The Politics of Speculative Collectivities in the Work of Friedrich Schelling

Abstract

ABSTRACT In Friedrich Schelling’s philosophy of nature, the attempt to think the unconditioned absolute of nature performs unconditioning, thereby transforming the present into a field of experimentation. Schelling’s nature-philosophy produces a series of interventions into cultural fields of consistency, drawing on material operations to reconceptualize forms of collective organization. In Schelling’s First Outline, beings have a specific signature: to be is to resist. In the Deities of Samothrace, philosophy performs a “magic singing” that gathers initiates together by continually exorcising—and preserving—the unruly obstinacy of pre-socialized drives. This conception of philosophy coheres with a gesture from his earlier lectures on the philosophy of art in which music forms the basis of inorganic communities, implicitly cultivating collective forms called upon to navigate the dangers of overly cohesive (harmonic) and overly transgressive (rhythmic) forms of life, while directing an unconditioning power to the conditions of the present.