame, an account of progress in which the gradual abstraction and spiritualisation of all things which was once worked out along the great chain of being comes now to be mapped across a historical scale. Here theology is placed as one stage along a developmental scheme within which, in its classical form, the pagan deification of nature gives way to the outward law of Jewish monotheism, then the inward law of Christianity, and finally the spiritualisation or internalisation of theology’s claims; the realisation that it is not God but reason which drives forward history.

A similar process of interiorisation and abstraction is at work in narratives of the development of art over history. The novel is placed towards the end of a process of development which begins in myth and fable.[12] What is modernity if not Don Quixote, awakening from a dream of chivalry and romance to discover himself, the protagonist of a work of fiction? The modern art gallery removes works of art from religious, ritual or social function and places them into a blank white box. Something similar can be said of the museum, which marks its difference from the gallery precisely by placing the works it holds into context, thus marking them out from art works proper, at the same time as it insist on the relegation of these contexts to the past. Recent conflicts over the fate of the Benin bronzes, for example, looted by British soldiers from Nigeria, have included contention both over the appropriateness of displaying the bronzes as separate works, rather than within the altars for which they were originally made, and also over the practice of removing them from the daily life of the communities from which they were stolen.[13]

In Black Marxism, Cedric Robinson says that his work began from the recognition that the theories of history which he encountered in Western radicalism were insufficient; that ‘something more than objective material forces were responsible for “the nastiness”’. But this need to understand was ‘not simply a question of outrage or concern for Black survival. It was a matter of comprehension.’ We are talking, then, about a double excess; two forms of desire, of pleasure, connected to the acquisition of knowledge. One thing that has happened with the shift from formal and explicit logic of segregation and empire to the less tangible and explicit order of neoliberal multiculturalism has been a shift towards the language of culture and religion as a justification for racial violence under the banner of the threat to Europe’s Christian heritage, or the decline of Western culture.

This shift implicates both theology and the arts more deeply, at the same time as it has heightened the attacks on both insofar as they have resisted these attempts to weaponise them. I wonder whether this has to do with the ambivalent role of pleasure which is more explicit here than in the sciences, precisely because both theology and the art deal with that which is not quite graspable or containable; precisely because both open up the space to confront what cannot quite be contained within the logic of racial order, alongside the pleasures which sustain it. Both theology and art have to do both with beauty and with suffering, and with the slippage between the two. Both know how to redeem the suffering of others, how to turn it into profit. The cost of interiorization and abstraction is sometimes described as ‘disenchantment’; the reward of centuries of violence and dispossession has been, for both art and theology, a certain kind of crisis of confidence, a loss of faith in the reality or value of what we do. What certain kinds of theological or artistic diversity work have in common with the violence of reactionary politics unfolding around the world is perhaps a need to witness certain kinds of suffering in order to restore a sense of reality or urgency or pleasure to the world. What is the difference between a White House video of immigrants being deported to Guantanamo and the keffiyeh-wrapped baby Jesus in the Vatican nativity scene?[14] In Heidelberg, recently, I went to an exhibition about the history of Orientalism in German art. I found myself in a room full of people looking at racist art, wondering whether we were there to enjoy the racist art, or to enjoy feeling superior to the people who made the racist art, or to enjoy feeling bad about being part of a society that had made so much racist art. What is coming for us now, I think, is a movement of reaction which both feeds on the pleasure of racial violence and very much does not want to think about those pleasures. Perhaps that is a place for us to start.

---

[1] Étienne Balibar, ‘Politics and Science, One Vocation or Two?’ in boundary2, 15 March 2021 https://www.boundary2.org/2021/03/etienne-balibar-politics-and-science-one-vocation-or-two

[2] Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism (The University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

[3] ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument’ in CR: The New Centennial Review 3.1 (2003), 257-2337.

[4] The Undercommons: Fugutive Planning & Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013).

[5] Jacob Taubes, ‘Dialectic and Analogy’ in The Journal of Religion 34.2 (1954), 111-119.

[6] Cecilio M. Cooper, ‘Fallen: Generation, Postlapsarian Verticality + the Black Chthonic’ in Rhizomes 38 (2022).

[7] Stephen Prickett, Secret Selves: A History of Our Inner Space (Bloomsbury, 2021).

[8] Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets (Harvard University Press, 2001).

[9] Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (Yale University Press, 2010).

[10] Étienne Balibar, Identity and Difference: John Locke and the Invention of Consciousness, translated by Warren Montag (Verso, 2013).

[11] Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano, ‘Race, real estate and real abstraction’ in Radical Philosophy 194 (2015).

[12] Atesede Makonnen, ‘Romanticism and the Novel(ty) of Race in Manu Samriti Chander, The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and Race (Cambridge University Press, 2024.

[13] Barnaby Phillips, Loot: Britain and the Benin Bronzes (Oneworld, 2021).

