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'.

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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.

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'Contraction' as Religious and Ethnic Fundamentalism

From The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters, by Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 1996 & 2007). The following citation is from the 2007 edition, p. 27.

Perhaps the supreme ideologico-political example of contraction is provided by today's religious and ethnic fundamentalisms which are merging as a reaction to the withering-away of the Nation-State. The key fact of today's world is the unheard-of expansion of capitalism, which is less and less bound by the form of the Nation-State, capitalism's hitherto fundamental unit of contraction, and asserts itself more and more in direct 'transnational' form; the reaction to this boundless expansion which threatens to sweep away every particular self-identity are 'postmodern' fundamentalisms as the violent 'contraction' of social life into its religious-ethnic roots. Is not this contraction a kind of mocking imitation of the Schellingian primordial act of choosing one's own eternal character? In rediscovering one's ethnic roots or religious tradition (all of which, of course, are faked retroactive projections), a social group as it were chooses its eternal nature--that is, freely decides what it always-already was....

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Discipline as the Condition of Freedom (cf. Lacan's Name of the Father and 'symbolic castration')

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. 25-26.

Let us refer again to Hogrebe, who evokes another nice analogy from athletics: just before the start, the runner has to 'contract'-concentrate himself, to 'immobilize' himself, to turn himself into a statue, so that he can then, at the sound of the pistol, spring up and run as fast as possible--or, as Lenin would have put it, 'one step backwards, two steps forward'. In this precise sense the Beginning is the opposite of the Process itself: the preparatory-contractive 'step back', the setting up of a foundation which then serves as the springboard for taking off and rushing forward--in short, the denial [Verneinung] of what follows, of what is the beginning: 'only in the denial is there a beginning'.

On a somewhat higher, more 'spiritual' level, one usually fails to take note of how a free play of our theoretical imagination is possible only against the background of a firmly established set of 'dogmatic' conceptual constraints: our intellectual creativity can be 'set free' only within the confines of some imposed notional framework in which, precisely, we are able to 'move freely'--the lack of this imposed framework is necessarily experienced as an unbearable burden, since it compels us to focus constantly on how to respond to every particular empirical situation in which we find ourselves. Suffice it to recall the paradoxical lesson of so-called 'closed' societies: when an ideological edifice is imposed as the obligatory frame of reference (as it was with Marxism in 'actually existing Socialism'), the subject is relieved of the pressure to ponder all the time upon the basic conceptual schema--the rules of the game are clearly defined, so one can devote one's intellectual energy to the game itself.... On a rather different plane, the same experience is regularly reported by Japanese scientists: questioned by their Western colleagues on how they can stand the stiff hierarchy and the rules of ritualized courtesy which regulate intersubjective relations even in scientific communities (openly to contradict a higher authority is considered extremely coarse behaviour, etc.), they claim that these imposed rules of proper conduct enable them to dismiss from their mind any concern about intersubjective tensions, and to concentrate wholly on scientific work and inventions.

The most acute philosophical formulation of this motif of 'discipline as the condition of freedom' is found in Hegel who, in 'Anthropology' (Subsection A of Part I of his Philosophy of Mind), emphasized the liberating aspect of habit: it enables us to dispense with continuous, time-consuming worries about how to react to the multitude of ever-new empirical situations surrounding us. Habit provides ready-made answers which can be applied blindly, without reflection; when a habit becomes our second nature which we follow spontaneously, this very unawareness of the rules which regulate our activity sets our mind free for higher spiritual matters. In short, what effectively sets us free is the 'mechanical' contraction of our dealing with immediate surroundings in the network of habits which forms our 'second nature'. The supreme example, of course, is language itself as the paradigm of all institutions: one is effectively able to think freely only when one is fully accustomed to the language in which one thinks--when one loses awareness of its rules and learns to follow them 'blindly'. The moment one has to pay attention to the rules of grammar, and so on, one's thought no longer moves freely, but begins to drag--the free expansion of thinking has its Ground in the 'contraction' of grammatical and other rules. The example of custom clearly demonstrates that contraction is not the external opposite to free expansion: the free activity of thinking does not assert itself against custom; rather, it takes place in the very medium of (linguistic) custom--we 'think freely' only when we follow the rules of language without being aware of them.

Finally, when all is said and done, this is what self-identity is about: a self-identity is never fully transparent--the more it is 'self-', the more it implies a minimum of opaque contraction which holds it together and thus prevents it from dispersing.

The Indivisible Remainder (5)

Schelling's God as Fantasy

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.22-23: Is not the God prior to the primordial contraction, this pure gaze which finds enjoyment in contemplating its own non-being, also therefore a fantasy-formation at its purest? Schelling emphasizes again and again that the passage of the pure Seinskönnen of the primordial Abyss into the contracted Ground cannot be accounted for or 'deduced': it can be described (narrated) only post festum, after it has already taken place, since we are dealing not with a necessary act but with a free act which could also not have happened--however, does this not amount to an implicit admission of the fact that its status is that of a retroactive fantasy?

Schelling's God as Psychotic

p. 24: What we have here is Schelling's grandiose "Wagnerian" vision of a 'psychotic', mad God who is absolutely alone, a One who is 'all' since He tolerates nothing outside Himself--a 'wild madness, tearing itself apart'. The horror of this rotary motion resides in the fact that it is no longer impersonal: God already exists as One, as the Subject who suffers and endures the antagonism of drives. Here Schelling provides a precise definition of anxiety: anxiety arises when a subject experiences simultaneously the impossibility of closing itself up, of withdrawing fully into itself, and the impossibility of opening itself up, admitting an Otherness, so that it is caught in a vicious cycle of pulsation--every attempt at creation-expansion-externalization repeatedly 'aborts', collapses back into itself. This God is not yet the Creator, since a proper act of creation posits the being (the contracted reality) of an Otherness which possesses a minimal self-consistency and exists outside its Creator--this, however, is what God, in the fury of his egotism, is not inclined to tolerate.

