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In a post-Enlightenment and postrevolutionary moment, German Idealism proves to be important not only for its genealogical and diagnostic investigations but also for its capacity to speculatively articulate immanence as preceding (and thus putting into question) all transcendence. German Idealism creates varied conceptual frameworks of immanence that are irreducible to the (Christian-modern) world—this world of division, domination, and the incessant not-yet of universality and progress, a world that entices the subject with its seemingly endless possibilities and promises of the way it could be, thereby reproducing the way it is. Indeed, these frameworks, while being foreclosed by the Christian-modern apparatus of the world, index what has the power to delegitimate and subvert it. This is an unorthodox portrait of German Idealism, to be sure, one that resists reducing it to a philosophy of the subject alienated from the world, determined by structures of division and diremption that, in turn, necessitate the (conservative) logics of synthesis, reconciliation, and wholeness, characteristic of the Christian-modern paradigm. More orthodox readings miss the way that German Idealism attempts to think not only the overcoming of division into unity (an overcoming that is premised on the very fact of division and strives to subsume everything into the universal) but also, and more decisively, the various ways of questioning and undermining the very structure of division as the ultimate horizon of reality. At its most radical, German Idealism theorizes what is prior to and cannot be inscribed into the Christian-modern world—indexed by such concepts as nothingness, chaos, bliss, indifference, and the earth. As shown by the contributions to this volume, these are all names for what is neither transcendent nor immanent to the world, but for a radical immanence that subverts the very amalgamation of immanence and transcendence. The resulting portrait of post-Kantian thought is one of a series of experiments with immanence in opposition to the logics that structure the Christian-modern world: division and unity, particularity and universality, futurity and transcendence.

To provide an example, Joseph Albernaz’s contribution to the volume explores this ante-worldly immanence under the name of the earth, as thought by Friedrich Hölderlin and Karoline von Günderrode.³⁸ The earth is the first common, the Real-in-common which is then enclosed, divided, and segregated by the colonial regime of the world. The sovereign, transcendent character of this regime is evident already in what Hölderlin, Schelling, Hegel, and later Carl Schmitt consider to be its inaugurating act: judgment (Ur-teil), which combines the operation of division (into particular kinds, properties, and territories) with that of unification (where the divided particulars are subsumed under universals). The resulting process of possession, division, and appropriation is foundational for the modern colonial project and Christian in its origin and significance. The earth as the common, by contrast, allows us to think that which refuses and ungrounds division and exploitation (in particular, the exploitation of the earth by the Christian-modern apparatus of transcendence). As a result, the earth becomes a political-theological ruin—and yet, to inhabit this ruin (of the common) is to think the ruination of the universalizing, dominating order of reality. What results from this, is a movement of local and alien immanence that destitutes and collapses the world, revealing it to be imposed and exploitative, feeding on the immanence of the earth and the common while foreclosing it.

In a convergent fashion, James Martel’s contribution exposes in Kant, the originator of the problematics found in German Idealism and Romanticism, a materiality that persists in priority to the transcendental order (of subject and object), revealing the latter to be secondary and imposed, to be promising salvation in the future by foreclosing material immanence in the now. By remaining with and within the ordinary and material, we can, for Martel, an-archically resist such an imposition—a resistance that carries with it a messianic aspect, a messianism of the ordinary in the Benjaminian vein. This messianicity saves us, immediately, from the transcendental structure of salvation itself—from the way the transcendental philosopher imagines the world is or ought to be.

This kind of immanence carries with it not just a refusal of the ways of the world but also a “nihilistic” threat of undoing the very structures that uphold religious and secular authority or sovereignty. The absolute is, throughout German Idealism, intimately related to an affirmation of (the) nothing that seeks to escape any logic of the world’s givenness or any absolutization of the world and its powers. This conjunction of immanence and the refusal to be subjected to the world did not go undetected by German Idealism’s contemporaries. Jacobi, with his investment in transcendence, correctly sensed the German idealist threat (to transcendence) in his double identification of German Idealism with Spinozism and nihilism. Failing to grasp its metaphysical and political-theological innovation, he sought to reduce German Idealism to the simplistic fantasy of an “egotistic,” merely subjective I, to a “will that wills nothing” and thus reduces all to nothing.³⁹ To this, Jacobi contrasted “the true” or God as “the outside,” the transcendent reality sustained by faith—as, ultimately, a faith in the outside and thus in the world and its ontological priority over nothingness, ruin, and discontinuity. Relatedly, Jean Paul saw Idealism and Romanticism as “the lawless, capricious spirit of the present age, which would egotistically annihilate the world and the universe in order to clear a space merely for free play in the void.”⁴⁰ Or, as Jacobi succinctly put it, “Man has this choice, however, and this alone: Nothingness or a God.”⁴¹

