Left Over: Towards a Post-Apocalyptic Reading of Political Theology

by Nils Richber

This is the first installment of 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. Read Peter Gratton’s introduction here, essays by Peter Gratton and Jay Martin, and a response from Adam Kotsko.

Ideas and events which transform the nature of man and the features of humanity cannot be compressed into moments but must be seen through: they complete their course within a historical economy which comprises seemingly disparate centuries. Since the spirit of eschatology grows more transparent to itself each time, the tidal flow quickens its pace.^[1]

This is the great esoteric depression
we sold our souls but couldn’t buy salvation.^[2]

The Afterlife of Solidarity

In HBO’s 2019 miniseries ‛Chernobyl’, the nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl atomic power plant in 1986 sets the scene for a strangely ambivalent swan song to the Soviet Union and its era. On the one hand, the series verbosely elaborates on the denialism that Soviet ideology seemed to impose on its subjects in the face of a catastrophe like this: the very pretense of control and the hard-boiled technological optimism involved in a project dedicated to the progressive overcoming of the chaotic forces of nature and of human social relations alike would unleash those same forces in an unprecedented way. Whatever legitimacy this project of mastery still might have retained, it would seemingly be impossible to acknowledge what happened and have any of it left over.^[3] But on the other hand, the doom this society appears to have brought upon itself becomes the backdrop for an unadorned post-apocalyptic heroism: workers putting their lives on the line at the disaster site to contain an apocalypse that seems to already signify the lack of a future to fight for—‘What world do they even think they are saving?’, one might be tempted to ask. The glorious surplus of sacrifice yielded by the anticipation of communism has subsided and is called upon without much effect. Those who cannot be persuaded to do what is expected of them need to be forced or lied to. Nonetheless, throughout the series’ depiction of the events, the hopeless assumption of the responsibility to simply—or not at all simply do what must be done remains at the centre like a strange, spectral afterglow of the belief in collective self-determination on which the dying revolutionary project was built.^[4] There is no more ‘world to win’, as the Communist Manifesto would famously have it^[5]—all that is left is for things to get ‛less worse’.^[6]

Although this diagnosis seems to translate quite well into the present situation, there is a crucial difference: the now common-sense notion that Soviet communism—for whatever it exactly was—did not work, depends on the very supposition of an agency laying claim to collective responsibility for how things were going. The standard to which this society had established to hold itself was that of finally instating a collective subject in place of the anonymous social forces governing the then so-called pre-history of communism—and it is by this standard that the ultimate failure of the project needed to be so desperately denied and then became so firmly ascertainable. No such standard seems to apply to what Anna Kornbluh calls ‛too-late capitalism’—and in hindsight, this makes the collapse of the Soviet Union appear like the latest turn of the tides in the modern cycle of disenchantment and secularisation, rendering obsolete another secular paradigm of theodicy. Under too late capital, on the other hand, the fallout of blameworthiness in the face of the state of the world disperses into the everywhere-and-nowhere of an at once atomized and globalized social fabric, as the transcendence of the supposed subject of responsibility is melting down. Because assuming responsibility, as Mark Fisher poignantly put it in homology to the universe of Kafka, is exactly what capital cannot, for the life of it, do:

The supreme genius of Kafka was to have explored the negative atheology proper to Capital: the centre is missing, but we cannot stop searching for it or positing it. It is not that there is nothing there—it is that what is there is not capable of exercising responsibility.^[7]

Whichever apocalyptic events might unfurl in its course, capital might treat them as its own business, but it will not ascribe them as failures of its own making. Where Soviet socialism turned out not to have worked, ‘too-late capitalism’ paradoxically continues to profit from what stopped working—and leaves the blame with others, that is, with everyone.

Eschatological Bankruptcy

There is a sense in which it is always already too late. Of course, the philosophical locus classicus pertaining to this idea is Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and his notorious allegory of the Owl of Minerva:^[8] if the task of philosophy is to make sense of its own time, then time has to assume the form of logical necessity—time that has become necessity is petrified time, time that ended, time past. Hence, the subject position of modern philosophy according to Hegel is situated in the hereafter of some end of time—what philosophy comes too late to do is to provide guidance and meaning with regard to what matters most at any given moment. This, for him, was the consequence of the at once catastrophic and ecstatic event of the French Revolution, inaugurating the principle of human freedom as the deeply ambiguous ‛core value of Western modernity’ (PW, 198), around which Kotsko’s political-theological genealogy revolves.^[9] By that same token, the modern world becomes tied to an essentially self-undermining principle of generating legitimacy: no set of institutional practices and fundamental assumptions about the meaning of human life may retain durability without paying its due to this ‛ultimate concern’ of freedom^[10]—but that same human freedom is also, as Alex Hochuli, George Hoare and Philip Cunliffe paraphrase Hegel, what ‛spill[s] over the boundaries of any concrete political order’,^[11] undercutting any attempt at the construction of a lastingly stable framework of meaning and legitimacy. The modern world stabilizes itself only on the condition of perpetually discharging an excess of instability that it can no longer deposit within a theologically or politically defined outside realm.

Bringing down the old orders in the wake of the age of freedom, the horrors that this not only disorienting but in many ways violent process of disruption entailed did not eclipse the utopian spirit that carried the early bourgeois age across the threshold of revolution, the millenarian character of which has been emphasized in different ways by thinkers like Jacob Taubes, Karl Löwith or Sylvia Wynter. The suffering and violence paving its way were perceived as tolerable by the Zeitgeist to the degree it was accepted as the necessary price to pay for ‛the progress of the consciousness of freedom’^[12] in history to take its course. And even though communists and socialists scandalized the old and new forms of subjugation constitutive of bourgeois society, they still participated in its modernist and millenarian pathos, figuring themselves not simply as enemies of that society, but as the heirs of the revolutionary task it left unfinished.

For Frankfurt school critical theory, this secularized eschatology had exhausted itself, as modernity had unleashed unheard of forces of destruction, now unmitigated by any plausible redemptive vision on the horizon. The twentieth century renders everything in its aftermath post-apocalyptic, ‛after doomsday’, as Adorno put it with regard to the ceaseless rhythm of violent disruption characteristic of World War II, which he considered to be incommensurable with meaningful experience and the formation of historical memory.^[13] As the German historian Jan Gerber, drawing on critical theory, summarizes the post-war assessment:

The belief in a rational course of history, precarious as it was, had already been seriously compromised following World War I […]. But Auschwitz meant the final dissolution of the connexion between history and reason: How the Holocaust should be a necessary precondition for a society of free and equal human beings could not be explained by means of reason, however hard one might try.^[14]

Those shocks, according to Gerber, took a good portion of their full toll only with some delay after the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union—only then did it become clear how much even and especially those parts of the left still depended on the sheer existence of the Eastern Bloc, which supposedly had left their idealisations long behind (DLG, 17-18). Not unlike a fetish, it allowed for a certain disavowal of the left’s eschatological bankruptcy:

With the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc, the left rather lost its system of reference and legitimacy that since 1917—and stretching over 1945—had provided it with some sense of direction, though rapidly deteriorating from the seventies onward, and lent a certain degree of meaning to its actions. (DLG, 18-19)

So the subject-position of the left-wing intellectual, for critical theory, can no longer be that of any kind of progressive vanguard—of ‛moving with the current’,^[15] as Walter Benjamin would say—but of a paradoxical, post-apocalyptic remainder—of being left over as subject without substance, after the breakdown of the eschatological promises of modernity etched the impossibility of the restoration of meaning by way of some positive utopian future into their consciousness. The Owl of Minerva returns with a vengeance in the image of Benjamin’s Angel of History (ÜB, 697-8.)—not making sense of the past but dwelling on the failures and catastrophes eclipsed by the rationalisations of enlightened eschatology—on all the ends of history not ceasing not to end.

The Biblical Tradition and its Discontents

Benjamin’s angelic turn to an apocalyptic past spilling over and over into the future resounds in the position Kotsko takes with regard to the subject matter of political theology: ‘[T]he “revelation” of the Christian West is not a permanent historical deposit of meaning to which political theologians hope to return, but an ongoing disaster we seek urgently to escape’.^[16]

