RT Article
T1 Seeing is Feeling

JF Biblical interpretation
VO 22
IS 4/5
SP 473
OP 502
A1 Kotrosits, Maia
LA English
PB Brill
YR 2014
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1496070623
AB Most scholarship of the last few decades on the book of Revelation has focused on its colonial conditions and heated, even forceful, political engagement, making conflicting conclusions about to what extent it “reproduces” or “resists” imperial ideology. Of particular focus has been the striking image of the lamb on the throne, an image that ambiguously imparts both conquest and victimhood. This essay builds on and steps to the side of this work by addressing the image of the lamb on the throne as an expressive and emotionally, rather than ideologically, ambivalent image. Placing this image alongside other affectively rich spectacles in Revelation’s context, I suggest that the enthroned lamb gives voice to conflicted feelings about imperial life: attachment and loss, extravagant dreams of sovereignty and victory, as well as the painful realities of vulnerability and subjection, all in complex inter-implication.

K1 Book of Revelation
 : the Lamb
 : affect theory
 : visual imagery
 : ideological criticism
 : colonial ambivalence

DO 10.1163/15685152-02245p06