Abstract
This chapter argues (1) that no systems are closed, (2) that reality is not self-grounding/positing, and thus (3) that reality and thought are fundamentally contingent. Therefore, (4) both thought (the Symbolic) and the Real admit of an “indivisible remainder.” These staples of Žižek’s thought would have been impossible without Schelling.
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Notes
- 1.
I would like to thank Thomas Jeannot, who is better equipped to write the Žižek portions of this chapter than I am, for his many helpful comments and criticisms. I would also like to thank Tilottama Rajan for her personal comments as well as her Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology: Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), which proved indispensable for navigating murky distinctions, often stipulated, between deconstruction and poststructuralism. Her investment in my chapter—and probably in all chapters—far exceeded the normal work of an editor.
- 2.
Rajan has attempted, persuasively even if in isolation from prevailing trends, to “desynonymize deconstruction and poststructuralism” (Deconstruction and the Remainders, ix), arguing, with Derrida, that these terms were only “first used synonymously in the North American reception of French theory” (Deconstruction and the Remainders, xi). More will be discussed later, but for the purposes of this chapter ‘poststructuralism’ is best understood as a general historical term that designates French theory post-1968, and so even if not synonymous with deconstruction, it is, in this chapter, certainly inclusive of it.
- 3.
Rajan, I believe (and hope), is ultimately in agreement with this thesis, as, for her, “Deconstruction is a transposition of phenomenological into linguistic models that retains the ontological concerns of the former” (Deconstruction and the Remainders, 7). Utilizing her distinctions, a Schelling-inspired Žižek could remain within the orbit of deconstruction, which retains a concern for ontology, even an ontology of the subject, but such a Žižek must break from poststructuralism (in her view a solely American phenomenon), which disbands with all phenomenological (or even properly philosophical) concerns, ultimately allowing philosophy to be liquidated into social and literary studies.
- 4.
“Indivisible remainder” is Žižek’s translation of “der nie aufgehende Rest” from the 1809 “Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände,” in Sӓmtliche Werke I/7, ed. K. F. A. Schelling (Stuttgart: Cotta Verlag, 1860), 331–416, 360. For the English translation of this text, see F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006). “Der nie aufgehende Rest” might most literally be translated as “never surfacing remainder” or “never appearing remainder.”
- 5.
Rex Butler and Scott Stephens. “Editor’s Introduction,” in Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, eds. Butler and Stephens (London: Continuum, 2006), 1.
- 6.
Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012), 581.
- 7.
As has already been noticed by many and, depending on whom one asks, may or may not be an egregious fault, Žižek is a self-plagiarist. In numerous places, and it is not worth the time to catalogue them properly, Žižek will repeat paragraphs to pages of text verbatim from one book to another, sometimes even across three different books.
- 8.
Slavoj Žižek, “Lacan – At What Point is he Hegelian?,” in Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, eds. Butler and Stephens (London: Continuum, 2006), 26.
- 9.
Slavoj Žižek, “The Abyss of Freedom,” in The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World (second draft, 1813), ed. Judith Norman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 4.
- 10.
For another attempt to show that Schelling is our contemporary because at the source of contemporary debates, see Andrew Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1993).
- 11.
Žižek, “The Abyss of Freedom,” 61.
- 12.
Carl Raschke, “The Monstrosity of Žižek’s Christianity,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 11, no. 2 (2011), 14.
- 13.
Slavoj Žižek, “Hegel, Lacan, Deleuze: Three Strange Bedfellows,” in Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, eds. Butler and Stephens (London: Continuum, 2006), 176.
- 14.
Žižek, “The Abyss of Freedom,” 58.
- 15.
Ibid., 34.
- 16.
Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996), 16.
- 17.
It “is a necessary question: Why is there sense at all, why not non-sense instead of sense?…The whole world lies as it were caught in reason, but the question is: How did it come into this net, (because in the world is manifestly something other than and something more than pure reason, indeed even something striving beyond these borders). […ist eine notwendige Frage: warum ist Sinn überhaupt, warum ist nicht Unsinn statt Sinn?…Die ganze Welt liegt gleichsam in der Vernunft gefangen, aber die Frage ist: wie ist sie in dieses Netz gekommen, <da in der Welt offenbar noch etwas Anderes und etwas mehr als blosse Vernunft ist, ja sogar noch etwas über diese Schranken Hinausstrebendes>.]” F. W. J. Schelling, Die Grundlegung der positiven Philosophy: Münchner Vorlesung WS 1832–33 und SS 1833 (Torino: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1972), 222.
- 18.
Žižek, “The Abyss of Freedom,” 3.
- 19.
Ibid., 14.
- 20.
Ibid., 24.
- 21.
Note Schelling: “[T]he world as we now behold it, is all rule, order and form; but the unruly lies ever in the depths as though it might again break through, and order and form nowhere appear to have been original, but it seems as though what had initially been unruly had been brought to order” (Philosophical Investigations, 34.
- 22.
Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder, 33.
- 23.
Ibid., 39.
- 24.
See specifically lectures 6 and 7 from F. W. J. Schelling, The Grounding of Positive Philosophy: The Berlin Lectures (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 155–92. Also see F. W. J. Schelling, “Darstellung des philosophischen Empirismus,” in Sӓmtliche Werke I/10, 225–286.
- 25.
Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder (1996), 45.
- 26.
Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute; or, Why is the Christian legacy is worth fighting for? (London: Verso, 2000), 71.
- 27.
Ibid., 92.
- 28.
Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder, 46.
- 29.
