ANNA DELLA SUBIN I thought Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, would be a good starting point for our conversation. It’s a funny coincidence that you’re distantly related through marriage to one of the accidental gods in my book, which situates you in a divine lineage.
AGNIESZKA KURANT It’s a complicated genealogical tree. My grandfather’s first cousin married Zamenhof’s grandson, but the families have always been very close. They’re both Polish Jewish. The great-granddaughters of Zamenhof, one of whom lives in Paris and the other in Philadelphia, are close family of mine and involved in Esperanto societies and occasionally give talks. One of them, Hanna Zamenhof-Zaruski, wrote a book about Esperanto and her great-grandfather. When I was a child, it was a great mystery to me, of course, and a big source of inspiration. I became interested in artificial languages, social constructs and fictions of sorts. That was the first point of contact I had, long before I became interested in sociology or anthropology; it was this tangible thing that somebody in my distant family created this artificial language ex nihilo. Later on, I began thinking about how languages can be compared to religions and to other types of collectively shared fictions. Obviously today, there’s consensus about the fact that civilisations or societies are founded on these shared fictions of various kinds, economic or religious, money or laws. The fictions are a social glue, a binding factor for people who never met, and usually they emerge in a way that isn’t exactly controlled. Languages ordinarily emerge naturally and are the least controlled of all. Then this idea of Esperanto arose, this myth of universalism and the question of how we could create a language that would also be a collectively shared fiction or belief. I’m curious, what was your point of entry to Zamenhof?

ADS Zamenhof became deified in the religion of Oomoto in Japan. It arose in the late 19th century as a rejection of the official state Shinto and the enforced divinity of the Meiji emperor. The reason why he, in particular, was deified was because his ideas of universality and the collective imagination spoke so strongly to Oomoto’s prophet, Deguchi Onisaburo. It strikes me that these aspects of why Zamenhof became divine are also so clearly present in your work: the dedication to the collective, to discerning how crowds create meaning and connection. Of all the figures in my book, Zamenhof is most clearly a “god of language”, but in many of the stories, acts of apotheosis often hinge upon questions of language. Sometimes it’s a single word that is the source of myths that coalesce around an accidental god.
AK The concept of universalism – which Zamenhof’s Esperanto tapped into – is one of the most contradictory elements of European cultural legacy, and so today it is being profoundly questioned. On the one hand, the Christianity that established the foundation of universalism treats every human person as equal, but on the other hand, the ideology of universalism was an important part of the colonial project, forcing subjected populations into obedience and destroying their ways of life. Today we realise that forceful unification of identities is an error because in fact, we’re living in a world of differences: differences of gender, ethnicity, belief or spirituality. At the same time, the global, universal nature of challenges that we are facing – such as climate change or massive migration – are threats that humanity can successfully counter only as a unified subject. So we need to form some kind of new universalism.

ADS We’re living through the death of the gods of universalism. No one worships Zamenhof anymore, except perhaps his great-granddaughters.
AK Esperanto was a kind of prescriptive, controlled way of organising universalism in the world. It’s a fact that Esperanto failed at becoming the universal language, and English succeeded, which is very telling. Although we now have a lot of tools, such as AI, to control crowds, to predict risks and collective behaviour, even though these tools seem so capable and we think everything is computable and predictable, in fact, they are just operating on this kind of neoliberal notion of Homo economicus and people being rational beings. Except that we’re all highly irrational and how we make decisions is irrational. Such complex phenomena as the spread of religions or rumours in the world cannot be controlled, though governments may try. Esperanto was a beautiful idea, but it’s just impossible to impose a language top-down.

ADS It’s interesting in the case of Oomoto that, even though the religion still exists today, Zamenhof as a prophet is not a part of it at all. His divinity in Oomoto was an idea that belonged to the founding era, and then vanished.
AK I was struck in your book by how you show how religions can be so porous. What interests me is how religions shifted in response to our economies and the marriage between local religions and capitalism; how much the local conditions on the ground and the spirituality of a given society would help or stand in the way of capitalist imperialism. For instance, in the case of Hinduism and the British Empire, on the one hand, we can see how local beliefs react to a new religion or economy arriving, and on the other hand, we see how capitalism is penetrating these spiritual conditions on the ground. The East India Company realised how spiritual belief could be used for nefarious purposes by economists and politicians.

