Rebecca Comay



Dead Right: Hegel and the Terror

Between Revolution and Reform

Dialectic of Disenchantment

Terror as Melancholia

Cabbage-heads

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 confirmation of the living death to

which life had seemingly been reduced—thus the proliferation of blushing

heads, talking heads, suffering heads, heads that dreamed, screamed,

returned the gaze, the disembodied body parts, detached writing hands, the

ghosts and ghouls and zombies that would fill the pages of gothic novels

throughout Europe. （ zizek82）

Horror vacui

‘‘. . . another land’’

the purity of the moral will can

be no antidote to the terrifying purity of revolutionary virtue. All the logical

problems of absolute freedom are essentially carried over into Hegel’s

analysis of Kantianmorality: the obsessionality, the paranoia, the suspicion, （ zizek63）

If it presents itself as

the narrative successor to the revolution, this is not because it logically fulfils

or supersedes it: Kant’s critical venture phenomenologically succeeds the

revolution that it chronologically, of course, anticipates only insofar as his

text becomes legible only retroactively through the event that in institutionalizing

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 subjected—not itself without a

great degree of cruelty—in the Phenomenology: the revolution itself inflicts

on Kant’s own text a kind of retroactive trauma. （ zizek62）

Notes

Endlessly debated and redrafted in the fatefulsummer of 1789, the first version of the Declarationof the Rights of Man and of the Citizen wasabruptly finalized by the Assemble´e Nationaleon August 27. The draft was published in itstruncated form with an explicit decision to suspendfurther discussion until the more urgenttask had been achieved of ‘‘fixing’’ the FrenchConstitution to which the Declaration itself wasnonetheless to supply both the prefatory contextand the integral first chapter.1 In a perfectillustration of the logic of the supplement, theDeclaration was declared provisional pendingthe completion of a constitution that woulditself in turn be incomplete without it insofaras the presence or absence of such a manifestowould mark the ‘‘only difference’’ between aradically new constitution and the prolongationof preexistent tradition.2 Released separately, intheir unfinished forms, both the Declaration andthe eventual first version of the Constitution towhich by 1791 it had attached itself were nonethelessinvested from the outset with a biblicalauthority conveyed by numerous iconographicallusions to the tablets of the law handed down atSinai—by 1792 the Legislative Assembly decreedThe South Atlantic Quarterly 103:2/3, Spring/Summer 2004.Copyright©2004 by Duke University Press.376that its members would wear a tricolor ribbon bearing a medallion in theshape of two round-headed tablets inscribed with the words ‘‘Droits del’Homme’’ and ‘‘Constitution’’ 3—an association that would in turn predictablyprovoke a Mosaic violence directed against the threat of the law’s owninaugural self-betrayal during the repeated revision of both documentsthroughout the revolutionary period. In May 1793 a copper tablet of theby-then obsolete first version of the Declaration of the Rights of Man wasexhumed from its burial place in the foundation of a projected—never tobe completed—monument on the site of the demolished Bastille. By orderof the Convention the embalmed document was ritually mutilated and itsbroken fragments deposited for perpetuity in the National Archives as a‘‘historicalmonument.’’4 The archive had come to congeal destruction itselfas a lasting memorial to its own powers of reinvention, and as a reminder,too, of unfinished business.The incident is compelling for a number of reasons. Aside from illustratingthe general paradox of revolutionary negation—the insistent reinstatementof tradition in and through the very erasure thereof—and quite apartfrom the overdetermined pathos generated by this unburied corpse andrelic, it raises a very specific question regarding the status of the revolutionarydiscourse of rights: the defaced tablet here carries the entire burden ofthe tabula rasa. Does the damaged body of the text hint of an irrreparablefracture within the law itself, and does themuseification of such a breach inturn acknowledge an interminable mourning for an unfinished past? Howdoes the modern liberal idiom of human rights intersect with the politicaltheologicallegacy of Bourbon absolutism at the moment of the latter’s disinvestment?What is the connection between the revolutionary caesura createdby the radical humanization of the law and the fundamentalist logic itwould interrupt?Hegel’s analysis of the dialectic of secularization places terror itself at thevery heart of the modern political experiment.Hegel both reiterates and almost overturns the standard German ideologyaccording to which a revolution in thought would, in varying proportions,precede, succeed, preempt, accommodate, comprehend, and generallyupstage a political revolution whose defining feature was increasinglythought to be its founding violence: the slide from 1789 to 1793. According377to this ideology, from Schiller to Thomas Mann, Germany could simultaneouslydomesticate and dispense with political revolution by virtue of aspirituality that would have already achieved the rationality to which theFrench only clumsily, violently, impatiently, through their precipitous actingout, could only aspire. Having already been there in theory, Germanycould put off until doomsday the grab for practical fulfillment—the infinitetask.Having undergone its own Reformation, that is, Germany could escapethe tumult at its own gates and thereby serve as the revolution’s most lucidand most passionate, because dispassionate, observer. Heine will remark,only half in jest, that Kant had in any case far surpassed Robespierre in intellectualterrorism: whereas the guillotine managed to kill off only a pathetic,fat king who had lost his head anyway, the axe of reason had slain deismitself throughout Germany. Schlegel will determine the French Revolutionas the allegory5 of an ‘‘other’’6—more comprehensive—revolution in themind that would simultaneously exceed and moderate the French slide todespotic violence.7 For Fichte, the deliverance fromthe tyranny of the thingin-itself would prefigure, inspire, and eventually neutralize the revolutionarydeliverance from material bondage. For Schiller, an infinite adjustmentof sensibility or Gesinnung would forestall and vicariously alleviate the horrorsof political revolution. For Kant, a moral revolution would suspend,preempt, and ultimately absorb revolution thus rendering it consistentwiththe requirements of continuous reform.Revolution here is at once, paradoxically, both singularized and relativized.The traumatic strangeness of the French Revolution—its radical originality,its contingency—is simultaneously asserted and denied as Germanphilosophy seeks to internalize this ‘‘peculiar crisis’’ within a larger movementof thought.8 The German revolution of the mind both precedes anddisplaces the political revolution in exposing it to a spiritual afterlife as yetunknown.Hegel’s version of this well-rehearsed story is at once orthodox and unpredictable.His orthodox commitments are most explicit in the later Berlinlectures 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 beat378down. Such reactivity—abstract negativity at its most truculent—essentiallydefines for Hegel the culture of the French enlightenment at the endof the ancien re´gime: the endless symbiosis of myth and self-mystifyingdisenchantment. Germany would have already cut through this circle. The‘‘northern principle’’—Lutheran freedom of thought—would have inoculatedthe nation against political upheaval in that it had from the outsetachieved a secularization surpassing that attainable by mere enlightenment.Having undergone, with the Reformation, its own immanent rationalizationof faith,Germany could bypass the turmoil of revolution by evadingthe dialectic of enlightenment sketched with dizzying efficiency in thePhenomenology, according to which a benighted superstition could only beinsulted, assaulted, persecuted (and thereby prolonged, exaggerated, perverted)by a rationality blind to its own reasons and thus above all to itsfascinated complicity with the faith it would wipe out.Absolute-freedom-and-terror (Hegel’s conjunction is really an appositionor identity) is merely the political expression of reason’s own fall into abstractionin its panic flight from the vertiginous disorientation of a collapsingsocial order: courtiers clustering like ornaments, says Hegel, around thethrone of a shadow king whose very name had come to mean everythingand therefore nothing. Having expropriated the entire subjectivity of thenation, the absolute monarch had revealed the truth that he was, in fact,the dazzling emptiness of an image projected by a populace whose lastditchbid for uplift through reintegration had only catapulted them into thechronic ressentiment of those in bondage to a nonmaster: the paradox, thereal economic problem, of every masochism. Flattery—the theatre of Versailles—was at once the hyperbole of language, the very promise of universality,and had as such immediately deconstructed itself as pure performativeself-contradiction: in naming you king I deprive myself, and thereforeyou, and therefore cease to deprive myself, and so on, of the very subjectivityI would impart. (Hegel has just in fact named the essential paradox ofthe gift: the sacrifice must be a vain one—something for nothing—or it isnot a sacrifice, and yet . . .) Thiswas the rancorously funny inverted world ofRameau’s nephew, who from the slightly tiresome perspective of the freefloatingintellectual almost managed to see through it all, but in the end . . .not quite. Enter insight, together with its shadow brother faith, to whichinsight attaches itself with increasingly ambivalent desperation as they seekrespectively to see through and beyond the shattered appearances of theexisting social world. . . . But—and this will eventually become the linchpin379of Hegel’s analysis—in this very flight from objectivity reason both masksand catastrophically perpetuates its own collusion with the faith it woulddisavow.Such a complicity betrays itself fromthe outset in the proselytizing fanaticismofinsight’s uncomprehending attacks on the faithwhich it would extirpate—Hegel’s analysis in the Phenomenology is wicked, unflinching, andnot without its own inquisitorial aggressivity—and are illustrated perfectlyby the orgiastic festivals of de-Christianization staged in the early 1790s:from the smashing of the statues of the kings of Judaea to the consecrationof the Temple of Reason opened with great fanfare in the fall of 1794 inthe former church of Notre Dame. The sacral darkness of the cathedral hadbeen banished by brilliantly arranged stage lighting which, at the climax ofthe celebration turned the spotlight on a young actress impersonating Reasonherself dressed in Roman gown and garlands. Hegel’s analysis of thevicious circle of iconoclasm captures perfectly the spiral of revolutionarydestruction and the increasingly desperate attempts to control the fetishisticcircle of self-reifying negation throughout the revolutionary period andindeed beyond.These strategies are perhaps familiar but worth rehearsing. From thedecapitation of kings and nobles to the destruction and defacement ofmonuments; from the renaming of streets and citizens to the recalibrationof clock and calendar; from the plunder and dislocation of artworksto their recontextualization within the newly founded national museumsthat would simultaneously preserve and destroy them through neutralizingdisenchantment. (The ambivalence about themuseum’s own latentmonumentality—the implicit cult of art it would inaugurate, the reinstatement ofaura in the very production of surplus exhibition value—would in turn beregistered by recurrent fantasies of the museum in ruins, victim from theoutset of time’s own depredations: the essential paradox of a revolutionarymuseum—the creation of a heritage of modernity—did not go unmarked.Hubert Robert’s paintings of the rubble heaps of desecrated churches andstatues were immediately supplemented by his futuristic visions of thenewly founded revolutionary Louvre in ruins—paintings that now of coursehang securely in the Louvre.) In a further recursive doubling, a revolutionaryiconoclasm would come to direct itself against the very iconoclasm thathad inevitably threatened to congeal into yet another dogmatism: erasureswould be erased, the new naming system would be reversed, in 1794 Robespierrewould institute the cult of the supreme being and therewith con380demn atheism as a new ‘‘fanaticism’’: in his plans for the Festival of theSupreme Being, David himself was to orchestrate a ritualistic burning ofthe statue of Atheism itself, now consecrated and desecrated as the newestidol. According to one eyewitness report, the festival included a burning ofan effigy of Nothing itself—now reified as yet another positivity painstakingconstructed so as to be demolished.9Hegel insists that it makes no difference here whether reason’s assault onits adversary is by way ofmissiles launched from a safe distance or by way ofan insidious viral contamination against which ‘‘every remedy adopted onlyaggravates the disease’’ (to argue back is to identify with the aggressor, togive reasons against reason, and thus for faith already to concede defeat).10In either case, reason’s mortification of its supposed antithesis leaves aslegacy for future generations the toxic waste of the unburied dead—Creon’sunending legacy to posterity. Hegel at one point describes the infiniteregress of idolatrous iconoclasm as a kind of germ warfare whose unnumberedcasualties are all themore burdensome for going unmarked: enlightenmentspreads its disease like a ‘‘perfume in an unresisting atmosphere’’and its vanquished enemies silently collect like ghosts.‘‘One fine morning it gives its comrade a shove with the elbow andbang! Crash! the idol lies on the floor’’—‘‘one fine morning’’ whosenoon is bloodless if the infection has penetrated to every organ of spirituallife. Memory alone then preserves the dead form of the Spirit’sshape as a vanished history [vergangene Geschichte], vanished one knowsnot how. And the new serpent of wisdom raised on high for admirationhas in this way painlessly cast merely a withered skin. (545)I will return to this ‘‘dead form’’ of a superstition cast off or abjected ‘‘oneknows not how’’ and just what is at stake in this unknowing. Hegel has justexplicitly identified enlightenment as melancholia.German philosophy, according to Hegel’s reading, could cut throughthis loop—having both enlightened and been enlightened by religion, itcould be spared the indignity of regressing back into an ever-more-mystified(because demystified) form of it—and thus seems to bypass the viciouscircle of myth and enlightenment. Having already overcome the abstractantinomy of faith and insight, Protestant Germany promises the reciprocalaccommodation of religion and reason through its culture of spiritualfreedom, and ultimately (or so the Philosophy of Right will eventually argue)through the Prussian state apparatus that would come—with a stretch, and381I think Hegel knows this—to express this. Absolute knowing registers thisaccommodation.Hegel’s depiction of the difference between German philosophy and Frenchenlightenment—the difference between the Aufkla¨rung (self-understoodas reason’s own self-clarification or explication) and the lumie`res (selfmisunderstoodas reason’s illumination of a blind, superstitious other)—might be understood as the difference betweenmourning and melancholia.In the first case, reason is able to internalize, relinquish, and surpass a religionthat has already precipitated into conceptual thought. Philosophy commemoratesand discharges its debt to a religion so compatible that its essentialfigures can be harmlessly recycledwithin the ether of absolute knowing.The Phenomenology thus concludes by toasting Schiller’s own poetic reworkingof the Eucharistic formula. ‘‘From the chalice of this realm of spiritsfoams forth for Him his own infinitude’’: the sacramental ritual is remembered,mourned, and philosophically neutralized in being circulated withoutresidue 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 bodyblocking thought. Insight’s secret identification with what it reifies as analien or ‘‘changeling’’ (550) means disowning the rationality both of itsobject and ultimately of itself as persecuting subject—‘‘enlightenment isnot very enlightened about itself ’’ (656×→565○)—which thus condemns it to a compulsivelyrepetitive, ritualistic reenactment of destructive disenchantment.Hegel repeatedly uses Freud’s terminology throughout this section of thePhenomenology: disavowal or Verleugnung—even perversion (Verkehrung)—characterizes insight’s relationship to what it assaults.11 Splitting, isolation,12 the stubborn forgetting13 of the lost object: Hegel has here justsketched the defensive apparatus of a subject bent on sustaining itself onwhat it gives up.The constitutive melancholia afflicting insight condemns it to disown theviolence it perpetrates on a faith whose grief is matched only by insight’sown manic jubilation: enlightenment fails to register faith’s losses as, intruth, its very own. Insight matches Creon in the stubbornness of its refusalto bury its dead: from the tyrant’s disrespect for the divine law wehave passed over to the philosophes’ desecration of divinity as such. Hegel382describes insight’s stupid euphoria before the open grave of the world.Whereas an expropriated faith slumpsmorosely before the rubble heap of aworld razed to emptiness, insight exultantly sets up house.Hegel’s descriptionof faith’s anxious wandering from nothing to nothing is compelling:Faith has lost the content which filled its element, and collapses intoa state in which it moves listlessly to and fro within itself. It has beenexpelled from its kingdom; or, this kingdom has been ransacked, sincethe waking consciousness hasmonopolized every distinction . . . [and]has vindicated earth’s ownership of every portion of it . . . what speaksto Spirit is only a reality without substance and a finitude forsaken bySpirit. Since faith is without any content and it cannot remain in thisvoid, or since, in going beyond the finite which is the sole content, itfinds only the void, it is a sheer yearning, its truth an empty beyond,for which a fitting content can no longer be found, for everything isbestowed elsewhere. (573)Hegel slyly suggests that faith’s afflictions will soon come to haunt enlightenmentitself whose own sun will surely enough be blackened by faith’slosses. ‘‘We shall see whether Enlightenment can remain satisfied: thatyearning of the troubled spirit which mourns over the loss of its spiritualworld lurks in the background. Enlightenment itself bears within it thisblemish [Makel] of an unsatisfied yearning’’ (573). This blemish—the stainor blind spot generated by insight’s own drive to purity14—will expose itselfalternatively as the mystification of the lost object in the formof reified negativity(the hypostasis of the supreme being devoid of predicates: enlightenment’srecourse to negative theology) or—the logical flipside—as theempty materialism that makes do with lukewarm ‘‘leftover’’ matter (all thatremains once thought has ‘‘abstracted’’ all sensuous properties) (577).Hegeldescribes this turgid materiality as exhibiting a ‘‘listless aimlessmovement’’(dumpfesWeben) (577) that matches perfectly the ‘‘listlessmovement’’ of thebereft subject whose grief is a secret even to itself: the melancholic identificationwith the lost object is here complete.Everything that follows can be attributed to Enlightenment’s own disavowedgrief for the lost object which culminates in the revolution, hereeffectively characterized as a violent passage a` l’acte.Utilitarianismis the firststop along the way, described by Hegel as the vandalism which appropriates,manipulates, and consumes the last shred of objectivity, including thatof the intersubjective social world, which is reduced to a collective survival383mechanism regulated by a tepid pleasure principle committed to the rule ofmaximum reciprocal serviceability: the gang or ‘‘troop’’ (Trupp) rampaginglike animals in the garden of Eden—Hegel’s startling, prescient anticipationof Nietzsche’s critique of utilitarianism as a herdmorality (560).Hegeldarkly suggests that this collective self-regulation is but a thinly veiled defenseagainst what lies beyond the pleasure principle—Hegel’s languageagain almost literally anticipates Freud’s—that is, a death drive in whichenjoyment and transgressive self-destruction are indissolubly linked.And here Hegel’s narrative takes on an intensity unmatched elsewherein the Phenomenology. The entire precipitation into terror is contained inreason’s campaign against a world it can neither accommodate nor, in theend, let go.Having defined itself as negative, reason embarks on an annihilating missionthat will culminate in a ‘‘fury of destruction.’’ The retreat from objectivityescalates as Spirit progressively moves from the demystification, manipulation,and instrumentalization of externality to the latter’s eventualsuspension, elimination, and extermination: thus the unstoppable movementfrom insight through utility to the self-transparency of the generalwill. The transition from utility to absolute freedom is the almost indiscerniblebut critical transition from a subject which still needs to projectat 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 it—to a subject whose withdrawal from objectivity is seeminglycomplete. Absolute freedom suspends the vestigial trace of differencestill implicit in instrumental reason and both consummates and overturnsthis, as utility yields to a delirious potlatch of useless, meaningless destruction.With an exquisitely Nietzschean sensitivity Hegel here smells a rat:the putrid stench of the unburied corpse of the abandoned object still waftsunpleasantly from the open grave of the world.The individual consciousness itself is directly in its own eyes thatwhich had [previously] had only a semblance of an antithesis; it is universalconsciousness and will. The beyond of this its actual existencehovers over the corpse of the vanished independence of real being, orthe being of faith, merely as the exhalation of a stale gas, of the vacuousE^tre supre`me. (586)384Absolute freedom is terror as the infinite melancholia of a self that knowsno other. Its essence is to recognize no obstacle, no mediating agency, nolocal nuance or detour thatmight delay or dilute the passage from individualityto totality or from part to whole and back again: the individualwill fuseswith the universal immediately, totally, without residue.Direct democracy is only one of its many features.Hegel identifies as thelatter’s essential outcome the unending oscillation between the rock andthe hard place of dictatorship (‘‘a simple, inflexible cold universality’’), onthe one hand, and on the other hand—but the terms of Hegel’s descriptionare almost identical—anarchy (‘‘the discrete, absolute hard rigidity andself-willed atomism of actual self-consciousness’’) (590). Abstract individualismis the principle—the scary link, for Hegel, between the seeminglydisparate ideologies of revolutionary decisionism, of social contractualism,of absolutist nationalism, and of free-market liberalism—and can accountfor the oft-noted and otherwise inexplicable tension within the Declarationof Rights itself between the apparently irreconcilable poles of individualrights and national sovereignty, between the right of each (against all) andthe right of all (against each), between the rights of man and the rights ofcitizen, between private and public liberty (a tension only partially explicablein terms of the revolution’s own split pedigree between Gallic absolutismandan importedmodern liberalism).15 It is in each case, for Hegel, thelost ligature of the social bond which is registered without being acknowledged:the loss of the binding power of religion as religare, the splintering ofthe community into an aggregate of ‘‘volitional atoms,’’ and the foreclosureof the political—the incarnate divinity of the state itself—within the transparenthomogeneity of a civil society sutured together by the anonymousrule of law.16 With the assumption of mass sovereignty as a sovereignty ofimmediacy we have the outline of the Sartean ‘‘group-in-fusion’’: the endlessreversibility of democracy and dictatorship within what Alain Badiouhas called a ‘‘fellowship of terror.’’ 17Paranoia is another feature. In the universe of the will, difference canbe visible only as opposition, and opposition itself becomes indistinguishablefrom treason: according to Hegel’s own ever-so-speedy synopsis alldistinction as such eventually assumes the insidious appearance of a complotaristocratique. Antirevolution becomes legible as only counterrevolutionjust as foreign war and civil war come conceptually to coalesce. Theenemy is always already inside the gate, and Polyneices is the prototype ofthe disowned other: the outside on the inside is the foreign body engen385dered through the repression that violently and summarily expels it. Thelaw of suspects is thus for Hegel not a distortion of or contingent deviationfrom the revolution but its essential outcome, and finds its perfect corollaryin the mass-production of the corpse—the theoretical sniffing out ofalterity here implying its practical snuffing out in the will’s own escalatingcycle of tautological self-affirmation.The guillotine serves to cancel out the phantom objectivity created bythe law of suspects according to which imaginary counterfactual intentionsassume the status of objective guilt. Suspicion is the epistemology of a worlddevoid of enduring objects—alterity has to be constructed and denouncedas if discovered if only in order to be refuted, purged, and eliminated—anddecapitation is at once the traumatic literalization, the allegorization, andthe repetitive self-deconstruction of this aporetic, circular epistemology.Hegel’s philosophical exegesis of the guillotine goes beyond Foucault’sown unforgettable description, in Discipline and Punish, of the transitionfromthe lurid Baroque ‘‘festivals of cruelty’’ (the extravaganzas of public torture)to themodern production of the criminal’s body as an undifferentiatedinstrument on which punishment can be administered within the homogenoustransparency of a penal regime. Hegel emphasizes not only the modernbanalization of death—its reduction to the anonymous numericity ofthe production line, its submission to new rituals of hygiene and efficiency,its recuperation by the state as secular or civil function—and the establishmentof a new disciplinary regime.His target is the paradox of amurder thatstrips away not only the life but the antecedent subjectivity of the victim:the guillotine’s essential action is to render itself essentially redundant orinessential.The guillotine provides the practical confirmation of the object’sessential nonexistence in that it strips even death itself of its singularityand intensity: the machine retroactively retracts theminimal recognition itsimultaneously concedes its victim (as worthy of suspicion) in that it directsitself in the first instance against the already nullified nonentity of the lostobject.The quicklime that is to swallow up the corpse within the anonymity ofthe mass grave only confirms that we are here in the region of what Adornowill eventually call the ‘‘philosopheme of pure identity’’—that is, death inits most unsublimated, insignificant uniformity: modern death. Creon’sPyrrhic victory is near complete. Hegel here names a death ‘‘which has noinner significance or filling, for what is negated is the empty point of theabsolutely free self ’’ (590).Themachine only perfects and ritualistically for386malizes the evacuation of alterity that Hegel finds implicit at the very originsof modern democratic sovereignty. Thus Hegel’s chilling description,so contemporary in its resonance, of the ‘‘cold, matter of fact annihilation ofthis existent self, from which nothing else can be taken away but its merebeing’’ (591).Among the many paradoxes of the guillotine is that it simultaneouslyenforces and erodes the distinction between dying and living: the momentof death becomes at once precise, punctual, identifiable, and indeterminate—both measurable and endlessly uncertain. Decapitation at once isthe answer to the (at the time) prevalent fear of live burial, and feeds thisanxiety. The fall of the blade marks the transitionless transition from analready mortified existence to the posthumous mortality of a subject forwhom the very difference between life and death—as between subjectivityand objectivity, between humanity and machinality—has been eroded.Thus the famous cabbage-heads—Hegel’s startling anticipation of Heidegger’snotorious comparison of the death camps with modern agribusiness.We are probably as close as it is possible to get, circa 1800, to whatAdorno will later theorize, in Negative Dialectics as the impossible, Auschwitzeancondition of ‘‘dying today.’’ Tempting as it is, the comparison is,however, insidious and must be resisted.18Terror is thus neither explained away byHegel on circumstantial grounds—the exceptional security measures improvised by a young republic strugglingto sustain itself in the face of an extraordinary array of contingentpressures, from foreign wars to internal counterrevolutionary upheavals,from bread shortages to whatever—nor mystified as some kind of inexplicablediabolical cataclysmic eruption. For Hegel, unlike for Kant, the revolutionis a block: the terror cannot be surgically excised as a local anomaly,387deformation, or betrayal of its founding principles, the revolution does notsplinter into essential and inessential, structural and incidental. Indeed anyattempt to define the chronological boundaries of the terror—to confine itto a sixteen-month interval as a temporary deviation from the revolution—arguably only prolongs the persecutory logic that is contained (a paradoxexemplified by the Thermidorian counterterrorist reaction and the virulentculture of denunciation it perpetuated: Thermidor is itself the prototype ofevery war on terrorism).19 ForHegel, therefore, the terror proper begins notwith the law of 22 Prairial, not with the law of suspects, not with the regicidein January 1793, not with the king’s arrest and trial, not with the Septembermassacres of 1792, not with the riots at the Tuileries on August 10,1792, not with the suspensive veto of the 1791 Constitution, and not withthe storming of the Bastille. Hegel backdates the terror to the very onsetof the revolution, if not before—June 17, 1789, the day the E´tats Ge´ne´rauxspontaneously and virtually unanimously recreated itself as the Assemble´eNationale as sole agent and embodiment of the nation’s will.With the tennis-court oath, the ex nihilo transition of the tiers e´tat from‘‘nothing’’ to ‘‘everything’’ is announced and performatively accomplished:the oath both marks and makes the people’s transition from political nullityto the ‘‘complete nation’’ that it will retroactively determine itself alwaysalready to have been. As structurally complete, the nation must eliminatewhat falls outside it as an excrescence whose existence is a contradiction:the founding act of revolutionary democracy is thus the purge. This literalizationof Abbe´ Sieye`s’ formula thus determines political modernity as afellowship of terror. And with this gesture, writes Hegel, ‘‘the undividedsubstance of absolute freedom ascends to the throne of the world withoutany power being able to resist it’’ (585).In identifying terror with the very onset of the revolutionHegel has beenpredictably compared to Burke (whose Reflections on the Revolution in Francehad been translated into German almost immediately and indeed in thepages of Hegel’s own favorite journal), to Bonald and Taine (for whom theslide from the revolution of liberty to the despotism of equality was implicitfrom the outset) or even to de Maistre (for whom the terror was both theinevitable outcome of and God’s providential punishment for the hubris ofhuman self-assertion). These comparisons have a tiny degree of justice—and Hegel’s own unwarranted savagery toward Rousseau (in the Philosophyof Right and the History of Philosophy), it must be said, does nothing to discouragethem, although his rhetoric stops well short of Burke’s own hys388terical denunciation of Rousseau as an ‘‘insane Socrates.’’ Hegel has muchto account for, not least his general sourness about the July Revolution andperceived sycophancy toward the censors at Berlin—what was ultimatelyeven within his lifetime to earn him his reputation (undeserved, as it happens)as ideologue of the Restoration. At Berlin, as well, there is this embarrassing(one might say, abstract) tendency to conflate everything—terrorism,mysticism, Hinduism, Islamic fundamentalism, Rousseau, ThomasMunzer, Anabaptism, Judaism, whatever—within the same soup of abstractnegativity.20 Terror is not only what you get when you put abstract ideasinto practice—what both Burke and Hegel (as well as Tocqueville, Schiller,and so many others) will identify as the occupational hazard of ‘‘Frenchtheory.’’ Terror is not just the result of philosophical abstraction: it is itselfthe abstraction that in leaping from ‘‘all to all’’ (Rousseau’s 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 itselfand proves irrelevant. Hegel’s unflinching identification of terror as theinauguration of political modernity does not prevent him from attemptingto absorb it as inevitable, comprehensible, and infinitely productive. I’mnot referring to Hegel’s personal sensibilities—the dance around the freedomtree, the annual toast on Bastille Day, and so on—gestures which inthemselves are the standard reflex of the liberal intelligentsia that wouldtake 1789 without the rest: Hegel is virtually unique among his contemporariesfor having tried to deconstruct this squeamish liberalism. Nor canone demarcate the line between endorsement and repudiation by means ofperiodization (the young student rhapsodic at Tübingen, the old man disillusionedat Berlin) or even according to standard psychological categoriessuch as ambivalence.Hegel’s visible hesitation between an unqualified andlyrical ‘‘enthusiasm’’ (his—Kantian—word) for the ‘‘glorious mental dawn’’risen in France and his unequivocal condemnation of this same event asthe ‘‘most fearful tyranny’’ is expressed in the same text and in the samebreath,21 and moreover we find this hesitation expressed consistently from1794 to 1830. Indeed it may not be possible to disentangle them.In taking absolute-freedom-and-terror as a package Hegel perhaps comesclosest to those—from Tocqueville to Lefort, from Furet to Gauchet—whowould insert the French Revolution as one more episode within the longue389dure´e of European absolutism: revolutionary democracy both interruptsand prolongs—prolongs through interrupting—the theological-politicalheritage, and herein lies at once its promise and its danger. Tocquevillerecalls Mirabeau’s reassuring letter to the king, less than a year into therevolution, that ‘‘the modern idea of a single class of citizens on an equalfooting’’ should ultimately provide a smooth surface on which royal powercould all the more easily apply itself.22 Centralization provides the essentialhinge between ancien re´gime and revolutionarymodernity: the decisiveshift—the ‘‘first revolution’’—is not the transition frommonarchy to republicbut rather the self-subverting passage withinmonarchism itself from anolder feudal apparatus (with its intricate corporate hierarchies and particularisms)to the absolute monarchy that, by accumulating for itself all localprivilege, reconstitutes the body politic as a homogeneous mass capable forthe first time of functioning as a unified, collective subject. In the hypertrophyof the monarchy lies the germ of the modern egalitarian nation.For these writers, therefore, the regicide is the symbolic inauguration ofpolitical modernity: the instantaneous and total transfer of absolute sovereigntyfrom king to people. The fall of the blade marks the sublime instantseparating and thereby fusing before and after, ancien re´gime and revolutionaryrepublic: Le roi estmort—vive la patrie. This sacrificial logic was ceremoniallyenacted on January 21, 1793 in an event marked, at least accordingto all the narratives, by sacred pomp and ceremony. It was formalized at theking’s trial when Robespierre invokes the ‘‘baptismal’’ quality of the execution.‘‘The king must die because the nation must live’’: an infinite investmentin the sacral body of the king must be generated by the staging ofthe latter’s infinite divestment. The regeneration of the people is nothingother than the restoration of a nation’s body to itself through the expropriationof the expropriator. The regicide thus marks what Daniel Arasse hascalled the perfect ‘‘syncope de la sacralite´ ’’: the banal death of Louis Capetis the consecration of the nation.23 And from such a baptism flow all thecontradictions of modernity: the inaugural self-betrayal of democracy inever-more-inventive forms of terror.Although Hegel barely pauses at the regicide, he is perhaps the first tonote the link between the terrors of modern democracy and the disavowedfundamentalism on which it rests; he is the first also to make the connectionbetween this disavowal and the compulsive construction of fanaticismas the terrifying fundamentalism of the Other: war on terror is democracy’sown way of abjecting what remains its own darkest secret to itself through390ritualistically repetitive projection. Insight needs faith, and modern democracyis just the story of their violent symbiosis within the endless melancholiaof an ungrieved loss.WhatClaude Lefort calls the persistence of the theological-politicalmightbe understood as a kind of fetishism: the filling of the empty place left bythe evacuation of the divinely sanctionedmonarchy—the self-production ofthe body politic of the people as power incarnate.24 The sacramental substitutionof people for king immediately closes the space it opens up—lackis, perversely, simultaneously acknowledged and disavowed—and can beunderstood as the prototype for every politics of fusion, in the face of whichgenuine democracy, in Lefort’s terms, must mobilize itself as a perpetualnegotiation to maintain the empty place as an active vacancy rather than asthe usual power vacuum into which anything and everything might flow.One might understand this as a kind of mourning.Hegel goes further in that he establishes that the place was always, intruth, empty. The risk is not simply that of reinstating absolutism throughrevolutionary dictatorship: absolutemonarchy was already itself an ‘‘emptyname,’’ ornaments clustering around an empty throne, and it is this originaryloss that enlightenment both covers up and transmits, which it commemoratesthrough disavowal—the emptiness at the very heart of the symbolicorder. Nor does this loss begin with the self-evacuation of absolutemonarchy: the emptiness of the king’s name is itself only the delayed registrationof the ‘‘ruination’’ (476) into which beautiful Sittlichkeit had fromthe start been thrown, and therewith the shattering of any fantasy of fulfillmentalong organic lines—the ‘‘infinite grief ’’ of a world splintered into amechanical aggregate of abstract spiritual atoms (as Hegel was to describethe political situation inaugurated by imperial Rome) and the institution of‘‘right’’ as such as the asocial principle of political association. The experienceof Bildung can be understood therefore not as a progressive accumulationof meaning but rather as the unconscious, blanked-out transmissionof a void that has almost the quality of an Abraham/Torok-style crypt; weare close to what Benjamin describes, in his Kafka essay, as the ‘‘sickness oftradition’’: tradition in and of the very absence of a determinate content tobe transmitted, transmission of the impossibility of transmission—that is,the transmission of trauma.The abyss of untrammeled negativity—the revolutionary ‘‘fury of destruction’’—is just the condensation, the literalization, and the hyperbolicdemonstration of the emptiness that has been plaguing Spirit from thestart. It does not function as the eruption of some kind of singular excess391or irrecuperable exception to the system, as a certain Bataillean readingmight suggest. Rather the seeming exception is here in truth the rule:unworked negativity is less a distortion than the prototype of Spirit’s dialectic.Absolute-freedom-and-terror does not somuch deviate from the trajectoryof the Phenomenology as illuminate its essential logic.The meaninglessdeath on the scaffold is both the culmination and the retrospectivecommentaryon the entire history of spirit to this point. It crystallizes by exaggeratingto a point of absurdity what could have escaped no reader: there neverhas been so far, in fact, a death that actually worked. Either the burial wasblocked, like Polyneices’—society was not up to it—or the sacrifice provedvain, like the feudal knight’s. In the dismembered body of the suspect theaccumulated debt of Spirit comes to a head: nonrecognition, nonproductivity,noncommemoration, nonredemption.Hegel’s wager is of course to discharge by consolidating that debt: to makethis worklessness work in such a way that the slaughter bench of historymight present itself as the Golgotha of Spirit and melancholia thereforesupersede itself in mourning. In this light he seeks to redeem by radicalizingthe Christian wager by sharpening the antithesis between finite andinfinite to the point of seemingly unbridgeable, undialectical disjunction:the flat death on the scaffold puts symbolization to its most radical test,and in the extremity of its resistance supplies the measure of Spirit’s mostprodigious power of recuperation.This is essentially the story that follows absolute-freedom-and-terror, asSpirit takes possession of its very self-dispossession as it comes to recognizeits losses as, in truth, its own. With the will’s own self-encounter aspure ‘‘unfilled negativity’’ Spirit takes on its nothingness as its very own—symbolically assumes the castration it had both inflicted and suffered—andin this traumatic recognition thereby translates or determines immediacy(abstract or indeterminate negativity) as, precisely, mediation. Radical lossthus congeals into the ultimate acquisition of a subjectwhose ultimate heroismis to find self-possession in the act of self-dispossession: the void itselfhere becomes, formoral consciousness, a kind of preemptive filling. Terroris in this way retroactively integrated as the condition of possibility of theself-willing will and marks the rebirth of the subject from the ashes of itsmost profound desubjectification.At this point the burden ‘‘passes over to another land’’ (595): the ‘‘unreal392world’’ in which Germanmoral philosophy in working out its own problemssimultaneously discharges the legacy of the revolution and therebymourns,commemorates, and eventually redeems enlightenment’s own compulsiveattachment to a faith it must let go. The elaboration and eventual selfovercomingof Kantian-stylemoral rigorism is therefore forHegel identicalwith the attainment of (what he calls) true religion, which in its complexrationality is to resolve the antinomy of insight and superstition on whichthe revolution itself had, byHegel’s own reading, short-circuited.One couldthus argue that the task of German Idealism is just the interrogation andredemption of the thwarted promise of the revolution—absolute-freedomand-terror on trial. ‘‘Morality’’ is philosophical Thermidor.In this turn from Terror to Kant, Hegel is at once his most conventionaland his most inventive. If he comes very close to reproducing the standardGerman idealist self-interpretation of the relation between philosophy andterror—Protestant-style freedom of the will as at once the exegesis, the phenomenologicalsuccessor, and the determinate negation or overcoming ofFrench revolutionary action—he also slightly displaces this solution, at leastto the extent that he immediately establishes that Kantian-stylemorality initself does nothing manifestly to redeem the blocked promise of the revolution.Hegel makes it bitterly clear thatthe evaporation of objectivity within the violent hyperbole of a subjectivitybent on reproducing itself within a world it must disavow. In the PhenomenologyHegel 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 specificallyfulminated against what Hegel identified as a Jewish form of terrorism:the vengeful, genocidal purism, with which Hegel’s Kant was alsohere more or less assimilated, but he does not essentially soften his earlierreading.And these problemswill only be aggravated asmorality passes over inexorablyand almost indiscernibly into its tangled Fichtean, Schillerean, andRomantic phase (the various strands are at times difficult to unravel), whereit will prove to be the very same drive for purity which finally convicts a consciencethat in its desperate bid for a restored immediacy ultimately fails toconvince either others or, in the end, itself. Hegel acidly observes how theanarchicmoral autarchy pioneered by Fichte’s revision of Kant slides, under393Romanticism, into a narcissistic aestheticism, aestheticism into paralyzingpurism, and eventually into a self-serving harangue that catastrophicallyfails to recognize itself in what it most reviles. Hegel spares no irony indescribing the fastidiousness of the aesthete turned moral onlooker whoseself-admiration is matched only by his horror of engagement.The final turn,under Romanticism, tomoral genius as an answer to the aporias ofmoralitywill complete the conversion of politics into aesthetics, of revolution intospectacle, and will establish German ideology around 1800 as above all anaesthetics of the beautiful. Hegel’s analysis will in turn show beauty itselfto be an infinitely destructive ideal.Hegel does not, then, or does not only, reproduce the standard Germanresponse to the French Revolution: the well-traveled route from politicalrevolution to moral regeneration and thence, inexorably, to the aestheticupheaval which is, effectively, the modernist autonomous work of art—the‘‘revolution in poetic language’’ that marks the seemingly one-way streetfrom modernity to aesthetic modernism. He in effect stages it in orderto denaturalize it or make it strange, almost as a thought experiment thatpushed to its extreme will be forced to refute itself, and with it every fantasyof innocent spectatorship. The moral view of the world is just onemore phantasm Spirit will have had to work through, suffer, and eventuallyexpose in all its vengeful, compensatory violence.It would be an exaggeration to say that Hegel’s overcoming of Kant andcompany makes good on the failed promise of the revolution or that hefinally escapes the asceticism he so severely challenges. But with this gesturehe both prolongs and reigns back, if only for a moment, the inevitabletemptation to slide from a phenomenology of embodied freedom to a noumenologyof the will. As such he returns thought to the order of experience—even if, perhaps, it is ultimately a question of amissed experience, alapsed experience, or even, in the end, another’s experience: an experience394that came knocking only to find (as Benjamin was eventually to formulateit in a rather different context) that ‘‘we, the masters [wir, die Herrschaft],’’were not home.1 For some of the details of this decision, see Dale van Kley, ‘‘Origins of an Anti-HistoricalDeclaration,’’ in Dale van Kley, ed., The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and theDeclaration of Rights of 1789 (Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 1994), 72–113, andKeithBaker, ‘‘Fixing the French Constitution,’’ in Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the FrenchRevolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 261–71. For the key debatesleading up to the adoption of the first Declaration of the Rights of Man, see Antoinede Baecque,Wolfgang Schmale, and Michel Vovelle, L’an 1 des droits de l’homme (Paris:Presses du CNRS, 1988).2 Comte Stanislas de Clermont-Tonerre’s report on July 27 to the constitutional committeeof the Assemble´e Nationale is here emblematic when he identifies the inclusion of adeclaration of rights as ‘‘the only difference between the cahiers that call for a new constitutionand those that call for only the reestablishment of what they regard as an existingconstitution’’ (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 in which the guarantee of rights is not secured . . . has no constitution.’’3 For some of the visual representations (both revolutionary and royalist) of both the Declarationand 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, 6–28.4 SeeJ.-P.Babelon,Archives nationales, Muse´e de l’histoire de France, vol. 4 (Paris: Publisher,1965), 84. The decree, presented by Gilbert Romme in the name of the Committee onPublic Safety, is quoted by Ribner, Broken Tablets, 15 (together with some photographs ofboth the mutilated Declaration and the similarly vandalized Constitution of 1791, whichwas exhumed by the same order in 1793).5 Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe, vol. 2, ed. Ernst Behler andHans Eichner (Munich/Paderborn: Schoningh, 1958–1987), 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-identicalformulation 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 efforts to integratethe French Revolution, see Richard Brinkmann, ‘‘Fruhromantik und FranzosischeRevolution,’’ in Deutsche Literatur und Franzosische Revolution: Sieben Studien (Gottingen:Vandenhoeck, 1974), 172–91.8 Johann GottfriedHerder, Briefe zu Befo¨rderung der Humanita¨t (1792), in Sa¨mtlicheWerke,ed. Bernhard Suphan (Berlin: Weidman, 1877–1917), 18:366.9 See Marie-He´le`ne Huet, Mourning Glory: TheWill of the French Revolution (Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 37.10 GeorgWilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Ox395fordUniversity 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 paragraphs551, 555, 556, 565, 580. Verleugnung is also howHegel describes faith’s own relationto an object.12 On Isolierung see Ibid., 567, 571; on Trennung, 565; and on Entzweiung, 579.13 On insight’s forgetfulness, see Ibid., 564, 568.14 ‘‘It is the . . . the defilement of Enlightenment through the adoption by its self-identicalpurity 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 aserror and prejudice’’ (548).15 On some of these tensions, see the essays by J. K.Wright, ‘‘National Sovereignty and theGeneral Will,’’ and Keith Michael Baker, ‘‘The Idea of a Declaration of Rights,’’ both inDale van Kley, ed., The French Idea of Freedom (Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 1994),as well as Marcel Gauchet, La Revolution des Droits de l’homme (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, Abre´ge´ de la metapolitique´ (Paris:Seuil, 1998).18 Simon Schama’s Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1989)makes the connection in a particularly flamboyant fashion, but the linkage is implicit inboth Jacob Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker andWarburg,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 prolongationof 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 de Tocqueville,TheOldRegime and theFrenchRevolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (NewYork: Anchor, 1955), 8.22 Daniel Arasse, Le guillotine et l’imaginaire de la terreur (Paris: Flammarion, 1987), 70.23 Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1988).24 This is the one time that the narrative of Spirit takes an explicitly nonchronological form;this might baffle readers who have come to expect a fit, at least at this stage of development,between phenomenology and chronology.This wrinkle of latency at the very heartof the present is precisely where the traumatic structure of history as a whole becomesfor the first time fully visible.25 Walter Benjamin, ‘‘The Image of Proust,’’ in SelectedWritings, vol. 2, ed.Michael Jennings,Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).