Sovereignty between the Katechon and the Eschaton: Rethinking the Leviathan

Melayna Lamb and German E. Primera’s “Sovereignty between the Katechon and the Eschaton: Rethinking the Leviathan” appears in Telos 187 (Summer 2019). Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are available in both print and online formats.

This paper both rejects the reading of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan as a secularized katechon and rethinks anew the questions of sovereignty and politics in his thought. It does so by examining the eschatological character of his politico-theological understanding of the relation between the kingdom of the Leviathan and the kingdom of God. Indeed, through different contemporary readings of Hobbes’s theory of the state, this paper offers an insight into the concrete eschatology at operation in Hobbes’s thought and underscores its relevance for the understanding of government, biopolitics, and sovereignty. This is achieved through two different, albeit interconnected undertakings, which in turn allow us to agree but also to go beyond Giorgio Agamben’s claim that the state, in Hobbes, does not have a katechontic function. The first is an exposition of the a-teleological character of Hobbes’s eschatology and his metaphysics of motion. The second involves a consideration of the temporality and the nature of the relation between the ahistorical world of reason and the historical world of faith that underpins Hobbes’s theory of the state. Contrary to the contemporary interpretations in which Hobbes’s eschatology is presented as future regarding, we will highlight the chronological coincidence between the historical time of faith and the ahistorical time of the Leviathan, placing Hobbes within the political coordinates of Walter Benjamin’s messianism. By bringing this eschatological perspective to the fore, not only will the reading of Hobbes’s theory of sovereignty that aligns him with liberalism be problematized, but also an analysis of the resources that Hobbes offers to imagine a different form of politics will be developed.

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On Equality, Right, and Identity: Rethinking the Contract through Hobbes and Marx

Rahul Govind’s “Equality, Right, and Identity: Rethinking the Contract through Hobbes and Marx” appears in Telos 154 (Spring 2011). Read the full version at TELOS Online website.

The following essay is an investigation into the nature of the contract, the way in which the contract indexes “right” and equality, and the textual and historical expressions—as well as echoes—that this has taken from Thomas Hobbes to Karl Marx. The opening set of conceptual remarks lead to a reading of Hobbes’s Leviathan and Marx’s “On the Jewish Question,” arguing that both texts were concerned with theoretically explicating the relationship between right and equality, germane to which was the problematic of the “nation”/community, which was itself conceived via the “Jewish question.” The essay argues that only an attention to Marx’s reformulation of the older problematic, as found in Hobbes, will help us understand the significance of his critique of the (post–)French Revolutionary theory of abstract right, and thereby the need for the development and critique of the field of political economy. Through this exposition of the thread between the conceptualization of the political and political economy, it seeks to reconfigure the canonical texts of Hobbes and Marx in rethinking the interrelations between right, equality, and community within a historico-philosophical horizon.

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