“On a somewhat higher, more “spiritual” level, one usually fails to take note of how a free play of our theoretical imagination is possible only against the background of a firmly established set of “dogmatic” conceptual constraints: our intellectual creativity can be ‘set free’ only within the confines of some notional framework in which, precisely, we are able to ‘move freely’ –the lack of this imposed framework is necessarily experienced as an unbearable burden, since it compels us to focus constantly on how to respond to every particular empirical situation in which we find ourselves.” –from Zizek’s The Indivisible Remainder
“As I understand it, Zizek ties this in with the delicate balance required between contraction and expansion: the speed of the universe’s expansion which, were it too fast for gravity to keep in check, would rip everything completely apart.”
And to kick off this particular rhizome (for effect perhaps (perhaps even a cheap one:
“To give you an example, I recently started on an immersion into Zizek’s The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters. What I didn’t think about going into it was that I know absolutely nothing about Schelling. I, therefore, at the “library”, for my study point, attempted to learn about him through Wiki and the Stanford page on philosophy, but only realized those would require an immersion in itself. Nor was Blackburn’s Dictionary of Philosophy much help. It just became a distracting use of resources. I therefore decided to just focus on the book, write about it as if Schelling was not involved, and leave him for another immersion.”
As it turns out, much to my surprise, while an immersion might deepen my understanding of the book, I’m actually getting by based on themes that overlap with those in other books of Zizek I have read. What I’m mainly noting here is the relationship between expansion and contraction which, as I go along, I will attempt to connect with Zizek’s emphasis on Lacan’s Jouissance: that push/pull way in which we find ourselves engaging with reality throughout many of our activities. (And please note that I am fumbling around with a lot of new material.) That said, for today’s quote I turn to page 40:
“It is the same with the couple of expansion and contraction: in Weltalter [a German term (one among many) that hopefully my German jam-mate, Harald, may be able to help me with], ‘expansion’ expresses God’s love, His ‘giving away’ of Himself; ‘contraction’ expresses His destructive rage, His egotistical withdrawal into-Self; in ‘positive philosophy’ we again have an inversion: expansion is now identified with the destructive rage which draws every finite, limited, firmly delineated being into its formless vortex, whereas the contractive force is conceived as creative, formative, as the activity of providing things with a stable form which alone guarantees their ontological consistency.”
First I would clarify that what Zizek is talking about here is the two later phases in Schelling’s process. And this, of course, goes back to an earlier point I made in this immersion:
““Some scholars characterize Schelling as a protean thinker who, although brilliant, jumped from one subject to another and lacked the synthesizing power needed to arrive at a complete philosophical system.” -from Wikipedia
“Perhaps we can think of Schelling as the prototypical rhizomatic thinker.”
But can’t we also see the old school element involved in Schelling’s obsession with expansion and contraction as well the perfectly understandable conflict (and consequential vacillation (an intellectual process might go through attempting to accommodate its religious beliefs with its philosophical ones? And we can see how both models might work for Schelling. On one hand (and I’m speaking metaphorically here, we can see expansion as God’s love in that it is what allows us to be as compared to not being and contraction as that which pulls us back to not being. (And I would note here an analogy that Zizek makes with Eros and Thanatos: the life and death instincts.) On the other, we can perfectly understand the reversal in which expansion is seen as the evil threatening to rip everything apart while contraction seems like the good that pulls everything back into order. Think, for instance, of Robert Frost’s classicist point:
“We rise out of disorder into order. I would sooner write free verse as play tennis with the net down.”
And while I consider myself more of a free verse person, I still gotta sympathize when Frost describes poetry (much as I would language (as a momentary stay against confusion.