Schelling’s Nothingness—the Figuration of the Death Drive in German Idealism in Žižek’s reading of Ages of the World

Abstract

Abstract: This article examines Slavoj Žižek’s reading of F.W.J. Schelling’s Ages of the World (1813 second draft) from the standpoint of the ontological status of nothingness in Schelling’s idealism as contrasted with Žižek’s methodology of dialectical materialism. Although Schelling’s theosophical theism differs from Žižek’s materialist hermeneutic, Schelling’s thought nevertheless enacts an important breakthrough in Western philosophy that anticipates the dynamics of the Marxist interpretation of the dialectic. In particular, his positing of opposed unconscious drives within the ante-cosmic Godhead prefigures Sigmund Freud’s theory of the death drive.