by Peter Gratton
This is the introduction to a series of essays on Adam Kotsko’s work, which came out of the roundtable ‘Close Encounter: Adam Kotsko’ from the 2025 conference of the Association for Philosophy and Literature. The series continues with essays by Nils Richber, Peter Gratton, Jay Martin, and a response from Adam Kotsko.
Adam Kotsko’s genealogies of political theology have become indispensable for diagnosing and living with the monumental issues of our age. His work bridges rigorous theoretical scholarship and sharp cultural criticism, demonstrating how theological concepts—providence, demonology, redemption and so on—continue to structure contemporary political and economic life, even (or especially) in their secularized forms.
Kotsko is one of those rare scholars whose work is both deeply rigorous and strikingly accessible, moving seamlessly between theoretical monographs on Giorgio Agamben and sharp cultural criticism of sitcom archetypes and Star Trek franchises. What unifies these seemingly disparate projects is a methodological commitment that runs throughout his career: close reading as a way of unpacking the political, economic and ethical structures that shape our common life. Whether analysing patristic theology, neoliberal subject formation, or the moral economies of television, Kotsko employs genealogical method to reveal how theological categories continue to organise contemporary experience. The four essays gathered here—by Nils Richber, Jay Martin and me, along with a reply by Kostko—engage different dimensions of this work, extending his analyses while testing the explanatory power of his political-theological method. What follows in this introduction is a brief overview tracing the development of Kotsko’s thought, from his early engagements with Žižek and Agamben through his landmark study of neoliberalism to his recent work on franchise culture.
Kotsko first came to prominence in theology with his early monograph Žižek and Theology (2008), which was one of the first sustained treatments of Slavoj Žižek’s work for a theological audience, reading Žižek’s Lacanian-Marxist framework as a resource for thinking about Christian doctrine, ideology critique and political subjectivity. That early engagement with Žižek’s understanding of ideology—especially the ways enjoyment (jouissance) binds us to oppressive systems—can be seen in the background of Neoliberalism’s Demons, where Kotsko reframes similar insights through the genealogy of Christian moral psychology. While the Žižek book predates Demons by a decade, we can see him starting to develop claims that will come to fruition later.
In The Politics of Redemption (2010), Kotsko reworks his doctoral work to argue for a ‘social-relational’ ontology of atonement, in dialogue with liberationist, feminist and other marginalised theologies, as well as Continental philosophy. This was not just a revision of doctrine for its own sake—it was a constructive intervention in political theology, aimed at dismantling the individualistic and hierarchical assumptions of much Christian thought and opening it to questions of solidarity, agency and structural critique. That this was an important political intervention more widely in the U.S. context, in particular, wasn’t lost on any of his readers, attacking as it does individualist conceptions of God:
What is needed […] is a form of community that clears the way for its members to be in real relation among themselves, rather than simply gathering together a cluster of individuals who share only a relationship with God or with the church conceived as an authoritative institution. Such a communal form is not simply an adjunct to the gospel, it is the gospel.[1]
This will, of course, lead to many of his claims about the political theology of neoliberalism, but also right into Schmittian conceptions of sovereignty and the political.
In these years, Kotsko was also an important interlocutor in the Anglophone reception of Giorgio Agamben, serving as the translator for major works such as The Sacrament of Language, The Highest Poverty and Opus Dei. This translation work was not mere service to the field; it was an interpretive act that shaped how Agamben’s notoriously complex arguments would circulate in English. His 2013 essay ‘Genealogy and Political Theology’[2] is an exemplary methodological reflection on Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory, showing how theological genealogies can deepen our grasp of modern political and economic arrangements.
Alongside these scholarly contributions, Kotsko has developed a widely followed public voice as a cultural critic. Books like Awkwardness (2010) and Why We Love Sociopaths (2012) apply the conceptual tools of political theology and ideology critique to popular culture. His analyses of television characters and genre conventions are not just digressions from his serious work—they’re part of the same project: diagnosing how moral and political orders are naturalised in our everyday entertainment. Rereading these works, it’s easy to be struck even more than at the time by how well they mapped a landscape in which we very much still live—one where the awkward has become a staple of branding and online persona, where the charismatic sociopath is not just a TV trope but a familiar figure in politics, tech culture and corporate leadership. The moral economies he charted in those books have not disappeared. If anything, they have intensified, shaping the affective habits and ideological reflexes of a generation raised amid precarious work, mediated intimacy and endless content.