Like Benjamin’s ‛historical materialist’, Kotsko keeps the chilling critical distance adequate to that kind of cultural heritage.^[17] Other than for Carl Schmitt, for Kotsko, political theology does not entail an attempt to directly invest a very particular set of secular political concepts with a theological surplus of authority. Although this is in fact the kind of process political theology is equipped to describe, its task is not to vindicate it, but to be in touch with the contingency from which it emerges and which opens it up to critical reflection.^[18] While for Schmitt, the vagueness pertaining to the exact nature of the relationship between political and theological concepts seems to be part of the method, blurring the lines between critical analysis on the one hand and the restoration of a normative paradigm of sovereignty on the other,^[19] for Kotsko the mobius strip-like entanglement of the political and the theological is symptomatic of a fundamental impossibility^[20] which circulates between the poles of their outward opposition. This impossibility is reflected in the twin problems of evil and legitimacy. They mark the goalposts of a ‛most general concept of political theology’, which would be

a nonreductionist analysis of the homologies between political and theological or metaphysical systems, grounded in the recognition that both types of systems are attempts to grapple with the perennial dilemma that is represented theologically as the problem of evil and politically as the problem of legitimacy (ND, 31).

While the ambiguity regarding the larger difference between theology and metaphysics contains a further question as to the heterogeneity of the Western tradition,^[21] his seminal work The Prince of this World first and foremost focuses on the specific forms into which the biblical tradition has moulded these problems and on how their fundamentally contingent metamorphoses have shaped the world we know today. He is drawing here on the genealogical, anti-methodological method Nietzsche developed and famously deployed in his critique of Christianity. But the fundamental concern of Kotsko’s critical trajectory arguably remains in solidarity with the hysterical discontent the biblical tradition itself is charged with. This is indicated by his initial reference to the book of Job that precedes the critical genealogy like a clef precedes the score:

[I]t is best to begin by treating the problem of evil less as a puzzle and more as a kind of open wound. This is, in fact, how the monotheistic tradition itself approaches it, as evidenced by the Book of Job. Job’s impassioned speeches, which cycle through a variety of positions and even make shocking accusations against God, can ultimately be read as an anguished attempt to hold the three propositions together. His friends’ speeches, in contrast, retrospectively seem to anticipate the theological tradition’s attempt to explain away the experience of evil and suffering. […] In short, the Book of Job is grappling with an irresolvable deadlock—or better, a deadlock that it utterly refuses to resolve. This deadlock makes its mark on the text (PW, 6).

And although Kotsko emphasizes the exceptional status of this text, making it appear like a strange, foreign object within the canon (PW, 7), this mark could seem to be a formal character of that canon itself compared to, say, Hesiod’s unifying genealogical attempt at coherence or the towering systematic theologies of the later Christian tradition: does not the bible present itself as much more of a furrowed and openly heterogenous theological record of a precarious experience, marked by permanent conflict with the reigning orders of dominion and legitimacy,^[22] barely holding together what is threatening to fall apart at any moment?^[23] The Nietzschean method of political theology thus may retroactively seem to find itself in a Benjaminian ‛secret agreement’^[24] (ÜB, 694) with the materiality of biblical theology, turning to our attention not the conscious surface of supposed logical continuity and coherence in time, but to the sites of breakdown, the cycles of failure and forceful rearrangement of patterns of meaning—bringing the violence involved in this to attention and making it a problem for the reader, disturbing her peace even where the text aims to restore justification. The sequence of political-theological paradigms, the analysis of which makes up the main part of The Prince of this World, are mostly such attempts to restore meaning and justification with relation to an unjustifiable instance of suffering—but they never do so without bearing witness to that suffering by holding on to the demand for justice throughout the very shifting of paradigms, which constitutes the historiographic axis along which so many catastrophic failures of justice align. Thus, here in agreement with Slavoj Žižek’s materialist theology, Kotsko reads the book of Job as a reinscription into the canon itself of its own ultimate failure at harmonisation.^[25] Political theology as a materialist practice of theology could thus be understood in homology to the reflexive position of Job, subjectivising the discontent of the canon from within itself: it could be figured as itself a paradigmatic constellation, reconfiguring scripture and tradition according to its own ‛rigorous infidelity’ (WT, 59) and thereby remaining faithful to the covenant founded in the antinomian concept of justice (PW, 21)—only this time not following any positively redemptive idea of justice to convert ‛the brute fact of suffering into an experience that has meaning’ (PW, 8), but by patiently working our attention to the point of acknowledging that every meaning is built on the unsalvageable ruins of past ‛catastrophes of meaning’^[26] littering the hellscape of history. The recognition of past suffering renders the self-reflexive paradigm of political theology post-apocalyptic, as may be argued in the words of Philip Goodchild:

