I’ve not read everything that sci-fi/fantasy author Lois McMaster Bujold has written, but from what I have read, she sure loves to set a fantasy world in a key site of the emergence of the modern racial structures whilst trying to imagine what it might have been like if they’d been good, actually. Her Chalion/World of the Five Gods novels are set in a fantasy version of Reconquista Spain, where the conflict between Catholics and Muslims has become a conflict between those who worship a fivefold God (Father, Son, Mother, Daughter, Bastard) and the Ragnari, an invading and enslaving people who insist on divine fourness, refusing to recognise the divinity of the fifth person of the Quintarian divinity. While the Ragnari exist as a vague threat in the background of some of the Chalion stories, the real threat is the conflict within and between the Quintarians, who must learn to trust in providence, find the good in demons, and accept their mortality.
Bujold’s Sharing Knife novels have, as far as I can tell, come in for a fair amount of online criticism due to the problematic age gap between the novels’ protagonists, 18 year old farmer-girl Fawn and 55 year old Lakewalker Dag. The world of the Sharing Knife books is more or less the American frontier of the 19th century North America, with the farmers — gradually spreading out into the new-to-them-world — standing in for European settlers and the Lakewalkers — ancient nomadic inhabitants of the land in possession of magical powers — for Native Americans. Here the age gap, as well as being a romance genre trope, stands in for the different relationships of the two peoples to the land. Despite their great differences in age, Fawn and Dag are meant for one another: she, while lacking his magical powers, and threatening to dilute the purity of his bloodline, brings a youthful energy and a home-making capacity which Dag, old and tired, and a little weary of his life of tents and travelling, very badly needs. The two must overcome not only others’ qualms about their gap, but also the longstanding hostility between farmers and Lakewalkers. Their union becomes, both symbolically and in real terms, the beginning of a reconciliation between the two peoples, as they unite to face their common enemy: the malices or blight bogles which are found scattered around the land.
The malices are a pure evil of unknown origin, lacking any ‘ground’ of their own and so parasitic of the ‘ground’ of others, Ground here is something like life force, form, or being. The malices begin as shapeless entities which, as they suck the life from the world around them, gradually begin to take form and intelligence from the beings whose life they consume, beginning with small animals and usually working their way up to roughly humanoid forms. Eventually they begin to capture real human beings, here always farmers rather than Lakewalkers, ‘enslaving’ them so that they lumber around, lacking much in the way of intelligence but able nonetheless to do a lot of damage. If the malice is destroyed in time, it’s possible to free these hapless and subjugated souls, but the malice ‘can’t make life at all, really. Only death.’ The malices, that is to say, are a figure for blackness: located, like maroon communities, in the swamps and at the frontiers of North America during colonisation; threatening always to undermine the coherence of the social order, to suck the life from both indigenous people and settlers, who must therefore band together to defeat them; neither human nor non-human animal but something even more uncanny; figures of as Jared Sexton has it, ‘the affectable, the derelict, the monstrous … the unimaginable loss of that all too imaginable loss itself (nothing for no one)’; not the magical and intuitive Lakewalker connection to the land but ‘the slave’s inhabitation of the earth’ which ‘precedes and exceeds any prior relation to land … no ground for identity, no ground to stand on … the landless inhabitation of selfless existence.’
There is only one way to kill a malice, and that is to strike into it a knife which has been infused with the power of a Lakewalker’s death. As a Lakewalker is dying, either they or someone else must take a bone knife (cut from the thigh bone of a dead Lakewalker) and plunge it into their chest before they breathe their last. They must share their death with the knife, that is, in order to share their death with the malice. A malice, for all that it lacks being and substance, is nonetheless unable to die because it does not know how to do so, and must be taught. Only the Lakewalkers can do this, because of their mystical connection to being. Where the farmers’ existence is justified simply by the fact of their existence, by their wholesome and comfortable way of life, which seeks nothing more than to carry on making babies and planting crops, the Lakewalkers’ existence, dangerous and lacking in creature comforts, must adapt itself to the ever-changing threat of the malice’s. Here the Sharing Knife novels repeat what Shari M Huhndorf describes as the ‘primary cultural work’ of narratives of ‘going Native: ‘the regeneration of racial whiteness’; ensuring that ‘European Americans’, as figured by Fawn, ‘are the proper heirs of “Indianness” as well as of the land and resources of the conquered natives’: here conquered not (as in reality) by the brutality of mass slaughter, broken promises, and the violent separation of children from their parents, but by that most deadly of Christian fantasies: by love.
Su Fang Ng makes (I think) a pretty compelling case that that Hobbes ‘rejects the story of Lucretia’s rape as the foundational myth of Rome in favour of the wolf suckling Remus and Romulus, which represents a more monarchical aetiological myth of state formation.’ According to the story, Lucretia, a Roman noblewoman, is raped by a king’s son named Tarquin (a name I had come across before as the kind of thing a stereotypically posh British person might name their child, which it turns out is extremely fucked up thing to do) and kills herself. This suicide prompts a rebellion amongst the Roman aristocracy, following which Rome ceases to be a kingdom and becomes instead a republic. It makes sense that Hobbes, obsessed with making sure that there’s ultimately one person with the power to decide, and much more worried about the threat of political dissolution than he is about abuse of sovereign power, would be less interested in this kind of origin story than he is in the one where two brothers, more or less identical, fight to the death to decide which one gets to be the decided. But reading Ng made me wonder whether a similar argument could be made about Augustine.
According to The City of God, the story of Romulus and Remus encapsulates the truth of the earthly city: a society in which everyone loves themselves above everything else, and which conflict emerges out of pride, selfishness, and the desire for mastery. Augustine contrasts the story of the warring Roman twins with the biblical story of Cain and Abel, which for Augustine exemplifies not the war of all against all which characterises the earthly city but the conflict between the heavenly city — Abel, a pilgrim — and the earthly city — Cain, who exemplifies ‘the devilish envy that the wicked entertain towards the good for no other reason than that they are good, whereas they themselves are evil.'(15.6).
Lucretia does appear in The City of God, not as an avatar of republican revolution but as a thought experiment on the ethics of sexual violence and of self-murder (Augustine rejects the suggestion that women should be held morally responsible for their violation by others, but also, because he can’t just be kind for once in his life, does insist that to kill oneself in the wake of violation is to add ‘to the crime of others a crime of [one’s] own’ (1.19)); and then briefly in a later discussion of how the Roman kings met their ends which seems to me (on an admittedly superficial reading) intended to demonstrate that the fortunes of Roman leaders should not be straightforwardly understood as indicative of divine judgment: in service, that is, of Augustine’s broader insistence that the declining fortunes of the Western Empire can not be laid at the feet of Christianity’s rising influence.
This year I designed and taught a number of new modules in my new job and I’ll be posting my syllabi for them over the summer while I finally get time to catch my breath and think about how to rework the modules from this year that I’ll be teaching next year, alongside planning a new undergraduate ecclesiology module and a new MA level module on mystical theology in the Abrahamic traditions that I’m really excited about, and which will be the first of the modules I’ll teach at DCU I’ve actually designed myself. This module was designed for our part time, evening BA in Theology and Religious Studies, and was taught over five weeks in 3-4 hour session. It was surprisingly fun for a module about such unrelentingly grim things. Thanks are due to various people who helped me pull this together all at quite short notice, but especially to Jake Erickson and to Anthony Paul Smith.
Week 1: What is the Problem of Evil? This week we’ll spend some time introducing the module, beginning to think about the God question and the problem of evil. Then we’ll take a look at some of the classical Christian texts about the nature of God and evil, focusing on the excerpts from Irenaeus, Augustine and Dionysius which are this week’s required reading.
Required Reading: ‘Irenaeus’, ‘Augustine’ and ‘Dionysius’ extracts from Mark J. Larrimore (ed), The Problem of Evil: A Reader. Blackwell, 2001.
Recommended Reading: ‘Job’s Question’ in Navid Kermani, The Terror of God: Attar, Job and the Metaphysical Revolt. Polity, 2011.
Week 2: The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea This week we’ll think about some of the ways that classical Christian ideas about God and evil related to questions of power and violence. How did Christians think about the relationship between good and evil? How was evil understood in relation to questions of law and order? How did beliefs about hell and the devil shape how Christians thought about the societies they lived in? How did ideas about the nature of God and goodness shape how Christians thought about social, political and economic hierarchies?
Recommended Reading: Stump, Eleonore. ‘Providence and the Problem of Evil’. Oxford Handbook of Aquinas. Brian Davies ed. 2012.
Week 3: Theodicy This week we’ll look at some of the distinctive ways that the problem of suffering begins to emerge in modernity, along with new ways of thinking about the nature of God, the individual, and the foundations of social order.
Required Reading: ‘Voltaire’, ‘Hobbes’ and ‘Leibniz’ extracts from Mark J. Larrimore (ed), The Problem of Evil: A Reader. Blackwell, 2001.
Recommended Reading: ‘Kant’, ‘Schopenhauer’ and ‘Hegel’ extracts from Mark J. Larrimore (ed), The Problem of Evil: A Reader. Blackwell, 2001.
Week 4: Evil in God’s Name One of the ways that evil is a problem for Christian theology is that throughout history, some Christians have done things in the name of God which other Christians have considered to be evil. This week we’ll spend some time thinking about some ways that Christians have justified inflicting suffering on other people, and reflecting on what this means for the God question and the problem of evil.
Required Reading: Humbert of Romans, ‘Opus Tripartitum’ in Riley-Smith, Louise, and Jonathan Simon Christopher Riley-Smith. ‘The Crusades: Idea and Reality, 1095-1274’. 1981.
Recommended Reading: Nigel Biggar, ‘Individual Rights versus Common Security? Christian Moral Reasoning about Torture’ in Studies in Christian Ethics 27.1 (2014), 3-10 (this nasty little piece takes a very unpleasant delight in superfluously graphic descriptions of torture and I regretted not giving my students a heads up about this earlier in the semester)
Week 5: Reconsiderations
Required Reading: Extracts from Gustavo Gutiérrez, On Job : God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent. Orbis Books, 1987.
Recommended Reading: ‘God Can’t Prevent Evil’ from Oord, Thomas Jay. God Can’t: How to Believe in God and Love after Tragedy, Abuse, and Other Evils. SacraSage Press, 2019.
General Bibliography Adams, Marilyn McCord. Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God. Cornell University Press, 2000. Armstrong, Amaryah. ‘Christian Order and Racial Order: What Cedric Robinson Can Teach Us’. The Bias, 3 June 2020, https://christiansocialism.com/2020/06/03/cedric-robinson-racial-order-christianity-socialism/. Griffin, David Ray. God, Power, and Evil: A Process Theodicy. Westminster John Knox Press, 2004. Gutiérrez, Gustavo. On Job : God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent. Orbis Books, 1987. Hart, David Bentley. The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? Eerdmans, 2011. Jantzen, Grace. Becoming Divine : Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Religion. [Bloomington, Ind], 1999. Jones, William R. Is God a White Racist? A Preamble to Black Theology. 1973 Kermani, Navid. The Terror of God: Attar, Job and the Metaphysical Revolt. Polity, 2011. Kilby, Karen. God, Evil and the Limits of Theology. 2020. ———. Suffering and the Christian Life. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019. Kitamori, Kazoh. Theology of the Pain of God: The First Original Theology from Japan. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2005. Kotsko, Adam. The Prince of This World. Stanford University Press, 2016. Larrimore, Mark J. The Problem of Evil: A Reader. Blackwell, 2001. Levenson, Jon D. Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence. Princeton University Press, 1994. Löwy, Michael. Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s’ On the Concept of History’. Verso Books, 2016. McCabe, Herbert. Faith within Reason. A&C Black, 2007. ———. God Matters. A&C Black, 2005. McGill, Arthur Chute. Suffering: A Test of Theological Method. Westminster John Knox Press, 1982. Oord, Thomas Jay. God Can’t: How to Believe in God and Love after Tragedy, Abuse, and Other Evils. SacraSage Press, 2019. Pinn, Anthony B. Why, Lord?: Suffering and Evil in Black Theology. Bloomsbury Publishing, 1999. Riley-Smith, Louise, and Jonathan Simon Christopher Riley-Smith. ‘The Crusades: Idea and Reality, 1095-1274’. 1981. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Penguin, 2004. Stump, Eleonore. ‘Providence and the Problem of Evil’. Oxford Handbook of Aquinas. Brian Davies ed. 2012. Surin, Kenneth. Theology and the Problem of Evil. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2004. Tilley, Terrence W. The Evils of Theodicy. Georgetown University Press, 1991. Vincent, Alana M. ‘Dissenting from Redemption: Judaism and Political Theology’. European Judaism [Amsterdam], vol. 50, no. 1, 2017, pp. 32–40, https://doi.org/10.3167/ej.2017.500106. Zizek, Slavoj, and Boris Gunjevic. God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse. Seven Stories Press, 2012.
Assignment This final assignment will count for 100% of your overall mark for the module. You will be asked to write a 2500 word (+/-10%) essay in response to one of the following questions:
C S Lewis: “If Christianity is true then it ought to follow (a) That any Christian will be nicer than the same person would be if he were not a Christian. (b) That any man who becomes a Christian will be nicer than he was”. Discuss.
William R Jones, “Black theology, precisely because of the prominence of ethnic suffering in the black experience, cannot operate as if the goodness of God for all mankind were a theological axiom”. Discuss.
Karen Kilby, “Christian theology ought neither to construct theodicies, nor ignore the kinds of problem theodicies try to address. It ought instead to acknowledge itself to be faced with questions it cannot answer.” Discuss.
Dorothee Soelle, ‘Any attempt to look upon suffering as caused directly or indirectly by God stands in danger of regarding him as sadistic’. Discuss.
Kenneth Surin, ‘Doing theodicy … as if it were an essentially ‘theoretical’ and ahistorical activity … not only frustrates historically situated reflection on the manifold forms and occurrences of evil, but also militates against a properly Christian response to the ‘problem of evil’. EITHER discuss this claim OR pick one of the thinkers we have read over the course of the module and consider their account of evil in relation to the historical context in which they were/are writing.
Discuss one of the following pieces of fiction which address the problem of evil in light of the materials we have covered over the module:
Pick one event, recent or historical, which raises the problem of evil. What kinds of questions does this event raise about the god question and the problem of evil, and how might those questions be addressed?
CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE. If you would like to write your essay on a topic other than those set out in the questions above, you are free to do so on the condition that you a) pick a topic that will enable to you to meet the learning outcomes and b) get my approval for your chosen essay topic before you submit the essay. I’m really happy to talk over ideas with you and suggest readings etc. but you MUST get in touch with me before you submit your final essay.
If you are responding to one of the prompts which asks you to discuss a quotation, you can choose either to engage extensively with the thinker the quotation is taken from or simply to use the quotation as a way into talking about themes and ideas in the thinkers and texts we’ve studied in this module.
Your essay can draw on a mixture of texts from the module, texts from the module bibliography, and texts that you’ve found yourself. You should cite at least four scholarly sources. Your essay should use quotations as evidence, either to back up your overall argument, or to dissect in order to discuss the thinker or text you are discussing. You should not directly cite lecture materials.
Your essay must have a thesis: a central idea or insight which is arguable (i.e. someone could disagree with it).
As I write this piece, US and Israeli bombs continue to fall on Iran. US secretary of defence Pete Hegseth, author of American Crusade, tattooed with Christian insignia including both a Jerusalem Cross and a Chi Rho, recently quoted the Bible at a Pentagon briefing.[3] A few weeks ago, Christian pastors gathered in the Oval Office to pray for Trump as he led the US into war.[4] Theologian James Orr was recently appointed head of policy for Reform UK.[5] Billionaire Peter Thiel — friend of Jeffrey Epstein, fan of Tolkien, and founder of Palantir — continues to tour his Girardian theology of the end times, according to which we are invited to view Greta Thunberg as the avatar of the antichrist.[6] Perhaps the problem contemporary theology faces as a discipline is not so much its failure as its success.
But we are here to talk about failure. I have argued elsewhere that if there is one thing that Christians can agree on, it is that theology has failed. I am conscious that not all SST members are Christians, and I so hope it is not too much of a colonizing move to suggest that we might broaden this still further: if there is one thing we can all agree on, it is that theology has failed. Things become tricky only when we try to pin down precisely what has gone wrong, and why. In this paper I will take as my starting point a 2024 paper by Esther McIntosh and Anupama Ranawana, which argues that SST specifically has failed in the face of the ongoing genocide in Palestine. I will suggest that failure is best understood neither as a falling away from an original goodness or as a disordering of theology’s inherent orientation towards a particular telos but as inherent and constitutive. The question we should be asking is not how to stop failing but, rather, how to relate to failure. Whether or not we are willing to acknowledge it, theology has always renewed itself through its liaisons with its others, and I will argue that the work of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan offers us resources for considering this question – how to relate to failure? If Palestine is now, as Steven Salaita argues, an “avatar of campus suppression”, it is because it also condenses so many of the urgent crises we face today.[7]
If I am pessimistic about the possibility of our agreeing on the nature of theological failure, then all the more so about the possibility that we might agree on what theology is. For the purposes of this paper, let us assume that (to lightly paraphrase the SST constitution) ‘theology’ refers to everyone engaged in what they consider to be theology, across a wide range of contexts including the academy and the churches. Theology is done not only in preaching, teaching, and research, but also in the work of making and remaking the institutions in and by which theology is done – in administration, in informal networks of influence and prestige, in mentoring and pastoral care just as much as in gossip and in whisper networks. I think it is crucial, as theologians, that we reflect not only on what we think, but also on what we do, consciously and unconsciously. I am conscious here that my primary location in a university will shape what I say, and want to emphasise that this is not intended in any way to disparage or dismiss the theological work done in churches and elsewhere (some of my best friends are priests).
