In this way, we circle back to the theorization of an indifference that refuses mediation—but which also, as Dubilet suggests in his essay’s conclusion, may refuse the universal name “human.” The work of Daniel Whistler is crucial here, insofar as it attempts to think a non-Hegelian trajectory within German Idealism, one that would refuse the primacy of mediation and human (transcendental) subjectivity in thinking the world. In a recent essay, Whistler has shown how Schelling seeks to exhibit reality indifferently from a utopic standpoint prior to all difference and particularity (which always already exist within the regime of mediation)—a standpoint that can only be grasped as nonhuman or even inhuman.49 In his essay in this volume, Whistler shows indifference to be a way of rethinking the secular modern without being beholden to the understandings of secularization as the negation of particularity or its remediation into a universal. If one can think an immanence (here equated with indifference) that refuses the logics of mediation and universality—Christian in their origins and inherited by modernity—then perhaps this immanence can provide a different way of thinking the secular itself? To that end, Whistler theorizes abstraction as indifference, which results in a complete destitution of the transcendental, collapsing the subject-object dichotomy and refusing to mediate between particular possibilities. Instead of sublating them into a universality, this abstraction neutralizes and remains absolutely indifferent to them. In its indifference and nullity, it may also be said to be universal, but in a completely nonstandard sense—as an immediate imposition of a plane of immanence that operates, one could say, without relation to particulars. This imposition may carry with it a kind of violence, too, but this violence—and this logic of the secular—although modern, is no longer the Christian-Hegelian modern; as such, it offers a different conceptual apparatus for the political-theological understanding of modernity.
Saitya Brata Das continues the Schellingian polemics with Hegel in his essay, which instead of theorizing immanence anew articulates the late Schelling’s radical transcendence as the counter to the Hegelian theodicy of worldly immanence. In Hegel, the world is understood as potentiality, as the world-historical possibility actualized by spirit as the subject of history. In this theodicy of history, the world is justified by its own movement, that of actualizing possibility. Indeed—to complement Das’s analysis—to see the movement of the world as one of progressive actualization of possibility, the way Hegel does, is itself quintessentially modern. As Hans Blumenberg has shown, the inaugurating move of modernity, the move that inaugurates the program of the subject’s self-assertion, is to make the world (and not God) into the totality of possibility. Faced with reality as possibility yet to be actualized, the task of the modern subject becomes that of producing reality, of mastering it by making use of it, exploring the possibilities inherent in it, and exploiting them to the fullest.50 The subject becomes the subject of this process of actualization—the figure of possibility itself. This is, one could say, the way the modern world legitimates itself: by thinking of itself as open and producible, as making room for and enacting all the possibility. For Das, the significance of late-Schellingian political theology is, by contrast, to delegitimate worldly sovereignty by eschatologically emptying it out, by freely letting it pass away. In this Schellingian kenosis, the very logic of theodicy is refused, dissolved in the beatitude of an actuality without telos.
Agata Bielik-Robson’s contribution offers a different move against Hegelian kenosis. She opposes Hegel’s teleological-sacrificial logic of the death of God with the idea of God’s free self-withdrawal (tsimtsum) found in the Jewish tradition, from Luria to Derrida. Both concepts, kenosis and tsimtsum, may be said to lie at the foundation of modernity—an optic in which the death of God ceases to be a Christian monopoly. Kenosis and tsimtsum both open up the space of finitude in which the world can be affirmed, but in radically different ways. In Hegel, God may freely consent to die, yet his self-sacrificial death lays an infinite burden upon the world—a debt and guilt that can only be repaid at the end of history. History is thereby turned into a space of divine sovereignty even in God’s death. By contrast, what tsimtsum allows us to think is a gift without sacrifice, a self-contraction of God that simply lets finitude be, without reason or telos. The “religion of flowers” that Hegel criticized as not serious enough, here aligned with tsimtsum, turns out to be an immanently anti-Hegelian moment opening up onto a non-Christian, also future-oriented yet nonsacrificial, logic of modernity.
If the Hegelian dialectic is complicit with the Christian-modern world, then one move is to think the nondialectical as that which refuses this world immanently, as multiple essays in this volume do. Another move, however, which lies broadly within the Hegelian trajectory itself, would be to open up the dialectical movement, to un-resolve it—perhaps transforming it into a spiral. This is suggested by S. D. Chrostowska in her contribution, which focuses on the so-called “Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism.” The basic gesture of the “Oldest Systematic Program” is messianic and revolutionary, forgoing the religious-secular binary in order to think an openness to the utopic that resists closure and mastery. As Chrostowska argues, an entire tradition of dialectical utopianism follows this gesture. The openness of the spiral resists the Schmittian closure of political theology—disclosing its alternative forms and perspectives, siding not with authority, but with the emancipation of the suffering and the oppressed. In this, Chrostowska endorses not the dialectic in its late-Hegelian form, but the earlier, Romantic-Hegelian revolutionary impulse and the liberatory political theologies to which it helped give rise.
The figure of an opening or gap is analyzed critically in Steven Shakespeare’s contribution. Shakespeare diagnoses the ambivalence of German Idealism as at once pointing toward an immanence that subverts the subject and its world and as foreclosing this immanence by way of the gap between the self and its reflected counterpart, the I and the not-I. Interrogating the constitution and failure of the subject and its world through Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard, Shakespeare traces in these thinkers three different attempts to think the gap without resolving or dialectically unifying it, without appealing to any sort of transcendent authority that would serve to close the gap. Instead, these thinkers reduplicate and intensify this gap of subjectivity as a way of signaling the immanently fractured, nonunitary character of reality. Reduplication points thereby to the inevitable problem of expression inherent in theories of immanence, insofar as expression requires a minimal difference to be possible. In these thinkers, this minimal difference is transformed into the dialectical motor of life, which remains however (despite—or indeed precisely because of—its proclamations of universality) a fundamentally Christian logic, transforming others, most directly Judaism, into the embodiment of the unlife. It is through this investment in life, with the hierarchical and supersessionist logics it engenders, that Idealism ultimately forecloses immanence and reproduces transcendence. The resulting theoretical question, which Shakespeare leaves open, is whether reduplication, and thus the expression of immanence without appeal to models of truth from above, can be divorced from this structure of supersession.
The move of recuperation and subjugation is, of course, likewise at the heart of the Hegelian world history. In his contribution, Vincent Lloyd seeks to think that which is occluded by this recuperation—namely, Africa as, for Hegel, the continent prior to history—and to find in this ante-historical origin resources for refusing the moves of dialectical recuperation, for pushing back against Hegel’s methodical ambition to mediate everything from the normative world-historical standpoint. Africa and blackness index in Hegel that which is unspeakable and without recognition, whose functioning in and against Hegel’s narrative Lloyd proceeds to trace—as the exteriority that persists, unassimilable to the dialectic. Africa can only be articulated by way of the complete dismantling of the apparatus of history, the absolute stripping-away of spirit or subjectivity. What results from this is a pure contingency of raw events and objects without a binding force, a life of immediacy without any sense of totality. In this, a different kind of sovereignty emerges, embodied for Hegel in the figure of the Congo queen, whose agency is despotic and immediate, secular in the sense of being driven wholly by materialistic concerns. In a different way than Barber and Dubilet, Lloyd also diagnoses the presence of sovereignty at the basis of the supposedly immanent movement of history.