Katechontic Sovereignty

Security Politics and the Overcoming of Time

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2264385
AutoresFrançois Debrix (0000-0003-4932-3364, Virginia Tech, autor correspondente)
Ano2015
Volume9
Fascículo2
Páginas143-157
Data de publicação2015-06-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoInternational Political Sociology (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1749-5679 • E-ISSN: 1749-5687
EditoraOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1111/ips.12088
OpenAlexW1851986647
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas11
Referências citadas37

At its core, security is obsessed with the survival of the sovereign order. Security tends to see the sovereign's existence as threatened by agents whose purpose is to challenge the life of the sovereign. In this article, I mobilize a theological language about the relationship between sovereignty and security to grasp the place that the question of life versus death, the fact of sovereign violence, and the problem of temporality occupy in past and present modalities of security. The notion of sovereign restraint, captured by the theological concept of katechon, is introduced to suggest that the politics of security is dependent upon a fundamentally violent, uncompromising, and often terrorizing objective: to keep at bay forces of temporal finitude seen as disorder or chaos. Forces of temporal finitude that refuse to abide by the belief in the sovereign's infinity can be described as the eschaton or as agents of eschatological time. Katechontic sovereignty, the sovereign practice intent on holding off finite ends (and on casting away agents of eschatological “terror”), is generative of security operations that involve decisions over life and death, matters of biopolitics versus necropolitics, and encounters between the ontological vulnerability of the sovereign and “terrorizing” agents

Law and economics · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Sovereignty · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · International Development and Aid · International Relations and Foreign Policy · Law