Indivisible Remainder - 9781844675814

The feature which distinguishes the great works of materialist thought, from Lucretius' De rerum natura through Capital to the writings of Lacan, is their unfinished character: again and again they tackle their chosen problem. Schelling's Weltalterdrafts belong to this same series, with their repeated attempt at theformulation of the 'beginning of the world,' of the passage from thepre-symbolic pulsation of the Real to the universe of logos.

F.W.J. Schelling, the German idealist who for too long dwelled in theshadow of Kant and Hegel, was the first to formulate the post-idealistmotifs of finitude, contingency and temporality. His unique workannounces Marx's critique of speculative idealism, as well as theproperly Freudian notion of drive, of a blind compulsion to repeatwhich can never be sublated in the ideal medium of language.

The Indivisible Remainder beginswith a detailed examination of the two works in which Schelling'sspeculative audacity reached its peak: his essay on human freedom andhis drafts on the “Ages of the World.” After reconstituting their lineof argumentation, Slavoj Zizek confronts Schelling with Hegel, andconcludes by throwing a Schellingian light on some “related matters”:the consequences of the computerization of daily life for sexualexperience; cynicism as today's predominant form of ideology; theepistemological deadlocks of quantum physics.

Althoughthe book is packed with examples from politics and popular culture —the unmistakable token of Zizek's style — from Speed and Groundhog Day to Forrest Gump,it signals a major shift towards a systematic concern with the basicquestions of philosophy and the roots of the crisis of ourlate-capitalist universe, centred around the enigma of modernsubjectivity.