is no world, revealing the world as imposed, is, however, not enough. For what to do about the fact that the world is there—the fact that we are subjects in and subject to the necessity of the world? For, no matter the force of world destitution and affirmation of nothingness, it is the construction (the thinking of the world) that ultimately determines whether, how, and to what extent the world survives and is justified. This construction may, as in Schlegel, take the form of ironic or poetic deconstruction, of taking apart the binaries that make up the world in order to freely rearrange them—but it is crucial that some sort of construction occur, some sort of inquiry into the exact conditions and function of the taking place or imposition of the world. If the construction is simply forgone, the world is either absolutized or turned into a ghost (or both). It might turn out, in this case, that the world is reproduced by way of its rejection, that the specter of the world persists paradoxically by way of its exorcism. Accordingly, the manner in which, and the end to which, the construction takes place is key. It does not suffice to declare the world to be nothing; it is important to destabilize the very conditions of possibility of the world and not to, wittingly or unwittingly, absolutize them. Even if the world is taken to be made or imagined, it is essential to trace how this imagination works—and the power it has over us. Deconstruction alone is insufficient; construction must take place. Such is a central insight that German Idealism bequeaths to contemporary political theology and contemporary theory.
Notes
1 1. The human is, after all, one of the names of the world—as “our world” (per the Meillassoux epigraph).
2 2. On the question of world-making as a central political-theological question, see Daniel Colucciello Barber, “World-Making and Grammatical Impasse,” Qui Parle 25, nos. 1–2 (2016): 179–206.
3 3. See also my and Alex Dubilet’s introduction. On the world in question as the Christian-modern world, see also our introduction, as well as Joseph Albernaz and Kirill Chepurin, “The Sovereignty of the World: Towards a Political Theology of Modernity (after Blumenberg),” in Interrogating Modernity: Debates with Hans Blumenberg, ed. Agata Bielik-Robson and Daniel Whistler (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 83–107.
4 4. As first suggested, in a different context, by Odo Marquard. See, for example, Marquard, Transzendentaler Idealismus, Romantische Naturphilosophie, Psychoanalyse (Cologne: Verlag für Philosophie Jürgen Dinter, 1987), 77–83. I take issue with Marquard’s understanding of modern theodicy, however, and German idealist theodicy in particular. He seems to take the term theodicy at face value, putting too much emphasis on God and not enough on the world—whereas, starting already from Leibniz (who coined the term), at stake in theodicy was the justification of the world as the best possible world, and of the negativity of the world as in some way necessary, ineliminable, and ultimately good. Thus, when Hegel says famously that world history is theodicy, the main function of that claim is not so much a defense of the figure of God but a justification of the course of world history as the best possible and even necessary or “divine”—so that no better world is possible, and no forms, categories, or grammar of spirit other than the ones produced historically by spirit itself. This, too, is a version of the transcendental knot.
5 5. This and the following section are a condensed version of the reading of the early Schelling offered in my “To Break All Finite Spheres: Bliss, the Absolute I, and the End of the World in Schelling’s 1795 Metaphysics,” Kabiri: The Official Journal of the North American Schelling Society 2 (2020): 40–67.
6 6. Friedrich Schelling, “Vom Ich als Princip der Philosophie,” in Werke: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1980), 1.2:109. Hereafter cited in text as VI and page number in parentheses.
7 7. Friedrich Schelling, “Philosophische Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kriticismus,” in Werke: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1982), 1.3:82.
8 8. Friedrich Schelling, Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen, in Werke: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2017), 2.8:68.
9 9. Schelling, “Philosophische Briefe,” 79.
10 10. Friedrich Schelling, Aphorismen über die Naturphilosophie (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2018), 30.
11 11. Friedrich Schelling, “System der gesammten Philosophie” [“Würzburg System”], in Sämmtliche Werke (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1860), 1.6:140.
12 12. Schelling, Aphorismen, 49.
13 13. I owe the idea of Schelling’s identity-philosophical construction as exhibiting the world indifferently to Daniel Whistler’s work.
14 14. As suggested by Schelling himself in Aphorismen über die Naturphilosophie, 61.
15 15. Quentin Meillassoux, “Spectral Dilemma,” Collapse 4 (2008): 261–275.
16 16. Meillassoux, 267.
17 17. See Kirill Chepurin, “Indifference and the World: Schelling’s Pantheism of Bliss,” Sophia 58 (2019): 613–630.
18 18. Schelling, Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen, 166.
19 19. Friedrich Schelling, Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, in Werke: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2018), 1.17:159.
20 20. All excerpts from Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Die späten wissenschaftlichen Vorlesungen (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2003), 2:3–5.
21 21. Fichte, Vorlesungen, 2:15.
22 22. For a related argument on the standpoint of the system in Fichte as the impossible utopic non-place prior to the world’s construction, see Kirill Chepurin, “Suspending the World: Romantic Irony and Idealist System,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 53, no. 2 (2020): 111–133.
23 23. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Die späten wissenschaftlichen Vorlesungen (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2000), 1:181.
24 24. Fichte, Vorlesungen, 1:189.
25 25. Fichte, 1:191–192.
26 26. Fichte, 1:189.
27 27. Fichte, 1:192.
28 28. This section draws from the more detailed interpretation of Schlegelian irony in my “Suspending the World: Romantic Irony and Idealist System.”
29 29. Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler et al. (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1958), 2:370. Hereafter cited in text as KFSA followed by volume and page number.
30 30. “Neutrality” is important here insofar as the neutral indexes precisely a neutralization of the binary logic.
31 31. G. W. F. Hegel, Werke in 20 Bänden (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1971), 18:460.
32 32. For an important unorthodox reading of the movement of spirit in Hegel—not via his philosophy of history but via the transition from the Phenomenology of Spirit to the Science of Logic—that may be more aligned with the non-Hegelian and even Romantic trajectory charted in this essay, see Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda, The Dash—The Other Side of Absolute Knowing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018).
33 33. Lisa Robertson, 3 Summers (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2016), 47.
34 34. To borrow an expression from Frédéric Neyrat, “On the Political Unconscious of the Anthropocene,” Society and Space, March
