Rebecca Comay

Dead Right: Hegel and the Terror

Endlessly debated and redrafted in the fatefulsummer of 1789, the rst version of the Declara-

tion of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was

abruptly nalized by the Assemble Nationale

on August 27. The draft was published in its

truncated form with an explicit decision to sus-

pend further discussion until the more urgent

task had been achieved of xing the French

Constitution to which the Declaration itself was

nonetheless to supply both the prefatory con-

text and the integral rst chapter.1In a perfect

illustration of the logic of the supplement, the

Declaration was declared provisional pending

the completion of a constitution that would

itself in turn be incomplete without it insofar

as the presence or absence of such a manifesto

would mark the only dierence between a

radically new constitution and the prolongation

of preexistent tradition.2Released separately, in

their unnished forms, both the Declaration and

the eventual rst version of the Constitution to

which by 1791 it had attached itself were none-

theless invested from the outset with a biblical

authority conveyed by numerous iconographic

allusions to the tablets of the law handed down at

Sinaiby 1792 the Legislative Assembly decreed

The South Atlantic Quarterly 103:2/3, Spring/Summer 2004.Copyright 2004 by Duke University Press.

dayMuse

LeonardoSticky Notein The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 103, Number 2/3, Spring/Summer 2004, pp. 375-395.

376 Rebecca Comay

that its members would wear a tricolor ribbon bearing a medallion in the

shape of two round-headed tablets inscribed with the words Droits de

lHomme and Constitution3an association that would in turn predict-

ably provoke a Mosaic violence directed against the threat of the laws own

inaugural self-betrayal during the repeated revision of both documents

throughout the revolutionary period. In May 1793 a copper tablet of the

by-then obsolete rst version of the Declaration of the Rights of Man was

exhumed from its burial place in the foundation of a projectednever to

be completedmonument on the site of the demolished Bastille. By order

of the Convention the embalmed document was ritually mutilated and its

broken fragments deposited for perpetuity in the National Archives as a

historicalmonument.4The archive had come to congeal destruction itself

as a lasting memorial to its own powers of reinvention, and as a reminder,

too, of unnished business.

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

ing the general paradox of revolutionary negationthe insistent reinstate-

ment of tradition in and through the very erasure thereofand quite apart

from the overdetermined pathos generated by this unburied corpse and

relic, it raises a very specic question regarding the status of the revolution-

ary discourse of rights: the defaced tablet here carries the entire burden of

the tabula rasa. Does the damaged body of the text hint of an irrreparable

fracture within the law itself, and does themuseication of such a breach in

turn acknowledge an interminable mourning for an unnished past? How

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

theological legacy of Bourbon absolutism at the moment of the latters dis-

investment?What is the connection between the revolutionary caesura cre-

ated by the radical humanization of the law and the fundamentalist logic it

would interrupt?

Hegels analysis of the dialectic of secularization places terror itself at the

very heart of the modern political experiment.

Between Revolution and Reform

Hegel both reiterates and almost overturns the standard German ideol-

ogy according to which a revolution in thought would, in varying propor-

tions, precede, succeed, preempt, accommodate, comprehend, and gener-

ally upstage a political revolution whose dening feature was increasingly

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

Dead Right 377

to this ideology, from Schiller to Thomas Mann, Germany could simulta-

neously domesticate and dispense with political revolution by virtue of a

spirituality that would have already achieved the rationality to which the

French only clumsily, violently, impatiently, through their precipitous act-

ing out, could only aspire. Having already been there in theory, Germany

could put o until doomsday the grab for practical fulllmentthe in-

nite task.

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

the tumult at its own gates and thereby serve as the revolutions most lucid

and most passionate, because dispassionate, observer. Heine will remark,

only half in jest, that Kant had in any case far surpassedRobespierre in intel-

lectual terrorism: whereas the guillotinemanaged to kill o only a pathetic,

fat king who had lost his head anyway, the axe of reason had slain deism

itself throughout Germany. Schlegel will determine the French Revolution

as the allegory5of an other

6more comprehensiverevolution in the

mind that would simultaneously exceed and moderate the French slide to

despotic violence.7For Fichte, the deliverance from the tyranny of the thing-

in-itself would pregure, inspire, and eventually neutralize the revolution-

ary deliverance from material bondage. For Schiller, an innite adjustment

of sensibility or Gesinnung would forestall and vicariously alleviate the hor-rors of political revolution. For Kant, a moral revolution would suspend,

preempt, and ultimately absorb revolution thus rendering it consistentwith

the requirements of continuous reform.

Revolution here is at once, paradoxically, both singularized and relativ-

ized.The traumatic strangeness of the French Revolutionits radical origi-

nality, its contingencyis simultaneously asserted and denied as German

philosophy seeks to internalize this peculiar crisis within a larger move-

ment of thought.8The German revolution of the mind both precedes and

displaces the political revolution in exposing it to a spiritual afterlife as yet

unknown.

