The advantage of believing that 'the end of the World is nigh' is that you may become more devout and nicer to other people. The problem with it is that you may do crazy shit like giving away all your money rather than paying your mortgage. If there is widespread belief that the world will end on a particular day, there is a danger that Society may break down altogether.
Thus St. Paul came up with the notion of the Katechon to restrain lawlessness.
Wikipedia says- The katechon (from Greek: τὸ κατέχον, "that which withholds", or ὁ κατέχων, "the one who withholds") is a biblical concept which has subsequently developed into a notion of political philosophy.
The term is found in 2 Thessalonians 2:6–7 in an eschatological context: Christians must not behave as if the Day of the Lord would happen tomorrow, since the son of perdition (the Antichrist of 1 and 2 John) must be revealed before. St. Paul then adds that the revelation of the Antichrist is conditional upon the removal of "something/someone that restrains him" and prevents him being fully manifested. Verse 6 uses the neuter gender, τὸ κατέχον; and verse 7 the masculine, ὁ κατέχων.
Marxism has an eschatological aspect. There is supposed to be a 'final crisis' of Capitalism after which there is a Revolution and then a Dictatorship of the Proletariat and then the State withers away and then everything becomes really nice and each gives according to his ability and receives according to his need.
Marx saw his role as restraining workers and peasants from simply breaking machines, killing educated people, banning money and commodity markets and getting rid of Law Courts and Police Forces and Armies and so forth so as to revel in their own swinishness till they started to starve or the enemy invaded and enslaved the population.
Thus Marxism is itself a Katechon. So is the Church- in the view of Doestoevsky's Grand Inquisitor. So is the hetairoi's Symposium, the hetaira's Salon, and every other such locus of unmanly, status seeking, poodle fakery.
Sadly, careerists sometimes, by mistake, reject a ladder for a snake. Carl Schmitt should have stuck with being a conservative Catholic jurist. Instead, he embraced Hitler. After the War, the silly man started babbling about the Katechon. Agamben and other such shitheads took up the cry.
A Finnish Professor- Sergei Prozorov- writes
One of the most important contemporary developments in continental political thought is its ‘messianic turn’, associated with the work of Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Jean Luc Nancy and Slavoj Zizek. Despite their enormous differences, these and other participants in this discussion all share a sense of exigency about the advent of a radically different world: the world of democracy to come, the coming community, the politics of truth, a new ‘creation’ of the world or emancipatory ‘divine violence’. What constitutes these diverse orientations as messianic is less their relation to any historical tradition of messianism than this exigency that the potentiality of radical change be actualized. What this thought opposes is therefore not a purely secularist politics that would be wholly indifferent to the messianic, but another tradition, which is both aware and wary of the messianic event and seeks to delay its advent at all cost. Just as the contemporary messianic turn, which is strongly influenced by Pauline epistles, this tradition, which arguably continues to define the basic coordinates of Western politics, is also grounded in a particular interpretation of a (disputed) Pauline text, namely the passage in the Second Letter to the Thessalonians on the figure of the katechon.
There is a big difference between people who want the End of the World so as to get to Heaven- rather than have to wait in their coffins for the Resurrection- and those who pretend to want the end of Scarcity and the withering away of the State coz everybody enjoys working so as to provide for the needy who are unable to do anything for themselves.
In Heaven, there is no work. Also, there is the satisfaction of knowing that however boring Paradise might be, still your enemies, those infidels or whited sepulchres or whatever- are being fucked up the ass but good with red hot pokers.
Sadly, the 'world of democracy to come'- once the 'divine violence' is over- will feature no such compensating schadenfreude for its Stakhanovite longueurs.
Anyway, the vast mass of people, including young people since 1968 (when a hotter type of sex was on the cards), don't want that boring Terrestrial paradise where, you can bet your boots, porn will be banned and all the young people on Netflix series about Vampires or Werewolves will be differently abled, gender diverse, and look like shit.
Thus, the only 'accelerationists' we have with us are nutjobs who dream of the final victory of violent Racist or Religion based States on the pattern of ISIS or Margaret Atwood's Gilead. Here, since the outcome of History is believed to be inevitable, the imposition of a horror is justified as just getting the thing over more quickly. Thus, if you believe in the 'technological singularity', you may as well start behaving like a robot because the robots are bound to take over. The reductio ad absurdum of the accelarationist creed is to just act like a corpse because, long term, as Keynes observed, we are all dead.
