This is an excerpt from the introduction to the book Political Theology Reimagined (Duke University Press, 2025). Edited by Alex Dubilet and Vincent Lloyd, the book grew out of a series of posts on the Political Theology Network blog. Bringing together twenty contributors working across regions, religious traditions, and strands of critical theory, the book aims to open new horizons for thinking, writing, organizing, and conjuring.
“Love always means non-sovereignty,” asserts Lauren Berlant. “I think sovereignty badly conceptualizes almost anything to which it is attached. It’s an aspirational concept and, as often happens, aspirational concepts get treated as normative concepts, and then get traded and circulated as realism.”
These lines condense a knot of challenges for political theology. There is the challenge of genealogy: critically undoing what appears as natural and necessary by tracing the hidden normative investments that make it function. There is the challenge of sovereignty and its others: theorizing politics that acknowledge the materialized dreams and realities of statist modernity no less than the ways they are never as exhaustive as they claim. There is the challenge of conceptual distinction and scale: the problem of sovereignty is not exclusively that of the state but of anything to which it is ascribed—an individual or a citizen, a comportment or a disposition. And there is the challenge of the persistent lives and afterlives of the sacred: to eschew sovereignty, a turn to love, but this turn takes place in the ineradicable shadow of theology, since what is God if not love, at least in the Christian tradition that shapes the Western imagination (and its detractors)?
Tracing subterranean interactions and conceptual links between sovereignty and its others, reflecting on the impact of theological and other violent legacies on the psyche and bodies of the living and the dead, and doing so via surprising sites (be they textual, historical, or material): this is some of what political theology has to offer.
The Cree poet Billy-Ray Belcourt concludes his 2017 collection This Wound is a World with Berlant’s definition of love and adds, “Love is a process of becoming unbodied; at its wildest, it works up a poetics of the unbodied.” There are no clean divides: on the obverse side of political sovereignty and the body politic one does not find love purified of politics. To be bodied or unbodied does not just happen. Settler colonialism, white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, capitalism: these are the interlocking forces that body and unbody.
The rigor of poetry does not merely name these abstractions, nor does it allow them to remain abstract. Instead, it renders them visceral, somatic. A poetics of the unbodied explores what happens when the distinctions between corporeal and incorporeal, the living and the dead, cease being obvious conditions of intelligibility. The claim to have a body remains within an analytic of possession and sovereignty, but intimacy with unbodying renders bodies inseparable from historical violence and from text: “sometimes bodies don’t aways feel like bodies but like wounds.”
Woundedness is world-making, so the title seemingly announces. But Belcourt resists converting unbearable and inescapable loss into potentiality and salvation by inviting the reader into the ambivalent attachments and desires that make this wound not a lack but a source for a poetics where attention is trained to structure ecstasy and where ecstasy shatters structure. The world remains in the wound, and the wound attests to the world’s violent undoings and to the violating promises—whether of sovereignty, love, or salvation—it carries.
There is a persistent liminality at the heart of the psycho-geography of Belcourt’s poems that undoes the kind of heroic centering that words like potentiality and world might suggest. As the lyrical voice unapologetically locates itself, “I am from the back alley of the world”; “we need not to pretend that love was to be found in wasteland like these.” In back alleys and wastelands, the dead are not left to bury the dead. There, a communion takes place between the dead who have afterlives and the living who live in intimate proximity to death. The past is not past but persists in violent fragmentation, never easily sublated or superseded despite the claims of theologico-political narratives of salvation and progress.
The vision of the poet constructs a conceptuality that binds and unbinds, that diagnoses the violence of the past but does not stop there. Rather, it intensely weaves the past with the present, the ghosts of the dead with the living. It links the holy and the material, the mythical and the natural, violence and ecstasy. Untethered from sovereignty, from a vertical chain between God and the sky and the king on the throne and the soul as individuated and possessed, the political and theological link and unlink, igniting thought and the imagination.
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No longer is political theology a branch of Christian thought. No longer does it name the contested legacy of fascist legal theory. Today, political theology is a field engaged across a variety of disciplines, from cultural studies to anthropology, from comparative literature to Black studies. As we become increasingly aware of the dangerous and liberatory entanglements of religion, secularity, and power, political theology names a crucial site for research and teaching, discussion and collaboration. Yet misconception (it’s Christian, it’s Nazi, it’s authoritarian) about this burgeoning field remain prevalent.
What holds together the field of political theology? Scholarly fascination by and critical suspicion of the secular and its ontology. Creative exploration of the imbrications and intertwinements of the theological and the political. Rigorous investigations of legitimation and delegitimation, and how religious operations haunt these processes. Commitment to insurgent struggles for liberation, to impossible justice, to assertions of freedom antagonistic to the reign of law and order. Nuanced attention to the force of conceptual narratives for our understanding of what constitutes religion and the secular, the theological and the political. The imperative to attend to religious ideas, practices, and imaginaries and the way they are inflected by anti-Blackness, patriarchy, caste prejudice, and colonial legacies. The power of genealogy to constellate history anew and to make visible ambivalent attachments in our critical practice.
In short, political theology grapples with religion in all its complexity and with critical thought in all its complexity, combining them in ways that trouble regnant sureties and commonplaces.
