comay, r. - dead right. hegel and the terror (2004)
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Dead Right. Hegel and the TerrorTRANSCRIPT
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Rebecca Comay
Dead Right: Hegel and the Terror
Endlessly debated and redrafted in the fatefulsummer of 1789, the rst version of the Declara-
tion of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was
abruptly nalized by the Assemble Nationale
on August 27. The draft was published in its
truncated form with an explicit decision to sus-
pend further discussion until the more urgent
task had been achieved of xing the French
Constitution to which the Declaration itself was
nonetheless to supply both the prefatory con-
text and the integral rst chapter.1In a perfect
illustration of the logic of the supplement, the
Declaration was declared provisional pending
the completion of a constitution that would
itself in turn be incomplete without it insofar
as the presence or absence of such a manifesto
would mark the only dierence between a
radically new constitution and the prolongation
of preexistent tradition.2Released separately, in
their unnished forms, both the Declaration and
the eventual rst version of the Constitution to
which by 1791 it had attached itself were none-
theless invested from the outset with a biblical
authority conveyed by numerous iconographic
allusions to the tablets of the law handed down at
Sinaiby 1792 the Legislative Assembly decreed
The South Atlantic Quarterly 103:2/3, Spring/Summer 2004.Copyright 2004 by Duke University Press.
dayMuse
LeonardoSticky Notein The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 103, Number 2/3, Spring/Summer 2004, pp. 375-395.
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376 Rebecca Comay
that its members would wear a tricolor ribbon bearing a medallion in the
shape of two round-headed tablets inscribed with the words Droits de
lHomme and Constitution3an association that would in turn predict-
ably provoke a Mosaic violence directed against the threat of the laws own
inaugural self-betrayal during the repeated revision of both documents
throughout the revolutionary period. In May 1793 a copper tablet of the
by-then obsolete rst version of the Declaration of the Rights of Man was
exhumed from its burial place in the foundation of a projectednever to
be completedmonument on the site of the demolished Bastille. By order
of the Convention the embalmed document was ritually mutilated and its
broken fragments deposited for perpetuity in the National Archives as a
historicalmonument.4The archive had come to congeal destruction itself
as a lasting memorial to its own powers of reinvention, and as a reminder,
too, of unnished business.
The incident is compelling for a number of reasons. Aside from illustrat-
ing the general paradox of revolutionary negationthe insistent reinstate-
ment of tradition in and through the very erasure thereofand quite apart
from the overdetermined pathos generated by this unburied corpse and
relic, it raises a very specic question regarding the status of the revolution-
ary discourse of rights: the defaced tablet here carries the entire burden of
the tabula rasa. Does the damaged body of the text hint of an irrreparable
fracture within the law itself, and does themuseication of such a breach in
turn acknowledge an interminable mourning for an unnished past? How
does the modern liberal idiom of human rights intersect with the political-
theological legacy of Bourbon absolutism at the moment of the latters dis-
investment?What is the connection between the revolutionary caesura cre-
ated by the radical humanization of the law and the fundamentalist logic it
would interrupt?
Hegels analysis of the dialectic of secularization places terror itself at the
very heart of the modern political experiment.
Between Revolution and Reform
Hegel both reiterates and almost overturns the standard German ideol-
ogy according to which a revolution in thought would, in varying propor-
tions, precede, succeed, preempt, accommodate, comprehend, and gener-
ally upstage a political revolution whose dening feature was increasingly
thought to be its founding violence: the slide from 1789 to 1793. According
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Dead Right 377
to this ideology, from Schiller to Thomas Mann, Germany could simulta-
neously domesticate and dispense with political revolution by virtue of a
spirituality that would have already achieved the rationality to which the
French only clumsily, violently, impatiently, through their precipitous act-
ing out, could only aspire. Having already been there in theory, Germany
could put o until doomsday the grab for practical fulllmentthe in-
nite task.
Having undergone its own Reformation, that is, Germany could escape
the tumult at its own gates and thereby serve as the revolutions most lucid
and most passionate, because dispassionate, observer. Heine will remark,
only half in jest, that Kant had in any case far surpassedRobespierre in intel-
lectual terrorism: whereas the guillotinemanaged to kill o only a pathetic,
fat king who had lost his head anyway, the axe of reason had slain deism
itself throughout Germany. Schlegel will determine the French Revolution
as the allegory5of an other
6more comprehensiverevolution in the
mind that would simultaneously exceed and moderate the French slide to
despotic violence.7For Fichte, the deliverance from the tyranny of the thing-
in-itself would pregure, inspire, and eventually neutralize the revolution-
ary deliverance from material bondage. For Schiller, an innite adjustment
of sensibility or Gesinnung would forestall and vicariously alleviate the hor-rors of political revolution. For Kant, a moral revolution would suspend,
preempt, and ultimately absorb revolution thus rendering it consistentwith
the requirements of continuous reform.
Revolution here is at once, paradoxically, both singularized and relativ-
ized.The traumatic strangeness of the French Revolutionits radical origi-
nality, its contingencyis simultaneously asserted and denied as German
philosophy seeks to internalize this peculiar crisis within a larger move-
ment of thought.8The German revolution of the mind both precedes and
displaces the political revolution in exposing it to a spiritual afterlife as yet
unknown.
Dialectic of Disenchantment
Hegels version of this well-rehearsed story is at once orthodox and unpre-
dictable. His orthodox commitments are most explicit in the later Berlin
lectures on the Philosophy of History, which implicitly draw on his earlierattempt, in the Phenomenology, to derive the rise of revolutionary violencefrom the virulence of a rationality enthralled by the fanaticism it would beat
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378 Rebecca Comay
down. Such reactivityabstract negativity at its most truculentessen-
tially denes for Hegel the culture of the French enlightenment at the end
of the ancien rgime: the endless symbiosis of myth and self-mystifying
disenchantment. Germany would have already cut through this circle. The
northern principleLutheran freedom of thoughtwould have inocu-
lated the nation against political upheaval in that it had from the outset
achieved a secularization surpassing that attainable by mere enlighten-
ment. Having undergone, with the Reformation, its own immanent ratio-
nalization of faith,Germany could bypass the turmoil of revolution by evad-
ing the dialectic of enlightenment sketched with dizzying eciency in the
Phenomenology, according to which a benighted superstition could only beinsulted, assaulted, persecuted (and thereby prolonged, exaggerated, per-
verted) by a rationality blind to its own reasons and thus above all to its
fascinated complicity with the faith it would wipe out.
