Dead Right: Hegel and the Terror

Comay, Rebecca.

The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 103, Number 2/3, Spring/Summer2004, pp. 375-395 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

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Rebecca Comay

Dead Right: Hegel and the Terror

Endlessly debated and redrafted in the fateful

summer of 1789, the first version of the Declara-

tion of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was

abruptly finalized by the Assemblée 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 ‘‘fixing’’ the French

Constitution to which the Declaration itself was

nonetheless to supply both the prefatory con-

text and the integral first 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 difference’’ between a

radically new constitution and the prolongation

of preexistent tradition.2Released separately, in

their unfinished forms, both the Declaration and

the eventual first 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

Sinai—by 1792 the Legislative Assembly decreed

The South Atlantic Quarterly 103:2/3, Spring/Summer 2004.

Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press.

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

l’Homme’’ and ‘‘Constitution’’3—an association that would in turn predict-

ably provoke a Mosaic violence directed against the threat of the law’s 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 first version of the Declaration of the Rights of Man was

exhumed from its burial place in the foundation of a projected—never to

be completed—monument 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 unfinished business.

The incident is compelling for a number of reasons. Aside from illustrat-

ing the general paradox of revolutionary negation—the insistent reinstate-

ment of tradition in and through the very erasure thereof—and quite apart

from the overdetermined pathos generated by this unburied corpse and

relic, it raises a very specific 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 themuseification of such a breach in

turn acknowledge an interminable mourning for an unfinished past? How

does the modern liberal idiom of human rights intersect with the political-

theological legacy of Bourbon absolutism at the moment of the latter’s 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?

Hegel’s 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 defining feature was increasingly

thought to be its founding violence: the slide from 1789 to 1793. According

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 off until doomsday the grab for practical fulfillment—the infi-

nite task.

Having undergone its own Reformation, that is, Germany could escape

the tumult at its own gates and thereby serve as the revolution’s 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 off 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’’

6—more comprehensive—revolution 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 prefigure, inspire, and eventually neutralize the revolution-

ary deliverance frommaterial bondage. For Schiller, an infinite 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 Revolution—its radical origi-

nality, its contingency—is 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

Hegel’s 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 earlier

attempt, in the Phenomenology, to derive the rise of revolutionary violencefrom the virulence of a rationality enthralled by the fanaticism it would beat

378 Rebecca Comay

down. Such reactivity—abstract negativity at its most truculent—essen-

tially defines for Hegel the culture of the French enlightenment at the end

of the ancien régime: the endless symbiosis of myth and self-mystifying

disenchantment. Germany would have already cut through this circle. The

‘‘northern principle’’—Lutheran freedom of thought—would 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 efficiency 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 (Hegel’s conjunction is really an apposition

or identity) ismerely the political expression of reason’s own fall into abstrac-tion in its panic flight 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, the

real economic problem, of every masochism. Flattery—the theatre of Ver-

sailles—was 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 sacrifice must be a vain one—something for nothing—or it is

not a sacrifice, and yet . . .) This was the rancorously funny inverted world of

Rameau’s nephew, who from the slightly tiresome perspective of the free-

floating intellectual almostmanaged 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. . . . But—and this will eventually become the linchpin

Dead Right 379

of Hegel’s analysis—in this very flight 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 insight’s uncomprehending attacks on the faithwhich itwould extir-

pate—Hegel’s analysis in the Phenomenology is wicked, unflinching, andnot without its own inquisitorial aggressivity—and 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. Hegel’s 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 museum’s own latent monu-

mentality—the implicit cult of art it would inaugurate, the reinstatement of

aura in the very production of surplus exhibition value—would in turn be

registered by recurrent fantasies of the museum in ruins, victim from the

outset of time’s own depredations: the essential paradox of a revolutionary

museum—the creation of a heritage of modernity—did not go unmarked.

Hubert Robert’s paintings of the rubble heaps of desecrated churches and

statues were immediately supplemented by his futuristic visions of the

newly founded revolutionary Louvre in ruins—paintings 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-

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 effigy of Nothing itself—now reified as yet another positivity painstaking

constructed so as to be demolished.9

Hegel insists that it makes no difference here whether reason’s 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, reason’s mortification of its supposed antithesis leaves as

legacy for future generations the toxic waste of the unburied dead—Creon’s

unending legacy to posterity. Hegel at one point describes the infinite

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 fine morning it gives its comrade a shove with the elbow and

bang! Crash! the idol lies on the floor’’—‘‘one fine 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 Spirit’s

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 off or abjected ‘‘one

knows not how’’ and just what is at stake in this unknowing. Hegel has just

explicitly identified enlightenment as melancholia.

German philosophy, according to Hegel’s reading, could cut through

this loop—having both enlightened and been enlightened by religion, it

could be spared the indignity of regressing back into an ever-more-mystified

(because demystified) form of it—and 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 Rightwill eventually argue)through the Prussian state apparatus that would come—with a stretch, and

Dead Right 381

I think Hegel knows this—to express this. Absolute knowing registers this

accommodation.

Terror as Melancholia

Hegel’s depiction of the difference betweenGermanphilosophy andFrench

enlightenment—the difference between the Aufklärung (self-understoodas reason’s own self-clarification or explication) and the lumières (self-misunderstood as reason’s illumination of a blind, superstitious other)—

might be understood as the difference betweenmourning andmelancholia.

In the first 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 figures can be harmlessly recycledwithin the ether of absolute knowing.

ThePhenomenology thus concludes by toasting Schiller’s ownpoetic rework-ing of the Eucharistic formula. ‘‘From the chalice of this realm of spirits

foams forth for Him his own infinitude’’: 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 that

it castigates and that it thereby prolongs as a stony relic or foreign body

blocking thought. Insight’s secret identification with what it reifies as an

alien or ‘‘changeling’’ (550) means disowning the rationality both of its

object and ultimately of itself as persecuting subject—‘‘enlightenment is

not very enlightened about itself ’’ (656)—which thus condemns it to a com-

pulsively repetitive, ritualistic reenactment of destructive disenchantment.

Hegel repeatedly uses Freud’s terminology throughout this section of the

Phenomenology: disavowal orVerleugnung—even perversion (Verkehrung)—characterizes insight’s relationship to what it assaults.

11Splitting, isola-

tion,12the stubborn forgetting

13of 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 afflicting insight condemns it to disown the

violence it perpetrates on a faith whose grief is matched only by insight’s

own manic jubilation: enlightenment fails to register faith’s losses as, in

truth, its very own. Insight matches Creon in the stubbornness of its re-

fusal to bury its dead: from the tyrant’s disrespect for the divine law we

have passed over to the philosophes’ desecration of divinity as such. Hegel

382 Rebecca Comay

describes insight’s stupid euphoria before the open grave of the world.

Whereas an expropriated faith slumpsmorosely before the rubble heap of a

world razed to emptiness, insight exultantly sets up house. Hegel’s descrip-

tion of faith’s anxious wandering from nothing to nothing is compelling:

Faith has lost the content which filled 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 earth’s ownership of every portion of it . . . what speaks

to Spirit is only a reality without substance and a finitude forsaken by

Spirit. Since faith is without any content and it cannot remain in this

void, or since, in going beyond the finite which is the sole content, it

finds 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 is

bestowed elsewhere. (573)

Hegel slyly suggests that faith’s afflictions will soon come to haunt enlight-

enment itself whose own sun will surely enough be blackened by faith’s

losses. ‘‘We shall see whether Enlightenment can remain satisfied: 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 unsatisfied yearning’’ (573). This blemish—the stain

or blind spot generated by insight’s own drive to purity14—will expose itself

alternatively as themystification of the lost object in the formof reifiednega-

tivity (the hypostasis of the supreme being devoid of predicates: enlight-

enment’s recourse to negative theology) or—the logical flipside—as 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 the

bereft subject whose grief is a secret even to itself: the melancholic identi-

fication with the lost object is here complete.

