Political Theology and the Concept of the “Katechon” (part 1 of 2)

Recently a short article of mine was recently published on the excellent Genealogies of Modernity blog. I repost it here, merely with the aim of including some of the footnotes and references that were precluded by that format.

To look up the verb katecho (κατέχω) in a Greek lexicon is to encounter a long and complex entry. Among others, we are likely to notice the following definitions: “to hold back or withhold; to hold down, restrain or keep in check; to put off or delay; to cover, conceal or wrap; to have control over or seize possession of.”

The rich polysemy of the word is instructive when we turn to its various occurrences in the New Testament, and in the Second Letter to the Thessalonians in particular (2 Thess 2:6,7). In this Epistle, the Apostle Paul is responding to rumors about the imminent return of Christ. He reminds the Christian community in Thessalonica that this event will not take place so long as a divinely-appointed restraining force, the katechon, remains in place. Only when this is lifted or removed will there be a final confrontation between Christ and “the lawless one,” followed by the end of the world itself. In this text, then, the katechon seems to refer to a power or entity that is holding back or deferring the eschaton, and whose operation is currently active in the midst of human affairs.

The actual referent of the term katechon, this power or entity that restrains the end of time, is less clear. No explanation is offered by Irenaeus, who was the first to quote the Scriptural text itself, nor by Hippolytus. Tertullian proposes a more concrete idea in his Apologeticum when he suggests it refers to the Roman empire itself.^[1] “The tremendous force which is hanging over the whole world, the very end of the age, with its threat of dreadful afflictions…is arrested [retardii] for a time by the continuance of the Roman empire,” he writes. Since Christians have “no desire to experience this event,” and indeed “pray that it may be deferred [differri],” it follows that “we favour the continuance of Rome.” For Tertullian, the Roman empire, being in its essence law, opposes that which is lawless and therefore can be equated with the katechontic force identified by the Apostle. The alignment of worldly imperium with divine providence that is implied here prefigures a number of subsequent political theologies that seek to baptise an earthly sovereign as exclusive guarantor of social order (Eusebius of Caesarea; the Catholic authoritarianisms of de Maistre and Donoso Cortés; Thomistic-Maurrasian integralism).

But there is an alternative strand of interpretation. Here, the katechon is understood not as referring to a secular power, but rather to the activity of God or the spiritual jurisdiction of the Church. Intimations of this are found in Augustine and Chrysostom (although both expressed caution about their exegesis of these verses), as well as in Theodore of Mopsuestia and Theodoret of Cyrus. Later, Calvin makes this idea explicit when he suggests that it is “more probable” the Apostle was announcing “that the light of the Gospel must be diffused through all parts of the earth before God would thus give loose reins to Satan.”^[2] Holding back the eschaton was therefore an expression of the mercy of God in allowing time for more people to be converted to faith. The effect on those who understand this should be a renewed energy for mission and good works in the world.

A tension between these two interpretations—the katechon as referring to a temporal or to a spiritual power—is evident throughout the history of Christian thought. That tension has been transposed onto the thinker who has done more than anyone else to revitalize the concept for contemporary political theory: Carl Schmitt.

Writing towards the end of his career, Schmitt proposes that the concept of the katechon provides the key to all his writing: “for more than 40 years I have been collecting materials on the problem, and for all these years I have looked for a human ear that would listen to this question and understand it—for me, it is the crucial question [Kernfrage] of my political theology.”^[3] Although it is likely he first encountered the idea in the 1930s via his friend Wilhelm Stapel, a political journalist and member of the German nationalist Conservative Revolutionary Movement, the word began to appear in his own work in the 1940s. For example, in a 1942 article published in the weekly Nazi propaganda newspaper Das Reich he refers to the katechontic role of the German imperial project, whose role was to “prevent the long-overdue apocalyptic end of times from already happening now.”^[4] The term then features prominently in his post-war writing, especially in his diaries and in his important 1950 book The Nomos of the Earth.

But what valency does Schmitt claim for this obscure concept in relation to his own political theory?