To begin, then. In their 2024 paper, ‘Silence is Complicity: Theological Failure in the Face of Genocide’, Esther McIntosh and Anupama Ranawana argue that SST has failed in the face of the ongoing genocide in Palestine.[8] “This failure”, they argue, “in the form of theological silence, is complicity” in the ongoing injustices suffered by Palestinians.[9] This silence, the authors argue, is in conflict with SST’s 2016 Theology and Race report, which argued that “British academic theologians need to engage critically with the role of race in the formation of the discipline in the context of race in the UK and the British Empire.”[10] Since McIntosh and Ranawana’s paper was published, SST has sought to address the issue of Palestine in both speech and action. The Society organised an online event on “Theology and the War in Gaza” in 2024, issued a public statement in 2025, and in 2025 also decided to relocate from the University of Warwick, where staff and student campaigns to end the university’s complicity in “genocide, the arms trade & occupied apartheid Palestine” have so far been unsuccessful.[11] Despite these developments, I think that McIntosh and Ranawana are right to see in SST’s response to the genocide a failure. But their critique gives us too much credit.
Theology has a long history when it comes to justifying slaughter. In 1274 Humbert of Romans, Master General of the Dominican Order, wrote a treatise which set out to theologically justify the crusades and to respond to various critics who saw crusading as incompatible with the demands of Christianity.[12] Some people, he said, were arguing that it was wrong for Christians to shed blood. After all, don’t the examples of Christ and the martyrs demonstrate that the truly Christian path is to turn the other cheek and to refuse violence, even if it costs us our lives? Ah, says Humbert, there is a time to build and a time to tear down buildings, a time to refuse the sword and a time to take it up. What if infidels wanted to kill every Christian and erase Christianity from the face of the earth; surely then Christians would not continue to preach peace? There is no end to the hostility and ill-will of the Muslims, he claims. How can Christians accept the occupation of the land of Israel by such an evil people, who do not allow for true Christian worship? Did not God command the Hebrews never to make treaties with the worshippers of false gods who occupied the promised land? The Crusaders, Humbert insists, are not invading other people’s territory, but taking back their own land, the land which God gave first to the Jews and then to the Christians.
Humbert goes on to remind his readers of Jesus’ parable about a field where the wheat was growing alongside weeds. The servants of the field’s owner asked if they should pull up the weeds, but the owner told them to hold back – pulling up the weeds would also damage the wheat. Instead, he said, the servants should wait until harvest time to separate out the good plants from the bad. But what of a field which has only weeds and no wheat? Should the plants not all be pulled up? Is the Holy Land not like a fig tree which bears no fruit, and should be cut down; or like the city of Sodom, in which not even ten good men could be found, and which should be razed to the ground with fire?
The editors’ note I have attached to my copy of Humbert’s text says that his arguments “would certainly not convince anyone today”.[13] But they are all too familiar.[14] Humbert draws on biblical passages in which God commands the Hebrew people to enter the promised land and to wipe out its existing inhabitants; to erase their religion, their culture, and their memory from the earth. Contemporary scholarship suggests that this violent erasure of the Canaanites never actually took place (at least not on anything like the scale imagined by the biblical text). But the texts come to us now dripping with blood, thanks to the work of Christian interpreters in whose hands it became a warrant not only for the ultimately failed Christian attempt to recapture Jerusalem for Christianity, but also for the brutal expulsion of Jews and Muslims from medieval Spain, and for the modern invention of settler colonialism.[15] As Robert Warrior and Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz have shown, the theological tools developed by Humbert and his contemporaries to justify the Crusades were wielded once again during the conquest of the Americas and European attempts to wipe indigenous Americans from the face of the earth.[16] They are wielded again today both by Christian Zionists and by the state of Israel, arguing that the mass killing and starvation of Palestinians is both necessary and morally justified.
As Warrior points out, the other side of the story of the liberation of the Hebrew people from captivity in Egypt is the story of their conquest of the land of Canaan, and God’s injunctions to wipe the Canaanites from the face of the earth.[17] It is tempting, in the face of horrors committed in the name of God, to move to disavowal, to insist that these things are not Christian, that theology cannot be claimed as a warrant for such obscenity. But to make this claim is not only to fail to face up to the reality of the discipline which has formed us, it is also to fall into the very logic which so often legitimizes Christian violence.
As Daniel Boyarin argues, the emergence of Christian identity is centrally tied to the distinction of heresy. In inventing heresy, Christianity draws for itself a border, a partition line which cuts artificially across the divisions which formerly defined the world from which it was born — between Jew and Greek, enslaved and free, male and female — and brings into being a new and more absolute distinction between Christian and non-Christian.[18] As Denise Kimber Buell has it, this distinction produces not only a new divide between Christians and non-Christians but also Christian universalism, composed of three claims: that Christianity is one thing — that it consists of a unified set of beliefs and practices — that anyone can become a Christian, and that everyone should become a Christian.[19] As Gil Anidjar puts it,
Christianity, the Jesuic distinction in humanity (if I may propose this awkward rephrasing of Jan Assmann’s “Mosaic distinction”), is the difference between innocence and guilt as the basis of human society, the difference across humanity, between the old and guilty (humans) and the new and innocent (Christians). It is indeed the advent of a new humanity. From now on, may God protect the humanity of old.[20]
Both the desire to see Christianity as one thing only and the attempt to identify a purely liberatory core to Christianity in relation to which all other elements of Christian tradition are corruptions or degenerations mirror the theological logics of sexual, racial, and ethnic purity which have profoundly shaped Christianity across its history. They obscure the ways that liberation theologies so often remain implicated in the very systems which they seek to oppose;[21] the difficult, skilful, and creative work which goes into the endless remaking of Christian theology for new times, places, and contexts;[22] and the ways in which liberatory forms of Christianity have been shaped not only by Christian tradition but by Christians’ relations with those outside of the church. Christianity has never been simply the passing down of traditions or the preservation of an original message. Fidelity to Christian tradition is always also betrayal, miscegenation, and mutation.[23]
If we want to think about theology and its failure in the face of the genocide in Palestine, we cannot simply seek to exonerate some pure essence of Christianity from responsibility. We must instead confront the ways in which theology has functioned — and continues to function — as one element of the machinery of this abomination. Theology is deeply implicated in the logics of supersession, anti-Judaism, and philosemitism on which not only Christian Zionism but also Christian nationalism, secular modernity, and the modern nation state rely; and in the ideology and practices of settler colonialism, Islamophobia, Orientalism, and racism on which our world is founded.[24] The systems of secular politics, international law and human rights which have — for all their supposedly universal values — so signally failed to stop the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians draw deep from theological wells. More directly, the theological academy is deeply tied to the Zionist project, most especially so in biblical studies whose entanglement in the ongoing settler colonial project includes both participation in archaeological research which has functioned to displace Palestinians both materially and theoretically, and the construction of narratives of “ancient Israel” which serve to legitimise contemporary Israeli identity.[25]
“We might expect”, McIntosh and Ranawana write, “to see widespread public statements and action by theologians and theological ethicists across the globe condemning genocide, especially a genocide that claims theological justification and threatens the lives of Christians”.[26] It will not surprise you by now to hear that I do not share this optimism. I am not trying to deny that people have struggled against genocide, violence, and other forms of injustice in the name of theology. I am not — to be very clear — suggesting that those of us who call ourselves theologians cannot or should not justify our struggle against these things in theological terms. But I do think we need to confront the reality that Christianity is not simply one thing; that is is, as it always has been, a religion of both oppressors and oppressed. Both individual theologians and theological institutions have taken sides with both enslavers and enslaved, revolution and repression, lynch mobs and lynched, fascists and anti-fascists, the wealthy and the dispossessed, and with both colonialism and decolonisation.
This is a problem for us to grapple with not merely as individual theologians, but also as members of SST. The SST constitution says that the Society will “support all those engaged in theology, across the full range of approaches and church traditions”.[27] This commitment to representing the diversity of theology underpins SST’s statement on theology and race, which states that SST “is seeking to address, within the scope of its life, the marginalisation in academia of black and minority ethnic people and their perspectives, and the narrowing of scholarship that goes with it around the concerns and interests of those racialised as white’” so that SST can be “a society for all scholars and students of theology”.[28] Here we encounter a problem.
As the SST statement on Gaza says, “Our Society and our Committee include people who have a range of views regarding the purpose and responsibilities of theologians, the work of theology and of the Society”. A series of quite careful statements follows. The society condemns “the use of Christian Zionist thought, which has led to uncritical support for the Israeli state’s assault on the Palestinian people.” SST “support … the view that theologians must consider the implications and outcomes of their theological production, in this case, their complicity in perpetuating new and old forms of violent settler colonialism” [italics mine].[29] I do not find this satisfying as a response to the open letter from Palestinian Christians, which calls on church leaders and theologians to condemn not only Israel’s response to October 7 but also “the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine”, and asks us to recognise the fact that October 7 and the events which followed it must be placed within the wider context of ‘Israel’s systematic oppression of the Palestinians over the last 75 years since the Nakba, the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and the oppressive and racist military occupation that constitutes the crime of apartheid’.[30]
I find the statement’s careful hedging to be both unethical and strategically unhelpful: in addressing itself to members it offers neither meaningful solidarity to the open letter’s authors, nor any commitment to defend members who do take a more unambiguous public stand. But I also know that to be a member of SST, to be a theologian, to be an academic, is to find myself a member of institutions which are either actively or passively enabling an ongoing genocide. I know that I am thereby implicated, and I know that there are limits to the price I am willing to pay to challenge either this or the other forms of violence which I know myself to be reproducing, however unwillingly, however imperfectly. I know that theological systems and structures which it seems to me we should be working urgently to dismantle are for others of you foundational and indispensable.
There are irreconcilable contradictions here. What would happen if we paid attention to them, instead of trying to paper over the cracks? As I have said elsewhere, “A Christianity which sees itself as one thing into which everyone can and should be brought is a Christianity which cannot reckon with the possibility or the reality of internal disagreement and dissent, and which cannot see the failure to convert as an indication of anything other than in indication of corruption. It is this fantasy of wholeness, of one-ness, which has tended to make Christianity so dangerous to both internal dissenters and external others, and which has rendered it so unable to reckon with the conflicts, disagreements, and inconsistencies that run through its institutions, texts, and practices.”[31]
There is no escape from failure. But there are good theological reasons to understand failure not as a fall away from some primordial success, some original wholeness, but as in fact the constituting condition of our being. To insist that God creates from nothing, from freedom rather than necessity, is to say that at the heart of our being is something which cannot be explained. To speak about God is to founder on the limits of theological language, to try and to fail again to name the unnameable, to limit the illimitable, to know the unknowable. Failure is ontological.
Failure is also the reality of the disciplines and institutions which form us as theologians. The sexual, familial, and reproductive metaphors so central to Christian narratives of both ecclesial identity and the study of theology, however disciplined, cannot but draw our attention to the impossibility of fidelity, to the inevitability of failure. We neither understand nor control the ways that our parents have formed us, any more than parents can grasp or master who and what their children become. On sex, the Bible will tell the truth if we will not — that the order based on men’s possession of women has always been sustained and maintained by violent men, manipulative wives, courageous sex workers, and infidelities great and small.
The question that we should ask then, is not how we might now succeed but, instead, how to relate to this constitutive failure. Theological failure is a problem of being, of knowledge, and of power; and the question of how to relate to this failure is a problem of desire. I want to turn now to the Jacques Lacan, who offers a typology of four discourses, four ways of relating to the incompleteness, the constitutive failure of being, language, and order. As I’ve argued elsewhere, this typology is deeply indebted to Christian theology, and Lacan’s four discourses — the master’s discourse, the university discourse, the hysteric’s discourse and the analyst’s discourse — correspond to the four stages of theological speech as set out in Dionysius’ foundational account of mystical theology: the naming of God according to the logic of doctrinal propriety, the proliferation of divine names, the denial of divine names, and finally the mystical language of contradiction, paradox, and silence.[32] As Thomas Lynch puts it, “Understanding these configurations enables an analysis of four key social phenomena: ‘governing, education, protesting, and revolutionizing’”; all of which, I will argue, can illuminate the discipline of theology as it is exercised in the context of churches, universities and (of course) learned societies.[33]
The first of Lacan’s four discourses is the Master’s discourse. This “is the discourse of unquestionable authority; the discourse of strong leaders and traditional values. It says that the solution to what ails us is a reaffirmation of authority (biblical, encyclical, or political), and a return to hierarchies of race, gender, class, or church governance.”[34] It is the discourse of sovereign power, of groundless decision, of the God who creates by dividing, out of nothing. The Master’s discourse believes that the solution to failure is to re-establish proper order, and is willing to wield violence in order to do so.
But there are two truths that the Master’s discourse cannot confront. First is the reality of incompleteness and division. Christianity is not one. However hard we try to impose authority on the world, it will always escape our grasp. I am sure I am not the only member of the Society who grew up very sure that there was a right way to be a Christian, a right way to read the Bible, and who has found that this belief fell apart the more tightly I clung to it. I suspect that this failure is one reason why so much energy is now being put into various attempts to discipline academic theology along with the rest of higher education.[35] There are cracks in the texts that some of us cannot help but fall through. The other thing concealed by the Master’s discourse is the pleasure of transgression and the ways that enjoyment is intensified by prohibition. The last few years have been a lesson on the ubiquity of those pleasures in the places of power. This pleasure is, for Lacan, crucial to understanding the way that this discourse is sustained: “What keeps people attached to a model so obviously built on repression and hypocrisy are the pleasure of hating those who are excluded by this discourse’s legalistic order and the transgressive pleasures of breaking the law”; though also, I think it is important to add, the pleasures of doing violence to others who transgress it. As Alberto Toscano has argued, “the fascist – as the phantasmatic synthesis of the settler and the soldier (or the cop) – needs to imagine him or herself as an active shareholder in the monopoly of violence”.[36]
When the master’s discourse begins to break apart, one route out of these contradictions is what Lacan refers to as the ‘university discourse’. Here the solution to incompleteness and contradiction is to multiply knowledge: “If we just write another report, create another policy or procedure, conduct more research, run more training sessions, track more data, or add another layer of paperwork, then we will arrive at a resolution. This is the discourse of bureaucracy, of ‘equality and diversity’ committees, and of ‘post-political’ pragmatic government” which claims not to be ideological but to be interested simply in better management, in more efficient systems and processes.[37] I am reminded here of a paper that Gerard Loughlin gave at SST several years ago in which he described the Anglican Living in Love and Faith process as an endless series of reports suggesting that what was needed was “more listening”; whether this was better or worse than the decisions lately arrived at I will leave to you to decide. This is also, of course, the discourse of the REF. One of the last things I did before leaving the UK for Ireland last summer was to draft a REF environment statement. I had to describe what my unit was doing to encourage career progression amongst its members. A laudable goal, except that we had not been able to apply for promotions for four years, due to an ongoing financial crisis; and when the university had paused its promotion process it had also withdrawn its promotion criteria, with the (also laudable!) goal of rewriting them to be both clearer and more equitable. A report, then, on how we were working to help our colleagues work towards unknown criteria for a non-existent end, for a system of assessment which barely anyone believes in, all in the middle of a deepening crisis in which it was (and is) not even clear that my job, my programme, or the institution as a whole would make it as far as the next REF. The university discourse functions, then, “both to evade the real questions and conflicts that characterise institutions and also to disempower and deflate any attempts to confront these real problems by ensuring that people are kept so bored and alienated by endless busy-work that they become cynical and disengaged.”[38] While — as the very persistence of the REF testifies — it is possible to get stuck here, it is also possible that the pointlessness, the absurdity, or the sheer tedium will lead to the discourse breaking down.