On our flight home from Rome, we hit some turbulence — the borderline scary kind that turns your stomach and elicits the occasional gasp. I am a pretty seasoned traveller, so it would take much more than that to make me really fear for my safety. But my mind did wander: what if this was the end? And I thought about my improbably good life: a wonderful partner, a job that lets me genuinely contribute to society while challenging myself intellectually, a beautiful highrise apartment in a city we love, a lifestyle that accomodates frequent international travel…. It would be a shame not to get as much of this life as we could, but if a freak accident cuts it short, we have at least been living the life we want. My Esteemed Partner, happily engrossed in her movie, was apparently even less affected by the turbulence than me, but I imagined that if it really was a serious situation and she really was scared and upset, sharing thoughts along these lines with her might bring some comfort — maybe even some peace.

I sat with this line of thought for a few moments, savoring my sense of calm and equanimity. And then I thought: “Am I okay?” Is it normal for a person in the prime of life to be so comfortable with the thought of premature death? Is this a sign of wisdom and maturity, or of despair? Reflecting on this experience several times over the past few months, I have not been able to settle on an answer to that question. But what has become clear is that it was not about death as such, or at least not entirely: it was about Trump, the one force on earth that seems somehow even more inescapable than death.

Part of why I could imagine that flight home as the end is that we had joked, and maybe more than joked, about that trip being our last for the foreseeable future. The fears that motivated that speculation seemed distant and outlandish at the time — maybe My Esteeemed Partner, whose passport expires in a couple years, would not be able to renew it for some reason; maybe we would come to understand that we wouldn’t be guaranteed reentry if we left the country.

Now those fears seem somehow more realistic, not because of anything concrete that has happened in connection to the Trump administration’s policy on travel, but simply because everything feels like it’s up for grabs. I know that there’s always someone willing to claim they were the one voice in the wilderness that no one would listen to, but surely no one could have predicted how arbitrary and far-reaching the damage would be. Did Trump campaign on, for instance, suspending all medical research grants indefinitely? Did anyone really understand that he was going to hand the keys to Musk and completely ignore the Congressional appropriations process? Did anyone think the president would be openly musing about picking and choosing which government debts he regarded as binding?

And yet I still live my life, basically unaffected so far except for some mild anxiety about whether I will actually receive my tax refund. In fact, things are going well. I’ve been promoted, at long last, to associate professor, and though the Shimer faculty was not given the opportunity to gain tenure status, we have at least achieved some formal job security after many years of uncertainty. I’m enjoying my teaching this year — which is a good mix of familiar courses and challenging new material — and I’m happy to be serving my colleagues as chair of a major standing committee within faculty governance. My book Late Star Trek is coming out in a few short weeks, and I’m working toward establishing my scholarly expertise in the Qur’an.

In short, everything is coming together — but I’m not 100% sure there will even be college next year. Most are interpreting the assaults on federal research funding as attacks on higher ed more broadly, and the entire sector is deeply, deeply dependent on federal funding. Would they get rid of Pell Grants? That would be fatal for many institutions. Getting rid of federal student loans would be fatal for nearly all. I find myself in the bargaining stage as to whether North Central is likely to be affected by each step. I can even imagine scenarios, albeit highly improbable ones, where the loss of student loans is somehow survivable. But such speculation requires at least some stable background, some comprehensible context — and I will admit that I cannot process what a total repudiation of higher ed by the federal government does to the enterprise of higher ed, much less one particular school.

More radical thoughts present themselves as I go through the bargaining stage. What if I lose my job? I have savings that can last me a good long while, even leaving aside My Esteemed Partner’s income. And even if we both find ourselves out of work, we could probably survive for many years at a tolerable level of comfort. But that presupposes things like the continued viability of banks, or the continued value of money, or the stability of the power grid, or the safety of the water. John Quiggin introduced some nightmare fuel over at Crooked Timber: what if Trump announces the convertibility of US dollars with cryptocurrency? As recently as five weeks ago, I would have laughed off the idea. I’m not laughing now.

And it’s like this for everything. Will there be a flu shot next year? Will there be a Post Office next year? Will air travel remain viable? Will we be bogged down in a counterinsurgency in Canada? Will we join the Russian Federation? I threw the last one in there to test whether there’s a limit of what seems possible, and I find that I can’t dismiss even that — not after Trump’s insane lies about Zelinskyy and the origins of the war in Ukraine!

For a long time, I have been encouraging people to consider whether George W. Bush was even worse than Trump, but in a few short weeks Trump has demolished my case. Bush was an evil president using the power of the state to do evil things. Trump has effectively abolished the state. We do not have laws. We do not have a government. We certainly don’t have a Congress and we barely have courts. But in an important sense, we also don’t have a president. We have the irritable whims of two billionaires, handling domestic and foreign policy, respectively, and we have a bunch of psychos in charge of more detailed policy portfolios. The goal is not to change public policy, but to render public policy impossible. The goal is not to transform American society, but to destroy it completely, to destroy everything that makes it possible to call this great and terrible nation a human society.

Everything is up for grabs, because there is no limit to how capricious and spiteful and short-sighted the people ostensibly “in charge” will allow themselves to be. There is no possibility of any positive outcome until they are removed from office and replaced by literally anybody else — even J.D. Vance, who at least lacks Trump’s demonic charisma and who certainly does not inspire the same kind of fear and pathetic self-abasement and hence might get some pushback from someone.

