This is the text of an address I (Marika) gave recently as part of the KU Leuven annual Thomas Feast on the theme of theology, art, and decolonisation.

For several years now I’ve been haunted by a piece by Étienne Balibar about the relationship between politics and knowledge in the university. Balibar wrote that, ‘We realise now that our ruling class is no longer a bourgeoisie in the historical sense of the world. It does not have a project of intellectual hegemony, nor an artistic point of honour. It needs (or so it thinks) only cost-benefit analyses, ‘cognitive’ educational programs, and committees of experts. That is why, with the help of the pandemic and the internet revolution, the same ruling class is preparing the demise of the social sciences, humanities, and even the theoretical sciences. To accelerate the process, why not have the victim become the culprit (‘Islamo-leftist’, ‘activism’, ‘ideology’…)? It will make things easier.’[1]

It’s a strange time to be reflecting on the relationship between theology, art and decolonisation, as both theology and the arts are struggling for survival in a global war waged ‘on wokeness’ – which is to say, on the side of white supremacy. When things that we love – or that we depend on for our salaries, stipends, or future job prospects – are threatened, it can be tempting simply to knuckle down, to try to cling to what we still have for as long as we can. But I want to suggest that we take our cue from Cedric Robinson, who writes in Black Marxism that his goal in writing the book was not simply ‘a question of outrage or concern for Black survival’ but ‘a matter of comprehension.’[2] How can we understand the relationship between theology, art, and empire?

Two things are often missing from contemporary attempts to grapple with this question, which are frequently both too abstract and not abstract enough. Our conversations often get stuck at the level of theological and artistic content – questions of who or what is represented or talked about. What this misses is both the very particular and material question of the institutions and resources which make theological and artistic expression possible, and then the more abstract question of theological and artistic form. So I want to spend some time sketching out some thoughts on these two areas.

Both the arts and academic theology in the Western world take their shape in large part from the huge social transformations which took place within Europe over the late medieval and early modern period along with the emergence of slavery, colonialism, and racism. I’m going to focus here on the role of universities, both because that’s what I know most intimately and because that’s where we currently are, but the other institutions on which theology and the arts rely – churches, galleries, concert halls, philanthropic and government funding bodies  – were also transformed with or emerged out of these same processes. Universities were born from Christian Europe’s encounters with its others, out of the wealth of cultural, scientific, and philosophical materials which became available in the wake of the fracturing of Andalusia; out of European encounters with the Arab and Ottoman worlds through the Crusades; and from the age of European discovery, conquest, and slavery. They emerged in ways which reflected the needs of growing European nations for clerical and economic administration of emergent European nation states and empires, for legal and theological justifications for new forms of property and dispossession and, connected to all of this, for new frameworks of nation, race and history within which all of these could take place; frameworks created and sustained by theology, art, and culture.

I’ve come to think that theology, art, and the institutions in which these are done, can be best understood in terms of social reproduction. For the most part, that is, theology and the arts tend to function both to repeat and to re-inscribe the hierarchical ordering of the societies which produce them, along with the spiritual and aesthetic values which sustain these hierarchies; and also to rework these values as the societies which they organise encounter new challenges. As Sylvia Wynter suggests, we see within the Western world a gradual shift from ideas about racial hierarchy which were justified in the late medieval period on theological grounds, to a justification of racial order through reason – the predominant frame of the 16^th through to the 18^th centuries  – followed by a hierarchy in which evolutionary and economic success come to measure eugenic perfection from the 19^th century onwards; the belief that economic success indicates not only intelligence but also racial superiority.[3]

Universities exist both to reproduce the forms of knowledge which justify and re-make interconnected distinctions of race, class, and gender and also to reproduce the people who will in turn re-make the world which relies on these distinctions. The crisis we find ourselves in, then, can be understood as the result of the ongoing shifts by which racial and colonial order remake themselves. The second part of the twentieth century can perhaps best be grasped through the framework of neo-colonialism globally and multiracialism in the imperial core: a form of racial order in which, as Denise Ferreira da Silva argues, white Westerners invite non-white people to enter into the supposedly secular sphere of universal values and human rights, both failing to recognise the particularity of our own sense of what is universally human, and relying implicitly on the figure of the inhuman, fanatical or unassimilable other: the barbaric and homophobic Hamas fighter; the misogynistic, violent, immigrant; the drug addicted and welfare-dependent black mother.

Much of what passes for decolonisation in this period, then, can be better described as diversification. The West allows for formal desegregation and decolonisation, welcoming diversity into its ranks precisely in order to maintain its imperial power. We see this reflected in the paradoxes of contemporary theological and artistic institutions: the galleries showing work by black artists with the help of funding from oil companies; universities who refuse to take down statues honouring slave-owners whilst advertising their diversity schemes, running workshops on decolonising the curriculum next door to departments partnering with arms companies; or working to widen access whilst closing off our students’ future possibilities by delivering them into debt. This conjuncture has created challenges for those of us seeking to confront the historical entanglement of theology and the arts with racism and colonial violence. The university is asking us to talk about these things, but not too much; as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney wrote twelve years ago of the subversive intellectual: ‘the university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings.[4]’

And of course, all too often we choose not to confront our institutions but to hold back; to limit what we say and do for the sake of our jobs, our connections, or our future employment prospects. To live in the university is to be formed by its systems and structures in ways that I do not think we are very good at reckoning with, and so it is often our undergraduate students who are able to see with the clearest eyes and speak with the bravest voices. I think we’ve seen very clearly in the wake of October 7^th the limits of the neoliberal university’s commitment to decolonisation. The violence with which universities have shut down even the mildest demands for disinvestment from the machinery of destruction throughout the ongoing genocide of Palestinians has been revealing. I wonder whether we will look back on these protests as a turning point: the absolute failure of liberal institutions to defend free speech, the capitulation to pressure from donors and governments perhaps the death knell for the Western commitment to the multicultural ideals of diversity, equality and inclusion; and perhaps for the university as such.

What comes next of course, looks to be worse. What does it mean to confront the possibility that, as Balibar suggests the golden age of the university is over? The destruction of the university may look like what is currently taking place in the US, where an attempt is underway to systematically dismantle both universities and the arts, or in the UK, where instead of the wrecking ball of Elon Musk’s DOGE, a purportedly left wing government is overseeing the gradual death by starvation of both the university and the arts sectors. What does it mean to recognise that these changes are happening not, whatever politicians, consultants, or vice chancellors claim, out of economic necessity, but out of a groundless insistence, a kind of pure faith in the superfluity of the arts and humanities?

Let’s talk about abstraction. Jacob Taubes suggests that the fundamental shift which takes place between the medieval and the modern world can be understood, if not explained, in terms of the shift from Ptolemaic to Copernican cosmology.[5] Medieval Europeans understood themselves as part of the great chain of being, a cosmic order reflected not just in the ranked ordering of humans and other creatures but in the very universe itself, a hierarchy both literal and figurative leading from the chthonic darkness below the earth up to the celestial spheres and the heavenly beings.[6] This cosmic and metaphysical order gave both theology and art a firm anchor in the universe.

To speak of God, to make art, was to reflect an order of goodness, truth and beauty in which what was said and done on earth corresponded in a very real sense to what was done in heaven. The Catholic Church was right, Taubes says, to see in Copernicus not just a new scientific theory but an existential threat to the metaphysics which grounded both ecclesial authority and artistic representation. After Copernicus, unable to ground spiritual or ecclesial authority in the external order of the universe, Taubes suggests, both philosophy and theology turned inwards: a shift which we see both in the Kantian turn to human categories and in the ongoing struggle of Christian theology to reconcile the now antithetical poles of God and human being.

 This turn inwards is reflected too, I want to suggest, in an inwards turn which we can see in both Catholic and Protestant piety: a new emphasis on inwardness, on intention over action, on self-examination; a proliferation of new mysticisms of internal ascent leading not from heaven to earth but up the stairways of the interior castle to the darkness of God. But art, too, is unmoored, and comes to find its bearings within the individual mind and imagination. Stephen Prickett connects this process both to the spread of literacy and the newly emergent European divide between the public and the private spheres, suggesting that this internalisation of imagination and speculation is seen first in the newly emergent art form of the novel, but appears also in the visual arts and in poetry in tendencies towards realism, idealism, and perspectivalism.[7] Along similar lines, Victoria Nelson has traced the transposition of ancient ideas about underworlds into what she calls ‘psychotopography’, the literary and visual depiction of the underworld as an image of the inner depths of the mind and imagination; an allegorical rather than analogically artistic vision which, she argues, shapes the emergence of the grotesque, the fantastical, and the science fictional in artistic representations in the West.[8]

