by Adam Kotsko
This is Adam Kotsko’s response to a series of essays on his 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, and essays by Nils Richber, Peter Gratton, and Jay Martin.
I would like to start with a note of thanks to Peter Gratton for proposing and organizing the original conference session as well as this publication,[1] and to all three contributors for developing such rich and creative responses to my work. In different ways, all of them have picked up concepts and themes from my writings and done things with them that I never would have expected—the greatest tribute any scholar or thinker could hope for. In this response, I will try to continue the dialogue with each of the panellists in turn, then provide some broader reflections on the trajectory of my work.
Response to Richber
I will begin with Nils Richber’s contribution, which brings my ideas into conversation with a rich array of other thinkers—particularly Benjamin and Adorno—and draw out the deeper implications of my work. Both Benjamin and Adorno have in various ways accompanied me throughout my entire career. Like any graduate student in the Bush era and any reader of Agamben in particular, I was, of course, steeped in the debate between Benjamin and Schmitt and took the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ as an almost scriptural text. If I have focused primarily on Schmitt himself without as much explicit reference to Benjamin, it has been due not to any antipathy for Benjamin—much less any sympathy for Schmitt—but rather out of some combination of a kind of ‘anxiety of influence’ and a sense that recourse to Benjamin had become too easy and lost some of its critical edge in that historical moment. Richber’s use of those key concepts and quotations makes explicit what I had left implicit.
As for Adorno, I have always felt an instinctive bond with his grumpiness—or, more seriously, his uncompromising critique. I recently completed a summer reading group on Negative Dialectics, and my comrades frequently expressed frustration at the sense that Adorno’s gestures toward an alternative to ‘wrong life’ are so vague and fragmentary. In my own work, I have often wished to take Adorno’s approach even further and omit any mention of a plan of action or positive goal. The addiction to ‘solutions’, the constant (utterly unconvincing) claim that our academic and scholarly work has some direct, indeed radical political pay-off—none of this seems to me to be any different from neoliberalism’s glib utilitarianism, its demand that no problem be mentioned unless it comes pre-packaged with its own solution.
To the extent that I have nevertheless included any articulation of a ‘solution’ or ‘alternative’ in my own writing, I primarily did so in order to prevent readers from projecting a hidden agenda onto my critique. And as in Adorno’s evocations of utopia or happiness, my ‘solution’ or ‘alternative’ has not so much articulated a plan or concrete goal as a desire, or rather the dissatisfaction that motivates the critique itself. This is perhaps clearest in the case of Neoliberalism’s Demons, where I propose that we must abolish the market. I do not claim such a thing is likely or even possible in our lifetimes. But that is the desire that motivates the work—not the desire for a return to Fordism (for which I am not ‘nostalgic’) or for a sensible, realistic reform of capitalism, but for our collective life to be organized otherwise than by the invisible hand. Doubtless, a rejuvenation of the welfare state and a more vigilant regulation of the market would be ‘better’ than our present situation, but it’s not what I finally want. Capitalism, even in its ‘best’ form, is a wrong life. I want something else, even if, as Adorno points out, I am a product of wrong life and would therefore almost certainly find a right life unlivable.
From that perspective, I find Richber’s account of freedom and of the ‘hysterical’ elements of the biblical tradition productively challenging. He articulates more clearly than I do myself how paradoxical it is to claim to found a political order on freedom, a value that by definition seems to exceed any given political order. The same could be said of the biblical demand for justice, which my late mentor Ted Jennings’ reading of Derrida and the Apostle Paul has shown to be excessive with regard to any given legal order.[2] Yet Richber’s reflection on the right-wing reaction and the culture of ‘trolling’ highlight the ways that the demand for freedom can be a demand for violation (the ‘freedom’ to use politically-incorrect slurs or perform Nazi salutes) and the demand for justice can be a demand for suffering and punishment (above all to punish political opponents with one’s own irritating presence).
It is too easy simply to say that this is not the real freedom, not the real justice—but even worse to give up and ‘admit’ that this was the necessary and only possible final result of embracing those values. I think here of Adorno’s evocation in Negative Dialectics of the rabbinic principle that the messianic world will be just a little different from ours, in some unspecifiable, ungraspable way. Adorno connects it to the prohibition of images—to presume to describe the messianic world would be to render it an idol. Yet by the same token, to deny it any reality, to collapse the critical space opened up by that minimal difference, is to give up on the possibility of anything but idolatry.
