world as produced—so that the alleged necessity of the way the world is gets fully suspended—but also to expose the Real on which these binaries are imposed and which can only be thought of as collapsing any binary, and thus as incomprehensible: the Real of incomprehensibility or chaos.
“Irony,” says Schlegel, “is the clear consciousness … of the infinitely full chaos” (KFSA, 2:263). The irony of this expression, suspending the clear-chaotic opposition, is itself programmatic. There is, Schlegel observes, a certain symmetry to the chaos inherent in irony, with its move of “logical disorganization” (2:403)—a symmetry that cannot be the standard symmetrical demarcation between A and non-A. Rather, symmetry here names the structure of indistinction between any binary terms, or the total (“infinitely full”) collapse of dichotomies. In nature-philosophical terms, Schlegel speaks of this full suspension as “the point of indifference [Indifferenzpunkt] where everything is saturated” (18:391), where everything is, to the point of indistinction, dissolved into one.
The first operation of irony stops, as it were, the cycle of reproduction of binaries, completely suspending the world with all its binaries, so as to begin with the chaos that must be regarded as prior to any world. At the atopic standpoint from which irony proceeds, all binaries are collapsed—so that, for example, all is jest and all is seriousness at once (KFSA, 2:160). The all suggests here not an alternation between the terms but an affirmation of a point of suspension in which the two (and any other opposing terms) coincide at any given moment. This is an operation of immediate annihilation, too—the world’s decreation to the zero point that collapses all divisions. In a fragment from his philosophical notebooks, Schlegel connects neutralization, annihilation (nothingness), and chaos in the following way: “The chaos relates to the nothing in the same way that the world relates to the chaos. Chaos [is] the only real concept of the nothing. Nothing itself [is] the purely analytic concept.… The neutral, too, is confusion and chaos.… Nothing (Nichts) is more original than the chaos” (18:78).30 Elsewhere Schlegel says, “Only that confusion is a chaos which can give rise to a new world” (2:263), and thus to speak of chaos is to speak of the world suspended or decreated. Similarly, to speak of nothingness, this purely ideal or “analytic” absence of anything, is to speak of chaos as a state in which all oppositions are refused in the all-encompassing Indifferenzpunkt.
There is, in this chaos, no trajectory or topos, no movement of mediation or distribution of possibility and actuality. It is the void of negativity grasped as “real,” as an immanent materiality of nothingness—as pure material in which all distinctions are collapsed and with which the work of construction (of a world) begins. Chaos is nothingness considered as productive and generative. The ensuing construction reconfigures immanently this world-material—and in this, it is for Schlegel at once critical (“critique is the universal chaos”; KFSA, 18:366) and artistic: “the contact between the artist and the material is only thinkable as creation from nothing” (18:133). No wonder, then, that chaos is intrinsic for Schlegel both to the novel (“in its form, the novel is a well-formed artificial chaos”; 16:207) and to Romantic poetry (18:337). It is from this atopic standpoint of material nothingness that any binary—and any distribution of binaries, that is, a world—may be said to be constructed.
This decreation is configured by Schlegel, furthermore, as a revolutionary operation: “The chaos that, in the modern world, has previously been unconscious and passive, must return actively; eternal revolution” (KFSA, 18:254). Revolution is decreation followed by creation; or, even, creation by way of decreation. The same principle—“creation from nothing”—can be discerned for Schlegel in the three main contemporary events: the French Revolution, Fichtean idealism, and “the new [Romantic] poetry” (18:315). This nexus is crucial. What needs to be thought is simultaneous deconstruction of the world (to chaos or nothing) and its construction—one that is “artistic” or “poetic” in the sense of experimenting immanently with the pure material and constructing a world out of it: the transcendental conjunction as decoupled from the justification of the world under construction as necessary or the best possible. It is this decoupling that the terms poetry or art index—and not the valorization of the subjective and the arbitrary (as the supposed “subjectivism” of early Romanticism is sometimes understood). The ironist undermines any world she constructs by keeping open the capacity to confuse, to collapse any binary. The Kantian-Fichtean transcendental conjunction is important for Schlegel because it allows to see the world as constructed—without necessarily thinking it as necessary. The knot has to be cut only if one ties it in the first place; but why must one do so?
To think the poetic with Schlegel is to think construction without justification, and potentiality or capacity without necessity, including the necessity of actualization—but also without end. Romantic poetry is “progressive” (as Schlegel terms it) not in the sense of a not-yet, but as the absence of end or telos. Nor does it mean “incomplete” in any standard sense: instead, poetic construction begins immanently with a complete suspension of the world. The point is not to exorcize the world, thereby demonizing it or making it haunt us, but to think it (or, with Schelling’s holy man, act in it) without investment in the way it is or could be. Thus, even if we accept that it is necessary to construct a world in some way, this does not have to mean justifying this world as necessary or implying that its construction must proceed in this and not some other way, toward this end or toward some end at all, or that it needs to be objective or serious.
That is, of course, an important part of Hegel’s criticism of Schlegel: that irony “takes nothing seriously”31—that it does not take the objective movement of world history seriously. I do not have the space here to consider Hegel—or, for that matter, Marx—in any detail. But the way the transcendental knot is tied to world justification remains central to them both. In Hegel, world history famously is theodicy, and the transcendental structure—the way spirit produces its own conditions of possibility as necessary for its actualization and forward movement—is central to this history. To destabilize this conjunction the way Schlegel does is to endanger the teleology of spirit.32 The issue, in Marx, of changing the conditions (of possibility) that are necessary to effect this change in the first place points to a similar knot. In the words of Lisa Robertson:
Here is Marx’s big dilemma, the reason he goes to Lucretius:
practice arises from conditions
yet these are the conditions we must change.33
This is, in different terms, precisely the issue which this essay has attempted to outline. In order to resolve it, Marx, Robertson suggests, turns to a thinking that is poetic in form. In the post-Kantian context, poetry indexes a “chaotic imagination that generates the promises of new worlds.”34 Romanticism wants to think the possibility of new worlds—but is that really the way to resolve the transcendental knot, this tension between annihilating and justifying the world? The (possibility of the) appearance of the new is, after all, at the heart of this tension that is political-theological in character.
This tension seems to remain as long as the world remains—because it indexes the fact of the world. In this essay, I have partially sketched the theoretical spectrum that emerges from attempts to engage with this tension and some of the pitfalls along the way. I have argued that, before German Idealism proceeds to construct the world, it annihilates it in order to reveal the Real that the world forecloses, so as to begin with this Real and not with the world. Instead of proceeding from the world as the ultimate reality, Idealism proceeds from a zero point absolutely free from any need for or any necessary transition to a world. This starting operation transports the speculative thinker to an atopic standpoint at which the world is turned to or exposed as Nichts, and which must be thought of as preceding the world. To annihilate the world, the way I have used this term, is to expose the world as secondary and imposed—to reduce it affirmatively to nothing—so as to proceed immanently from this nothingness (alternatively termed chaos, God, or bliss)