The apocalypse has already happened. […] Let us not count occasions and figures, though the occasions are too numerous and the figures too immense to count. Each event, in its own significance, outweighs the counting of numbers. […] Unless one counts total destruction as qualitatively different, there is no evil which could happen on Earth which has not already happened. One may hope to diminish some of the tragedies of the future, but all action comes essentially too late.^[27]

As Jacob Taubes has pointed out with reference to the work of Albert Schweitzer, the primacy of too-lateness and of a salvific event that did not take place is central even to the gospel‛s account of the life of the Christian messiah. The sense that we should not even be here anymore does not only haunt the various theological attempts to reconcile the apocalyptic nature of the Christian religion with its institutional consolidation over time,^[28] nor is St. Paul the first to deal with this problem—it marks the life of Jesus itself. It takes a turn when the universal repentance that is supposed to be brought about by the imminence of the coming Kingdom fails to happen:

This disappointment is central to the life of Jesus; it brings his work up to that point to a close and determines his life anew from there on. If the whole history of Christendom is founded upon the delayed Second Coming [Verzögerung der Parusie], then the first date in Christian history can be taken to be the nonfulfillment of the prophecy of Jesus. This non-occurring event [nicht ereignende Ereignis] marks the decisive, otherwise inexplicable turn of events in the work of Jesus. […] Until the return of the disciples, Jesus turns to the multitudes to force [herbeizwingen] the arrival of the Kingdom. After the disappointment, he intends to bring the Kingdom about by suffering and death on behalf of the many. (OE, 56-7)

In the course of disappointment, the focus of the salvific narrative shifts from a utopian near future to the catastrophe of the cross as the ultimate site of unjust suffering—thereby embodying a demand for solidarity with the suffering that is not a means to some other end than solidarity itself.^[29] While ‛[s]uffering is apocalyptic’ (CR, 213) and hence while any attempt at its sublation in however grand an eschatological vision of ultimate redemption bespeaks a fundamental impotence, the recognition of that suffering and impotence is the condition of possibility of a relation of post-apocalyptic solidarity. This relation can only be contrary to that of instrumental reason, because only in facing what cannot be mended can a social bond be forged out of something else than the continued exploitation and renewed repression of the singularity of suffering. Hence, every intervention that might retain some redemptive efficacy or ‛weak messianic force’ (ÜB, 694) is referred to the paradoxical recognition of its futility.^[30]

Demons and Trolls: Interrogating the Passions of Disillusionment

If, then, there still is a tenable sense of ‛progress in the consciousness of freedom’ from this post-apocalyptic perspective, the consciousness of freedom and the consciousness of the catastrophic failures of meaning and legitimacy coincide in a way that does not seem to leave much space for meaningful action. The proliferation of evil in the social imaginary might be considered a theological symptom of this jamming of the mechanisms of legitimacy.

According to his own assessment, Kotsko’s more recent work ‛chart[s] a somewhat counterintuitive path from constructive theological work to more critical and genealogical approaches’ (WT, xvi). A similar, though somewhat larger arc seems already to have lead his thinking from a social-relational Politics of Redemption, drawn from a comprehensive reconstruction of paradigmatic models of atonement-theory, to a critical engagement with the politics of demonisation, as it marks the current landscape of politics wherever one chooses to look.