Absolute-freedom-and-terror (Hegels conjunction is really an apposition
or identity) ismerely the political expression of reasons own fall into abstrac-tion in its panic ight from the vertiginous disorientation of a collapsing
social order: courtiers clustering like ornaments, says Hegel, around the
throne of a shadow king whose very name had come to mean everything
and therefore nothing. Having expropriated the entire subjectivity of the
nation, the absolute monarch had revealed the truth that he was, in fact,
the dazzling emptiness of an image projected by a populace whose last-
ditch bid for uplift through reintegration had only catapulted them into the
chronic ressentiment of those in bondage to a nonmaster: the paradox, thereal economic problem, of every masochism. Flatterythe theatre of Ver-sailleswas at once the hyperbole of language, the very promise of univer-
sality, and had as such immediately deconstructed itself as pure performa-
tive self-contradiction: in naming you king I deprive myself, and therefore
you, and therefore cease to deprive myself, and so on, of the very subjec-
tivity I would impart. (Hegel has just in fact named the essential paradox of
the gift: the sacrice must be a vain onesomething for nothingor it is
not a sacrice, and yet . . .) This was the rancorously funny inverted world of
Rameaus nephew, who from the slightly tiresome perspective of the free-
oating intellectual almost managed to see through it all, but in the end . . .not quite. Enter insight, together with its shadow brother faith, to which
insight attaches itself with increasingly ambivalent desperation as they seek
respectively to see through and beyond the shattered appearances of the
existing social world. . . . Butand this will eventually become the linchpin
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Dead Right 379
of Hegels analysisin this very ight from objectivity reason both masks
and catastrophically perpetuates its own collusion with the faith it would
disavow.
Such a complicity betrays itself from the outset in the proselytizing fanati-
cismof insights uncomprehending attacks on the faithwhich itwould extir-
pateHegels analysis in the Phenomenology is wicked, uninching, andnot without its own inquisitorial aggressivityand are illustrated perfectly
by the orgiastic festivals of de-Christianization staged in the early 1790s:
from the smashing of the statues of the kings of Judaea to the consecration
of the Temple of Reason opened with great fanfare in the fall of 1794 in
the former church of Notre Dame. The sacral darkness of the cathedral had
been banished by brilliantly arranged stage lighting which, at the climax of
the celebration turned the spotlight on a young actress impersonating Rea-
son herself dressed in Roman gown and garlands. Hegels analysis of the
vicious circle of iconoclasm captures perfectly the spiral of revolutionary
destruction and the increasingly desperate attempts to control the fetishis-
tic circle of self-reifying negation throughout the revolutionary period and
indeed beyond.
These strategies are perhaps familiar but worth rehearsing. From the
decapitation of kings and nobles to the destruction and defacement of
monuments; from the renaming of streets and citizens to the recalibra-
tion of clock and calendar; from the plunder and dislocation of artworks
to their recontextualization within the newly founded national museums
that would simultaneously preserve and destroy them through neutralizing
disenchantment. (The ambivalence about the museums own latent monu-
mentalitythe implicit cult of art it would inaugurate, the reinstatement of
aura in the very production of surplus exhibition valuewould in turn be
registered by recurrent fantasies of the museum in ruins, victim from the
outset of times own depredations: the essential paradox of a revolutionary
museumthe creation of a heritage of modernitydid not go unmarked.
Hubert Roberts paintings of the rubble heaps of desecrated churches and
statues were immediately supplemented by his futuristic visions of the
newly founded revolutionary Louvre in ruinspaintings that nowof course
hang securely in the Louvre.) In a further recursive doubling, a revolution-
ary iconoclasm would come to direct itself against the very iconoclasm that
had inevitably threatened to congeal into yet another dogmatism: erasures
would be erased, the newnaming systemwould be reversed, in 1794Robes-
pierre would institute the cult of the supreme being and therewith con-
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380 Rebecca Comay
demn atheism as a new fanaticism: in his plans for the Festival of the
Supreme Being, David himself was to orchestrate a ritualistic burning of
the statue of Atheism itself, now consecrated and desecrated as the newest
idol. According to one eyewitness report, the festival included a burning of
an egy of Nothing itselfnow reied as yet another positivity painstaking
constructed so as to be demolished.9
Hegel insists that it makes no dierence here whether reasons assault on
its adversary is by way ofmissiles launched from a safe distance or by way of
an insidious viral contamination against which every remedy adopted only
aggravates the disease (to argue back is to identify with the aggressor, to
give reasons against reason, and thus for faith already to concede defeat).10
In either case, reasons mortication of its supposed antithesis leaves as
legacy for future generations the toxic waste of the unburied deadCreons
unending legacy to posterity. Hegel at one point describes the innite
regress of idolatrous iconoclasm as a kind of germ warfare whose unnum-
bered casualties are all the more burdensome for going unmarked: enlight-
enment spreads its disease like a perfume in an unresisting atmosphere
and its vanquished enemies silently collect like ghosts.
One ne morning it gives its comrade a shove with the elbow and
bang! Crash! the idol lies on the oorone ne morning whose
noon is bloodless if the infection has penetrated to every organ of spiri-
tual life. Memory alone then preserves the dead form of the Spirits
shape as a vanished history [vergangeneGeschichte], vanished one knowsnot how. And the new serpent of wisdom raised on high for admiration
has in this way painlessly cast merely a withered skin. (545)
I will return to this dead form of a superstition cast o or abjected one
knows not how and just what is at stake in this unknowing. Hegel has just
explicitly identied enlightenment as melancholia.