But these transformations are also racial transformations. As Willie Jennings writes, the emergence of racial slavery and European empire is characterised by a forcible deracination of enslaved and colonised people; the destruction of their relationships with one another and with their particular places and contexts in order to place them instead within a racial scale which runs not from heaven to hell but from white to black.[9] This racial logic is also a logic of property. Enslaved people, Jennings argues, are relocated both into Christian identity and also into ‘the market’. New European notions of the interior self are themselves tied to new orders of property. Balibar finds in John Locke the first full expression of the notion of self-consciousness; a notion which, he suggests, cannot be separated from Locke’s understanding of personhood as property.[10] It’s the opening up of inner space which makes it possible for Locke to understand personhood as self-possession, and this relationship of self-possession which in turn opens up new forms of possessive relation to the external world. It is this understanding of personhood which allows Locke to claim ownership not only of the ore dug up by his own hands, but also of the grass that his horse has eaten, and the turf cut by his servant. It is this interiority, this self-possession which, Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano argue, smuggles ‘a racial anthropology of the human’ into the very heart of Western ideas of personhood, the self-conscious, rational, imaginative and self-possessed person contrasted with racialised non-persons, understood to be lacking in self-consciousness, irrational, and trapped outside of history in the realm of nature.[11]

The racial frame within which this new interiority is mapped is also a historical frame, an account of progress in which the gradual abstraction and spiritualisation of all things which was once worked out along the great chain of being comes now to be mapped across a historical scale. Here theology is placed as one stage along a developmental scheme within which, in its classical form, the pagan deification of nature gives way to the outward law of Jewish monotheism, then the inward law of Christianity, and finally the spiritualisation or internalisation of theology’s claims; the realisation that it is not God but reason which drives forward history.

A similar process of interiorisation and abstraction is at work in narratives of the development of art over history. The novel is placed towards the end of a process of development which begins in myth and fable.[12] What is modernity if not Don Quixote, awakening from a dream of chivalry and romance to discover himself, the protagonist of a work of fiction? The modern art gallery removes works of art from religious, ritual or social function and places them into a blank white box. Something similar can be said of the museum, which marks its difference from the gallery precisely by placing the works it holds into context, thus marking them out from art works proper, at the same time as it insist on the relegation of these contexts to the past. Recent conflicts over the fate of the Benin bronzes, for example, looted by British soldiers from Nigeria, have included contention both over the appropriateness of displaying the bronzes as separate works, rather than within the altars for which they were originally made, and also over the practice of removing them from the daily life of the communities from which they were stolen.[13]

In Black Marxism, Cedric Robinson says that his work began from the recognition that the theories of history which he encountered in Western radicalism were insufficient; that ‘something more than objective material forces were responsible for “the nastiness”’. But this need to understand was ‘not simply a question of outrage or concern for Black survival. It was a matter of comprehension.’ We are talking, then, about a double excess; two forms of desire, of pleasure, connected to the acquisition of knowledge. One thing that has happened with the shift from formal and explicit logic of segregation and empire to the less tangible and explicit order of neoliberal multiculturalism has been a shift towards the language of culture and religion as a justification for racial violence under the banner of the threat to Europe’s Christian heritage, or the decline of Western culture.