The logic of this movement has been brought to attention by René Girard:^[31] for him, the processes of disenchantment and secularisation lead to a tendency in the course of which society becomes less and less capable of producing the reconciliatory effects of the sacred, but the function of demonisation, while always already implied in it, is running into overdrive.^[32] For Girard, the mechanism of sacralization is essentially sacrificial in nature, meaning it symbolically—while ever so violently—exteriorizes what is impossible to make sense of in a given economy of meaning, that is, first and foremost, the forceful nature of the production of meaning itself. While in Nietzsche’s view this sacrificial violence needs to be restored to ‛a sort of second innocence’,^[33] the biblical paradigm of divine justice introduces major complications which coalesce in the concept of evil: originating as ‛a theological tool of the oppressed’ (PW, 4) to substantiate an antagonistic demand for ‛justice from below’,^[34] it marks the refusal to accept their victimisation as simply part of the pre-ethical, natural-cosmological order.^[35] But in the series of ‛tragic reversals’ (PW, 4) that make up Kotsko’s genealogy of theological evil, the demand for justice in the face of evil becomes a demand for justification by way of evil. Wherever the monotheistic ‛anti-statist countersociety’ (PW, 45) structured by the continued opposition of theocracy to earthly political rule^[36] assumes a hegemonic position, the need to justify the necessarily ensuing disenchantment with utopian expectations creates the bad conscience that is the engine of demonisation: the use of freedom as ‛an apparatus for producing blameworthiness’ (PW, 131) in place of the unfulfilled promise of salvation.^[37] The series of disappointments gaping all over the Western grand narrative of salvific history continues in shrinking intervals to raise the stakes of belief^[38]—and every crisis of disenchantment explodes in recurring bursts of demonisation, because belief in evil turns out to be the kind of toxic radiation discharged when the hope of salvation starts to decay, creating a society crowded with demons in proportionality to its being emptied of transcendence.^[39]

The cycles of victim-blaming Kotsko identifies as central to the order of neoliberal capitalism he is describing are the remainders of botched redemptive sacrifices; in resemblance to this, the ultimate value that is the spurious self-undermining freedom to participate in the market represents less of a salvific promise than it is capitalising on the decomposition process of these kinds of promises.^[40]

This seems to result in a progressive diffusion of cynical enjoyment across the political spectrum, not unlike the vision of hell where the fallen angels maintain their participation in the crumbling power-structure by continuing ‛to execute God’s providential plan by punishing the damned for all eternity’ (PW, 167). The politics of spite that has become known as ‘trolling’ seems to be last in a series of demonic reversals of the idea of justice, where collective disillusionment is converted into a gloating enjoyment of dismantling the illusions of others—seeing them ‘debunked’, ‘destroyed’ or ‘crushed by reality’, as the language goes. On the left, a whole array of perversions of that order seems more and more to be legitimising itself as ‘critique’,^[41] while the Trumpian right seems to be hell bent on erasing from within whatever remains of the unreedemed surplus in the Western tradition in which the victims of their bigotry seem to find themselves ‛addressed’,^[42] as if inadvertently. On that note, the German critic Lars Quadfasel remarks:

Because what the racists are least able to forgive the blacks, the Latinas, the other minorities, is not their otherness of whatever nature—it is the fact that they are the last to still believe in the American Dream, that immense and immensely compromised promise of life, freedom and pursuit of happiness. All relevant surveys confirm that nobody in the U.S. has more hope for the future than the members of an oppressed minority. Because they were never really allowed in, they also have no reason to turn their backs in disappointment—harshly unlike the nihilism of Trump’s following, which basically no longer expects anything from life but to make it hell for others.^[43]

The choice opened up here leads back from demonology to the question of what is left of the politics of redemption. Indeed ‛immensely compromised’, it seems to have exhausted itself in an unending series of disappointments, mitigated now only by the comforts of cynicism and vindictiveness—but while attempts at resurrecting lost eschatological illusions is are bound to lead deeper into the cycle of blame and debt, there is a sense in which even our leftover investment in the scrap of legitimacy that is market freedom is fuelled by a genuine, though latent and garbled call to responsibility:

I have claimed that the political theological root of neoliberalism is freedom and have characterized its vision of freedom as hollow. Yet paradoxically, part of the appeal of neoliberalism is precisely the limitation it places on freedom. While from a certain point of view it illegitimately ‛responsibilizes’ us for outcomes that are beyond our control, from another perspective it relieves us of collective responsibility—with all the political conflict and struggle that meaningful collective action brings with it. (ND, 142-3)

Already in The Politics of Redemption, Kotsko relates this foreclosure of the communal meaning of freedom and the logic of possession and debt that it entails to the state of bondage which is the problem at the heart of the theology of atonement:

In place of self-determination, we find ourselves subject to a destructive machine that perpetuates itself without anyone ever fully choosing it. All in all, bondage to the devil represents a thorough renunciation of humanity’s task as the nodal point of a network of relationality based in free enjoyment, above all insofar as it is a renunciation of humanity’s most important freedom—the freedom to consciously work out the form of our life together. (PR, 198)

So as the demonic distortions proliferating across the fabric of Western culture render it progressively unintelligible to any intent of good faith, as one might put it, the Benjaminian task of wresting tradition from the grip of the Antichrist (ÜB, 695) remains tied to a social-relational understanding of freedom—a social bond of love (PR, 162) that does not wallow in the disillusionment of others, but rather becomes answerable to the desire for change in an other and nourishes an openness to change with them. There is probably not much that would not have to be invented anew to that end, but also nothing that would not need to be built from what is left over.

