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.
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.
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.
This post is by LL Hodges, a writer, historian and professor based in Los Angeles. They focus on queer history and questions of memory, loss and time.
It was the Monday in November after the daylight saving time ended. Riding my bike home in the City of Quartz after work suddenly meant navigating a setting sun. I was unprepared. So, I rode on the concrete sidewalk portion of the bridge over the Los Angeles River instead of on the road. That’s when the sign came into view. From the corner of my eye, I saw bright red and yellow and stopped pedaling. Cars sped behind me as I turned to look. Had this always been there? And so it was that during the reminder of time’s construction, rolled back an hour and plunged into darkness, I saw— perched on a rooftop and written in neon—Concrete is Fluid.
I’d had the pleasure of reading the introduction to Rajbir Singh Judge’s book Prophetic Maharaja by then. Ideas of loss, mourning, and grasping perseverated. Not to mention the claim: “One could say that mourning is the project for historians (Judge 15).” Full disclosure: I am a historian. This means many things. For starters, I should believe in determinate negations and aufheben (truthfully, I shouldn’t even know what that is since I was trained in the U.S. and not supposed to learn theory). I’m supposed to take out my thread and needle to repair our current/past loss, progressing society forward with each suture. I build narratives across space. Doesn’t concrete do the same? Isn’t it an example of how “success is grasped through a frozen hold on time” (Judge, 16).
As a kid I used to dial a number on our house telephone and, at the tone, hear what the time would be. But on that evening of all evenings, just after the state exercised its power over time, my mind was left malleable. Concrete. Space. Time. As a trained historian, I want to eschew the prickliness that disrupts teleology promise (Arondekar, For the Record, 17). Yet the time-change lingered in unfixed aches that day as it worked itself through my unadjusted body. I could not ignore it. I started to lose my grasp on history. Queerness has a way of ungrasping.
Concrete is not solid. This became clear, freeing even. Thus, the idea conjured queerness. It brought the orbits of Jean Genet and Gerry Bibby together with Gayatri Spivak and Anjali Arondekar and Rajbir Singh Judge. These orbits aligned or even crashed in the space of my brain. Is this a fair collision? It is in this post. And not to worry, the event did not signify an end or a conclusion. I am still floating in that space.
In the writer Jean Genet’s only film, Un Chant d’Amour, the queer desires of men in prison exceed their concrete walls of confinement. The film revels in its homoeroticism, but that isn’t my concern here. Instead, I pull out two themes that recall the discourses of Duleep Singh’s public and hidden transcripts (Judge 30). Publicly, there is a swinging of flowers. Privately, there is a blowing of cigarette smoke.
The film opens as a guard walking to work sees two arms hanging outside of the barred prison windows. From one window an arm swings a string with a bouquet of flowers tied at the end. The waiting hand of the next window over tries to grasp the bouquet. He misses. Again, the bouquet pendulum swings, again a miss. Loss becomes continuous. This opening, like the opening to Prophetic Maharaja, asks the viewer to sit with Spivak’s idea of “simultaneously grasping and ungrasping,” as Rajbir reconceptualizes it (25). We are not asked to grasp and hold on. In this book Rajbir asks of us to keep grasping. I cannot think of a more intellectually caring call to arms. Be wary of redemption, keep letting go.
What might this mean for an archive? Rajbir turns to Arondekar for “an archival approach that articulates against the guarantee of recovery” (Judge 60). I turn back to Genet’s afterlives. In 2010 and then again in 2023, the artist Gerry Bibby performed an ode to Genet. Once called Un Chant. Grotto Giganta: stalactite/stalagmite (2010) and later Un Chant/A Shoe/Achoo. We’re gonna have a Good Time: For BP(2023), Bibby’s performance centered on the swinging bouquet. Rather than swung between two hands, a bouquet swung back and forth above a photocopy machine. Bibby tried continuously to capture a photocopy of the bouquet, all while reading the technical manual to the copy machine out loud. These fleeting moments of desired intimacy evaded capture, despite the drone of technical, administrative operation.
Then, like Rajbir, I, too, turn to Arondekar, imagining the copy machine spewing attempt after attempt. “What if the recuperative gesture returns us to a space of absence? How then does one restore absence itself? Put simply, can an empty archive also be full?” (Arondekar, For the Record, 1). Subverted, the question echoes: Can a full archive also be empty? Yes. “The colonial archive is thus most empty precisely when it is most full” (Arondekar, For the Record, 12). This is Bibby’s archive of photocopies gathering in the machine’s receptacle. A full archive moves towards what Rajbir explains as the colonial politics of “securing the world” (2), one that creates a “carceral register” (20).
A pile of paper can easily become an archive. “The carceral operation of history” (185), however, is not without its difficulties. The frustrations of the colonial apparatus, of mechanical administration and bureaucratic systems is the site of queerness constituted against capture or redemption. The machine does capture something, but only the right-before-vanishing.
Here, Dhurm Singh transitions us, in a slippery way, from the outside of concrete to the inside. A man with good intentions and lucky timing. As Rajbir writes, he was “both meager and many, lacking and copious, absent and present, Dhurm Singh had arrived at his destination and disappeared” (85). Could a poesis be at play here? This suspension, to be empirically determined but lost, to live on the edge of the limits of the state, slips through time. Like the failed photocopy of the bouquet, Dhurm Singh appears as a sort of blur. In this blur he avoids becoming objectified and overdetermined as an archival subject. In these current times of heightened surveillance, there is a way of being here that I find inviting. With AI object recognition technologies trying to “secure the world,” how might we endeavor to live in blur.
Now within the prison walls, there is another kind of grasping at play. In Genet’s film, two men in neighboring cells share cigarette smoke through a hole in the concrete wall between them. The act arouses them, frustrates them.
We should not be surprised by such little holes. Prophetic Maharaja reveals the tears and the holes of the carceral operation, to show, for example, how everyday practices like taking amrit render the colonial order “a sieve” (105). Like a sieve, the concrete wall allows for movement. The smoke moves like rumor, dissident and uncapturable, as irreducible as air. Sometimes the man ignores it, sometimes he inhales it. Desire itself becomes unfixed and free within concrete.
Genet’s film ends with the hand firmly grasping of the bouquet. Maybe affection is allowed to be secured. But Bibby’s performance, ends without a clear photocopy, leaving a lingering suspension, exceeding placement. This feels more apt to Rajbir’s work.
Prophetic Maharaja rejects a neat conclusion into the future, instead asking for the present act of learning. Specifically, it asks of us “to learn without closure” (185). But its opening challenge moves further, “to learn…without end, without satisfaction, and open to the possibility of failure” (26). What might it mean to have a failed history? Not a history of failure, not a failed historian, but a history that reneges on The Promise?
Recall that mourning is the project of historians. In our desire to secure the present through interpretations of the past, we are tied to the future. The secure past works to secure the future. They are inseparable for many. I might go as far as to say that to the extent that we spend our time in the past, we are stuck in the future. Perhaps this is why, after discussing research on the past, a historian is liable to face the question: “So, what do you think will happen?” The common historian answers, “Well, I study the past, so I can’t see into the future. But…” and continues. Orthopedics, indeed.
Yet Prophetic Maharaja asks us to avoid satisfaction. What, then, if there is something satisfying in the lack of satisfaction?
By now the sky was dark purple and reaching for black. The city’s skyscrapers glowed in the distance as the Los Angeles River trickled down its concrete banks below. The neon sign continues its challenge: Concrete is Fluid. I looked this up later and found it part of the artist Lauren Bon’s greater project to hack the LA River’s infrastructure. It seems possible. But of course, concrete is also solid. It builds and it traps.
In Los Angeles, the weight of concrete has its own character. According to Mike Davis, who spoke with a piece of concrete in his hand at the 1998 Critical Resistance conference , the substance used to hold promise, but now seems sinister. Now it holds “the stink” of, among nefarious things, claustrophobia. I think back to the pile of photocopies growing during Un Chant, of the historian wading through piles of documents. Davis opened by saying the Romans invented concrete, thus evoking empire. If one could trace the development of concrete, would they find it paired with the development of the archive?
I looked down at my watch and realized the time. My watch is powered with help of a quartz, a component of concrete. This moment both could not have happened on any other day and continuously happens ever since. I turned and rode my bike home.
This is a guest post by SherAli Tareen, Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College.
At its core Rajbir Singh Judge’s dazzling monograph Prophetic Maharaja presents an argument for “dwelling in loss” rather than seeking the enticing yet entrapping desires for restoration, recovery, and healing. By writing a “historical narrative that refuses to historicize,” Judge pushes his readers to examine notions of sovereignty and history that the practice of dwelling might make available. Conceptually, through the example of Duleep Singh (d. 1893) and the politics his life and memory make possible, the book seeks to interrupt dominant scholarly notions of historicism and colonial logics of religion and sovereignty, that reappear in varied apparitions in contemporary scholarship as well. It is very rare for a monograph, and even rarer for a first monograph, to offer an example of close and patient reading that rattles deeply held and deeply prized normative assumptions of one’s field of intervention. Judge achieves precisely that. And he does so in multiple ways and registers.