Dialectic of Disenchantment

Hegels version of this well-rehearsed story is at once orthodox and unpre-

dictable. His orthodox commitments are most explicit in the later Berlin

lectures on the Philosophy of History, which implicitly draw on his earlierattempt, in the Phenomenology, to derive the rise of revolutionary violencefrom the virulence of a rationality enthralled by the fanaticism it would beat

378 Rebecca Comay

down. Such reactivityabstract negativity at its most truculentessen-

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

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

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

northern principleLutheran freedom of thoughtwould have inocu-

lated the nation against political upheaval in that it had from the outset

achieved a secularization surpassing that attainable by mere enlighten-

ment. Having undergone, with the Reformation, its own immanent ratio-

nalization of faith,Germany could bypass the turmoil of revolution by evad-

ing the dialectic of enlightenment sketched with dizzying eciency in the

Phenomenology, according to which a benighted superstition could only beinsulted, assaulted, persecuted (and thereby prolonged, exaggerated, per-

verted) by a rationality blind to its own reasons and thus above all to its

fascinated complicity with the faith it would wipe out.

Absolute-freedom-and-terror (Hegels conjunction is really an apposition

or identity) ismerely the political expression of reasons own fall into abstrac-tion in its panic ight from the vertiginous disorientation of a collapsing

social order: courtiers clustering like ornaments, says Hegel, around the

throne of a shadow king whose very name had come to mean everything

and therefore nothing. Having expropriated the entire subjectivity of the

nation, the absolute monarch had revealed the truth that he was, in fact,

the dazzling emptiness of an image projected by a populace whose last-

ditch bid for uplift through reintegration had only catapulted them into the

chronic ressentiment of those in bondage to a nonmaster: the paradox, thereal economic problem, of every masochism. Flatterythe theatre of Ver-sailleswas at once the hyperbole of language, the very promise of univer-

sality, and had as such immediately deconstructed itself as pure performa-

tive self-contradiction: in naming you king I deprive myself, and therefore

you, and therefore cease to deprive myself, and so on, of the very subjec-

tivity I would impart. (Hegel has just in fact named the essential paradox of

the gift: the sacrice must be a vain onesomething for nothingor it is

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

Rameaus nephew, who from the slightly tiresome perspective of the free-

oating intellectual almost managed to see through it all, but in the end . . .not quite. Enter insight, together with its shadow brother faith, to which

insight attaches itself with increasingly ambivalent desperation as they seek

respectively to see through and beyond the shattered appearances of the

existing social world. . . . Butand this will eventually become the linchpin

Dead Right 379

of Hegels analysisin this very ight from objectivity reason both masks

and catastrophically perpetuates its own collusion with the faith it would

disavow.

Such a complicity betrays itself from the outset in the proselytizing fanati-

cismof insights uncomprehending attacks on the faithwhich itwould extir-

pateHegels analysis in the Phenomenology is wicked, uninching, andnot without its own inquisitorial aggressivityand are illustrated perfectly

by the orgiastic festivals of de-Christianization staged in the early 1790s:

from the smashing of the statues of the kings of Judaea to the consecration

of the Temple of Reason opened with great fanfare in the fall of 1794 in

the former church of Notre Dame. The sacral darkness of the cathedral had

been banished by brilliantly arranged stage lighting which, at the climax of

the celebration turned the spotlight on a young actress impersonating Rea-

son herself dressed in Roman gown and garlands. Hegels analysis of the

vicious circle of iconoclasm captures perfectly the spiral of revolutionary

destruction and the increasingly desperate attempts to control the fetishis-

tic circle of self-reifying negation throughout the revolutionary period and

indeed beyond.

These strategies are perhaps familiar but worth rehearsing. From the

decapitation of kings and nobles to the destruction and defacement of

monuments; from the renaming of streets and citizens to the recalibra-

tion of clock and calendar; from the plunder and dislocation of artworks

to their recontextualization within the newly founded national museums

that would simultaneously preserve and destroy them through neutralizing

disenchantment. (The ambivalence about the museums own latent monu-

mentalitythe implicit cult of art it would inaugurate, the reinstatement of

aura in the very production of surplus exhibition valuewould in turn be

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

outset of times own depredations: the essential paradox of a revolutionary

museumthe creation of a heritage of modernitydid not go unmarked.

