To provide an example, Joseph Albernaz’s contribution to the volume explores this ante-worldly immanence under the name of the earth, as thought by Friedrich Hölderlin and Karoline von Günderrode.38 The earth is the first common, the Real-in-common which is then enclosed, divided, and segregated by the colonial regime of the world. The sovereign, transcendent character of this regime is evident already in what Hölderlin, Schelling, Hegel, and later Carl Schmitt consider to be its inaugurating act: judgment (Ur-teil), which combines the operation of division (into particular kinds, properties, and territories) with that of unification (where the divided particulars are subsumed under universals). The resulting process of possession, division, and appropriation is foundational for the modern colonial project and Christian in its origin and significance. The earth as the common, by contrast, allows us to think that which refuses and ungrounds division and exploitation (in particular, the exploitation of the earth by the Christian-modern apparatus of transcendence). As a result, the earth becomes a political-theological ruin—and yet, to inhabit this ruin (of the common) is to think the ruination of the universalizing, dominating order of reality. What results from this, is a movement of local and alien immanence that destitutes and collapses the world, revealing it to be imposed and exploitative, feeding on the immanence of the earth and the common while foreclosing it.
In a convergent fashion, James Martel’s contribution exposes in Kant, the originator of the problematics found in German Idealism and Romanticism, a materiality that persists in priority to the transcendental order (of subject and object), revealing the latter to be secondary and imposed, to be promising salvation in the future by foreclosing material immanence in the now. By remaining with and within the ordinary and material, we can, for Martel, an-archically resist such an imposition—a resistance that carries with it a messianic aspect, a messianism of the ordinary in the Benjaminian vein. This messianicity saves us, immediately, from the transcendental structure of salvation itself—from the way the transcendental philosopher imagines the world is or ought to be.
This kind of immanence carries with it not just a refusal of the ways of the world but also a “nihilistic” threat of undoing the very structures that uphold religious and secular authority or sovereignty. The absolute is, throughout German Idealism, intimately related to an affirmation of (the) nothing that seeks to escape any logic of the world’s givenness or any absolutization of the world and its powers. This conjunction of immanence and the refusal to be subjected to the world did not go undetected by German Idealism’s contemporaries. Jacobi, with his investment in transcendence, correctly sensed the German idealist threat (to transcendence) in his double identification of German Idealism with Spinozism and nihilism. Failing to grasp its metaphysical and political-theological innovation, he sought to reduce German Idealism to the simplistic fantasy of an “egotistic,” merely subjective I, to a “will that wills nothing” and thus reduces all to nothing.39 To this, Jacobi contrasted “the true” or God as “the outside,” the transcendent reality sustained by faith—as, ultimately, a faith in the outside and thus in the world and its ontological priority over nothingness, ruin, and discontinuity. Relatedly, Jean Paul saw Idealism and Romanticism as “the lawless, capricious spirit of the present age, which would egotistically annihilate the world and the universe in order to clear a space merely for free play in the void.”40 Or, as Jacobi succinctly put it, “Man has this choice, however, and this alone: Nothingness or a God.”41
German Idealism, indeed, often chose (the) nothing. That did not, however, necessarily entail choosing the subjective or making the capricious subject into an omnipotent God, as Jacobi tendentiously proclaimed. Not even early Romanticism, at the height of what is often taken to be its subjectivism, considered the logic of artistic creation to be subjective in this narrow sense.42 The conjunction of nihilism with Spinozism—the philosophy of impersonal immanence—remained not fully thought through by Jacobi, even if he was the one to accuse German Idealism of both.
The example of Schelling is crucial here. Already in 1795, several years before Jacobi’s open letter on Fichte’s nihilism, Schelling proclaimed the will that wills nothing—the non-will, without mediation or striving, without expansion or want, the will that is prior to and refuses all demands of the world—as the absolutely Real from which all thought must begin.43 This non-will was for him not the subjective I but the full dissolution or annihilation of the subject and the object, in their inextricable relation—a relation in which the subject is opposed to the object, a not-I, and wants (mastery over) it. Without such relation, premised on the subject-object opposition, the subject cannot exist as the subject of (the possibility of) mastery, production, and freedom. The philosophy of Kant and the early Fichte were for Schelling representative of this logic—the logic of divisive relationality, the inside/outside, and the endless striving to overcome this originary division, as the logic through which the world is produced and reproduced by the subject through synthesis, ultimately through the expansionism of finite reason. (Finitude marking here precisely the gap between subject and reality, proclaimed to be primary and ineliminable.) Schelling’s radical move was to refuse this gap through which the subject and the world was produced and to think instead the absolute as immanent groundlessness, the void of the Real that is absolutely nonproductive and even annihilative of any possibility of division and relation—to think the absolute as what he would later call absolute indifference (Indifferenz), in which the very logic of difference, negativity, and care is voided.44
The absolute, as absolutely groundless (grundlos),45 was affirmed by Schelling as the only unconditioned point of beginning for any thought that seeks to not absolutize the world—the world as always not yet perfect, not yet moral, postponing fulfillment into an indefinite, transcendent future which only leads to reproducing the divisions and negativities of the way things are. Understood in this way, the world must be annihilated, if there is to be a way of thinking in terms other than those this regime of reality demands or proclaims to be the only terms possible. As Kirill Chepurin’s essay in this volume points out, this No to the world was the atopic starting point not only for Schelling but also for (the later) Fichte and for Friedrich Schlegel—for whom this was an explicitly revolutionary operation, a decreation of the world toward chaos or nothingness, an immanent materiality from which indifferently to construct any world and any binary opposition without justifying the world under construction as the best possible. There was for them, furthermore, bliss to be found in this atopic operation—not a happiness in the world, but a joy at the annihilation of the world, at exposing the world as imposed and unfree. The world is ungrounded in order to inhabit a void without relation to or care for the world, a freedom from the world in which no world is possible or needed.
As Oxana Timofeeva argues in this volume, even Hegel, the idealist thinker most invested in the world as it is, knew the joy—and enjoyment—found at the end of the world. Reason joyfully inhabits this end as the ruin from which philosophy, in the figure of the Owl of Minerva, begins its constitutively belated flight. In this postapocalyptic political-theological situation of a world that has always already ended and a God that is always already dead—which must, however, be thought of as the beginning of thought—Hegel is joined by Kant and Sade. Together they form a transition through the catastrophic situation of solitude and death, ultimately rejoicing in this situation as at once apocalyptic, rational, and utopian, one in which a new collectivity, a new “we,” may be seen to emerge.
Thus, in German Idealism,