German philosophy, according to Hegels reading, could cut through
this loophaving both enlightened and been enlightened by religion, it
could be spared the indignity of regressing back into an ever-more-mystied
(because demystied) form of itand thus seems to bypass the vicious
circle of myth and enlightenment. Having already overcome the abstract
antinomy of faith and insight, Protestant Germany promises the recipro-
cal accommodation of religion and reason through its culture of spiritual
freedom, and ultimately (or so the Philosophy of Right will eventually argue)through the Prussian state apparatus that would comewith a stretch, and
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Dead Right 381
I think Hegel knows thisto express this. Absolute knowing registers this
accommodation.
Terror as Melancholia
Hegels depiction of the dierence betweenGermanphilosophy andFrench
enlightenmentthe dierence between the Aufklrung (self-understoodas reasons own self-clarication or explication) and the lumires (self-misunderstood as reasons illumination of a blind, superstitious other)
might be understood as the dierence betweenmourning andmelancholia.
In the rst case, reason is able to internalize, relinquish, and surpass a reli-gion that has already precipitated into conceptual thought. Philosophy com-
memorates and discharges its debt to a religion so compatible that its essen-
tial gures can be harmlessly recycledwithin the ether of absolute knowing.
ThePhenomenology thus concludes by toasting Schillers ownpoetic rework-ing of the Eucharistic formula. From the chalice of this realm of spirits
foams forth for Him his own innitude: the sacramental ritual is remem-
bered, mourned, and philosophically neutralized in being circulated with-
out residue in the transparent medium of thought.
In the second case, reason disavows its own identity with the faith thatit castigates and that it thereby prolongs as a stony relic or foreign body
blocking thought. Insights secret identication with what it reies as an
alien or changeling (550) means disowning the rationality both of its
object and ultimately of itself as persecuting subjectenlightenment is
not very enlightened about itself (656)which thus condemns it to a com-
pulsively repetitive, ritualistic reenactment of destructive disenchantment.
Hegel repeatedly uses Freuds terminology throughout this section of the
Phenomenology: disavowal or Verleugnungeven perversion (Verkehrung)characterizes insights relationship to what it assaults.
11Splitting, isola-
tion,12
the stubborn forgetting13
of the lost object: Hegel has here just
sketched the defensive apparatus of a subject bent on sustaining itself on
what it gives up.
The constitutivemelancholia aicting insight condemns it to disown the
violence it perpetrates on a faith whose grief is matched only by insights
own manic jubilation: enlightenment fails to register faiths losses as, in
truth, its very own. Insight matches Creon in the stubbornness of its re-
fusal to bury its dead: from the tyrants disrespect for the divine law we
have passed over to the philosophes desecration of divinity as such. Hegel
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382 Rebecca Comay
describes insights stupid euphoria before the open grave of the world.
Whereas an expropriated faith slumps morosely before the rubble heap of a
world razed to emptiness, insight exultantly sets up house. Hegels descrip-
tion of faiths anxious wandering from nothing to nothing is compelling:
Faith has lost the content which lled its element, and collapses into
a state in which it moves listlessly to and fro within itself. It has been
expelled from its kingdom; or, this kingdomhas been ransacked, since
the waking consciousness has monopolized every distinction . . . [and]
has vindicated earths ownership of every portion of it . . . what speaks
to Spirit is only a reality without substance and a nitude forsaken by
Spirit. Since faith is without any content and it cannot remain in this
void, or since, in going beyond the nite which is the sole content, it
nds only the void, it is a sheer yearning, its truth an empty beyond,for which a tting content can no longer be found, for everything is
bestowed elsewhere. (573)
Hegel slyly suggests that faiths aictions will soon come to haunt enlight-
enment itself whose own sun will surely enough be blackened by faiths
losses. We shall see whether Enlightenment can remain satised: that
yearning of the troubled spirit which mourns over the loss of its spiritual
world lurks in the background. Enlightenment itself bears within it this
blemish [Makel ] of an unsatised yearning (573). This blemishthe stainor blind spot generated by insights own drive to purity
14will expose itself
alternatively as themystication of the lost object in the formof reiednega-
tivity (the hypostasis of the supreme being devoid of predicates: enlight-
enments recourse to negative theology) orthe logical ipsideas the
empty materialism that makes do with lukewarm leftover matter (all that
remains once thought has abstracted all sensuous properties) (577).Hegel
describes this turgidmateriality as exhibiting a listless aimlessmovement
(dumpfesWeben) (577) that matches perfectly the listless movement of thebereft subject whose grief is a secret even to itself: the melancholic identi-
cation with the lost object is here complete.
Everything that follows can be attributed to Enlightenments own dis-
avowed grief for the lost object which culminates in the revolution, here
eectively characterized as a violent passage lacte.Utilitarianism is the rststop along the way, described by Hegel as the vandalism which appropri-
ates,manipulates, and consumes the last shred of objectivity, including that
of the intersubjective social world, which is reduced to a collective survival
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Dead Right 383
mechanism regulated by a tepid pleasure principle committed to the rule of
maximum reciprocal serviceability: the gang or troop (Trupp) rampaginglike animals in the garden of EdenHegels startling, prescient anticipa-
tion of Nietzsches critique of utilitarianism as a herd morality (560). Hegel
darkly suggests that this collective self-regulation is but a thinly veiled de-
fense against what lies beyond the pleasure principleHegels language
again almost literally anticipates Freudsthat is, a death drive in which
enjoyment and transgressive self-destruction are indissolubly linked.
And here Hegels narrative takes on an intensity unmatched elsewhere
in the Phenomenology. The entire precipitation into terror is contained inreasons campaign against a world it can neither accommodate nor, in the
end, let go.