Yet we all live our lives, day to day, as though we still live in a society, as though promises mean something, as though it’s possible to tell the future more than a week in advance, as though there’s anything we can be sure they won’t take from us. And as I think about that, I can sometimes even work myself into a state of calm resignation where I can contemplate the possibility of my life becoming much different and worse due to circumstances beyond my control and conclude that I will survive and find ways to affect the world positively and maybe even still experience moments of satisfaction and joy. But there are other times where I read the latest headline and spontaneously think: I don’t want to live in this world anymore.

When I’m in that mood, sometimes I think back to that turbulence. The strange thing about being in a plane crash, at least to my mind, is that you are going to be falling — for the rest of your life. The sick roller coaster sensation — at least this is how I imagine it, though it’s presumably much worse — is what you are going to be experiencing for the rest of your life. With one major exception, of course! But maybe one is accepting of that outcome in a different way in an endless moment of perpetual falling than in a moment of abstract contemplation. Food for thought, certainly!

Am I okay? I don’t even know what that would mean under these circumstances. And I — a white, straight, monogamously partnered, property-owning male with a savings account — am certainly the least of anyone’s worries. All due respect to those who are being more directly victimized! But what I’m sure we can all agree on, regardless of privilege level, is: This can’t go on forever. It can’t even go on for four years. And yet it might go on for four years and maybe even longer. For some people, it will last — perhaps already has lasted — the whole rest of their lives.

Agamben is best known for his critique of sovereign emergency powers and their tendency to reduce all legal subjects to a homo sacer-like state of absolute exposure to violence. But in more recent years, he has written more often about a seemingly opposite, but actually deeply correlative problem: the attempt to legislate every area of life. On the political level, this means collapsing legitimacy (our sense of what the law should be and do) into legality. Whatever the law is, must be legitimate, simply because it is the law — meaning that the idea of legitimacy as a critical standpoint over against the law is lost. One can see this on the level of constitutional law in the United States, where establishing the Founder’s intent, or simply repeating the way the existing institutions function, often suffices to establish the legitimacy of a particular outcome, at least in the minds of many liberals.

The same dynamic holds at an interpersonal level. On the one hand, we have increasingly lost any sense of the distinction between the legal and the ethical. I think here of the frequently given advice that after a car accident, one should not apologize, because it would mean admitting fault and could put you at a legal disadvantage. In a sane society, though, a person who believes themselves to have caused serious harm to another should apologize — and the person receiving the apology should not seize on that natural human reaction to maximize their legal advantage. On the other hand, people increasingly seem to believe that their interpersonal relationships can and indeed must be structured according to strict contractual terms. This comes up especially in sexual contexts, where one might expect legal niceties to be out of place. I look at the vogue for polyamory, for instance, and wonder at people’s apparent belief that anyone can “promise” that their feelings won’t be hurt. We could say something similar for people’s love of inscribing themselves into ever more precise identity categories that come complete with their own list of demands — or for other’s apparent belief that merely being asked to acknowledge the existence of unfamiliar gender or sexual identities is an unjust imposition to which they did not consent.

For me, the distinction between legality and legitimacy — or, more vividly, between law and justice — is pretty foundational. This is, blessedly, not because of Schmitt’s book by that title, but because it was foundational for Ted Jennings’ teaching when I was in grad school. This was when he was working on his two career-capping works on Paul, Reading Derrida / Thinking Paul and Outlaw Justice. As is well known, Paul’s mission in life was to vindicate the full inclusion of non-Jewish or Gentile believers in the Jesus movement — without requiring them to fulfill the Jewish law. And he argues for this position theologically by taking a fairly extreme position: “works of the law” cannot be necessary to save the Gentiles, because they have never actually saved anyone. What is salvific is actually faith or trust in God, apart from any external work. Although he would probably resist this description, in both books Jennings “secularizes” Paul’s argument by claiming that he is pointing to a universal dynamic in the relationship between law and justice. Law always points beyond itself, toward the principle of justice, and that principle means that law can always be called into question. When law claims to be fully self-sufficient, it betrays itself and becomes a tool of injustice.

In those days, there were many clear examples of what happens when law is separated from justice. George W. Bush was president, having taken office with a minority vote after a deeply questionable Supreme Court decision. No one had won the Electoral College without winning the popular vote in over a century, and the Supreme Court had never intervened in an election case in such an overtly partisan way. But the Electoral College was technically the law, and the Supreme Court is the last court of appeal, so he took office. After 9/11 — somewhat contrary to Agamben’s analysis — Bush did not claim sweeping emergency powers so much as fashion himself “legal tools” to wage his War on Terror. New legal categories were invented (“enemy combatant”), loopholes relating to territoriality were exploited (Guantanamo and CIA black sites), and the use of military force was authoritized even if war was not declared (in either Afghanistan or Iraq). Most chillingly, the White House set teams of lawyers to work elaborating a legal basis for the use of torture.

Basically all of this is still on the books. The Authorization to Use Military Force against al Qaeda and its allies is still the law of the land. Obama took advantage of Bush-era laws and norms to run a drone strike program that even claimed the right to execute American citizens without due process. Bush’s torture memos, even if never used by later administrations, were never tested in court, and certainly none of the architects of the torture regime were ever prosecuted. And the normalization of the Electoral College technicality gave us Trump in 2016 — and almost provided him with a perfectly legal means to seize a second term against the popular will in 2020.

