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Bliss Against the World critically analyzes and systematically reconstructs the work 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. Schelling emerges from this account 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.
List of contents
- General Introduction: Modernity, Theodicy, Bliss
- Part I Why Must This World Be?
- Chapter 1: The General Christian Contradiction
- Interlude I: Ordo quis datus?
- Chapter 2: The Demiurgic Subject
- Interlude II:"Abyss of Repose and Inactivity"
- Chapter 3: Evil Is but a Shadow
- Part II The Dark Ground
- Introduction to Part II: On Schelling's Post-1809 System Narrative
- Chapter 4: Universal Ekstasis; or, Fallenness and Method
- Chapter 5: Universal Spiral
- Interlude III: Clock Time as Fallen Time
- Chapter 6: The Race to Bliss: Assembling Global Humanity
- Conclusion: Bliss Against Theodicy
About the author
Kirill Chepurin is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies, University of Hamburg, Germany. He is a scholar of Idealism and Romanticism, philosophy of religion, and critical theory and the co-editor of Nothing Absolute: German Idealism and the Question of Political Theology.
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Thanks to his commanding knowledge of Schellings work and his sophisticated understanding of contemporary debates around coloniality, racialization, and political theology, Chepurin shows that Schelling offers novel resources for addressing todays most pressing theoretical questions. After a half-century fixation on Hegel, Chepurin demonstrates how generative it would be for critical thought to be re-centered around Schelling.
