The Indivisible Remainder (8)

Temporality: Schelling vs. Heidegger

From The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters, by Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 1996 & 2007). The following citation is from the 2007 edition, pp. 31-32.

One more thing should be noted about the blind rotary motion of God prior to the pronouncement of the Word: this motion is not yet temporal, it does not occur 'in time', since time already presupposes that God has broken free from the closed psychotic circle. The common expression 'from the beginning of time...' is to be taken literally: it is the Beginning, the primordial act of decision/resolution, which constitutes time--the 'repression' of the rotary motion into the eternal Past establishes the minimal distance between Past and Present which allows for the linear succession of time.

Here we encounter the first of Schelling's many anti-Platonic 'stings': eternity prior to the Word is the timeless rotary motion, the divine madness, which is beneath time, 'less than time'. However, in contrast to those who emphasize Schelling's affinity with Heidegger's assertion of temporality as the ultimate, unsurpassable horizon of Being, it should be said that nowhere is Schelling farther from Heidegger, from his analytics of finitude, than in his conception of the relationship between time and eternity. For Schelling, eternity is not a modality of time; rather, it is time itself which is a specific mode (or rather, modification) of eternity: Schelling's supreme effort is to 'deduce' time itself from the deadlock of eternity. The Absolute 'opens up time', it 'represses' the rotary motion into the past, in order to get rid of the antagonism in its heart which threatens to drag it into the abyss of madness. On the other hand--and, again, in clear contrast to Heidegger--freedom for Schelling is the moment of 'eternity in time', the point of groundless decision by means of which a free creature (man) breaks up, suspends, the temporal chain of reasons and, as it were, directly connects with the Unground of the Absolute. This Schellingian notion of eternity and time--or, to put it in more contemporary terms, of synchrony and diachrony--is therefore to be opposed to the standard notion of time as the finite/distorted reflection of the eternal Order, as well as the modern notion of eternity as a specific mode of temporality: eternity itself begets time in order to resolve the deadlock it became entangled in. For that reason, it is deeply misleading and inadequate to speak about eternity's 'fall into time': the 'beginning of time' is, on the contrary, a triumphant ascent, the act of decision/differentiation by means of which the Absolute resolves the agonizing rotary motion of drives, and breaks out of its vicious cycle into temporal succession.

Schelling's achievement here is a theory of time whose unique feature is that it is not formal but qualitative: in contrast to the standard notion of time that conceives the three temporal dimensions as purely formal determinations (the same 'content' 'travels', as it were, from the past through the present to the future), Schelling provides a minimal qualitative determination of each temporal dimension. The rotary motion of drives is in itself past: it was not once present and is now past, but is past from the beginning of time. The split as such is present--that is, the present stands for the moment of division, of the transformation of drive's undifferentiated pulsation into symbolic difference, whereas the future designates the reconciliation to come. The target of Schelling's critique here is not only the formalism of the standard notion of time but also, perhaps even primarily, the unavowed, hidden prerogative of the present involved in it--for Schelling, this prerogative equals the primacy of mechanical necessity over freedom, of actuality over possibility.