The Indivisible Remainder (9)

Schelling's Fundamental Conceptual Opposition

From The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters, by Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 1996 & 2007). The following citations are from the 2007 edition.

pp. 32-33: Schelling's 'dialectical materialism' is therefore encapsulated in his persistent claim that one should presuppose an eternally past moment when God himself was 'in the power (exponent) of B', at the mercy of the antagonism of matter, without any guarantee that A--the spiritual principle of Light--would eventually prevail over B--the obscure principle of Ground. Since there is nothing outside God, this 'crazy God'--the antagonistic rotary motion of contracted matter--has to beget out of himself a Son, that is, the Word which will resolve the unbearable tension. The undifferentiated pulsation of drives is thus supplanted by the stable network of differences which sustains the self-identity of the differentiated entities: in its most elementary dimension, the Word is the medium of differentiation.

Here we encounter what is perhaps the fundamental conceptual opposition of Schelling's entire philosophical edifice: the opposition between the atemporal 'closed' rotary motion of drives and the 'open' linear progression of time. The act of 'primordial repression' by means of which God ejects the rotary motion of drives into the eternal past, and thereby 'creates time'--opens up the difference between past and present--is His first deed as a free Subject: in accomplishing it, He suspends the crippling alternative of the subjectless abyss of Freedom and the Subject who is unfree, caught in the vicious cycle of rotary motion. Here God is in exactly the same position as man on the verge of his timeless act of choosing his eternal character: it is only via this act of primordial decision that God's freedom becomes the actual 'freedom to do Good or Evil'--that is to say, He has to choose between self-withdrawal and opening up, between psychotic madness and the Word.

The Founding text of Dialectical Materialism

pp. 37-39: The critical point of Weltalter--and at the same time the ultimate source of its breathtaking magnitude, the sign of the absolute integrity of Schelling's thought and the feature which makes the Weltalter fragments the founding text of dialectical materialism--resides in the repeated failure of Schelling's desperate endeavor to avoid the terrifying intermediate stage between the pure, blissful indifference of the primordial Freedom and God as a free Creator. What comes in between the primordial Freedom and God qua free Subject is a stage at which God is already a Subject (He becomes a Subject when, by means of contraction, He acquires reality), but not yet a free one. At this stage, after contracting being, God is submitted to the blind necessity of a constricted rotary motion, like an animal caught in a trap of its own making and destined endlessly to repeat the same meaningless motions. The problem is that God's Reason, His awareness of what goes on, in a sense comes too late, is behind this blind process; so that later, when He pronounces the Word and thereby attains actual freedom, he can in a sense acknowledge, accept, only what he 'contracted' not even unwillingly but in the course of a blindly spontaneous process in which his free Will simply played no part. In other words, the problem is that 'one has to admit a moment of blindness, even of "madness", in the divine life', on account of which creation appears as 'a process in which God was engaged at His own risk, if one may put it this way'.