ABSTRACT

This chapter examines how the modern imperative to securitise finds its historical roots, and many of its distinguishing analytical features, deep within modernity's temporal enframing of finitude. It also explores how this modern factical finitude defined by an infinity of finite things sets the problem space for modern politics, government and rule. Consider this opening argument, that modern sovereignty and biopower were two of the principal means by which concrete political form was given to modern factical finitude. It becomes an integral part of that great baroque spectacle of simulation that the apparatus of modern sovereignty demands in order to feign the fiction of sovereign power. The conclusion is that biopolitics of security was one of the ways in which concrete political form was given to the factical finitude that succeeded the soteriological finitude which once temporally enframed western problematisations of politics, government and rule.