In Panjab Studies, there is a pervasive trend of excavating a redemptive narrative of a Panjabi cosmopolitan ethos that might offer the fantasy of traversing and transcending the alleged juggernaut of religious convictions that according to this view stifle such “cosmopolitan” pasts and futures. The Sikh tradition, under the calculus of this desire for “Panjabiyyat” or “Panjabiness” can either work as a quintessentially hybrid religion that naturally inheres pluralism or as a model for a colonial infested discursive machine that can only be repaired through the prophylactic of secular baptism. Judge entertains none such fantasy. In fact, Prophetic Maharaja conducts a devastating indictment of the politico-conceptual coherence as well as the desirability of the secular quest for Panjabiyyat by presenting a reading of Duleep Singh’s quest for sovereignty that does not seek to resolve, recover, overcome, or redeem any restorative project of liberal redemption and goodness.
Through an analysis both painstakingly layered and theoretically vivacious, Judge masterfully walks his reader through a terrain of political theology populated by visions of sovereignty neither liberal nor secular, but rather nestled in the refusal to exercise the sovereign decision to historicize, humanize, and heal any alleged ruptures of history. Judge’s analysis of Duleep Singh’s attunement to the loss and possibility of sovereignty propels the reader to confront and wrestle with a grammar of life that is not driven by or available for secular projects of dividing that life into binaries like religion and culture, state and society, plural harmony and exclusivist bigotry. Life, Judge teaches us, taking a cue from anthropologist Talal Asad, is “essentially itself.”
One of the great lessons of this book that I found particularly striking and productive concerns its theorization of loss and its simultaneous recognition that loss escapes and exceeds any neat theorization. Judge is at his most brilliant and intellectually courageous during moments in this book when he meditates on the aporias of his own encounter with the conceptual constitution of his project. And remarkably, and again in a rare achievement, these are precisely the moments when his argument is most piercing and compelling. His discussion of loss is a great example of this. As Judge writes very early in the book (in its Introduction), signposting an analytical attitude and conviction he sustains throughout the monograph: “rather than provide a new theorization of loss-which cements a relation to loss-this book endeavors to reckon with the powerful resources that work on loss, such as mourning and melancholia, and what they have already provided.” Judge continues, in a flash of utter brilliance, “I contend with loss instead of transcending it through recovery [emphasis mine]…I do not tie a thread throughout the text that provides an adequate answer to loss because there might not be any answer to it. In this sense the book does not provide a theorization of loss but dwells in the various rhythms of loss. My goal is not to recognize loss and provide it taxonomic space but to sit with losses as they appear, disappear, and reappear throughout the text” (p. 13). This mini paragraph I have just cited represents a moment of tremendous significance in the study of South Asian History and Religion. Note, in the interest of careless readers who will rush towards the inconsiderate gesture, all too pervasive among historians of a certain ilk, to dismiss or undermine careful theoretical interventions as Judge’s here as convoluted high theory. Note particularly that dwelling, in Judge’s account, as both an analytical concept and as a mode and practice of life, is anything but passive inactivity. Exactly to the contrary, dwelling represents that aggressive commitment to a politico-conceptual ethic of refusing to repair and overcome loss through secular gestures of managing and healing the violence of history.
Dwelling in loss, instead of activating the secular instinct of historicizing, humanizing, and supposedly transcending loss makes possible a horizon of the political that comes to live with rather than attempt to overcome the aporias of life. Judge’s invitation to his readers to “sit with losses as they appear, disappear, and reappear” in the passage of a text or in the passage of history is I believe a profound call for suspending sovereign confidence in compensating for loss and treating the wound of historical contingency through the fantasy of historicist rigor, of returning life to its immanent materiality. What sort of politics and possibilities of sovereignty might become available by dwelling in loss, by sitting with rather than treating with the prophylactic of secular historicism the vertigo of historical conjunctures such as the one involving the loss, renewal, and diffusion of Duleep Singh’s aspiration for sovereignty? In asking and addressing this question, Judge successfully offers pathways for recognizing and exploring the political power and philosophical sophistication of imaginaries of sovereignty, like Duleep Singh’s, that are otherwise conveniently though perniciously catalogued as sorry tragedies of a colonized subject. Making Duleep Singh’s example speak back to and interrupt the alleged tragedy of his quest for sovereignty, Judge undertakes a critically important endeavor of decolonizing both colonial and contemporary secularist models of South Asian history populating the Western academy. This forum brings together outstanding scholars, conducting theoretically cutting edge critiques of secular power from multiple disciplinary perspectives, to engage, wrestle with, and celebrate a book with major ramifications and consequences in the study of religion, history, philosophy, and South Asia. The Prophetic Maharaja is in many ways a model and master seminar in bringing together invasive attention to the particularity of an archive and theoretical reflection that paves as well as shifts the terrain of multiple fields of knowledge simultaneously.
