The infamous katechon is a historically formative figure. By restraining the revelation of the Anomos or Antichrist, he also postpones the return of Christ, pushing back the end date. He first appears briefly in a letter intended for people from Thessaloniki. Almost 2,000 years later, this figure is having strange resonances.
The idea for my talk was triggered by 7 October and its consequences. These events have awakened and intensified something that can be called a katechontic temporality. The new slogan after 7 October became: ‘Never again is now!’ In this intensification of ‘Never again!’, the ambivalence of this formula also became apparent; it came to mean the overriding of fundamental human rights precisely in the name of stopping the worst, the legitimising of the worst in the guise of attempting to prevent it. My talk bears on the plausibility of a katechontic conception of time after Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and in the face of the climate catastrophe. And on its ambivalence, which becomes recognisable in the situation of exception to international law par excellence: that of occupation.
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Luca Di Blasi is Associated Professor of Philosophy at the Theological Faculty of the University of Bern in Switzerland and Associate Member of the ICI Berlin. His main theoretical interests include philosophy of religion, modern continental philosophy, and political theology. Main publications: Politik der Schuld. Eine Durchquerung (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2025, in Vorbereitung), Dezentrierungen. Beiträge zur Religion der Philosophie im 20. Jahrhundert (Vienna: Turia+Kant, 2018); Der Weiße Mann. Ein Anti-Manifest (Bielefeld: transcript, 2013); Der Geist in der Revolte. Der Gnostizismus und seine Wiederkehr in der Postmoderne (Munich: Fink, 2002).
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Portrait of Luca Di Blasi by Joulia Strauss