“I noticed that the Christian concept of the “Katechon,” or the restrainer of the AntiChrist, was a very near synonym to “deferral.””
From the Archive
“I was prompted to do so, in part, by reading Raphael Gross’s Carl Schmitt and the Jews: The “Jewish Question,” the Holocaust and German Legal Theory (a very good book, by the way), where I noticed that the Christian concept of the “Katechon,” or the restrainer of the AntiChrist, was a very near synonym to “deferral.” This makes it possible to further extend center study into new fields of inquiry, in this case not only Schmitt, but Peter Thiel’s studies of apocalypse, which makes regular use of this theological framing of politics. (While I have been familiar with the Katechon for some time, I think what jarred me into taking it more seriously was a point in Gross’s discussion where he uses the word “deferral” in describing Schmitt’s understanding of the term, and something clicked.)”
“the difference between pointing as singling out the victim for a lynching and pointing as an act of deferral, a substitute for the lynching (let’s say, the paraclete, or advocate, supplementing the katechon)”
AI Overview
— AI-generated synthesis. The archive passages above are the primary source.Katechon is the Christian political-theological figure of "the restrainer of the AntiChrist." Bouvard takes it up because it is, in his reading, "a very near synonym to ‘deferral’" — holding off the end is the work of deferral itself.
Imported through Carl Schmitt (by way of Raphael Gross) and used by Peter Thiel in his studies of apocalypse, it lets center study extend into the theology of politics: the restrainer can be paired with the paraclete, or advocate, as supplements to the same deferring logic. It is a borrowed concept rather than a native coinage, included here because center study gives it an anthropological footing.
Across the Corpus
How this idea is developed elsewhere in the archive, earliest to latest.
“I am trying to develop a mode of political thinking that is not a political philosophy. A political philosophy, like any philosophy, has “first principles,” and then starts “deducing” secondary principles from the first one (freedom, consent, the will of the people, etc.) including justifications of monarchy in terms of such principles, like the monarch as…”
“This post will be a synthesis and reframing of many of my previous discussions of language, prompted by the observation that I have never directly applied deferral to the analysis of language itself, in the form of analyzing and interpreting language in terms of modes, degrees and layers of deferral—something which, in the context of originary debt and…”
“The “ fort/da d’où surgit toute nomination” opposes the significant object to its absence, just as the first ostensive name-of-God opposes the significant/sacred central object to the insignificant/profane periphery. The phenomenon of deferral , Derrida’s différance transferred from a metaphysical to an anthropological context, from its creator’s…”
“The fact of contemplating the central object in the course of the event involves not simply being physically distant from it, but understanding this distance as the worldly expression of an interdictory sacred space surrounding the object which can be breached only by the group’s eventual common agreement to divide up the animal for consumption in a…”
“Derrida himself was too much of a snob to take an interest in GA, so we’ll never know what he might have thought of GA’s use of the “Derridean” term deferral , the English translation of différance . It is a bit artificial to divide between the Jewish and the Christian the metaphysical realm, which belongs to neither, but at the very least we can say that…”
“Here are some dictionary provided synonyms for “defer”: postpone, put off, adjourn, delay, hold off, hold over, shelve, suspend, delay, hold in abeyance, stay, prorogue, pigeonhole, mothball. None of them quite get at how minimal “deferral” is, conceptually, and how central it therefore is to the specificity of the originary hypothesis, and to GA’s…”
“But as we might expect, any speculations on these matters take us into a grey area between the originary hypothesis and historical evidence, a domain in which the hypothesis supplies only general principles. The point to retain is that the principle of deferral, as Derrida well understood from within the philosophical tradition, is a principle of…”
“Let us imagine an appetitive object, such as the cadaver of a large animal discovered or killed by a hunting party. The members of the group surround the object, the Alpha among them. But the level of mimetic tension in the group has risen too high for the Alpha to be able to rely on his primacy as in the past: appropriating the animal, taking his portion,…”
“That the deferral of violence within a given community may involve the exercise of violence against another community has been a fact of human life since the beginning. Our species has not ceased to be its own worst enemy, but each human community maintains its own viability by deferring its internal violence. We incur disaster when we disobey God’s law,…”
“The declarative sentence encompasses in its “timeless” predication both the firstness and the deferral of the originary ostensive use of language. Instead of designating the center as an interdicted space in which violence is deferred, it takes this center, or “subject,” into itself, and attaches by predication a new “truth” about it that goes beyond the…”
Key Texts
Where the term is defined.
Extends the term into the deferral framework.