SherAli Tareen is Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College and currently a Patricia Crone member in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton NJ for the academic year 2024-25. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award in the Analytical-Descriptive Studies category. His second book is Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire(Columbia University Press, 2023) which was selected as a finalist for the 2024 American Academy of Religion Book Award in the Textual Studies category.
Rajbir Singh Judge is Assistant Professor in History at California State University, Long Beach. Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia was published in 2024, and over the next few weeks we have a series of contributors who’ll be offering their reflections, followed by a response from Rajbir. I’ll update this post with links to the other posts as they’re published:
From mid-April to early May we’ll be hosting the next AUFS book event on Rajbir Singh Judge’s recent book Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia. Rajbir is Assistant Professor in History at California State University, Long Beach, and the book explores loss and the limits of history by considering Maharaja Duleep Singh and his struggle during the 1880s to reestablish Sikh rule, the lost Khalsa Raj, in Punjab. Do get your own copy of the book and join us to talk about it. The event is currently scheduled to run as follows:
This is the text of an address I (Marika) gave recently as part of the KULeuven annual Thomas Feast on the theme of theology, art, and decolonisation.
For several years now I’ve been haunted by a piece by Étienne Balibar about the relationship between politics and knowledge in the university. Balibar wrote that, ‘We realise now that our ruling class is no longer a bourgeoisie in the historical sense of the world. It does not have a project of intellectual hegemony, nor an artistic point of honour. It needs (or so it thinks) only cost-benefit analyses, ‘cognitive’ educational programs, and committees of experts. That is why, with the help of the pandemic and the internet revolution, the same ruling class is preparing the demise of the social sciences, humanities, and even the theoretical sciences. To accelerate the process, why not have the victim become the culprit (‘Islamo-leftist’, ‘activism’, ‘ideology’…)? It will make things easier.’[1]
It’s a strange time to be reflecting on the relationship between theology, art and decolonisation, as both theology and the arts are struggling for survival in a global war waged ‘on wokeness’ – which is to say, on the side of white supremacy. When things that we love – or that we depend on for our salaries, stipends, or future job prospects – are threatened, it can be tempting simply to knuckle down, to try to cling to what we still have for as long as we can. But I want to suggest that we take our cue from Cedric Robinson, who writes in Black Marxism that his goal in writing the book was not simply ‘a question of outrage or concern for Black survival’ but ‘a matter of comprehension.’[2] How can we understand the relationship between theology, art, and empire?
Two things are often missing from contemporary attempts to grapple with this question, which are frequently both too abstract and not abstract enough. Our conversations often get stuck at the level of theological and artistic content – questions of who or what is represented or talked about. What this misses is both the very particular and material question of the institutions and resources which make theological and artistic expression possible, and then the more abstract question of theological and artistic form. So I want to spend some time sketching out some thoughts on these two areas.
Both the arts and academic theology in the Western world take their shape in large part from the huge social transformations which took place within Europe over the late medieval and early modern period along with the emergence of slavery, colonialism, and racism. I’m going to focus here on the role of universities, both because that’s what I know most intimately and because that’s where we currently are, but the other institutions on which theology and the arts rely – churches, galleries, concert halls, philanthropic and government funding bodies – were also transformed with or emerged out of these same processes. Universities were born from Christian Europe’s encounters with its others, out of the wealth of cultural, scientific, and philosophical materials which became available in the wake of the fracturing of Andalusia; out of European encounters with the Arab and Ottoman worlds through the Crusades; and from the age of European discovery, conquest, and slavery. They emerged in ways which reflected the needs of growing European nations for clerical and economic administration of emergent European nation states and empires, for legal and theological justifications for new forms of property and dispossession and, connected to all of this, for new frameworks of nation, race and history within which all of these could take place; frameworks created and sustained by theology, art, and culture.
I’ve come to think that theology, art, and the institutions in which these are done, can be best understood in terms of social reproduction. For the most part, that is, theology and the arts tend to function both to repeat and to re-inscribe the hierarchical ordering of the societies which produce them, along with the spiritual and aesthetic values which sustain these hierarchies; and also to rework these values as the societies which they organise encounter new challenges. As Sylvia Wynter suggests, we see within the Western world a gradual shift from ideas about racial hierarchy which were justified in the late medieval period on theological grounds, to a justification of racial order through reason – the predominant frame of the 16th through to the 18th centuries – followed by a hierarchy in which evolutionary and economic success come to measure eugenic perfection from the 19th century onwards; the belief that economic success indicates not only intelligence but also racial superiority.[3]
Universities exist both to reproduce the forms of knowledge which justify and re-make interconnected distinctions of race, class, and gender and also to reproduce the people who will in turn re-make the world which relies on these distinctions. The crisis we find ourselves in, then, can be understood as the result of the ongoing shifts by which racial and colonial order remake themselves. The second part of the twentieth century can perhaps best be grasped through the framework of neo-colonialism globally and multiracialism in the imperial core: a form of racial order in which, as Denise Ferreira da Silva argues, white Westerners invite non-white people to enter into the supposedly secular sphere of universal values and human rights, both failing to recognise the particularity of our own sense of what is universally human, and relying implicitly on the figure of the inhuman, fanatical or unassimilable other: the barbaric and homophobic Hamas fighter; the misogynistic, violent, immigrant; the drug addicted and welfare-dependent black mother.
