Tyler Tritten

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION: schellingian experiments in speculation

T he following essays are attempts to take seriously Iain Hamilton Grant’s claim in the above passage that “Schelling is a contemporary philosopher.” Schelling is read in dialogue with key figures in the canon of European philosophy and critical theory (Badiou, Chat̂elet, Deleuze, de Man, Meillassoux, Merleau-Ponty, Simondon, Žizěk, Malabou), as well as in light of recent trends in analytic philosophy (Brandomian pragmatism, powers-based metaphysics and semantic naturalism) – and such readings are not meant merely to highlight Schellingian influences or resonances in contemporary thinking, but rather to challenge and interrogate current orthodoxies by insisting upon the contemporaneity of Schellingian speculation. To quote Grant once more, “Schellingianism is resurgent every time philosophy reaches beyond the Kant-inspired critique of metaphysics, its subjectivist-epistemological transcendentalism, and its isolation of physics from metaphysics” (5). Speculative philosophy is not dead; it is, in fact, enjoying quite a notorious renaissance – and the rehabilitation of Schellingianism has played a substantive role in this. Two decades ago, F.W.J. Schelling’s name first resurfaced as a resource for contemporary philosophising in Slavoj Žizěk’s The Indivisible Remainder, and Žizěk’s strategy of redeploying Schellingian themes for contemporary ends has continued to play a role, more or less subterranean, in the writings of many since (Gabriel, Laruelle, Nancy). However, it was in 2006 with the publication of Grant’s Philosophies of Nature after Schelling that Schelling was most fully revived as a dialogue-partner for contemporary thinking. Grant recapitulates the famous passage from the Freiheitsschrift in which Schelling bemoans the lack of a concept of nature in post-Cartesian philosophies by extending it to all post-Kantian philosophies and even Schelling scholarship itself. Thus, Grant speaks of “all post-Cartesian European

AGAINST KANT: toward an inverted transcendentalism or a philosophy of the doctrinal

Abstract F.W.J. Schelling’s late distinction between negative and positive philosophy correlates negative philosophy with critical philosophy, which delimits what could be said of things without yet actually being able to do so. Positive philosophy, however, is able to make assertions about the actual existence of such objects without transgressing Kant’s prison of finitude, i.e., without moving from an immanent, subjective and transcendental position to a transcendent (read: noumenal) object. Schelling’s later positive philosophy rather asserts that one begins outside Kant’s prison. This is not a dogmatism or, more properly, a dogmatizing philosophy, that attempts to reach the transcendent from an immanent locus, transcendental subjectivity, but it is a “doctrinal philosophy” that begins in transcendence and then has as its task the consequent construction of the domain of transcendental subjectivity. By this means, Schelling’s positive philosophy, which he also deems a “historical” and “progressive” philosophy, exposes what Quentin Meillassoux has termed “the great outdoors.” Schelling, however, does not show how one might acquire access to this absolute outside, but he argues that one should depart from it. Transcendence is not the aim of knowledge but the absolute prius from which positive, i.e., progressive, philosophy begins.