German Idealism, indeed, often chose (the) nothing. That did not, however, necessarily entail choosing the subjective or making the capricious subject into an omnipotent God, as Jacobi tendentiously proclaimed. Not even early Romanticism, at the height of what is often taken to be its subjectivism, considered the logic of artistic creation to be subjective in this narrow sense.⁴² The conjunction of nihilism with Spinozism—the philosophy of impersonal immanence—remained not fully thought through by Jacobi, even if he was the one to accuse German Idealism of both.

The example of Schelling is crucial here. Already in 1795, several years before Jacobi’s open letter on Fichte’s nihilism, Schelling proclaimed the will that wills nothing—the non-will, without mediation or striving, without expansion or want, the will that is prior to and refuses all demands of the world—as the absolutely Real from which all thought must begin.⁴³ This non-will was for him not the subjective I but the full dissolution or annihilation of the subject and the object, in their inextricable relation—a relation in which the subject is opposed to the object, a not-I, and wants (mastery over) it. Without such relation, premised on the subject-object opposition, the subject cannot exist as the subject of (the possibility of) mastery, production, and freedom. The philosophy of Kant and the early Fichte were for Schelling representative of this logic—the logic of divisive relationality, the inside/outside, and the endless striving to overcome this originary division, as the logic through which the world is produced and reproduced by the subject through synthesis, ultimately through the expansionism of finite reason. (Finitude marking here precisely the gap between subject and reality, proclaimed to be primary and ineliminable.) Schelling’s radical move was to refuse this gap through which the subject and the world was produced and to think instead the absolute as immanent groundlessness, the void of the Real that is absolutely nonproductive and even annihilative of any possibility of division and relation—to think the absolute as what he would later call absolute indifference (Indifferenz), in which the very logic of difference, negativity, and care is voided.⁴⁴

The absolute, as absolutely groundless (grundlos),⁴⁵ was affirmed by Schelling as the only unconditioned point of beginning for any thought that seeks to not absolutize the world—the world as always not yet perfect, not yet moral, postponing fulfillment into an indefinite, transcendent future which only leads to reproducing the divisions and negativities of the way things are. Understood in this way, the world must be annihilated, if there is to be a way of thinking in terms other than those this regime of reality demands or proclaims to be the only terms possible. As Kirill Chepurin’s essay in this volume points out, this No to the world was the atopic starting point not only for Schelling but also for (the later) Fichte and for Friedrich Schlegel—for whom this was an explicitly revolutionary operation, a decreation 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 the political theology of immanence; rather it constitutes a mechanism of transcendent mediation. The exception that mediates across the two realms renders transcendence livable, but it also reproduces the dirempted life, establishing it as the unsurpassable horizon and foreclosing all operations of dissolution or abolition that could collapse the structure of civil society and the state that governs “the order of the world.” Although immediate transcendence (sovereignty) may be positioned, as it is in the Schmittian paradigm, as radically distinct from its mediational counterpart, in relation to real immanence the two operate as a collusive ensemble.

The topic of the secular state and its production of citizenship is picked up by Thomas Lynch in connection with the liberal doctrine of religious toleration. Lynch’s essay traces the way the modern state relies on the Christian logic of universality as mediation in order to legitimate itself and its sorting out of religion into legitimate and illegitimate forms—into forms that support the universal (i.e., the state itself) and forms that potentially endanger it. For Lynch, this universalist logic underlies both Hegel and liberal theorists of toleration: only that difference can be tolerated which promotes and upholds the universal. “Which religions are compatible with secularism?” This becomes the guiding question, and any failure to disentangle religion from politics is turned into the demand that we secularize better—which serves to obscure the way the very binary of the religious and the political is produced and reproduced from within the Christian-modern logic of the universal. Against this regime of difference to be mediated and transcended toward universality, Lynch positions the idea of indifference as refusing to negotiate between differences—as “negating those regimes by which difference is organized and rendered consistent.”

In this way, we circle back to the theorization of an indifference that refuses mediation—but which also, as Dubilet suggests in his essay’s conclusion, may refuse the universal name “human.” The work of Daniel Whistler is crucial here, insofar as it attempts to think a non-Hegelian trajectory within German Idealism, one that would refuse the primacy of mediation and human (transcendental) subjectivity in thinking the world. In a recent essay, Whistler has shown how Schelling seeks to exhibit reality indifferently from a utopic standpoint prior to all difference and particularity (which always already exist within the regime of mediation)—a standpoint that can only be grasped as nonhuman or even inhuman.⁴⁹ In his essay in this volume, Whistler shows indifference to be a way of rethinking the secular modern without being beholden to the understandings of secularization as the negation of particularity or its remediation into a universal. If one can think an immanence (here equated with indifference) that refuses the logics of mediation and universality—Christian in their origins and inherited by modernity—then perhaps this immanence can provide a different way of thinking the secular itself? To that end, Whistler theorizes abstraction as indifference, which results in a complete destitution of the transcendental, collapsing the subject-object dichotomy and refusing to mediate between particular possibilities. Instead of sublating them into a universality, this abstraction neutralizes and remains absolutely indifferent to them. In its indifference and nullity, it may also be said to be universal, but in a completely nonstandard sense—as an immediate imposition of a plane of immanence that operates, one could say, without relation to particulars. This imposition may carry with it a kind of violence, too, but this violence—and this logic of the secular—although modern, is no longer the Christian-Hegelian modern; as such, it offers a different conceptual apparatus for the political-theological understanding of modernity.

Saitya Brata Das continues the Schellingian polemics with Hegel in his essay, which instead of theorizing immanence anew articulates the late Schelling’s radical transcendence as the counter to the Hegelian theodicy of worldly immanence. In Hegel, the world is understood as potentiality, as the world-historical possibility actualized by spirit as the subject of history. In this theodicy of history, the world is justified by its own movement, that of actualizing possibility. Indeed—to complement Das’s analysis—to see the movement of the world as one of progressive actualization of possibility, the way Hegel does, is itself quintessentially modern. As Hans Blumenberg has shown, the inaugurating move of modernity, the move that inaugurates the program of the subject’s self-assertion, is to make the world (and not God) into the totality of possibility. Faced with reality as possibility yet to be actualized, the task of the modern subject becomes that of producing reality, of mastering it by making use of it, exploring the possibilities inherent in it, and exploiting them to the fullest.⁵⁰ The subject becomes the subject of this process of actualization—the figure of possibility itself. This is, one could say, the way the modern world legitimates itself: by thinking of itself as open and producible, as making room for and enacting all the possibility. For Das, the significance of late-Schellingian political theology is, by contrast, to delegitimate worldly sovereignty by eschatologically emptying it out, by freely letting it pass away. In this Schellingian kenosis, the very logic of theodicy is refused, dissolved in the beatitude of an actuality without telos.

Agata Bielik-Robson’s contribution offers a different move against Hegelian kenosis. She opposes Hegel’s teleological-sacrificial logic of the death of God with the idea of God’s free self-withdrawal (tsimtsum) found in the Jewish tradition, from Luria to Derrida. Both concepts, kenosis and tsimtsum, may be said to lie at the foundation of modernity—an optic in which the death of God ceases to be a Christian monopoly. Kenosis and tsimtsum both open up the space of finitude in which the world can be affirmed, but in radically different ways. In Hegel, God may freely consent to die, yet his self-sacrificial death lays an infinite burden upon the world—a debt and guilt that can only be repaid at the end of history. History is thereby turned into a space of divine sovereignty even in God’s death. By contrast, what tsimtsum allows us to think is a gift without sacrifice, a self-contraction of God that simply lets finitude be, without reason or telos. The “religion of flowers” that Hegel criticized as not serious enough, here aligned with tsimtsum, turns out to be an immanently anti-Hegelian moment opening up onto a non-Christian, also future-oriented yet nonsacrificial, logic of modernity.