Much of what passes for decolonisation in this period, then, can be better described as diversification. The West allows for formal desegregation and decolonisation, welcoming diversity into its ranks precisely in order to maintain its imperial power. We see this reflected in the paradoxes of contemporary theological and artistic institutions: the galleries showing work by black artists with the help of funding from oil companies; universities who refuse to take down statues honouring slave-owners whilst advertising their diversity schemes, running workshops on decolonising the curriculum next door to departments partnering with arms companies; or working to widen access whilst closing off our students’ future possibilities by delivering them into debt. This conjuncture has created challenges for those of us seeking to confront the historical entanglement of theology and the arts with racism and colonial violence. The university is asking us to talk about these things, but not too much; as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney wrote twelve years ago of the subversive intellectual: ‘the university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings.[4]’
And of course, all too often we choose not to confront our institutions but to hold back; to limit what we say and do for the sake of our jobs, our connections, or our future employment prospects. To live in the university is to be formed by its systems and structures in ways that I do not think we are very good at reckoning with, and so it is often our undergraduate students who are able to see with the clearest eyes and speak with the bravest voices. I think we’ve seen very clearly in the wake of October 7th the limits of the neoliberal university’s commitment to decolonisation. The violence with which universities have shut down even the mildest demands for disinvestment from the machinery of destruction throughout the ongoing genocide of Palestinians has been revealing. I wonder whether we will look back on these protests as a turning point: the absolute failure of liberal institutions to defend free speech, the capitulation to pressure from donors and governments perhaps the death knell for the Western commitment to the multicultural ideals of diversity, equality and inclusion; and perhaps for the university as such.
What comes next of course, looks to be worse. What does it mean to confront the possibility that, as Balibar suggests the golden age of the university is over? The destruction of the university may look like what is currently taking place in the US, where an attempt is underway to systematically dismantle both universities and the arts, or in the UK, where instead of the wrecking ball of Elon Musk’s DOGE, a purportedly left wing government is overseeing the gradual death by starvation of both the university and the arts sectors. What does it mean to recognise that these changes are happening not, whatever politicians, consultants, or vice chancellors claim, out of economic necessity, but out of a groundless insistence, a kind of pure faith in the superfluity of the arts and humanities?
Let’s talk about abstraction. Jacob Taubes suggests that the fundamental shift which takes place between the medieval and the modern world can be understood, if not explained, in terms of the shift from Ptolemaic to Copernican cosmology.[5] Medieval Europeans understood themselves as part of the great chain of being, a cosmic order reflected not just in the ranked ordering of humans and other creatures but in the very universe itself, a hierarchy both literal and figurative leading from the chthonic darkness below the earth up to the celestial spheres and the heavenly beings.[6] This cosmic and metaphysical order gave both theology and art a firm anchor in the universe.
To speak of God, to make art, was to reflect an order of goodness, truth and beauty in which what was said and done on earth corresponded in a very real sense to what was done in heaven. The Catholic Church was right, Taubes says, to see in Copernicus not just a new scientific theory but an existential threat to the metaphysics which grounded both ecclesial authority and artistic representation. After Copernicus, unable to ground spiritual or ecclesial authority in the external order of the universe, Taubes suggests, both philosophy and theology turned inwards: a shift which we see both in the Kantian turn to human categories and in the ongoing struggle of Christian theology to reconcile the now antithetical poles of God and human being.