A direction to answer to this question is often found in an observation made by Jacob Taubes. Scarred by his experience of the disintegration of the Weimar system in the 1920s and 1930s, Taubes argued that Schmitt had one central intention in all his work, namely, “that chaos should not rise to the top, that the state should remain. No matter what the price.”^[5] For Taubes, “this is what Schmitt later called the katechon, which is the restrainer [der Aufhalter] that holds down the chaos that pushes up from below.”The assumption here is that Schmitt deploys the concept of the katechon in order to explain the right of a political entity, a nation-state or an empire, to avoid chaos by enforcing order within its boundaries.

Understood in this way, the concept presents itself as a tool for genealogical analysis. For if this is correct, then political order, wherever it is found, must be related in some way to the presence of a constituted power or entity able to restrain the threat of disorder. As Schmitt himself notes in an entry in his Glossarium of December 1947: “we have to be able to name the katechon for every epoch in the last 1948 years. The place has never been unoccupied, otherwise we would not be present anymore.”^[6] So whilst there is no doubt that Schmitt’s initial reference is to the German imperialism of his day, it would appear this analysis could be applied to any period of world history, from the Ius Gentium of the ancient Roman legal system to the development of Westphalian sovereignty, and even to the contemporary political project of European union.

However, as other commentators have pointed out, not least in Massimo Cacciari’s provocative study,^[7] there is something curiously reductive about the concept of the katechon as a genealogical tool. For do we expect nothing more of sovereign power than that it should merely hold back or restrain that which threatens disruption and disintegration? What resources does this provide for societal progress toward solidarity and maturity in attaining the common good? As Roberto Esposito puts it, “in delaying the explosion of evil [the concept of the katechon] also at the same time delays the final victory of the principle of good. The triumph of evil is held in check, true, but the divine parousia is also delayed by its very existence. Its function is positive, but negatively so.”^[8] That is to say, there seems to be an ambiguity about the deferral that the katechon enacts. The threat of violence that is associated with the future is certainly held in abeyance. But as a corollary, the future is denuded of its power to infuse the present, inspiring a sense and a direction in time. The contemporary moment becomes one in which nothing can really happen because the sense of historical becoming, that has its truth only in the eschaton, is indefinitely deferred.

What follows is a curious depoliticization of the contemporary political order. If the eschaton is perpetually to be deferred, the present moment finds itself vulnerable to capture by alternative narratives that offer a direction to history that is fixed and immutable, whether these be economic, social, cultural or political in form. By definition, totalizing narratives like these offer no sanction or encouragement to conceive of alternative futures to the ones they themselves prescribe. As Schmitt himself put it, under a façade of promoting human freedom and choice, modernity tends to generate a “neutralization” and a “depoliticization” of the political domain. This, perhaps, explains the sense of claustrophobia felt by many who experience the neoliberal hegemony of the West. After all, as Frederick Jameson famously quipped, “nowadays it seems easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”^[9] There is no reason to think anything significant has changed even under the shock of the global pandemic. For as Adam Tooze notes in his recent book Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy,^[10] what is remarkable about the last two years is not so much the actions taken by political administrations around the world, which have often been quite radical in size and in scope, but that in retrospect we can see these were intended not to build a new society but to preserve the old one.

“I believe in the katechon,” wrote Schmitt in 1947, “it is for me the only possibility as a Christian to understand history and find it meaningful.” Yet, as we have seen, when the concept is handled by contemporary theorists it takes on a disappointingly conservative hue. The deferral of the eschaton does nothing but clear the stage for other narratives that are ready to take its place, themselves offering to provide the structure and direction to history time that was previously allocated to providence. There seems to be little room here for political activisms that might seek to challenge the status quo.

So what remains for the katechon today?

In the next article, I will argue that the concept can indeed be redeemed. But only when it is referred back to its original theo-logic and to the (Christian) eschatological vision that first powered it. Indeed, I will show that it is precisely in these terms that the concept has been taken up and embraced in a most surprising way by a number of continental philosophers.

