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Substance Against Itself: The Disturbing Vortex of Trieb In line with his descriptions of the Cartesian cogito, the Kantian noumenal Ding an sich, and the Hegelian “night of the world” (all of which he describes as terrifying monstrosities—see chapter 3), Žižek likewise characterizes the Schellingian ground as something awful and disturbing : “The gap between the ethereal image and the raw fact of the—inert, dense—Real is precisely the gap between Existence (ethereal form) and its impenetrable Ground, on account of which, as Schelling puts it, the ultimate base of reality is the Horrible” (Žižek 1997a, 23–24). He is alluding here to a passage from Schelling’s Weltalter that proclaims, “But were they capable of penetrating the exterior surface of things, they would see that the true prime matter of all life and existence is precisely what is horrifying” (Schelling 2000, 104). Whereas neither Descartes nor Kant, for example, paint pictures of their central concepts in these shades and tones employed by Žižek, Schelling explicitly does so in his later texts. In a similar vein, in The Fragile Absolute, Žižek’s discussions of Schelling refer to the “ultimate monstrosity of the truth” and its reliance upon “a preontological obscene idiosyncratic scenario.”1 These characterizations refer to the Schellingian ground more in the sense of Grund than of Urgrund. The material substratum beneath ideationally mediated experiential reality and its ephemeral structures is something horribly formless , a repulsive, fleshly mass (Žižek identifies this substratum as “the bodily depth of the Real”2 ). As already seen (see chapter 3), a possible explanation for Žižek’s seemingly strange choice of adjectives like horrible, monstrous, and so on with respect to particular modern philosophical notions has to do with the finitude of embodied being, with the mortal destiny of “the way of all flesh” (i.e., the corpo-Real as the thriving id-body of drives, with all drives being, to a certain extent, death drives3 ). Along precisely these lines, Schelling, in his Clara dialogue, speaks of the “horror of nature,”4 claiming that “within nature there was something nameless and frightful ” (Schelling 2002, 21). He then points to the “hideous” necessity of nature’s transient nature.5 In The Ages of the World, he maintains that intuiting the “inner life” lying beneath the “peaceful” façade of reality’s ap7 0 pearances is liable to provoke “terror.”6 This Schellingian theme, which comes to the fore in those later texts heavily favored by Žižek’s interpretive agenda (especially the Freiheitschrift, the “Stuttgart Seminars,” the Clara dialogue, and the Weltalter manuscripts), is incredibly important for a metapsychologically informed transcendental materialist theory of subjectivity insofar as it tacitly advances two axiomatic theses crucial for such a theory: first, the underlying ontogenetic base of the subject consists of the materiality of a certain Real, more specifically, of an internally conflicted libidinal economy at odds with itself from the very beginning (i.e., the Schellingian-Žižekian “vortex of Trieb” as the volatility of, as it were, substance against itself); and second, the subject is genetically produced as a consequence of the fact that the disturbing discontent of this initial state—the originally dysfunctional libidinal economy is plagued by unsettling antagonisms—prompts efforts at taming and domesticating this corpo-Real, efforts that come to constitute and define the fundamental contours of subjectivity itself (à la a subject-position characterized by a partial transcendence of embodied materiality). Žižek zeros in on the Weltalter manuscripts as containing the keys to extracting this philosophical-metapsychological account of subjectivity from Schelling’s quasi-religious musings on God and the creation of the world. Various passages in Schelling’s 1809 essay on human freedom foreshadow the subsequent theosophical narrative sketched in The Ages of the World. For instance, Schelling declares therein that: following the eternal act of self-revelation, the world as we now behold it, is all rule, order and form; but the unruly lies ever in the depths as though it might again break through, and order and form nowhere appear to have been original, but it seems as though what had initially been unruly had been brought to order. This is the incomprehensible basis of reality in things, the irreducible remainder which cannot be resolved into reason by the greatest exertion but always remains in the depths. Out of this which is unreasonable, reason in the true sense is born. Without this preceding gloom, creation would have no reality; darkness is...

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