Response to Gratton
I turn now to Peter Gratton’s paper, the second to evoke Hegel’s ‘owl of Minerva’. Where Richber meant that philosophy or critical thought is always in some sense too late, Gratton is focused more specifically on the implications of the present moment for my analysis of neoliberalism. As he points out, Neoliberalism’s Demons could already have been seen as too late, as many commentators took the first Trump administration to mark the end of neoliberalism. In the book and in many publications in the years that followed, I consistently held that Trump’s first administration was not a break with neoliberalism so much as an extreme parody version.[3] Trump still fundamentally believed that the endless competition of the market would reward the truly deserving, but his racist and nationalistic frame required him to claim that the market was somehow ‘rigged’. What common sense held to be corruption, self-dealing and cheating was, in Trump’s view, necessary to free the market from the shackles of woke globalism so that it would more consistently reward the ‘right’ people—namely, white Americans.
I was committed to that argument because at the time there were many on the left who thought Trump’s break with neoliberalism could provide an opening for a progressive alternative. Slavoj Žižek, for instance, argued that Trump’s disruption of the status quo was preferable to Hillary Clinton’s commitment to neoliberalism.[4] Something similar happened in the early days of the Biden administration, when a segment of the American left commentariat decided that Joe Biden was somehow the next FDR. Again, I argued strenuously for the continuity between Bidenomics and the neoliberal order.[5] Hopefully, it is clear that I have no affection for neoliberalism, nor was I simply trying to maintain the ongoing relevance of my work—I would love for Neoliberalism’s Demons to become obsolete due to the end of neoliberalism. I simply thought that these declarations of the end of neoliberalism represented a foolish wishful thinking.
But now? Even I have to admit that the neoliberal order is well and truly over. Given free rein to indulge his fantasies that white Americans have been somehow cheated, Trump is destroying the foundations of the global order, along with the internal governance of the United States itself. Even if individual leaders, countries and supranational entities continue to embrace the old solutions, they take place in a context that has been irreversibly changed—for the even worse. I love Gratton’s description of the grift economy and its paradoxical embrace of its own naked illegitimacy as the very principle of its legitimacy. It does indeed almost make one nostalgic for neoliberalism. But I must quibble with Gratton’s Big Lebowski quote (which is also one of my favourites). Neoliberals did not have an ethos—they had no true positive vision, only a nihilistic feedback loop of guilt. The transition from neoliberalism’s self-chastisement to the grift economy’s ‘honest’ fraudulence is the transition from passive to active nihilism, from believing in nothing to actively willing nothingness.
This is not to say that the grift economy is ‘still’ neoliberalism in any meaningful way. But neither is it a clean break. Instead, I would propose that the grift economy is a fantasy generated by the very deadlocks of neoliberalism—a fantasy that I analysed in Why We Love Sociopaths.[6] There I argued that the surge in anti-hero characters—in everything from reality shows where contestants who ‘aren’t here to make friends’ to the most prestigious and sophisticated TV dramas ever made—is a response to a broken social order. At the time I was writing it, I hadn’t yet articulated the dynamic of entrapment that is at the centre of Neoliberalism’s Demons, but I did suggest that the growing experience of futility and powerlessness under neoliberalism generates fantasies of transgression that render anti-hero narratives appealing and cathartic.
From that perspective, we might be tempted to say that Trump is the anti-hero who stepped out of the TV and into the real world. But I’m not sure that’s how his supporters, or even Trump himself, understand the situation. Instead, it’s as though the real world has been sucked into the TV. One of the most frustrating and dangerous things about Trump and his followers is that they don’t seem to understand that what they’re doing is real. Trump himself is constantly thinking about how he comes across on television—most infamously after his shouting match with Zelenskyy, which he declared to be ‘great television’—and many of his followers seem to be acting out a part, playing a character they saw on TV (or heard on the radio, or listened to on a podcast). That character is fundamentally a con man, for whom even stating an opinion is not so much an expression of personal belief as a bid to get a certain kind of reaction out of the presumed liberal listener. When they mock the supposed ‘woke’ liberal, they are not mocking them for having incorrect beliefs—they are mocking them for even operating at the level of belief at all. Sincerity, consistency, responsibility, attention to consequences—all of those traits are marks of, well, a mark.
To continue riffing on Gratton’s ideas, then, I would say that what keeps the grift economy going is the continued existence of a critical mass of marks—people who respond to Trumpist jokes and insults as though they are political debate and, more seriously, who continue to follow the laws and constitutional norms that Trump holds in total contempt. In reality, the US Constitution is no longer in force and has not been since Trump took office. Congress has abdicated its duties, the Supreme Court now hands down decrees with no legal reasoning attached, and the executive branch has now become an instrument of Trump’s will rather than the executor of the law. The federal government as we knew it has been effectively dissolved and replaced with the contingent whims of one man.
And I suspect that, to the extent that non-Trumpist media and political leaders are not simply cowards and fools (though they definitely are cowards and fools!), part of the reason they continue to behave as marks and allow the grift to continue is that the alternative is civil war. We could say the same for all the nations of the world, which continue to behave as though Trump is even capable of making binding agreements. The alternative to playing along and hoping Trump goes away is to begin taking radical actions—such as organizing a global trade boycott of the US in an attempt to force Trump’s resignation or removal—and the reality is that Trump is, in fact, in charge of the most powerful military ever to exist in human history and he possesses the nuclear codes. The present regime is indeed extremely fragile, if only because it is so tied to the unique charisma of Trump as an individual, but it still has a gun to the world’s head, and I do not pretend to know how we should or even can collectively respond to that.
Response to Martin
Last but not least, I turn to the one paper that, despite being about Hegel, does not mention the owl of Minerva—namely, Jay Martin’s careful reconstruction and application of my methodology to the virtual absence of the devil in Hegel. The question is creative and surprising, the analysis of Hegel is nuanced and rigorous, and the conclusion—that Hegel was motivated to ‘disappear’ the devil to avoid admitting the possibility for a rival to the state—is convincing. More than that, for me, the conclusion is very satisfying in that it represents a continuation of my genealogy of the devil into modernity, showing how the initial ‘displacement’ of the devil (in the transition from the patristic ransom theory of the atonement to Anselm’s theory of substitutionary atonement) gives way to the attempt to eliminate him altogether.[7]
This disappearance of the devil happens not only in Hegel, but in essentially all liberal Protestant theology, even up to the present day. It would be too easy to read that move as a simple demythologization, an attempt to purge the tradition of outdated superstitions. The refusal to think an enemy is the refusal to think an alternative to the progressive narrative of history, in which liberal global governance and divine providence enter into an Agambenian ‘zone of indistinction’. I remember once, as a first-year MA student at the most left-wing seminary in the US, asking aloud, ‘Wait, is “the image of God” for liberal theologians just the same as “human rights”?’ Coming from a Barthian background, I found the conflation of the theological and political blasphemous, but my fellow students mostly accepted it as obvious. From that perspective, Barth’s strident critique of liberal theology is an attempt to reignite the rivalry between God and the state—though by way of reigniting Protestant polemics against Roman Catholicism rather than by making significant recourse to the figure of the devil as such. Even his famous declaration against natural theology in Church Dogmatics I/1—‘I regard the analogia entis as the invention of the Antichrist’—seems to represent a conscious effort to avoid mentioning Satan.[8]
Continuing on the theme of grad school nostalgia, I was pleased to see Jay’s references to Thomas Altizer in the conclusion. Altizer was a major mentor of Ted Jennings, and therefore a kind of intellectual grandfather to me. Despite his many personal idiosyncrasies, Altizer remains an indispensable point of reference for the study of religion in the modern world. This is due not only to the often-astounding insight of his reading of key figures, but because Altizer is perhaps the only thinker who takes modernity’s sublation of Christianity seriously as a religious experience—one that he himself underwent, in his profound mystical intuition that the traditional God of Christianity is identical with Satan. But as in Barth’s case, for Altizer the political valence is again displaced. Altizer’s declaration of God as Satan does not concern the state, but rather simply us, all of humanity. By this he means that modern humanity is set free through the death of God and the explosion of the Holy Spirit into the world. If Barth displaces the rivalry of God and state onto a rivalry within the sphere of theology itself (the struggle against Roman Catholicism), Altizer displaces the modern experience of divinity into the sphere of literature—namely, James Joyce’s declaration in Finnegan’s Wake: ‘Here comes everybody’.
At this point, I am tempted to say that the truest heir of Hegel is actually Carl Schmitt, whose singular focus on the sphere of the state is unparalleled. Unlike Hegel, however, in the final chapter of Political Theology, Schmitt does revive the devil as a symbol for anarchism and the radical left, both of which aim to destroy the conditions for sovereignty and therefore to abolish the political once and for all.[9] Perhaps here we finally have a fully secularized apocalyptic theology, one in which God could actually lose. Later, in Theory of the Partisan,[10] Schmitt goes even further, granting left-wing insurgents their own unique form of political agency and suggesting the possibility of a global civil war. Obviously, Schmitt viewed Hegel himself as the apotheosis of the liberal triumphalism he despised, yet I wonder if the development from Hegel to Schmitt is more organic than Schmitt would feel comfortable admitting. I am thinking here of Hegel’s theory of the rabble, as an element that is necessarily generated by modern society and yet completely inassimilable.[11] Hegel’s philosophy of history and the state reached their mature forms at just the moment that the modern state seemed most triumphant and the rabble most politically inert. Had Hegel been able to witness the developments of even the next few decades, the devil may have put in a better showing in his work.