Meanwhile, Republicans have been weaponizing laws and rules in many other ways. The anti-abortion movement has routinely passed state laws that were known to be unconstitutional, for the express purpose of giving them a route to the Supreme Court in the hopes of chipping away at and eventually overturning Roe v. Wade. In Congress, they have exploited every rule and loophole — from the abuse of the fillibuster to McConnell’s refusal to even consider Obama’s last Supreme Court nominee. Less discussed have been their efforts to ratchet the balance of power in the House permanently to the right. By means of the Hastert Rule (named after a convicted child molestor, by the way), which mandates that no legislation can come to the floor unless it has a support of the majority of Republicans, laws that would have enjoyed majority support have been obstructed even more efficiently than with the Senate fillibuster.

Meanwhile, professing the sanctity of laws and norms, Democrats refuse to change the rules to take away Republicans’ illegitimate advantage — because they have no conceptual basis for calling it illegitimate. The rules are the rules, and changing them would be cheating. That goes even for a stolen Supreme Court, whose Democratic members insist must be respected even as it undoes all their priorities with a gleeful disdain for precedent or even normal legal procedure — many of the biggest recent decisions should have been dismissed because the plaintiff lacked standing. But again, the rules are the rules, and all Democrats can do is grin and bear it.

We may be seeming to enter a new phase with the total brazen lawlessness of Trump 2.0. But I think it is, instead, the natural next step in the dialectic. Law shorn of legitimacy is already a kind of force, an inert brute fact — and so it should not surprise us that it eventually gives way to overt force. When law that has become nothing but a tissue of arbitrary technicalities, is it surprising that someone would eventually treat the concept of law itself as one huge annoying technicality? Meanwhile it is hard to imagine popular passions being inflamed by the call to vindicate the claims of Congress, which has systematically rendered itself incapable of passing routine legislation with majority support, or of the Courts, which have increasingly revealed themselves to be the servants of presidential power in any case. Nor is it any wonder that low-information normies approve of Trump’s actions, because the dysfunction of the system has created pent-up demand for someone to finally do something — without all the infighting and excuses.

The fact that what is being done is purely destructive, that we are losing things we may never get back, has not yet become clear. And when it does, we will need leaders who can speak to the level of justice and legitimacy rather than law and norm and procedure — leaders who can say, straightforwardly, that Trump shouldn’t do what he’s doing because it’s pointlessly cruel and that Trump doesn’t have a mandate to do what he’s doing because he’s a liar. When that moment comes, though, I fear that we will instead get the same mealy-mouthed losers who could do nothing but mumble about a “democracy” that means you can only vote for one party for the rest of your life and you should never actually expect to get anything out of it. We should want a return to law, a return to procedures and norms recognized by all political actors — but only on just and legitimate terms. Perhaps that can occur within the boundaries of the existing constitution, but a return to the status quo ante of 2024 is not and cannot be the answer. Until people of good will come to understand this, there will never be hope.

[spoilers ahead]

The protagonist of Kevin Smith’s Dogma, the last living descendant of Mary, mother of Jesus, is named Bethany. It’s standard practice in this kind of apocalyptic film for names to mean something, and Dogma seems in general to bear this out. Chris Rock’s character, the black thirteenth apostle, is called Rufus, after the biblical son of Simon the Cyrene, mentioned in Mark’s account of the crucifixion and by Paul in Romans 13. Alan Rickman plays the voice of God, Metatron, and takes his name from an angel who appears as a divine figure standing beside God in various apocryphal texts. So why is the last living descendant of God called Bethany?

The name Bethany comes from the biblical town of Bethany, where Lazarus lived with his sisters, Mary and Martha. Like Lazarus, Bethany dies and is resurrected by God – here Alanis Morissette rather than Jesus. I’d like to suggest that we can infer from this that Jay and Silent Bob occupy, in Smith’s film, the roles of Mary and Martha.

Like Mary and Martha with Lazarus Jay and Silent Bob have – despite their best efforts – a non-sexual relationship with Bethany. Like Mary, who washed Jesus’ feet in an erotic act of service and is traditionally associated with sex workers, Jay is constantly making sexual advances to the people around him. Like Mary, who angrily remonstrates with Jesus when Lazarus dies (‘Lord if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”), Jay shouts at God who has appeared apparently too late to prevent catastrophe: “What the fuck is this shit?! Who the fuck are you lady?!” Like Martha, who approaches Jesus with faith (“But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask”) and opens up the tomb where Lazarus’ body has been laid to rest, it is Silent Bob who carries Bethany’s lifeless body to God to be raised. Like Martha, it is Silent Bob who quietly gets on with the necessary work, and Jay who insists on conversation.

Let us say then, with Jesus: “Jay has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from him.” Great is the mystery of Dogma. Blessed be the name of Alanis Morissette.

As I have been writing my posts on the relationship between Trump and neoliberalism, a feeling of futility has sometimes set in. Who cares about this abstract question amid all the wreckage he has already created? My first response to such a demand for practicality is to insist that it is always better to understand than not to understand. To the extent that my analysis is accurate, it’s important because it’s true. And that truth may lead to a strategic gain, insofar as viewing Trump as a big dumb continuation of neoliberalism might reduce the leftist temptation to think “maybe we can use this” or, worse, “maybe he has a point.”