ADS It makes me think of the cult of Lala Hardaul in the early 19th century. There was this period in the East India Company’s rule when British officers found themselves in charge of the administration of temples and shrines in the lands they had seized. In one incident, some British troops had slaughtered a cow in a grove where the ashes of this nobleman Lala Hardaul were resting, and then a terrible cholera epidemic broke out soon afterwards and was blamed on the British. The British officials began to enforce the idea that everyone should worship Hardaul as the new god of cholera, and build altars to him, to try to stop the epidemic. How the colonisers became so enmeshed in Hindu practices was very controversial among public opinion at home in Britain, especially from the pious Christian corners. But in the case of Hardaul, the British themselves administered rituals for this god and ensured that the religion spread across northern India to keep pace with the spread of the epidemic. The British were really the ones promoting the worship of this accidental god, just to save themselves.
AK In the book you talk about how politics can be taking place in the dreamworld of popular culture. I’m very interested in how, as you write, political power is the ability to create something out of nothing, like a god. I think of colonialism itself as a dream imposed on others. A book that greatly inspired me before I started my cycle of works Phantom Capital was Giorgio Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory. He talks about religion in the form of economy, governance, essentially the economy of divine life, the theological-economic paradigm, which can be situated somewhere at the origin of many categories of modern politics, from the division of power to Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Agamben writes of how the early fathers of the Church organised the nuts and bolts of their religion to use them as instruments of control over populations and the economy. They were asking questions such as, what is the actual status of Christ, the Holy Spirit and God? Should they permit icons or favour iconoclasm? They concluded that it’s better to provide some kind of embodied form of a god, because it’s going to be a better instrument of political power. Agamben describes the earlier depictions of divinity, of a disembodied god – like an empty, ornate throne that is being prepared for the glory to descend – and how later these ideas were pruned into something that could become a better tool of governance. We could ask what is coloniality today – it is completely invisible. The algorithms deployed by corporations colonising our emotional life, our labour and even our dreams are completely invisible.

ADS Have you ever read Peter Brown’s book The Ransom of the Soul? He captures how early Christian ideas were deeply mercantile; how heaven was pictured as an economic exchange, in an economy of salvation. There is that verse in the Gospel of Matthew: “Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust will destroy them.” All these ideas were present in early Christianity, of building mansions in heaven, of it being great real estate in the afterlife. And many people might still think of heaven as an expensive, gilded city and suburbs. It’s a fascinating book.
AK Capitalism has given us this infinity of different things, objects, that we can worship. It’s obviously a form of religion, but there’s this illusion that we’re not living in religion, that we’re living in secular societies. Yet in fact, the principles of our societies are very religious – when you go to a deeper level, there’s something very religious about them.

ADS Would you say that capitalism is the dream that colonialism exported across the earth?
AK Yes, and white supremacy was also a part of that dream. As you point out in the book, white supremacy is kind of an original sin that explains most of human experience, in a way. With capitalism, or proto-capitalism, it’s more complex. As you know I’ve done some work around currencies, the different objects that Indigenous societies used as their own currencies, and the idea of the virtualisation of money or value, virtual capital. Today many people identify this with cryptocurrencies or the digitalisation of currency, but this virtualisation of money started much earlier, with early societies and the circulation of many different objects that functioned as currency, for instance, rai stones in the Philippines and Palau. The stones were often gigantic, quarried on one island and transported on rafts to another. Very often the raft would sink, and people would be killed or wounded, and then even though the stone was at the bottom of the sea, it would still change hands in a virtual way. Somebody would symbolically be the owner of this rai stone buried at the bottom of the sea, and the value of the stones would increase on the basis of how many people died or were injured during the transportation of the stone. So the matters of life, death and freedom have long been closely connected with value creation. These currencies, these objects that were carriers of value and trade, emerged in various cultures that were later colonised by Europe. David Graeber and David Wengrow in their book The Dawn of Everything draw attention to how we could essentially rethink early human societies in a way that creates a radical revision of pretty much everything we know. How European thought was actually inspired by Indigenous perspectives, which were later eliminated from history because they didn’t fit the market capitalism discourse of survival of the fittest. We can look at the origins of all these things, like farming or private property or cities, slavery, democracies and all of civilisation itself through other perspectives and different ways of organising society that were all present in Indigenous communities that lived successfully for millennia without social stratification, private property or agriculture as we know it. We basically only produced discourse in the West that legitimised the liberal or the imperial, colonial order. We have this view of how private property and agriculture emerged, and how this led to social stratification, and so on, but it’s not true. Our idea of linear progress is just liberal ideology. It’s just that the analysis of these archaeologists or anthropologists who had this point of view were written into history, and other opinions were written out because it didn’t fit the colonial order.

ADS To me, your work around all these different phantasmic objects used as currency is so interesting, because it captures this millennia-long burden of humankind, that we’ve had to suspend disbelief, and invest the worth of our lives in all these random objects. I feel like now we’re at a moment where we can’t afford to suspend our disbelief any longer. We’re tired of it. Thinkers such as Graeber and Wengrow speak so well to the turning point that we are at.
AK Yet still we find the emergence of new currencies. In my piece Currency Converter, I juxtapose currencies that circulated in antiquity, from whale teeth to human heads, with new ones that appeared in communities touched by crisis, such as Argentina in 2001 amid food shortages. In Poland in the 1980s, you could exchange toilet paper for vodka or bars of chocolate or tights and shoes. There was this kind of return to hard currency, to objects circulating. We see the development of new currencies especially in closed communities, like kindergartens or boarding schools or prisons, such as Tide detergent, which has been widely used to buy drugs in the US. In many prisons, for example, samples of clean urine and blood are becoming currency because prisoners need to test negative for drugs in their system. And of course, cigarettes are a currency as well. Despite the fact that today over 90% of money in the world is virtual or digital – it doesn’t exist as real banknotes and coins – we still constantly find new, informal currencies. And of course, we have shadow economies, entire global economies running parallel to current markets.

ADS It reminds me of the “Gandhi currency” in my book, which arose in the early 1920s when thousands of people in what’s now Uttar Pradesh began to worship Gandhi as an avatar of Vishnu. The paper receipts for donations to his campaign became a new currency called the Gandhi Note. It was deeply subversive and threatening to British rule because suddenly there’s this currency that is not only rejecting British-imposed ideas of economy, but is also tied to a different god. If the British pound is sanctified by one godhead, which is the Crown and the Church of England, this was a currency bound to a completely new godhead: Mahatma Gandhi.
AK You also wrote about how Queen Victoria became recognised as divine in certain provinces in India because it was obvious: if her face could be on the coin, then she must be a god.
ADS In the 1990s, the portrait of Queen Elizabeth II that had been on British banknotes since the 1960s was redrawn to reflect the fact that the queen had aged. It’s a funny idea, when you think of it, that they felt they needed an elderly version of her, wrinkles and all, to reflect her living presence. But if divinity is immortal, there’s no need to keep up with her age.
AK Or even the queen’s picture at all. Coming back for a second to Agamben, he pointed out how capitalism is the apotheosis, the most successful iteration, of the invisibility of a religious cult – because power in capitalism is invisible. It’s completely dispersed; take, for instance, a retired hedge-fund owner in Florida who loses money in some investment that results in a factory being closed and somebody on the other side of the world losing their job. It’s a butterfly effect from the perspective of ordinary people. The hidden nature of power in capitalism is the ultimate achievement of what was once a religious project of sorts: to have pure invisibility.

ADS Many of the movements in my book have a strong sense of an approaching eschaton or an end of days. Men become messiahs in light of a radical hereafter soon to come. I wonder in what ways capitalism also hinges upon human impulses towards apocalypticism and whether it’s getting more fervent as we have a clearer sense of an ending. Especially with the news today that Antarctica is currently 40 degrees Celsius warmer than it should be.
AK It makes me think of my piece Risk Management, and how we so often fail to understand human irrationality. The way we make decisions as societies and as individuals is often governed by irrational factors, like, what’s the weather on the day of the elections, on which day of the week the election takes place, whether people had sex or a good meal the day before. This plays into collectively made decisions, including around climate change. What all this irrational social behaviour, such as mass hysteria or collective delusions, has in common is that it appears at moments of crisis or economic or political unrest.