The Indivisible Remainder (3)

The aim of this book:

Slavoj Žižek, from The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters

(London: Verso, 1996, 2007), the following excerpt is from the 2007 edition, pp. 5-6:

Again, the relationship between Schelling and Hegel is the knot, the junction at which 'everything is decided'. According to the predominant doxa, in Hegel's absolute idealism and panlogicism the self-movement of the Idea generates its own content and retroactively grounds its own presuppositions, whereas Schelling introduced a gap which opens a way for the post-Hegelian problematic of finitude: the Hegelian Idea can comprehend only the ideal necessity of a thing, what a thing is, the thing in its conceptual determination, in its notional possibility; what is out of reach is the contingent fact that something exists at all, a fact which depends on a free act of creation.

This surplus which eludes notional self-mediation can be discerned exemplarily apropos of the problematic of Evil: Hegel reduces Evil to the subordinated moment in the self-mediation of Idea qua supreme Good, whereas in Schelling Evil remains a permanent possibility which can never be fully 'sublated [aufgehoben]' in and by the Good. A doxa--a cliche, even--on Schelling is that in his philosophy the subject can assert its self-presence only against the background of an obscure, dense, impenetrable Grund which withdraws-into-self the moment it is illuminated by the light of Reason: logos can never fully mediate/internalize this Otherness of the Ground--in its elementary dimension, Grund is nothing but the impediment of an Otherness which maintains forever its externality....

Is this comprehension of the Hegelian dialectical process as the self-mediation of the Notion which externalizes itself, posits its content in its independence and actuality, and then internalizes it, recognizes itself in it, adequate? Our premiss, of course, is that it is not. Our aim, however, is not simply to defend Hegel against Schelling's critique by demonstrating how Schelling misses his target and ultimately fights a straw man--this would be a rather boring, purely academic exercise. Our thesis is more complex: in the case of Schelling, as well as that of Hegel, what we may call a formal envelope of error (the standard misleading image of Schelling as the philosopher of irrational Ground, of Weltseele, etc.; the standard misleading image of Hegel as the philosopher of absolute idealism, of the accomplished self-mediation of the Notion, etc.) conceals, and simultaneously contains, an unheard-of subversive gesture which--herein resides our ultimate premiss--is the same in both cases. What is effectively at stake in our endeavor, therefore, is not to pit Hegel's wits against Schelling but to discern the contours of this gesture with regard to which the standard readings of Schelling and Hegel, these two 'formal envelopes of error', are simply two modalities to avoid it, to render it invisible. Our second premiss, of course, is that it is Lacan's psychoanalytic theory which enables us to approach this gesture, the only true Sache des Denkens.