Cabbage-heads
Having dened itself as negative, reason embarks on an annihilating mis-
sion that will culminate in a fury of destruction. The retreat from objec-
tivity escalates as Spirit progressively moves from the demystication, ma-
nipulation, and instrumentalization of externality to the latters eventual
suspension, elimination, and extermination: thus the unstoppable move-
ment from insight through utility to the self-transparency of the general
will. The transition from utility to absolute freedom is the almost indis-
cernible but critical transition from a subject which still needs to project
at least an empty show of objectivity (583)it has to treat the object asif it were something alien (586, italics mine) if only in order to possessit and exploit itto a subject whose withdrawal from objectivity is seem-
ingly complete. Absolute freedom suspends the vestigial trace of dierence
still implicit in instrumental reason and both consummates and overturns
this, as utility yields to a delirious potlatch of useless, meaningless destruc-
tion. With an exquisitely Nietzschean sensitivity Hegel here smells a rat:
the putrid stench of the unburied corpse of the abandoned object still wafts
unpleasantly from the open grave of the world.
The individual consciousness itself is directly in its own eyes that
which had [previously] had only a semblance of an antithesis; it is uni-versal consciousness and will. The beyond of this its actual existencehovers over the corpse of the vanished independence of real being, or
the being of faith,merely as the exhalation of a stale gas, of the vacuous
tre suprme. (586)
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384 Rebecca Comay
Absolute freedom is terror as the innitemelancholia of a self that knowsno other. Its essence is to recognize no obstacle, no mediating agency, no
local nuance or detour that might delay or dilute the passage from individu-
ality to totality or frompart towhole and back again: the individualwill fuses
with the universal immediately, totally, without residue.
Direct democracy is only one of its many features. Hegel identies as the
latters essential outcome the unending oscillation between the rock and
the hard place of dictatorship (a simple, inexible cold universality), on
the one hand, and on the other handbut the terms of Hegels descrip-
tion are almost identicalanarchy (the discrete, absolute hard rigidity and
self-willed atomism of actual self-consciousness) (590). Abstract individu-
alism is the principlethe scary link, for Hegel, between the seemingly
disparate ideologies of revolutionary decisionism, of social contractualism,
of absolutist nationalism, and of free-market liberalismand can account
for the oft-noted and otherwise inexplicable tension within the Declaration
of Rights itself between the apparently irreconcilable poles of individual
rights and national sovereignty, between the right of each (against all) and
the right of all (against each), between the rights of man and the rights of
citizen, between private and public liberty (a tension only partially expli-
cable in terms of the revolutions own split pedigree betweenGallic absolut-
ism and an imported modern liberalism).15
It is in each case, for Hegel, the
lost ligature of the social bond which is registered without being acknowl-
edged: the loss of the binding power of religion as religare, the splintering ofthe community into an aggregate of volitional atoms, and the foreclosure
of the politicalthe incarnate divinity of the state itselfwithin the trans-
parent homogeneity of a civil society sutured together by the anonymous
rule of law.16
With the assumption of mass sovereignty as a sovereignty of
immediacy we have the outline of the Sartean group-in-fusion: the end-
less reversibility of democracy and dictatorship within what Alain Badiou
has called a fellowship of terror.17
Paranoia is another feature. In the universe of the will, dierence can
be visible only as opposition, and opposition itself becomes indistinguish-
able from treason: according to Hegels own ever-so-speedy synopsis all
distinction as such eventually assumes the insidious appearance of a com-plot aristocratique. Antirevolution becomes legible as only counterrevolu-tion just as foreign war and civil war come conceptually to coalesce. The
enemy is always already inside the gate, and Polyneices is the prototype of
the disowned other: the outside on the inside is the foreign body engen-
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Dead Right 385
dered through the repression that violently and summarily expels it. The
law of suspects is thus for Hegel not a distortion of or contingent deviation
from the revolution but its essential outcome, and nds its perfect corol-
lary in the mass-production of the corpsethe theoretical sning out of
alterity here implying its practical snung out in the wills own escalating
cycle of tautological self-armation.
The guillotine serves to cancel out the phantom objectivity created by
the law of suspects according to which imaginary counterfactual intentions
assume the status of objective guilt. Suspicion is the epistemology of aworld
devoid of enduring objectsalterity has to be constructed and denounced
as if discovered if only in order to be refuted, purged, and eliminatedand
decapitation is at once the traumatic literalization, the allegorization, and
the repetitive self-deconstruction of this aporetic, circular epistemology.
Hegels philosophical exegesis of the guillotine goes beyond Foucaults
own unforgettable description, in Discipline and Punish, of the transitionfrom the lurid Baroque festivals of cruelty (the extravaganzas of public tor-
ture) to themodern production of the criminals body as an undierentiated
instrument onwhich punishment can be administered within the homoge-
nous transparency of a penal regime. Hegel emphasizes not only the mod-
ern banalization of deathits reduction to the anonymous numericity of
the production line, its submission to new rituals of hygiene and eciency,
its recuperation by the state as secular or civil functionand the establish-
ment of a newdisciplinary regime.His target is the paradox of amurder that
strips away not only the life but the antecedent subjectivity of the victim:
the guillotines essential action is to render itself essentially redundant or
inessential.The guillotine provides the practical conrmation of the objects
essential nonexistence in that it strips even death itself of its singularity
and intensity: the machine retroactively retracts the minimal recognition it
simultaneously concedes its victim (as worthy of suspicion) in that it directs
itself in the rst instance against the already nullied nonentity of the lost
object.
The quicklime that is to swallow up the corpse within the anonymity of
the mass grave only conrms that we are here in the region of what Adorno
will eventually call the philosopheme of pure identitythat is, death in
its most unsublimated, insignicant uniformity: modern death. Creons
Pyrrhic victory is near complete. Hegel here names a death which has no
inner signicance or lling, for what is negated is the empty point of the
absolutely free self (590).Themachine only perfects and ritualistically for-
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386 Rebecca Comay
malizes the evacuation of alterity that Hegel nds implicit at the very ori-
gins of modern democratic sovereignty. Thus Hegels chilling description,
so contemporary in its resonance, of the cold, matter of fact annihilation of
this existent self, from which nothing else can be taken away but its mere
being (591).