This shift implicates both theology and the arts more deeply, at the same time as it has heightened the attacks on both insofar as they have resisted these attempts to weaponise them. I wonder whether this has to do with the ambivalent role of pleasure which is more explicit here than in the sciences, precisely because both theology and the art deal with that which is not quite graspable or containable; precisely because both open up the space to confront what cannot quite be contained within the logic of racial order, alongside the pleasures which sustain it. Both theology and art have to do both with beauty and with suffering, and with the slippage between the two. Both know how to redeem the suffering of others, how to turn it into profit. The cost of interiorization and abstraction is sometimes described as ‘disenchantment’; the reward of centuries of violence and dispossession has been, for both art and theology, a certain kind of crisis of confidence, a loss of faith in the reality or value of what we do. What certain kinds of theological or artistic diversity work have in common with the violence of reactionary politics unfolding around the world is perhaps a need to witness certain kinds of suffering in order to restore a sense of reality or urgency or pleasure to the world. What is the difference between a White House video of immigrants being deported to Guantanamo and the keffiyeh-wrapped baby Jesus in the Vatican nativity scene?[14] In Heidelberg, recently, I went to an exhibition about the history of Orientalism in German art. I found myself in a room full of people looking at racist art, wondering whether we were there to enjoy the racist art, or to enjoy feeling superior to the people who made the racist art, or to enjoy feeling bad about being part of a society that had made so much racist art. What is coming for us now, I think, is a movement of reaction which both feeds on the pleasure of racial violence and very much does not want to think about those pleasures. Perhaps that is a place for us to start.

[1] Étienne Balibar, ‘Politics and Science, One Vocation or Two?’ in boundary2, 15 March 2021 https://www.boundary2.org/2021/03/etienne-balibar-politics-and-science-one-vocation-or-two

[2] Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism (The University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

[3] ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument’ in CR: The New Centennial Review 3.1 (2003), 257-2337.

[4] The Undercommons: Fugutive Planning & Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013).

[5] Jacob Taubes, ‘Dialectic and Analogy’ in The Journal of Religion 34.2 (1954), 111-119.

[6] Cecilio M. Cooper, ‘Fallen: Generation, Postlapsarian Verticality + the Black Chthonic’ in Rhizomes 38 (2022).

[7] Stephen Prickett, Secret Selves: A History of Our Inner Space (Bloomsbury, 2021).

[8] Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets (Harvard University Press, 2001).

[9] Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (Yale University Press, 2010).

[10] Étienne Balibar, Identity and Difference: John Locke and the Invention of Consciousness, translated by Warren Montag (Verso, 2013).

[11] Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano, ‘Race, real estate and real abstraction’ in Radical Philosophy 194 (2015).

[12] Atesede Makonnen, ‘Romanticism and the Novel(ty) of Race in Manu Samriti Chander, The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and Race (Cambridge University Press, 2024.

[13] Barnaby Phillips, Loot: Britain and the Benin Bronzes (Oneworld, 2021).

There are a number of candidates for “the book that predicted Trump,” from Octavia Butler’s eerily prescient near-future dystopia that purported to “Make America Great Again” to Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind. I have occasionally quipped that Creepiness is the book that truly deserves the title. There is a moment of truth there — I do argue that the creepiness trend was in large part about the breakdown of white masculinity — but it was mostly just a joke about the almost overwhelming creepiness of Trump himself. More recently, though, it has dawned on me that another book in the series may deserve some prophetic credit, namely Why We Love Sociopaths. Or rather, it seems to have initially dawned on Aaron Bady, who tweeted about it a few times, and that prompted me to realize that Trump fits my cultural diagnosis in that book in a way that is, dare I say it, almost creepy.

My argument in Why We Love Sociopaths is that the remarkable prevelance of sociopathic characters in 2000s television was a symptom of a broken cultural contract. With the decline of the Fordist order and the rise of neoliberalism, one long-standing narrative about social mobility and merit had been discarded without being replaced by a plausible alternative. This situation gave rise to a growing sense that the only reliable means to get ahead in the system is to cheat. Certainly we can read Trump 2.0, and especially the seeming public indifference to his flagrant violation of laws and constitutional structures, as an extreme outgrowth of that basic tendency.

I organized my account around three types of sociopaths, all of which seem in retrospect to capture the Trump phenomenon in some way. The first category was the Schemer, which I mainly associated with cartoon shows where the characters are attempting to get away with mischief for its own sake. My key example was Eric Cartman from South Park, the strangely charismatic and resourceful child who periodically comes close to taking over the United States and even the world. Though Trump obviously lacks Cartman’s discipline and focus, there is something of the childish schemer in Trump — though that element is less prevalent in the embittered end-state we are now witnessing.