Hubert Roberts paintings of the rubble heaps of desecrated churches and

statues were immediately supplemented by his futuristic visions of the

newly founded revolutionary Louvre in ruinspaintings that nowof course

hang securely in the Louvre.) In a further recursive doubling, a revolution-

ary iconoclasm would come to direct itself against the very iconoclasm that

had inevitably threatened to congeal into yet another dogmatism: erasures

would be erased, the newnaming systemwould be reversed, in 1794Robes-

pierre would institute the cult of the supreme being and therewith con-

380 Rebecca Comay

demn atheism as a new fanaticism: in his plans for the Festival of the

Supreme Being, David himself was to orchestrate a ritualistic burning of

the statue of Atheism itself, now consecrated and desecrated as the newest

idol. According to one eyewitness report, the festival included a burning of

an egy of Nothing itselfnow reied as yet another positivity painstaking

constructed so as to be demolished.9

Hegel insists that it makes no dierence here whether reasons assault on

its adversary is by way ofmissiles launched from a safe distance or by way of

an insidious viral contamination against which every remedy adopted only

aggravates the disease (to argue back is to identify with the aggressor, to

give reasons against reason, and thus for faith already to concede defeat).10

In either case, reasons mortication of its supposed antithesis leaves as

legacy for future generations the toxic waste of the unburied deadCreons

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

regress of idolatrous iconoclasm as a kind of germ warfare whose unnum-

bered casualties are all the more burdensome for going unmarked: enlight-

enment spreads its disease like a perfume in an unresisting atmosphere

and its vanquished enemies silently collect like ghosts.

One ne morning it gives its comrade a shove with the elbow and

bang! Crash! the idol lies on the oorone ne morning whose

noon is bloodless if the infection has penetrated to every organ of spiri-

tual life. Memory alone then preserves the dead form of the Spirits

shape as a vanished history [vergangeneGeschichte], vanished one knowsnot how. And the new serpent of wisdom raised on high for admiration

has in this way painlessly cast merely a withered skin. (545)

I will return to this dead form of a superstition cast o or abjected one

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

explicitly identied enlightenment as melancholia.

German philosophy, according to Hegels reading, could cut through

this loophaving both enlightened and been enlightened by religion, it

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

(because demystied) form of itand thus seems to bypass the vicious

circle of myth and enlightenment. Having already overcome the abstract

antinomy of faith and insight, Protestant Germany promises the recipro-

cal accommodation of religion and reason through its culture of spiritual

freedom, and ultimately (or so the Philosophy of Right will eventually argue)through the Prussian state apparatus that would comewith a stretch, and

Dead Right 381

I think Hegel knows thisto express this. Absolute knowing registers this

accommodation.

Terror as Melancholia

Hegels depiction of the dierence betweenGermanphilosophy andFrench

enlightenmentthe dierence between the Aufklrung (self-understoodas reasons own self-clarication or explication) and the lumires (self-misunderstood as reasons illumination of a blind, superstitious other)

might be understood as the dierence betweenmourning andmelancholia.

In the rst case, reason is able to internalize, relinquish, and surpass a reli-gion that has already precipitated into conceptual thought. Philosophy com-

memorates and discharges its debt to a religion so compatible that its essen-

tial gures can be harmlessly recycledwithin the ether of absolute knowing.

ThePhenomenology thus concludes by toasting Schillers ownpoetic rework-ing of the Eucharistic formula. From the chalice of this realm of spirits

foams forth for Him his own innitude: the sacramental ritual is remem-

bered, mourned, and philosophically neutralized in being circulated with-

out residue in the transparent medium of thought.

In the second case, reason disavows its own identity with the faith thatit castigates and that it thereby prolongs as a stony relic or foreign body

blocking thought. Insights secret identication with what it reies as an

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

object and ultimately of itself as persecuting subjectenlightenment is

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

pulsively repetitive, ritualistic reenactment of destructive disenchantment.

Hegel repeatedly uses Freuds terminology throughout this section of the

Phenomenology: disavowal or Verleugnungeven perversion (Verkehrung)characterizes insights relationship to what it assaults.

11Splitting, isola-

tion,12

the stubborn forgetting13

of the lost object: Hegel has here just

sketched the defensive apparatus of a subject bent on sustaining itself on

what it gives up.

The constitutivemelancholia aicting insight condemns it to disown the

violence it perpetrates on a faith whose grief is matched only by insights

own manic jubilation: enlightenment fails to register faiths losses as, in

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

fusal to bury its dead: from the tyrants disrespect for the divine law we

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

382 Rebecca Comay

describes insights stupid euphoria before the open grave of the world.

