《Toscano》.pdf

Pli 8 (1999), 46-70. Fanaticism and Production: On Schelling’s Philosophy of Indifference ALBERTO TOSCANO Schelling’s work in the period leading up to and including the philosophy of identity, that is to say from his first published writings in 1794 to the essay on freedom of 1809, is deployed in a conceptual space determined by four critical instances: the question of the organism as presented in Kant’s Critique of Judgement, the debate on Spinozism which traversed and polemically polarized post-Kantian philosophy, Fichte’s doctrine of the primacy of practical reason, and the anti-mechanistic investigation of the natural sciences. The often experimental appearance of the writings from this period is symptomatic of the tensions arising out of the conflicting demands imposed by these lines of questioning, often leading Schelling to abrupt redefinitions, partial overhauls and implicit disavowals. Within this often labyrinthine work-in-progress certain fundamental tendencies can nonetheless be delineated, as can certain moments of singular invention which show Schelling incisively displacing the very terms in which the post-Kantian debates had hitherto been posed. Between the Wissenschaftslehre and the Phenomenology of Spirit, Schelling’s philosophy of nature and his system of identity briefly indicated the possibility of a destitution of the metaphysics of subjectivity and the constitution, through the “immanentistic affirmation of the infinite”,1 of a philosophy capable of inquiring into the impersonal being of production, genesis and individuati