The Non-Sovereign Exception
This chapter reads the Stuttgart lectures of 1810 to show how Schelling is concerned with elaborating an eschatological conception of being. The lectures show Schelling understanding eschatology in terms of infinite disclosures of the divine that constantly open us to a future to come that refuses to embody itself in the immanence of the world-historical potencies. These world-historical powers thereby lose their autochthony and autarchy, their legitimacy and sovereignty, their power to elicit from us absolute obligation. They can at best be understood as belonging to the order of ‘passing away’, as the impoverished attempts of mankind to supplement the Fall (Abfall). Such a Fall, with which the history of mankind itself is inaugurated, will henceforth mark the world-historical powers with an indelible caesura that can never be redeemed by these powers themselves. This caesura will forever haunt any attempt to construct a strict analogy between the political and theological, the divine, and the profane.