Continue reading with the introduction to this series, essays by Peter Gratton and Jay Martin, and a response from Adam Kotsko.

1. Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2009), 87. Henceforth cited as OE. ↑

2. Architects, ‛Nihilist’, taken from the album All Our Gods Have Abandoned Us (Amsterdam, Epitaph Europe, 2016). ↑

3. One might think also here of Carl Schmitt’s alleged fear of radio waves, signalling the limits of his concept of state sovereignty with regards to the later 20^th century and compelling him to reformulate his famous definition of sovereignty: ‘After the First World War, I said: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” After the Second World War, in view of my own death, I now say: “Sovereign is he who commands the waves of space”’. As quoted in Byung-Chul Han, In the Swarm: Digital Prospects, translated by Erik Butler (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2017), 5-6. Of course, the nuclear fallout is not a medium for the transmission of power, but precisely its disintegration and dispersion. It is the product of the loss of the sovereign’s power to convert that which is by ‛definition beyond anyone’s control’ into the very ‛basis of his power’. Adam Kotsko, The Prince of this World (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2017), 191. Henceforth cited as PW. ↑

4. This becomes especially clear in the last conversation between the scientist Legasov (Jared Harris) and the apparatchik Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgård), who authorised the practical implementation of Legasovs’ assessments. Although initially trying to rid himself of Legasov’s unsettling presence as quickly as possible, Shcherbina ends up as one of his closest allies. In that conversation, Shcherbina bemoans the insignificance of his life‛s work next to that of the scientist, only to be lauded by Legasov as the real hero for his sheer willingness to assume responsibility as representative of collective authority, regardless of his personal merits—as they would be assigned according to the competitive standards of a market economy. ↑

5. See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’, translated by Samuel Moore in cooperation with Friedrich Engels, in Marx and Engels, Selected Works. Volume One (Moscow, USSR, 1969), 98-137, 125. ↑

6. This is how Anna Kornbluh sets the contemporary stakes of social emancipation in Immediacy or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (London, Verso, 2023), 16. ↑

7. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism. Is There No Alternative? (Hampshire, Zero Books, 2009), 65. ↑

8. G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, translated by S.W. Dyde (Kitchener, Batoche Books, 2001), 20. ↑

9. The varying emphases different scholars place on the American, the French or the British revolution as inaugural events of modernity and the analytical and political implications depending on that choice would maybe warrant its own renewed investigation. ↑

10. Adam Kotsko, Neoliberalism’s Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capital (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2018), 36. Henceforth cited as ND. ↑

11. Alex Hochuli, George Hoare, Philip Cunliffe, The End of the End of History: Politics in the Twenty-First Century (Winchester and Washington, Zero Books, 2021), 34. In the last sections of Neoliberalism’s Demons, Kotsko also gestures towards the problem Hochuli, Cunliffe and Hoare centreer their analysis around: ‛[N]eoliberalism will never again appear as the righteous insurgent of the combative period (in which was devoted to the cause of creating the conditions for freedom against the looming forces of totalitarianism, see Kotsko, ND, 115) or as the self-evident order of the normative period (in which was concerned with immanently increasing ‛fairness’, see ND, 98-9). The spell has been broken—or rather, it has collapsed, and therein lies the difficulty. Neoliberalism has lost its aura of inevitability, but at the same time no comprehensive alternative has presented itself’ (ND, 125). ↑

12. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, translated by John Sibree (Kitcher, Batoche Books, 2001), 33. ↑

13. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia. Reflections on Damaged Life, translated by Edmund F.N. Jephcott (London, Verso Books, 2005), 54. ↑

