To think the world from the standpoint of the ought, is to demand that the reason behind the world—the ought itself—become visible. The ought is thereby redoubled: as beginning and as end (as “the ought of the visibility of the ought,” the telos of the world). “To construct the true world of sense” is, accordingly, to think the utopian point where the world coincides fully with the visibility of its ought. The gap between the two “oughts” fully filled, we find ourselves back at the original atopic standpoint.25 Why, then, must we leave it in the first place? Because, again, the world is there and its meaning needs to be glimpsed. The existence of the world is the condition of possibility of the ought (it is because the world is there that the realization of the ought is thought to be possible26)—but, also, it is only “on the condition that [individuals] find themselves on the path of glimpsing the ought” that the world and its ought may be seen to coincide: that the world may be regarded as justified.27 To construct the world is to reconstruct it on the condition of its ought, and thus as not yet the (true) world—with a view to its end; and to think the end of the world, the point where its ought is fully visible, is to justify the world. Thereby, the world is constructed as the condition of possibility of its own (future) end. The ante-original, atopic beginning of the system is remediated into an eschatological telos to which the world is bound—and which is itself bound to the world.
The transcendental knot could not be tied any tighter. It is, perhaps, time to cut it again.
An alternative approach would be to think the world without an “ought”—the empty potentiality we glimpsed in Fichte.28 In this approach, the transcendental conjunction is destabilized via the focus on the world-making capacity without a normative horizon or any necessary process of actualization. This would amount neither to absolutizing the world nor to declaring it an illusion, but to proceeding from the fact that the world is made or imagined. This is the early Romantic, poetic focus. Here, the transcendental knot is both acknowledged and ungrounded by thinking the conditions of possibility of the world without thinking this world (or any other world) as necessary or seeking to justify it.
“Is not,” asks Friedrich Schlegel, “this entire, unending world constructed by the understanding out of incomprehensibility or chaos?”29 The world is endlessly constructed (“unending”), serving to foreclose the incomprehensible—the chaos—not only as the Real but also, so to speak, as the material from which the world is being constructed. This idea is Kantian in origin: the in-itself as providing the material of sensation which the subject arranges into the world with the help of the categories. In Kant, however, the standpoint of the in-itself (which Schlegel calls “chaos”) is cognitively inaccessible to the subject—and, as mentioned earlier, the categories themselves are necessary for the world to appear to the subject in the first place. The categories are thereby fixed and justified as necessary. They are also binaries or dichotomies (which are then mediated), in keeping with the character of the world as imposing itself on the Real by dividing and mediating it. Schlegel, too, acknowledges that the world, and the way we reflect about the world, functions this way. We tend to employ binary terms to construct the world or make it comprehensible—not just the ones found in Kant’s table of categories, but also high and low, serious and jocular, beautiful and ugly, natural and artificial, and many others.
This is where, for Schlegel, irony comes in, which takes any pair of such terms and subverts or collapses them—so that, faced with irony, the subject cannot know whether the ironist (the ironic text or ironic speech) is being serious or jocular, where the higher might become the lower and the lower the higher, where the familiar might be revealed as strange, the natural as artfully constituted, and the ugly as beautiful, if in a different, unusual way. Thereby irony interrupts the flow of the world’s construction in which we are habitually engaged, ungrounding the world’s imposition and transporting the ironist to a standpoint at which all binaries are immediately collapsed. The operation of irony amounts to “a total interruption and canceling-out” of any process of construction (KFSA, 11:88). This serves not only to expose binary categories as themselves constructed and the world as produced—so that the alleged necessity of the way the world is gets fully suspended—but also to expose the Real on which these binaries are imposed and which can only be thought of as collapsing any binary, and thus as incomprehensible: the Real of incomprehensibility or chaos.
“Irony,” says Schlegel, “is the clear consciousness … of the infinitely full chaos” (KFSA, 2:263). The irony of this expression, suspending the clear-chaotic opposition, is itself programmatic. There is, Schlegel observes, a certain symmetry to the chaos inherent in irony, with its move of “logical disorganization” (2:403)—a symmetry that cannot be the standard symmetrical demarcation between A and non-A. Rather, symmetry here names the structure of indistinction between any binary terms, or the total (“infinitely full”) collapse of dichotomies. In nature-philosophical terms, Schlegel speaks of this full suspension as “the point of indifference [Indifferenzpunkt] where everything is saturated” (18:391), where everything is, to the point of indistinction, dissolved into one.
The first operation of irony stops, as it were, the cycle of reproduction of binaries, completely suspending the world with all its binaries, so as to begin with the chaos that must be regarded as prior to any world. At the atopic standpoint from which irony proceeds, all binaries are collapsed—so that, for example, all is jest and all is seriousness at once (KFSA, 2:160). The all suggests here not an alternation between the terms but an affirmation of a point of suspension in which the two (and any other opposing terms) coincide at any given moment. This is an operation of immediate annihilation, too—the world’s decreation to the zero point that collapses all divisions. In a fragment from his philosophical notebooks, Schlegel connects neutralization, annihilation (nothingness), and chaos in the following way: “The chaos relates to the nothing in the same way that the world relates to the chaos. Chaos [is] the only real concept of the nothing. Nothing itself [is] the purely analytic concept.… The neutral, too, is confusion and chaos.… Nothing (Nichts) is more original than the chaos” (18:78).30 Elsewhere Schlegel says, “Only that confusion is a chaos which can give rise to a new world” (2:263), and thus to speak of chaos is to speak of the world suspended or decreated. Similarly, to speak of nothingness, this purely ideal or “analytic” absence of anything, is to speak of chaos as a state in which all oppositions are refused in the all-encompassing Indifferenzpunkt.
There is, in this chaos, no trajectory or topos, no movement of mediation or distribution of possibility and actuality. It is the void of negativity grasped as “real,” as an immanent materiality of nothingness—as pure material in which all distinctions are collapsed and with which the work of construction (of a world) begins. Chaos is nothingness considered as productive and generative. The ensuing construction reconfigures immanently this world-material—and in this, it is for Schlegel at once critical (“critique is the universal chaos”; KFSA, 18:366) and artistic: “the contact between the artist and the material is only thinkable as creation from nothing” (18:133). No wonder, then, that chaos is intrinsic for Schlegel both to the novel (“in its form, the novel is a well-formed artificial chaos”; 16:207) and to Romantic poetry (18:337). It is from this atopic standpoint of material nothingness that any binary—and any distribution of binaries, that is, a world—may be said to be constructed.
This decreation is configured by Schlegel, furthermore, as a revolutionary operation: “The chaos that, in the modern world, has previously been unconscious and passive, must return actively; eternal revolution” (KFSA,