Whereas an expropriated faith slumps morosely before the rubble heap of a

world razed to emptiness, insight exultantly sets up house. Hegels descrip-

tion of faiths anxious wandering from nothing to nothing is compelling:

Faith has lost the content which lled its element, and collapses into

a state in which it moves listlessly to and fro within itself. It has been

expelled from its kingdom; or, this kingdomhas been ransacked, since

the waking consciousness has monopolized every distinction . . . [and]

has vindicated earths ownership of every portion of it . . . what speaks

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

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

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

nds only the void, it is a sheer yearning, its truth an empty beyond,for which a tting content can no longer be found, for everything is

bestowed elsewhere. (573)

Hegel slyly suggests that faiths aictions will soon come to haunt enlight-

enment itself whose own sun will surely enough be blackened by faiths

losses. We shall see whether Enlightenment can remain satised: that

yearning of the troubled spirit which mourns over the loss of its spiritual

world lurks in the background. Enlightenment itself bears within it this

blemish [Makel ] of an unsatised yearning (573). This blemishthe stainor blind spot generated by insights own drive to purity

14will expose itself

alternatively as themystication of the lost object in the formof reiednega-

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

enments recourse to negative theology) orthe logical ipsideas the

empty materialism that makes do with lukewarm leftover matter (all that

remains once thought has abstracted all sensuous properties) (577).Hegel

describes this turgidmateriality as exhibiting a listless aimlessmovement

(dumpfesWeben) (577) that matches perfectly the listless movement of thebereft subject whose grief is a secret even to itself: the melancholic identi-

cation with the lost object is here complete.

Everything that follows can be attributed to Enlightenments own dis-

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

eectively characterized as a violent passage lacte.Utilitarianism is the rststop along the way, described by Hegel as the vandalism which appropri-

ates,manipulates, and consumes the last shred of objectivity, including that

of the intersubjective social world, which is reduced to a collective survival

Dead Right 383

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

maximum reciprocal serviceability: the gang or troop (Trupp) rampaginglike animals in the garden of EdenHegels startling, prescient anticipa-

tion of Nietzsches critique of utilitarianism as a herd morality (560). Hegel

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

fense against what lies beyond the pleasure principleHegels language

again almost literally anticipates Freudsthat is, a death drive in which

enjoyment and transgressive self-destruction are indissolubly linked.

And here Hegels narrative takes on an intensity unmatched elsewhere

in the Phenomenology. The entire precipitation into terror is contained inreasons campaign against a world it can neither accommodate nor, in the

end, let go.

Cabbage-heads

Having dened itself as negative, reason embarks on an annihilating mis-

sion that will culminate in a fury of destruction. The retreat from objec-

tivity escalates as Spirit progressively moves from the demystication, ma-

nipulation, and instrumentalization of externality to the latters eventual

suspension, elimination, and extermination: thus the unstoppable move-

ment from insight through utility to the self-transparency of the general

will. The transition from utility to absolute freedom is the almost indis-

cernible but critical transition from a subject which still needs to project

at least an empty show of objectivity (583)it has to treat the object asif it were something alien (586, italics mine) if only in order to possessit and exploit itto a subject whose withdrawal from objectivity is seem-

ingly complete. Absolute freedom suspends the vestigial trace of dierence

still implicit in instrumental reason and both consummates and overturns

this, as utility yields to a delirious potlatch of useless, meaningless destruc-

tion. With an exquisitely Nietzschean sensitivity Hegel here smells a rat:

the putrid stench of the unburied corpse of the abandoned object still wafts

unpleasantly from the open grave of the world.

The individual consciousness itself is directly in its own eyes that

which had [previously] had only a semblance of an antithesis; it is uni-versal consciousness and will. The beyond of this its actual existencehovers over the corpse of the vanished independence of real being, or

the being of faith,merely as the exhalation of a stale gas, of the vacuous

tre suprme. (586)

384 Rebecca Comay

Absolute freedom is terror as the innitemelancholia of a self that knowsno other. Its essence is to recognize no obstacle, no mediating agency, no

local nuance or detour that might delay or dilute the passage from individu-

ality to totality or frompart towhole and back again: the individualwill fuses

with the universal immediately, totally, without residue.

Direct democracy is only one of its many features. Hegel identies as the

latters essential outcome the unending oscillation between the rock and

the hard place of dictatorship (a simple, inexible cold universality), on

the one hand, and on the other handbut the terms of Hegels descrip-

tion are almost identicalanarchy (the discrete, absolute hard rigidity and

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

alism is the principlethe scary link, for Hegel, between the seemingly

disparate ideologies of revolutionary decisionism, of social contractualism,

of absolutist nationalism, and of free-market liberalismand can account

for the oft-noted and otherwise inexplicable tension within the Declaration

of Rights itself between the apparently irreconcilable poles of individual

rights and national sovereignty, between the right of each (against all) and

the right of all (against each), between the rights of man and the rights of

citizen, between private and public liberty (a tension only partially expli-

cable in terms of the revolutions own split pedigree betweenGallic absolut-

ism and an imported modern liberalism).15

It is in each case, for Hegel, the

lost ligature of the social bond which is registered without being acknowl-

edged: the loss of the binding power of religion as religare, the splintering ofthe community into an aggregate of volitional atoms, and the foreclosure