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[1]   Tertullian, Apologetic Works (trans. Joseph Daly & Edwin A. Quain, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997), chapter 32, section 1, p.88.

[2]   John Calvin, Commentaries on the Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Philippians, Colossians, and Thessalonians (trans. and ed. John Pringle, Edinburgh: The Calvin Translation Society, 1851), p.333.

[3]   Alexander Schmitz & Marcel Lepper (eds.), Hans Blumenberg, Carl Schmitt: Briefwechsel 1971-1978 und weitere Materialien (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007).

[4]   Carl Schmitt, “Beschleuniger wider Willen” in Das Reich, April 19, 1942; republished in Land and Sea (trans. Simona Draghici, Washington: Plutarch Press, 1997), p.8, 43.

[5]   Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul (2004, trans. Dana Hollander, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), p.103.

[6]   Carl Schmitt, Glossarium. Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947-1951 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991), p.63 (cited & trans. in Peter Szendy, 2016, ‘Katechon’ in Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon).

[7]   Massimo Cacciari, The Withholding Power: An Essay on Political Theology (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

[8]   Roberto Esposito, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life (trans. Zakiya Hanafi. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011, 2002), p.63).

[9]   Frederic Jameson, ‘Future City’ in New Left Review No. 21, May–June, 2013, p.76.

[10]   Adam Tooze, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy (London: Penguin Random House).

Latour and the non-space and non-time of Modernity (part 3 of 3)

This is the third of a three-part series. See here for parts one and two.

Just like the concept of “utopia”, the concept of “achronia” (literally “being without time”) functions in an equivalent way for Latour.

Globalization not only dislocates or displaces human beings in space, but it also does so in time, interjecting them into what Latour calls an experience of “temporal aridity” (see here). To put it another way, since the globalization project presents itself as an inevitable forward march in history, it does not brook a social imaginary that might lead to alternative futures than the one it prescribes. Globalization is a drama-free zone.

Those who inhabit Modernity therefore inhabit a world whose flow of time has already been determined. The present moment, with its rich potential to be the crucible of something wholly new and emergent, is held in abeyance. It is not too far to suggest that the time of globalization is ‘without time’, because it is envisaged as proceeding along a temporal grid that nothing and no-one can alter, as if its ultimate triumph was guaranteed by some kind of sovereign diktat. The ability of local actors to represent and define an account of the world by means of ‘trials’, which themselves take place in the flow of time from past to present to future, is foreclosed. “l’histoire peut avancer plus lentement que prévu; mais elle ne peut pas radicalement changer de direction. Au sens propre, la cause que nous servons est transcendante à l’histoire” (my translation: “history may advance more slowly than you expected; but it cannot change its direction in a radical way. In the literal sense, the cause we serve transcends history”, see here, pp.232).

So what are we to conclude?

For Latour, the concepts of utopia and achronia describe the framework within which contemporary Western existence is invariably contained. Within this framework, the contingencies of the present are over-determined by a spatio-temporal conditioning effect that is imposed ‘from above’. For Latour, this is instantiated even in the contemporary phenomenon of globalization, concerning which he offers the revisionist interpretation that it is not so much an organic, interconnected network as it is a regressive, hegemonic grid. To be globalized is to engage in a continual flight away from the world ‘down below’ in the vain attempt to find a space that will be free from interference and a history whose end has already been guaranteed. The ideological and teleological structure that undergirds this is essentially religious, because it is derived by proxy with a realm of transcendence and with the attributes credited to the being of God by classical theism. As Graham Ward has pointed out: “globalization, like secularization, is proving to be an ideology—that is, a myth masquerading as natural law, even divine providence” (Ward, 2008, ‘Religion after Democracy’, p.203). Latour’s critique thus stands alongside other recent evaluations of globalization as a religious phenomenon, especially Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000) and Commonwealth (2009).

Latour and the non-space and non-time of Modernity (part 2 of 3)

See my first post on the topic here.

Latour’s appropriation of the concept of utopia is quite different from what I described in my previous post.

