To think the poetic with Schlegel is to think construction without justification, and potentiality or capacity without necessity, including the necessity of actualization—but also without end. Romantic poetry is “progressive” (as Schlegel terms it) not in the sense of a not-yet, but as the absence of end or telos. Nor does it mean “incomplete” in any standard sense: instead, poetic construction begins immanently with a complete suspension of the world. The point is not to exorcize the world, thereby demonizing it or making it haunt us, but to think it (or, with Schelling’s holy man, act in it) without investment in the way it is or could be. Thus, even if we accept that it is necessary to construct a world in some way, this does not have to mean justifying this world as necessary or implying that its construction must proceed in this and not some other way, toward this end or toward some end at all, or that it needs to be objective or serious.
That is, of course, an important part of Hegel’s criticism of Schlegel: that irony “takes nothing seriously”31—that it does not take the objective movement of world history seriously. I do not have the space here to consider Hegel—or, for that matter, Marx—in any detail. But the way the transcendental knot is tied to world justification remains central to them both. In Hegel, world history famously is theodicy, and the transcendental structure—the way spirit produces its own conditions of possibility as necessary for its actualization and forward movement—is central to this history. To destabilize this conjunction the way Schlegel does is to endanger the teleology of spirit.32 The issue, in Marx, of changing the conditions (of possibility) that are necessary to effect this change in the first place points to a similar knot. In the words of Lisa Robertson:
Here is Marx’s big dilemma, the reason he goes to Lucretius:
practice arises from conditions
yet these are the conditions we must change.33
This is, in different terms, precisely the issue which this essay has attempted to outline. In order to resolve it, Marx, Robertson suggests, turns to a thinking that is poetic in form. In the post-Kantian context, poetry indexes a “chaotic imagination that generates the promises of new worlds.”34 Romanticism wants to think the possibility of new worlds—but is that really the way to resolve the transcendental knot, this tension between annihilating and justifying the world? The (possibility of the) appearance of the new is, after all, at the heart of this tension that is political-theological in character.
This tension seems to remain as long as the world remains—because it indexes the fact of the world. In this essay, I have partially sketched the theoretical spectrum that emerges from attempts to engage with this tension and some of the pitfalls along the way. I have argued that, before German Idealism proceeds to construct the world, it annihilates it in order to reveal the Real that the world forecloses, so as to begin with this Real and not with the world. Instead of proceeding from the world as the ultimate reality, Idealism proceeds from a zero point absolutely free from any need for or any necessary transition to a world. This starting operation transports the speculative thinker to an atopic standpoint at which the world is turned to or exposed as Nichts, and which must be thought of as preceding the world. To annihilate the world, the way I have used this term, is to expose the world as secondary and imposed—to reduce it affirmatively to nothing—so as to proceed immanently from this nothingness (alternatively termed chaos, God, or bliss) as that which the world would foreclose.
To conceive immanently of a standpoint at which there is no world, revealing the world as imposed, is, however, not enough. For what to do about the fact that the world is there—the fact that we are subjects in and subject to the necessity of the world? For, no matter the force of world destitution and affirmation of nothingness, it is the construction (the thinking of the world) that ultimately determines whether, how, and to what extent the world survives and is justified. This construction may, as in Schlegel, take the form of ironic or poetic deconstruction, of taking apart the binaries that make up the world in order to freely rearrange them—but it is crucial that some sort of construction occur, some sort of inquiry into the exact conditions and function of the taking place or imposition of the world. If the construction is simply forgone, the world is either absolutized or turned into a ghost (or both). It might turn out, in this case, that the world is reproduced by way of its rejection, that the specter of the world persists paradoxically by way of its exorcism. Accordingly, the manner in which, and the end to which, the construction takes place is key. It does not suffice to declare the world to be nothing; it is important to destabilize the very conditions of possibility of the world and not to, wittingly or unwittingly, absolutize them. Even if the world is taken to be made or imagined, it is essential to trace how this imagination works—and the power it has over us. Deconstruction alone is insufficient; construction must take place. Such is a central insight that German Idealism bequeaths to contemporary political theology and contemporary theory.
Notes
1 1. The human is, after all, one of the names of the world—as “our world” (per the Meillassoux epigraph).
2 2. On the question of world-making as a central political-theological question, see Daniel Colucciello Barber, “World-Making and Grammatical Impasse,” Qui Parle 25, nos. 1–2 (2016): 179–206.
3 3. See also my and Alex Dubilet’s introduction. On the world in question as the Christian-modern world, see also our introduction, as well as Joseph Albernaz and Kirill Chepurin, “The Sovereignty of the World: Towards a Political Theology of Modernity (after Blumenberg),” in Interrogating Modernity: Debates with Hans Blumenberg, ed. Agata Bielik-Robson and Daniel Whistler (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 83–107.
4 4. As first suggested, in a different context, by Odo Marquard. See, for example, Marquard, Transzendentaler Idealismus, Romantische Naturphilosophie, Psychoanalyse (Cologne: Verlag für Philosophie Jürgen Dinter, 1987), 77–83. I take issue with Marquard’s understanding of modern theodicy, however, and German idealist theodicy in particular. He seems to take the term theodicy at face value, putting too much emphasis on God and not enough on the world—whereas, starting already from Leibniz (who coined the term), at stake in theodicy was the justification of the world as the best possible world, and of the negativity of the world as in some way necessary, ineliminable, and ultimately good. Thus, when Hegel says famously that world history is theodicy, the main function of that claim is not so much a defense of the figure of God but a justification of the course of world history as the best possible and even necessary or “divine”—so that no better world is possible, and no forms, categories, or grammar of spirit other than the ones produced historically by spirit itself. This, too, is a version of the transcendental knot.
5 5. This and the following section are a condensed version of the reading of the early Schelling offered in my “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.
6 6. Friedrich Schelling, “Vom Ich als Princip der Philosophie,” in Werke: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1980), 1.2:109.