On a personal level, though, part of the reason I am focusing on such large-scale questions is simply that I have done a poor job as a day-to-day commentator or prognosticator. I wrote shortly after the election that it seemed fanciful that Trump would attempt to cancel future elections. Now it turns out that his opening gambits were to attempt to invalidate the Fourteenth Amendment and the separation of powers, which makes extreme outcomes like that much more imaginable. At the same time, however, the Democratic refrain that democracy is in peril seems to remain unconvincing to the general population. Trump’s approval ratings are favorable, seemingly precisely because of the actions he is taking. He won the election, he seems to be taking bold action to fulfill his promises, and most people like it — where’s the threat to democracy?

The problem, as ever, is the lack of clarity about what democracy is and why it’s valuable. And part of the confusion comes from the tendency to conflate “democracy” with “the US Constitutional system,” which was avowedly set up in order to tame and even frustrate democratic ambitions to the extent possible. To the extent that Democrats are simply calling for a return to the conventional constitutional order, I would certainly prefer that to the current situation. But that order is sclerotic and unsustainable. Indeed, many of the kinds of actions that Trump is doing now are ones that I would have liked to see Obama or Biden do — strong-arming the Senate instead of deferring to their stupid anti-democratic customs, or simply ignoring things like the debt ceiling. I’m even on record as saying that Obama should have refused to acknowledge Trump’s Electoral College technicality and begun the transition with Hillary.

What’s frustrating about this situation is that this final presidential push was bound to happen. The current system does not fulfill popular demands, by design, and there’s no reason to expect a society to tolerate that indefinitely. And unfortunately, the presidency is the only institution other than Congress with anything like a democratic mandate, and it is definitely the only institution that can directly do stuff. The shame is that it didn’t happen under a president who wanted to do good, instead of a president who wants to do nothing but harm. And that stems in part from our old friend neoliberalism, whose “best practices” do not include bold state initiatives. But it also stems from the older generation of Democrats’ pathetic Boomer reverence for the Constitution that never evolved past childish Cold War truisms. And now that it’s tumbling down, we’re all being asked to hope that the system that frustrated popular demands for a generation and gave us Trump will somehow stop Trump.

There is nonetheless a deep irony here, because Trump’s rampage against the constitutional order is obviously undercutting the sources of presidential power and even of state legitimacy. One reason that the executive branch is able to do stuff is that it knows stuff — indeed, it provides the standard statistics that underwrite all other public and private economic activity and much else besides. By destroying that basic state capacity, Trump is destroying any reason for citizens to trust the government about anything, unless they happen to trust the current holder of the presidency. It becomes pretty difficult to run a society — even a paranoid police state determined to carry out the biggest forced population transfer in human history — without that baseline of trust. It also becomes pretty difficult to know whether you’ve succeeded in achieving your goals and to convince others that you have.

Low-information voters are still only seeing the broadest themes in Trump’s actions. He said he’d cut foreign aid, which most voters falsely believe to take up a huge portion of the budget, and he’s doing so. He said he’d appoint Musk to head up an effort to aggressively cut waste in the federal government, and he’s doing so. He said he’d use tariffs to strong-arm other countries, and he’s doing so. The self-undermining and nonsensical nature of many of those actions, much less their long-term consequences for the constitutional order, are seemingly not on people’s radar. But if he continues to “succeed,” many people will be rudely awakened to the fact that the government seemingly has no ability to benefit them in any way — and whether that realization hits while Trump is president or after he dies peacefully in his sleep surrounded by his friends and family, it will be a major, probably fatal blow to the legitimacy of the system.

It might even be the kind of things where particular states or regions start asking why the federal government even exists, and then the great “national divorce” so desired by conservatives might actually happen. And then we might all recall, too late, that “national divorce” is a euphemism for civil war — which, as everybody knows, is the very worst thing that can happen to a society. So now I’ve maxed out the negativity of my predictions about Trump and no longer have to worry about being made to look naive by the actual course of events.

In my last post, I awkwardly name-dropped a book to admit I hadn’t read it — namely Robert McDonald’s Works Like a Charm: Incentive Rhetoric and the Economization of Everyday Life, available wherever fine books are sold. Since then I have in fact read it and want to discuss some connections with my notion of a Trumpian “shove” as the successor to the neoliberal “nudge.” What follows is not a full account of the book — which, along with being a great critique of “nudge” rhetoric, also turns out to be an accessible primer on Lacan (with depressingly relevant examples) — but a sampling of some key concepts that I find especially applicable to Trump’s heretical neoliberalism.

McDonald’s Lacanian approach allows him to see some internal dynamics of the nudge that otherwise would not be as evident. (I will spare you the Lacan and give you the pay-off.) First, he notes that nudges never live up to their promise of seamless unconscious manipulation of behavior. Instead, they always announce themselves more or less clearly, spurring the subject to begin questioning what the nudger wants from them — and possibly rebelling against the intended outcome simply out of annoyance at the attempted manipulation. For this reason, nudges generally don’t work, and presumably the nudgers know they don’t work. Hence McDonald concludes that nudges are not actually directed at the ostensible nudgees, but are messages sent to some presumed third party. For example, the attempts to “incentivize” a return to work post-covid by removing unemployment benefits had not apparent impact on employment — but they were a powerful message that everyone should get back to work and no longer expect any mollycoddling (my term, not McDonald’s). Finally, the nudge paradigm as a whole sends a broader message of despair, signalling clearly that any deliberate collective project is impossible. This opens up a performative contradiction, because on the one hand, only the market can be trusted to deliver any social benefit, but on the other hand, the market is apparently not achieving that on its own and needs tinkering by expert state actors.

