Biblical studies scholar Erin Runions shows how biblically coded discourse and affect is used to try to contain, localize, and hierarchize bodies for capital. She considers how the Bible, and in particular the figure of Babylon, has been used to promote the market conditions and political subjectivities (the subject of interest) that legitimate graduated sovereignty, while still maintaining the fiction of unified national sovereignty. The Bible is deployedin ways that both sacralize and naturalize the securitizing and regularizing processes of biopolitics. Seemingly disconnected and even countervailing impulses—e.g., nationalism, militarism, the focus on the family, involvement in globalized markets, graduated sovereignty, and the economized political subject—fit together and are made to seem coherent in the national discourse through reference to the Bible and to Babylon/Babel.
This talk is sponsored by the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life; the Department of Religion at Barnard College; the Department of Political Science at Columbia University; and the Department of Religion at Columbia University.
Now in its third year, the Religion and Politics in American Public Life lecture series is co-coordinated by Professors Courtney Bender, Jean Cohen, and Josef Sorett. It is jointly sponsored by For more information on the series, including future speakers, go to ircpl.org/americanpubliclife.
Erin Runions is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Affiliate Faculty in Gender and Women’s Studies at Pomona College. Her most recent book is The Babylon Complex: Theopolitical Fantasies of War, Sex and Sovereignty.