In Fichte’s philosophy of history, modernity—as the epoch of alienation, individuation, religious wars, globalization, and colonialism—is shot through by the opposition of what he initially configures as two types of Christianity, the Johannine and the Pauline, that structurally define subsequent religious and philosophical conflicts and positions. The Pauline trajectory determines, for Fichte, the mainstream of medieval and modern thought; while the Johannine names what the Pauline, with its investment in worldly power and sovereignty, forecloses. What is initially defined as Johannine Christianity turns out, however, to be not Christianity per se, but the ante-historical persistence of an originary religion that must be thought of as preceding the world and ungrounding the primacy of history—as the nondialectical, nonmediatable core of the dialectic of the implicit and the explicit; of past, present, and future; of immanence and transcendence; of the modern state and the true ethical community. Fichte attempts at once to critique and justify modernity—as a specific moment of this dialectic, an epoch of alienation and domination that is, nonetheless, necessary within the movement of history—but also, significantly, to diagnose modernity and trace the genealogy of its conceptual structures without falling into the modern myth of self-legitimation or orthodox religious critique. This is done, in other words, not as a defense of Christian faith but in order to manifest a certain systematic structure that undermines (and functions otherwise than through) the clear demarcation separating the religious and the secular.
Even Schelling—who in his late, so-called positive philosophy offered a “theistic” critique of Hegel’s thought as too immanentist and rationalist, instead embracing (at least according to the standard account) the transcendent God of Pauline Christianity—may be seen as wrestling, throughout his thinking, with the world of modernity and its genealogy. Already in his early metaphysics, it is the not-yet of the modern world—its negativity and alienation, its freedom as infinite striving for freedom in the future, its character of expansion and domination (over what is considered to constitute mere possibility for the subject of modernity), and the work of actualization it demands—that leads Schelling to think the absolute not as an absolutization of the world, but as an immanence that precedes the movement of negation and actualization as well as cuts through the world of mediation. For Schelling at his most subversive, the logic of the absolute and the logic of that which is nothing vis-à-vis the world, and which ungrounds the not-yet of the world, crucially coincide.36 What Schelling diagnoses is the constitutive neediness and negativity of the modern world and modern rationality, the way modernity is permeated by both a nostalgic longing and the striving for a future of reconciliation, fulfillment, and bliss—and how it is precisely its most secular forms (e.g., modern morality, subjectivity, domination over nature) that are infused with this longing and striving. The secular world is defined constitutively as the structure of lack and as the transition from an inaccessible past to a wished-for future that is, however, never now, but only endlessly deferred and foreclosed. In all this, modernity for Schelling at once inherits Platonic and Christian forms of temporality and intensifies them by making this negativity and lack, and not God, into the first, ultimate reality—an intensification by way of inversion.37
The novelty of this line of questioning, which stands at the origin of nineteenth- and twentieth-century genealogical inquiry—including political theology and secularization theory—must not go unnoticed. This is not merely a return of religion: after all, it was thinkers such as Friedrich Jacobi and Friedrich Schleiermacher who represented, in the post-Kantian climate, the side of religiosity. Jacobi in particular consistently opposed the German idealists (first Kant, then Fichte, then Schelling), accusing them, and modern thought more generally, of pantheism and atheism. Lamenting what he saw as the loss of faith and transcendence resulting from philosophy’s illegitimate use of religious archives, Jacobi sought to expose German Idealism’s nihilistic perversion of true religiosity. In this, his position prefigured contemporary Christian critiques of modernity—and indeed proleptically contributed to the contemporary fixation of (and on) the religious-secular binary. By contrast, German Idealism sought neither to critique modernity from the standpoint of Christianity (although some, especially the late Schelling, participated in this as well) nor to defend secular philosophy or secular modernity against its religious opponents. Both positions merely reproduce the religious-secular binary, which German Idealism, across its array of speculative explorations, sought to question and undermine. Nor should German Idealism be seen as merely a post-Enlightenment synthesis of modernity and Christianity; instead, it is precisely the original interwovenness of the two that here, for the first time, becomes the subject of an all-encompassing genealogical analysis. In this, German Idealism contributes directly to the field of political theology, whose critical and analytical power has come in large part precisely from its recognition of this interwovenness and the resulting challenge it has posed to the self-congratulatory narratives, secularist no less than religious.
This is the constitutive reason why German Idealism has been the subject of both irritation and praise, in religious and secular camps alike. Obviously, German idealist critique of modernity can be used for explicitly religious or explicitly secularist goals, as has often been done, not least by German idealists themselves. However, significantly for this volume, it is its appreciation of the entanglements of modernity with Christianity, its attempts to trace these entanglements genealogically, and its grappling with what came to be known as the secularization thesis—that marks German Idealism as a crucial political-theological archive and resource.
The decisive question is, what is to be done with this resource? If the intention here is not to draw on the archive of German Idealism for the sake of recuperating Christianity or shoring up secularist narratives, then what kind of use remains for this archive? We see two distinct trajectories of response, both proceeding from the fact of the originary political-theological entanglement of Christianity and modernity. Whereas one seeks to uncover, within German Idealism, resources for articulating conceptual paradigms that contribute to contemporary political theology by challenging the religious-secular binary, the other focuses on German Idealism as itself a high point of this entanglement—as itself a high point of modernity—in order to critique it. From both of these perspectives, it remains necessary that political theology revisits, and continues revisiting, the German idealist archive.
German Idealism between Nothingness and the World
In a post-Enlightenment and postrevolutionary moment, German Idealism proves to be important not only for its genealogical and diagnostic investigations but also for its capacity to speculatively articulate immanence as preceding (and thus putting into question) all transcendence. German Idealism creates varied conceptual frameworks of immanence that are irreducible to the (Christian-modern) world—this world of division, domination, and the incessant not-yet of universality and progress, a world that entices the subject with its seemingly endless possibilities and promises of the way it could be, thereby reproducing the way it is. Indeed, these frameworks, while being foreclosed by the Christian-modern apparatus of the world, index what has the power to delegitimate and subvert it. This is an unorthodox portrait of German Idealism, to be sure, one that resists reducing it to a philosophy of the subject alienated from the world, determined by structures of division and diremption that, in turn, necessitate the (conservative) logics of synthesis, reconciliation, and wholeness, characteristic of the Christian-modern paradigm. More orthodox readings miss the