Scmitt's notion of the Katechon had little impact. By contrast, Vogelin's work was popularized by William Buckley and then appropriated in the late Sixties and Seventies by the Counter Culture. Thus, by the time I got to College, 'immanentizing the eschaton' was associated with the Illuminatus books, not the thought-farts of Chairman Bill. Beginning one's working life under Reagan and Thatcher enabled one to see that the katechon was better extemporized than the eschaton could ever be immanentized. For every Kalki on a White Horse, there was a Mahatma Gandhi running round like a headless chicken ensuring the White Man didn't relinquish his burden till it became unprofitable to shoulder it. But then India is very big. The Law of Large Numbers applies. Concurrency deadlocks and livelocks militate for a disaggregated Katechon. Perhaps a small, relatively isolated, country is more at risk from eschatological craziness.
It may be that Finland, a sparsely populated Lutheran country which must keep a wary eye on Russia, is threatened by nutters of a type the big democracies have little reason to fear. Perhaps this is why Prozorov writes-
As this article shall demonstrate, the passage on the katechon in 2 Thessalonians 2 is the most intensely political texts in the Western tradition and the conflict over its interpretation is similarly an intensely political struggle, at stake in which is the very existence of constituted power.
This is nonsense. Nobody ever gave a toss about the katechon. Homoousian may have mattered at the time of the split between the Greek and Latin Church. The doctrine of 'sola fide' was mentioned as the reason for the Lutheran split. The eschaton is associated with Millennialism of various more or less maniacal types. But nobody has ever got worked up about 'katechon'. Schmitt mentioned it after the Nazis had lost. Shitheads like him were despised by all but a couple of stupid professors of shite subjects in the West and that too merely as a matter of Cold War strategy. Vogelin and Buckley were repudiated by Johnson and Nixon. Since the Catholic Church didn't take up this nonsense, it had zero political significance. A couple of failed, but philosophical, Leftist Academics in Italy cornered this market but only after it became obvious that Berlusconi, not Bolshevism, would prevail in that deeply dysfunctional Republic.
On the other hand, it is true that belief in the 'End of Days' may play some part in Right Wing American politics. Evangelical support for Israel is often mentioned in this connection. But this has nothing to do with any sort of Katechon. As for the Left- it is secular. It has no interest in the eschaton- save to fuel demands for a 'Green New Deal' before Global Warming gets out of hand. Wealth inequality matters to the Left. A Universal Basic Income may be a vote winner. David Icke seems to have enough fans to swell anti-lockdown protests whereas Agamben's followers were not visible at all. But nobody now thinks Jurisprudence of a theological type has anything to offer. If Laws and Constitutions and juristic processes mattered so much, there could be no global E-commerce based on simple preference revelations mechanisms and quick, algorithmic, dispute resolution processes.
Prozorov does not pretend that the katechon is important to Faith based political ideologies.
Moreover, the significance of this text has little to do with a persistence of a vestige of the theological in modern politics. On the contrary, we shall argue that the logic of the katechon
which is about an occult force preventing the dead rising from their graves- i.e. is not logical at all- unless the 'invisible hand' or 'mysterious economy' of God simply means everybody getting on with their enlightened duty-as-self-interest (which isn't too far from the Stoic conception of kathekon) till entropy paves the way for a cosmic bounce or palingenesis.
only fully comes into its own in the contemporary condition of biopolitical nihilism
by which is meant that we are not sacrificing our first born to Ba'al or offering Virgins to Hecate
and any serious attempt to overcome this nihilism will therefore have to confront this logic.
Logic? This shit is logical?
We shall begin by setting out two diametrically opposed approaches to the passage in a reading of Giorgio Agamben’s critique of Carl Schmitt’s interpretation of the katechon, demonstrating that this critique is not merely a matter of context-specific disagreement but rather exemplifies the fundamental division on the question of the political as such. In the following two sections we shall address the functioning of this concept in the contemporary context of biopolitics, devoid of the eschatological dimension. The reading of Paolo Virno’s attempt at a positive revaluation of the katechon in the context of the naturalistic philosophical anthropology and Roberto Esposito’s study of the immunitary orientation of modern politics will help us reconstruct the logic of the katechon in terms of the problem of the negation of negativity.
To whom is the negation of negativity a problem? No one with a univalent Type theory or a Ken Wilson type notion of a renormalization group. In other words, no one with a bit of Higher Maths in their degree since the Eighties doesn't know why 'negations of negations' are nonsense. The world is not dialectical. It features phase transitions of a universal, atemporal, sort.
Virno spent some time in jail for being associated with the Red Brigades. He renounced Marxian dialectics but to no good purpose. What prevailed in Europe- so long as the Ponzi scheme of Monetary integration continued to pay out- was Kojevian Euro-Bureaucracy as 'universality'. In America this type of stupidity reappeared as Straussian Neo- Conservatism but came a cropper in Iraq.
Esposito had developed a 'bio-political' concept of 'immunity'. It was shite. The COVID crisis makes this apparent.
Consider the following apercu of his on 'herd immunity'- 'It recalls Foucault’s concept of pastoral power insofar as the government functions as a shepherd for the population as a flock.
