Bliss Against the World: Schelling, Theodicy, and the Crisis of Modernity

The concept of bliss, in its connotations of beatitude and salvation, may seem of little relevance to so-called secular modernity. Bliss Against the World argues otherwise by advancing a novel framework of the entanglement between modernity, Christianity, and bliss through the thought of German Idealist and Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling (1775--1854). In Schelling's concept of bliss ( Seligkeit ), the idea of salvation from the world mutates into a burning concern with the negativity of the modern world, and with the way modernity inherits the Christian promise of a non-alienated future that never arrives. Throughout his thinking, Schelling grapples with the question of theodicy: Can this negative world be justified? And what would it mean to be free of the world--to enact bliss right now--when the idea of otherworldly salvation increasingly loses its conceptual relevance? This leads Schelling to conceptualize bliss as what refuses or apocalyptically annihilates this world and its divisions and burdens. Bliss Against the World reinterprets Schelling's philosophical trajectory from the 1790s to the 1840s, showing his metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and natural philosophy to be underwritten by the apocalyptic tension between bliss and theodicy. It argues that this tension is located likewise at the heart of modernity and reconstructs the Schellingian genealogy of the modern age as intensifying what may be termed the general Christian contradiction. It also focuses on Schelling's anxiety about the possibility of universal history in the dark and de-centered universe and critiques his Romantic construction of humanity and his geo-racial theodicy of history--a theodicy that refracts and legitimates the violent logics of post-1492 modernity, including European colonialism, racialization, and transatlantic slavery. Bliss Against the World thus theorizes bliss not only with, but also against Schelling, who emerges from this book as a key thinker of modernity, and of the Christian-modern trajectory as a path to salvation in the shadow of whose failure we continue to live. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Contents Preface Acknowledgments Abbreviations General Introduction: Modernity, Theodicy, Bliss I.1. Schelling’s Plenum of Bliss I.2. The Genealogical Question I.3. A Scene of Bliss: Rousseau and Adorno I.4. The Fall from Bliss (into the World): Kant I.5. Modernity and Theodicy Part I Why Must This World Be? Epigraph 1 The General Christian Contradiction 1.1. Separation and Delegitimation 1.2. Faith and the Not-Yet of the World 1.3. The Epoch of Crisis: Modernity and Alienation 1.4. With and Against the Christian-Modern 1.5. Mysticism, Magic, and the Signs of the Times (with an Excursus on Wordsworth) Interlude I: Ordo quis datus? I1.1. The World-Historical Constellation 2 The Demiurgic Subject 2.1. To Break All Finite Spheres: In Search of Lost Bliss 2.2. To Reproduce the World: Idealism as the Katechon Interlude II: “Abyss of Repose and Inactivity” 3 Evil Is but a Shadow 3.1. The One Common Being: Re-visioning the Universe as Bliss 3.2. To Dissolve as in Water, to Consume as in Fire 3.3. Everything in Its Place and Time: An Aesthetic Cosmic Theodicy Part II The Dark Ground Epigraph Introduction to Part II: On Schelling’s Post-1809 System Narrative 4 Universal Ekstasis; or, Fallenness and Method 4.1. Decentering: The Fall of Adam and the Inverted World (of Modernity) 4.2. Kenosis and Construction: The Method of Philosophy 5 Universal Spiral 5.1. God’s Own Shelter from the World: Cosmic War and Cosmic Peace 5.2. Bliss before the Law 5.3. Recentering the Human in a Cosmic Revolution 5.4. Conclusion: Human Self-Assertion Restaged at the Meta-level Interlude III: Clock Time as Fallen Time 6 The Race to Bliss: Assembling Global Humanity 6.1. Negative and Positive Philosophy; or, Modernity and Christianity Redux 6.2. Without God, Without Possibility: Racialization and Conversion Conclusion: Bliss Against Theodicy Bibliography Index