Steve Shaviro's workblog
Ground and God

I explained Whitehead’s God in relation to D & G’s Body Without Organs. But it seems that both of these might be usefully put in the context of Schelling’s conceptions of Ground and of God, which I am only beginning to understand (with the help of Grant, Andrew Bowie, and Zizek). Say that Whitehead’s God, like the ungroundable Ground in Schelling, is a necessary function in order to make possible the coherence of relations and happenings. Then Whitehead would be “secularizing” this function by making it a particular entity of a weird sort, instead of a universal ground(lessness) subtending the particular — his strategy towards Schelling (even if he never read him) in this way would parallel his strategy towards both Leibniz and Spinoza; it would be related to, but less absolutizing than, Klossowski’s reading of the Eternal Return as non-ground.

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