Everything that follows can be attributed to Enlightenment’s own dis-

avowed grief for the lost object which culminates in the revolution, here

effectively characterized as a violent passage à l’acte.Utilitarianism is the first

stop 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

Dead Right 383

mechanism regulated by a tepid pleasure principle committed to the rule of

maximum reciprocal serviceability: the gang or ‘‘troop’’ (Trupp) rampaging

like animals in the garden of Eden—Hegel’s startling, prescient anticipa-

tion of Nietzsche’s critique of utilitarianism as a herdmorality (560). Hegel

darkly suggests that this collective self-regulation is but a thinly veiled de-

fense against what lies beyond the pleasure principle—Hegel’s language

again almost literally anticipates Freud’s—that is, a death drive in which

enjoyment and transgressive self-destruction are indissolubly linked.

And here Hegel’s narrative takes on an intensity unmatched elsewhere

in the Phenomenology. The entire precipitation into terror is contained in

reason’s campaign against a world it can neither accommodate nor, in the

end, let go.

Cabbage-heads

Having defined 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 demystification, ma-

nipulation, and instrumentalization of externality to the latter’s 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 possess

it and exploit it—to a subject whose withdrawal from objectivity is seem-

ingly complete. Absolute freedom suspends the vestigial trace of difference

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

Être suprème. (586)

384 Rebecca Comay

Absolute freedom is terror as the infinitemelancholia of a self that knows

no 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 identifies as the

latter’s essential outcome the unending oscillation between the rock and

the hard place of dictatorship (‘‘a simple, inflexible cold universality’’), on

the one hand, and on the other hand—but the terms of Hegel’s descrip-

tion are almost identical—anarchy (‘‘the discrete, absolute hard rigidity and

self-willed atomism of actual self-consciousness’’) (590). Abstract individu-

alism is the principle—the scary link, for Hegel, between the seemingly

disparate ideologies of revolutionary decisionism, of social contractualism,

of absolutist nationalism, and of free-market liberalism—and 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 revolution’s own split pedigree betweenGallic absolut-

ism and an imported modern liberalism).15It 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 political—the incarnate divinity of the state itself—within the trans-

parent homogeneity of a civil society sutured together by the anonymous

rule of law.16With 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, difference can

be visible only as opposition, and opposition itself becomes indistinguish-

able from treason: according to Hegel’s 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-

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 finds its perfect corol-

lary in the mass-production of the corpse—the theoretical sniffing out of

alterity here implying its practical snuffing out in the will’s own escalating

cycle of tautological self-affirmation.

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 objects—alterity has to be constructed and denounced

as if discovered if only in order to be refuted, purged, and eliminated—and

decapitation is at once the traumatic literalization, the allegorization, and

the repetitive self-deconstruction of this aporetic, circular epistemology.

Hegel’s philosophical exegesis of the guillotine goes beyond Foucault’s

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 criminal’s body as an undifferentiated

instrument onwhich punishment can be administered within the homoge-

nous transparency of a penal regime. Hegel emphasizes not only the mod-

ern banalization of death—its reduction to the anonymous numericity of

the production line, its submission to new rituals of hygiene and efficiency,

its recuperation by the state as secular or civil function—and 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 guillotine’s essential action is to render itself essentially redundant or

inessential.The guillotine provides the practical confirmation of the object’s

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 first instance against the already nullified nonentity of the lost

object.

The quicklime that is to swallow up the corpse within the anonymity of

the mass grave only confirms that we are here in the region of what Adorno

will eventually call the ‘‘philosopheme of pure identity’’—that is, death in

its most unsublimated, insignificant uniformity: modern death. Creon’s

Pyrrhic victory is near complete. Hegel here names a death ‘‘which has no

inner significance or filling, for what is negated is the empty point of the

absolutely free self ’’ (590).Themachine only perfects and ritualistically for-

386 Rebecca Comay

malizes the evacuation of alterity that Hegel finds implicit at the very ori-

gins of modern democratic sovereignty. Thus Hegel’s 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, identifiable, and indetermi-

nate—both 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 mortified existence to the posthumous mortality of a subject for

whom the very difference between life and death—as between subjectivity

and objectivity, between humanity andmachinality—has 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 confirmation of the living death to

which life had seemingly been reduced—thus the proliferation of blush-

ing 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.

Thus the famous cabbage-heads—Hegel’s startling anticipation of Hei-

degger’s 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 whatever—nor mystified 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,

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 define the chronological boundaries of the terror—to confine it

to a sixteen-month interval as a temporary deviation from the revolution—

arguably only prolongs the persecutory logic that is contained (a paradox

exemplified by the Thermidorian counterterrorist reaction and the virulent

culture of denunciation it perpetuated: Thermidor is itself the prototype of

every war on terrorism).19ForHegel, 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 king’s 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 before—June 17, 1789, the day the États Généraux

spontaneously and virtually unanimously recreated itself as the Assemblée

Nationale as sole agent and embodiment of the nation’s will.

With the tennis-court oath, the ex nihilo transition of the tiers état from‘‘nothing’’ to ‘‘everything’’ is announced and performatively accomplished:

the oath both marks and makes the people’s 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 Abbé Sieyès’ 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 revolutionHegel has been

predictably compared to Burke (whoseReflections on the Revolution in Francehad been translated into German almost immediately and indeed in the

pages of Hegel’s 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 God’s providential punishment for the hubris of

human 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 dis-

courage them, although his rhetoric stops well short of Burke’s own hys-

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 Berlin—what 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 conflate everything—terror-

ism, mysticism, Hinduism, Islamic fundamentalism, Rousseau, Thomas

Munzer, Anabaptism, Judaism,whatever—within the same soupof abstract

negativity.20Terror is not only what you get when you put abstract ideas

into practice—what 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’’ (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 itself

and proves irrelevant. Hegel’s unflinching identification of terror as the

inauguration of political modernity does not prevent him from attempting

to absorb it as inevitable, comprehensible, and infinitely productive. I’m

not referring to Hegel’s personal sensibilities—the dance around the free-

dom tree, the annual toast on Bastille Day, and so on—gestures which in

themselves are the standard reflex 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 Tübingen, the old man dis-

illusioned at Berlin) or even according to standard psychological categories

such as ambivalence. Hegel’s visible hesitation between an unqualified and

lyrical ‘‘enthusiasm’’ (his—Kantian—word) 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,21and moreover we find 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 those—from Tocqueville to Lefort, from Furet to Gauchet—who

would insert the French Revolution as one more episode within the longue

Dead Right 389

durée of European absolutism: revolutionary democracy both interrupts

and prolongs—prolongs through interrupting—the theological-political

heritage, and herein lies at once its promise and its danger. Tocqueville

recalls Mirabeau’s 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.22Centralization provides the essen-

tial hinge between ancien régime and revolutionarymodernity: the decisive

shift—the ‘‘first revolution’’—is 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 homogeneousmass capable for

the first time of functioning as a unified, 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 régime and revolu-

tionary republic: Le roi est mort—vive la patrie. This sacrificial 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

king’s trial when Robespierre invokes the ‘‘baptismal’’ quality of the execu-

tion. ‘‘The king must die because the nation must live’’: an infinite invest-

ment in the sacral body of the king must be generated by the staging of

the latter’s infinite divestment. The regeneration of the people is nothing

other than the restoration of a nation’s body to itself through the expropria-

tion of the expropriator. The regicide thus marks what Daniel Arasse has

called the perfect ‘‘syncope de la sacralité ’’: the banal death of Louis Capet

is the consecration of the nation.23And from such a baptism flow 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 first to

note the link between the terrors of modern democracy and the disavowed

fundamentalism on which it rests; he is the first 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 democracy’s

own way of abjecting what remains its own darkest secret to itself through

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 filling of the empty place left by

the evacuation of the divinely sanctionedmonarchy—the self-production of

the body politic of the people as power incarnate.24The sacramental sub-

stitution of people for king immediately closes the space it opens up—lack

is, perversely, simultaneously acknowledged and disavowed—and can be

understood as the prototype for every politics of fusion, in the face of which

genuine democracy, in Lefort’s 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 flow.