of the politicalthe incarnate divinity of the state itselfwithin the trans-

parent homogeneity of a civil society sutured together by the anonymous

rule of law.16

With the assumption of mass sovereignty as a sovereignty of

immediacy we have the outline of the Sartean group-in-fusion: the end-

less reversibility of democracy and dictatorship within what Alain Badiou

has called a fellowship of terror.17

Paranoia is another feature. In the universe of the will, dierence can

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

able from treason: according to Hegels own ever-so-speedy synopsis all

distinction as such eventually assumes the insidious appearance of a com-plot aristocratique. Antirevolution becomes legible as only counterrevolu-tion just as foreign war and civil war come conceptually to coalesce. The

enemy is always already inside the gate, and Polyneices is the prototype of

the disowned other: the outside on the inside is the foreign body engen-

Dead Right 385

dered through the repression that violently and summarily expels it. The

law of suspects is thus for Hegel not a distortion of or contingent deviation

from the revolution but its essential outcome, and nds its perfect corol-

lary in the mass-production of the corpsethe theoretical sning out of

alterity here implying its practical snung out in the wills own escalating

cycle of tautological self-armation.

The guillotine serves to cancel out the phantom objectivity created by

the law of suspects according to which imaginary counterfactual intentions

assume the status of objective guilt. Suspicion is the epistemology of aworld

devoid of enduring objectsalterity has to be constructed and denounced

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

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

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

Hegels philosophical exegesis of the guillotine goes beyond Foucaults

own unforgettable description, in Discipline and Punish, of the transitionfrom the lurid Baroque festivals of cruelty (the extravaganzas of public tor-

ture) to themodern production of the criminals body as an undierentiated

instrument onwhich punishment can be administered within the homoge-

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

ern banalization of deathits reduction to the anonymous numericity of

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

its recuperation by the state as secular or civil functionand the establish-

ment of a newdisciplinary regime.His target is the paradox of amurder that

strips away not only the life but the antecedent subjectivity of the victim:

the guillotines essential action is to render itself essentially redundant or

inessential.The guillotine provides the practical conrmation of the objects

essential nonexistence in that it strips even death itself of its singularity

and intensity: the machine retroactively retracts the minimal recognition it

simultaneously concedes its victim (as worthy of suspicion) in that it directs

itself in the rst instance against the already nullied nonentity of the lost

object.

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

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

will eventually call the philosopheme of pure identitythat is, death in

its most unsublimated, insignicant uniformity: modern death. Creons

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

inner signicance or lling, for what is negated is the empty point of the

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

386 Rebecca Comay

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

gins of modern democratic sovereignty. Thus Hegels chilling description,

so contemporary in its resonance, of the cold, matter of fact annihilation of

this existent self, from which nothing else can be taken away but its mere

being (591).

Among the many paradoxes of the guillotine is that it simultaneously

enforces and erodes the distinction between dying and living: the moment

of death becomes at once precise, punctual, identiable, and indetermi-

nateboth measurable and endlessly uncertain. Decapitation at once is

the answer to the (at the time) prevalent fear of live burial, and feeds this

anxiety. The fall of the blade marks the transitionless transition from an

already mortied existence to the posthumous mortality of a subject for

whom the very dierence between life and deathas between subjectivity

and objectivity, between humanity and machinalityhas been eroded. The

obsessive fantasies of survival entertained by the popular imaginary of the

guillotine, and that preoccupied both literature and medical science from

the 1790s, are but the inversion and conrmation of the living death to

which life had seemingly been reducedthus the proliferation of blush-

ing heads, talking heads, suering heads, heads that dreamed, screamed,

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

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

throughout Europe.

Thus the famous cabbage-headsHegels startling anticipation of Hei-

deggers notorious comparison of the death camps with modern agribusi-

ness. We are probably as close as it is possible to get, circa 1800, to what

Adorno will later theorize, in Negative Dialectics as the impossible, Ausch-witzean condition of dying today. Tempting as it is, the comparison is,

however, insidious and must be resisted.18

Horror vacui

Terror is thus neither explained away byHegel on circumstantial grounds

the exceptional security measures improvised by a young republic strug-

gling to sustain itself in the face of an extraordinary array of contingent

pressures, from foreign wars to internal counterrevolutionary upheavals,

from bread shortages to whatevernor mystied as some kind of inexpli-

cable diabolical cataclysmic eruption. For Hegel, unlike for Kant, the revo-

lution is a block: the terror cannot be surgically excised as a local anomaly,

Dead Right 387

deformation, or betrayal of its founding principles, the revolution does not

splinter into essential and inessential, structural and incidental. Indeed any

attempt to dene the chronological boundaries of the terrorto conne it

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

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

exemplied by the Thermidorian counterterrorist reaction and the virulent

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

every war on terrorism).19

ForHegel, therefore, the terror proper begins not

with the law of 22 Prairial, not with the law of suspects, not with the regi-

cide in January 1793, not with the kings arrest and trial, not with the Sep-

tember massacres of 1792, not with the riots at the Tuileries on August 10,

1792, not with the suspensive veto of the 1791 Constitution, and not with

the storming of the Bastille. Hegel backdates the terror to the very onset

of the revolution, if not beforeJune 17, 1789, the day the tats Gnraux

spontaneously and virtually unanimously recreated itself as the Assemble

Nationale as sole agent and embodiment of the nations will.

