ABSTRACT
This chapter brings together Schelling’s great, unfinished opus on the philosophy of time, the Weltalter (Ages of the World), and Freud’s more practical concerns with the timelessness of the unconscious. Revealed in this analysis is the way the opposition between distinct drives is disturbed—undone by a very different logic of unconscious temporalization and the transformations of pleasure. The claim is that while Schelling’s approach is metaphysical, and Freud’s therapeutic, they both call attention to the trauma of beginning: the rupture, the abyssal ground of all that exists that, cannot itself be brought to presence. That is, ontology and therapy converge in recognition of the fundamentally tragic dimension of all that is inherited and personal—of human life and decision. The success of this comparison largely rests on an interpretation of Freud’s concept of Nachträglichkeit, or “deferred action.” With close readings of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and extended analysis of Jean Laplanche’s work on primary masochism and trauma, Freud is shown to elaborate and help clarify some of Schelling’s rather radical claims about a non-linear, organic temporality.