Among the many paradoxes of the guillotine is that it simultaneously
enforces and erodes the distinction between dying and living: the moment
of death becomes at once precise, punctual, identiable, and indetermi-
nateboth measurable and endlessly uncertain. Decapitation at once is
the answer to the (at the time) prevalent fear of live burial, and feeds this
anxiety. The fall of the blade marks the transitionless transition from an
already mortied existence to the posthumous mortality of a subject for
whom the very dierence between life and deathas between subjectivity
and objectivity, between humanity and machinalityhas been eroded. The
obsessive fantasies of survival entertained by the popular imaginary of the
guillotine, and that preoccupied both literature and medical science from
the 1790s, are but the inversion and conrmation of the living death to
which life had seemingly been reducedthus the proliferation of blush-
ing heads, talking heads, suering heads, heads that dreamed, screamed,
returned the gaze, the disembodied body parts, detached writing hands, the
ghosts and ghouls and zombies that would ll the pages of gothic novels
throughout Europe.
Thus the famous cabbage-headsHegels startling anticipation of Hei-
deggers notorious comparison of the death camps with modern agribusi-
ness. We are probably as close as it is possible to get, circa 1800, to what
Adorno will later theorize, in Negative Dialectics as the impossible, Ausch-witzean condition of dying today. Tempting as it is, the comparison is,
however, insidious and must be resisted.18
Horror vacui
Terror is thus neither explained away byHegel on circumstantial grounds
the exceptional security measures improvised by a young republic strug-
gling to sustain itself in the face of an extraordinary array of contingent
pressures, from foreign wars to internal counterrevolutionary upheavals,
from bread shortages to whatevernor mystied as some kind of inexpli-
cable diabolical cataclysmic eruption. For Hegel, unlike for Kant, the revo-
lution is a block: the terror cannot be surgically excised as a local anomaly,
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Dead Right 387
deformation, or betrayal of its founding principles, the revolution does not
splinter into essential and inessential, structural and incidental. Indeed any
attempt to dene the chronological boundaries of the terrorto conne it
to a sixteen-month interval as a temporary deviation from the revolution
arguably only prolongs the persecutory logic that is contained (a paradox
exemplied by the Thermidorian counterterrorist reaction and the virulent
culture of denunciation it perpetuated: Thermidor is itself the prototype of
every war on terrorism).19
ForHegel, therefore, the terror proper begins not
with the law of 22 Prairial, not with the law of suspects, not with the regi-
cide in January 1793, not with the kings arrest and trial, not with the Sep-
tember massacres of 1792, not with the riots at the Tuileries on August 10,
1792, not with the suspensive veto of the 1791 Constitution, and not with
the storming of the Bastille. Hegel backdates the terror to the very onset
of the revolution, if not beforeJune 17, 1789, the day the tats Gnraux
spontaneously and virtually unanimously recreated itself as the Assemble
Nationale as sole agent and embodiment of the nations will.
With the tennis-court oath, the ex nihilo transition of the tiers tat fromnothing to everything is announced and performatively accomplished:
the oath both marks and makes the peoples transition from political nul-
lity to the complete nation that it will retroactively determine itself always
already to have been. As structurally complete, the nation must eliminate
what falls outside it as an excrescence whose existence is a contradiction:
the founding act of revolutionary democracy is thus the purge. This liter-
alization of Abb Sieys formula thus determines political modernity as a
fellowship of terror. And with this gesture, writes Hegel, the undivided
substance of absolute freedom ascends to the throne of the world without
any power being able to resist it (585).
In identifying terror with the very onset of the revolution Hegel has been
predictably compared to Burke (whose Reections on the Revolution in Francehad been translated into German almost immediately and indeed in the
pages of Hegels own favorite journal), to Bonald and Taine (for whom the
slide from the revolution of liberty to the despotism of equality was implicit
from the outset) or even to de Maistre (for whom the terror was both the
inevitable outcome of and Gods providential punishment for the hubris of
human self-assertion). These comparisons have a tiny degree of justice
and Hegels own unwarranted savagery toward Rousseau (in the Philosophyof Right and the History of Philosophy), it must be said, does nothing to dis-courage them, although his rhetoric stops well short of Burkes own hys-
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388 Rebecca Comay
terical denunciation of Rousseau as an insane Socrates. Hegel has much
to account for, not least his general sourness about the July Revolution and
perceived sycophancy toward the censors at Berlinwhat was ultimately
even within his lifetime to earn him his reputation (undeserved, as it hap-
pens) as ideologue of the Restoration. At Berlin, as well, there is this embar-
rassing (one might say, abstract) tendency to conate everythingterror-ism, mysticism, Hinduism, Islamic fundamentalism, Rousseau, Thomas
Munzer, Anabaptism, Judaism,whateverwithin the same soupof abstract
negativity.20
Terror is not only what you get when you put abstract ideasinto practicewhat both Burke and Hegel (as well as Tocqueville, Schiller,
and so many others) will identify as the occupational hazard of French
theory. Terror is not just the result of philosophical abstraction: it is itselfthe abstraction that in leaping from all to all (Rousseaus perfect phrase)
can in the end only elaborate itself as the repetitive production of nothing
the endless negativity of an unworked death.
But it is precisely here that comparison with Burke at once invites itself
and proves irrelevant. Hegels uninching identication of terror as the
inauguration of political modernity does not prevent him from attempting
to absorb it as inevitable, comprehensible, and innitely productive. Im
not referring to Hegels personal sensibilitiesthe dance around the free-
dom tree, the annual toast on Bastille Day, and so ongestures which in
themselves are the standard reex of the liberal intelligentsia that would
take 1789 without the rest: Hegel is virtually unique among his contempo-
raries for having tried to deconstruct this squeamish liberalism. Nor can
one demarcate the line between endorsement and repudiation by means of
periodization (the young student rhapsodic at Tbingen, the old man dis-
illusioned at Berlin) or even according to standard psychological categories
such as ambivalence. Hegels visible hesitation between an unqualied and
lyrical enthusiasm (hisKantianword) for the glorious mental dawn
risen in France and his unequivocal condemnation of this same event as
the most fearful tyranny is expressed in the same text and in the same
breath,21
and moreover we nd this hesitation expressed consistently from
1794 to 1830. Indeed it may not be possible to disentangle them.
In taking absolute-freedom-and-terror as a package Hegel perhaps comes
closest to thosefrom Tocqueville to Lefort, from Furet to Gauchetwho
would insert the French Revolution as one more episode within the longue
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Dead Right 389
dure of European absolutism: revolutionary democracy both interruptsand prolongsprolongs through interruptingthe theological-political
heritage, and herein lies at once its promise and its danger. Tocqueville
recalls Mirabeaus reassuring letter to the king, less than a year into the
revolution, that the modern idea of a single class of citizens on an equal
footing should ultimately provide a smooth surface on which royal power
could all the more easily apply itself.22
Centralization provides the essen-
tial hinge between ancien rgime and revolutionarymodernity: the decisive
shiftthe rst revolutionis not the transition frommonarchy to repub-
lic but rather the self-subverting passage within monarchism itself from an
older feudal apparatus (with its intricate corporate hierarchies and particu-
larisms) to the absolute monarchy that, by accumulating for itself all local
privilege, reconstitutes the body politic as a homogeneous mass capable for
the rst time of functioning as a unied, collective subject. In the hypertro-
phy of the monarchy lies the germ of the modern egalitarian nation.
For these writers, therefore, the regicide is the symbolic inauguration of
political modernity: the instantaneous and total transfer of absolute sover-
eignty from king to people. The fall of the blade marks the sublime instant
separating and thereby fusing before and after, ancien rgime and revolu-
tionary republic: Le roi est mortvive la patrie. This sacricial logic was cere-monially enacted on January 21, 1793 in an event marked, at least according
to all the narratives, by sacred pomp and ceremony. It was formalized at the
kings trial when Robespierre invokes the baptismal quality of the execu-
tion. The king must die because the nation must live: an innite invest-
ment in the sacral body of the king must be generated by the staging of
the latters innite divestment. The regeneration of the people is nothing
other than the restoration of a nations body to itself through the expropria-
tion of the expropriator. The regicide thus marks what Daniel Arasse has
called the perfect syncope de la sacralit : the banal death of Louis Capetis the consecration of the nation.
23And from such a baptism ow all the
contradictions of modernity: the inaugural self-betrayal of democracy in
ever-more-inventive forms of terror.
Although Hegel barely pauses at the regicide, he is perhaps the rst to
note the link between the terrors of modern democracy and the disavowed
fundamentalism on which it rests; he is the rst also to make the connec-
tion between this disavowal and the compulsive construction of fanaticism
as the terrifying fundamentalism of the Other: war on terror is democracys
own way of abjecting what remains its own darkest secret to itself through
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390 Rebecca Comay
ritualistically repetitive projection. Insight needs faith, and modern democ-racy is just the story of their violent symbiosis within the endless melan-
cholia of an ungrieved loss.
WhatClaudeLefort calls the persistence of the theological-politicalmight
be understood as a kind of fetishism: the lling of the empty place left by
the evacuation of the divinely sanctionedmonarchythe self-production of
the body politic of the people as power incarnate.24
The sacramental sub-
stitution of people for king immediately closes the space it opens uplack
is, perversely, simultaneously acknowledged and disavowedand can be
understood as the prototype for every politics of fusion, in the face of which
genuine democracy, in Leforts terms, must mobilize itself as a perpetual
negotiation to maintain the empty place as an active vacancy rather than as
the usual power vacuum into which anything and everything might ow.
One might understand this as a kind of mourning.
Hegel goes further in that he establishes that the place was always, in
truth, empty. The risk is not simply that of reinstating absolutism through
revolutionary dictatorship: absolute monarchy was already itself an empty
name, ornaments clustering around an empty throne, and it is this origi-
nary loss that enlightenment both covers up and transmits, which it com-
memorates through disavowalthe emptiness at the very heart of the sym-
bolic order. Nor does this loss begin with the self-evacuation of absolute
monarchy: the emptiness of the kings name is itself only the delayed reg-
istration of the ruination (476) into which beautiful Sittlichkeit had fromthe start been thrown, and therewith the shattering of any fantasy of fulll-
ment along organic linesthe innite grief of a world splintered into a
mechanical aggregate of abstract spiritual atoms (as Hegel was to describe
the political situation inaugurated by imperial Rome) and the institution of
right as such as the asocial principle of political association. The experi-
ence of Bildung can be understood therefore not as a progressive accumu-lation of meaning but rather as the unconscious, blanked-out transmission
of a void that has almost the quality of an Abraham/Torok-style crypt; we
are close to what Benjamin describes, in his Kafka essay, as the sickness of
tradition: tradition in and of the very absence of a determinate content to
be transmitted, transmission of the impossibility of transmissionthat is,
the transmission of trauma.
The abyss of untrammeled negativitythe revolutionary fury of de-
structionis just the condensation, the literalization, and the hyperbolic
demonstration of the emptiness that has been plaguing Spirit from the
start. It does not function as the eruption of some kind of singular excess
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Dead Right 391
or irrecuperable exception to the system, as a certain Bataillean reading
might suggest. Rather the seeming exception is here in truth the rule:
unworked negativity is less a distortion than the prototype of Spirits dialec-
tic. Absolute-freedom-and-terror does not so much deviate from the trajec-
tory of the Phenomenology as illuminate its essential logic. The meaninglessdeath on the scaold is both the culmination and the retrospective commen-
tary on the entire history of spirit to this point. It crystallizes by exaggerat-
ing to a point of absurdity what could have escaped no reader: there never
has been so far, in fact, a death that actually worked. Either the burial was
blocked, like Polyneicessociety was not up to itor the sacrice proved
vain, like the feudal knights. In the dismembered body of the suspect the
accumulated debt of Spirit comes to a head: nonrecognition, nonproduc-
tivity, noncommemoration, nonredemption.
