The concept of bliss, in its connotations of beatitude and salvation,
may seem of little relevance to so-called secular modernity._ Bliss
Against the World_ argues otherwise by advancing a novel framework of
the entanglement between modernity, Christianity, and bliss through
the thought of German Idealist and Romantic philosopher Friedrich
Schelling (1775--1854). 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. Throughout his thinking, Schelling grapples with the question
of theodicy: Can this negative world be justified? And what would it
mean to be free of the world--to enact bliss right now--when the idea
of otherworldly salvation increasingly loses its conceptual relevance?
This leads Schelling to conceptualize bliss as what refuses or
apocalyptically annihilates this world and its divisions and burdens.
_Bliss Against the World_ reinterprets Schelling's philosophical
trajectory from the 1790s to the 1840s, showing his metaphysics,
philosophy of religion, and natural philosophy to be underwritten by
the apocalyptic tension between bliss and theodicy. It argues that
this tension is located likewise at the heart of modernity and
reconstructs the Schellingian genealogy of the modern age as
intensifying what may be termed the general Christian contradiction.
It also focuses on Schelling's anxiety about the possibility of
universal history in the dark and de-centered universe and critiques
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._Bliss Against the World_ thus theorizes
bliss not only with, but also against Schelling, who emerges from this
book as a key thinker of modernity, and of the Christian-modern
trajectory as a path to salvation in the shadow of whose failure we
continue to live.
Les mer
Schelling, Theodicy, and the Crisis of Modernity
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780197788912
Publisert
2024
Utgave
1. utgave
Utgiver
Oxford University Press Academic US
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter