Introduction

Abstract

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This study makes manifest the ‘eschatological’ or ‘messianic’ spirit in Schelling's work that insists on the ‘structural opening’ of the world to a radical exteriority, to the excess un-enclosed in the immanent rational foundation of the world. This ‘outside’ of the world — not another world as opposed to this world but an outside of the world as such, keeps the world open to the event of pure futurity: eschaton means for Schelling nothing but this idea of exception that explodes the continuum of the world-history to its outside. The historical Reason of the world is torn open from its foundation to the eschatological event of redemption to come. This makes impossible not only the representation of this eschatological event in any earthly sovereign figure, but also attempts to translate such an event into the rational-secular structure of metaphysical propositions.