The Demiurgic Subject

Abstract This chapter interrogates the emergence of the concept of beatitude or bliss (Seligkeit) and the antagonistic entanglement between “bliss” and “world” as the dirempted structure of reality in Schelling’s early metaphysics. It argues that, in his 1795 writings, Schelling advances an analytic of the aporias of the modern demiurgic subject of self-assertion. In this analytic, the subject’s ceaseless synthetic productivity and striving for moral purity—the two paths to “absolute identity,” “absolute freedom,” or “absolute bliss”—are underwritten by the Gnostic longing for bliss as the immediate abolition of the world understood as the prison to which the subject is bound. Bliss, however, cannot be produced: in seeking to produce bliss out of diremption, the subject reproduces the world, endlessly deferring bliss. In philosophically legitimating this deferral, idealism functions for Schelling as what Carl Schmitt calls the katechon, re-mediating, via the world’s not-yet, the demand for bliss in the now.