This trajectory led to perhaps his best-known book, Neoliberalism’s Demons (2018), which reframes neoliberalism as a political-theological regime. Drawing on the tradition of political theology, Kotsko argues that neoliberalism produces subjects who see themselves as free and entrepreneurial, even as they are bound more tightly to systems of competition, precarity and guilt. But going on those familiar critiques, Neoliberalism’s Demons traces the governing logic of neoliberalism to theological roots that long predate its late-twentieth-century ascendancy. Drawing on Agamben’s turn from sovereignty to oikonomia, Kotsko shows that neoliberalism inherits and repurposes the moral architecture of Western Christianity—especially the Augustinian and Protestant emphasis on the self as both free and perpetually guilty. This moral-theological inheritance produces a subject who is enjoined to act as a self-determining entrepreneur, yet who can never finally discharge their responsibility or measure up to the demands placed upon them. In this way, neoliberalism manages the paradox of freedom through guilt: the more ‘free’ the subject is told they are, the more they are compelled to internalise systemic failures as personal shortcomings.
This theological genealogy reframes contemporary political economy in two important ways. First, it broadens the scope of political theology beyond the Schmittian paradigm of sovereignty and exception, opening it more fully, as Agamben had done in a different way in Kingdom and the Glory, to the economic sphere and its subject-forming power. Second, it offers a moral diagnosis of why neoliberalism persists despite repeated crises: it is not simply a set of market arrangements but a regime of spiritual discipline, one that binds individuals to their own subjection through an ethic of endless self-management. By articulating neoliberalism in these terms, Kotsko brings political theology into direct conversation with the lived experience of exhaustion, insecurity and self-blame that shapes so much of everyday life today. If we are indeed seeing the end of neoliberalism today, we haven’t seen the end of these demonic forces, as Kotsko describes them.
Agamben’s Philosophical Trajectory (2020) resists the common scholarly habit of treating Agamben as if his work had been a single, continuous project from the start. Instead, Kotsko offers a periodized account, identifying genuine shifts in emphasis and method, from early aesthetics and linguistics, through political theology, and into late meditations on use, economy and form-of-life. The result is not just a map of Agamben’s oeuvre, but a model of how to read any thinker historically—attentive to the continuities and ruptures in their thought—something that might come back today in our discussion of his work. Kotsko writes in the introduction (in a manner that fits reading him, as well):
[C]ommentators are right to observe that Agamben keeps returning to familiar ideas and patterns of thought. No theme or concept is ever truly left behind, nor does he ever explicitly repudiate any previous argument. [H]e has always been striving toward some kind of consistency, some sense that his body of work adds up to something more than a series of randomly juxtaposed texts. Yet that impulse stands in productive tension with Agamben’s responsiveness—to his ever-changing cast of intellectual comrades, to new influences and new ways of understanding old ones, and to the most important historical events that have unfolded around him.[3]
More recently, Kotsko has extended his method into the analysis of Star Trek in his 2025 book Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era, which treats ‘late Star Trek’ as an analogue to ‘late capitalism’. It’s a study of how beloved intellectual properties shift when story decisions are driven primarily by brand management and shareholder imperatives. But as with all his work, it’s not a simple lament: Kotsko reads these series—across television, film, novels and fan cultures—as complex cultural artifacts that aren’t just fated to be the derivative detritus of so much contemporary culture. That is, instead of seeing franchises like Star Trek as less creative or meaningful because they aren’t supposedly original series and such, he argues:
Franchise storytelling revives an approach that has been perennial in essentially all known human cultures. What holds back franchises is not their reliance on the familiar but rather the unique status of our modern myths as corporate intellectual property rather than common cultural heritage.[4]
Taken together, then, Kotsko’s political-theological method has proven adaptable across vastly different objects of analysis while maintaining conceptual precision and critical force. The genealogical approach he has refined—tracing how theological structures migrate, mutate and persist in ostensibly secular forms—offers tools for understanding not only neoliberalism’s rise but also whatever infernal regime may be emerging in its wake.
The three essays gathered here engage Kotsko’s work from complementary angles, each extending his genealogical method into new terrain while testing its explanatory power. Nils Richber’s essay explores the post-apocalyptic dimensions of Kotsko’s critical practice, tracing affinities between his political theology and critical theory. Richber argues that critique itself exists in an eschatological afterlife—carrying the ‘dead weight of a bankrupted archive of salvific promises’ while having no normative ground beyond these very promises. His essay reads Kotsko’s exegetical practice as a negative, post-apocalyptic assertion of fidelity to biblical justice in the face of justification’s impossibility, ultimately asking whether a minimal politics of redemption might be reimagined as post-apocalyptic solidarity.
My own essay, ‘A Hell Without End? Neoliberalism and the Grift Society’, takes up Kotsko’s claim that neoliberalism’s self-legitimating strategies were inherently self-undermining, producing subjects too anxious and exhausted to sustain belief in the system. I argue that while Kotsko was right about neoliberalism’s fundamental contradictions, the regime emerging in its wake has discovered something more insidious: a mode of governance requiring no belief at all, only cynical participation in acknowledged fraud. If neoliberalism operated as a political theology demanding faith in market providence, the grift society thrives on something like a ‘belief-beyond-belief’—a recursive structure in which everyone knows the con is running yet remains compelled to participate. This shift from neoliberal demonology to post-neoliberal nihilism suggests that Kotsko’s genealogical method remains essential even as the object of analysis mutates.
Jay Martin’s ‘“Every God Has a Devil for a Father”: The Disappearing of the Devil in Hegel’ investigates a conspicuous absence in Hegel’s philosophical theology—the near-total silence on Satan in a theological landscape saturated with diabolical figures. Drawing on Kotsko’s The Prince of This World, Martin argues that this silence is not mere omission but active disappearance: a dialectical operation rendering Satan conceptually superfluous. Against the backdrop of Luther, Boehme, Kant, Schelling and Goethe—for whom the Devil remained vital—Hegel’s erasure becomes symptomatic of a deeper philosophical-political move. Martin demonstrates how Hegel internalizes rebellion into divine self-differentiation, neutralizing its political valence and securing metaphysical unity alongside political stability.
In his response, Kotsko engages each essay on its own terms while opening new theoretical horizons. Addressing Richber, he reflects on the Adornoian inheritance in his critical writings, affirming the connexions Richber draws between his genealogical practice and the negative dialectics of the Frankfurt School. With my essay, he takes up the question of neoliberalism’s terminal crisis, arguing that the second Trump Administration marks not merely a mutation but the final demise of the neoliberal order, and explores the darker implications of what I call the ‘grift economy’—a regime that has learned to operate without even the minimal legitimation neoliberalism required. In dialogue with Martin, Kotsko broadens the analysis of Hegel’s Satanic erasure into a wider critique of modern liberal theology, provocatively suggesting that Carl Schmitt’s quasi-deification of the state may represent Hegel’s truest theological legacy.
Throughout these engagements, a unifying thread emerges: Kotsko returns to the concept of freedom as the central preoccupation of his work—not freedom as neoliberalism’s alibi, but freedom as the site where theological genealogy, political diagnosis and ethical possibility converge. His response thus demonstrates what has made his work so indispensable: the capacity to meet scholarly interlocutors with generosity while pushing the conversation toward the most urgent questions of our historical moment.
The Adam Kotsko Roundtable continues with essays by Nils Richber, Peter Gratton and Jay Martin, and a response from Adam Kotsko.
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Adam Kotsko, The Politics of Redemption: The Social Logic of Salvation (New York, T&T Clark, 2010), 15. Henceforth cited as PR. ↑
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Adam Kotsko, ‘Genealogy and Political Theology: On Method in Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory’, Political Theology 14:1 (2013), 107-14. ↑
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Adam Kotsko, Agamben’s Philosophical Trajectory (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 9-10. ↑
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Adam Kotsko, Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era (Minneapolis, Minnesota University Press, 2025), 29-30. ↑