If at this point we resist the lure of the Master’s discourse, we may find ourselves instead moving into the discourse of protest, of complaint: the hysteric’s discourse. For Lacan, this is a moment with transformative potential. The hysteric insists on the failure of the system within which she is positioned. The master discourse’s insistence on order is incoherent, and the university discourse’s insistence that incoherence can be resolved by the production of knowledge is doomed. This is the work of critique; but critique can be a trap. In the student revolutions of 1968, Lacan notoriously said to his protesting students, “You are hysterics who demand a new master. You will get one.”[39] The hysteric recognises that there is something wrong with the way that things are, but has not yet given up on the fantasy of wholeness. Sara Ahmed writes eloquently about the ways that complaint and protest can be absorbed by universities into self-serving and self-aggrandising narratives of improvement and transformation.[40] Critique can function to reproduce the very systems and structures at which it is directed, and this reproductive function cannot be laid solely at the feet of institutions. The queer theorist Lauren Berlant talks about “cruel optimism” which exists, they say, “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing”; Daniel Colluciello Barber suggests that something like cruel optimism can come to structure the way we critique the institutions we are part of.[41] The very act of critique, he suggests, can itself be a form of investment in that institution. Why waste time understanding what is wrong, trying to convince others to agree with us and so on if not that we hope, on some level, that change is possible, that the institution can become better? Critique can be a way of sustaining our relation to the things we criticise; it can be a way of disavowing our on responsibility for a situation and of failing to reckon with the power that we have ourselves; it can be a way to sustain our own sense of goodness by distancing ourselves from the institutions in which we are implicated. Critique, that is to say, can be a form of care, a kind of reproductive labour.
It is difficult to inhabit institutions in the midst of multiple overlapping catastrophes. I know I am not the only person to find myself returning over and again to Walter Benjamin’s famous description of the angel of history pictures the angel, eyes wide open, mouth open and wings outstretched, his face turned towards the past, blowing him into the future and so ever further from paradise as he watches history unfold as “one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his fee”’.[42] As Nadia Abu El-Haj demonstrates, one tendency which emerged out of the horrors of the Holocaust and Hiroshima was the figure of the witness, whose “prophetic quality was inseparable from her trauma”.[43] El Haj connects this figure of the witness to the emergence, over the last few days, of a “new humanitarianism”, a new ethics of care which focuses not on the struggle for a most just world so much as on the attempt to relieve human suffering, which replaces “talk of politics” with “moral obligation”, an “ethical turn … understood as ideologically neutral and thus ‘post’-political”.[44]
Of course, before there were hysterics there were medieval women mystics. I want to close this discussion of the hysteric’s discourse by turning to Catherine of Siena, in whose life and work protest, care, and the witness of suffering are closely entangled; in whose self-aggrandising self-abnegation, martyr complex, violence, frustrated power and compassion I recognise not only myself but also — please forgive me — many of you. According to Catherine’s biographer Raymond of Capua, when a local sister called Andrea became sick with breast cancer, her wounds so putrid that people could only stand to be near her if they stuffed their noses so as not to be able to smell, Catherine tended to her faithfully, washing Andreas’ oozing breast. Catherine was not immune to the stench of Andrea’s wound, but demonstrated her perfect self-mastery when, experiencing nausea whilst tending to the wound, she bent her face to it until she almost passed out (I, too, have attended meetings about my institution’s financial crisis).[45]
You might think that such commitment to care and self-sacrifice would be met with gratitude but, like so many people around the saint, it seems that Andrea could not stand the holy Catherine, spreading nasty rumours about her, and accusing her of sexual immorality. Catherine, however, remained undeterred, continuing to attend to Andrea’s bedside until one day the bitter and resentful old sister saw Catherine’s face transformed into that of an angel, on which she repented, called together all those to whom she had slandered Catherine’s reputation, and admitted that Catherine was not only pure but, indeed, a saint.
Catherine’s greatest joys, it seems, were always prompted by great suffering; in her letters she writes to her confessor, Raymond of Capua of the unspeakable joys she experienced when attending the execution of a young nobleman, with whom she had stayed up praying throughout the night. As she waited for him to be brought out to the executioner’s block, eager for spiritual encounter, she laid her neck upon the block. But, she says, “my desire did not come there, for I had too full consciousness of myself.”[46] Instead she resumed her prayers for the young man, as he in turn laid his head upon the block, speaking the names of both Jesus and of Catherine herself just before the axe fell and his head in turn fell into Catherine’s lap, whereupon she experienced the ecstasy for which she had been longing.
With all this holiness, Raymond marvels, it is difficult to understand the many insults Catherine received throughout her life from those around her. Those around her seem to have been persistently incensed by her spiritual patience and self-discipline. So greatly did the Sisters of Penance of St Dominic envy Catherine’s superior wisdom and devotion that they began to complain about her, deciding that her miracles were not from God but the devil, working to keep her out of their meetings, keeping her away from holy communion, denying her access to a confessor; so incensed by her that, when she did manage to partake in communion, falling immediately after into a deep trance, they would pick her up and throw her bodily out of the church, some of them even kicking her as she lay insensible on the ground.[47]
What does it mean to insist on tending to the wounds of someone who finds your presence extremely irritating? What does it mean to ecstatically receive the host in a community which finds that ecstasy so unacceptable that your fellow congregants literally pick up your body to remove you from church? What complex ties of power, pleasure, suffering and self-aggrandisement are at work in Catherine’s relationships with the pious nuns who cannot bear her and her confessor Raymond for whom the obvious irritation which Catherine provokes in others becomes itself a sign of her sainthood?
Writing about the psychic burn-out often experienced by migrant care workers, Jared Sexton suggests that burnout and breakdown are endemic to the profession of caring, because of the inherent paradoxes at the heart of care work itself. Psychoanalysis tells us, he suggests, that our best intentions are laced with unbidden aggression and sexuality, that dangerous and sometimes violent desires emerge when those cared for do not go along with the caregiver’s best intentions, resulting in harms both to the carer and to those cared for.[48] Catherine’s life and work speaks to this complex intertwining of self-sacrifice and pleasure, to the ways that self-denial can be a way to seek out power; the violence that so often takes root in the midst of care, directed both at carers and at those cared for. Liberation theology has often talked about God’s preferential option for the poor, but there is a risk here – as liberation theologians well knew – that this sense of God’s solidarity with the oppressed can turn into a kind of fetishisation of suffering and poverty.[49]
Why do so many of us stay in jobs, churches and institutions which are draining the life out of us? Why is it that so many of us find ourselves frozen, being blown ever further from Paradise, as catastrophe piles upon catastrophe before our open eyes? Why are we so much more easily moved by pity than by anger; what does it mean that it was not Palestinian resistance and struggle against occupation and genocide which brought about mass support within the West for the Palestinian cause, but the endless, unbearable images of Palestinian suffering?
The route out of this bind, Lacan suggests, is the final of the four discourses: the analyst’s discourse. It is only here, for Lacan, that we truly confront the reality of failure: the impossibility of mastering ourselves or those around us. The task of the analyst is not to control, not to produce endless knowledge, not to protest, but to open a space in which the other may come face to face with failure. We might think of this in terms of Slavoj Žižek’s suggestion that the role of philosophy is not to provide answers but to ask the “right questions”.[50] We might think of it in terms of Marcella Althaus-Reid’s argument for “a theology which aims (as only Queer Theology can) to scandalise, that is, to be a stone on the road to force theologians to stop, fall down, while pausing in their pain and thinking during the pause”.[51]
This work of interruption, of scandal, of asking questions, is no simple matter of brute force. It may take only a single blow of the hammer to stop the wheels from turning; the art is in knowing where to hit it. Things are trickier still when we begin to work at scale: how to trip the feet of a discipline, a sub-field, a scholarly guild, an institution, a congregation, or a classroom? Here too is failure; here too we must seek to know not only ourselves, not only the institutions and structures we inhabit, but also the relationship between those things. This is work — for Žižek, the work of love, of agape — and it requires careful attention, along with a sustained attempt to let go of the fantasies of wholeness or redemption which so often structure our relationship to research, teaching, preaching, our ministry, pastoral and administrative work.[52]
Perhaps this has always been the case, but it seems to me that one of most significant difficulties with which this task presents us is that to truly pay attention, to face up to the task of theology — be that intellectual, institutional, or pedagogical — is to find ourselves, like Catherine, face to face with horror and obscenity. Academic theology has always been a site of struggle, has always been an engine of violence, and of the reproduction of the violent distinctions of race, class, and gender; but just as Christians come together in agreement that theology has failed if not on anything else, so too I would suggest to you, my readers, that if we can agree on anything it is that university life is not, on the whole, improving. Back in 2013, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney wrote that, “it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment.”[53] There is still truth in this, but places of refuge are shrinking everywhere, albeit still in ways stratified by geography and also by class.
It has become commonplace to speak about “the Palestine exception” — the tendency for both speech and action by and about Palestine to be suppressed, particularly within universities. Yet as Steven Salaita points out, “this Palestine exception informs and is constituted by broader, and older, forms of suppression”, the return of repressed truths of colonial violence past on which our world is built.[54] What is happening — what continues to happen — in Palestine is a horror beyond grasping. It is also a vision of the future which looks to be coming for us all: the razing to the ground of universities and libraries, the killing, torture and incarceration of both students and teachers in Palestine the corollary of the central role Israeli universities play in producing not only the historical and theoretical justification for apartheid, in making and testing technologies of surveillance and slaughter, and in suppressing both staff and student speech and activism.[55]
Christian narratives of salvation and redemption can render us, as Amaryah Armstrong argues, unable to confront the reality of loss.[56] It is difficult not to fall into the logic of theodicy, which says that any kind of suffering, loss, or failure can be justified if – and only if – we believe that ultimately all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. Modern secular narratives of historical progress have deep roots in Christian tradition. One thing that these narratives imply is that failure can only ever be a staging post on the way towards victory; that hope is only possible if we believe that God hides behind the curtain of history, ensuring that, whatever happens to other people over there, we are going to be fine, that the suffering and defeat of others exists in the end as a backdrop to our own final triumph over history. Christ’s crucifixion has come to mean, for many of us, not the necessity of the destruction of a world which is willing to put Christ to death, but that redemption will emerge out of suffering, through suffering. There is a kind of obscenity in this. What kind of glorious victory would suffice to cancel out the suffering of all of those who been killed in Gaza, in California fires, in small boats in the British channel, in countless other singular apocalypses?
Perhaps instead we might come, as Amaryah Armstrong suggests, to “understand black riots as an instance of black revelation”; to see “looting, property destruction, and physical resistance to the state’s and citizenry’s enforcement of white nationalism” as “a means of contesting the law, order, and economy of an anti-black world and the reality it legitimates”.[57] Perhaps we might welcome, with whatever trepidation, the abolition of “what exists now” which is, as Anthony Paul Smith argues, “indefensible”, such that “its destruction is a kind of grace, a liberation from the deathly self”.[58] Perhaps we might hear the words of Edward Said, in the poem by Mahmūd Darwīsh from which this paper takes its title: “If I die before you, I urge you to cling to the impossible!”[59] Perhaps we might ask one another how we can relate to our failure to love our enemies, who are also ourselves.
[2] I am grateful to Christians for Palestine UK (and especially to Grey Collier) and to Modern Church (especially Alison Webster) for giving me the opportunity to develop these thoughts on Palestine, some of which have been previously published as blog posts: ‘Remember Amalek’, Modern Church blog, 12 April 2024, https://modernchurch.org.uk/marika-rose-remember-amalek; and ‘Hope and Heartsickness’, Modern Church blog, 8 August 2025, https://modernchurch.org.uk/hope-and-heartsickness. Fellow members of the International Network for Experimental Theology and Philosophy (INEPT) provided invaluable input on a very sketchy draft of the paper – thank you to Tommy Lynch, Hannah Strømmen, Ulrich Schmiedel. Aaron Goldman, Annette Langer-Pitschmann, Gorazd Andrejč, Zoran Grozdanov, Mattias Martinson, Ida Simonsson, Susanne Wigorts Yngvesson, and Mark Godin . I’m also very grateful to my Dublin colleagues, Brad Anderson, Miriam DeCock, Alyson Staunton, and Daniele Pevarello who read and commented on an early draft, and especially to Anthony Paul Smith who was an invaluable sounding board and insightful editor throughout the writing process. I should note that the generosity of the interlocutors I have listed above should not be taken either as implicating them in any errors which remain or as signalling their agreement with the arguments I make in what follows.
[9] Esther McIntosh and Anupama M. Ranawana, ‘Silence Is Complicity: Theological Failure in the Face of Genocide’, International Journal of Public Theology (Leiden, The Netherlands) 18, no. 4 (2024): 463–87, https://doi.org/10.1163/15697320-20241605. 464
[10] ‘Report of the SST Executive Committee Subgroup on Theology and Race’, 2018, 7.
[11] Warwick Staff and Student Solidarity Network, An Investment in Injustice (2024).
[12] Humbert of Romans, ‘Opus Tripartitum’, in The Crusades: Idea and Reality, 1095-1274, ed. Louise Riley-Smith and Jonathan Riley-Smith (Edward Arnold, n.d.).
[14] See, for example, the section on ‘Expressions of Genocidal Intent Against the Palestinian People by Israeli State Officials and Others’ in South Africa, ‘Application Instituting Proceedings and Request for the Indication of Provisional Measures’, International Court of Justice, 29 December 2023, 140–64, https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20231228-app-01-00-en.pdf.
[15] See, for example, John Edwards, ‘Reconquista and Crusade in the Fifteenth Century’, in Crusading in the Fifteenth Century: Message and Impact, ed. Norman Housley (Springer, 2004), 166; Sarah Covington, The Devil from over the Sea: Remembering and Forgetting Oliver Cromwell in Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2022), 2; Jace Weaver, ‘Unsettling the Settled: A Response’, Political Theology 24, no. 7 (2023): 788.
[16] Robert Allen Warrior, ‘Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians’, Christianity and Crisis (New York) 49, no. 12 (1989): 261; Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2023); see also Steven Salaita, Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine (U of Minnesota Press, 2016).
[18] Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judeo-Christianity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 1–33.
[19] Denise Kimber Buell, Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity / Denise Kimber Buell., Gender, Theory, and Religion (Columbia University Press, 2005), https://doi.org/10.7312/buel13334., 140.
[20] Gil Anidjar, Blood: A Critique of Christianity (Columbia University Press, 2014). 254.
[21] See for example, Warrior, ‘Canaanites’; Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology (Routledge, 2002), 4–6; Amy-Jill Levine and Ted A. Smith, ‘Habits of Anti-Judaism: Critiquing a PCUSA Report on Israel/Palestine’, The Christian Century, accessed 22 March 2026, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2010-06/habits-anti-judaism; James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Orbis Books, 2010), xx.
[22] See, for example, Delores Williams, ‘Hagar in African American Appropriation’, in Hagar, Sarah, and Their Children: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Perspectives, ed. Phyllis Trible and Letty M. Russell (n.d.), 172; Amaryah Armstrong, ‘Christian Order and Racial Order: What Cedric Robinson Can Teach Us’, The Bias, 3 June 2020, https://christiansocialism.com/2020/06/03/cedric-robinson-racial-order-christianity-socialism/.
[23] Marika Rose, A Theology of Failure: Žižek against Christian Innocence / Marika Rose., First edition., Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (Fordham University Press, 2019), 11–13, https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823284092; Marika Rose, ‘Holy Mothers of God: Sex Work, Inheritance, and the Women of Jesus’ Genealogy’, Theology & Sexuality (Abingdon) 25, nos 1–2 (2019): 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1080/13558358.2019.1652031; Marika Rose and Anthony Paul Smith, ‘Hexing the Discipline: Against the Reproduction of Continental Philosophy of Religion’, Humanities & Social Sciences Communications (London) 5, no. 1 (2019): 2, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-018-0207-4; Anthony Paul Smith and Daniel Whistler, ‘Editor’s Introduction: What Is Continental Philosophy of Religion Now?’, After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion, 2010, 1–25.
[24] See, for example, Mahmood Mamdani: ‘the history of the prevailing state system begins in 1492, with the Reconquista’ (Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020), 5.
[25] See, for example, Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (University of Chicago Press, 2008); Keith W. Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History (Routledge, 1996); Nur Masalha, The Bible and Zionism: Invented Traditions, Archaeology and Post-Colonialism in Palestine-Israel / Nur Masalha. (Zed Books, 2007); Michael J. Sandford, ed., The Bible, Zionism, and Palestine: The Bible’s Role in Conflict and Liberation in Israel-Palestine (Relegere, 2016), https://www.academia.edu/29776721/The_Bible_Zionism_and_Palestine_The_Bibles_Role_in_Conflict_and_Liberation_in_Israel_Palestine; Maya Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom (Verso, 2024).
[31] Marika Rose, ‘Love Your Enemy: Theology, Identity and Antagonism’, in Dissenting Church: Exploring the Theological Power of Conflict and Disagreement (Springer, 2024), 205.
[33] Thomas Lynch, ‘Making the Quarter Turn: Liberation Theology after Lacan’, in Theology after Lacan: The Passion for the Real, ed. Creston Davis et al. (2015), 217, citing Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (Norton, 2007), 166.
[40] Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Duke University Press, 2020).
[41] Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Duke university press, 2020), 1; Daniel Colucciello Barber, ‘World-Making and Grammatical Impasse’, Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 25, nos 1–2 (2016): 179–206.
