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Apocalypse Delayed: Katechontic Thinking in Late Putinist Russia

David G. Lewis

in Russia's New Authoritarianism: Putin and the Politics of Order

This chapter explores the role of messianic thinking in Russian foreign policy. Russia’s international role was increasingly expressed in terms of exceptionalism, reviving a long historical tradition ... More

This chapter explores the role of messianic thinking in Russian foreign policy. Russia’s international role was increasingly expressed in terms of exceptionalism, reviving a long historical tradition of messianic thought in Russian political philosophy and spiritual thinking. This messianism, however, also borrowed from more modern philosophical trends, including Carl Schmitt’s interpretation of the biblical figure of the katechon. In Russian reinterpretations, Russia is the katechon, playing a role as the ‘restrainer’ in the international system and acting as a bulwark against global chaos.Less

Contemporary Turmoil: Posthegemonic Epochality, or Why Bother with the Infrapolitical?

Gareth Williams

in Infrapolitical Passages: Global Turmoil, Narco-Accumulation, and the Post-Sovereign State

In this passage the contemporary is the eclipse of a notion of political authority grounded previously in the representation of the ‘mortal God’ of Hobbesian sovereignty. It is also, however, its ... More

In this passage the contemporary is the eclipse of a notion of political authority grounded previously in the representation of the ‘mortal God’ of Hobbesian sovereignty. It is also, however, its permanent reactionary regurgitation in the form of political demagoguery, brute force, and biopolitical absolutism. We live in the exhaustion of the classical and modern structure of the katechon, or Christian metaphysics of restraint. This challenges in particular the validity of the notion of hegemony. Through specific discussions of contemporary and past political thinking (Lenin, Gramsci, Cacciari, Laclau and Moufee, etc.), this passage moves in the direction of the infrapolitical as an absolutely necessary proposition in the wake of the apotheosis and closure of the era of bourgeois revolution and the integral nation-state. It is a thinking attuned to an existential analytic that cannot be exhausted in the history of our modern biopolitical representation.Less

Heidegger’s Paul

Ryan Coyne

in Heidegger's Confessions: The Remains of Saint Augustine in "Being and Time" and Beyond

This chapter provides a detailed look at Heidegger’s 1920–1921 course entitled “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion,” in which the writings of the apostle Paul play a crucial role. Setting ... More

This chapter provides a detailed look at Heidegger’s 1920–1921 course entitled “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion,” in which the writings of the apostle Paul play a crucial role. Setting this course in its philosophical context, it argues not only that Heidegger turned to Paul’s earliest writings in search of a novel understanding of temporality, but that the eschatological model of temporality Heidegger equated with Christian religiosity revolves curiously around the Pauline “katechon”-an obscure figured identified in the Second Letter to the Thessalonians as “holding back” the Second Coming of Christ. In demonstrating that Heidegger’s Paul lays the blame for the delay in Christ’s return squarely upon the Christian believer, this chapter contends that Heidegger’s initial readings of Christian theological sources, and his focus on eschatology, generates an extreme version of personal guilt that ultimately haunts his subsequent attempts to describe selfhood and human existence philosophically in terms of being-guilty.Less

More on the Idea of Empire

Massimo Cacciari

Alessandro Carrera (ed.)

in Europe and Empire

After the end of the great conflicts of the twentieth century, the State (meaning the State according to the European model) is assuming more and more the role of the katechon, the power that “holds ... More

After the end of the great conflicts of the twentieth century, the State (meaning the State according to the European model) is assuming more and more the role of the katechon, the power that “holds back,” elusively mentioned by Paul in his 2 Thessalonians. By turning to merely administrative functions, the State undergoes a process of de-politicization that nonetheless preserves, as much as it is possible, the status quo against the creative-destructive forces of globalization. What politics beyond the State? That has become the dominant political problem of our era. Neither Ernst Jünger’s World State nor Alexandre Kojève’s Latin Empire are viable forms. The Roman form of an empire established on a pact among citizens and a constant widening of citizenship could still be workable, but the only power existing today that could be capable of such a vision, namely the United States, relies on technology and focused military interventions rather than “great politics.” Europe, which could still play a vital role, lacks the political will and its political subject is still missing.Less

Empire and Katechon: A Question of Political Theology (from Paul, 2 Thessalonians 2)

Massimo Cacciari

Alessandro Carrera (ed.)

in Europe and Empire

The term katechon (“he who holds back” or “that which holds back”) appears in Saint Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians. The passage has generated a substantial literature from the early ... More

