ABSTRACT
The Conclusion asks: can there be an ethics of Romantic metasubjectivity? The historicity, the motile forces of Romantic metasubjectivity by definition cannot be contained by the ethical metanarrative of the current age, which totalises humanism and objectifies Nature to a degree imperilling the human species. But rather than dismiss ethics or its possibility, Romantic metasubjectivity demands the bracketing of its universalising pretentions. To this end, Jung's Answer to Job (1952) is read as a radically dis-integrative text casting the confrontation between Yahweh and Job as primal analytic scene to demonstrate that even God must individuate in time and history, thus asserting individuation's purposiveness against transcendentalised human ethics. This assertion also aligns with Jung's late thinking on the archetype, which represents it as a non-human force in the form of the crystal. John Caputo's Against Ethics (1993) develops a “poetics of obligation” along similar lines, as a chemical-magnetic binding between entities which preserves moral obligation against the totalising ethical. The Conclusion ends with a reading of the hit TV series Breaking Bad (2008–2013) which combines the Romantic themes of chemical ontology, individuation, and crystallogeny to offer a “case study” of how Romantic metasubjectivity can be used to read contemporary cultural narratives.
