Specters of Biopolitics: Finitude, Eschaton, and Katechon

This essay argues that security is not a commodity or value but a generative principle of political formation. Inasmuch as security politics are also politics of the limit, they derive their political rationalities and governing technologies from the vantage point of the end of the temporal order of things. Every politics of security, in the name of which war is waged, is thus also a political eschatology. Modern politics of security are distinguished by the fact that the temporal horizon within which they take place is that of the factical finitude of modern times. Its security politics are katechontic. Said to be an open horizon of the infinite becoming of finite things, happenings or events, the katechontic security politics of modern times are also said to be traversed by intensive relations of procreative force. Including the motif of life as species existence among those of state, nation, society, and people as referent objects through which concrete form is given to factical finitude, modern biopolitics of security and war exemplify the political eschatology of modern times.