And, as Schelling emphasizes again and again, even today this all-destructive divine vortex remains the innermost base of all reality: 'if we were able to penetrate the exterior of things, we would see that the true stuff of all life and existence is the horrible'. In this sense, all reality involves a fundamental antagonism and is therefore, sooner or later, destined to fall prey to Divine fury, to disappear in the 'orgasm of forces'. 'Reality' is inherently fragile, the result of a temporary balance between contraction and expansion which can, at any moment, 'run amok' and explode into one of the extremes. Hogrebe resorts here to an analogy from cinema: if the projection of a film is to give rise to an 'impression of reality' in the spectator, the reel has to run at the proper speed--if it runs too quickly, the movement on the screen is blurred and we can no longer discern individual objects; if it is too slow, we perceive individual pictures and the effect of continuity which accounts for the impression that we are watching 'real life' is lost. Therein resides Schelling's fundamental motif: what we experience as 'reality' is constituted and maintains itself through a proper balance in the tension between the two antagonistic forces, with the ever-present danger that one of the two sides will 'be cracked', run out of control and thus destroy the 'impression of reality'.

The Indivisible Remainder (4)

On Freedom, Time, and the Unconscious

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

p. 16: The whole world is thoroughly caught in reason, but the question is : how did it get caught in the network of reason in the first place? Here Schelling inverts the standard perspective : the problem is not how, in an universe regulated by inexorable natural laws, freedom is possible--that is, where, in the determinist universe, there is a place for freedom which would not be a mere illusion based on our ignorance of the true causes--but, rather, how the world as a rational totality of causal interconnections made its appearance in the first place." [....] "For Schelling, then, the primordial, radically contingent fact, a fact which can in no way be accounted for, is freedom itself, a freedom bound by nothing, a freedom which, in a sense, is Nothing; and the problem is, rather, how this Nothing of the abyss of primordial freedom becomes entangled in the causal chains of reason.

p. 18: Anti-Fichtean here is Schelling's assertion of a radical split--an ontological incompatibility, even--between consciousness and freedom, in clear contrast not only to Fichte but also to the commonplace association of freedom with consciousness ('I decide freely when I make a conscious choice, whereas an unconscious decision is by definition no decision at all, but something blindly imposed'). In a sense Schelling is 'more Fichtean than Fichte himself': while he fully endorses Fichte's thesis according to which the very essence of man is his own act, he does not confine this act to self-consciousness but situates it in terms of the real kernel of man's being which precedes consciousness--man contracts his very being, his eternal character (in the double meaning of the verb which is crucial for Schelling: to harden-condense-concentrate into a consistent form of being and to get infected with being) by means of an unconscious primordial act of decision.

p. 20: The emergence of Freedom means that Spirit has posited itself as such in opposition to its impenetrable-inert Ground, that it has acquired a distance towards its Ground and can now 'make free with it', and that the 'chain of being' is broken--that is to say, Spirit is no longer determined by the network of causality. Freedom is thus stricto sensu the moment of eternity--it stands for the suspension of the temporal chain of (sufficient) reasons-causes, for the leap from the enchainment [Verkettung] of finite, determinate entities into the abyss of their primordial origin, of the 'source of things'.

In the experience of freedom, in the vortex we perceive for a brief moment when we confront a groundless act of freedom, we 'rejoin the Absolute'--that is, we re-establish contact--our identity even--with the primordial origin outside temporal reality, with the abyss of eternity prior to the fall into the world of creatures. Man is directly linked to the Absolute in so far as he occupies a unique place among created things: what re-emerges in him (and in him only) is a 'possibility-potentiality of being [Seinskonnen]' which does not immediately collapse into actuality. Other actually existing entities do not relate to possibility as such; in them, a possibility is simply realized; man only relates to possibility as such--for him, a possibility is in a sense 'more' than actuality, as if the actualization-realization of a possibility somehow already 'betrays' or 'devalues' it. This opposition, of course, coincides with the opposition between necessity and freedom: an unfree entity simply is, it coincides with its positive actuality, whereas (as Schelling asserts, announcing thereby the existentialist problematic) a free being can never be reduced to what it is, to its actual, positive presence--its 'project', the undecidable opening of what it might do or become, its 'want-to-be', is the kernel of its very existence.

pp. 21-22: The key to this enigma of the primordial deed is that 'it is done eternally [for all time], i.e. it is eternally [at any time] already done, therefore past'. What is thereby resolved is the tension between eternity and the singularity of the act: how can an act, unique by definition, a happenstance, be eternal? What is done eternally (in the sense of remaining, in its very withdrawal, the eternal foundation of the present, not just something disappearing in the recess of the past) must be eternally (at any time always-already) done, and is therefore inherently past--that is, it has to belong to a past which was never present. This is what the predicate 'unconscious' designates: a past which, although it never existed, persists as a durable foundation of the present. The paradox of such an 'eternal past' is constitutive of time: there is no time without reference to a past which was never present--that is to say, temporality, in its original dimension, is not a single line of events that runs from the past through the present to the future, but involves the tension of a relationship to an act which, precisely in so far as it was never present, in its very withdrawal, is always here as the (past) foundation of the present.

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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.