[45] Raymond of Capua, The Life of Catherine of Siena, trans. George Lamb (P.J. Kennedy & Sons, n.d.), 369–71.
[46] Catherine of Siena, ‘To Brother Raimondo of Capua of the Order of the Preachers’, in Saint Catherine of Siena as Seen in Her Letters, trans. Vita Dutton Scudder (J.M. Dent and E.P. Dutton, 1905), http://www.domcentral.org/trad/cathletters.htm.
[48] Jared Sexton, ‘Antidoting’, The Black Scholar 51, no. 3 (2021): 12–13.
[49] See, for example, Gustavo Gutiérrez et al., A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation / Gustavo Gutiérrez; Translated and Edited by Caridad Inda and John Eagleson. (SCM, 1985), 287–91.
[51] Marcella Althaus-Reid, The Queer God (Routledge, 2004), 35.
[52] Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (Verso, 2000), 117–18.
[53] Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013.), 26.
[54] Salaita, ‘The Free Speech Exception to Palestine’, 3.
[55] On scholasticide in Palestine, see e.g. 00/00/0000 00:00:00 On Israeli universities, see e.g. Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel; Anthony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World (Verso Books, 2024).
[57] Armstrong, ‘Christian Order and Racial Order’.
[58] Anthony Paul Smith, ‘On White Christian Violence’, in In Sheep’s Clothing: The Idolatry of White Christian Nationalism, ed. George Yancy and Bill Bywater (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023), 340.
Thomas Hobbes’ biographer Arnold Rogow writes that, “Hobbes … may never have loved a woman, but no one has ever hinted that he was homosexual” (Radical in the Service of Reaction, 66). Even if that was true at the time Rogow was writing (1986), I’m sure it can’t possibly be true any more; but I spent some time digging around Hobbes scholarship over the summer (with the generous support of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies) and came up empty-handed. Let me then be, perhaps, the first person to suggest it: I think it’s possible that Hobbes was gay. Here are some of my reasons:
As Rogow notes, Hobbes never married and was described by his biographer John Aubrey as not ‘a woman-hater … but … even in his youth, (generally) temperate, both as to wine and women’ (66).
One of Hobbes’ early pieces of writing was a Latin poem about a cavern in Derbyshire called the Devil’s Arse (‘partially so-called because the rocks supposedly look like the buttocks of a person bending over. The rocks are enormous and between them is a very deep cavern, in which the sun never shines’), in which he also discussed another local cave called “Poole’s Hole”. (A P Martinich, Thomas Hobbes, 73)
Rogow writes, ‘References to human anatomy in the Peak do not establish that Hobbes and the second earl shared an interest in the more intimate physical aspects of life, but we may doubt that Hobbes would have included these references had the earl, for whom the poem was written, be displeased by them’ (71) — the earl here is Hobbes’ student as well as his employer, and also a close companion. Of the earl, Hobbes writes in a. poem full of bawdy innuendos the following lines: “Magnificent, not lavish, still he spends/His riches freely, and amongst his Friends’ (73).
Rogow suggests that these images of holes and caves haunted Hobbes for the rest of his life and that the Devil’s Arse may have inspired Hobbes’ last reported words before his death: ‘I shall be glad to find a Hole to creep out of the world at’ (71).
Hobbes was convinced that the secret to a long life was ridding the body of excess moisture, and so as an old man he would play vigorous games of tennis or go for long walks to work up a sweat and then, according to Aubrey, “give the servant some money to rub him” (Brief Lives, 165).
Also, apparently in quest of a less moist life, Hobbes would lie in bed at night singing ‘prick songs’ (Rogow, 226). Here ‘prick’ refers to a particular form of musical notation, but also, I mean, come on
Aubrey also recounts a story told to him by Hobbes about a time that Hobbes was hired as a tutor to the young Duke of Buckingham, according to Hobbes a man of ‘great naturall parts’ and a quick wit, who was however slow to comprehend Hobbes’ instruction; this, it transpired, was because he was “at mastrupation (his hand in his Cod-piece)” (Rogow, 153).
At the heart of Hobbes’ political theory is an (unusual!) insistence that authority has no gender, that the distinctions between men and women are overwhelmingly artificial rather than natural, and that the same therefore goes for any societal norms around sexual behaviour
Obviously none of this is conclusive. But I do think that it’s at least worth both asking the question, and also wondering why it is that the question has not been more seriously considered (in the process of writing this post I began to wonder whether Rogow — a psychoanalyst and close friend of Gertrude Stein — was, in fact, hinting at the possibility of Hobbes’ homosexuality). I do think it’s symptomatic of a general gap between political theological readings of Hobbes which tend to be better at thinking about the symbols, metaphors and underlying metaphysics of Hobbes’ thinking but tend to ignore questions of gender and sexuality, and the feminist scholarship of Hobbes which tends to a somewhat literalist reading of Hobbes which tends to assume that his ideas about gender can primarily be inferred from the times when he explicitly discusses gender and not say, his ideas about snakes and frogs and rivers of blood. Rogow says, when discussing Hobbes in relation to Bacon, that both expressed ‘more than a hint of misogyny’. I’ve not finished the Rogow book so it’s possible I am missing something, but what I’ve read so far suggests that it is not so much that Hobbes — who worked for women, left money to women, and could imagine a world in which women ruled over men — hated women as that he was just more personally interested in men.
My reason for doing this is a sense that I need a change. It may be permanent or it may fizzle out. In either case, this site and its archives will remain available, and it will be open for new posts from any of my co-bloggers (i.e., Marika).
Existing email subscribers to this blog have been subscribed to the new one. I apologize for any inconvenience and annoyance. Feel free to unsubscribe without judgment or offense. But by the same token, I’d love to continue the conversation with any past blog fans.
Yesterday, a friend I’d not seen in person in a while asked me how my back pain was doing. He asked because he follows me on Facebook, which I use as a personal diary, and I had mentioned back problems there frequently for the last several week. The odd thing about that is that I had one discrete episode of back pain, with a clear etiology related to an injury that I aggravated by exercising too soon, and I fully recovered from it weeks ago. He thought my back was still a problem because I was writing frequently about my fear that it might happen again and my extreme caution about exercising when I feel even the slightest crick in my neck.
I assured my friend that I was fine, but I was a little embarrassed to realize that I had been projecting these fears so frequently. And reflecting back on the last several months, I realized that a similar pattern kept happening. A series of minor health setbacks — bad allergies, a sinus infection, a short bout of covid, and then the back pain — had a disproportionate emotional impact on me. Even aside from the drain on my physical energy, when suffering from these ailments I felt unable to go about my everyday activities. Thankfully most of this happened during summer vacation, so there were few mandatory daily activities — but the collective impact is that I spent a lot of my summer bored and depressed. The back pain was worst of all, because its impact on my exercise routine sent me down a spiral where my entire life would have to change. I rewatch Star Trek on the rowing machine, for instance, so I would never watch Star Trek again and stop writing my blog on the topic. In fact, maybe I’d just stop writing anything, because who cares?
One might note a certain illogic to these reactions, and the more I think about it, the more I feel like I am having reverse-psychosomatic reactions to the political situation. I am carrying around a lot of anxiety about the actions of the Trump administration — including, most recently, uncertainty about whether the US military will invade the city where I live. More and more of the structure of our lives depends on the whims of the most selfish, stupid, and impulsive man alive, and I am 100% convinced that nothing durably good can happen politically in the US until he and his movement are out of power.
And yet, good things continue to happen to me. I was finally promoted. I had the opportunity to apply for a sabbatical. I’ve been exploring a variety of writing projects. I had a successful reading group this summer and plan to join a reading group this fall. I literally just responded to a session devoted to my work, at an interdisciplinary international conference. I have unique, fulfilling teaching. I live with a wonderful partner in a beautiful apartment. I have money in the bank and a credit score that could move mountains. Everything’s coming up Kotsko, except for the part where the world is ending.
Ironically, one of those things that’s coming up Kotsko is precisely my health. At my most recent annual physical, I got a clean bill of health except for one of the standard afflictions of middle age: high blood pressure, which I am now controlling with a side-effect free medication. The doctor even said to “keep up the good work”! But the anxiety has to land somewhere, and my body gave it occasion to land on fleeting ailments that my mind chose to interpret as signs of more widespread collapse.
Even the timing seems meaningful in retrospect. My allergies and sinus infection came as the first wave of tariff disruptions were happening, filling me with the fear that we might be in for a repeat of the Global Financial Crisis — and suddenly, when faced with the same allergy symptoms that I have had literally my entire adult life, I felt that I couldn’t keep going, that my body was attacking itself, that I could barely get up in the morning. My covid infection came after we returned from Mexico City, our first trip abroad post-Inauguration. We worried that we might face trouble at the border, but it was the easiest trip through Customs we’ve ever had. When I got the positive diagnosis a few days later, I felt bizarrely angry, and even kicked and dented our garbage can. It’s as though all the aggressive energy I’d been storing up to fight my way back into the country had to find its way back out.
Now that I’ve had this revelation, will I experience greater peace of mind? Probably not! Trump is still out there doing his thing, day after day after day! Important infrastructure of modern life is being torn out, likely never to be replaced. Trying to build my little life in the midst of all of that still feels simultaneously impossible and meaningless. How can I settle in and enjoy the privileges of a more stable academic career when there might not even be universities in any recognizable form by the time Trump finishes with them? How can I seek to interpret human politics and culture when both are being degraded beyond recognition?
But at the same time, how can I do anything else? What use is it for me to steal my life from myself, on Trump’s behalf? What else can I do in the face of apocalypse but build my avowedly useless little shelter?
No matter how well-matched a couple is, every relationship brings with it some kind of compromise. In our household, one such compromise has resulted in me being a near scholar of the survival reality show Alone. I’ve hated camping for as long as I can remember and, in general, share Socrates’s preference for the city over the countryside. My Esteemed Partner is not the opposite by any means, but she would probably like to do more outdoor activities than we actually wind up doing. When we discovered Alone during the pandemic, that created an important release valve. She gets to indulge her fantasies of roughing it in the wilderness, while I get to apply my “always-on” analytical mind to a show that is in fact almost a parody of neoliberal individualism.
The premise is simple and cruel, taking the “skills-based” reality show paradigm to its logical limits. Contestants are dropped off in the remote wilderness, in the same region but far distant from each other. The winner is the one who is able to endure the isolation and deprivation the longest. All the contestants are in some sense survival experts, in many cases either living off the grid, providing instruction in survival, or both. Hence they have many skills that can help them extract some kind of living from the land. But few have the experience of extended periods of complete social isolation — perhaps we see here why the show became a hit during the pandemic? — and all of them are tormented by a complete lack of knowledge as to how many other contestants are still going and how long they may have to hold out.
Winning does not require holding out against death. Contestants receive periodic medical checks and can be extracted if their condition has dangerously deteriorated. (To my knowledge, no contestant has actually died, but part of me wonders if someone has and they just never showed the footage or acknowledged their existence.) Instead, they are holding out against the temptation to give up — an ever-present option. They are equipped with a satellite phone that allows them to “officially tap out,” the term of art for giving up. Within the space of an hour, a team shows up to film them sharing the vital life lessons they have learned from the experience and then to clean up their hard-won shelter so that it is as though they were never there.
The post-“tap out” filming is an exceptional moment — up until then, the contestants must film themselves. We occasionally get a glimpse of the quite imposing suitcase full of camera equipment they have to lug around in addition to their survival gear. Sometimes this gives them an advantage, for instance using the camera’s light for other purposes or setting up motion-detecting cameras to track animal habits. I assume that they have enough downtime that the work of setting up the shots, etc., doesn’t become excessively burdensome. But I suspect the act of filming is a double-edged sword. It gives them an imaginary friend to talk to (one contestant this year constantly addresses the camera as “you guys,” by which I assume she means the home audience), but sometimes the irony of constantly performing for an absent interlocutor seems to promote the inevitable spiral into abject loneliness.
I’m sure there is a lot to say about the subcultures that have grown up around the show, its effect on survivalist circles, the almost uncanny recurrence of the theme of a man leaving his very pregnant wife behind to be on the show, etc. I don’t know anything about that — I just know what I see on screen. And what I see is so perfectly, sublimely ideological that I almost suspect that Adorno is an executive producer. The surface-level content of the show is radically individualistic. Each of the contestants is completely isolated and forced to rely on their wits, their knowledge, and the limited kit of survival items they have cultivated. The contest appears to be a pure meritocracy, judged not by a fallible human being but by nature itself.
Yet seldom has there been a less “natural” setting. They are undertaking a task no human being has attempted or even would attempt. The places they are forced to survive in have, as far as I can tell, never been permanently inhabited by humans. Had they chosen to live there, they would not have done so in radical isolation, but in a group. There are no indigenous lifeways that involve shivering alone in a makeshift shelter north of the Arctic Circle or hunkering down under a tarp in the middle of a freak rainstorm in the South African desert. The scenario is, in short, completely contrived — it would only “really” come up as a result of a highly technologically-mediated event like a plane crash.
And their existence is itself highly technologically mediated. Their “tap out” phones depend on a network of satellites connected to the GPS system. They have an elite medical team on call at a moment’s notice. And the reason we can even see what they are doing is that they have a wide range of camera equipment — including extremely durable batteries and advanced solar cell technology — to capture them as they essentially generate endless video “content.” The material they are filming will be distributed on cable and streaming networks, but what they are doing is not essentially different from a TikTok influencer. In fact, many of them already are influencers — the “getting to know you” segments often include YouTube clips of their survival feats — and as the show has gone on, awareness of the past episodes and the surrounding social media discussion has deeply shaped how more recent contestants prepare. After the first few seasons, it became common for current contestants to name-drop past stars of the show, both as models and cautionary tales. The most radically individual experience is thus profoundly socially mediated.
The show is not without its pleasures. There is amusement in seeing an arrogant contestant brought low by his failure to catch any fish day after day. There is morbid fascination in getting a window into the minds of these certified weirdos (who else would even attempt such a thing?). And there can be moments of profound empathy when a bedraggled contestant drops out, unaware that they are one of the last two remaining and that their opponent is also hanging on by a thread.
As when watching obscure sports on the Olympics, one becomes an insta-expert, confidently judging the contestants’ choices. (My go-to commentary: Hunting big game? Always a mistake, absolute hubris. Fishing, only fishing!) But having seen almost all extant episodes, I cannot accept the notion that this is a contest of skill or merit. The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. One rule of thumb, for instance, is that the person who builds the most effective shelter will always tap out shortly thereafter. As I have said, the contestants who get their food situation permanently “locked down” (by killing a big game animal and drying all the meat) wind up with an albatross around their neck — their sole task becomes to protect their horde from the various rodents and scavengers. And in the end, no one ever has “enough” food for the long haul. Winter comes, nature closes up shop, and the show becomes a “starvation contest” — a phenomenon that has itself entered the contestants’ patter. Along the way, competitors are more likely to be eliminated by sheer happenstance — as when an otherwise highly skilled Australian competitor’s boot came unglued shortly after he landed — than by any discrete mistake.
In the end, it is an emotional game, and few of us have the emotional resources to stand up to the boredom, deprivation, and isolation of this competition. Those who do seem to be either vaguely insane or — I don’t know how else to put it — a little bit stupid. A recent winner fit the latter description, letting every disappointment and setback roll over him, only once losing his temper (upon finding that the persistent marten he had nicknamed “Sassy” had yet again stolen his food cache), mostly passing the time by reciting self-help slogans and other banalities. He was not just the last man standing, he was the Last Man.
And yet one did not begrudge him. Indeed, we were rooting for him to prevail against the last holdouts. There is a certain satisfaction in seeing the person that the system has selected for. I have no doubt he would be an exemplary middle manager, an unflappable customer service rep. But at the end of the day, we were rooting for Sassy, the true winner — who received a life-changing jackpot from this man who had been forced to generate social media content at the outer reaches of the GPS network.
I hate generative AI. I hate how it’s destroying writing pedagogy and giving students even more excuses not to read (because they can just read a “summary”). I hate how whiny and defensive AI users are about the pathetic little ways they’ve integrated it into their lives. If I could push a button and permanently delete it from existence, I would. If I could go back in time and prevent it from being invented, I would.
The reason I hate it is not just that its output is mediocre bullshit. It’s that it is an active attack on everything I value — literacy, analysis, thought. I find the thought that I would use ChatGPT actively degrading and humiliating. I have never touched it, not even as a joke, not even to prove it sucks, not even — as Beatrice has been doing — to see what it’s showing my students. I admit that this is somewhat irresponsible of me, to indulge my revulsion in this way. This technology — which is unimaginably expensive and resource-intensive and which has not developed anything approaching a plausible profit model — is of course inevitable, “here to stay.” Nothing could interrupt the progress of a technology that requires hundreds of billions of dollars to be shovelled into the furnace year after year after year without returning anything. (Can you tell I’m angry? Can you tell I’m sick of hearing these thoughtless clichés?)