See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2013), 163. This passage is, however, here (mis)translated as “There is nothing outside the text.”
- 30.
Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder, 47.
- 31.
Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 646.
- 32.
See Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London: Continuum, 2010).
- 33.
Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 647.
- 34.
Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009), 243.
- 35.
In this sense, Žižek proves neither properly Schellingian nor Hegelian, rather reenacting Fichtean idealism, that is, Fichtean “practicism.” The Real is symbolic, but it is also practical; it does not derive from an order absolutely antecedent to a subjective position.
- 36.
Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 8.
- 37.
Ibid., 10.
- 38.
Ibid., 279.
- 39.
Schelling and Hegel share in common the notion that Spinozism must be altered by conceiving of substance also as subject; this is how life can be breathed into an otherwise perfectly geometrical system.
- 40.
Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), 282.
- 41.
Žižek, The Fragile Absolute, 121.
- 42.
S. J. McGrath, “Schelling on the Unconscious,” Research in Phenomenology 40, no. 1 (2010): 79.
- 43.
Moreover, if the Symbolic is thought of not as a system of signifiers but fundamentally as an act, as a decision, then this too is arguably more Fichtean than Schellingian. If Fichtean, however, then a Fichteanism with a dash of Hegelianism insofar as the excluded other is necessary for the Symbolic’s own self-constitution. For a fairer reading of Hegel and of Žižek’s reading of Hegel than one is likely to find either in this chapter or even in the work of Sean McGrath, see Joseph Carew, “The Grundlogik of German Idealism: The Ambiguity of the Hegel-Schelling Relationship in Žižek,” International Journal of Žižek Studies 5, no. 1 (2000): 1–18. This article refuses to make a caricature of either Schelling or Hegel while simultaneously showing how Žižek creatively synthesizes the two (a move perhaps already more Hegelian than Schellingian though). Open to the fact that in this creative endeavor Žižek may be misreading each, it does show how this misreading would yet be charitable, given the light of Žižek’s own project, rather than a straw man.
- 44.
S. J. McGrath, The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious (New York: Routledge, 2012), 26.
- 45.
Ibid., 29.
- 46.
Ibid., 34.
- 47.
McGrath, “Schelling on the Unconscious,” 78.
- 48.
Butler and Stephens, “Editor’s Introduction,” 6.
- 49.
Ibid.
- 50.
Slavoj Žižek, “From Proto-Reality to the Act: A Reply to Peter Dews,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 5, no. 3 (2000), 142.
- 51.
Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder, 47.
- 52.
Peter Dews, “The eclipse of coincidence: Lacan, Merleau-Ponty and Schelling,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 4, no. 3 (1999): 19.
- 53.
Ibid.
- 54.
Ibid., 20.
- 55.
Hence the possible charge of Fichtean practicism.
- 56.
McGrath, “Schelling on the Unconscious,” 78.
- 57.
McGrath, The Dark Ground of Spirit, 35.
- 58.
McGrath, “Schelling on the Unconscious,” 89.
- 59.
Ibid., 91.
- 60.
Matthew Sharpe and Geoff Boucher, Žižek and Politics: A critical introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 116.
- 61.
Ibid., 131.
- 62.
Here, perhaps, one can actually see the connection, stemming from Schelling and his insistence on a pre-conscious Decision that is retroactively assumed as one’s own, as ours, to capitalism. The liberal tolerance of differences, but intolerance of a decision that would actually exclude something, is actually a friend of capitalism. However much contemporary philosophies of difference, of which poststructuralism is surely an instance, assert the contrary, they are rarely willing, Žižek decries, to denounce capitalism in toto. In other words, they may denounce it in theory, but remain happy to let capitalism market the interests of various identity groups. In the end, such ethics of difference always means an ethics of specialness, but only so long as every special interest group has free access to the market in order that it be able to make its own public demands for its own special rights. These rights and identities are, somehow, to be affirmed as unique (nonshareable), yet universally acknowledged and normalized. Žižek, for better or worse, fails to see how this can be had apart from capitalism and, as a critic of capitalism, so too must he level a critique against this brand of multiculturalism, that is, liberal authoritarianism’s version of multiculturalism.
- 63.
Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 963.
- 64.
Ibid.
- 65.
Schelling, Philosophical Investigations, 34.
- 66.
Butler and Stephens. “Editor’s Introduction,” 5
- 67.
Žižek, “The Abyss of Freedom,” 37.
- 68.
Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder, 218.
- 69.
Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 935–6.
- 70.
Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder, 45.
- 71.
Moreover, like Žižek, who is also always quick to add that these theorists are friends of capitalism, Nancy Fraser too has asserted, “It is highly implausible that gay and lesbian struggles threaten capitalism in its actually existing historical form” ( “Heterosexism, Misrecognition, and Capitalism: A Response to Judith Butler,” Social Text 52/53 (1997): 285).
- 72.
Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder, 3.
- 73.
See F. W. J. Schelling, “Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie oder Darstellung der reinrationalen Philosophie,” in Sӓmtliche Werke II/1, 253–572. Particularly note lectures 22–24, which have been translated by Kyla Bruff. For excerpts from these lectures, see The Schelling Reader, eds. Daniel Whistler & Benjamin Berger (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 406–19. For the full translation, see Kyla Bruff, “Schelling’s Late Political Philosophy: Lectures 22–24 of the Presentation of the Purely Rational Philosophy,” Kabiri 2 (2020): 93–135.
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Tritten, T. (2023). Reading Schelling. In: Rajan, T., Whistler, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Poststructuralism. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27345-2_8
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