Conclusion: On Freedom
As for us, the devil remains sadly relevant to our politics, and I am pleased that my work has helped to provide some unexpected and productive angles for reflection. I am also pleased that the relative emphasis of the panellists reflects my own assessment of where the heart of my work lies: in The Prince of This World and Neoliberalism’s Demons. And, as Gratton pointed out in response to an audience question at the original conference session, at the core of both of those works is the ambivalent value of freedom.
When asked what I mean by the term, I responded that it refers to the indisputable, irreducible fact that human beings act in surprising and unaccountable ways. By this I do not mean to imply that freedom is a form of pure randomness or spontaneity—in fact, I believe that it is precisely our capacity for reasoned deliberation that allows us to interrupt the instinctual sequences that make up our evolutionary heritage. For the sake of political analysis, however, the important thing about this notion of freedom is that it proves that no project of total political control can ever succeed. My critical analysis of the Christian tradition shows that even the most radical vision of total control, predestinarian monotheism, cannot help but testify to the irreducibility of creaturely freedom, which resists God’s providential plan from the very first instant of creation through the endless wastes of an infernal eternity. If even the almighty God cannot secure complete submission, then neither can the program of neoliberal governance via the passive-aggressive nudge, nor the Silicon Valley aspiration to total algorithmic manipulation of human behaviour, nor even the Trumpist attempt at domination through a kind of perversely mocking coercion. All three projects have done tremendous damage, and the latter two look set to do even more. But the irreducible fact of freedom—a force so strong that not even the gates of hell can prevail against it—means that their ultimate failure is ontologically guaranteed.
As for the world that emerges from that failure, there is equally no guarantee that it will be better. The task of making it so is our unique privilege and responsibility as free human beings. Admittedly, it is a privilege and a responsibility that most of us prefer, most of the time, to shirk and deny, and perhaps I have been guilty of contributing to that through my preference for the critical over the constructive. Yet at the end of the day, the driving force behind my work is to remind my readers that the future has not been written—the present is open, just as every past moment was. The fact that our predecessors have most often chosen disastrously is undeniable, as is the fact that the world they have collectively built for us has closed down innumerable redemptive possibilities. But our very outrage at their monstrous failures testifies that their path was not natural, inevitable, or predetermined—and neither is ours.
Continue reading with the introduction to this series, and essays by Nils Richber, Peter Gratton, and Jay Martin
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Earlier versions of the papers in this roundtable were given at the Association for Philosophy and Literature conference in August 2025. ↑
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See Theodore W. Jennings, Jr., Reading Derrida / Thinking Paul: On Justice (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2005). ↑
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See, for instance, Adam Kotsko, ‘Trump as Neoliberal Heretic’, The Philosopher 107:2 (Spring 2020). Available at https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/kotsko. Consulted 28 September 2025. ↑
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Slavoj Žižek, ‘Slavoj Žižek on Clinton, Trump and the Left’s Dilemma’, In These Times (November 7, 2016). Available at https://inthesetimes.com/article/slavoj-zizek-on-hillary-clinton-donald-trump-and-the-lefts-election-dilemma. Consulted 28 September 2025. ↑
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Adam Kotsko, ‘The Many Deaths of Neoliberalism’, The Bias (August 9, 2021). Available at https://christiansocialism.com/neoliberalism-joe-biden-covid-demons-theology/. Consulted 28 September 2025. ↑
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Adam Kotsko, Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide to Late Capitalist Television (New York, Zero Books, 2012). ↑
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See Adam Kotsko, The Politics of Redemption: The Social Logic of Salvation (New York, T&T Clark, 2010), especially chapters 5 and 6. ↑
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Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics Volume I: The Doctrine of the Word of God, Part 1, translated by G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh, T & T Clark, 1975), xiii. ↑
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Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, translated by George Schwab (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005), chapter 4. ↑
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Carl Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political, translated by G.L. Ulmen (New York, Telos, 2007). ↑
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See Frank Ruda, Hegel’s Rabble: An Investigation into Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (New York, Continuum, 2011). ↑