The second was the Climber, who stops at nothing to climb the social ladder. My key examples here was Don Draper from Mad Men. Here the connection to Trump is admittedly more distant, since my analysis was focused on meritocrats of the Obama type, who I argue should not be counted on to challenge the basic terms of the system that enabled their rise. Yet I do start out with an analysis of reality television, which I present as a “dumbed-down” version of the same basic worldview we see in prestige dramas like Mad Men and The Wire, and so I want to claim partial credit due to Trump’s association with reality TV.

The final sociopathic archetype was the Enforcer, the lawman who breaks the law in order to save it. My key example here was Jack Bauer of 24, who murders and tortures his way to stopping terrorist attacks that only see seems to have the insight to predict. Trump himself has identified unambiguously with this category, in his infamous quote (attributed to Napoleon) claiming that it is impossible to violate the law in service of your country. Clearly he is counting on his fellow citizens to decide that it doesn’t matter if he follows the legal niceties as long as he gets things done — nor is there any way to deny that the system as constituted on January 19, 2024, was basically incapable of delivering any meaningful results in a way that would be legible to the public.

Not only does Trump fit, in some way, into all of these categories, but his appeal depends on his ability to pivot among them. His status as a Cartman-esque provocateur gives people license to dismiss his scarier or more nonsensical declarations as mere bluster; his reputation as a (sort of) self-made businessman is key to his appeal; and his promise to “get things done” by any means necessary both emboldens his supporters and cows his enemies into submission. You can’t hold all three of these images together simultaneously, but they often combine in a kind of one-two punch. Cartman Trump seems most useful for such strategies. For instance, the existence of Climber Trump allows people to use the Cartman Trump to dismiss his destructive economic plans as bluster, while the frightening ambitions of Jack Bauer Trump can be rendered more palatable by reference to Cartman Trump. But on the less jovial side, it is precisely the Climber Trump that renders him plausible to many as a Jack Bauer figure who won’t be beholden to political restraints.

While in my conclusion I do offer up the feeble hope that, in a broken system, we might all benefit from being more sociopathic — a counterintuitive soundbite that was for a time picked up by Slavoj Žižek in his public lectures — my overall assessment of this trend is negative. It does offer a diagnostic of our broken system, sometimes even (in the case of The Wire in particular) a remarkably insightful one, and I admit up front that I enjoyed many of these shows (including South Park and some reality TV).

But its dominance of the entertainment field was, I believed, socially corrosive, and I think events have proven me correct. Trump 2.0 is not just politics as entertainment, which is bad enough, but it’s politics as 2000s entertainment, it’s politics as designed by people who watched way too much South Park, 24, and reality TV. I’m not making this up. Literal Republicans say as much, about themselves. Ross Douthat wrote a famous column on the rise of “South Park Republicans,” motivated primarily by a brash anti-PC attitude rather than any positive ideology. Supreme Court Justice Scalia — supposedly “the smart one” — literally cited 24 in an opinion, and the current conservative supermajority are all intellectual heirs of Scalia. As for the influence of reality TV, Trump’s trajectory speaks for itself, and clearly neither J.D. Vance nor any of Trump 2.0’s luminaries are “here to make friends.”

Obviously sociopath TV is not the only cause of Trump — nor am I saying as much. I’m saying the trend itself arose as a symptom of social breakdown, which it then helped to exacerbate. The one thing my diagnosis excludes is social media, for which I can perhaps be forgiven since I was writing in 2012 (and the book was after all about TV). But I think that many of the attitudes inculcated by South Park, reality TV, and 24 — the reflexive anti-PC “provocativeness,” the endless zero-sum competition for “clout,” and the ambient menace of violent fantasies — have shaped the social media field as well.

I’m not sure how much credit I really deserve for this prediction, since the fact of having written the book didn’t help me to predict either Trump’s success in the primaries nor his Electoral College technicality. But then, like most sane people, I had not up till that point given Donald Trump — who was little more than a vapid media phenomenon — much thought. If I had, perhaps I would have seen how well the cultural trends I diagnosed in Sociopaths converged in him. The cost, though, is that I would have squandered some of those precious remaining years and months before I was forced to spend so much of my time and energy thinking about one of the most worthless human beings ever to live. I stand behind that trade-off, even if I had no way of knowing I was making it. And if it turns out that my little book about TV trends, properly contextualized, could have prevented Trump’s rise — all I can do is apologize.