colonial settlement that is the world. To locate this power in that which is transcendent to the world (a coming God perhaps), would be to reintroduce indefinite futurity into the picture. Another Schellingian answer would refer to this power as “nature”—this being of vast indifference and immense power, on which the modern world (of the Anthropocene) is imposed. It is unclear, however, whether waiting for a coming retribution from nature is any different from waiting for the arrival of a God. To wait is, again, to let the world be—which means that, in order not merely to wait, one needs to find ways of not simply leaving the world in place. That, in turn, implies thinking the world and the reality of its power (a thinking absent in the divine violence itself), even inhabiting it, if only to know where to ignite or how to produce or identify the cracks in the wall that should help make it give in to the coming flood. This issue is central not only for political theology but for contemporary thought as a whole. In Laruellean terms, the problem is that the Real and the world are both real, albeit in different ways, so that the reality of the world’s power, if it is to be confronted, cannot simply be discounted as illusory. Unless it is confronted, however, the world continues to persist.
The move of beginning with what is absolutely nothing from the point of view of the world appears likewise in Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre. The dogmatists—those who take the world to be the ultimate reality—“think of things as the first, and make knowledge depend on those, be formed through those.” Knowledge and being for them coincide, so that, in dogmatic philosophy, the world fundamentally remains in place. The dogmatists, as a result, can only have “doctrines of things: ontology, cosmology, etc.”—mere “images of things.” The task is, however, to investigate the conditions of possibility of the world as it appears, or to trace how the world is constructed: a “construction a priori,” which cannot begin with anywhere (any place or position) in the world. This kind of knowledge can, accordingly, only begin with a nonplace that must be thought of as preceding and totally dis-placing the world: the task is to think “knowledge as something independent—and for that matter, first, the question of whether things can still have any being outside knowledge if left in their place.” The dogmatists cannot think such a nowhere, and so “cannot have any Wissenschaftslehre.” To them, “it would be the doctrine of nothing.”20
As proceeding immanently from the nonplace of total displacement, “knowledge structures itself through itself as an organized and articulated full system.… One part of that system is its concept of itself in its above-mentioned original organization. This is, precisely, the W.L. [Wissenschaftslehre].”21 The point from which the Wissenschaftslehre begins, as part of the system of knowledge, is the point of the original completion of the system of knowledge as such. That the system is complete—a totality that is, however, not the totality of everything in the world—and that the standpoint of the Wissenschaftslehre is the atopic point where this totality coincides with itself, is crucial. It is, for Fichte, the atopic totality indexed by the system that ungrounds the world as always not-yet and instead grounds knowledge.22
“God” is what Fichte calls this atopic standpoint, similar to Schelling’s absolute being. This being, too, is without negation or transition to otherness. As such, it cannot act, or produce any world.23 Accordingly, the central issue is that of glimpsing the ought (Soll) behind the world. To what end must the world be? What is its meaning, its justification? To think the world without such an ought would be to think it as the mere capacity to effect an infinite series of things or positions, in space and time—as a potentiality without end or purpose, as meaningless, a nothing. But to reduce the world to nothing (Vernichtung) is—in a familiar inversion—to suspend this endless series of schematization (the drive to instantiate further things, without end), in order to expose the absolute being that it forecloses, a being that is itself a no-thing in the world. To inquire into the ought is to suspend the world as perpetually not-yet, so as to find oneself precisely at the original atopic standpoint with which we saw the system begin.24
To think the world from the standpoint of the ought, is to demand that the reason behind the world—the ought itself—become visible. The ought is thereby redoubled: as beginning and as end (as “the ought of the visibility of the ought,” the telos of the world). “To construct the true world of sense” is, accordingly, to think the utopian point where the world coincides fully with the visibility of its ought. The gap between the two “oughts” fully filled, we find ourselves back at the original atopic standpoint.25 Why, then, must we leave it in the first place? Because, again, the world is there and its meaning needs to be glimpsed. The existence of the world is the condition of possibility of the ought (it is because the world is there that the realization of the ought is thought to be possible26)—but, also, it is only “on the condition that [individuals] find themselves on the path of glimpsing the ought” that the world and its ought may be seen to coincide: that the world may be regarded as justified.27 To construct the world is to reconstruct it on the condition of its ought, and thus as not yet the (true) world—with a view to its end; and to think the end of the world, the point where its ought is fully visible, is to justify the world. Thereby, the world is constructed as the condition of possibility of its own (future) end. The ante-original, atopic beginning of the system is remediated into an eschatological telos to which the world is bound—and which is itself bound to the world.
The transcendental knot could not be tied any tighter. It is, perhaps, time to cut it again.
An alternative approach would be to think the world without an “ought”—the empty potentiality we glimpsed in Fichte.28 In this approach, the transcendental conjunction is destabilized via the focus on the world-making capacity without a normative horizon or any necessary process of actualization. This would amount neither to absolutizing the world nor to declaring it an illusion, but to proceeding from the fact that the world is made or imagined. This is the early Romantic, poetic focus. Here, the transcendental knot is both acknowledged and ungrounded by thinking the conditions of possibility of the world without thinking this world (or any other world) as necessary or seeking to justify it.
“Is not,” asks Friedrich Schlegel, “this entire, unending world constructed by the understanding out of incomprehensibility or chaos?”29 The world is endlessly constructed (“unending”), serving to foreclose the incomprehensible—the chaos—not only as the Real but also, so to speak, as the material from which the world is being constructed. This idea is Kantian in origin: the in-itself as providing the material of sensation which the subject arranges into the world with the help of the categories. In Kant, however, the standpoint of the in-itself (which Schlegel calls “chaos”) is cognitively inaccessible to the subject—and, as mentioned earlier, the categories themselves are necessary for the world to appear to the subject in the first place. The categories are thereby fixed and justified as necessary. They are also binaries or dichotomies (which are then mediated), in keeping with the character of the world as imposing itself on the Real by dividing and mediating it. Schlegel, too, acknowledges that the world, and the way we reflect about the world, functions this way. We tend to employ binary terms to construct the world or make it comprehensible—not just the ones found in Kant’s table of categories, but also high and low, serious and jocular, beautiful and ugly, natural and artificial, and many others.
This is where, for Schlegel, irony comes in, which takes any pair of such terms and subverts or collapses them—so that, faced with irony, the subject cannot know whether the ironist (the ironic text or ironic speech) is being serious or jocular, where the higher might become the lower and the lower the higher, where the familiar might be revealed as strange, the natural as artfully constituted, and the ugly as beautiful, if in a different, unusual way. Thereby irony interrupts the flow of the world’s construction in which we are habitually engaged, ungrounding the world’s imposition and transporting the ironist to a standpoint at which all binaries are immediately collapsed. The operation of irony amounts to “a total interruption and
