Against the Katechon features three papers that creatively and antagonistically confront Schmitt’s reading of the Katechon, or “the one that withholds the man of lawlessness” that Paul speaks about in 2 Thessalonians. Schmitt’s conception of the katechon sees in this figure the paradigmatic function of state politics rooted in the law. In distinction, the papers on this panel seek to develop a political theology from below. With papers that consider the impact of Afropessimism, anarchist political thought, and radical messianisms against Christianity, this paper drives forward an important conversation in political theology.
In this paper, I consider the implications of Carl Schmitt’s claim that what matters most in the thought of Thomas Hobbes is the simple declaration of faith that “Jesus is the Christ.” I frame the problem by way of Giorgio Agamben’s several criticisms of Schmitt’s reading of 2 Thessalonians (in which the apocalyptic figure of the katechon holds back the lawlessness of the eschaton) as a scriptural basis for a Christian doctrine of State and Empire. Instead of neutralizing Schmitt by collapsing the katechon, and the lawlessness to which it is opposed, into a single mystery (as Agamben does), a political theology attuned to the messianic idea should rather confront Schmitt head-on. 2 Thessalonians is indeed a charter for a katechontic doctrine of Christian power, at least since Nicaea. The properly messianic act dispenses with all neutralizations and commences, instead, with a denial: Jesus is not the Christ.
This paper argues that Afropessimism reveals the Human(/)World as the katechonic apparatus restraining what Frank Wilderson calls gratuitous freedom—which is precisely freedom from the Human, the World, and even Being as such. Accordingly, it is from within what Jared Sexton calls a “blackened vantage or lens” that this paper reads Giorgio Agamben when he describes the katechōn as “the force ... that clashes with and hides katargēsis [inoperativity], the state of tendential lawlessness that characterizes the messianic, and in this sense delays unveiling the ‘mystery of lawlessness.’” This paper thus speculates that constellating Agamben’s paradigmatic analysis of 2 Thessalonians 2 with Afropessimism’s paradigmatic analysis of Blackness potentiates, on the one hand, the analytic of the katechōn as a paradigm for anti-Blackness and, on the other hand, the messianic mystery of lawlessness as a paradigm for what Wilderson calls "learn[ing] the steps" to the “dance of social death.”
Mainstream political theory remains dependent on notions of sovereignty. Who is sovereign and how sovereignty functions are up for debate, but the equating of sovereignty with politics remains unquestioned. In this paper, I argue that the concept of destituent power is one way to refuse the politics of sovereignty. After briefly tracing the functions of sovereignty, I locate a theory of destituent power in Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’. I then contrast James Martel's and Marchello Tarì's readings of the text and explore the differences in the resulting forms of anarchism This comparison shows that destituent power is essential for an anarchist politics that rejects sovereignty at the level of the state as well as the individual. I conclude by considering how such an anarchism can respond to projects that seek to reclaim sovereignty rather than reject it outright.