ABSTRACT

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in this book. Geopolitically, the modern state was classically regarded as the katechon, whose provision of security came in the form of the restrainer of chaos and lawlessness. It may also have become the container for other ambitions as well. But its katechontic task was always regarded as the condition of possibility for all other political ambitions. Katechontic restraint was once the limit condition, definitive of the state, baroquely expressed through the arcana imperii of modern state power. But Western geopolitics have become biopolitics in ways that classically express those complex and ornate interchanges between categories, creating the complex textures of neo-baroque intertextuality between geopolitics and biopolitics. In its geopolitically armed pursuit of the ambition to govern the interface between life and death biopolitically as well, therefore, these politics of security give concrete political form to finitude through becoming creator and destroyer of worlds.