What does it mean to chant “No Kings”, as so many did over the summer of 2025?
At the most basic level, to utter “No Kings” is to say that one does not want a king or a monarch. In the context of the 2025 summer protests, this slogan referred to worries over the US Presidential Office breaching its constitutional limits and assuming some kind of quasi-monarchical status. To become “King” (capitalization intended), in this understanding, is to acquire a kind of transcendence: not only transcending the constitutional limits of one’s elected official position, but perhaps even transcending all legal limits such that one sits outside—indeed, beyond—the checks and balances of the state. In political theological terms, it is to acquire a quasi-divine status of the “Sovereign”, what Carl Schmitt notably defines as an exception to the existing legal and political order at the outset of Political Theology (1922).
Political theology, at least as understood by Schmitt, is concerned primarily with the figure of the sovereign—with the one “who decides on the exception” (Political Theology, p. 1). As we attend to the “No” in “No Kings”, to the “No” that is said to a King qua figure of sovereignty, we may think of the political proclamation of “No Kings” as a kind of anti-political theological or negative political theological statement.
To speak of “negative political theology” is, in this regard, to take a critical stance towards such a preoccupation with sovereignty. At one level, it may be to negate or resist any attempts to assume a divine status that is undue to any created being—what one might call political theological “idols”.
In this sense, “No Kings” would be “no one should ever become King” (or at least “no one but God”). It would be to declare that there ought to be an absence of any king-like figure: the “No” in “No Kings” refers to a lack—to an idealized lack of false gods pretending or trying to be or become God. To say “No Kings”, then, is to assert that there should be no figure of sovereignty, that the non-being or non-existence of a sovereign figure is the principle which one seeks to achieve.
However, “No Kings” could also mean much more than saying “No” to the transgression of constitutional powers. There may be another, perhaps more radical, understanding of the assertion of “No Kings”, where the principle which drives the one’s political actions and political assertions is not the “lack” or “nonbeing” of some sovereign figure, attending not to figures of sovereignty (or their absence), but to figures of non-sovereignty, to figures who are not sovereign.
Perhaps we may speak of this as a different kind of “negative political theology”: one which focuses not so much on sovereign political figures who are most like God or try the hardest to be like God, but figures who are, politically speaking (or even political-theologically speaking), most unlike God. Instead of saying “No” to “Kings”, such a negative political theological understanding of “No Kings” would attend to those who are not kings or indeed to those who are themselves “No Kings”—to those, one might even say, who embody the assertion and principle that there are “No Kings”.
As opposed to the aforementioned non-being or non-existence of a sovereign figure, such an alternative understanding of the “No” in this negative political theology would have as its principle and focus of analysis the being or existence of a non-sovereign figure. Instead of political structures of “sovereignty” and the possession of power or even omnipotence, such negative political theology would attend to those who lack sovereignty, power, and potency, those whom the Black critical theorist and poet Fred Moten calls figures of “insovereignty” (“Blackness and Nothingness”, 774).
In Moten’s account, this sense of “insovereignty” is exemplified in Black existence, wherein one not only does not possess any political power but also any legal rights or social standing, such as the “social death” in which many people found themselves under chattel slavery. Such is a mode of being which Moten enigmatically describes as a “nothingness”, a paradoxical kind of “social life” that he finds amidst the “social death” of those beings who possess nothing.
Much more could be said about the construal of “nothingness” we find in contemporary Black thought and its implications for theology and philosophy, especially with regards to the metaphysical conception of God as “being” itself. But, for our current purposes, it suffices to note that what we find in Moten and others is a shift from sovereignty or even “being” to insovereignty or “nothing” as the paradigmatic features of political thinking or even political theological thinking, one which may give rise to a new way of understanding or even practicing “negative political theology” as a mode of critique.
In his influential explication and expansion of Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty, Giorgio Agamben speaks of the figure of the homo sacer as one who, like the sovereign, exists as an exception to the socio-politico-legal order. But unlike the God-like King or sovereign who enjoys power above and beyond the order of the state, like the slave, Agamben’s homo sacer is a figure of “insovereignty” distinguished—and indeed excluded from the political order—by its lack of power, rights, and sovereignty. As Agamben writes, “the sovereign and homo sacer present two symmetrical figures that have the same structure and are correlative: the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and the homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns” (Homo Sacer, p. 84).
In other words, whenever someone tries to become an absolute sovereign, to make oneself “King” or “God”, such an act of sovereignization brings about the de-sovereignization or in-sovereignization of everyone else, such that everyone else all become insovereign with respect to this newly self-enthroned, quasi-deified, sovereign King.
Considered in light of such a negative political theology of insovereignty, to utter “No King” is not only to say that “no one should ever become King”. Instead of—or in addition to—this, it is to assert that “We are No Kings”: It is to align or even identify oneself with those who lack power, those who are excluded and marginalized from the socio-political order. Understood in this negative political theological way, in this via theologica politica negativa,“No King” is no longer just a political slogan; it becomes a way of life, a mode of being that one inhabits.
