“I couldn’t encounter my loss face to face”

SST 2026 conference poster: an image of a mountain peak with a stained glass sunburst behind it
~ Marika Rose ~ Leave a comment

Last week I gave a keynote address at the Society for the Study of Theology annual conference, which was on the theme “Theology: A Discipline of Failure?” Below is the text of my paper.

“I couldn’t encounter my loss face to face”[1][2]

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]

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Was Hobbes gay?

An image of the frontispiece of Hobbes' Leviathan, but with a back view of a naked man instead of the figure of the sovereign
~ Marika Rose ~ 2 Comments

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:

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New blogging venture

~ Adam Kotsko

I have decided to start a new solo blog entitled That Blog You Like Is Going to Come Back in Style. My first post is an attempt to set an appropriate tone.

My reason for doing this is a sense that I need a change. It may be permanent or it may fizzle out. In either case, this site and its archives will remain available, and it will be open for new posts from any of my co-bloggers (i.e., Marika).

Existing email subscribers to this blog have been subscribed to the new one. I apologize for any inconvenience and annoyance. Feel free to unsubscribe without judgment or offense. But by the same token, I’d love to continue the conversation with any past blog fans.

I’m not sick, but I’m not well

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 1 Comment

Yesterday, a friend I’d not seen in person in a while asked me how my back pain was doing. He asked because he follows me on Facebook, which I use as a personal diary, and I had mentioned back problems there frequently for the last several week. The odd thing about that is that I had one discrete episode of back pain, with a clear etiology related to an injury that I aggravated by exercising too soon, and I fully recovered from it weeks ago. He thought my back was still a problem because I was writing frequently about my fear that it might happen again and my extreme caution about exercising when I feel even the slightest crick in my neck.

I assured my friend that I was fine, but I was a little embarrassed to realize that I had been projecting these fears so frequently. Continue reading “I’m not sick, but I’m not well” →

Alone and the Neoliberal Sublime

~ Adam Kotsko

No matter how well-matched a couple is, every relationship brings with it some kind of compromise. In our household, one such compromise has resulted in me being a near scholar of the survival reality show Alone. I’ve hated camping for as long as I can remember and, in general, share Socrates’s preference for the city over the countryside. My Esteemed Partner is not the opposite by any means, but she would probably like to do more outdoor activities than we actually wind up doing. When we discovered Alone during the pandemic, that created an important release valve. She gets to indulge her fantasies of roughing it in the wilderness, while I get to apply my “always-on” analytical mind to a show that is in fact almost a parody of neoliberal individualism.

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ChatGPT is going to kill God

~ Adam Kotsko ~ 7 Comments

I hate generative AI. I hate how it’s destroying writing pedagogy and giving students even more excuses not to read (because they can just read a “summary”). I hate how whiny and defensive AI users are about the pathetic little ways they’ve integrated it into their lives. If I could push a button and permanently delete it from existence, I would. If I could go back in time and prevent it from being invented, I would.

The reason I hate it is not just that its output is mediocre bullshit. It’s that it is an active attack on everything I value — literacy, analysis, thought. Continue reading “ChatGPT is going to kill God” →

Agamben Between Pauline Messianism and Institutional Christianity

~ Adam Kotsko

[This paper was presented at the European Academy of Religion conference in Vienna on July 11, 2025, in a session entitled “Agamben’s Theological-Political Horizons: Reimaging Judaism, Christianity, and Messianic Potentiality,” organized by Libera Pisano, Federico Dal Bo, and Carlo Salzani. The topic of my paper drifted a bit from my original proposal, which was going to be an overview of Agamben’s approach to Christianity guided by the question of whether he embraced a “fall narrative.” (Spoiler alert: no.) Hence the title doesn’t quite fit what I presented, but here we are.]

Surely one of the strangest moments in Agamben’s career is that captured in the short book The Church and the Kingdom. Here, in contrast to the academic audience presupposed by virtually all of his other works, Agamben is addressing the bishop of Paris and other clerics, in person, in Notre Dame Cathedral in 2009. In this august and presumably somewhat intimidating setting, he lays out a thorough-going critique of the Church’s betrayal of its Pauline legacy. The Church, he claims, has lost sight of the unique experience of time implied by Paul’s concept of messianism and has thereby ceased to be a community of sojourners in this world and instead become but one worldly institution among others.

For most readers of Agamben’s work up to this point, especially The Time That Remains, this diagnosis is predictable. Those who had moved on to The Kingdom and the Glory would find some of the claims he makes about the result of the Church’s loss of its messianic calling similarly familiar—though with the twist that here he proclaims a “theological genealogy” for the structure of law and exception rather than that of economy:

The crises—the states of permanent exception and emergency—that the governments of the world continually proclaim are in reality a secularized parody of the Church’s incessant deferral of the Last Judgment. With the eclipse of the messianic experience of the culmination of the law and of time comes an unprecedented hypertrophy of law—one that, under the guise of legislating everything, betrays its legitimacy through legalistic excess. I say the following with words carefully weighed: nowhere on earth is a legitimate power to be found; even the powerful are convinced of their own illegitimacy. (CK 40)

Perhaps surprisingly, though, this bleak yet strangely envigorating declaration is paired with an invocation of the possibility that the Church could nonetheless come to play a redemptive role in the world. Though the expected answer to his closing rhetorical question—“Will the Church finally grasp the historical occasion and recover its messianic vocation?” (CK 41)—is surely no, the very fact that he asks implies that the Church might regain the Pauline experience of time and thus presumably serve as a positive model for other institutions.

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Accurate, Current, and Relevant (Prophetic Maharaja Book Event)

Image of toy soldiers arranged to form an infinity symbol
~ Marika Rose ~ 1 Comment

This post is by Rajbir Singh Judge.

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).

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Non-redemptive Narration (Prophetic Maharaja Book Event)

~ biqbal ~ 1 Comment

1. One of the things for which I have come to rely on Rajbir over the years is his unfailing attentiveness to the dynamics of loss: one that is unsentimental and non-indulgent. (Against the empire of trauma and the weaponization of victimhood, to say nothing of wounded attachments and left melancholia.) Of course, this is not to say that one can stand apart from loss, either; simply that the language of loss is ubiquitous: it does not make you special or confer some kind of election. And this despite the manifold claims of loss today, when the political and media classes run breathless about identity politics, however “for” or “against”. These claims are everywhere; they populate the discourse of the institutions that shape our lives, even into the methodologies that now promise epistemological emancipation (“autoethnography” and “lived experience,” ad nauseum).

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