Schelling and Richir: Destabilizing Political Domination

on the Basis of a Phenomenological Metaphysics

Lszl Tengelyi and Saitya Das have both argued1 that Schellings late thinking of
contingency, presented in the context of a break between negative (rational) philosophy and
the positive philosophy of existence, provides a metaphysical and historical framework for
post-Husserlian phenomenology. Specifically, Das argues that Schellings paradoxical exit
from the metaphysics of presence2 enables us to phenomenologically deconstruct the current
order and confront its limits. This opens being to the event of the eschaton, or the possibility of a
singularity to come (actuality without potentiality, the event of the future anterior), i.e.
political messianism.3
After expanding Schellings general influence on phenomenology as delineated above,
this essay will then reconstruct how Marc Richir (1943-2015) explicitly drew on Schelling in the
areas of phenomenology and politics.4 Firstly, Richirs phenomenological interpretation of
Schellingian metaphysics5 incites the introduction of an unsurmountable element into the
genetic account of the structure of the phenomenological field. Secondly, Richirs portrayal of
phenomenological experience as an experience of freedom that entices us to think beyond the
rational contortions of the metaphysics of presence is distinctly Schellingian.6 These two
points, I argue, connect to Richirs inquiry into the sublime in politics (the abyss of political
foundation),7 in which it is argued that a Schellingian, metaphysical caesura can destabilize
political, despotic foundations. My conclusion is that both Schelling and Richir structurally
challenge despotic, coercive power and the division of the dominant and the dominated
through their fundamental commitment to contingency.8

1
Consult Lszl Tengelyi, Welt und Unendlichkeit: Zum Problem phnomenologischer Metaphysik, Freiburg and Munich: Karl
Alber, 2014, and Saitya Das, The Political Theology of Schelling, Edinburgh: EUP, 2016.
2
Das describes the metaphysics of presence challenged by Schellings late thinking thusly: The potentiality, the capacity or
the power of being (the capacity to be), lies in the immanence of its self-presence; from the ground of its presence (or, from the
self-presence of its ground), being would assert its sovereignty, its sheer capacity to be. From this understanding of being as
potentiality there can then be deduced a plethora of its attributes and predicates: being is existence; it is an actuality (an act, an
acting) or a reality (that has its ontological ground in itself) (The Political Theology of Schelling, 3).
3
Ibid., 5. This political messianism structurally opposes the form of political domination rooted in the subsumption of the
singular under the particular, and then the particular under the general.
4
Richir wrote multiple pieces exclusively on Schelling, e.g. Quest-ce quun Dieu ? Mythologie et question de la pense,
preface to F.W.J. Schelling, Phiosophie de la Mythologie, trans. Alain Pernet, Grenoble: ditions Jrme Million, 1992; and
Inconscient, nature et mythologie chez Schelling, Schelling et llan du Systme de l'idalisme transcendantal, ed. A. Roux et
M. Vet, Paris: L'Harmattan, 2001.
5
Richir, Inconscient, nature et mythologie chez Schelling, 187.
6
This account of phenomenological experience as an experience of freedom is found in Richir, Phnomenologie et institution
symbolique, Grenoble: ditions Jrme Million, 1988. Florient Forestier initiates the comparison with Schelling on this point in
his La phnomnologie gntique de Marc Richir, Heidelberg, Berlin and New York: Springer, 2004, 197.
7
Consult Richir, Du sublime en politique, Paris: Payot, 1991.
8
This concluding comparison is derived largely from Richirs La contingence du despote, Paris: Payot, 2014, and Schellings
Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie oder Darstellung der reinrationalen Philosophie, Smmtliche Werke, Bd. 11,
Lectures 22-24.