The Babylon Complex

Contributor: Erin Runions Erin Runions is a professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Pomona College. She explores how biblical teaching and citation shape political subjectivity, gender, sexuality, U.S. national sovereignty, and biopolitics. Her most recent book is The Babylon Complex: Theopolitical Fantasies of War, Sex, and Sovereignty (Fordham University Press, 2014). Her next book is on the Bible and the prison-industrial complex.

“Erin Runions’ remarkable book explores various ways in which the biblical figure of Babylon, or Babel, circulates in contemporary U.S. politics and culture… her book should be read by any scholar interested in the role of the Bible in the contemporary world.” --- “…Erin Runions has written a closely argued, verbally incandescent, and deeply insightful study: The Babylon Complex: Theopolitical Fantasies of War, Sex, and Sovereignty. Her project is to trace the complex and contradictory set of interpretive frames that surround the figure of Babylon, illustrating how its invocation sustains claims to sovereignty and shapes the potential for critique. In the process, she stakes out a new, activist role for critical scholarship wherein analysis ranges widely from ancient text to contemporary interpretive context, tracking the conspiracy of power and knowledge production to condition the political field.” --- With fearless insight and incisive prose, Erin Runions offers a breathtaking tour de force of astute biblical-political-philosophical analysis that persistently reframes the intertwining of biblical interpretation and biopolitics through the figure of Babel/Babylon. As she shows, the pervasive theopolitics of American discourse, right and left, is informed by an eschatological fantasy sanctioned by the twin edifices of bible and law. This engrossing account of biblically inflected defenses of US sovereignty places biblical interpretation at the center of critical theory and critical theory at the center of biblical interpretation. A must read for anyone interested in the current state of theodemocratic exceptionalism, in the unpredictable and shifting meanings of biblical texts, and in the possibility of listening, finally, to an other.---—Jennifer Knust, Boston University --- Erin Runions reveals Babylon to be an ambivalent but perversely indispensable figure for theopolitical discourses girding contemporary biopolitics. Modeling a queerly sublime ethics of reading, The Babylon Complex sets an agenda for a next generation of biblical scholars while demonstrating what cultural studies gains from engagement with biblical studies.---—Jennifer Glancy, Le Moyne College --- The Babylon Complex is unlike anything else in the fields it engages and crosses; its scholarship is unique, top-tier, and challenging, offering much savvier reflections upon biblical heritages and uses than what one often finds in the current theoretical 'turn to religion.' In short, it is both relevant and interdisciplinary, two terms too often used, but seldom as aptly as they are for this truly excellent book.---—Joseph A. Marchal, Ball State University --- “Runions’ scholarship is phenomenal. It’s stunning that she can sustain her rigor over this variety of cultural and political contexts. That she does is a testament to her breadth as a scholar, and her critical acumen.”---—Jay Twomey, University of Cincinnati