14. Jan Gerber, Das letzte Gefecht. Die Linke im Kalten Krieg (Berlin, XS Verlag, 2022), 45-6 (translations from the German are my own). Henceforth cited as DLG. Gerber’s project of critical historiography, working through revolution, antifascism and anti-imperialism as a sequence of paradigmatic constellations restoring the intelligibility of the historic process for the left and reinvigorating its sense of agency is reminiscent of Kotsko’s genealogical approach to political theology in more than one way. ↑

15. Walter Benjamin, Über den Begriff der Geschichte in Gesammelte Schriften 1:2 (Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp, 1974), 691-704, 698. Henceforth cited as ÜB. ↑

16. Adam Kotsko, What Is Theology? Christian Thought and Contemporary Life (New York, Fordham University Press, 2021), 22. Henceforth cited as WT. ↑

17. ‛The loot is, as it always used to be, carried along in the triumphal procession. Cultural assets is what they are called. They are bound to meet a detached observer in the historical materialist. […] Never are they a document of culture without at the same time being a document of barbarism. And as it is itself not free from barbarism, neither is the process of transmission in which it has fallen from one to another. The historical materialist thus, by measure of what is possible, moves away from it. He considers it to be his task to brush history against the grain’ (Benjamin, ÜB, 696-7). ↑

18. See ND, 27. In Walter Benjamin: Images, the Creaturely and the Holy (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2008), 42, Sigrid Weigel argues—maybe aiming in a similar direction—that Schmitt doubly limits his study of secularized theological concepts to the formal models of analogy and transfer and to the field of state theory, thereby laying claim to the theological heritage from the position of an authoritative emphasis on the state and on the secular without accounting for other modes of relation or for their possible repercussions. Weigel’s Benjaminian position, by contrast, accounts for modernity in terms of the irreducible incompleteness of secularization that necessitates a reflexive ‛double reference’ to secular and theological categories in their non-identity, rather than spuriously obscuring the gap (‛Abstand’) that opens between them (29). ↑

19. See also https://itself.blog/2021/02/24/which-begs-the-question-what-is-political-theology/, consulted 29 July 2025. ↑

20. As Kotsko once remarked in a conversation with Anna Kornbluh, psychoanalysis and political theology for him intersect to the degree that they both deal with the solutions that people construct to problems which are not solvable. ↑

21. Kotsko addresses it further in the eponymous essay in What Is Theology?, exploring the respective formal modes of truth-production that govern philosophy or metaphysics on the one hand and theology in the narrower sense on the other (WT, 1-23). ↑

22. Kotsko associates this with the concept of ‛minority monotheism’ (PW, 19-23). ↑

23. As Max Horkheimer pointed out, this problem of formal instability is irreducible for critical theory, too, because the opposition to dominant forms of social organization is just as much an opposition to common sense, i.e., to what, by habit, lends immediate intelligibility and moral plausibility to a given set of ideas. See Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York, Continuum, 2001), 218. ↑

24. The German ‛Verabredung’ connotes ‛appointment’ or ‛date of a meeting’, as well as ‛agreement’. ↑

25. See Kotsko, Žižek and Theology (London, T&T Clark, 2008), p. 90-1. For another emphatic reading of the singularity of the book of Job as centring on God’s questionable ability to attend to the covenant, see Klaus Heinrich, Vom Bündnis denken. Religionsphilosophie (Frankfurt a.M.l, Stroemfeld, 2000), 101-3. ↑

26. ‛Sinnkatastrophe’ is the concept the German political theologian Johann Baptist Metz introduces to denounce the lack of receptivity to shock and disorientation typical of theological reactions to the Holocaust at his time. See Johann Baptist Metz, Jenseits bürgerlicher Religion. Reden über die Zukunft des Christentums (Munich and Mainz, Kaiser/Grünewald, 1980), 32. ↑

27. Philip Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion. The Price of Piety (London, Routledge, 2002), 212-13. Henceforth cited as CR. ↑

28. ‘Yet a simple reversion to the prophetic paradigm is not available within the Christian perspective, because Jesus has already set the apocalyptic sequence irrevocably in motion through his death and resurrection. Going back on apocalyptic can only mean going back on Christianity as such’ (PW, 71). ↑

29. The crucial caveat here is the rejection of the strain of Christian thought that restores an instrumental relation between the cross and atonement. Kotsko characterizes its key coordinates as ‛redemptive suffering, obedience and surrogacy’, all of which devalue the human agency which solidarity is, arguably, meant to restore, if only conditionally (PR, 29). ↑