The government functions as a government insofar as it is a government. It does not recall 'pastoral power' because saving the soul is not a function of government. Shepherds belong to a different species to sheep. The governed belong to the same species as governors.
And yes, there is a quite clear difference between the policies of the Latin countries, like Spain, Italy, and France, which all went into lockdown, and some other countries.
No there isn't. Places which had soaring infection rates had draconian lockdowns. This was an idiographic matter. Political philosophy played no part.
Initially only Italy went into lockdown, but then the others followed quickly.
Because there are Chinese manufacturing hubs in a very densely populated part of Italy. Furthermore, because of the presence of three generation households and other demographic factors, Italy had to be more cautious than Sweden.
On the other side of the debate, the United Kingdom, the United States and even some Northern European countries like Sweden initially tried to follow this path of herd immunity.
Because of crap Scientific advise. According to a 'stress test' performed last year, the US and the UK were supposed to perform best under this scenario. But the CDC turned out to be shit. The NHS need not have been shit but, perhaps because of privatization of laboratory testing, turned out to be severely lacking in capacity. No doubt, a shambolic Cabinet played a part in the fiasco. On the other hand, one could always blame British 'yobbishness'. We are a nation of drunken football hooligans.
But this choice is, honestly, a form of eugenics, and in some ways even thanatopolitical, because it entails the deaths of a considerable number of people who would otherwise live. For herd immunity to develop, many of the weakest people are destined to die, as Boris Johnson also admitted.
Boris, like most of us, believed that if you go regularly to the pub and eat plenty of steak and kidney pie, then the Virus will back off from a confrontation. That is why BoJo went to gladhand the sick. Then he got the virus and almost died. The effect was salutary- but, sadly, not lasting.
He said that “many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time”.[2] However, these countries quickly changed course. The UK and the US also chose lockdowns eventually, albeit in different forms than what we have experienced in continental Europe. Let’s say that my assessment of herd immunity is a rather negative one: it acts as a form of autoimmune disease, that is, it tries to protect life through the death of a part of the population. The only non-negative population-wide form of immunity – i.e. one not based on the sacrifice of innocent victims – depends on the discovery of a vaccine. That is, if we ever get one. The lockdown strategy, on the other hand, has its own problems, by the way, and other risks linked to desocialization. The immunitary lockdown conflicts, beyond a certain level, both with individual freedom and with the exigencies of life as a community. So lockdowns are also risky immunitary dispositifs causing many problems we are only discovering since a few weeks. But, in my opinion, it is still preferable to herd immunity.
So Esposito isn't a moral imbecile. By contrast, Agamben said COVID was like the flu. The State was using the panic as an excuse to do something very sinister.
In other words, Professors of Shite Subjects talked shite during this crisis. But such has always been the case.
Prozorov's paper has been overtaken by events. We can now see, through the prism of reactions to COVID, that there was no 'logic' to this particular availability cascade. When it wasn't what Harry Frankfurt calls 'bullshit'- i.e. polemics unconcerned with truth- it was what the English call 'waffle'- i.e. it could as easily affirm or deny any proposition in the same sonorous terms.
In the fourth section we shall elaborate this logic in the analysis of Walter Benjamin’s theory of baroque sovereignty
which does not exist. He had a notion of tyrant and martyr as characterizing a particular genre of German baroque literature. But he was wrong. What was actually happening was the pushing forward of a notion of Germania whose seeds are in Tacitus. Neither tyrant not martyr could matter for the people of Arminius. Their katechon was racial- a compound of blood and soil- more especially as that soil yielded Krupps' steel.
and demonstrate that pace Schmitt the katechon does not function as a link between the political and the eschatological,
The political exists with or without God. The End of Times requires His personal attention. Telling people they are crazy and restraining them if they get agitated is the only way to 'break the link' between nutters and politics.
but rather exists only as the severance of this link, whereby nihilism, as it were, theologizes itself.
Nothing theologizes itself, though nutters may, quite inconsequentially, theologize nobodies.
In the concluding section we shall return to Agamben’s messianic interpretation of 2 Thessalonians 2 and address the conditions for the fulfillment of the messianic exigency in the contemporary political terrain.
Agamben's messianism has revealed itself in all its glory- astride the donkey of COVID denial. The Church, thankfully, is keeping its distance. Meanwhile, Audrey Tan in Taiwan is using Maths and I.T skills to show the world the proper way forward. 'Test and Trace' pulverises facile notions of 'the herd'. There is a Ken Wilson type 'renormalization group' which can turn 'Biopolitics' into something useful and scientific rather than a paranoid cliche.
Come to think of it, the Finns are plenty smart. Prozorov could get together with a couple of Mathsy types at his University and recast this woeful availability cascade into something useful and operationalizable. But that would win him no kudos in his own field of study. It would be career suicide. Still, one can only wish him well.
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