Containable being

In his Freedom essay, Schelling attributes to the abyss of the past a certain ‘inhuman freedom’, an ‘atemporal will’ that is more previous than all formerity combined – an ‘unwritten revelation’. This abysmal origin always places being ‘in darkness’ but does so only to make a point – that this origin is possible to be conceived having its ‘own kind of freedom’, its primordial vitality through the ‘disease’ [or evil or darkness] of which it is capable’. In short, the past (seemingly dead) is contained in another that is alive, a disease (a physical evil) or moral evil itself that contains the past in it. But the past does not occur by itself: an irritable principle has to be aroused and awakened. That which lurks in the ‘quiet of the depths’ is activated by a philanthropic intervention in the ‘quiet separation of Man and animal’ that has long been culturally nurtured by our anthropic advance to progress.

That is how the virus is placing us all in darkness, having been aroused by a fatal drive to become a body without organ, a paranoiac syndrome to become-animal (the virus originated from a delirious man-animal alliance backed by laws enabling wildlife domestication) yet in the most ‘animal-like’, in the ‘most desocialized’ desiring-production, as Deleuze and Guattari described in Anti-Oedipus, anticipating the ‘social distancing’ scandal of 21st century pandemic. As Schelling contends, “without [this] preceding darkness creatures have no reality: darkness is their necessary inheritance.”

And yet it is essential that a ‘restoration of the separate’ must be conceived, so that even a disease will ‘emerge in the whole’ only to strive to become itself, that is, as separate, as a containable emergence into being.