Abstract
This chapter investigates the theologically defined katechontic crisis (the endless crisis) and relates it to the Arendtian view of politics as freedom. In other words, it problematizes how the temporality of the katechontic crisis embodies a politics of deterrence. This politics of deterrence is further discussed with the paradigm of civil war. Following Agamben, the paradigm of civil war as constitutive of politics will be discussed in contrast to Arendt’s understanding of politics as freedom. Subsequently, it will be explained how politics finds an affinity with the unpolitical by emerging from the anarchical principle underlying the salvific management of oikonomia. The last section of the chapter proposes a critique of the spatial dichotomy between sacred spaces and profane spaces.
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- 1.
The FP-25 case was a judicial process that started in 1984 and ended with the last condemnations of some of their militants on the 6th of April 2001. The FP-25 (25th of April Popular Forces) was a military organization that appeared on the 20th of April 1980 as a response to the progressive liberalization of the economy in Portugal. The FP-25 was the military force of a far-left coalition Força de Unidade Popular (FUP). Between 1980 and 1987 the FP-25 committed 17 homicides, 66 bomb attacks and 99 bank robberies in Portugal. In 1996 the Portuguese parliament approved an Amnesty proposed by the President of the Republic for all the condemned, except for those who committed blood crimes.
- 2.
The PRP-BR (Revolutionary Party of the Proletariat—Revolutionary Brigades) was founded in 1973 (Fontes 2012: 164). Contrary to other parties, the PRP-BR always advocated direct action to fight against fascism. Responsible for several sabotage actions against the military apparatus of the colonial war, it was a kind of party-army organization (idem: idem) which, as it happened with other political movements and parties during the last years of the dictatorship, emerged as a reaction to the progressive abandonment of armed struggle and the adoption of “class alliances” by the PCP (idem: 163). On the eve of the 25th of November, the coup that ended the revolutionary process (PREC), PRP/BR goes underground with 1000 G3 machine guns to prepare the “armed insurrection” (idem: 177). The PRP-BR was later dissolved in 1982.
- 3.
The SUV—“United Soldiers Will Win”—was an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist military force that emerged during the last months of the PREC, rejecting the hierarchy and authority of the army controlled by the MFA. According to its manifesto of September 1975, their main purpose was the formation of the “popular revolutionary army” (SUV 1975: 20).
- 4.
Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho was part of the MFA movement that organized the 25th of April military coup. During the revolutionary period he became responsible for the COPCON—the military unit of the MFA. Otelo represented, until the 25th of November, the revolutionary and military left within the MFA. During the 25th of November coup, the revolutionary left put in Otelo the hope for a military response. The “resentment” and “treasury” of the revolution became somehow personified in Otelo for his last-minute retreat on that day. Otelo will be arrested for five years under the liberal democrat regime, being accused of belonging to the FP-25, an accusation that he has always denied until today.
- 5.
Álvaro Cunhal was the general secretary of the Portuguese Communist Party from 1961 to 1992.
- 6.
The constituent process opened by the coup d’état originated a dual power situation: the MFA was not the only political agent. In fact, the population reacted to the military coup and engaged in a parallel process of radical democratization of the society by taking control of the means of production while, as referred before, an non-hierarchical military force (the SUV) emerged from the army and escaped the political control of the MFA (Varela 2013: 81).
- 7.
“This experience, similarly to the experience of all European revolutions, from the end of the eighteenth century on shows that civil war is the sharpest form of the class struggle, it is that point in the class struggle when clashes and battles, economic and political, repeating themselves, growing, broadening, becoming acute, turn into an armed struggle of one class against another” (Lenin 1972).
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Nunes de Almeida, J. (2020). Politics of Crisis. In: The Sacralization of Time. Radical Theologies and Philosophies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46543-8_3
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