Latour understands utopia to be a representation of a certain spatial conditioning effect that is imposed upon the human subject by the epistemological regime of Modernity. Unlike the social theorists mentioned in my previous post, then, Latour dismisses the possibility of utopia functioning as a resource by which alternative futures might be mapped and by which constructive political forces might be motivated. On the contrary, he shows how the discourse of utopia, wherever it is found in the contemporary West, refers to a territory that has already been mapped out for its inhabitants and thus contains within itself no internal dynamic for change. The idea of utopia does not facilitate a social imaginary in which a different configuration of human existence to the one currently being lived might be thought and through which progressive action to achieve it might be unleashed. Instead, it functions to neutralize all thought of an alternative future, thereby de-animating the associative ‘political’ forces that would be required to bring it about. For Latour, utopia is therefore subservient to the teleology of Modernity, whose end is always to abridge and curtail the generative complexity of the ‘political’ movements of plural actors in favour of an account of the world that is imposed upon it ‘from above.

Latour’s description of utopia in this negative sense develops out of his analysis of globalization, which he interprets as a vehicle for the epistemology of Modernity in general.

What is globalization? It is a logic of commerce and exchange that promises a large and unambiguous net gain for everyone. Because globalization allows different kinds of producers and consumers to inter-connect across borders, so the celebratory narrative goes, all would ultimately enjoy the benefits of progress and growth that globalized economic and trade networks would facilitate.

For Latour, however, that narrative is idealized, its promise of some kind of integrated wealth distribution being ultimately unrealizable. This is because, far from mobilizing associative forces, globalization has in fact already defined territories within which its various stakeholders must operate, thereby foreclosing the possibility that these same stakeholders will define any other future for themselves than the one they are currently experiencing. For all its expanded borders, globalization imprisons us all within a territory. Globalization thus imposes a utopia upon those who live within its reach, in the negative sense that I defined in my previous post.

In order to illustrate why globalization functions in this way, I will consider some of the expressions of utopia that Latour identifies and describes in our contemporary globalized world.

The 1% of Global Elites

The first is the utopia of the global elites, the 1% who are able to profit from the wealth generated by globalized networks of capital flow. Whilst their rhetoric has warmly embraced the concept of globalization as an opportunity for the material benefit of the whole, this minority section of society was really leveraging globalization for its own end and had no will to see greater wealth and resource distribution to the majority. For these elites, globalization was a utopia that only they would be inhabiting in the end. The self-interested and exclusionary utopic vision of these global elites was exposed by the global recession of 2008–2009 and by the retrenchment of capital flow that followed, when the myth of the progressive spread of wealth to the whole was suddenly and brutally revealed as hollow. Latour makes this point in a recent article on the future of the European project, where he observes that “si la mondialisation était une utopie—elle était réservée à ceux qui avaient abandonné jusqu’à l’idée de faire monde commun avec les masses” (my translation: “if globalization were a utopia—it was one reserved for those who had abandoned the idea of making a common world with the masses”).

The Fragmented Remainder of hte 99%

But there is also a second utopia. This is the utopia of the fragmented remainder. After the recession of 2008–2009, having realised that the project of globalization would not be serving their interests in the way that had been rhetorically mooted, those who were not global elites found themselves regressing to an alternative vision of utopia, which would be a space that this time they themselves would occupy and call their own, and in which they would not be beholden to the global elites as previously. This was the utopia of the nation-state, with the protections that are implied by its clearly-defined and firmly-policed borders. As Latour puts it in that same article, the utopias of the fragmented majority are the various spaces of “ceux qui fuient à rebours vers la protection, elle tout à fait imaginaire, assurée par les frontières nationales ou ethniques” (my translation, “those who flee backwards towards the completely imaginary protection offered by national and ethnic borders”). Latour proposes this second utopia as an explanation for the populism that has surfaced in contemporary British (post-Brexit), European and Trumpian politics, which is characterised by its promise to uphold the identities of those who are threatened by globalizing trends precisely by returning to or re-instating a narrower definition of what constitutes a valid social community, often couched in terms of nationally- or ethnically-based identity markers and anti-immigration policy platforms.

