Bliss Against the World

Abstract The concept of bliss, in its connotations of beatitude and salvation, may seem of little relevance to so-called secular modernity. This book argues otherwise by advancing a framework of the entanglement between modernity, Christianity, and bliss through the German idealist and Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling. In Schelling’s concept of bliss (Seligkeit), the idea of salvation from the world mutates into a burning concern with the negativity of the modern world and with the way modernity inherits the Christian promise of a non-alienated future that never arrives. The book rethinks Schelling’s philosophical trajectory from the 1790s to the 1840s, showing his metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and natural philosophy to be underwritten by the tension between bliss as world-annihilation and theodicy as world-legitimation—a tension located at the heart of modernity. Part I theorizes the apocalyptic dimension of bliss and reconstructs the Schellingian genealogy of modernity as intensifying what the book terms the general Christian contradiction. Part II focuses on Schelling’s anxiety about the possibility of universal history in the dark, decentered, and contingent universe, developing a critique of his Romantic construction of humanity and his geo-racial theodicy of history, a theodicy that refracts and legitimates the violent logics of post-1492 modernity, including European colonialism, racialization, and transatlantic slavery. This book thus thinks bliss not only with, but also against Schelling, who emerges from the book as a key thinker of modernity, and of the Christian-modern trajectory as a trajectory of salvation in the shadow of whose failure we continue to live.