. . . another land
Hegels wager is of course to discharge by consolidating that debt: to make
this worklessness work in such a way that the slaughter bench of history
might present itself as the Golgotha of Spirit and melancholia therefore
supersede itself in mourning. In this light he seeks to redeem by radical-
izing the Christian wager by sharpening the antithesis between nite and
innite to the point of seemingly unbridgeable, undialectical disjunction:
the at death on the scaold puts symbolization to its most radical test,
and in the extremity of its resistance supplies the measure of Spirits most
prodigious power of recuperation.
This is essentially the story that follows absolute-freedom-and-terror, as
Spirit takes possession of its very self-dispossession as it comes to recog-
nize its losses as, in truth, its own. With the wills own self-encounter as
pure unlled negativity Spirit takes on its nothingness as its very own
symbolically assumes the castration it had both inicted and sueredand
in this traumatic recognition thereby translates or determines immediacy
(abstract or indeterminate negativity) as, precisely, mediation. Radical loss
thus congeals into the ultimate acquisition of a subjectwhose ultimate hero-
ism is to nd self-possession in the act of self-dispossession: the void itself
here becomes, for moral consciousness, a kind of preemptive lling. Terror
is in this way retroactively integrated as the condition of possibility of the
self-willing will and marks the rebirth of the subject from the ashes of its
most profound desubjectication.
At this point the burden passes over to another land (595): the unreal
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392 Rebecca Comay
world inwhichGermanmoral philosophy inworking out its ownproblems
simultaneously discharges the legacy of the revolution and therebymourns,
commemorates, and eventually redeems enlightenments own compulsive
attachment to a faith it must let go. The elaboration and eventual self-
overcoming of Kantian-stylemoral rigorism is therefore forHegel identical
with the attainment of (what he calls) true religion, which in its complex
rationality is to resolve the antinomy of insight and superstition on which
the revolution itself had, byHegels own reading, short-circuited.One could
thus argue that the task of German Idealism is just the interrogation and
redemption of the thwarted promise of the revolutionabsolute-freedom-
and-terror on trial. Morality is philosophical Thermidor.
In this turn from Terror to Kant, Hegel is at once his most conventional
and his most inventive. If he comes very close to reproducing the standard
German idealist self-interpretation of the relation between philosophy and
terrorProtestant-style freedom of the will as at once the exegesis, the phe-
nomenological successor, and the determinate negation or overcoming of
French revolutionary actionhe also slightly displaces this solution, at least
to the extent that he immediately establishes that Kantian-style morality in
itself does nothing manifestly to redeem the blocked promise of the revo-
lution. Hegel makes it bitterly clear that the purity of the moral will can
be no antidote to the terrifying purity of revolutionary virtue. All the logi-
cal problems of absolute freedom are essentially carried over into Hegels
analysis of Kantianmorality: the obsessionality, the paranoia, the suspicion,
the evaporation of objectivity within the violent hyperbole of a subjectivity
bent on reproducing itself within a world it must disavow. In the Phenome-nology Hegel does not go quite as far as he had, in the Spirit of Christianity,of explicitly indicting Kant of terrorism. That earlier text of 1798 had spe-
cically fulminated against what Hegel identied as a Jewish form of ter-
rorism: the vengeful, genocidal purism, with which Hegels Kant was also
here more or less assimilated, but he does not essentially soften his earlier
reading.
And these problemswill only be aggravated asmorality passes over inexo-
rably and almost indiscernibly into its tangled Fichtean, Schillerean, and
Romantic phase (the various strands are at times dicult to unravel), where
it will prove to be the very same drive for purity which nally convicts a con-
science that in its desperate bid for a restored immediacy ultimately fails to
convince either others or, in the end, itself. Hegel acidly observes how the
anarchicmoral autarchy pioneered by Fichtes revision of Kant slides, under
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Dead Right 393
Romanticism, into a narcissistic aestheticism, aestheticism into paralyzing
purism, and eventually into a self-serving harangue that catastrophically
fails to recognize itself in what it most reviles. Hegel spares no irony in
describing the fastidiousness of the aesthete turned moral onlooker whose
self-admiration ismatched only by his horror of engagement.Thenal turn,
under Romanticism, tomoral genius as an answer to the aporias ofmorality
will complete the conversion of politics into aesthetics, of revolution into
spectacle, and will establish German ideology around 1800 as above all an
aesthetics of the beautiful. Hegels analysis will in turn show beauty itself
to be an innitely destructive ideal.
Hegel does not, then, or does not only, reproduce the standard German
response to the French Revolution: the well-traveled route from political
revolution to moral regeneration and thence, inexorably, to the aesthetic
upheaval which is, eectively, the modernist autonomous work of artthe
revolution in poetic language that marks the seemingly one-way street
from modernity to aesthetic modernism. He in eect stages it in order
to denaturalize it or make it strange, almost as a thought experiment that
pushed to its extreme will be forced to refute itself, and with it every fan-
tasy of innocent spectatorship. The moral view of the world is just one
more phantasm Spirit will have had to work through, suer, and eventu-
ally expose in all its vengeful, compensatory violence. If it presents itself as
the narrative successor to the revolution, this is not because it logically ful-
ls or supersedes it: Kants critical venture phenomenologically succeeds therevolution that it chronologically, of course, anticipates only insofar as histext becomes legible only retroactively through the event that in institution-
alizing the incessant short circuit of freedom and cruelty puts the project
of modernity to its most extreme trial.25
It is the experience of the Terror
that forces Kant to the ordeal to which he is subjectednot itself without a
great degree of crueltyin the Phenomenology: the revolution itself inictson Kants own text a kind of retroactive trauma.
