The Harnessed Lightning, or the Politics of Apocalypse: Hegel, Rosenzweig, Derrida

Abstract

What could be the common thread linking these three very different thinkers: Hegel, Rosenzweig, and Derrida? In my essay, I will argue that this link is provided by a certain form of political theology which is polemical towards Carl Schmitt’s notion of the katechon or the “restrainer of the apocalypse.” While the political theology which they propose is also based on the idea of the restraint, it takes a different form than the Schmittian postponement of the apocalyptic event. Their alternative notion is attenuation which results in the political and philosophical practice of maintaining a distance between God and the world. Neither simply restraining it, nor simply hastening, this new formula takes a third dialectical position between the katechon and the apocalyptic, which consists in “easing the lightning to the children”: the world as God’s child—weak, fragile, and exposed to the infinite power of creation and destruction—must nonetheless find a way to use the revelatory power of the eschaton for the immanent purposes.