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  • The Devil's Perverse Reversals:Kotsko's The Prince of this World
  • Caroline Alphin (bio)
Adam Kotsko, The Prince of this World. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. 225. pages. $20.52 (pbk). $66.92 (hc). ISBN 9780804799683

A common theme among conservative ideologues is that Christianity, its followers, and its values are under attack in the United States. Some Christian populations view a push for insurance to provide birth control, a broadening of the definition of marriage, an elimination of prayer in school, and even the use of "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas," as signs of the secularization of the United States, and thus, as attacks on its Christian foundations. An all too common response to these anxieties is to dismiss them as simply the result of ignorance, lies, or delusions. Yet, according to Adam Kotsko in The Prince of this World, to dismiss these anxieties is to misunderstand their theological origins. In particular, he argues, they reflect a victim-blaming logic that the modern secular order has inherited from a medieval theological paradigm. The vulnerability expressed by some conservative Christian populations over threats to the legitimacy of God's will are nothing new, and to dismiss them is to ignore the insidious consequences of conceptual transfers (modern political subjectivity, social contract theory, racialization, sovereignty, and freedom) from Christian theology to the current political situation. Kotsko examines these transfers and their consequences by way of an elegantly written and well-structured genealogy of the Judeo-Christian Devil.

Early, in The Prince of this World, Kotsko highlights an important reversal in the role of the devil, which is perhaps its strongest contribution to contemporary politics: "the devil, having originated as a theological tool of the oppressed, has become a weapon of the oppressor."1 As he traces the reversal of the figure of the devil, Kotsko defamiliarizes some of the core values of the modern western secular world (freedom, responsibility, sovereignty, the social contract, and justice), placing his book firmly within a long tradition of post-modern political theory that has grappled with neoliberalism, racism, capitalism, and sovereignty, etc. Where Kotsko may differ from other interventions in this tradition is in his claim that we must first recognize that the modern world is "Christianity-shaped," and that we cannot build an alternative to it without coming to terms with this "explosive inheritance," and further, without considering this inheritance as part of a solution. In other words, in order to build a better alternative, we must know what it is that we need to tear down first.

Kotsko offers a careful genealogy of the entangled forces at play behind the development of the devil's story. His approach borrows primarily from Giorgio Agamben's and Michel Foucault's adaptations of Nietzsche's genealogical methods. Agamben's The Kingdom and the Glory,2 in particular, offers a model for synthesizing a genealogical method and the epistemology of political theology. Kotsko writes that "like the present study, then, The Kingdom and the Glory is a genealogical investigation that aims to expose the unexpected [End Page 577] theological roots of modern political concepts" (164). Kotsko distinguishes a series of "paradigms" (Deuteronomistic, Prophetic, and Apocalyptic), framing each as an attempt to grapple with the problem of evil, chronologically in the first part of his book, and then thematically in the second half. The way Kotsko organizes his analysis of the development of the devil, for example, a chronological and then thematic examination of theological paradigms and their reversals and paradoxes, allows him to offer, as I suggested above, his strongest contribution to political theory: namely, his argument that the devil is a weapon of the oppressed.

Like Agamben, Kotsko accepts Carl Schmitt's basic proposition in Political Theology that "all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts…" (12). However, Kotsko connects Carl Schmitt's position that sovereignty is defined by deciding on the exception (e.g., a natural disaster, an internal conflict, an economic crisis, etc.) to earlier Jewish, and later, early Christians' attempts to legitimize God's will/sovereignty through the exception. The exception points to moments where God/sovereignty asserts control over events that are uncontrollable (disasters...

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