Restrain

The re- of ‘restrain’ — not the more common iterative ‘re-’ but a mere, if semantically obscure intensifier — marks a temporal paradox: the restraint that prevents a force from reaching its telos is not only a delay, but the intervention of a separate, autonomous, and anti-teleological regime of time. The article reads the biblical figure of the katéchon, ‘the withholder’, as an expression of this paradox and as symptomatic of a political-theological ambivalence essential to the foundation of Western political thought. If the ‘secular order’ or ‘worldly government’ has the function of withholding both the ultimate salvation and the final outbreak of chaos, then it sustains itself only by postponing any determination of its value or effect.