This turn inwards is reflected too, I want to suggest, in an inwards turn which we can see in both Catholic and Protestant piety: a new emphasis on inwardness, on intention over action, on self-examination; a proliferation of new mysticisms of internal ascent leading not from heaven to earth but up the stairways of the interior castle to the darkness of God. But art, too, is unmoored, and comes to find its bearings within the individual mind and imagination. Stephen Prickett connects this process both to the spread of literacy and the newly emergent European divide between the public and the private spheres, suggesting that this internalisation of imagination and speculation is seen first in the newly emergent art form of the novel, but appears also in the visual arts and in poetry in tendencies towards realism, idealism, and perspectivalism.[7] Along similar lines, Victoria Nelson has traced the transposition of ancient ideas about underworlds into what she calls ‘psychotopography’, the literary and visual depiction of the underworld as an image of the inner depths of the mind and imagination; an allegorical rather than analogically artistic vision which, she argues, shapes the emergence of the grotesque, the fantastical, and the science fictional in artistic representations in the West.[8]
But these transformations are also racial transformations. As Willie Jennings writes, the emergence of racial slavery and European empire is characterised by a forcible deracination of enslaved and colonised people; the destruction of their relationships with one another and with their particular places and contexts in order to place them instead within a racial scale which runs not from heaven to hell but from white to black.[9] This racial logic is also a logic of property. Enslaved people, Jennings argues, are relocated both into Christian identity and also into ‘the market’. New European notions of the interior self are themselves tied to new orders of property. Balibar finds in John Locke the first full expression of the notion of self-consciousness; a notion which, he suggests, cannot be separated from Locke’s understanding of personhood as property.[10] It’s the opening up of inner space which makes it possible for Locke to understand personhood as self-possession, and this relationship of self-possession which in turn opens up new forms of possessive relation to the external world. It is this understanding of personhood which allows Locke to claim ownership not only of the ore dug up by his own hands, but also of the grass that his horse has eaten, and the turf cut by his servant. It is this interiority, this self-possession which, Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano argue, smuggles ‘a racial anthropology of the human’ into the very heart of Western ideas of personhood, the self-conscious, rational, imaginative and self-possessed person contrasted with racialised non-persons, understood to be lacking in self-consciousness, irrational, and trapped outside of history in the realm of nature.[11]
The racial frame within which this new interiority is mapped is also a historical frame, an account of progress in which the gradual abstraction and spiritualisation of all things which was once worked out along the great chain of being comes now to be mapped across a historical scale. Here theology is placed as one stage along a developmental scheme within which, in its classical form, the pagan deification of nature gives way to the outward law of Jewish monotheism, then the inward law of Christianity, and finally the spiritualisation or internalisation of theology’s claims; the realisation that it is not God but reason which drives forward history.
A similar process of interiorisation and abstraction is at work in narratives of the development of art over history. The novel is placed towards the end of a process of development which begins in myth and fable.[12] What is modernity if not Don Quixote, awakening from a dream of chivalry and romance to discover himself, the protagonist of a work of fiction? The modern art gallery removes works of art from religious, ritual or social function and places them into a blank white box. Something similar can be said of the museum, which marks its difference from the gallery precisely by placing the works it holds into context, thus marking them out from art works proper, at the same time as it insist on the relegation of these contexts to the past. Recent conflicts over the fate of the Benin bronzes, for example, looted by British soldiers from Nigeria, have included contention both over the appropriateness of displaying the bronzes as separate works, rather than within the altars for which they were originally made, and also over the practice of removing them from the daily life of the communities from which they were stolen.[13]
In Black Marxism, Cedric Robinson says that his work began from the recognition that the theories of history which he encountered in Western radicalism were insufficient; that ‘something more than objective material forces were responsible for “the nastiness”’. But this need to understand was ‘not simply a question of outrage or concern for Black survival. It was a matter of comprehension.’ We are talking, then, about a double excess; two forms of desire, of pleasure, connected to the acquisition of knowledge. One thing that has happened with the shift from formal and explicit logic of segregation and empire to the less tangible and explicit order of neoliberal multiculturalism has been a shift towards the language of culture and religion as a justification for racial violence under the banner of the threat to Europe’s Christian heritage, or the decline of Western culture.
This shift implicates both theology and the arts more deeply, at the same time as it has heightened the attacks on both insofar as they have resisted these attempts to weaponise them. I wonder whether this has to do with the ambivalent role of pleasure which is more explicit here than in the sciences, precisely because both theology and the art deal with that which is not quite graspable or containable; precisely because both open up the space to confront what cannot quite be contained within the logic of racial order, alongside the pleasures which sustain it. Both theology and art have to do both with beauty and with suffering, and with the slippage between the two. Both know how to redeem the suffering of others, how to turn it into profit. The cost of interiorization and abstraction is sometimes described as ‘disenchantment’; the reward of centuries of violence and dispossession has been, for both art and theology, a certain kind of crisis of confidence, a loss of faith in the reality or value of what we do. What certain kinds of theological or artistic diversity work have in common with the violence of reactionary politics unfolding around the world is perhaps a need to witness certain kinds of suffering in order to restore a sense of reality or urgency or pleasure to the world. What is the difference between a White House video of immigrants being deported to Guantanamo and the keffiyeh-wrapped baby Jesus in the Vatican nativity scene?[14] In Heidelberg, recently, I went to an exhibition about the history of Orientalism in German art. I found myself in a room full of people looking at racist art, wondering whether we were there to enjoy the racist art, or to enjoy feeling superior to the people who made the racist art, or to enjoy feeling bad about being part of a society that had made so much racist art. What is coming for us now, I think, is a movement of reaction which both feeds on the pleasure of racial violence and very much does not want to think about those pleasures. Perhaps that is a place for us to start.