But one must eventually face it. One must eventually give it some thought. Beatrice has been helping, in her Substack posts and in our continual chat thread. She also pointed me to the work of Jan Mullen on AI as externalized attention, which takes the kind of insanely overambitious long view of AI that I find appealling as an aficionado of political theology-style genealogies. Mullen compares the rise of AI to the rise of literacy and notes that the latter was, for most of its history, primarily a tool of state control. In a wide-ranging interview, Mullen wonders aloud whether the form of control AI is creating will line up with our idea of “the state” — but is absolutely clear that the purpose of generative AI is to manipulate and control us, to take away our power and agency, the power and agency that humanity somehow managed to wring out of the technologies of literacy.
I was particularly interested in a moment where Mullen postulates that the new model of control “will be distinctly post-literate — and, as a result, post-legal.” This triggered my political theology instincts and I immediately asked: does that mean it will also be post-monotheistic? Long-time readers know I love Jan Assmann’s theory of monotheism. For Assmann, what monotheism does is not primarily or most importantly to reduce the number of gods, but to introduce a new kind of god — an exclusive God, one in relation to whom all other gods are false. A crucial technology for stabilizing the claims of this exclusive God is of course the written scriptural text, which remains a durable deposit even as day-to-day religious practice inevitably drifts away from the strict demands of the original revelation. The monotheistic God, in contrast to previous pantheons with their loosey-goosey translatability and porosity and their ever-shifting body of mythical tales, is a God of the letter because he is a God of law.
So if ChatGPT destroys literacy and law, then ChatGPT is going to kill God. By this I don’t mean that the bearded guy in the sky is going to be found dead of a gunshot wound to the chest, but that monotheistic religion as we have traditionally understood it will not be able to function in a post-literacy regime.
Note that I am not claiming that ChatGPT will take away people’s ability to read in the sense of deciphering letters — obviously its functioning depends on that. But it is killing the notion of a stable, permanent, authoritative text and undercutting the skills needed to engage with that kind of text. Note also that I am well aware that the vast majority of monotheistic believers throughout history were illiterate (in either the “can’t decipher letters” or “can’t make sense of a complex text” sense). But the elite leaders definitely were fully literate, and in fact that was the source of their authority. One cannot say the same of the type of religious leaders who are most thriving in the meme-ified, Trumpified bastard child of Christianity that sets the tone for American religious practice today. Compared to even a generation ago, literal knowledge of what the Bible says at all has been radically set aside. Some combination of personal charisma and “vibes” — above all, opposition to what they imagine progressivism to be — are the source of authority, leading to obvious absurdities like the rejection of compassion as a Christian virtue.
I am a harsh critic of the dumbed down “seeker-sensitive” model of Christianity I was raised in. But in comparison with what passes for Christian teaching today, it is intellectually sophisticated and morally demanding. This is not to say it was simply “better” (after all, it paved the way for what’s happening now) or that the answer is to get back to the Bible. It’s just to mark how far we’ve fallen. What seemed like a vacuous, popified version of Christianity at the time now seems like a robust theological ethos. The haphazard methods of “Bible study” now seem fit for a graduate seminar.
Speaking of the evangelical milieu, I’ve always resisted Luhrmann’s thesis (in When God Talks Back) that evangelicals cultivate an internal voice that they identify with God. When I was growing up, I didn’t know what people meant when they said that Jesus was their best friend or that God was telling them to do something — and I assumed they didn’t know either, that it was just a weird kind of in-group signalling. For my part, Jesus was not my best friend and God didn’t tell me even one single thing. I was all alone up there in my head, always, and I assumed that everyone else was, too. The thought that everyone I grew up around was suffering from a low-grade self-induced psychosis is difficult to cope with.
Now that people are turning to ChatGPT for spiritual insight, though, I wonder if I finally have to admit it. Obviously here again we are dealing with what seems like a quantitative change — people are using the machine to shuffle religious clichés, where previously they just half-consciously did it themselves. But the qualitative difference is that the insights of “Buddy Christ” could always be corrected against the unchanging text of Scripture. When there is no longer an external anchor like that, when the divine revelation is “customized” for each and every reader, something has changed. Again, this is not to say that what happens to be in the Bible is necessarily “better” than any given ChatGPT transcript — presumbly it’s often worse. But a point of leverage has been lost. Counterargument is no longer possible in the same way. And insofar as that point of leverage, that external source of authority, was how “God” functioned in traditional monotheism, that means God is dead.
The new regime appears to be broadly polytheistic. There is of course always the god of the uncriticizable self, who behaves with the same irritable intolerance as the monotheistic God in the face of even the faintest suggestion that one might consider behaving or thinking differently. But there are many other sites of veneration, an overlapping consensus of podcast hosts and memesters and conspiracists that each believer can mix and match to drive themselves insane in the most relevant and appealing way. Joe Rogan belongs to this pantheon, along with Jordan Peterson and any number of other luminaries whose endlessly prattling voices people love more than their own families. Donald Trump is of course a very powerful god in this polytheistic milieu, but as the boos to his vaccine advocacy and the pushback to his Epstein caginess show, he is not all-powerful, his word is not quite law. And the fact that Trump’s words lack all self-consistency means that there are many Trumps as well, that Trump can be whatever his follower imagines him to be.
I cannot see what the believers see when they look at Trump. All I can see is the most degenerate loser ever to live, the most despicable piece of shit imaginable. Maybe this is of a piece with my revulsion at ChatGPT — and indeed, my failure to develop a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. I’m too hung up on facts and reality and meaning and consistency. I’m too literal. That’s why I am unsuited to the emerging world, why I reject it more forcefully than it would ever even bother to reject me. I’m just too literal.
[This paper was presented at the European Academy of Religion conference in Vienna on July 11, 2025, in a session entitled “Agamben’s Theological-Political Horizons: Reimaging Judaism, Christianity, and Messianic Potentiality,” organized by Libera Pisano, Federico Dal Bo, and Carlo Salzani. The topic of my paper drifted a bit from my original proposal, which was going to be an overview of Agamben’s approach to Christianity guided by the question of whether he embraced a “fall narrative.” (Spoiler alert: no.) Hence the title doesn’t quite fit what I presented, but here we are.]
Surely one of the strangest moments in Agamben’s career is that captured in the short book The Church and the Kingdom. Here, in contrast to the academic audience presupposed by virtually all of his other works, Agamben is addressing the bishop of Paris and other clerics, in person, in Notre Dame Cathedral in 2009. In this august and presumably somewhat intimidating setting, he lays out a thorough-going critique of the Church’s betrayal of its Pauline legacy. The Church, he claims, has lost sight of the unique experience of time implied by Paul’s concept of messianism and has thereby ceased to be a community of sojourners in this world and instead become but one worldly institution among others.
For most readers of Agamben’s work up to this point, especially The Time That Remains, this diagnosis is predictable. Those who had moved on to The Kingdom and the Glory would find some of the claims he makes about the result of the Church’s loss of its messianic calling similarly familiar—though with the twist that here he proclaims a “theological genealogy” for the structure of law and exception rather than that of economy:
The crises—the states of permanent exception and emergency—that the governments of the world continually proclaim are in reality a secularized parody of the Church’s incessant deferral of the Last Judgment. With the eclipse of the messianic experience of the culmination of the law and of time comes an unprecedented hypertrophy of law—one that, under the guise of legislating everything, betrays its legitimacy through legalistic excess. I say the following with words carefully weighed: nowhere on earth is a legitimate power to be found; even the powerful are convinced of their own illegitimacy. (CK 40)
Perhaps surprisingly, though, this bleak yet strangely envigorating declaration is paired with an invocation of the possibility that the Church could nonetheless come to play a redemptive role in the world. Though the expected answer to his closing rhetorical question—“Will the Church finally grasp the historical occasion and recover its messianic vocation?” (CK 41)—is surely no, the very fact that he asks implies that the Church might regain the Pauline experience of time and thus presumably serve as a positive model for other institutions.
The possible redemptive role of the Church is unexpected not only because it is about the Church, but because it is so concrete. Instead of pointing to the legal studies of a retired warhorse or the possibility of a world full of Pulcinellas, here he has in mind the reform of an institution that actually exists today in the world. A few short years later, in another short work on church affairs—The Mystery of Evil, based on lectures given in 2012 and 2013—Agamben claims that at least one church official, namely Benedict XVI, had embraced the kind of reform he hopes for, paradoxically through abdicating. While he thereby gave up any direct role in shaping church policy, Agamben believes that his abdication “forcefully calls attention to the distinction between two essential principals of our ethico-political tradition, of which our societies seem to have lost all awareness: legitimacy and legality” (ME 2). By acknowledging he was no longer up to the task and stepping aside—even though he was legally entitled to serve as pope for life—Benedict shows a rare awareness of the importance of legitimacy.
This gesture is first of all a rebuke to the worldliness of the Church, but as in The Church and the Kingdom, Agamben claims that both church and world are both facing a fundamentally identical problem: “The hypertrophy of law, which presumes to legislate over everything, on the contrary betrays, through an excess of formal legality, the loss of all substantial legitimacy” (ME 3). And while the example of abdication may initially seem to point toward the familiar invocation of bringing the Western machine to a halt, here Agamben adopts a different tone, declaring that “legitimacy and legality are the two parts of one single political machine, which not only must never be flattened out into one another, but must also remain in some way operative so that the machine can function” (ME 4).
In this paper, I want to talk about what the unexpectedly concrete and even reformist positions Agamben stakes out in his writings on the Church can tell us about the development of his intellectual project. To do this, I will need to make a perhaps counterintuitive case—namely that the extensive engagement with Christianity in the Homo Sacer project was an unexpected development that he even initially resisted. Though he arguably struggled to fully digest the implications of his theological genealogies, I will show that they helped him clarify both what he finds so objectionable about the “Western machine” and what is actually at stakes in his messianic critique. After tracing this development, I will briefly address the question of Agamben’s “consistency” across time and offer an assessment of the mature position that resulted from his fresh engagement with theology in the midst of his research for the Homo Sacer project.
Resisting the Theological
It may seem strage for me to claim that Agamben began engaging with theology at some discrete point. Obviously Agamben has dealt with theological themes and texts and thinkers throughout his career. From that perspective, the greater focus on theology beginning in the 2000s represents a quantitative rather than qualitative shift. Yet only with the beginning of the Homo Sacer project did Agamben feel constrained to account for his approach to theology explicitly. And he did so initially by leaving theology decisively aside. The figure of the homo sacer is never analogized to Christ, nor is Schmitt’s analogy between the sovereign decision-maker and the monotheistic God ever analyzed. Indeed, he bends over backwards to disprove any Christian genealogy for the concepts he is investigating, devoting multiple pages in both Homo Sacer and State of Exception to debunking Kantorowicz’s famous thesis on the Christian roots of medieval power structures in The King’s Two Bodies and asserting that royal death rituals had solely Greco-Roman roots (HS 92-94, SE 83). Shorn of Kantorowicz’s comforting narrative, we are forced to confront “a darker and more uncertain zone … in which the political body of the king seemed to approximate—and even to become indistinguishable from—the body of homo sacer” (HS 94).
This line of inquiry, so strongly emphasized in the early stages of the Homo Sacer project, will be abandoned entirely in the part-volumes that followed. In its place, Agamben would develop another conceptuality—namely, that of the interrelation of auctoritas and potestas, authority and power. In State of Exception, Agamben memorably connects this dynamic to the paradigm of sovereignty when he declares:
As long as [auctoritas and potestas] remain correlated yet conceptually, temporally, and subjectively distinct (as in republican Rome’s contrast between the Senate and the people, or in medieval Europe’s contrast between spiritual and temporal powers) their dialectic—though founded on a fiction—can nevertheless function in some way. But when they tend to coincide in a single person, when the state of exception, in which they are bound and blurred together, becomes the rule, then the juridico-political system transforms itself into a killing machine. (SE 86)
The state of exception, then, is a failure state of the dialectic between power and authority, what happens when that dialectic collapses. Yet aside from this point of contact, the two paradigms represent two parallel tracks in State of Exception, which lends the book its exceptionally disjointed character. Indeed, the reader may well wonder why we spend so much time on power and authority, since Agamben appears to view their collapse into the state of exception as more or less inevitable.
Yet the invocation of “medieval Europe’s contrast between spiritual and temporal powers” calls this fatalism into question, since that situation persisted in some form for centuries. Why pass over that long period of dormancy in a short parenthetical clause? It’s not for lack of knowledge. We know that Agamben is exceptionally well-informed about medieval theology and, through Dante, medieval political theory. We also know that it’s not any kind of prejudice against theology, since Agamben gave the seminar on Paul that became The Time That Remains during the same years that he was writing State of Exception (i.e., during his one significant period in America). Rather, I would propose that Agamben is avoiding the medieval Christian counterexample for the same reason that he wants to discredit Kantorowicz’s theory of the Christological roots of medieval sovereignty—they are difficult to square with his most extreme claims about the ineluctable destructiveness of the Western political machine.
The Theological Turn in the Homo Sacer Project
I have a lot that I could say about Agamben’s engagement with theology in the early 2000s, but for present purposes, the most important thing is the end result: namely, the massive tome The Kingdom and the Glory, which vastly expanded the conceptual scope of the Homo Sacer project and also promised a more complex structure for the series. Where most readers likely expected that the next installment would be the final volume on “form-of-life”—and presumably comparable in length to the existing volumes—The Kingdom and the Glory, though lengthier than the rest of the series combined, was designated as only a subsection of volume 2. The awkwardness of its place in the architectonic, which actually changed as the series was finalized, matches the awkwardness of its relation to the conceptuality that governed the first three books in the series. In the first chapter, he declares that there are actually two paradigms of governance: “political theology, which founds the transcendence of sovereign power on the single God, and economic theology, which replaces this transcendence with the idea of an oikonomia, conceived as an immanent ordering—domestic and not political in a strict sence—of both divine and human life” (1). This distinction never returns in subsequent volumes and arguably is not even maintained consistently in The Kingdom and the Glory. Indeed, by the end of the book, it seems as though “political theology” and “economic theology,” glory and economy, form part of a single paradigm analogous to the duality of auctoritas and potestas.
What are we to make, then, of the initial gesture of separation between political theology—the paradigm that had informed the Homo Sacer series up to this point—and the newly introduced economic theology? I believe that he wants to assert that the two are separate because, to put it bluntly, he finds economic thinking repellant. Indeed, he concludes his analysis of the theological genealogy of economy with the assertion that the only place the divine economy will remain eternally active is in hell—which means that our global paradigm, based on the eternal providential governance by the invisible hand of the market, is a kind of hell on earth. This rejection of economy is surprising on a first read, because the presentation of economic theology as an alternative to political theology, as well as its association with freedom and democracy, might lead the naïve reader to assume Agamben views it positively. What the association with hell helps to clarify is that, for Agamben, the promises of the economy are all false: it never lets us rest, never ceases to manipulate us, never stops undercutting our freedom in service of its providential plan. His analysis of office in Opus Dei reinforces this impression. The ethics of office are depersonalizing, desubjectivizing, turning all of life into a meaningless ritual performed for its own sake.
Taken together, as the preface to Opus Dei suggests, economy and office represent a kind of nihilistic mechanism, working for the sheer sake of working, world without end. And just as the paradigm of the economy, extended to all eternity, becomes hellish, so too does the ethics of office ultimately devolve, in Kant and Kelsen, into an open-ended demand for punishment and suffering. In contrast to the early volumes of Homo Sacer, which extrapolated from the most extreme possible situations to make generalizations about the normal operations of power, Agamben’s investigations of economy and office penetrate into the most mundane spheres of everyday life—our need to make a living and our identification with social and professional roles—to ground a diagnosis that is arguably even more bleak for being less easily dismissed.
The Search for Minority Traditions
The association of economy with hell is not the only unexpected reversal in The Kingdom and the Glory. In the second half of the book, the initial association of glory with fascism may seem to indicate that glory is somehow destructive or oppressive. Yet Agamben asserts that glory, if read against the grain, reveals the inoperativity at the root of all power structures. The idle king who reigns but does not govern, the God who basks eternally in his own glorification—both testify to the ultimately pointlessness of our institutional machinery, which Agamben traces back to Aristotle’s speculation that humanity might be “without work,” without some inherent pre-given task. Where the sovereign suspension of the law actually renders the law’s application more brutal and inescapable, the messianic suspension is a revelation of the ultimate groundlessness of all human works.
When can we see this messianic suspension in action, or rather in inaction? Agamben repeatedly asserts that his investigations into the inner workings of Western institutions succeed in rendering them inoperative. This seems to mean that simply understanding and contemplating the machine is already messianic, to the extent that it reveals the nihilism at its heart. For those seeking more concrete and embodied messianism, Agamben holds up the example of Franciscanism, which inducted its members into a status to which the fundamental category of law—that of possession or ownership—was simply inapplicable, freeing them to live the Gospel rather than follow or obey it as some external rule or law. Ultimately the machine found a way to absorb even the radical messianic claim of the Franciscans back into the legal apparatus by establishing the legal fiction that the pope owned their property on their behalf—and Agamben’s detailed readings of the debates that led to that outcome show that the Franciscan theorists were increasingly cornered into adopting the system’s own terms even as they sought to resist it.