With the tennis-court oath, the ex nihilo transition of the tiers tat fromnothing to everything is announced and performatively accomplished:

the oath both marks and makes the peoples transition from political nul-

lity to the complete nation that it will retroactively determine itself always

already to have been. As structurally complete, the nation must eliminate

what falls outside it as an excrescence whose existence is a contradiction:

the founding act of revolutionary democracy is thus the purge. This liter-

alization of Abb Sieys formula thus determines political modernity as a

fellowship of terror. And with this gesture, writes Hegel, the undivided

substance of absolute freedom ascends to the throne of the world without

any power being able to resist it (585).

In identifying terror with the very onset of the revolution Hegel has been

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

pages of Hegels own favorite journal), to Bonald and Taine (for whom the

slide from the revolution of liberty to the despotism of equality was implicit

from the outset) or even to de Maistre (for whom the terror was both the

inevitable outcome of and Gods providential punishment for the hubris of

human self-assertion). These comparisons have a tiny degree of justice

and Hegels own unwarranted savagery toward Rousseau (in the Philosophyof Right and the History of Philosophy), it must be said, does nothing to dis-courage them, although his rhetoric stops well short of Burkes own hys-

388 Rebecca Comay

terical denunciation of Rousseau as an insane Socrates. Hegel has much

to account for, not least his general sourness about the July Revolution and

perceived sycophancy toward the censors at Berlinwhat was ultimately

even within his lifetime to earn him his reputation (undeserved, as it hap-

pens) as ideologue of the Restoration. At Berlin, as well, there is this embar-

rassing (one might say, abstract) tendency to conate everythingterror-ism, mysticism, Hinduism, Islamic fundamentalism, Rousseau, Thomas

Munzer, Anabaptism, Judaism,whateverwithin the same soupof abstract

negativity.20

Terror is not only what you get when you put abstract ideasinto practicewhat both Burke and Hegel (as well as Tocqueville, Schiller,

and so many others) will identify as the occupational hazard of French

theory. Terror is not just the result of philosophical abstraction: it is itselfthe abstraction that in leaping from all to all (Rousseaus perfect phrase)

can in the end only elaborate itself as the repetitive production of nothing

the endless negativity of an unworked death.

But it is precisely here that comparison with Burke at once invites itself

and proves irrelevant. Hegels uninching identication of terror as the

inauguration of political modernity does not prevent him from attempting

to absorb it as inevitable, comprehensible, and innitely productive. Im

not referring to Hegels personal sensibilitiesthe dance around the free-

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

themselves are the standard reex of the liberal intelligentsia that would

take 1789 without the rest: Hegel is virtually unique among his contempo-

raries for having tried to deconstruct this squeamish liberalism. Nor can

one demarcate the line between endorsement and repudiation by means of

periodization (the young student rhapsodic at Tbingen, the old man dis-

illusioned at Berlin) or even according to standard psychological categories

such as ambivalence. Hegels visible hesitation between an unqualied and

lyrical enthusiasm (hisKantianword) for the glorious mental dawn

risen in France and his unequivocal condemnation of this same event as

the most fearful tyranny is expressed in the same text and in the same

breath,21

and moreover we nd this hesitation expressed consistently from

1794 to 1830. Indeed it may not be possible to disentangle them.

In taking absolute-freedom-and-terror as a package Hegel perhaps comes

closest to thosefrom Tocqueville to Lefort, from Furet to Gauchetwho

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

Dead Right 389

dure of European absolutism: revolutionary democracy both interruptsand prolongsprolongs through interruptingthe theological-political

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

recalls Mirabeaus reassuring letter to the king, less than a year into the

revolution, that the modern idea of a single class of citizens on an equal

footing should ultimately provide a smooth surface on which royal power

could all the more easily apply itself.22

Centralization provides the essen-

tial hinge between ancien rgime and revolutionarymodernity: the decisive

shiftthe rst revolutionis not the transition frommonarchy to repub-

lic but rather the self-subverting passage within monarchism itself from an

older feudal apparatus (with its intricate corporate hierarchies and particu-

larisms) to the absolute monarchy that, by accumulating for itself all local

privilege, reconstitutes the body politic as a homogeneous mass capable for

the rst time of functioning as a unied, collective subject. In the hypertro-

phy of the monarchy lies the germ of the modern egalitarian nation.

For these writers, therefore, the regicide is the symbolic inauguration of

political modernity: the instantaneous and total transfer of absolute sover-

eignty from king to people. The fall of the blade marks the sublime instant

separating and thereby fusing before and after, ancien rgime and revolu-

tionary republic: Le roi est mortvive la patrie. This sacricial logic was cere-monially enacted on January 21, 1793 in an event marked, at least according

to all the narratives, by sacred pomp and ceremony. It was formalized at the

kings trial when Robespierre invokes the baptismal quality of the execu-

tion. The king must die because the nation must live: an innite invest-

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

the latters innite divestment. The regeneration of the people is nothing

other than the restoration of a nations body to itself through the expropria-

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

called the perfect syncope de la sacralit : the banal death of Louis Capetis the consecration of the nation.

23And from such a baptism ow all the

contradictions of modernity: the inaugural self-betrayal of democracy in

ever-more-inventive forms of terror.

Although Hegel barely pauses at the regicide, he is perhaps the rst to

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

fundamentalism on which it rests; he is the rst also to make the connec-

tion between this disavowal and the compulsive construction of fanaticism

as the terrifying fundamentalism of the Other: war on terror is democracys

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

390 Rebecca Comay

ritualistically repetitive projection. Insight needs faith, and modern democ-racy is just the story of their violent symbiosis within the endless melan-

cholia of an ungrieved loss.

WhatClaudeLefort calls the persistence of the theological-politicalmight

be understood as a kind of fetishism: the lling of the empty place left by

the evacuation of the divinely sanctionedmonarchythe self-production of

the body politic of the people as power incarnate.24

The sacramental sub-

stitution of people for king immediately closes the space it opens uplack

is, perversely, simultaneously acknowledged and disavowedand can be

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

genuine democracy, in Leforts terms, must mobilize itself as a perpetual

negotiation to maintain the empty place as an active vacancy rather than as

the usual power vacuum into which anything and everything might ow.

One might understand this as a kind of mourning.

Hegel goes further in that he establishes that the place was always, in

truth, empty. The risk is not simply that of reinstating absolutism through

revolutionary dictatorship: absolute monarchy was already itself an empty

name, ornaments clustering around an empty throne, and it is this origi-

nary loss that enlightenment both covers up and transmits, which it com-

memorates through disavowalthe emptiness at the very heart of the sym-

bolic order. Nor does this loss begin with the self-evacuation of absolute

monarchy: the emptiness of the kings name is itself only the delayed reg-

istration of the ruination (476) into which beautiful Sittlichkeit had fromthe start been thrown, and therewith the shattering of any fantasy of fulll-

ment along organic linesthe innite grief of a world splintered into a

mechanical aggregate of abstract spiritual atoms (as Hegel was to describe

the political situation inaugurated by imperial Rome) and the institution of

right as such as the asocial principle of political association. The experi-

ence of Bildung can be understood therefore not as a progressive accumu-lation of meaning but rather as the unconscious, blanked-out transmission

of a void that has almost the quality of an Abraham/Torok-style crypt; we

are close to what Benjamin describes, in his Kafka essay, as the sickness of

tradition: tradition in and of the very absence of a determinate content to

be transmitted, transmission of the impossibility of transmissionthat is,

the transmission of trauma.

The abyss of untrammeled negativitythe revolutionary fury of de-

structionis just the condensation, the literalization, and the hyperbolic

demonstration of the emptiness that has been plaguing Spirit from the

start. It does not function as the eruption of some kind of singular excess

Dead Right 391

or irrecuperable exception to the system, as a certain Bataillean reading

might suggest. Rather the seeming exception is here in truth the rule:

unworked negativity is less a distortion than the prototype of Spirits dialec-

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

tory of the Phenomenology as illuminate its essential logic. The meaninglessdeath on the scaold is both the culmination and the retrospective commen-

tary on the entire history of spirit to this point. It crystallizes by exaggerat-

ing to a point of absurdity what could have escaped no reader: there never

has been so far, in fact, a death that actually worked. Either the burial was

blocked, like Polyneicessociety was not up to itor the sacrice proved

vain, like the feudal knights. In the dismembered body of the suspect the

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

tivity, noncommemoration, nonredemption.

. . . another land

Hegels wager is of course to discharge by consolidating that debt: to make

this worklessness work in such a way that the slaughter bench of history

might present itself as the Golgotha of Spirit and melancholia therefore

supersede itself in mourning. In this light he seeks to redeem by radical-

izing the Christian wager by sharpening the antithesis between nite and

innite to the point of seemingly unbridgeable, undialectical disjunction:

the at death on the scaold puts symbolization to its most radical test,

and in the extremity of its resistance supplies the measure of Spirits most

prodigious power of recuperation.

