32 32. Alex Dubilet, “The Catastrophic Joy of Abandoning Salvation: Thinking the Postsecular with Georges Bataille,” Journal of Critical Religious Theory 16, no. 2 (2017): 163–178, and Dubilet, Self-Emptying Subject, esp. 173–178. On the figure of utopian immanence, see Kirill Chepurin, “Beginning with Kant: Utopia, Immanence, and the Origin of German Idealism,” Russian Journal of Philosophy and Humanities 2, no. 1 (2017): 71–90; for this question, in a different intellectual context, see Kirill Chepurin and Alex Dubilet, “Russia’s Atopic Nothingness: Ungrounding the World-Historical Whole with Pyotr Chaadaev,” Angelaki 24, no. 6 (2019): 135–151.
33 33. One might recall that Slavoj Žižek has offered innovative political-theological reinterpretations of Hegel through a Lacanian lens. Within Žižek’s Hegelian reading, the true radicality of Christianity lies in its uncompromising affirmation of the death of God as the loss of all transcendent guarantees. Ultimately, Žižek’s reading connects Christianity with radical atheism in a way that affirms the unity and singular trajectory of the West. See Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, ed. Creston Davis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 234–303. The present volume points to a different set of theoretical directions. Neither ascribing primacy to psychoanalytic paradigms nor invested in recuperative gestures in relation to Christianity, it moves beyond the Žižek-Milbank polemics, as significant as those polemics may have been for political theology in the first decade of this century. For a useful synthetic but critical account of Žižek’s trajectory in relation to theology, see Marika Rose, “Slavoj Žižek,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Radical Theology, ed. Christopher D. Rodkey and Jordan E. Miller (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 479–495.
34 34. Hegel’s philosophy of history, Fichte’s Characteristics of the Present Age, and Schelling’s Exhibition of the Purely Rational Philosophy all variously inscribed colonialism into the project of modern universalism grounded in Christianity.
35 35. See especially Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994).
36 36. On the figures of refusing and even annihilating the world of mediation and history in Schelling, see Kirill Chepurin, “Indifference and the World: Schelling’s Pantheism of Bliss,” Sophia 58, no. 4 (2019): 613–630; “To Break All Finite Spheres: Bliss, the Absolute I, and the End of the World in Schelling’s 1795 Metaphysics,” Kabiri: The Official Journal of the North American Schelling Society 2 (2020): 40–67; and Chepurin’s paper in this volume.
37 37. On the inversion characteristic of modernity—which makes the finite world (rather than God) into the exemplification of reality—and the theoretical implications thereof, see, for example, Schelling, Aphorismen über die Naturphilosophie (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2018), 61.
38 38. We should recall that German Romanticism is frequently read today within the broader post-Kantian ambit of German Idealism (and rightly so). Recent examples include Frederick C. Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), and Dalia Nassar, The Romantic Absolute: Being and Knowing in Early German Romantic Philosophy, 1795–1804 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013).
39 39. F. H. Jacobi, The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, trans. George di Giovanni (Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 515.
40 40. Jean Paul, “School for Aesthetics,” trans. Margaret R. Hale, in German Romantic Criticism, ed. A. Leslie Willson (New York: Continuum, 1982), 32.
41 41. Jacobi, Main Philosophical Writings, 524.
42 42. For nonsubjectivist readings of early Romanticism, see, for example, Walter Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1996), 116–200; Maurice Blanchot, “The Athenaeum,” in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 351–359; Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988).
43 43. F. W. J. Schelling, “Vom Ich als Princip der Philosophie,” in Werke: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1980), 1.2:104, 109, 122–123.
44 44. See Chepurin, “Indifference and the World” and “To Break All Finite Spheres.”
45 45. F. W. J. Schelling, “Philosophische Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kriticismus,” in Werke: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1982), 1.3:96.
46 46. Schelling, Aphorismen über die Naturphilosophie, 61.
47 47. Schelling, “Vom Ich,” 109, 119, 122; see also 101.
48 48. For a reading of the early Hegel, however, that aligns him with immanence and the annihilation of finitude, see Alex Dubilet, “Speculation and Infinite Life: Hegel and Meister Eckhart on the Critique of Finitude,” Russian Journal of Philosophy and Humanities 2, no. 1 (2017): 49–70.
49 49. Whistler, “Abstraction and Utopia,” 7.
50 50. See Albernaz and Chepurin, “Sovereignty of the World.”
51 51. F. W. J. Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856), 2.1:509, 513–515.
1
Knot of the World
German Idealism between Annihilation and Construction
KIRILL CHEPURIN
Blackness is not the pathogen in afro-pessimism, the world is[—]maybe even the whole possibility of and desire for a world.
—Jared Sexton
The world is its own rejection, the world’s rejection is the world.
—Jean-Luc Nancy
For we cannot claim to know for sure whether or not our world, although it is contingent, will actually come to an end one day.
—Quentin Meillassoux
A specter is haunting contemporary theory—the specter of the world. To think the world radically otherwise; to refuse the very need for a world or to reduce it affirmatively to nothing, a mere illusion or hallucination; to dissolve it in absolute contingency or chaos; to think the reality of that which the world forecloses, subjugates, excludes; to expose the world as totalizing and to find ways of tearing it down or opening it up; to work out an apocalyptic, postapocalyptic, messianic, posthuman ontology, ethics, or politics1—along this entire spectrum, the world remains, even in cases where its remains are thought of as, or after, its end. Even when one could not care less about the world itself, one is troubled by the fact of the world. No matter how spectral the world is declared to be, this fact remains a problem, with which all theory feels the need to engage. Even to say that the world is an illusion, that one ought to desire no world, is to admit that the world is there (and is at issue)—that it has the power to foreclose and divide, to make one hallucinate, and, most importantly, the power to survive, to remain. It is also to imply that the world is necessarily this way. But, why is the world there in the first place? Why this world—of divisions and exclusions, endless striving and endless postponement? Must it even be, this way or at all? Do we have to proceed from the fact that we—the subjects of modernity—are always already in this world?
Among these and similar questions, I would single out one as central: how to think the world without absolutizing