The sites of insurgent thought and activity to which contemporary political theology turns were already practicing political theology. If we attend to the words, images, and actions of movements struggling against domination the world over – say, Zapatistas in Mexico, Dalit organizers in India, Aboriginal organizers in Australia, land reformers in South Africa – we will surely find religion and politics mixing in ways that are complex and generative, and that shift what we think counts as religion and what we think counts as politics. And the organic intellectuals formed by these movements, whether Houria Bouteldja in France or Essex Hemphill in Black America, must certainly be doing political theology.
What does a volume like Political Theology Reimagined that pushes outward from a Eurocentric, post-structuralist frame in feminist, queer, Black, and decolonial directions add when political theology is already happening, in sophisticated ways, outside of that narrow frame? And would additional scholarship – more attuned to the lives and afterlives of religion and theology – in cultural studies, anthropology, literature, and other fields where the turn beyond post-structuralism happened a generation ago not suffice?
Our contention is that political theology, whatever its limitations, has become a potent site of inquiry that has generated sophisticated conceptual tools and theoretical perspectives on the complex imbrications of religion and politics that are not simply available in proper disciplinary spaces. It has developed critical approaches to rigorously conceptualize the historical junctures and disjunctures of the theological and the political, which have continued to structure the colonial, racialized, capitalist modernity we inhabit.
This interdisciplinary conversation has produced inventive ways to interrogate the status of religion: its historical formation as a concept out of Protestantism and liberal modernity, its continuities and discontinuities with Christianity and its visions of particularism and universalism, its status as the default object of critique for secular philosophy or of management for the secular state. Political theology has provided a critical vantage on the ways that religion is shaped by power but also on the ways that forms of power are shaped by disavowed religious genealogies, and it has taught us to attend to assemblages – material and ideal, historical and contemporary – that weave together the theological and political across the long histories of modern religion and the state.
Our hope is that critical perspectives developed within political theology can help attend to texts and archives of those struggling against domination by rendering theoretically visible how forms of insurgency and counterinsurgency frequently enact political and religious dimensions in intricate ways. And its inventive modes of reading can unsettle common assumptions about the discourse of religion, which limit our approach to those texts and archives and their power to insurgently challenge regnant terms of order. Showcasing these expanding conversations can attune scholars across the critical humanities to political theology in ways that deepen and problematize their own scholarly and political itineraries.
Whether in Christian theology or political theory, Continental philosophy or the critical humanities, political theology often brings with it a radical edge. Those who think that the powers that be get things right most of the time, or need only the occasional gentle nudge, rarely gravitate toward political theology. The field grows out of crises, times in which fundamental assumptions come in play, times when the order of the world loses its solidity.
You will find a crisis at the center of whichever origin story for political theology you choose. There was a crisis for Augustine in the late Roman empire. There was a crisis for Carl Schmitt in Weimar Germany. There was the post-1989 crisis of the left that generated novel political-theological theorizing by the likes of Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Žižek; after September 11th, this line of investigation only intensified, now becoming dominant in the US academic context as well. In each case, the unsettling of the order of the world necessitates a rethinking of the foundations, and this could not avoid a reengagement with the theological dimension. In each case, the wealthy and powerful sought to exploit crises for their own ends, at times using the lexicon of political theology. Fending off these attempts, whether Hindutva or Christian nationalist or Zionist, requires developing the tools to cleave insurgent political theology from the political theology of order, purity, and domination.
This narrative of crises is worth interrogating: Crises for whom? Are intellectual crises the same as political crises? It does, however, track an important truth, that struggles born of vulnerability engender creativity. The experimental itineraries of Political Theology Reimagined grow out of the 2008 financial crisis, which made North Americans and Europeans aware of financial precarity in new ways, and the decade of social movements that followed: Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, Standing Rock, #MeToo, the fights for public education and prison abolition.
These movements captured the imagination of young scholars who, with increasing frequency, have one foot in the academy and another in activism. Social movements challenged scholarly fields to ask new questions, to create new tools, and to orient themselves in a clearer way to calls for justice. They have opened new theoretical terrains and conceptual problem-spaces, spanning from riotous insurgency to the commune form and destituent power. Scholars of color, first generation scholars, and queer and trans scholars entered conversations in political theology motivated not only by theoretical concerns but also frequently by existential concerns—concerns about life and death, faith and hope, violence and domination, for themselves and for their communities. A shift of perspective occurs: the state is decentered, and political theology’s focus shifts to insurgent theories, affects, and vernaculars opposing domination.
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Mapping normative rhythms and their interruptions, recovering voices and paths of antagonism, conjuring counter-plagues: these are the critical imperatives for the riotous times of the present. The aim is not to appropriate something to the proper name of political theology, but rather to explore the way that shards of the theological persist, across their lives and afterlives, into the present, and thus undermine all facile claims to secularity and all easy definitions of religion. For this, we must listen differently to voices, narratives, and archives, remain critically attentive to operations of justification and rationalization, construct novel constellations of texts and concepts, experiment with the many folds of transcendence and immanence, explore the archives of riotous insurgency across the catastrophes of a counterinsurgent modernity.
If the entanglements of sovereignty and sense, of the normative and the imaginary, prevent the formulation of a unified vision of justice, this does not prevent the poets from voicing different senses of this impossibility. Let us end with their words. Belcourt: “I mouthed the word justice / and then forgot how to speak.”
Copyright Duke University Press, 2025