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 disavowal—the 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 king’s 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 fulfill-

ment along organic lines—the ‘‘infinite 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 transmission—that is,

the transmission of trauma.

The abyss of untrammeled negativity—the revolutionary ‘‘fury of de-

struction’’—is 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

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 Spirit’s dialec-

tic. Absolute-freedom-and-terror does not so much deviate from the trajec-

tory of the Phenomenology as illuminate its essential logic. Themeaningless

death on the scaffold 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 Polyneices’—society was not up to it—or the sacrifice proved

vain, like the feudal knight’s. In the dismembered body of the suspect the

accumulated debt of Spirit comes to a head: nonrecognition, nonproduc-

tivity, noncommemoration, nonredemption.

‘‘. . . another land’’

Hegel’s 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 finite and

infinite 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 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 will’s own self-encounter as

pure ‘‘unfilled negativity’’ Spirit takes on its nothingness as its very own—

symbolically assumes the castration it had both inflicted and suffered—and

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 find self-possession in the act of self-dispossession: the void itself

here becomes, for moral consciousness, a kind of preemptive filling. 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 desubjectification.

At this point the burden ‘‘passes over to another land’’ (595): the ‘‘unreal

392 Rebecca Comay

world’’ inwhichGermanmoral philosophy inworking out its ownproblems

simultaneously discharges the legacy of the revolution and therebymourns,

commemorates, and eventually redeems enlightenment’s 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, byHegel’s 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 revolution—absolute-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

terror—Protestant-style freedom of the will as at once the exegesis, the phe-

nomenological successor, and the determinate negation or overcoming of

French revolutionary action—he 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 Hegel’s

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-nologyHegel 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-

cifically fulminated against what Hegel identified as a Jewish form of ter-

rorism: the vengeful, genocidal purism, with which Hegel’s 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 difficult to unravel), where

it will prove to be the very same drive for purity which finally 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 Fichte’s revision of Kant slides, under

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.Thefinal 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. Hegel’s analysis will in turn show beauty itself

to be an infinitely 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, effectively, the modernist autonomous work of art—the

‘‘revolution in poetic language’’ that marks the seemingly one-way street

from modernity to aesthetic modernism. He in effect 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, suffer, 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-

fils or supersedes it: Kant’s 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.25It 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 inflictson Kant’s own text a kind of retroactive trauma.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Hegel’s overcoming of Kant and

company makes good on the failed promise of the revolution or that he

finally 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-

ence—even if, perhaps, it is ultimately a question of a missed experience, a

lapsed experience, or even, in the end, another’s experience: an experience

394 Rebecca Comay

that came knocking only to find (as Benjamin was eventually to formulate

it in a rather different 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), 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 Antoine

de 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 commit-

tee of the Assemblée Nationale is here emblematic when he identifies the inclusion of a

declaration of rights as ‘‘the only difference 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 connection

explicit: ‘‘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, 6–28.

4 See J.-P. Babelon, Archives nationales, Musée de l’histoire 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 of

both 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, 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-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 efforts to inte-

grate the French Revolution, see Richard Brinkmann, ‘‘Fruhromantik und Franzosische

Revolution,’’ inDeutsche Literatur und Franzosische Revolution: Sieben Studien (Gottingen:Vandenhoeck, 1974), 172–91.

8 Johann Gottfried Herder, Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität (1792), in SämtlicheWerke,ed. Bernhard Suphan (Berlin: Weidman, 1877–1917), 18:366.

9 See Marie-Hélène Huet,Mourning Glory: The Will of the French Revolution (Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 37.

10 GeorgWilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Ox-

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 faith’s own relation

to 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-identical

purity of a negative attitude, that is an object for faith, which therefore comes to know

it 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 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, Abrégé de la metapolitiqué (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 in

both Jacob Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker and Warburg,

1952) and Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 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 l’imaginaire 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 baffle readers who have come to expect a fit, 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 first 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).