ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 articulates the unconscious of Romantic metasubjectivity by aligning several related threads: Jung's shift in thinking about the archetype from mere alchemical teleology to a focus on the “dark side of matter,” Romanticism's preoccupation with the affinities between formal aesthetics and historical processes (the so-called “rise of history”), and the evolution of the dissociationist model of the mind, which sees the person as “constitutively plural,” or composed of autonomous psychic contents. Schelling is a progenitor of this dissociative model, which develops through Reil, Bergson, Janet, and Jung to Deleuze and the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s. Collectively, these threads identify the Romantic metasubjective unconscious as a domain embedded in the materiality of historicity from which the discourse of history emerges. This material unconscious is described by the remarkable isomorphism between Schelling's actant and Jung's archetype: both co-articulate a general economy of nonmolar forces, or points of intensity in the domains of Nature and psyche. The chapter concludes by reading Jung's emphasis on the archetype's imbrication in images, affects, and language as an archetypal grammatology, a missed encounter between Jungian metapsychology and Derridean deconstruction.