Applying these to Trump’s “shoves” — his attempts to use economic inducements to blackmail people into his desired behavior — I think we get further evidence that Trump is a heretical mutation of the neoliberal project. First of all, like a classic nudge, Trump’s “shoves” generate a lot of questions as to what he really wants, but in contrast to the neoliberal apparatchik, Trump’s desire is fundamentally unknowable — apparently even to himself. Hence investors and political commentators all assumed, up to the weekend before they were set to take effect, that Trump would call off his harsh tariffs against Canada and Mexico. And at the last minute he did, at least temporarily, after securing concessions that most observers agree were already happening (and, bizarrely, conceding to Claudia Sheinbaum’s demand that he take more action to stop the flow of guns into Mexico). Will he find another excuse to kick the can down the road in early March? Presumably, but who knows?

What is at stake here is more than simple incoherence or inconsistency — and we are certainly not dealing with some game of 11-dimensional chess where Trump is skillfully deploying Nixon’s “madman strategy.” Where the nudger ostensibly sought to influence the behavior of the nudgee for the sake of some particular end, Trump’s shoves seem to be nothing but the assertion of dominance and control for its own sake. And we can see that the same ambition was present in the original nudge paradigm, which promised a form of seamless social control without political conflict. Surely what made nudging so appealing to people like Barack Obama was not the series of piecemeal social gains they could deliver (increasing uptake of 401(k)’s by 6%!) but the very idea that “smart” policymakers could gently guide society from behind the scenes without indulging in anything so vulgar as political contestation.

In practice, many subjects were offended by the implied blackmail of the nudge — and in protest, they have helped to elect someone who took away the implication but kept the blackmail. But, importantly, they are no longer the people being nudged. Rather, the deep state wreckers and DEI elites and, above all, foreigners are finally getting a taste of their own medicine. This is why Trump and company have targetted arguably the most sympathetic and beneficial use of government money (USAID) for absolute elimination and why they began their tariff crusade by threatening to blow up relations with our closest neighbors — to send the message that they will be swayed by no moral claim, especially not a claim of loyalty. All that matters is the brute fact of economic competition, which Trump is attempting to rig so that America wins every time (instead of merely most of the time). Any other concern or priority is not merely a distraction from the important task of “winning” every economic statistic, but an active deception and a ploy.

And that brings us to the performative contradiction of Trump’s agenda. If the classic nudgers were testifying to the failure of the state to organize collective life, Trumpian shoves presuppose the failure of the economy itself — and on a global scale. In his very desperation to gain the approval embedded in the economic statistics he has chosen to target (coming out “ahead” in all trade balances), Trump implicitly invalidates all previous economic outcomes as illegitimate, tainted as they are by wokeness and meddling foreigners. And his attempt to assert American domination presupposes that America has been almost comically weak for basically the entire postwar era, allowing even Canadians to manipulate them into unfavorable trade deals.

This disconnection from reality is what makes Trump so scary, but it is also what makes him weak. Indeed, on his own terms, Trump cannot possibly succeed, because he has deprived himself of any standard of judgment other than his own irritable whim — which will never be satisfied and which, ironically, makes him extremely vulnerable to people who manipulate him by setting up incentives and fooling him into thinking their preferred outcome is his own choice.

Though I haven’t written much on neoliberalism lately, I still dip into the literature now and again. The next book in my queue, Robert McDonald’s Works Like a Charm: Incentive Rhetoric and the Economization of Everyday Life, has put me in mind of the classic neoliberal notion of the “nudge” and how it might help us think through the vexed question of Trump’s relation to neoliberalism. (This post does not directly reflect McDonald’s specific view, though, because I am not planning to start it until my train ride tomorrow — but in the true spirit of blogging, I decided to write at the moment I had the time, the idea, and the motivation rather than waiting.)

In the “Trump chapter” of Neoliberalism’s Demons, I claim that Trump is a heretical neoliberal in the proper theological sense — someone who radicalizes the premises of neoliberalism in order to purify it. Trump doubtless violates many specific neoliberal policy preferences (e.g., free trade, trust in abstract expertise and competence), but when it comes to what I identify as the moral core of neoliberalism, he is a true believer. He really sees the world as a field of zero-sum competitions whose results don’t just sort people into winners and losers, but do so in a way that reveals their true worthiness as people. His critique of actual-existing neoliberalism is that the “wrong” people and countries are winning.

Hence Trump concludes that the system must be rigged against the “right” people and countries and sets about righting that supposed wrong to make sure that the “right” people and countries start winning again. Obviously his framework for determining the “right” people and countries is deeply racist and xenophobic, but I think it’s important to highlight that he’s taking a specifically neoliberal approach to racism and xenophobia — the damage that the racial and foreign Others are doing is economic and calls for a shift in economic policy. The economy is still in principle the site for legitimation of individuals and groups, but in his view it hasn’t been allowed to operate properly. Once he “fixes” it, white people will once again be in charge of everything (instead of merely most things) and America will once again dominate the world (instead of being merely the unipolar hegemon).