If the Hegelian dialectic is complicit with the Christian-modern world, then one move is to think the nondialectical as that which refuses this world immanently, as multiple essays in this volume do. Another move, however, which lies broadly within the Hegelian trajectory itself, would be to open up the dialectical movement, to un-resolve it—perhaps transforming it into a spiral. This is suggested by S. D. Chrostowska in her contribution, which focuses on the so-called “Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism.” The basic gesture of the “Oldest Systematic Program” is messianic and revolutionary, forgoing the religious-secular binary in order to think an openness to the utopic that resists closure and mastery. As Chrostowska argues, an entire tradition of dialectical utopianism follows this gesture. The openness of the spiral resists the Schmittian closure of political theology—disclosing its alternative forms and perspectives, siding not with authority, but with the emancipation of the suffering and the oppressed. In this, Chrostowska endorses not the dialectic in its late-Hegelian form, but the earlier, Romantic-Hegelian revolutionary impulse and the liberatory political theologies to which it helped give rise.

The figure of an opening or gap is analyzed critically in Steven Shakespeare’s contribution. Shakespeare diagnoses the ambivalence of German Idealism as at once pointing toward an immanence that subverts the subject and its world and as foreclosing this immanence by way of the gap between the self and its reflected counterpart, the I and the not-I. Interrogating the constitution and failure of the subject and its world through Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard, Shakespeare traces in these thinkers three different attempts to think the gap without resolving or dialectically unifying it, without appealing to any sort of transcendent authority that would serve to close the gap. Instead, these thinkers reduplicate and intensify this gap of subjectivity as a way of signaling the immanently fractured, nonunitary character of reality. Reduplication points thereby to the inevitable problem of expression inherent in theories of immanence, insofar as expression requires a minimal difference to be possible. In these thinkers, this minimal difference is transformed into the dialectical motor of life, which remains however (despite—or indeed precisely because of—its proclamations of universality) a fundamentally Christian logic, transforming others, most directly Judaism, into the embodiment of the unlife. It is through this investment in life, with the hierarchical and supersessionist logics it engenders, that Idealism ultimately forecloses immanence and reproduces transcendence. The resulting theoretical question, which Shakespeare leaves open, is whether reduplication, and thus the expression of immanence without appeal to models of truth from above, can be divorced from this structure of supersession.

The move of recuperation and subjugation is, of course, likewise at the heart of the Hegelian world history. In his contribution, Vincent Lloyd seeks to think that which is occluded by this recuperation—namely, Africa as, for Hegel, the continent prior to history—and to find in this ante-historical origin resources for refusing the moves of dialectical recuperation, for pushing back against Hegel’s methodical ambition to mediate everything from the normative world-historical standpoint. Africa and blackness index in Hegel that which is unspeakable and without recognition, whose functioning in and against Hegel’s narrative Lloyd proceeds to trace—as the exteriority that persists, unassimilable to the dialectic. Africa can only be articulated by way of the complete dismantling of the apparatus of history, the absolute stripping-away of spirit or subjectivity. What results from this is a pure contingency of raw events and objects without a binding force, a life of immediacy without any sense of totality. In this, a different kind of sovereignty emerges, embodied for Hegel in the figure of the Congo queen, whose agency is despotic and immediate, secular in the sense of being driven wholly by materialistic concerns. In a different way than Barber and Dubilet, Lloyd also diagnoses the presence of sovereignty at the basis of the supposedly immanent movement of history. At the same time, to think immanent exteriority as embodied in the Congo queen is to complicate any celebratory idealizations of the figure of the non-sovereign—to see in it the obverse side of the same conjunction of sovereignty and mediation.

Two tendencies within German Idealism emerge across the volume’s oftentimes diverging contributions. On the one hand, as a series of experiments in de-absolutizing and even annihilating the (modern, Christian-European) world—in affirmatively reducing it to nothingness, chaos, the earth, or indifference—German Idealism may be mobilized to think that which ungrounds and cannot be inscribed into dominant Christian-secular logics. On the other hand, even when German Idealism seeks to think the zero point that precedes the construction of the world, its next move is, all too often, to reconstruct the world as it is starting from this zero point, thereby justifying the (modern, Christian-European) world. In German idealist philosophy of history especially, the path of the absolute goes through world history, justifying it as an image of (and a necessary point of transition on the way to) the absolute. This trajectory points to the ways in which post-Kantian thought not only opens up a thinking of immanence but also, ultimately, forecloses it by realigning it with the modern world in the idealist philosophies of subjectivity, history, and the state.