[2] Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism (The University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
[3] ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument’ in CR: The New Centennial Review 3.1 (2003), 257-2337.
[4]The Undercommons: Fugutive Planning & Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013).
[5] Jacob Taubes, ‘Dialectic and Analogy’ in The Journal of Religion 34.2 (1954), 111-119.
[6] Cecilio M. Cooper, ‘Fallen: Generation, Postlapsarian Verticality + the Black Chthonic’ in Rhizomes 38 (2022).
[7] Stephen Prickett, Secret Selves: A History of Our Inner Space (Bloomsbury, 2021).
[8] Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets (Harvard University Press, 2001).
[9] Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (Yale University Press, 2010).
[10] Étienne Balibar, Identity and Difference: John Locke and the Invention of Consciousness, translated by Warren Montag (Verso, 2013).
[11] Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano, ‘Race, real estate and real abstraction’ in Radical Philosophy 194 (2015).
[12] Atesede Makonnen, ‘Romanticism and the Novel(ty) of Race in Manu Samriti Chander, The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and Race (Cambridge University Press, 2024.
[13] Barnaby Phillips, Loot: Britain and the Benin Bronzes (Oneworld, 2021).
The protagonist of Kevin Smith’s Dogma, the last living descendant of Mary, mother of Jesus, is named Bethany. It’s standard practice in this kind of apocalyptic film for names to mean something, and Dogma seems in general to bear this out. Chris Rock’s character, the black thirteenth apostle, is called Rufus, after the biblical son of Simon the Cyrene, mentioned in Mark’s account of the crucifixion and by Paul in Romans 13. Alan Rickman plays the voice of God, Metatron, and takes his name from an angel who appears as a divine figure standing beside God in various apocryphal texts. So why is the last living descendant of God called Bethany?
The name Bethany comes from the biblical town of Bethany, where Lazarus lived with his sisters, Mary and Martha. Like Lazarus, Bethany dies and is resurrected by God – here Alanis Morissette rather than Jesus. I’d like to suggest that we can infer from this that Jay and Silent Bob occupy, in Smith’s film, the roles of Mary and Martha.
Like Mary and Martha with Lazarus Jay and Silent Bob have – despite their best efforts – a non-sexual relationship with Bethany. Like Mary, who washed Jesus’ feet in an erotic act of service and is traditionally associated with sex workers, Jay is constantly making sexual advances to the people around him. Like Mary, who angrily remonstrates with Jesus when Lazarus dies (‘Lord if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”), Jay shouts at God who has appeared apparently too late to prevent catastrophe: “What the fuck is this shit?! Who the fuck are you lady?!” Like Martha, who approaches Jesus with faith (“But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask”) and opens up the tomb where Lazarus’ body has been laid to rest, it is Silent Bob who carries Bethany’s lifeless body to God to be raised. Like Martha, it is Silent Bob who quietly gets on with the necessary work, and Jay who insists on conversation.
Let us say then, with Jesus: “Jay has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from him.” Great is the mystery of Dogma. Blessed be the name of Alanis Morissette.
The Devil in Miss Jones (1973) is one of the classics of the ‘Golden Age’ of porn films. It was written, directed and produced by Gerard Damiano one year after the success of Deep Throat. The film takes inspiration both from Sartre’s No Exit – a play length exposition of the existentialist’s famous claim that ‘hell is other people’ – and from the Marquis de Sade’s Justine – whose titular character embodies the ideal feminine virtues of the 18th century, and is repeatedly punished for it; her innocence, piety, and honesty rewarded by a series of violations, as well as the torture, death, or betrayal of everyone she trusts (its sequel, Juliette, tells the story of Justine’s sister, who rejects both God and virtue, embraces corruption, and thrives).
The Devil in Miss Parton was released towards the end of a quiet period for angel film. After a glut of releases over the 1930s, 40s and 50s, barely anything was released between 1956 and 1968, when the genre gets going again with a series of films which deliberately play with its well-established cliches. If you’re familiar with angel films as a genre, it’s clear that The Devil in Miss Jones is written as a knowing parody of the standard tropes. The film’s protagonist Justine – having lived a perfectly virtuous life – dies by suicide, only to awaken into an afterlife where heaven is forbidden to her, yet she has not sinned enough to truly merit hell. The only solution, she is told by the angel Abaca assigned to judge her, is to go back to earth and earn her eternal damnation. She doesn’t seem enthused about the opportunity for theft, robbery or murder. What about lust, she asks?