We could say something similar for the briefer genealogies that Agamben lays out in The Time That Remains, which seemed to lay so much of the intellectual groundwork for the theological genealogies in the Homo Sacer project. Again and again, the messianic insights of Paul get reabsorbed and redirected by the Western machine. The messianic experience of time collapses into a mythological narrative, the messianic calling of Paul is perverted into the Weber’s idea of professional vocation—essentially every aspect of Paul’s thought has been repurposed to reinforce the machine.
One is tempted to ask whether these messianic interventions ever turn out to be effective, whether they ever establish anything durable. But in Agamben’s terms, these questions repeat the mistake of the Franciscan theorists of thinking on the machine’s terms. Indeed, I would suggest that even the notion that the machine could be permanently abolished—so often invoked by Agamben at crucial moments of his argument—would represent one last triumph of machine logic if taken literally as a prescription for a durable state of affairs. We can never fully abolish the economy in favor of glory, potestas in favor of auctoritas, the law in favor of the messianic. But by the same token, the machine cannot ever fully achieve the collapse in the opposite direction, at least not without destroying the life on which its existence depends. All we can do is keep the tension alive by finding ever-new ways to live in a way that suspends the machine’s claims to ultimacy and self-evidence.
Conclusion and Assessment
In conclusion, I will address two questions. First, is there really any change or development on Agamben’s part here? Second, and more importantly, what are we to make of this view of politics?
To the first question, I can only answer: yes, obviously. The fact that the quotations from The Church and the Kingdom and The Mystery of Evil sound so jarring to the reader more familiar with Homo Sacer and State of Exception is certainly prima facie evidence that a change has taken place. Agamben did not start out his career as a political theorist and his theory of politics did not emerge fully formed on his first try. He took on difficult questions, he remained open to new ideas and new areas of inquiry, and he often struggled to incorporate new materials and problems while remaining faithful to his deepest insights. To me, this more dynamic and open view of Agamben is more productive and interesting than the more typical reading in terms of “consistency”—and that is something I try to prove at greater length in Agamben’s Philosophical Trajectory, available wherever fine books are sold.
Turning to the second question, I find it more difficult to answer, because Agamben’s prescription seems vague and elusive but also obvious and even boring. Our institutions would work better, he seems to be saying, if everyone would approach them in good faith and follow the spirit of the law rather than weaponizing its letter. That seems hard to disagree with. But especially as an American living under the Trump regime, which has combined ramptant lawlessness with the weaponization of every available law and technicality, the notion that the solution is to hold law somehow more loosely can be hard to accept. But it is precisely fealty to the law for its own sake that allowed Trump to take power—above all by taking literally the rule that allowed him to “win” the 2016 election despite losing by millions of votes. More than that, attachment to the law has made it very difficult for opposition forces to find ways to straightforwardly oppose him, even in rhetorical terms. This is true above all of his claim to be aggressively enforcing immigration laws that previous administrations had ignored—all prominent leaders concede that “the law’s the law” and cannot be set ignored, much less changed. In this context, one version of a messianic intervention might be for an important political leader to say, “I don’t care what the Constitution or the law says—we can’t treat people like this!” It is a telling sign of our predicament that such an obviously necessary gesture on the part of any major political leader seems roughly as likely as the coming of the messianic age.
As I wrote Prophetic Maharaja, I often recalled that libraries cull their collections. This common practice is called ‘weeding,’ which, as the American Library Association has it, “is critical to collection maintenance and involves the removal of resources from the collection. All materials are considered for weeding based on accuracy, currency, and relevancy.” The task has become more onerous as budget cuts, the promise of the digital, limited space—the need for open student study spaces—and the overall destruction of the university further extends weeding. Publish and (eventually) perish, unless one can remain accurate, current, and relevant—a laborious task—especially so since destruction “can always happen faster than any creation, production, construction” to borrow from Gil Anidjar.
And yet creation, production, construction continue even as we witness continuous destruction in Gaza. The questions academics can ask then seem obscene: How does one remain adequate to the accumulation of knowledge over time? What does it mean to introduce time, as currency, into a community? What to make of the (in)sufficiency of narration in a historical moment, as Basit asks in this forum? For academic books, journals, and articles, we have a system in place that saves one from weeding: the prestige of the publisher, the number and substance of reviews, institutional affiliation, awards and, more concretely, the number of citations, neatly measured by the h-index. It is, perhaps, a professionalism that allows for ideological reproduction; a restricted economy emerges within the promises of the dwindling library. We can then say that to keep—and now even find—its place on the shelf, a book must be generative both in and of time, but certainly not wastefully so. One must overcome the remains and rubble, which, as Samera Esmeir writes, the colonial state can only look to conquer: a “progressive conquest” (49).
The three professional requirements articulated by the ALA are quite essential to the discipline of History, which struggles to accurately—today, objectively, rather than carefully—capture the past to retain the past’s currency and ascertain its relevance. It is a question of success. As Amaryah reflects: “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.” Whether one wants it or not, History offers redemption—accuracy, currency, and relevance—in the unfolding of an elevating historical process, which can then lead to a successful book. One must bend to History; know time to periodize—elevate—effectively. The demand is clear, one Nietzsche articulated long ago: “If every success is a rational necessity, if every event is a victory of the logical or the ‘idea’ then down on your knees quickly and do reverence to the whole stepladder of ‘success’” (105)! Of course, some do not revere that particular ladder and so, to follow Basit, “the sufficiency of a narration for the rabbis, for Sikhs, and for me (each inhabiting our losses, which touch one another, not least in language) may not be redemptive for the professional historian.”
Such success also evades me, although the ladder is a tantalizing one. Yet perhaps such a failure allows the book to exist without such anxieties about accuracy, currency, and relevance. My book, Anthony says, “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.” But ‘too irreverent and undisciplined’ are the accusations of those with authority especially as they want to see the knee bend. To give one example, when I asked to enter the rotation to teach the core course in the History MA Program, “Historical Thinking and the Discipline of History,” I was told I was not “good enough.” So, I will not arrive. I lack the requisite Historical Thinking (though I am grateful for Anthony’s 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)”).
I mention this all to say that I am grateful to the readers in this space, organized by my friend Marika, for allowing me to take their time, which has let my book do something else in the world, albeit only for a moment. They have allowed for a departure to learn with care, without end, without relevance—a more wandering, aimless, conversation that I am delighted to have.
But it is not so easy to reject direction and redemption, especially for those who feel lost. As Robert Meister has queried: “And what about those victims who feel lost? Such victims might recover by being found or saved.” This is possible if the past sufferings are “valorized and made meaningful.” Or, to heed Elizabeth Povinelli’s lesson: “suffering and dying can always be referred to a horizon of time where they are transformed into thriving and birthing” (184-5). Yet, as Basit declares in this forum, loss “does not make you special or confer some kind of election.” So, we are left with another question, one that Meister continues to go on to ask: “But is it redemption that lost victims always want?” (216). For Saidiya Hartman, the answer is ‘no’ especially in the “time of slavery,” which “negates the common-sense intuition of time as continuity or progression, then and now coexist; we are coeval with the dead” (759). So then one can be, should be, ungrateful toward one’s redeemers; it might be a mistake “to take everything objectively, to grow angry at nothing, to love nothing, to understand everything” as Nietzsche diagnosed in his untimely meditations (105). But if one is ungrateful, one can be called childish, especially if one stubbornly stays in the same spot, refusing to proceed, and remaining “coeval with the dead.”
Satbir Singh rightly focuses on loss and the child in his rich and astute analysis of the book to question the status of the child as an original or prototype for a community in time. We learn from Singh that the famous portrait of Duleep Singh, painted by Franz Winterhalter, and narrated by a mother, Queen Victoria, in her journal entry, can become a maternal phallus and offer an imaginary completion that relieves castration anxiety (although it cannot overcome it); recall, it is the obsessive that refuses to accept the mother’s castration, which leads to a masturbatory jouissance that represents “the crushing of desire” (433). Sikhs are often enough presented as obsessive by academics in their need for control: too worried about “who owns religion?” as Laurie Patton examines. As the underlying structure of the argument goes, Sikhs have been smothered and deny lack because of the anxiety the Other’s desire elicits. Therefore, they can only present their history as fully formed, fixed, their own, without lack. Satbir presses upon this point and asks about the Real: “Does he (for the Sikh at least) not evoke the lost, absent mother, to whom his gaze poses the Freudian dilemma, ‘father, don’t you see I am burning?’” In presenting us this dream-scene with the famous question, Singh offers another view in which Duleep Singh is linked with jouissance, an encounter with the Lacanian Real that fantasy—reality—then makes bearable (Žižek, Sublime Object, 44-45). For such a gaze is not “clear or penetrating,” but presents a dilemma: it does not realize a possibility, but “it is rather an impossibility that is crucial to the constitution of the subject–the impossibility, precisely, of any ultimate confirmation from the Other” (Copjec, Read My Desire, 36). Desire then is without content as it drives after an impossibility—essential to my own reading practice in Prophetic Maharaja.
Duleep Singh himself did not remain under the thrall of Queen Victoria as we see in the expansion of the maternal function as Satbir Singh theorizes it in relation to Thakur Singh Sindhanwalia. The maternal function, Elissa Marder demonstrates, can also emerge as “an uncanny, ambiguous vessel that contains uncontainable events, ideas, temporalities, and that paradoxically creates a space for the birth of futures that may have otherwise remained unimaginable” (8). It is what Amaryah, too, reads in Du Bois’ novel: “this unstable and open sense of possibility.” But the expansion of the maternal function, the refusal of Queen Victoria, as well as reading beyond standard narrations became a sign of “adolescent storm and stress” to British colonial officials. As Sara Pursley demonstrates, in her magnificent Familiar Futures, anticolonial insurgencies were indeed “read as symptoms of the emotional adolescent stage of development and of the psychological pathology of precocity.” What then to make of “development along native lines”? Perhaps such a development that looks to teach the native how to mourn properly must be rethought; we must, to use Satbir’s words, “conceive beyond major notions of successful mourning or melancholic entrapment, to ways of becoming and belonging that exceed the psychoanalytic canon’s parameters.”
In his beautifully written essay, Anthony gestures toward such a reading by turning to ‘rumor’ and ‘gossip’ in Agamben’s The Time That Remains. As Anthony recounts, “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.” Exceeding the economy of accuracy, currency, and relevance, gossip reveals an unrestrained expenditure (recall Freud’s close connection between melancholia and mania in relation to the question of economy). But perhaps here we can simply say that gossip is a “subaltern borrowing”—then and now—which reveals a complicity and connection that does not allow for a singular and known transaction in its anonymity. Therefore, rumors have, Mladen Dolar proclaims, “the capacity to inform the community by spreading not information, but the elusive substance of jouissance” (71). Dolar’s conclusion follows from his understanding that the shadow, symptom, of the big Other—“the epistemological foundation of proper knowledge” (logos)—is rumors, hearsay, and slander; the big Other is Janus-faced (11). It is an ambiguous constellation in which the beneficial slides into the detrimental as logos is complicit with its shadows (83). Dolar offers a similar conclusion as Anthony, who observes, “ambivalence becomes a powerful stance here.” Ambivalence is full of tensions, the difficulty of maintaining one’s movements in rhythm because we are overclose to the world. We can trip. And then we can get embarrassed and angry. Ambivalence, that is, is also about discord, which is itself a question of the heart. “When I say ‘I love you,’ it means that I want to be near the feeling of ambivalence our relation induces and hope that what’s negative, aggressive or just hard about it doesn’t defeat what’s great about it really—or in my fantasies of it, anyway,” is the way Lauren Berlant framed it. It is to return to Anthony’s question: what indeed does it mean to make it?
Marika, in her fantastic close reading of the text, asks a series of important and daunting—what she terms ‘vulgarly Marxist’—questions about gender and sexuality, property relations, and communication technologies. For example, how did gender order the distinction between public and private? What is the role of sugar in pahul ceremony, especially considering the role of sugar in imperial expansion and capitalism? How do we see this interplay between community, exchange, and the household especially with changes of property and production? And, finally, what to make of the communicative technologies at play? My response here will be inadequate, and I will only answer a few of them, since these questions themselves evoke a vast historiography to which I respond in the book.
Consider the question of the public/private divide, which Partha Chatterjee has famously investigated. He argues that a nationalist Indian public was premised on a constitutive split between outer and inner realms in contrast to Europe. Within Europe, although distinguished from each other, the public and private were still unified and consistent in a single political domain. In colonial society, however, “the political domain was under alien control and the colonized excluded from its decisive zones by a rule of colonial difference”(75). Therefore, as Chatterjee writes, “a neat separation between a private sphere of diverse individuals residing in bourgeois patriarchal families and a public sphere inhabited by homogeneous citizens was not available to Indian nationalism” (147). This exclusion meant that the private, spiritual, and inner domain became the place where nationalism fashioned its authority through cultural difference and resisting the sway of colonial institutions. As Chatterjee posits, “the home was the principal site for expressing the spiritual quality of national culture, and women must take the main responsibility of protecting and nurturing this quality.” Chatterjee contends the home—the site of particularity and difference—then, is where “the hegemonic project of nationalism was launched” (147). And so, Chatterjee concludes that there existed two political domains in tense relation to each other: civil society and community—the latter that provided opportunity to resist the universalizing tendencies of modern disciplinary power and capitalist rule (237-238). It is space in which “(primarily male) nationalist elites undertook to establish their own spheres of sovereignty and originality and sought to reject a colonially scripted secondariness”, if we work with Parama Roy’s formulation (3). In the struggle for the Khalsa Raj at the end of the nineteenth century, we also do see the desire for a masculine sovereign in the figure of Duleep Singh for many.
We can consider communication technologies similarly. The argument about communication technologies and Punjab is made by Harjot Oberoi. Oberoi states that “The transformation in communication made possible a new phase in the Sikh Panth: as old divisions slackened, new ties were effected through innovations like the printing press” (45). The rise of new elites, rather than colonial rule, thus leads to the conclusion that the Sikhs had become modern: a new cohesion emerged for Sikhs as a Sikh intelligentsia reconstructed the Sikh tradition into a Protestant form, a uniform identity, which led to the loss of a previous form, an enchanted universe (141). For Oberoi, then, the revolt around Duleep Singh is simply farce, the last gasp of “a rapidly dissolving” world (375). We can then make perhaps an easy diagnosis, turning to Marx. “Historical tradition produced the French [Punjabi] peasants’ belief that a miracle would occur, that a man called Napoleon [Deep Singh] would restore all their glory.” Oberoi says as much since he reduces the narrative of Duleep Singh to a question of transition and the fight for a “lost cause” by conservative peasants (even though re-readings of the 18th Brumaire by Spivak call into question such a rote analysis by instead highlighting the emergence of a constative and performative subaltern and suggesting a translation that offers “a condition of being elsewhere within oneself” as Michael Allan formulates it).
Needless to say, the critiques and revisions of such works are numerous in the colony and metropole—the complexity of gender, family, and nationalism in imperial societies especially in relation to time, for example. Still, Marika’s questions are so important because I think the typical response to them have left us with the promise of historical difference: the promise of a better, more inclusive, Indian nation or culture in its opposition to the forces that come to constitute European modernity. In South Asian Studies, such a promise often facilitates the discovery of alternative historical forms that can provide an antidote to a politics of community in the present—the Hindu Right. As SherAli mentions in the Introduction to this forum, the problem is particularly pronounced in Punjab Studies as recovery and repair have taken root. In contrast to this more typical move, I asked: what if this division, between public and private, also fails without recourse to an alternative behind it? Are communication technologies—the entry into modernity—constituted by a closure? What do we make of the tendency to periodize—which is a sovereign decision, let’s say, covering the absent foundation of sovereignty itself? In pondering these questions, it is important to remember that ideological critique is a two-part process as Slavoj Žižek maintains. So, yes, we need to “discern in an apparently universal, unchangeable limitation the ideological ‘reification’ and absolutization of a certain contingent historical constellation,” but we also need to consider the very failure of this absolutization: that there remains something that “cannot be interpreted away as the outcome of ideological manipulation, of the ‘false consciousness’ due to the social situation of the subject.”
Such a shift is what Joan Copjec has recently termed the “art of subtraction,” in which the task is double: “It must not only put an end to the obscurantist agenda of covering up the unconscious, of a recalcitrant wanting to know nothing about it, while avoiding the foolish error of trying to expose it.” This art of subtraction might be the work of the drive—a lesson I learned from Marika herself, who has written: “Linear, teleological desire, aiming consciously at the reintegration of the lost object and unconsciously at its endless deferral, is associated with time and with historical progress; circular, repetitious drive, which simply circles around the hole at the center of being is associated with eternity” (65). This is a reading practice that Amaryah too highlights, one in which there is “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.” And, indeed, LL Hodges brilliantly conjures this art of subtraction in their reading of the book. As they evocatively write, “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.” It is this practice, this fever dream, this art of subtraction, I attempted to embody in my own book against the typical narratives that simply look to expose or reintegrate lost objects. It was to ask the question that Marika ends with: “what do we want?”