Thus, in Fichte, the standpoint of the Wissenschaftslehre displaces the world totally, appearing as “the doctrine of nothing” to the dogmatist who would absolutize the way the world is—a standpoint that culminates, in the ethical register, in the idea of blessedness or bliss as refusing the logics of domination and the not-yet. At the same time, however, and from the same standpoint, Fichte proceeds to think the necessity of the progress of history and its culmination in Christian-European modernity as the actualization of the divine in and as the world. The world, and with it the state, strives to dissolve in the life of the divine—and yet this striving necessarily traverses Christianity and modern European history as its contemporary culmination and the closest that humanity has come to its end goal. This is, one could say, the tension between Fichte’s 1806 The Way Towards the Blessed Life and his Characteristics of the Present Age, published in the same year. The former thinks bliss, nonproductivity, non-sovereignty—just as the latter uses them to justify the evils of history (including colonial and state violence), as mere stages toward the final epoch in which bliss would be realized and all domination would cease.

This tension, and this overwriting of immanence by way of its inscription into a theodical project of justifying the world, is generally characteristic of the way German Idealism repeatedly forecloses the utopic immanence of nothingness or bliss by positioning it as the end goal of the world process, thereby, one could say, idealizing the world as it is. Schelling is guilty of this as well. One of his last works, Exhibition of the Purely Rational Philosophy (1847–1852), is particularly explicit in this regard. What the world is meant to do, for Schelling, is to actualize the totality of possibility until its full exhaustion—and what the philosopher is supposed to do is to trace the logic of this actualization in and as world history. The latter follows the natural logic of the Stufenfolge (succession of steps), in which the higher subsumes and builds on the lower, gradually getting closer to the all-encompassing “organic” unity. This naturalization of hierarchy and progress is extended by Schelling to European colonial history and thus becomes indicative of the modern logic of racialization, with Schelling speaking about “lower” races serving as mere possibility for the “higher”—a racialized logic endorsed by him as the way things simply and necessarily are. The lower is, according to this conception, destined to die out naturally as soon as it comes into contact with the higher (as illustrated by Schelling appealing to the disappearance of “the American natives”)—or to be put to use by the higher (as in the transportation of African slaves to America) thereby saving the lower from world-historical abandonment and giving it the possibility of becoming part of something higher—of becoming part of the logic of possibility itself.⁵¹ Not unlike in Fichte, the philosopher must refuse all divisions and think their all-dissolution in bliss, as refusing sovereignty and domination—and yet, in order to think this as the end goal of history, the philosopher must think the path to this nondomination as going by necessity through domination—and, furthermore, through domination in its historical forms, culminating in Christian-European modernity.

These two moves—thinking an immanence that refuses domination, sovereignty, or the not-yet, and positioning this immanence as the telos of the world that is not yet ethical, not yet free, not yet fully divine—need at once to be kept separate and grasped in their conjunction within German Idealism. This is, one could say, what happens when nothingness, bliss, and immanence are inscribed into the world’s logic of possibility, into the path of historical development, actualization, and progress: a folding back of immanence into the world of modernity. German Idealism is torn between wanting not to absolutize the world, by affirming that which refuses and even annihilates it—and to think the way the world is, identifying the logic of the world with the logic of ideality and thereby justifying the world. This tension is indicative of the post-Enlightenment, postrevolutionary moment as one in which modernity at once culminates and its cracks begin to show: the Christian-modern paradigm here at once reaches its peak and ceases to be self-evident, becoming a (theoretical and genealogical) problem for thought. This allows an unprecedented series of experiments in deconstructing or ungrounding the modern world, but it also leads to German Idealism’s holding on to the world of modernity that it inherited. In making the first grand attempt to self-reflectively think through the genealogical foundations of modernity, German Idealism ultimately ends up justifying them—and thereby justifying the project of modernity itself.

Can one ever think the world without justifying it? Is it possible to think an immanence that would immanently refuse the world, on the one hand, and the world as the regime of reality through which the subjects of modernity inevitably are required to pass, even as they assert an antagonism toward it, on the other? How is what is foreclosed by the Christian-modern to be thought? How does one think the enactment—the operativity or inoperativity—of this otherwise that would not fall back into the logics of restoration, fulfillment, actualization, or universality? How does one proceed from or out of the zero point of radical immanence—or how does one persist in it while also doing justice to the victims and exclusions of the world? The questions that German Idealism, in all its tensions and ambivalences, bequeaths to political theology are numerous—and remain absolutely central to its future.