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Acting in Time: Temporality and the Ent-Scheidung In the Weltalter narrative, the unbalanced Grund as Ungrund, due to its dissatisfying instability and desire-provoking contradictions, prompts the sudden event of a gesture of negation (with ground’s internal inconsistency being a vital condition of possibility allowing for this gesture’s very occurrence—the cracks within the foundation of Grund are the open spaces, the clearing, within and out of which can burst forth something other than this ground’s own drives). According to Schelling, this exit from (via immanent negation of) the inconsistent ground of the barred Real is the true moment of beginning (rather than the eternal past of the vortex of Trieb qualifying as a proper beginning). He asserts that the beginning of any movement whatsoever is predicated on a negation, a negation of a point that becomes a starting point through this very negation (i.e., the starting point is a locus of beginning only insofar as it’s overcome or surpassed).1 In combined theosophical and psychoanalytic terms, God must “abject” his unconscious, quasi-material side in order to become himself as a fully constituted subject; in fact, it is through this expulsive act of abjection, this violent taking of distance from the drives, that God comes to (be) himself.2 Once again, Freud comes to mind: in the concluding paragraphs of his 1925 essay “Negation” (“Die Verneinung”), he proposes that such foundational distinctions as inner versus outer, self versus other, and so on are produced by the mechanism of negation broadly construed (the earliest ontogenetic version of this being the movement of casting out, forcefully rejecting, or turning away from that which is unpleasurable).3 From a Lacanian perspective, an especially interesting feature of Schelling’s theosophy here is his employment of a distinction between “being” and “having” (see chapter 5). Immediately after asserting that non-being is far from mere nothingness (i.e., specific sorts of negativity enjoy a certain ontological status), Schelling states, “For that which is in each thing the actual Being cannot . . . ever be one and the same with that which has being” (Schelling 2000, 14). Therefore, it follows that whatever “has” being is something other than this being itself; whatever has being must, as other than being, be a sort of non-being/negativity 8 3 (just as the Lacanian subject-as-$ “has” a body, but, as itself a lack of being , isn’t reducible to this corporeality). Schelling proceeds to align being with the drives and, hence, to maintain that the drives don’t “have” being—they just “are.” The transition from the being of the drives (the Real as Grund) to the having of this being (a possessing made possible through the negating of this ontological ground) is brought about by what Schelling names the “cision” (die Scheidung—a divorce, parting, or separation).4 For the Žižekian interpretation, the event of rupture with the bog of the drives is of special interest. As early as Les plus sublime des hystériques (1988), Žižek’s attention is drawn to this crucial moment. He emphasizes that the Schellingian act (as a decision [Entscheidung] to divorce, part, or separate [scheiden]5 ), like aspects of the Lacanian Real, is an occurrence that has never taken place within the field of established reality (as the domain of existence opposed to that of ground), but that, nonetheless, must be presupposed as having happened, as always already past, in order to account for the status quo of the present.6 As Jean-Marie Vaysse puts it in his examination of Schelling’s role as an intellectual predecessor of psychoanalysis, “The pre-historic is that advent of the origin which has never taken place, which has the force of fate and never comes to the odyssey of consciousness that it nonetheless governs” (Vaysse 1999, 281). Insofar as historicity is coextensive with the chronological temporality of present reality (as opposed to the immobile eternity of the forever-past Real), this founding intervention (i.e., the act as Ent-Scheidung) is “outside of history” (hors l’histoire).7 Žižek opens the first chapter of his book on Schelling, The Indivisible Remainder, with a discussion of this issue of the beginning (this analysis appears verbatim early on in “The Abyss of Freedom”8 ): How, then, should one begin an essay on Schelling? Perhaps the most appropriate way is by focusing on the problem of Beginning itself, the crucial problem of German Idealism . . . Schelling’s “materialist...

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