For Copjec, Stefania Pandolfo, and Omnia El Shakry the art of subtraction is also a question of the Divine. Consider theorizations of barzakh, which Samaah also draws upon in her important and necessary essay on historicity, destruction, and Palestine. For Copjec, “Triebe, drive is like barzakh, both a limit and a zone of linkage” (44). This liminal space between life and death is, El Shakry writes, “a place the living may travel to, if only they would allow themselves the necromantic reverie” (19). Such a place is foreclosed by Christianity: God’s incarnation as Christ, which congealed the One, as Copjec and others have written about (19). Perhaps then the search for a historical Jesus—which was also a search for a historical Israel and a historical India—is a bit different in that the solution came to reside in historicity itself, in the promise of what Amos Funkenstein calls “contextual reasoning.” In contrast to Incarnation and the closure of context, a maintenance of the gap allows for travels that provide a different relation to history-writing, El Shakry argues, as it reorients the mode of communication with the past from discovery and knowledge to the dream and Al-ghayb, the unseen (18). In my own book, drawing on the Sikh tradition, I centered hukam, which is an inscrutable order within this world, invisible command, that is not a congealed or restricted form central to historicity today. Such is oneness in the Sikh tradition: a non-totalizing force. Indeed, hukam troubles the very distinctions between inner/outer, transcendence/immanence, mind/body, relevance/irrelevance that we traffic in.
Samaah, too, takes us to a tradition—Karbala—in which “historicity is not the point.” She draws on the work of Talal Asad and his interlocutors, as did I in my book, to “consider the possibilities of relating to, learning with, and caring for those unjustly buried in the past—inconclusively and without closure.” Part of the difficulty is, as Samaah notes, a certain kind of questioning that is inevitable when writing about a tradition: what is the precise meaning of Karbala, for instance? Yet such questioning is quite stale as Muneeza Rizvi has told us and, in turn, she has asked: what other forms of reasoning and moral criticism are there to consider a different type of enquiring (498)? This might be a question of genre—a question that my book sidesteps by conceding tragedy to the authors who equated it with failure. Yet genre, especially tragedy, is not so simple as we know. Just consider what the numerous readings of Antigone teach us. And yet tragedy might be inadequate to think about discursive tradition. Basit has rigorously paid attention to this point and shown that the anthropology of secularism is not informed by tragedy, but by Trauerspiel. This conclusion leads Basit to Asad’s antihistoricism, one which “allows the anthropologist to perceive the temporal work of modern reconfigurations without requiring the sovereign cut of periodization (secular/religious, modernity/tradition—and whether narrated as tragedy or comedy)” (89). It was this notion of tradition that I sought to highlight in my book.
But, as Samaah and Basit both query: are we also in the midst of a withdrawal of a tradition? What happens when a tradition is possibly rendered counterfeit, as Basit asks, following Aaron Eldridge’s forthcoming translation of Spiro Jabbour? Perhaps, it is the case that we are then traitors (the etymology of tradition has been discussed enough). Gil Anidjar has suggested that the only responsible assertion for the revolutionary actor is “we are traitors,” but, then, as he continues, “that assertion, spoken or not (for silence might remain golden) does not help, justify, or guarantee anything…’We are traitors,’ then, because we do not decide, nor can we know, the meaning of our actions, the nature or worth of our fame, nor can we ask, therefore, for an unambiguous, or risk-less, recognition, for instantaneous and righteous (?) fame” especially so since most traitors “are locked away somewhere dark and damp or worse” (102).
In Palestine, this question of tradition—of traitors—too is locked and perhaps encounters withdrawal in, what Abdaljawad Omar calls, a “temporal chasm, wherein the durée—essential to the rites of mourning—is systematically arrogated and denied.” Mourning, a recuperation of cathectic investments in an object for a future to come, is no longer possible; there is no retreat—a detachment from the world—possible in Palestine to make gains for a future. In contrast, our Christian world always promises more time: the day of judgment is deferred; one can supersede the losses that accumulate today. The unequal and unjust starting points themselves, it is assumed, can also be overcome by time especially since we live in a time “after evil,” but before justice as Meister describes it. It is thus a world without risk and loss—one, instead, of unlimited growth and accumulation—because its end is deferred, a temporal chasm of its own.
Freud, on the other hand, understood that there was risk inherent in investments–a question of desire and object-cathexis (Betsetzung, occupation), which is why there is a thin line between mourning, melancholia, and mania (and also introjection and incorporation). It is as Hartman has said: “the work of mourning is not without its perils, chief among these are the slippage between responsibility and assimilation and witnessing and incorporation” (771). It is for such reasons that Christopher Bracken ends his article on the graves of 215 children found in Kamloops Indian Residential School with a series of questions: “What feeling goes with losing your family’s history? Is it mourning? Melancholy? Mania?” (300)
So, there is a risk, that Freud centers, that comes with object-cathexis because losses can produce, in one’s investment and occupation, narcissistic identifications, self-abjection, internalized aggression, and more, all of which are a question of economics. But a libidinal economy is neither liberatory nor damning—a point I aimed to make in my book. Ambivalence, as Anthony alludes to, comes out in the open as investments are called into question by loss. There is much to be said about Freud’s speculations—the risk of losing all value—as Derrida has done. But I wanted to simply say that today, many, including our institutions (the university, to give one prominent example), do not want to take the risk that comes with their investment, their occupation, for their trade in volatility.
Theirs is a world governed by a destruction of loss, for Palestinians but also for themselves. To return to an earlier discussion, it is an obsessional neurosis—which, in all forms, is bound to destruction—that refuses loss and, therefore, risk. Consider the Zionist fantasy: an occupation without the risk entailed in desire; recall desire is bound to a lost object that arises with separation, which creates the enigmatic desire of the Other. In contrast, obsessives cannot accept loss and, instead, take the place of the Other. Cleverly, “the obsessive takes the object for himself and refuses to recognize the Other’s existence, much less the Other’s desire,” writes Bruce Fink (119). It is a position that is masturbatory—a self-generating desire (in a genealogical science, we can say)—as the Other is annihilated and annulled, reduced to an object (Fink, 128). Israel, Esmeir reminds us, is “obsessed…with colonizing [the land’s] surface and granting it new historic meaning” (41). This is, moreover, a position that is both imperious yet marked with remarkable weakness—one speaks constantly about one’s doubts, fears, impediments—as the obsessive refuses risk, the possibility of his own disappearance; one need only explore, here, the language of anti-anti-Semitism (Lacan, Formations of the Unconscious, 389).
The obsessive has frenzied activity and compulsive rituals—compulsive murder, too—governed by the ultimatum: “’If I don’t do this (the compulsive ritual), some unspeakably horrible X will take place;’” desire covered by demand (Žižek, Looking Awry, 25, Lacan, Anxiety, 293). Lacan discusses this minimization of risk by the obsessive in Formations of the Unconscious and elsewhere, particularly in the way the obsessional becomes bound to the need to obtain permission from the big Other: a question of the superego (395). Yet, as Lacan claims, “ultimately, this other with whom he is playing is only ever an other who is he himself and who, already, will in any case leave him with the laurels, from whichever side he approaches things;” there is “no kind of essential risk” (396). It is not then possible to be a traitor, to be in a tradition, to learn in such a subject position because there is no risk. There are numerous nuances and movements bound to the obsessional. But the question I want to ask from this analysis is simple enough: How do we make them—Zionists and the institutions that support the Zionist project—own the risk that comes with their investments, their occupations, (even if these investments are not a matter of choice)?
I end with this long tangent on obsession because my book wanted to foreground loss and desire—castration and drive are two sides of the same coin—to offer space for risk and, therefore, failure—a failure to be accurate, current, and relevant. How to allow for such failure within the production of knowledge today without offering oneself up for weeding? How to interrupt such decisions especially when “there are those who do not learn, ‘those who refuse to hear’”? We might need a certain kind of patience to hear an interruption—a question central to Subaltern Studies. “It is the subaltern, the fisher and the grass-roots peasant, who produces a constant interruption for the full telos of Reason and capitalism, for those who have the patience to learn,” as Spivak insists. But this is also a lesson that Talal Asad has repeatedly taught: “a living discursive tradition aims at mutual interrogation and continuous learning” (411). It is what Amaryah too ends with as well by stating my book “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.” I am grateful to have learned from these readings hosted in An und für sich and I hope I have responded adequately here, especially because of all the time I have taken from my friends who have read and written about my book. But perhaps one need not give back what had been originally given since it is in that gap that learning within a community, always a risky endeavor, can take place.
Friends of the blog will definitely be interested to read this article by long-time contributor (and now independent blogger) Beatrice Marovich, drawing on interviews with an astonishingly wide range of contemporary theologians reflecting on the possible death of their field.
1. One of the things for which I have come to rely on Rajbir over the years is his unfailing attentiveness to the dynamics of loss: one that is unsentimental and non-indulgent. (Against the empire of trauma and the weaponization of victimhood, to say nothing of wounded attachments and left melancholia.) Of course, this is not to say that one can stand apart from loss, either; simply that the language of loss is ubiquitous: it does not make you special or confer some kind of election. And this despite the manifold claims of loss today, when the political and media classes run breathless about identity politics, however “for” or “against”. These claims are everywhere; they populate the discourse of the institutions that shape our lives, even into the methodologies that now promise epistemological emancipation (“autoethnography” and “lived experience,” ad nauseum).
Talal Asad had argued decades ago that “it is not the origin of given theories, methods, or explanations which will tell us whether they are more suitable” (an argument of his I now keep repeating, since it strikes a discordant tone against how he is widely read today). (Yet, as I hear from progressive and traditionist colleagues and graduate students alike, the origin of theory and method do indicate what is suitable. Postcolonial nativism as decolonial voice, back to the things themselves. Here we run into an impasse, for it turns out that, despite my self-styled pessimism, I do affirm the possibilities of translation — mono-lingualism of the other — precisely through the proliferating losses — including of translation. Hmm.) More recently, in some reflections after October 7, 2023, Asad comments that the “power of the victim is capable of accommodating a variety of motives and experiences in all of which the desire for self-affirmation is central.” Claims to loss directly become a means for self-affirmation, for justification, for immunization: for sovereignty. Is this claim successful or frustrated? How is it to be measured? Is there an outside to its ambition? Does its justification admit another? (Is that admittance a name for “ethics”? Or is that also a liberal ruse?) In another register, how can one adjudicate between “competing narratives”? Holocaust and nakba, together (!)? (To be clear, that is another feint, a desperate pacification of the antagonism Rajbir has already alerted us to.) Is there no outside to which one can recourse, in order to sort out the history of loss, which is never one?
Instead of a history of Sikh loss, bounded and secured, Prophetic Maharaja opens onto the problematic of loss: where loss itself can be lost, along with the historical horizon. Or loss is destroyed, as in the big project Rajbir and I worked on during the pandemic years. But Rajbir’s attention to the prospect of losing loss does not veer into a kind of nihilism. (That would be too easy.) Instead he carefully shows how what is at stake in every gesture, expressed in the Sikh tradition, is the relationship between loss and sovereignty. Vah!
2. “Rather than centering the loss of a prior sovereignty,” Rajbir writes, “this book asks: what do we make of loss and sovereignty?” (11). The former construction is surely more familiar (not least in a work of history), however much I expected it to be complicated by an insistence on the double genitive (loss of sovereignty / sovereignty of loss), perhaps also with a comment on how each formulation implicates the other. But the shift from of to and does something else: it opens each of these terms to question. Rajbir cites the first page of “Force of Law” on this “and”, where Derrida comments that “the conjunction ‘and’ brings together words, concepts, perhaps things that do not belong to the same category. A conjunction such as and dares to defy order, taxonomy, and classificatory logic, no matter how it operates – by analogy, distinction, or opposition.” What even was sovereignty? And what loss? “And so loss and sovereignty become a problem for and of history” (11). The answer is not to ground loss in sovereignty or the other way around. Instead to embrace the ambivalence: “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” (13). Not to “provide a theorization of loss” but to dwell “in the various rhythms of loss.” The shape of these rhythms, it seems, is key, but following them (elaborating their poetics) remains foreclosed when either sovereignty or loss is a stable object of history or narration. Rajbir’s insistence on the conjunction (loss and sovereignty) is what allows for this ambivalence through his reading; this ambivalence is what allows, as on the final page, for “a learning without closure” (185). What more can one ask? The book is so instructive, on so many fronts (its formidable readings of psychoanalysis, Subaltern Studies, historiography, deconstruction, and more); among others, this turn from the genitive to the conjunction is one of the methodological commitments I will take with me to other readings.
3. We are given on the very first page the leading question: “What happens when a tradition encounters the possibility of its loss, especially when that loss – not unlike the present-day losses that mount in the wake of environmental, political, and social disaster – exceeds the very possibility of narration, reflection, and redemption?” (1). Perhaps a tradition is then withdrawn, surpassed in the disaster (per Jalal Toufic); perhaps it is rendered counterfeit. Or perhaps, as Rajbir writes precisely, people may “respond to loss not solely by seeking to recover the past but also by seeking to remake the past and create change” (2). Not simply to recover the past given in knowledge, or to repair it, but to remake the past and create change; what loss asks is something other than reproduction of the same (and not only because it puts that knowledge in question).
A dozen years ago, encountering al-Juwayni’s Ghiyath al-umam in a reading seminar at the University of Toronto, I was stunned by his unsentimental propounding of the loss of the living sharia. What if the scholars all passed away and the historical age were emptied? If there were no mujtahid in the community who could discover god’s law? Other Islamic theological schools refused to countenance this prospect but he is forthright about its possibility. I tried to understand this as one of the questions by which Islamic juridical theology confronted its limit, but here I remember how Juwayni’s account of the fatigue of the sharia prefigures the Hasidic story Scholem relays at the end of his book on Jewish mysticism, the story which Agamben reads as “an allegory of literature,” where “what remains of mystery is literature” (2): across the generations, knowledge of a prayer was lost, then the fire which was lit with it, then the place in the forest where it was recited—but knowledge of these losses itself is sufficient, say the rabbis. If each tale is a “memory of the loss of the fire” (3), if Scholem cannot access “the mystical kernel of tradition” except through “the wall of history,” or if variously with Koselleck and Hayden White there is no history without narrative, then we can only follow Agamben when he underscores the enigma of the rabbis’ smile: knowledge of the loss or its tale is sufficient to what??
The question of sufficiency cannot be answered in advance, not even by the historian. Certainly not with his given repertoire. (This question spools outward, into other registers: for example, it resonates with what I’m translating now as the Syrian dissident Yassin al-Haj Saleh’s inquiry into the “ruination of form” (takharrub al-shakl) in the destruction of Syria and what he calls the production of the atrocious, namely, how to engage violence when it scathes the frame of representation.) And yet, as Rajbir says directly, “one must narrate” (25). Here I remember a lengthy discussion with my late advisor Saba Mahmood on Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope. I had argued that if Lear read more deconstructively (let alone more politically), then he would understand that a tradition is always exposed to its outside and so it encounters the possibility of its loss. She had corrected my reading, noting that what is at stake is not only the possibility of its loss but how those inhabiting a form of life encounter its dissolution. What comes through Rajbir’s narration is thus not only the encounter with the possibility of loss but encounters with its shifting form (in and of community, in and of public, in and of conversion, in and of rumor, in and of reform). And a reminder that, given its shifting forms, sufficiency is only conjunctively related to redemption. The sufficiency of a narration for the rabbis, for Sikhs, and for me (each inhabiting our losses, which touch one another, not least in language) may not be redemptive for the professional historian.
I am grateful to have learned from Rajbir articulating a non-redemptive knowledge of the fire and the tale.
This summer, I’m trying to get a reading group on Adorno’s Negative Dialectics going. I chose this book for a few reasons. Adorno has been a continuous presence for me, but I’ve never really dug into his work systematically. More broadly, I am interested in dialectical thought and am especially seeking to recapture the magic of the reading group on Hegel’s Science of Logic I participated in during the pandemic — so this seems like the other main “big book” of dialectics. Even more broadly, I think that having a serious, extended discussion seminar with my intellectual peers would be refreshing to me, so to that extent, the specific text we choose may not be super-important.
And part of me wonders whether we will wind up switching texts, because Negative Dialectics is, in a sense, not fully available in English. The official published translation by A.B. Ashton is sloppy at best, to the point that Ashton was panned by Jameson in his book on Adorno as being “innocent of the philosophical tradition.” A widely circulated alternate translation by Dennis Redmond is significantly better, but still sloppy — as a translator myself, I’m shocked to see so many definite article errors, for instance. Finally, Christian Thorne and Matthius Menda have produced a positively good translation — of the first 43 pages of this 400-page book. Even in the Ashton, one gets the broad strokes, but it’s disappointing not to be able to do the kind of close reading that makes a discussion seminar really sing.
