The Indivisible Remainder

The feature which distinguishes the great works of materialist thought, from Lucretius’ <i>De rerum natura </i>through <i>Capital </i>to the writings of Lacan, is their unfinished character: again and again they tackle their chosen problem. Schelling’s <i>Weltalter</i> drafts belong to this same series, with their repeated attempt at the formulation of the ‘beginning of the world,’ of the passage from the pre-symbolic pulsation of the Real to the universe of logos.<br>F.W.J. Schelling, the German idealist who for too long dwelled in the shadow of Kant and Hegel, was the first to formulate the post-idealist motifs of finitude, contingency and temporality. His unique work announces Marx’s critique of speculative idealism, as well as the properly Freudian notion of drive, of a blind compulsion to repeat which can never be sublated in the ideal medium of language.<br><i>The Indivisible Remainder </i>begins with a detailed examination of the two works in which Schelling’s speculative audacity reached its peak: his essay on human freedom and his drafts on the "Ages of the World." After reconstituting their line of argumentation, Slavoj Zizek confronts Schelling with Hegel, and concludes by throwing a Schellingian light on some "related matters": the consequences of the computerization of daily life for sexual experience; cynicism as today’s predominant form of ideology; the epistemological deadlocks of quantum physics.<br>Although the book is packed with examples from politics and popular culture — the unmistakable token of Zizek’s style — from <i>Speed</i> and <i>Groundhog Day</i> to <i>Forrest Gump,</i> it signals a major shift towards a systematic concern with the basic questions of philosophy and the roots of the crisis of our late-capitalist universe, centred around the enigma of modern subjectivity.