Johnston, Adrian. Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Northwestern University Press, 2008.
According to this reading, Schelling basically agrees with Kant that attributing a notion such as “existence” to the noumenal ground underlying reality is erroneously to apply a concept forged within the boundaries of already constituted experience to the pre-experiential foundation of this same experiential field (in short,it amounts to a category mistake). Like Kant, Schelling forbids using discursive concepts to analyze and characterize the Real.
However, unlike Kant, Schelling refuses to conclude that the question as to the origin of experience (for instance, the enigma of how a thing affects the receptivity of the senses so as to become an object) is therefore meaningless and not worth asking.
Žižek identifies as the nature of Schelling’s peculiar radicalization of Kant (a radicalization crucial to allowing for the possibility of forging a transcendental materialist account of subjectivity). Žižek alludes to the idea that both Kant and Schelling uncover (although the former, in restricting himself to an epistemological investigation, fails to appreciate the true significance of this discovery/insight) the fact that being itself is shot through with antagonisms and tensions, riddled with cracks, fissures, and gaps (rather than being something homogeneous and harmonious, an ontological plane placidly consistent with itself). What one could call this “barring” of the Real is absolutely essential to Žižek’s philosophical project,a project centered on deploying and defending, in the midst of a prevailing postmodern doxa hostile to the very notion of subjectivity, a robust theory of the subject. Johnston ŽO 77