Hence I have turned to the German, which, to be fair to the translators, is genuinely very idiosyncratic and difficult — much harder than Agamben’s prose, for instance, and my translations of his work do unfortunately include some errors despite the greater accessibility of his texts. Adorno leans heavily on the case and gender endings in German to create densely woven prose. It can be very satisfying to read, but also makes unique demands on the reader. Normally in my German reading I can mostly handwave gender and case, which is treated as a somewhat vestigial structure by most authors I’ve read. Adorno is forcing me to finally whip myself into shape and master it, much like reading Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit forced me to master roots and prefixes. Thorne and Menda show that Adorno’s near self-dialect of German can be rendered into stylish English prose, but it’s hard.
It’s also hard for me simply to read. I have dipped into many languages for reading knowledge over the years, including Qur’anic Arabic, and somehow German is the one that most resists my advances. Through consistent work over the last couple years, I’ve gotten to the point where I can sit down and read standard scholarly German without getting overly bogged down in the dictionary — a skill I will need since my next major research project is on Goethe’s Faust — but to feel like I’m really understanding Adorno, I need to study every word, every pronoun, every ending, every particle. The result is that, in a typical session of an hour or so, I wind up getting through a page and a half. There is no way I can get through the German text quickly enough to keep up with any reasonable pace for a reading group. In fact, at this pace, I’ll be lucky to get through the introduction by the time next semester rolls around.
This observation raises the question of why I am even bothering. The only immediate use of this exercise is to assess the translations, but even there my ranking corresponds to what anyone would suspect after simply reading the translations in English with no reference to the German. For the broader purpose of sharpening my skill in German, Adorno may also be overboard — after all, I have managed to work my way through Part 1 of Faust in the original without undue difficulty. For the latter, I had the alibi of planning a research project and, more immediately, regularly teaching a course centered on the text, but even there my level of study was excessive. My scholarship would focus on the broad themes and influence of the Faust legend, not the nitty-gritty of the text, and in the context a student-centered discussion class, injecting my German tidbits is more likely to be distracting than helpful for students who are often struggling to get their minds around reading a great literary work in English.
One could say the same for other language projects. All of them have some kind of tangential justification, some relationship to my teaching and research. I do often teach the Bible, so gaining a familiarity with biblical Hebrew makes sense. The Qur’an, which I also often teach, is often regarded as both untranslatable into any other language and incomparably beautiful in its original Arabic, so making some effort to check that out for myself makes sense. Similar arguments could be lodged in favor of my attempts (less recent, sadly) to keep my Latin and Greek fresh — I am a professor in a Great Books program, after all! And yet, and yet…
There is a devotional quality to my language routine. Of course it’s not lost on me that many of the texts I’ve studied have been scriptural or devotional works (e.g., Augustine’s Confessions, 1 and 2 Samuel, the Qur’an). I can even trace my attention to linguistic detail back to my efforts to memorize long chunks of the New Testament for the sake of Bible quizzing — efforts that usually petered out, but that forced me to be attentive to every nuance of the (translated) text. What a stange passage I came across that day as I tried to memorize the opening verses of 1 Corinthians:
Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. (1 Corinthians 1:22-24, quoted in the New International Version that I studied for quizzing)
That second “Christ,” seemingly redundant and definitely syntactically awkward, becomes a stumbling block within the text itself. I remember struggling with it, asking myself — maybe for the first time ever — whether there could be a misprint or a mistake in the Bible. I’ve studied the passage in the original Greek; it doesn’t help. It’s irreducibly weird, just like so many of the things Paul struggles to express. If I had passively listened to the passage read out before a sermon or even read through it at a more normal pace, I probably wouldn’t have noticed. But to this day I can remember puzzling over that phrase, remember the texture of the pages, the weight of the print, the church van I was riding in (my memorization efforts usually began immediately after completely bombing out at the regional Bible quizzing level in late spring), even the faint nausea I experienced from reading in the car. I was physically uncomfortable and my efforts were motivated by frustration (how could I blow away the competition at the district level but be destroyed at the regional level?!), but it is a happy memory — perhaps my first memory of pure intellectual contemplation.
Similarly, if I reflect on my experience of reading Adorno each morning, or my experience of getting into a regular reading routine with many other texts over the years, I can only report that I find the work uniquely satisfying. A good morning foreign-language session makes me feel energized, in a way I now recognize as parallel to my feeling when I get done with a session on the rowing machine. I love entering that intellectual flow state, and I love seeing the structure and nuances of the other language. I love pondering what resists translation. And above all, I love encountering the thing itself, the original text, dwelling in it, meditating on it — simply for its own sake.
This is a guest post by Satbir Singh. Satbir grew up and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has a BS Biology from UCLA, and MD from the Medical College of Wisconsin. He completed general psychiatry residency at UCLA and child/adolescent fellowship at USC. He has been Clinical Assistant Professor in Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences at the Keck School of Medicine at USC, and currently works at a community mental health center and child/adolescent hospital
Rolling up to the Met Gala embodying the problematic caricature of a turbaned, orientalized Black dandy, the world’s “top Asian celebrity,” Diljit Dosanjh confounded the visual assignment to undo creative hierarchies, not only by carrying the Sikh’s Gurmukhi alphabet in literally on his back. His outfit replicated the lavish garb of a hereditary Punjabi prince including aigrette and sword. Per the designer Prabal Gurung, the outfit also configures “motifs of the lotus—India’s national flower—and the peacock, India’s national bird,” and per Prakriti Anand, studying ancient Indian History at the University of Delhi, “on his sleeves, [conspicuous] ancient emblems of the Sooryavanshi and Chandravanshi lineages, sun and moon, symbols that once appeared on royal insignia and temple murals.” (1)
Why would this otherwise savvy, hip-hop appropriating artist, exit the creative script with a childish act: “it’s about carrying your identity with pride right?” The exhibition catalogue upon which the gala theme was shaped describes “dandyism as a dialectic—a movement between being dandified and taking on dandyism as a means of self-fashioning.” (2) When the racial spectacularization that Diljit Dosanjh steps into harnesses principles of alternating pleasure/punishment, making America grate again (by, in other words, switching between satiating the psychoanalytic oral/anal drives), we get a discreet balancing act of Black dandyism alongside the spectatorship of lynching, shackled deportation, or the dandified-to-symbolic-death. What is the disconcerting dissonance that makes the camera teeter away, the moment Diljit enters the frame of the live broadcast, to an interview of FKA Twigs, who just released “Childish Things,” written by Jeremy O Harris, author of Slave Play?
Another Broadway play, Purpose by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, awarded the Pulitzer now, reconciles us, through the younger child of the family, to the awe-inspiring mists of Canadian lakes, lest we, like the elder son, become manic working within the sexually-sullied, hypocrisy-laden spiritual civil rights activism of the parents. In the drama, Naz, the younger son of a tremendously influential father, leaves divinity school without a laudable “purpose” or clear interest, whether in romance, progenitorship, oratorical rapture, except for photographically fixing transient, barely perceptible, phase-changing formations out there somewhere in nature awaiting the discerning eye. Bridging the nature gap, where outdoor enjoyments attract disproportionately fewer minorities, would seem for Sikhs of Canada facing transnational repression, involving violence and assassinations orchestrated in their neighborhoods and Gurdwaras, a leap of faith. Despite how compulsive forces of purposively pathologizing racially, sexually charged tropes are bound to exert effects that spill messily outside and inside the home, sublimation will seek alterity or ulterior terrain (though one supposes, the ex-timate showing up at the proverbial couch of analysis isn’t inherently impossible lakeside).
So, following the analysis by Rajbir Singh Judge, interrogating the ethics and psychology of Sikh contestations of loss must hold onto, simultaneously, the dissonance of the psychic disruptions of loss; the dandyism-dandified distinction can not be overlooked and ought not be reified through knowledge production either. Esther Rashkin in “Imperial Legacies and the Art of Abuse in The Picture of Dorian Gray,” draws on Sandor Ferenczi’s psychoanalytic postulates regarding abuse in children to argue that Dorian Gray has been interpreted within generic frames of transgressive desire, of homosexuality or aestheticism/dandyism, that miss the “haunting saga of abuse that mimics and allegorizes the abusive dynamics of Irish colonial history.” (3) Chipping away at the incestuous mother’s Picture of Duleep Singh, deploying “tearing and gifting” as the stated intent of Judge’s reading and writing practice. He critiques in the text interpretations of the Sikh figure and Duleep Singh, that in a therapy session translate into, “you are full of and fixated on yourself,” or reproduce the Fanonian “Mama, see the Negro. I’m frightened.”
Romeo Mivekannin. Young Lady at the Mirror after van Mieris (2023)
Furthering concepts formulated within literature and theater, and more recently gaining currency in popular renditions of the psychology of child/spousal abuse, may foster a colloquial (mis)reading of Prophetic Maharaja, that nevertheless provides an entry into the stakes and significance of the work. In such a framing, scholars postulating truth discovered in the “dandified” archive can be identified and labelled as contributing hegemonic knowledge, Lacan’s university discourse, as “flying monkeys” enabling and participating in the colonization of Sikh psychic space. Flying monkeys hail from misnaming the winged monkeys in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, who were once “a free people […] doing just as we pleased without calling anybody master.” A beautiful princess Gayelette however “found a boy who was handsome and manly and wise beyond his years […] so she took him to her ruby palace and used all her magic powers to make him as strong and good and lovely as any woman could wish.” She casts a spell on the monkeys when they mess with Quelala, the boy, ruining his “rich costume of pink silk and purple velvet,” rendering them “three times the slaves of the owner of the Golden Cap.”
Britain’s Queen Alexandrina Victoria also took an interest in Duleep Singh, the ostensible protagonist of Prophetic Maharaja, in his boyhood, writing how “extremely handsome, those eyes and teeth are too beautiful,” even commissioning a lavish portrait that depicts him at a wishful “manly” height he purportedly never eventually reached. While love bombing him with the portrait, the Queen even orchestrates a beguiling scene to have Duleep Singh physically hand over the Koh-i-noor (mountain of light) diamond at the same time he was sitting for the portrait. The huge diamond found in present day Andhra Pradesh, South India, pretty much the sole source of world diamonds until around the 1700s, tethered proclamations of sovereignty by various entities including Mughal, Afghan and Persian. Extraction from the “luxury slave” of cultural capital, including material semblances of sovereignty, rather than physical labor, appears with “the first black dandies, the luxury slaves in eighteenth-century England whose sartorial novelty and sometimes flamboyant personalities resulted in their representation in visual culture, on stage, and as literary subjects.” The possible fungibility of identity of Duleep Singh to take on what Monica L. Miller in “Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity” calls “black bodies […] often already “theatricalized spectacles”” (italics added) appears to have been captured, post Frederick Douglass visiting Scotland, in the moniker applied to Duleep Singh, “Black Prince of Perthshire,” that had a more prominent English precedent in the “Black Prince” of 1300s Britain, Edward of Woodstock, who had nothing to do with anything apparently African or, obviously, Black American. (4)
Once the British Raj imprisons the indomitable Sikh birth mother of Duleep Singh in his childhood, he is isolated from anyone who does not espouse Christianity, and then his conversion is celebrated as “an event [that] has now to be recorded in the history of India,” aligning with stages of child grooming writ large. Contemporary descriptions in layperson and scholarly sources obfuscating his condition of child hostage when he supposedly signs away his sovereignty speaks to the ongoing dynamics of discourse around Sikh sovereignty. That pre-colonial logics – Brahmanism most conspicuously – also constitutively embed subaltern subservience to elite power, the prevalence of terms such as government “agent” or “sarkari kute”, i.e. lapdogs, in contemporary Sikh political discourse signal the conscious and unconscious dynamics of capitulation, where even the colluding self may lack awareness of its entrapped, seduced status. The underlining of multifarious practices of abuse make imperative the question of response and treatment. Here, Judge’s work expands the lexicon around loss and abusive psychic injury, and the problematic compensations it compels, by challenging us to conceive beyond major notions of successful mourning or melancholic entrapment, to ways of becoming and belonging that exceed the psychoanalytic canon’s parameters.
“The Gaslight Phenomenon” was published by two British psychiatrists in the 1969 Lancet (5) medical journal, relying on an earlier theatrical production set in the latter half of the 19th century, “Gaslight: A Victorian Thriller,” which revolves around the intersubjectivity of perception and attributions of hallucinatory experience. Within the first few pages, Gaslight the play stages themes of complexion versus pallor, self reliance versus servitude, and the theater of, “comedy or tragedy – according to your choice […] I thought it would be well to take you out of yourself.” While the husband’s preparing and tampering with evidence are key methodologies of gaslighting, the question of cure-become-culprit is centered when Mrs. Manningham, the wife, is asked by her husband “whether it’s merely that your medicine is beginning to benefit you.” She replies “it’s not my medicine. I’ve taken my medicine religiously.” Going on, she suggests for succor and support instead, holistic, nurturing activities that allow her to sleep “like a child”, to be “like two children in the nursery.” The retired detective, named “Rough,” who is working to establish the husband’s duplicity also signals the level of intervention with the terms, “Mrs. Manningham, we’ve just got to take that risk. This is going to be child’s play, I fancy.” And at the moment Rough cracks the case, finding the jewels the husband has been searching for since he murdered the woman who owned them, Rough tells Mrs. Manningham to “take a good look at them before they go to the Queen.” Moreover, he suggests the visual conundrum whose decoding implicates the queen directly, is a keenly alphabetic arrangement, “I should have thought that as simple as ABC.”
Reflecting the forensic drama of the theatrical production Gaslight, the psychiatric cases described in the Lancet article involve wives pursuing extra-marital relationships while attempting to convince psychiatrists their husbands ought to be involuntarily institutionalized. The mother of Duleep Singh, referred to by the appellation “great queen” Jind Kaur, was smeared as the “Messalina” of Punjab by key British men assigned to the region, who then incarcerated her. This characterization followed her to London years later, the British press headlining ““The Messalina of the Punjab in London.” She responded to the attempts at character assassination directly, and stated that she was politically active on account of the incompetence of ministers of her region, and that she would not cower to efforts at maligning her by limiting who she met with and clarifying only that these persons were not “strangers.” The parental alienation that this effectively produced, is evident when Duleep Singh was taken from his mother and placed with a Scottish couple, the Logins. John Login wrote that he did not want to see any Sikh, including presumably his mother, once he was in their custody. When Duleep Singh’s conversion to Christianity was announced some time after, James Ramsey, “Lord Dalhousie,” Governor General of India, writes “My mind is doubly content as to what he lost; immeasurably content as to the gain he has found in his loss!” Schadenfreude aside, the declaration of gain found in loss launches a profuse indexing of time in the next sentences: “the first… of many”; “multiply it”; “from the hour”; “one moment”; “doubly”; “immeasurably”, “now to be,” “from time to time.” Bending time to archive “the justice or necessity of my act in dethroning the boy,” visual gratification appears to take psychological primacy “If I had had such a doubt, the sight of the blessed result for him, to which that act has led, would now have thoroughly consoled me for what I did then.”
Superfine: Tailoring Black Style Exhibition. Gallery 999, The Met Fifth Avenue.
The colonial image heralds a violent injunction, propelled by academicians, who like therapists forgoing personal analysis, intervene the way a lumberjack might shout timber when the tree is on the precipice of being unable to hold itself upright, an interjection situated akin to Rajiv Gandhi’s “when a big tree falls the earth shakes,” a heinously faulty physics, timber naming the living tree undifferentiated from the slain, objectified “thing” put to use for structural purposes. Duleep Singh, standing for his portrait in London is described to have the “beauty and nobility of bearing of the young Maharaja […] very amiable and patient, standing so still,” the gushing journal entry of Queen Victoria tells us. Does he (for the Sikh at least) not evoke the lost, absent mother, to whom his gaze poses the Freudian dilemma, “father, don’t you see I am burning?”
Ben Baer (6) on “Helium: A Novel,” by Jaspreet Singh writing about “a terrible pogram against the Skhs” is relevant here: “If Helium appears as an archive of knowledge about ‘1984,’ it simultaneously burns this archive.” What then with the prophetic function? Rajbir Singh Judge introduces, in the mode of “another mother” tracked in the book and signatory to the cover, “His Excellency, Sirdar Thakar Singh […] of the Lahore State. Pondicherry French East India” who arguably symbolizes the desire of an expanded maternal register moving within and beyond the mortifying, mollifying and murderous. Bruce Fink, prolific Lacanian psychoanalyst, cautions when talking about what Gil Anidjar might want us to realize with “the Political as Maternal,” (8) that to sidle in analytic silence and “hope the child articulates something […] runs the risk of abandoning the child to psychosis or perversion.” Fink suggests (7), alternatively “the therapist can invent an explanation.” A white lie, as simple as ABC, childish things. Rajbir Singh Judge in Prophetic Maharaja begins to move other embodied untranslatable articulations – Sikhidan, hukam, ardas, pakka Sikh – to get the process rolling.
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 19th and 20th 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 12th 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).
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.
Login
