Simply letting things be in order to immanently think absolute bliss runs the risk of simply leaving the world be, too. Similarly, to say that it is all up to an absolute, unmasterable contingency, may amount to justifying the world as merely (contingently) the way it is—to also simply letting it be. Contingency can do the work of legitimation as well: perhaps it is simply bad luck that the world is the way it is? Perhaps all we can do is hope for the lucky throw? Finally, to make the world into a ghost by proclaiming it to be illusory runs the risk of implying it can be simply refused—of trivializing the world’s violence, thereby also justifying the world. This is not to say there is no way to evade these pitfalls. However, upon this way, one has to tread a very thin line, behind which the world continues to loom and which cannot, it seems, be traversed without engaging with the world in some way. No matter how illusory or contingent the world is announced to be, one has to think of ways of dealing with it—with the fact of the world’s forceful imposition—if one does not want unwittingly to absolutize the world.
What to do about (or in) the world, too, remains a question with which Schelling continues to grapple. Elsewhere I have argued that the logic of highest agency (including moral agency) in Schelling’s so-called middle period amounts to acting out of absolute indifference—to simply enacting what is right or beautiful without caring about what the world proclaims to be possible.17 To act in such a way is to act in the world without relation to the world—an operativity that, for Schelling, completely disregards and, as it were, indifferently cuts through all worldly production and mediation. Moral virtue in particular is here no longer a matter of moral striving or progress, but a direct, immediate expression of the (soul’s or God’s) atemporal essence. “Let the [indifferent, blissful] soul act in you, or act through and through as a holy man”18—that is, one who acts, as Schelling points out in the Freedom essay, immediately out of the divine, out of “the highest resoluteness for what is right, without any choice.”19 In this state, the soul is immanent only to itself, so that morality, as the immediate expression of this immanence, operates without any deliberation and without relation to any context. It is atemporal in the sense of being without relation to the world’s temporality or regime of reproduction, instead directly enacting what is right. It does not negotiate or construe dialectical relationships with the world; it intervenes into it. Morality is indifferent to the world as it is while being operative in it. In this, one may be said to act in the world without legitimating it.
This, too, is a way of annihilating the world. The basic idea here may be seen as responding to the problem we saw in the early Schelling. Any agency that is supposed to break through this world of actualization and the not-yet must not itself be inscribed into or function as part of the process of actualization. Any activity that seeks to abolish the position of the world must not itself be represented as a position within the world. Accordingly, to ask whether such an agency is possible is to fall back into the logic of possibility and striving. Such an agency, then, fundamentally cannot be self-reflective or inquire into its own conditions of possibility (bypassing thereby the transcendental knot); it cannot relate to any particular configurations of the world; it cannot act toward any position or any telos. The way it (mindlessly) cuts through the world may best be likened to a forest fire or perhaps a flood. No wonder that Schelling compares it at once to divine love (Liebe) and divine wrath (Zorn)—a divine violence that needs, furthermore, to be powerful enough to disregard worldly possibility, even to obliterate it so it does not block its path.
Where is such absolute power to be found? To ask this question is to raise the crucial issue. The world, after all, does block one’s path. Even if we take the world, most radically, to be an illusion, its power—the violence it does, the hallucinations it produces, the fear it causes, the divisions it enacts—does not become any less real. Seeing as the world’s divisions have real power, it becomes a question of enacting a power that would rival and even overpower the world—a power that would be capable of blowing up, setting on fire, flooding the wall or the colonial settlement that is the world. To locate this power in that which is transcendent to the world (a coming God perhaps), would be to reintroduce indefinite futurity into the picture. Another Schellingian answer would refer to this power as “nature”—this being of vast indifference and immense power, on which the modern world (of the Anthropocene) is imposed. It is unclear, however, whether waiting for a coming retribution from nature is any different from waiting for the arrival of a God. To wait is, again, to let the world be—which means that, in order not merely to wait, one needs to find ways of not simply leaving the world in place. That, in turn, implies thinking the world and the reality of its power (a thinking absent in the divine violence itself), even inhabiting it, if only to know where to ignite or how to produce or identify the cracks in the wall that should help make it give in to the coming flood. This issue is central not only for political theology but for contemporary thought as a whole. In Laruellean terms, the problem is that the Real and the world are both real, albeit in different ways, so that the reality of the world’s power, if it is to be confronted, cannot simply be discounted as illusory. Unless it is confronted, however, the world continues to persist.
The move of beginning with what is absolutely nothing from the point of view of the world appears likewise in Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre. The dogmatists—those who take the world to be the ultimate reality—“think of things as the first, and make knowledge depend on those, be formed through those.” Knowledge and being for them coincide, so that, in dogmatic philosophy, the world fundamentally remains in place. The dogmatists, as a result, can only have “doctrines of things: ontology, cosmology, etc.”—mere “images of things.” The task is, however, to investigate the conditions of possibility of the world as it appears, or to trace how the world is constructed: a “construction a priori,” which cannot begin with anywhere (any place or position) in the world. This kind of knowledge can, accordingly, only begin with a nonplace that must be thought of as preceding and totally dis-placing the world: the task is to think “knowledge as something independent—and for that matter, first, the question of whether things can still have any being outside knowledge if left in their place.” The dogmatists cannot think such a nowhere, and so “cannot have any Wissenschaftslehre.” To them, “it would be the doctrine of nothing.”20
As proceeding immanently from the nonplace of total displacement, “knowledge structures itself through itself as an organized and articulated full system.… One part of that system is its concept of itself in its above-mentioned original organization. This is, precisely, the W.L. [Wissenschaftslehre].”21 The point from which the Wissenschaftslehre begins, as part of the system of knowledge, is the point of the original completion of the system of knowledge as such. That the system is complete—a totality that is, however, not the totality of everything in the world—and that the standpoint of the Wissenschaftslehre is the atopic point where this totality coincides with itself, is crucial. It is, for Fichte, the atopic totality indexed by the system that ungrounds the world as always not-yet and instead grounds knowledge.22
“God” is what Fichte calls this atopic standpoint, similar to Schelling’s absolute being. This being, too, is without negation or transition to otherness. As such, it cannot act, or produce any world.23 Accordingly, the central issue is that of glimpsing the