But in both cases—the minority utopia of the globalizing elites and the populist, border-orientated utopia of the fragmented majority who have been left behind—these utopias symbolize singular, monistic and defensive occupations of a territory, where the impetus to include or to represent the interests of other actors, those who are not yet incorporated into the territory, is diminished and sometimes even halted entirely. In other words, Latour identifies globalization as a generator of utopias that (A) are already fully realized in the present; (B) are premised on a gesture of exclusion of new entrants into the utopian territory that has been established; and therefore (C) cannot be vehicles for the sort of future-orientated, associative politics that is envisaged by the social theorists described above, and that Latour himself encodes in his concept of nonmodernity. In this way, Latour offers a revisionist critique of the contemporary project of globalization.

Latour advances one additional, but very important, point about the utopias that have arisen in the contemporary globalized world: they must actually be understood as non-spaces, in the sense that those who inhabit them find themselves removed and dislocated from the concrete space of this world in which ‘political’ existence can take place. Hence, as Latour puts it in his recent text, to invest in “l’utopie de la Modernization” (whichever version of utopia is in view) means that “l’accès au terrestre sera rendu impossible” (my translation: “access to the earthly has been made impossible”). When he refers to “le terrestre” (or, in other formulations, to “the Earth” or to that which is “Earthbound”), Latour is describing how the utopias of globalized Modernity cause human beings to be dislocated from their attachments to this world as if they were finding themselves dislocated from physical existence on the planet Earth itself and elevated to a realm located somewhere else. Perhaps this accounts for trends in the genre of ‘utopian’ writing itself, whose internal geography, it seems to me, has had to become more and more fantastical over time as it has begun to exhaust or exceed the boundaries of this Earth (think of Hollywood). Whereas for the Renaissance utopias the exoticism of the New World sufficed, the genre has since then found itself increasingly having to explore other or parallel worlds in various modes of avant-garde, symbolic or science-fiction writing.

Utopia must therefore be understood “au sens étymologique de ce qui est nulle part”. Or, as Latour put it in a lecture delivered in 2009:

For me, the whole history of the Moderns offers up a most radical utopia in the etymological sense: the Moderns have no place, no topos, no locus to sit and stay.

The idea of the planet Earth as the literal, physical site (Latour sometimes refers to the “soil” that lies “under our feet” to render the image as clearly as possible) on which human existence must be elementarily grounded is a hugely powerful one in his recent work. Its opposite or negation, namely, human existence as that which has become displaced or dislocated from its situatedness on Earth, is a good description of Modernity and of the gesture of transcendence that lies at its heart and that functions as its operating principle. This idea has already been encountered in this chapter in the idiom of “le point de vue de Sirius”, which is the cosmo-eccentric vantage-point from which Modernity artificially fixes the movements of actors in the space of the ‘down below’.

This same utopic space, and its implications for what might be called ‘Earthbound’ existence, is also explored by Carl Schmitt, with delicate irony, in the foreword to a book he wrote in the context of the post-war political situation in Europe, published in 1950, entitled The Nomos of the Earth.

In this very interesting text, Schmitt provides an idiosyncratic historical analysis of European political order. His argument is that, even though there have evidently been many regional conflicts and wars between European countries, a state of general stability has nevertheless been maintained within the European mainland over many centuries because of a particular spatial configuration that he calls a “nomos”. His argument is that this (relatively) stable order was made possible by the fact that extra-European territory was available in the New World and elsewhere for “discovery, occupation and expansion” by the primary European powers. This provided an ‘outside’ that guaranteed a flow of (relatively) stable political forces ‘inside’ Europe. At the time of writing, however, with evidence of the chaos of post-war disintegration all around him, Schmitt diagnoses this particular spatial ordering as rapidly coming to an end. Pondering the possible shape and form of a new nomos, he ruefully suggests that it would require some “fantastic parallel” to the previous one, such as could only be conceived “if men on their way to the moon discovered a new and hitherto unknown planet that could be exploited freely and utilized effectively to relieve their struggles on Earth”. In other words, Schmitt acknowledges that European political order (and, by implication, the nomos of the entire world) had been premised on a utopic ideology in which a new space, situated somewhere else, always had to be found. Since that new space was no longer available in the twentieth-century (short of rapid progress in technologies by which humans might be able to colonise other planets!), a perpetuation of that same nomos was no longer feasible. Instead, for Schmitt, a process of de-utopianization must take place: “human thinking again must be directed to the elemental orders of its terrestrial being here and now”, he writes in the Foreword, so as to re-conceive “the normative order of the earth”.

