The work of Satya Das inscribes itself in a profound trend in contemporary Schelling studies. It effectively demonstrates, in its own way, a necessary and sustained attention dedicated to that which, in the history of ‘metaphysics’ (understood in a broad sense, and not simply according to the Heideggerian tradition), Schelling has created, opened, underlined and inaugurated in an inchoate manner, and to that which, unevenly and differentially, entire currents of contemporary philosophy – including even its most prestigious names – have received, continued, and taken up anew, more or less faithfully, after him. The considerations and content of this ‘Protean Schelling’, as denoted by the author, and his ‘posterity’ were examined during the 2013 Strasbourg colloquium.

Inscribed in that which I just called a singular ‘attention’ devoted to a certain Schellingian heritage, Das’ book particularly concentrates on bringing into focus a particular line of heirs, from Kierkegaard to Heidegger, passing notably through Bloch, Rosenzweig and even Benjamin.

As such, this work focuses in a pronounced manner on what is identified in Schelling's work as a fundamental, living eschatological tension. It analyses instantiations and figures of this tension in the structural opening of the world to an irrevocable exteriority without sublation, to an irreducible and immemorial transcendence through which history and politics can be grasped in their very finitude – and where Schelling sees, not without paradox, a more arduous, and in any case, a more enigmatic problem other than that of the Absolute. This political eschatology, which entails the movement of Schellingian positive philosophy itself, leads, and this is the central thesis of this book, to a work of defection, destruction or deconstruction, according to the author's word, of any political theology founded on sovereignty. It is precisely the question of history and of the structures of historicity that is taken up by Schelling's late philosophy, and perhaps even by the entirety of his thought, indeed since its beginnings, after the secularised theodicy proposed by the Hegelian ontology of history.

The deconstructive eschatology that this work outlines and analyses in Schellingian philosophy, and its opening in the domain of the ‘political theology’ of history (which would be that of the author of the Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom), is developed, it seems to me, around the two central themes put forth here: the event and the exit.