It would be an exaggeration to say that Hegels overcoming of Kant and
company makes good on the failed promise of the revolution or that he
nally escapes the asceticism he so severely challenges. But with this ges-
ture he both prolongs and reigns back, if only for a moment, the inevitable
temptation to slide from a phenomenology of embodied freedom to a nou-
menology of the will. As such he returns thought to the order of experi-
enceeven if, perhaps, it is ultimately a question of a missed experience, a
lapsed experience, or even, in the end, anothers experience: an experience
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394 Rebecca Comay
that came knocking only to nd (as Benjamin was eventually to formulate
it in a rather dierent context) that we, the masters [wir, die Herrschaft],were not home.
Notes
1 For some of the details of this decision, see Dale van Kley, Origins of an Anti-Historical
Declaration, in Dale van Kley, ed., The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and theDeclaration of Rights of 1789 (Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 1994), 72113, andKeithBaker, Fixing the French Constitution, in Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the FrenchRevolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 26171. For the key debatesleading up to the adoption of the rst Declaration of the Rights of Man, see Antoine
de Baecque, Wolfgang Schmale, and Michel Vovelle, Lan 1 des droits de lhomme (Paris:Presses du CNRS, 1988).
2 Comte Stanislas de Clermont-Tonerres report on July 27 to the constitutional commit-
tee of the Assemble Nationale is here emblematic when he identies the inclusion of a
declaration of rights as the only dierence between the cahiers that call for a new consti-tution and those that call for only the reestablishment of what they regard as an existing
constitution (Archives parlementaires [27 juillet 1789]) vol. 8: 283, cited in van Kley, TheFrench Idea of Freedom, 108. Article 16 of the 1789 Declaration makes the connectionexplicit: A society inwhich the guarantee of rights is not secured . . . has no constitution.
3 For some of the visual representations (both revolutionary and royalist) of both theDecla-
ration and the Constitution as tablets of the ten commandments, see Jonathan P. Ribner,
Broken Tablets: The Cult of the Law in French Art from David to Delacroix (Berkeley and LosAngeles: University of California Press, 1993), especially chapter 1, 628.
4 See J.-P. Babelon, Archives nationales, Muse de lhistoire de France, vol. 4 (Paris: Publisher,1965), 84. The decree, presented by Gilbert Romme in the name of the Committee on
Public Safety, is quoted by Ribner, Broken Tablets, 15 (together with some photographs ofboth the mutilated Declaration and the similarly vandalized Constitution of 1791, which
was exhumed by the same order in 1793).
5 Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe, vol. 2, ed. Ernst Behler andHans Eichner (Munich/Paderborn: Schoningh, 19581987), 366.
6 Friedrich Schlegel, Ernst und Falk, in Kritische Ausgabe 3:96.7 Compare Friedrich Schlegel, Ideen, in Kritische Ausgabe 2:259. See the near-identical
formulation in Novalis, Christendom oder Europa, in Friedrich von Hardenberg, Werke,Tagebucher, und Briefe, vol. 2, ed. Hans-Joachim Mahl and Richard Samuel (Munich:Hanser, 1978), 724. For a discussion of some of the German romantic eorts to inte-
grate the French Revolution, see Richard Brinkmann, Fruhromantik und Franzosische
Revolution, in Deutsche Literatur und Franzosische Revolution: Sieben Studien (Gottingen:Vandenhoeck, 1974), 17291.
8 Johann Gottfried Herder, Briefe zu Befrderung der Humanitt (1792), in SmtlicheWerke,ed. Bernhard Suphan (Berlin: Weidman, 18771917), 18:366.
9 See Marie-Hlne Huet, Mourning Glory: The Will of the French Revolution (Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 37.
10 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Ox-
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Dead Right 395
fordUniversity Press, 1977), paragraph 545. All subsequent citations are given in the text,
by paragraph number.
11 On Verkehrung, see Hegel, Phenomenology, paragraphs 551, 563; on Verleugnung see para-graphs 551, 555, 556, 565, 580.Verleugnung is also howHegel describes faiths own relationto an object.
12 On Isolierung see Ibid., 567, 571; on Trennung, 565; and on Entzweiung, 579.13 On insights forgetfulness, see Ibid., 564, 568.
14 It is the . . . the delement of Enlightenment through the adoption by its self-identical
purity of a negative attitude, that is an object for faith, which therefore comes to knowit as falsehood, unreason, and as ill-intentioned, just as Enlightenment regards faith as
error and prejudice (548).
15 On some of these tensions, see the essays by J. K.Wright, National Sovereignty and the
General Will, and Keith Michael Baker, The Idea of a Declaration of Rights, both in
Dale vanKley, ed.,The French Idea of Freedom (Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 1994),as well as Marcel Gauchet, La Revolution des Droits de lhomme (Paris: Gallimard, 1989).
16 On volitional atoms see Hegel, Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover,1956), 445.
17 This whole formulation owes much to Alain Badiou, Abrg de la metapolitiqu (Paris:Seuil, 1998).
18 Simon Schamas Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1989)makes the connection in a particularly amboyant fashion, but the linkage is implicit in
both Jacob Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker and Warburg,1952) and Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1981).
19 For an excellent account of some of the paradoxes of Thermidor and the structural pro-
longation of terror in the name of counterterror, see Bronislaw Baczko, Ending the Terror:The French Revolution after Robespierre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
20 Hegel, Philosophy of History, 447.21 Alexis deTocqueville,TheOldRegime and the FrenchRevolution, trans. StuartGilbert (New
York: Anchor, 1955), 8.
22 Daniel Arasse, Le guillotine et limaginaire de la terreur (Paris: Flammarion, 1987), 70.23 Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1988).
24 This is the one time that the narrative of Spirit takes an explicitly nonchronological form;
this might bae readers who have come to expect a t, at least at this stage of develop-
ment, between phenomenology and chronology.This wrinkle of latency at the very heart
of the present is precisely where the traumatic structure of history as a whole becomes
for the rst time fully visible.
25 Walter Benjamin, The Image of Proust, inSelectedWritings, vol. 2, ed.Michael Jennings,Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).