of the world toward chaos or nothingness, an immanent materiality from which indifferently to construct any world and any binary opposition without justifying the world under construction as the best possible. There was for them, furthermore, bliss to be found in this atopic operation—not a happiness in the world, but a joy at the annihilation of the world, at exposing the world as imposed and unfree. The world is ungrounded in order to inhabit a void without relation to or care for the world, a freedom from the world in which no world is possible or needed.
As Oxana Timofeeva argues in this volume, even Hegel, the idealist thinker most invested in the world as it is, knew the joy—and enjoyment—found at the end of the world. Reason joyfully inhabits this end as the ruin from which philosophy, in the figure of the Owl of Minerva, begins its constitutively belated flight. In this postapocalyptic political-theological situation of a world that has always already ended and a God that is always already dead—which must, however, be thought of as the beginning of thought—Hegel is joined by Kant and Sade. Together they form a transition through the catastrophic situation of solitude and death, ultimately rejoicing in this situation as at once apocalyptic, rational, and utopian, one in which a new collectivity, a new “we,” may be seen to emerge.
Thus, in German Idealism, Jacobi’s pronouncement of nihilism is at once endorsed and reversed. As Schelling puts it in his 1806 Aphorisms, polemically endorsing Jacobi’s charge, “the doctrine of the absolute [is] a doctrine of the absolutely nothing.” “Indeed,” Schelling continues, deploying nothingness against the Jacobian outside but also against the Kantian-Fichtean logic of synthesis premised on the separation of subject and object, “[it is] a doctrine of the absolute nothingness of things,” ungrounding what dogmatically “appeared to him [i.e., Jacobi] as the quintessential reality.”46 The structure of transcendence in which the Jacobian subject of faith (in God and in the world) exists is here dismantled in order to reveal an immanence that does not operate through the divisions that the world declares ineliminable. In this, Idealism becomes a Spinozism, not of the world, but of what, from the point of view of the world, appears as the void—the immanently Real that thought must inhabit. This absolutely Real is indexed by the collapse of all worldly structures and mediations. Starting from 1795, Schelling repeatedly insists that the absolute cannot be mediated (and so cannot be synthesized), and can only be a nothingness (Nichts), a “nothing at all (= 0),” from the perspective of the world. At the standpoint of this immanent nothingness, the finite world is completely vernichtet.47
At moments like these, rather than fearing the nothing, as Jean Paul did in reaction to its perceived lawlessness, German Idealism embraces it in order to proceed immanently from the nothing, absolute bliss, or absolute indifference. As a result, the starting operation of Idealism is a total suspension and even annihilation of the world, its affirmative reduction to a nothingness or chaos, the a-position, the atopic standpoint that the speculative thinker must occupy. At this standpoint, any givenness of the world, any binary opposition through the lens of which we are accustomed to seeing the world (such as subject and object, but also higher and lower, possible and actual, particular and universal, finite and infinite), is refused. This standpoint needs to be affirmed as first in order to expose the world as secondary, imposed, and derivative, instead of taking the world dogmatically as a necessary and unsurpassable horizon. If to affirm the absolute is to reduce the world to nothing, then, one might say, nothing is absolute.
Even the figure of the finite subject, as alienated from the objective world which the subject seeks to master (and which in turn threatens to overpower the subject), only appears as foundational as the result of the constitution of objectivity as a realm severed from subjectivity. To think otherwise than through finitude does not therefore necessarily mean falling into the arrogance of subjectivity or supposedly overstepping the subject’s limits. At issue is the refusal of the whole discourse of finitude, entrenched as it is in the constitution of reality that divides the subject from the object and encloses them in a circle in which they must endlessly struggle. Rather than remaining within this circle by envisaging a universal whole which would sublate into itself all divisions—one can, instead, refuse (the legitimacy and inevitability of) the very act of setting up such a regime of reality in the first place. Doing so uncovers the beginning of speculative thought—as well as of bliss and joy—in the annihilation of the world.
The stakes of this annihilation, but also the paradoxes arising from it, are traced in Chepurin’s contribution, which reconfigures the German idealist trajectory through the tension between two basic operations: annihilation and construction. These operations are central to German Idealism, from the early Schelling to Schlegel to Fichte, Hegel and even Marx, insofar as they attempt to think the conditions of possibility of the finite world—to narrate or construct a world (or this world)—without absolutizing the way it is, instead proceeding from the Real that must be thought of as preceding and irreducible to the world. To think the Real, therefore, requires annihilating the world. To think this annihilation, this inhabitation of the void without the world, however, is not enough. For what is to be done about the fact that the world, with its divisions and mediations, is there and the subject is always already in the world? The world must therefore be confronted and constructed, so as not to be made a ghost—but if to think the world is to think its conditions of possibility, then can the world be thought without justifying it as necessarily the way it is? This is what Chepurin calls “the transcendental knot,” a problem faced by German Idealism no less than by contemporary thought. Even in thinking the end of the world, there remains the danger of absolutizing the way the world is; to find ways of not doing so is a crucial task that German Idealism bequeaths to political theology.
One of the fundamental logics upholding the world is the logic of mediation, familiar to us from (the late) Hegel.48 The way mediation joins with sovereignty is analyzed in Daniel Colucciello Barber’s and Alex Dubilet’s contributions to this volume. For Barber, the true function of Schmittian sovereignty is to uphold the world defined through divisive relationality and mediation, Christian (and Christocentric) in origin. In introducing the figure of Christ as the mediator, Christianity makes mediation itself into the horizon that is at once divine and worldly, directed toward the universal future (of salvation), the possibility of which is established by the mechanism of mediation. This structure persists into modernity. What is usually taken to be the immanence of the world, the way it remediates all positions into one universalizing world process and discards, suppresses, or sublates all that might remain outside of it (the way it happens, for example, in Hegel’s philosophy of history), reveals transcendence as its condition of possibility. It reveals, that is, the sovereign act, the decision that institutes it, to which Barber opposes Taubesian apocalypticism, while radicalizing it further toward a refusal of sovereignty without reliance on the world, a nihil without a care for worldly possibilities or the possibility of the world. In affirming this completely baseless negativity as the now-here of world-annihilation, coinciding with God understood as a term that is absolutely incommensurable with the logic of the world, Barber’s paper joins others in the volume that bring together German Idealism, apocalypticism, and the atopic nowhere—positioning it, however, not with but against German Idealism, or, more precisely, against its trajectory that bears the name Hegel. What emerges from this analysis is the structural coincidence of the Christian mechanism of mediation that holds the world together and defers its apocalyptic end, on the one hand, and the modern primacy of mediation as the field of worldly possibility held together by the law (of the world) instituted by the sovereign act, on the other.
Dubilet’s contribution turns to Marx’s “On the Jewish Question” in order to diagnose the collusive interplay between mediation and sovereignty as modes of transcendence that, together, prevent real immanence from irrupting. It does so by recovering the logic of “the general secular contradiction”—the division between the state and civil society that materializes and secularizes the structure of diremption originally articulated in theological form, as the opposition between heaven and earth. In this analysis, the logic of Christianity is shown to be imbricated with the political form of secular modernity itself. Moreover, this account reveals that the modern secular state does not inaugurate