Trump is pursuing this agenda even more radically in his second term. What’s striking to me, however, is how thoroughly neoliberal his tools are. So far, everything is structured as a big, dumb “nudge.” To start with the least heretical policy: he doesn’t like the trade balance with other countries, and so he threatens them economically with tariffs. Traditional neoliberals would prefer that tariffs be kept at a minimum, but there is room for protective or punitive tariffs if they aren’t following the rules of the free market, as Trump believes other countries are not. More radical, though, is his attempt to weaponize economic tools to achieve seemingly unrelated policy goals, like using tariffs in his negotiations with Colombia over deportations (apparently unsuccessfully, or at least not as successfully as Trump believes) or his threats to impose punitive tariffs on Denmark if they do not cede Greenland to him. And on the domestic side, he doesn’t like anything “woke” or DEI, so he tries to take away all their money — most dramatically through the attempted freeze on federal grants and loans, but also with the more routine threats to withold federal funding from sanctuary cities, school districts that acknowledge trans people exist, and other supposed malefactors.

In both cases, Trump also holds in reserve the punitive arm of the state — refusing to rule out a military conquest of Greenland (surely a mighty feat that will live on in song and legend) or the deployment of troops in his deportation scheme. That, too, broadly fits with the neoliberal paradigm, which tends to delegitimate any direct role for the state other than the police and military. But it is fascinating that these hamfisted economic “nudges” are what he reaches for first and most often. From the classic neoliberal perspective, the actions are much too “in your face” and forceful, rather than the seamless, almost unconscious manipulation that “nudges” were supposed to achieve. Hence we could call them “shoves” rather than “nudges.” But both are still economic in nature, and thus in continuity with a worldview in which economic incentives are the only legible motivations.

More than that, Trump conceives of the policy priorities that are not directly economic from a common sense perspective as profoundly economic. They are part of his agenda to “fix” the economic order so it starts delivering the “correct” results again. And once we see that, even some of his crazier policy preferences start to make a perverse kind of sense. The best example here is his fantasy that tariffs can somehow replace the income tax as the primary funding source for the federal government. This goal is for all intents and purposes impossible to achieve and the pursuit of it would cause untold suffering and disruption. But what makes him think it must be possible is that it is morally necessary — it would be a form of reparations from the whole world, for all the economic damage they have done to America with the many unfair deals they have imposed upon us. The same logic worked on a smaller scale with the fantasy that Mexico would pay for the wall. By supposedly “sending” so many immigrants to steal American jobs, Mexico had done profound economic harm to America, so it’s only fair that they should foot the bill for the solution.

Trump’s mutation of neoliberalism is of course delusional and simplistic — but it is, in its own way, deeply coherent. In fact, it is too coherent, which leaves it with no room to process the unexpected or even the unknown. The fact that all the people who actually know anything objectively true at all are in on the anti-American DEI conspiracy is obviously a huge weakness, and it leaves those of us on the outside of the Trump bubble with very little leverage to persuade them to change course. Yet I cannot help but notice that the reciprocal shove of everyone in the country simultaneously shouting at them that, no, they can’t arbitrarily shut down the entire federal government because some of duly legislated programs might be too “woke” did prove effective. We can also expect reality itself to shove them back if they really do attempt to replace the income tax with tariffs, because they will very quickly realize that they don’t have any money to pay all the guys with the guns.

This is obviously very far from the ideal of deliberative democracy, but it makes sense that a neoliberal heretic would not be invested in an ideal to which the orthodox believers gave half-hearted lip service at best.

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This year I had the unique opportunity to visit both Athens and Rome (on separate trips). I’ve therefore seen a ton of ruins. In most of my travels, I’ve found ruins and archaeology in general less interesting than well-preserved artworks in comfortable museums. This time it was more of a mixed bag — the Acropolis, for instance, was a little underwhelming, but it felt very meaningful to me to wander about in the Agora, imagining that this was the same ground Socrates trod.

My reaction to Roman ruins was more complex. Part of the reason that I had never visited Rome before, despite having ample opportunity, was that I have an antipathy to the Roman Empire, due to my intellectual formation in liberation-oriented theology circles. To me, they are history’s Bad Guys, and there is something pathological about the way they are fetishized again and again throughout Western history. What jumped out at me on this tour — especially in the day we spent at Pompeii, the preservation of which surely counts as one of the most horrifying yet amazing things ever to happen — was just how capable they were. The design of the city of Pompeii, for instance, seemed more functional and intelligent than that of 95% of US cities. (Here I count even the biggest cities — surely the Romans would have anticipated the problem of garbage piling up on the streets in New York City and designed the city with alleyways!) The fact that the routes of Roman roads are still travelled today, that aqueducts are still functional, that the international metropolis of Rome literally still uses the sewer dug by the Romans — it’s absolutely incredible.

