The Beatific Life

This chapter presents a reading of the much-neglected novella Clara. It presents Schelling as offering an imaginative-creative expression of what may be called the ‘beatific life’, a life that is moved not by the power of the law but is released from the cages of the law. Beatitude, then, is the fundamental attunement that, by releasing life from the foundation of the worldly nomos, attunes it to the eschatological advent of the holy: the result is a political theology that destitutes sovereignties in the worldly order. Our exposure to the gift of our very existence, the gift that wounds us in the outpouring of an unconditional beatitude, is not mere life at the disposal of the law but the being which exists just ‘like a rose, without a why’.

The Rhythm of History

This chapter presents a reading of the posthumously published fragment The Ages of the World (Die Weltalter) to show that the deconstruction of sovereignty demands a re-thinking of the question of history. Confronting Hegel's pantheistic-immanent philosophy of history, it attempts to reveal an eschatological vision of history at work in Schelling's The Ages of the World which radically puts into question the secularising theodicy formulated by Hegel in his lectures on the philosophy of history. He thereby opens up the possibility, later elaborated by Søren Kierkegaard, Franz Rosenzweig, and Walter Benjamin, of a messianic-eschatological critique of historical Reason. Such an eschatological-messianic conception of history, by withdrawing from the triumphal march of universal world-historical politics, gives voice to those who are oppressed by the irresistible demand of progress.

The Irreducible Remainder

This chapter presents a reading of Schelling's Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom (1809), which takes up the great philosophical problematic of freedom, a problematic that is rarely mentioned in contemporary philosophical discourse. Taking up the question of freedom anew, and posing it in the context of contemporary thought, it renews the Schellingian thought of an ‘irreducible remainder’ that does not allow itself to be enclosed in the cages of the world. The ‘irreducible remainder’ of the world keeps the world open, immemorially, to the incalculable arrival of the new and of the absolutely heterogeneous.

The Tragic Dissonance

This chapter presents a reading of Schelling's 1795 epistolary essay Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, where he first raises the problematic of the tragic. It is shown that Schelling's attempts to think the tragic as the belonging-together of freedom and necessity in a manner that already exceeds speculative-dialectical Idealism at the very moment of its institution. Bringing Schelling's tragic thought closer to Hölderlin's tragic ‘caesura of the speculative’ shows that what is at stake in his thought is the sense of a tragic differend that cannot be thought within the onto-theological constitution of metaphysics.

The Non-Sovereign Exception

This chapter reads the Stuttgart lectures of 1810 to show how Schelling is concerned with elaborating an eschatological conception of being. The lectures show Schelling understanding eschatology in terms of infinite disclosures of the divine that constantly open us to a future to come that refuses to embody itself in the immanence of the world-historical potencies. These world-historical powers thereby lose their autochthony and autarchy, their legitimacy and sovereignty, their power to elicit from us absolute obligation. They can at best be understood as belonging to the order of ‘passing away’, as the impoverished attempts of mankind to supplement the Fall (Abfall). Such a Fall, with which the history of mankind itself is inaugurated, will henceforth mark the world-historical powers with an indelible caesura that can never be redeemed by these powers themselves. This caesura will forever haunt any attempt to construct a strict analogy between the political and theological, the divine, and the profane.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This study makes manifest the ‘eschatological’ or ‘messianic’ spirit in Schelling's work that insists on the ‘structural opening’ of the world to a radical exteriority, to the excess un-enclosed in the immanent rational foundation of the world. This ‘outside’ of the world — not another world as opposed to this world but an outside of the world as such, keeps the world open to the event of pure futurity: eschaton means for Schelling nothing but this idea of exception that explodes the continuum of the world-history to its outside. The historical Reason of the world is torn open from its foundation to the eschatological event of redemption to come. This makes impossible not only the representation of this eschatological event in any earthly sovereign figure, but also attempts to translate such an event into the rational-secular structure of metaphysical propositions.

Actuality Without Potentiality

This chapter offers a reading of some of Schelling's last works, including the first few lectures on positive philosophy and on revelation that he delivered at the University of Berlin in 1841–42. It takes up the intricate and delicate question of actuality without potentiality to show that Schelling attempts to think of an exception without sovereignty that does not allow itself to be thought on the basis of worldly power. Thus, there can be no analogy between the divine monarchy and earthly sovereignty: between them there lies an irreducible caesura where the divine decision happens, and the world opens to us out of this divine decision. The chapter shows how Schelling's exit of/from philosophy is tied up with this task of thinking the radical transcendence of actuality outside worldly potentialities.