30. This recalls Adorno’s famous closing aphorism from Minima Moralia: ‛The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for the sake of the unconditional, the more unconsciously, and so calamitously, it is delivered up to the world. Even its own impossibility it must at last comprehend for the sake of the possible’ (247). ↑

31. The paranoid macro-architecture of Girard’s theory and its attractiveness for far-right and ultra-reactionary political figures poses a set of questions in their own right which cannot be discussed here. See, for example, Adrian Daub, What Tech Calls Thinking. An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), 64-72. Not unlike Carl Schmitt, though, he was sensitive to an array of phenomena that destabilize the divide between the theological and the secular from both ends, as well as to some of the specific forms in which the modern world violently disavows its inner antagonisms. His work thus provides insights that can be fruitfully thought through. ↑

32. See René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1978), 127-9. Since for the Girard this process is already at work in the biblical tradition, he reads the specific ‛texts of persecution’ that come to the fore in the Christian era as symptomatically failed attempts at the production of mythology. ↑

33. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997), 42, 62. ↑

34. Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2010), 49. Henceforth cited as PM. ↑

35. See Assmann’s notion of ‛cosmotheism’ (PM, 39-43). ↑

36. This is where Kotsko’s interpretation of political theology explicitly challenges Schmitt’s tendentious—and, from a biblical viewpoint, counterintuitive—narrowing down of political theology to the legitimizing parallelism between divine sovereignty and the sovereignty of the (dictatorial) state: ‛[T]here is something surprising in Schmitt’s formulation from the point of view of the Hebrew Bible: namely, that the earthly ruler should be comparable to God. As we have seen, it is precisely that possibility that the Hebrew biblical tradition is at pains to avoid. If there is any theological parallel to the earthly ruler within any of the paradigms we have examined, it is not God but his cosmic rival, the devil’ (PW, 43-4). In agreement with Jacob Taubes’ critique of Schmitt, Kotsko points out that his restrictive focus on the ‛catechontic’ paradigm amounts to an elision of those rather hysterical apocalyptic strains of tradition that might actualize the ultimate contingency and indefensibility of a given political status quo. See WT, 117-18. ↑

37. One could be inclined to characterize this dynamic as a pipeline leading from hysteria to paranoia. ↑

38. This logic of ‛doubling down’ for Kotsko is at the centre of what keeps the disaster rolling at compound rates up to the ostensibly secular logic of capital accumulation (see PW, 205-6) and the neoliberal ‛explosion of debt as a form of temporal colonisation, using the future itself as a site of primitive accumulation’ (ND, 122). ↑

39. Conspiracy theories, haunting not just today’s political right but also the left, are the readily laid out form these ‛last-ditch efforts to save an order of legitimacy and meaning that is breaking down’ tend to take, while denying and acknowledging this breakdown at the same time (114). ↑

40. This formulation is a variation on William Clare Roberts’s argument on primitive accumulation in Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2017), 204-9, where he describes the violence and theft involved in the creation of the conditions for capital as the symptoms of a declining old order of property and representation. Capital, then, offers itself as a form of mediation to support brittle social relations, while capitalizing on their instability. ↑

41. It seems to have taken a right-wing intellectual like Alain Finkielkraut to lucidly diagnose this in its own way self-reflexive paradigm of critique already in 1982, working through the phenomena of Holocaust denial and antisemitism on the left. In this context, the reflexivity of critique does not lead to a confrontation of thought with the contingency of human suffering and vulnerability, but is instead turned into another gesture of doubling down with relation to belief and dogmatism: ‛They believed they no longer believed: this conviction made their discourse invulnerable’. Alain Finkielkraut, The Future of a Negation. Reflections on the Question of Genocide, translated by Mary Byrd Kelly (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 41-3. ↑

42. ‛Denn es ist ein unwiederbringliches Bild der Vergangenheit, das mit jeder Gegenwart zu verschwinden droht, die sich nicht als in ihm gemeint erkannte’ (ÜB, 695). (‛Since it is an irretrievable image of the past vanishing with every present that does not recognise itself as being addressed in it’.) ↑

43. Lars Quadfasel ‛The White, White West’ in Konkret 7 (2020), 10-12, 12. ↑

by Nils Richber