Schelling has been exploited for a variety of psychoanalytical projects, from Marquard’s revision of Freud, to various readings of Jung, to Žižek’s interpretation of Lacan. What we have not seen is an elaboration of the psycho-therapeutical implications of Schelling’s metaphysics on its own terms. What we find when we read Schelling as metapsychologist is a nonpathologizing theory of dissociation. Like anything that lives, the psyche dissociates for the sake of growth. The law of productive dissociation is the source of psyche’s (...) adaptive power and an explanation of the structure of its illnesses. (shrink)

If a problem is the collision between a system and a fact, Spinozism and German idealism’s greatest problem is the corpse. Life’s end is problematic for the denial of death’s qualitative difference from life and the affirmation of nature’s infinite purposiveness. In particular, German idealism exemplifies immortalism – the view that life is the unconditioned condition of all experience, including death. If idealism cannot explain the corpse, death is not grounded on life, which invites mortalism – the view that death (...) is the unconditioned condition of experience. In “Philosophical Letters,” Schelling critiques idealism, arguing that death symbolizes the regulative ideal of a philosophical system’s derivation, our striving for which unifies our rational activity. I interpret Schelling’s critique as explaining how death puts philosophy into question, an idea he develops in the Freedom essay and Berlin lectures. Death is not a problem to be solved by a system, but represents philosophy’s highest yet unrealizable end. (shrink)

This paper aims to examine the very unstable concept of the “uncanny” from an atmospherological point of view. Its official theoretical “sanction” is due to Heidegger, who considered it the latent but fundamental ground of any being-in-the-world, and especially to Freud, who described it as the feeling that arises when something familiar suddenly becomes unfamiliar. Freud claimed to be inspired in this conception by Schelling's definition of unheimlich, which I try to explain to better understand what an uncanny atmosphere is. (...) It seems characterized by elements such as ontological ambiguity-vagueness and paranoid subjectification, alien corporeality and unpredictable situations. The paper ends with a brief analysis of the specific uncanny of houses, both in terms of their transformation from a secure interior to an uncanny place and in terms of the anxiety about materially inheriting a house and thus cohabiting with the past. In the perspective adopted here, the uncanny shows that we are not at home within our own body because we always coexist with an external-foreign and in this sense “monstrous” presence. (shrink)

After a long period of neglect that began in his lifetime, why has Schelling reemerged as an important philosopher, germane to contemporary concerns? In the first part of this essay I offer a brief history of Schelling’s early descent into obscurity and gradual ascent back into the light of philosophical relevance. In the second and final part of the essay, I offer a brief survey of the current Schelling resurgence in the English speaking reception of Continental philosophy.