The analysis, and critique, of utopic space as being, literally, a space of ‘no-where’, is a unifying feature of all Schmitt’s post-war writing. For example, in a 1955 radio broadcast entitled ‘Dialogue on New Space’, Schmitt contrasts two modes of understanding of space that correspond exactly with what I have described above. The first is embodied in dramatic terms by the character of ‘MacFuture’, whose understands the maintenance of post-war global order in terms of American cultural and economic exceptionalism, and the possibility of forms of technological progress that would enable advanced nation-states to move beyond the restrictions imposed upon them by their own boundaries. This character is therefore an advocate for the utopia of globalization. The second understanding of space is voiced in dramatic terms by Schmitt’s own mouthpiece, a character called ‘Altmann’, who advocates instead for an associative mode of politics that takes place in the concrete space of this world, and not in a utopia that abridges or curtails this activity by situating actors in a ‘nowhere’ of transcendence: “the new spaces, out of which this new call comes, must therefore be found upon our Earth, and not outside in the cosmos”, as this character prophetically announces.

Latour and the non-space and non-time of Modernity (part 1 of 3)

This is the first of a three part post. Parts 2 and 3 are here.

As far as Latour is concerned, Modernity has implications for our experience of space and time. In fact, Modernity exerts what I sometimes call a “spatio-temporal conditioning effect” upon our lived experience.

This theme in Latour’s writing on Modernity culminates in his description of contemporary Western society as being characterised by ‘utopia’ (the condition of being ‘without space’) and ‘achronia’ (the condition of being ‘without time’).

But first of all, what is the current state of the field in relation to this theme of utopia? What work is it doing in contemporary discourse?

A good place to start is this wonderful book, which is a companion volume to an exhibition held at the New York Public Library:

With reference to the work of twentieth-century theorists such as Ernst Bloch, Zygmunt Bauman and Karl Mannheim, this book shows how the concept of utopia has been positively re-appropriated in recent years, both as a framework for literary and artistic production, and as a tool to relate social theory to social practice and, indeed, praxis. Those working within this trajectory have no interest in utopia understood either as the fortuitous or imagined recovery of a lost earthly paradise or golden age, nor as a future, apocalyptic unveiling and donation of some such space by means of the Providence of God. Rather, they are interested in the idea of utopia as a space that might be achieved by the agency of humanitas and associative politics.

In an article within this volume, Lyman Tower Sargent traces the lineage of this mode of utopic thinking from ancient sources (the Ancient Egyptian Tale of the Eloquent Peasant, Solon, the Lycurgus of Plutarch, the Cryopaedia of Xenophon, Plato’s Republic and Laws), through to the Utopia of Thomas More, from there to Francis Bacon, Giordano Bruno, the Hartlib Circle, the eighteenth-century novel (Defoe, Swift, Johnson) and nineteenth-century science fiction (Wells, Huxley, Orwell), all the way to the progressive social theorists of the twentieth-century mentioned above. The idea of utopia understood in this way is offered to the contemporary reader as both an aspiration and as an objective to actualize in space and in time. As something that is potentially achievable via the co-operative action of humans, utopia is seized upon by these thinkers as something that can contest the static and calcifying drift that they see as inherent to political, economic and religious ideology and system. The concept of utopia thus becomes a tool by which progressive action in the present moment can be stirred up and energized.

Latour’s appropriation of the concept is quite different. I will explore that in my next post.