The Race to Bliss

Abstract In dialogue with black studies, this chapter interrogates Schelling’s Romantic vision of the oneness of humanity by revealing his concept of humanness and his vision of conversion to the consciousness of the true God to be racialized and supersessionist in character. The chapter revisits the logics of the universe and the Christian-modern world in Schelling’s lectures on “purely rational” philosophy, in which he justifies the white European subject as the normative demiurgic subject of history and advances his framework of race. The chapter argues that Schelling’s racialization of geo-cosmic darkness as blackness and his legitimation of European colonialism and transatlantic slavery refract the geo-extractive racial logics of the post-1492 global world. Schelling’s world-grammar or his metaphysics of the hierarchized ascent (Stufenfolge) to bliss constitutes, the chapter contends, at once a grammar of racialization, a universal mining operation, a supersessionist conversion narrative, and a racialized theodicy of the global.