Schelling's Materialist Notion of Subject
pp. 71-3: True freedom means not only that I am not fully determined by my surroundings but also that I am not fully determined by myself (by my own notion, by what I am, by my positive features): a person relates freely both to her existence and to her notion--that is to say,she is not fully determined by them but can transcend them (she can put at stake, risk, her existence as well as transform the bundle of features which make up her identity). The fact that Another Person is for me originally an enigma, an abyss beyond her positive features, accounts for the key role of the symbolic obligation and debt, of this desperate attempt to bind the Other, in intersubjective relations: since I cannot take hold of the Other, of the abyss which forms the elusive centre of her being, directly, I can only take her at her Word. And Schelling simply took seriously and literally the fact that God Himself, this absolute Other, is also a free person: as such, He also could become free only by gaining a distance towards the Ground of His being, by relating freely to this Ground, by not being wholly determined by it. The paradox (sacrilegious from the orthodox point of view, of course) is that this free relationship towards the Ground presupposes, is the obverse of, dependency on the Ground: God's Light, the creative emanation of His Logos, is, as Schelling puts it, a 'regulated madness' which draws its energy from the vortex of drives, as with a human person who is truly free not by opposing his drives but by adroitly exploiting their energy, regulating their madness....
Paradoxical as it may sound, with this specific notion of freedom as the subject's free relating to her existence and notion Schelling was the first to delineate the contours of a materialist notion of subject. In the standard (idealist and materialist) version of the philosophical opposition of subject and object, materiality is always on the side of the object: the object is dense, impenetrable and inert, whereas the subject stands for the transparency of the Thought to itself; within this horizon, the only way to assert a 'materialist' position is by trying to demonstrate how the subject is always-already an object (like the Derridean endeavor to demonstrate that the voice is always-already a writing, that it always-already contains some material trace which introduces into it the minimum of self-deferral, of non-coincidence with itself).
In clear contrast to this standard version, the materialist notion of subject outlined by Schelling (but also by Hegel, in his deservedly famous description of the struggle for recognition between the (future) Master and Servant--not to mention Lacan, of course) focuses on the fundamental 'impenetrability', the inert density, which always pertains to our encounter with Another Subject--which distinguishes this encounter from the encounter with an ordinary object. Again, paradoxical as it may sound, ordinary objects are in this precise sense less 'material' than Another Subject, since they lack the opacity characteristic of the Other's desire, the eternal enigma of 'Che vuoi?', of what does the Other want from me? One is led by this to assert that the Freudian-Lacanian (and already Kantian) Ding is originally the Other Subject, not a mere non-subjective thing--an ordinary material object is in the end always transparent, it lacks the enigma which would render it effectively opaque.... This original violence of the Other, the violence constitutive of what Heidegger called Mit-Sein, our relating to another human being, is what gets completely lost in the Habermasian ideology of the free space of intersubjective dialogue--perhaps even Heidegger's otherwise exemplary analysis of Mit-Sein in Being and Time passes too quickly over this traumatic dimension.
It is against the background of this materialist notion of subject that one can comprehend the limit of Schelling's philosophical enterprise, and thereby the cause of the failure of the Weltalter project. As we have already indicated, the criticism of Schelling which seems to impose itself from a Lacanian standpoint concerns his inability to 'traverse the fantasy': does not Schelling remain caught in the phantasmic loop? Does not the Schellingian problematic of a timeless act which is always-already accomplished and thereby precedes its own temporal genesis--that is, is present prior to its actual emergence--involve the structure of fantasy at its purest? And, furthermore, is not this presupposition of such an eternal act also the elementary matrix of ideology? So is not the most one can say about Schelling that he states openly the constitutive paradox (the temporal loop, the 'always-already') of ideology? Does he not thereby evade the true 'materialist' question: how does a material-temporal process retroactively engender its own phantasmic foundation?
The answer is no: what, according to Schelling, precedes the material-temporal process is not an ideal order, and so on, but the pure void/abyss [Ungrund] of Freedom, and Schelling's point is precisely that if Freedom is to actualize itself--that is, to become the predicate of a free Entity--it has to 'contract' the opaque Ground. The problem is, rather, that Schelling formulates the 'out-of-jointedness', the imbalance involved in this primordial contraction, as the ontological condition of the universe ('there is something and not nothing' only through a primordial catastrophe, only in so far as things are out of joint...), in the very form of the pre-modern mythology of a sexualized universe (of the primordial balance to be re-established, etc.). Here his ambiguity is radical and irreducible: the logic of his thought compels him to assert the inevitability of the 'out-of-jointedness' and of man's Fall--at the very point at which A should prevail over B, things have to go wrong--but the same logic leads him to maintain the dream of final reconciliation--it should be possible to heal the wound and to reinstate the lost balance, that is, the harmonious line of development of the 'great chain of being' from the lower to the higher stages (see, for example, the dialogue Clara, contemporaneous with Weltalter, in which death is reduced to the passage from the lower, terrestrial life to the higher 'world of Spirits [Geisterwelt]'). We are therefore back where we started: error cannot simply be subtracted from Truth--that is to say, it was possible for Schelling to accomplish the unheard-of step to radical contingency only in the guise of a 'regression' to the pre-modern mythology of a sexualized universe. This very 'regression' enabled him to formulate the materialist concept of subject (the opaque-enigmatic Otherness of freedom) in contrast to the purely spiritual 'idealist' subject: the materialist subject as the point at which nature 'runs amok' and goes off the rails....
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