The term katechon (“he who holds back” or “that which holds back”) appears in Saint Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians. The passage has generated a substantial literature from the early Fathers of the Church up to Carl Schmitt who resurrected the term in the twentieth century. The katechon is the power that holds back the triumph of the iniquity that will be followed by the Second Coming of Christ. Therefore, the katechon slows down the apocalypse. Cacciari joins the ranks of Schmitt scholars and Italian philosophers such as Roberto Esposito and Giorgio Agamben in applying the katechon to political theory with a strong historico-genealogical approach. He reviews all the most important assessments of the katechon to conclude that the katechon is very likely to be the Church itself, which in its coming to terms with secular political institutions always needs “more time” before the end of time.Less

Katechontic Democracy? Carl Schmitt and the Restraining Mediation of Popular Power

Hjalmar Falk

in Constituent Power: Law, Popular Rule and Politics

This chapter analyses how Carl Schmitt’s apocalyptic political mythology can provide a critical form for grasping contemporary challenges to the tradition of popular democratic rule. Schmitt’s ... More

This chapter analyses how Carl Schmitt’s apocalyptic political mythology can provide a critical form for grasping contemporary challenges to the tradition of popular democratic rule. Schmitt’s conception of an ‘illiberal’ democracy is based on seemingly contradictory elements of both ‘populism’ and ‘technocratic elitism’, attempting as it does to wed the popular enthusiasm of mass democracy to a concrete order through the principle of a shared homogeneous identity and the somewhat paradoxical idea of a ‘charismatic bureaucracy’. This amalgamation of authoritarianism and popular sovereignty emanates from what can be described as Schmitt’s ‘katechontic impulse’, a name derived from a Biblical figure introduced by St Paul. The Katechon is the principle or the person that restrains lawlessness or ‘the lawless one’, often interpreted as Antichrist and his reign before the end of days. The chapter shows how Schmitt’s apocalyptic imagery of an ordered popular sovereignty can be illustrated by this politico-theological mytheme and further investigates the implications thereof for contemporary democratic politics.Less

Narco-Accumulation: Of Contemporary Force and Facticity

Gareth Williams

in Infrapolitical Passages: Global Turmoil, Narco-Accumulation, and the Post-Sovereign State

This passage examines narco-accumulation—or illicit globalization—as a contemporary modality of war with specific existential connotations. It challenges previously sovereign national territory, ... More

This passage examines narco-accumulation—or illicit globalization—as a contemporary modality of war with specific existential connotations. It challenges previously sovereign national territory, which is now reconverted into the ritualized performance, living geography, and paramilitary end-game of post-katechontic force. For example, it realigns Mexico’s military-economic relation to the North, while also redefining and intensifying Mexican paramilitary force’s relation of dominance over the impoverished political spaces of, and the migrant bodies that flee from the social violence in, Central America. The national territory of Mexico becomes the new border, the tomb of the proper, the negation of space by space. The passage ends with the image of contemporary Central American migration to the U.S. as the site for an infrapolitical thinking of existence, capable of undermining the domination of the political over existence. This is the clearing promised throughout the book.Less

Zoē aiōniōs: Giorgio Agamben and the Critique of Katechontic Time

Nicholas Heron

in Agamben and Radical Politics

This chapter illuminates Agamben’s understanding of time, which is central to his ‘messianic’ approach to politics, by tracing the semantic history of the term aion (which gives rise to the modern ... More

This chapter illuminates Agamben’s understanding of time, which is central to his ‘messianic’ approach to politics, by tracing the semantic history of the term aion (which gives rise to the modern ‘eternity’). Heron shows that aion initially referred to an immanent life force before gradually shifted in meaning to denote an unending duration associated with a transcendent and unchanging being. This latter understanding of eternity became central to the Church, which justified its existence on the basis that the messianic event was delayed (a vision that was secularised by the modern state). The link that Agamben draws between eternal life and the ‘coming politics’ in the final pages of The Kingdom and Glory is an attempt to undermine this institutionalise the messianic event and restore the idea of eternity for use in the present.Less

Carl Schmitt

Sergei Prozorov

in Agamben's Philosophical Lineage

The work of Carl Schmitt has been a key influence on Agamben’s work, particularly his more political writings. Especially in the Anglo-American context, the discovery of Agamben’s work after the ... More

The work of Carl Schmitt has been a key influence on Agamben’s work, particularly his more political writings. Especially in the Anglo-American context, the discovery of Agamben’s work after the publication of the first volume of Homo Sacer coincided with a major revival of interest in Schmitt, both of which were partly motivated by the exceptionalist tendencies in US domestic and foreign policy in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. At least in the first wave of reception of Agamben’s writings,1 his reinterpretation of Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty in the Foucauldian biopolitical key was the best-known and most controversial aspect of his work. And yet Schmitt has been a strange kind of influence. His work hardly influenced Agamben philosophically, as Heidegger’s and Benjamin’s did on the level of ontology or method. Agamben did not try to ‘correct or complete’ Schmitt the way he did with Foucault’s work on biopolitics and government. Finally, Agamben did not really debate with or criticise Schmitt’s theories the way he did with Derrida. While Schmitt’s political thought was certainly employed in a variety of ways after Homo Sacer, Schmitt was not really engaged with as a philosophical interlocutor. Less

The Return of Political Theology

Peter Uwe Hohendahl

in Perilous Futures: On Carl Schmitt's Late Writings

The fifth chapter goes back to Schmitt’s 1922 Political Theology to frame the author’s late return to this theme. The chapter argues that this return underscores the centrality of political theology ... More

The fifth chapter goes back to Schmitt’s 1922 Political Theology to frame the author’s late return to this theme. The chapter argues that this return underscores the centrality of political theology for Schmitt’s late work in general. It means to show that Schmitt in his debate with the theologian Erik Peterson and the philosopher Hans Blumenberg in Political Theology II emphasizes the need for theological foundations. They can be found in the New Testament. As a consequence, he stresses the continued relevance of political theology.Less

“The Antichrist as an Imminent Political Possibility”: Sergei Nilus and the Apocalyptical Reading of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

Michael Hagemeister

in The Paranoid Apocalypse: A Hundred-Year Retrospective on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

This chapter highlights the role that the Russian Sergei Nilus played in framing the Protocols in a religious and apocalyptic discourse. Nilus, for a long time, was not a religious man, but ... More

This chapter highlights the role that the Russian Sergei Nilus played in framing the Protocols in a religious and apocalyptic discourse. Nilus, for a long time, was not a religious man, but eventually he “succumbed to the apocalyptic mood that was that was taking hold of the country.” Rising to prominence with his historical writings (both his own and epigraphic), Nilus had a broad antimodern reading public that relished “Doomsday scenarios” as the answer to revolution brought on by Jews and Freemasons—henchmen of the Antichrist. Indeed, as Nilus presented it, the text was an apocalypse, a revelation: its publication revealed the workings of Paul's katéchon (the mystery of lawlessness), and the text sounded the alarm at the imminent appearance of Antichrist.Less

Rubble, Ruins, and the Time before the End: Paul, Tertullian, and the Roman Empire as Katechon

Julia Hell

in The Conquest of Ruins: The Third Reich and the Fall of Rome

The introduction to chapter five presents a summary of the author’s analysis of the emergence of the rubble and ruin gazer scenarios in part one. The author defines the central features of these ... More

The introduction to chapter five presents a summary of the author’s analysis of the emergence of the rubble and ruin gazer scenarios in part one. The author defines the central features of these scenarios: their theatrical staging, their focus on the objects of rubble/ruin, their scopic nature and power constellations, and their inscriptions of imperial time. She then explores the Roman conceptualization of imperial time as the disciplined border zone of the time before the end. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben, Reinhart Koselleck, and François Hartog, she focuses on Paul’s concept of the katechon as the delayer of the end and Tertullian’s reading of the Paulinian katechon as the Roman Empire. The chapter ends with Augustine recalling Polybios’s scene.Less

Katechon: Carl Schmitt’s Theology of Empire

Julia Hell

in The Conquest of Ruins: The Third Reich and the Fall of Rome

In chapter twenty-four the author explores how Carl Schmitt evolved into the neo-Roman theorist of empire, imperial mimesis, and imperial imaginary. With his katechontic theory of empire and imperial ... More

In chapter twenty-four the author explores how Carl Schmitt evolved into the neo-Roman theorist of empire, imperial mimesis, and imperial imaginary. With his katechontic theory of empire and imperial mimesis, Schmitt sums up the entire neo-Roman imperial tradition. Polybios developed his ideas about imperial endtimes at the moment when Rome conquered Carthage. Schmitt’s idea of the restrainer who postpones the empire’s end emerged in the early 1940s, when Werner Best, the leading theorist of “great space orders” in the SS, argued that the Nazi empire might be in the process of repeating Rome’s fall. The chapter concludes with Schmitt’s return to his concept of the Pauline katechon in the 1970s.Less

Religion and Empire Carl Schmitt’s Katechon between International Relations and the Philosophy of History

Michele Nicoletti

in International Law and Religion: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

Carl Schmitt’s thought on international relations appears from the outset to be profoundly informed by his reflections on the philosophy of history. In this the German jurist seems to be fully ... More

Carl Schmitt’s thought on international relations appears from the outset to be profoundly informed by his reflections on the philosophy of history. In this the German jurist seems to be fully consonant with the climate of his time, of that generation which saw the 19th century ‘concert of Europe’ crumble beneath their feet into the great tragedy of European civil war which began with the First World War. The collapse of the world order thus almost inevitably leads him to question the meaning of history and to be influenced by the ideas of the end of the world and of history, and by the symbols and metaphors connected to this theme, which have been part of Western culture for centuries.Less