Most of the rest of the film plays out as a series of explicit sex scenes, beginning with Justine’s encounter with ‘the teacher’ whose role is to cure her of her inhibitions, so as (he says) to make his work easier and hers more pleasurable. In each of the scenes – involving various other people, animals, and objects – the focus is on Justine. Both her pleasure and her voice are centred. At the end, she returns to Abaca, asks to be allowed to stay, only to be told that no such thing is possible, and to find herself, in the end, trapped in a small white room with a man (played by Damiano) raving about flies as she begs him to touch her.
Many of these narrative moves are easily recognisable from earlier angel films: a person awaking after death to find themselves with a lowly functionary responsible for overseeing their time in the space in between death and final judgement (Outward Bound (1930), Heaven Can Wait (1943), Here Comes Mr Jordan (1941); wishing to make up for the opportunities they had missed in life and hoping to do enough to be granted passage through judgment into everlasting life (Liliom (1934), remade as Carousel (1956), Angel on my Shoulder (1946); being tempted by the charms of the world they have temporarily been sent back to (The Bishop’s Wife (1947), The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945)). What’s striking about The Devil in Miss Jones is that it brings together these familiar tropes into a new format which seems, in turn, to become the template for two later angel films: 1990’s Almost an Angel, starring Paul Hogan/Crocodile Dundee and 1996’s Unlikely Angel, starring Dolly Parton. Both films share with The Devil in Miss Jones a very precise formula, here inverted: a protagonist whose entire life except for the manner of their death would seem to destine them for one of heaven and hell, and an opportunity to return to earth so as to make good on the promise of that very final moment, a moment of realisation about the kind of life they missed out on whilst alive, and then a final glimpse of their passage into their eternal destiny.
In Almost an Angel, Paul Hogan’s Terry Dean is a career criminal whose first move on getting out of prison is to try to rob another bank. As he does so, however, he spots a small girl about to be hit by a car and dies whilst saving her, only to find himself in a meeting with God (Charlton Heston), who describes himself as Dean’s probation officer, and tells him that while his entire life he never did anything but take, his final act of selflessness means that he’s earned a chance at heaven by dedicating his life to others; by giving instead of taking. While it takes him some time to unlearn his bad old habits, he manages to perform a series of selfless acts: befriending a terminally ill man named Steve and helping out the youth centre he runs with his sister Rose by clearing out some local drug dealers, convincing a tight-fisted evangelical that God is calling him to greater acts of charity, and comforting Steve as he dies. Whilst his attraction to Rose makes him regret the fact he cannot stay on earth, the film ends with a cross miraculously lighting up, Terry discovering that he cannot die, and a voiceover assuring Rose that Steve is with God now.
The sins of Dolly Parton’s Ruby Diamond are never quite as clear, but seem to be related to singing in bars, flirting with men, dating men who cheat on her, and never settling down to get married or have children. Driving home from a gig one night, she swerves to avoid hitting a death, and dies, only to find herself in a meeting with a man in a white suit who introduces himself as Peter and tells her that she’s lived an entirely selfish life, and that it’s only because at the very end she sacrificed herself for another living then that she will get a chance to make up for it. She’s then sent back to earth where she has to reconcile a family in the wake of their mother’s death by helping the father to recognise that his children need him and need a proper Christmas, helping the children to forgive their father, and pushing the father to marry his secretary, all while resisting her own desire to stay and take her place in the family home. As the film ends we see Dolly walking through the pearly gates, receiving her wings, and joining in the angelic chorus singing praise to God.
It’s interesting how precisely Almost an Angel and Unlikely Angel invert the plot of of The Devil in Miss Jones, itself a much looser parody of the angel film genre. While I can’t find any existing scholarship which connects the three the parallels are so precise – and The Devil in Miss Jones such a classic – that I’m convinced it must be a relatively direct influence on the two later films. The Devil in Miss Jones relates to Almost an Angel and Unlikely Angel like Justine to its sequel Juliette, mirrored narratives of virtue and vice, reward and punishment whose precise inversions reflect, however, a much more conventional moral universe than that of de Sade. It’s Unlikely Angel which more perfectly parallels The Devil in Miss Jones. Whereas Terry Dean ends by walking off out into the world, the promise of both further earthly adventures and of possible romantic consummation hanging in the air, both Justine and Ruby return in the end to their previous condition, albeit transformed by the lessons they have learned during their brief return to earth. Justine is only now able to fully appreciate the horror of the lonely, untouched life she already hated enough to want to kill herself; Ruby only now unable to sing in praise of God and in service of the middle class nuclear family rather than the dive bar circuit which she came from. Both films ultimately offer us a vision of the pleasures of sexual liberation once more safely enfolded into a narrative which sets desire against the care and self-sacrifice by which the white family is made and remade, in which sex can be recuperated as long as we do not acknowledge, as de Sade did, the pleasures of power, pain, and violence.
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