One of My Esteemed Partner’s favorite sites was the Pantheon. On the ground level, it’s just a moderately cluttered and tacky church, but the ceiling is an unparalleled feat of engineering — a huge dome, with no internal infrastructure or supports. Contemporary investigators literally don’t know how they achieved it. And on this trip, a retrospectively obvious thing dawned on me: for most Western Europeans for a thousand years or more, that was how it was with essentially all Roman achievements.

Often modern people look down their nose at the so-called “dark ages” as an era when people were obsessed with the past, seemingly arbitrarily. But they were physically surrounded by infrastructure and buildings erected by the ancients that they couldn’t build if they wanted to. The engineering know-how, the access to resources, the sheer ability to organize and structure a labor process — it was all gone and there was seemingly no way to recapture it.

The situation reminded me of a common trope of contemporary dystopian sci-fi. In many of these stories, there is a kind of deposit of older technology that current-day people either rely on without fully understanding or else scavenge for parts — often with unanticipated consequences. The same thing happened with Roman technologies. The Colosseum, for instance, was obviously subject to wear and tear from the weather, as well as earthquakes, but a big part of why more and more sections of it kept collapsing was that people were simply pulling out the iron rods that held the columns together and using them for something else.

We could say the same for the intellectual achievements of the ancients. Medieval people didn’t rely on them simply because they were lazy or unimaginative. They lacked the intellectual infrastructure — not just the traditions of education, but often the physical documents themselves, which had to be copied afresh every generation or so. They assumed that Galen was smarter than any contemporary doctor not only because he was such a genius but because he was in a position to know much more than any current-day investigator. You can’t just rebuild that intellectual infrastructure through sheer force of will, certainly not as an individual. The most gifted person in medieval Europe simply could not get as far as a person in the Hellenistic era would have been able to get. Medieval Europeans thought the ancients were better because they were, and it took centuries for them to get to a place where they could seriously think of themselves as surpassing their achievements.

My big worry is that we are currently experiencing a process of decay that will leave future generations living among ruins. It might seem absurd in terms of contemporary ideology to say that we will soon be living off of older technologies, but even within a single lifetime we’ve collectively lost abilities — the ability to get to the moon safely, for instance — and there are still crucial systems that are running on “outdated” code (such as COBOL for bank mainframes, etc.). More prosaically, our roads, our other infrastructure, our housing stock are all cheaper and crappier than they were a generation ago. It is impossible to imagine contemporary buildings remaining functional a century from now, as so many institutional buildings from the turn of the 20th century are. In fact, many of them aren’t functional even when they’re built!

But my more urgent concern is the intellectual infrastructure. Academics of my generation look at people like Fredric Jameson and think of that kind of erudition as simply unachievable — much less earlier polymathic figures like Auerbach. I don’t think anyone the age of 50 would claim to know as much as Jameson did when he was 50. People just don’t do that anymore. And we are witnessing a further ratcheting down, at least in the US, as the humble art of reading an entire book is increasingly lost to the younger generation. Students are graduating from high school and college knowing less and less, and able to do less and less. What happens when they’re the ones teaching the younger generation?

This is not just “kids these days” scaremongering. It’s not about them as individuals, it’s about intellectual infrastructure. My strongest students now are every bit as smart and capable as my strongest students were when I first started teaching — in fact, I’d count some of the students I’ve taught in the last couple years as the finest I’ve ever encountered. But it’s much more binary, and more seriously, the students who lack those abilities and experiences most often don’t think of it as a problem. The students who can engage at a higher level appear to be anomalies, as though they are “born with it.” And if emulating their own stronger peers does not seem like a live possibility, what about emulating the professor, much less the people who are writing or editing or translating the books they’re reading?

Once in a discussion of Aristotle’s scientific writings, a student generously suggested that Aristotle did the best he could, because he couldn’t just look things up on Wikipedia like we can. I jumped in to say: Aristotle was Wikipedia to them! Just like you look it up on Wikipedia, they looked it up in Aristotle! My improvised retort was perhaps a little glib, but especially with the rise of generative AI, it does seem like we’re going to be in a situation where more and more people are going to be forced to rely on a deposit of knowledge from prior to 2019 — one that can be remixed and perhaps commented on, but not really expanded, because the skills and resources that it takes to expand it have somehow withered away.

Some have suggested that this shift is okay, because students are gaining other kinds of competencies we lack. To me, that seems like magical thinking — much like an ancient person assuming that if the Romans left, someone else would come along to build and maintain the roads. Things don’t happen simply because the space is left open for them. Maybe on the margins the new educational regime where text is radically decentered allows other competencies to grow more than they otherwise would, though some of the claimed competencies strike me as having dubious value (like posting TikTok videos). But there is no medium as information-dense or as able to capture complexity as text. People who cannot work with text simply cannot learn as much overall, and no amount of silver linings can undo the brute fact that less is less.

Mass literacy is a kind of infrastructure, and like all forms of infrastructure in our neoliberal and now potentially post-neoliberal world, it has been allowed to crumble. Without a rapid course correction that appears to be nowhere on the horizon, we are headed down a path where many future generations are going to be gleaning from our scraps, because they have been deprived of the resources and knowledge they need to match our achievements. Who knows how long people will look back on the golden age of the Twentieth Century like medieval Europeans looked back on Roman times? As history shows us, it can be a long time.