See Albernaz and Chepurin, “Sovereignty of the World.”51 51. F. W. J. Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856), 2.1:509, 513–515.
1
Knot of the World
German Idealism between Annihilation and Construction
KIRILL CHEPURIN
Blackness is not the pathogen in afro-pessimism, the world is[—]maybe even the whole possibility of and desire for a world.
—Jared Sexton
The world is its own rejection, the world’s rejection is the world.
—Jean-Luc Nancy
For we cannot claim to know for sure whether or not our world, although it is contingent, will actually come to an end one day.
—Quentin Meillassoux
A specter is haunting contemporary theory—the specter of the world. To think the world radically otherwise; to refuse the very need for a world or to reduce it affirmatively to nothing, a mere illusion or hallucination; to dissolve it in absolute contingency or chaos; to think the reality of that which the world forecloses, subjugates, excludes; to expose the world as totalizing and to find ways of tearing it down or opening it up; to work out an apocalyptic, postapocalyptic, messianic, posthuman ontology, ethics, or politics1—along this entire spectrum, the world remains, even in cases where its remains are thought of as, or after, its end. Even when one could not care less about the world itself, one is troubled by the fact of the world. No matter how spectral the world is declared to be, this fact remains a problem, with which all theory feels the need to engage. Even to say that the world is an illusion, that one ought to desire no world, is to admit that the world is there (and is at issue)—that it has the power to foreclose and divide, to make one hallucinate, and, most importantly, the power to survive, to remain. It is also to imply that the world is necessarily this way. But, why is the world there in the first place? Why this world—of divisions and exclusions, endless striving and endless postponement? Must it even be, this way or at all? Do we have to proceed from the fact that we—the subjects of modernity—are always already in this world?
Among these and similar questions, I would single out one as central: how to think the world without absolutizing or justifying it—to construct a world or the way the world could be, or to reconstruct the way the world is, without falling into the logic of justification—while accounting for the world’s being there, as fact or problem? From Quentin Meillassoux’s thinking of contingency as at once making the world possible and ungrounding it, to the Laruellean Real as prior to and without world and yet also, in the presence of the world, “giving” and “receiving” the world, to the polemics between Afropessimism and black optimism or queer negativity and queer utopianism, this question is inevitably at stake. The relation between world-making and theodicy (in the sense of world justification) marks this as a political-theological question.2 In view of contemporary political theology’s grappling with the problem of the (Christian-modern) world and its modes of legitimation, this question is central to its present and future.3
This is, at the same time, the typical transcendental conjunction, even the transcendental knot: conditions of possibility of experience are necessary for us to even have experience at all, so that to think the possibility of the world is necessarily to justify the world as necessary. This conjunction stems from Immanuel Kant, who formulates it in terms of so-called “transcendental conditions,” that is, conditions of possibility of experience—of the world as it appears to us. For Kant, in order for us to even have experience, it must fulfill certain conditions; it must conform to a specific set of categories and follow certain rules. Thus, the reality of the world (of experience) is always negative and divisive: it is a world of objects separated from the subject and from each other; a world in which unity is secondary to separation and can only be thought by way of mediation (synthesis) and relation. There can be, in fact, no experience unless it conforms to these conditions; the world can only appear in this and no other categorial way for it to cohere. If we are to think a world, it can only be this world—that is, a world structured in this categorial way—because this is the way experience (our being-in-the-world) works. The transcendental thus converts possibility into necessity: to inquire into the conditions under which the world is possible, is to show that these conditions are necessary for us to even think a world at all. The possibility of a world is converted into the necessity of the world. To think the (possibility of the) world is to justify it as necessary: the transcendental turn is a theodical operation.4
This conjunction of possibility and necessity can take many forms—including contemporary ones. For example, to say with François Laruelle that the world functions by way of dividing the Real is to say that, assuming there is a world, this is the way it necessarily works—to determine the world as necessarily this way, to convert a world into the world. This conjunction may also be seen as a tension, within which the above question—of how to think the world without justifying it or exorcizing it—exists.
This tension is already present within German Idealism, spanning the conceptual space between two poles: world annihilation and world construction. In this essay, I will present some of the ways in which German Idealism tried to resolve this tension. The point, however, is not to suggest that German Idealism succeeded in doing so, but to put forward the transcendental knot as a key problem that German Idealism shares with contemporary continental philosophy and political theology. Accordingly, the following sections will approach the transcendental knot from different perspectives to highlight its various aspects and to demonstrate the numerous pitfalls when trying to deal with it—or how the world tends to survive all thinking of its end or rejection. It is crucial to engage with the world, with the way in which it is constructed (and can be deconstructed), and with the real power it possesses rather than announcing the world to be illusory, merely contingent, or easily refusable.
I take the pair of “annihilation” and “construction” from Friedrich Schelling.5 Already in his early metaphysics, “the world” is a structure of divisive relationality: the original opposition between subject and object, the I and the not-I, which is then mediated by the I. Finding itself in the world, the subject is divided from object, faced with external reality as something different, other—something over and against which the I seeks to assert itself. Conflict, opposition, and striving are central characteristics of finitude; the finite world is a world of negativity, alienation, division.
As always already in the world, the I strives to break free of the world—be that through gathering the world into one totality that the I would perfectly possess (the dream of perfect sovereignty) or by purifying itself of any not-I (the dream of perfect dispossession, of having no need for the world). The former is the activity of synthesis: the I brings what is multiple into a unity. The latter is morality, configured as the striving to become absolutely nothing, without any need or lack. It may be seen, however, that the end goal of both strivings is, essentially, the same. “The ultimate end goal of the finite I and the not-I, i.e., the end goal of the world,” Schelling writes, “is its annihilation as a world.” What the I strives toward is absolute freedom from the negativity of the world—from conflict, division, and striving itself. This absolute freedom Schelling calls “absolute bliss.” As negative and divisive, the world is fundamentally unblissful; the I’s existence in such a world is, accordingly, a constant longing for bliss. The world does nothing but