This is essentially the story that follows absolute-freedom-and-terror, as

Spirit takes possession of its very self-dispossession as it comes to recog-

nize its losses as, in truth, its own. With the wills own self-encounter as

pure unlled negativity Spirit takes on its nothingness as its very own

symbolically assumes the castration it had both inicted and sueredand

in this traumatic recognition thereby translates or determines immediacy

(abstract or indeterminate negativity) as, precisely, mediation. Radical loss

thus congeals into the ultimate acquisition of a subjectwhose ultimate hero-

ism is to nd self-possession in the act of self-dispossession: the void itself

here becomes, for moral consciousness, a kind of preemptive lling. Terror

is in this way retroactively integrated as the condition of possibility of the

self-willing will and marks the rebirth of the subject from the ashes of its

most profound desubjectication.

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

392 Rebecca Comay

world inwhichGermanmoral philosophy inworking out its ownproblems

simultaneously discharges the legacy of the revolution and therebymourns,

commemorates, and eventually redeems enlightenments own compulsive

attachment to a faith it must let go. The elaboration and eventual self-

overcoming of Kantian-stylemoral rigorism is therefore forHegel identical

with the attainment of (what he calls) true religion, which in its complex

rationality is to resolve the antinomy of insight and superstition on which

the revolution itself had, byHegels own reading, short-circuited.One could

thus argue that the task of German Idealism is just the interrogation and

redemption of the thwarted promise of the revolutionabsolute-freedom-

and-terror on trial. Morality is philosophical Thermidor.

In this turn from Terror to Kant, Hegel is at once his most conventional

and his most inventive. If he comes very close to reproducing the standard

German idealist self-interpretation of the relation between philosophy and

terrorProtestant-style freedom of the will as at once the exegesis, the phe-

nomenological successor, and the determinate negation or overcoming of

French revolutionary actionhe also slightly displaces this solution, at least

to the extent that he immediately establishes that Kantian-style morality in

itself does nothing manifestly to redeem the blocked promise of the revo-

lution. Hegel makes it bitterly clear that the purity of the moral will can

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

cal problems of absolute freedom are essentially carried over into Hegels

analysis of Kantianmorality: the obsessionality, the paranoia, the suspicion,

the evaporation of objectivity within the violent hyperbole of a subjectivity

bent on reproducing itself within a world it must disavow. In the Phenome-nology Hegel does not go quite as far as he had, in the Spirit of Christianity,of explicitly indicting Kant of terrorism. That earlier text of 1798 had spe-

cically fulminated against what Hegel identied as a Jewish form of ter-

rorism: the vengeful, genocidal purism, with which Hegels Kant was also

here more or less assimilated, but he does not essentially soften his earlier

reading.

And these problemswill only be aggravated asmorality passes over inexo-

rably and almost indiscernibly into its tangled Fichtean, Schillerean, and

Romantic phase (the various strands are at times dicult to unravel), where

it will prove to be the very same drive for purity which nally convicts a con-

science that in its desperate bid for a restored immediacy ultimately fails to

convince either others or, in the end, itself. Hegel acidly observes how the

anarchicmoral autarchy pioneered by Fichtes revision of Kant slides, under

Dead Right 393

Romanticism, into a narcissistic aestheticism, aestheticism into paralyzing

purism, and eventually into a self-serving harangue that catastrophically

fails to recognize itself in what it most reviles. Hegel spares no irony in

describing the fastidiousness of the aesthete turned moral onlooker whose

self-admiration ismatched only by his horror of engagement.Thenal turn,

under Romanticism, tomoral genius as an answer to the aporias ofmorality

will complete the conversion of politics into aesthetics, of revolution into

spectacle, and will establish German ideology around 1800 as above all an

aesthetics of the beautiful. Hegels analysis will in turn show beauty itself

to be an innitely destructive ideal.

Hegel does not, then, or does not only, reproduce the standard German

response to the French Revolution: the well-traveled route from political

revolution to moral regeneration and thence, inexorably, to the aesthetic

upheaval which is, eectively, the modernist autonomous work of artthe

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

from modernity to aesthetic modernism. He in eect stages it in order

to denaturalize it or make it strange, almost as a thought experiment that

pushed to its extreme will be forced to refute itself, and with it every fan-

tasy of innocent spectatorship. The moral view of the world is just one

more phantasm Spirit will have had to work through, suer, and eventu-

ally expose in all its vengeful, compensatory violence. If it presents itself as

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

ls or supersedes it: Kants critical venture phenomenologically succeeds therevolution that it chronologically, of course, anticipates only insofar as histext becomes legible only retroactively through the event that in institution-

alizing the incessant short circuit of freedom and cruelty puts the project

of modernity to its most extreme trial.25

It is the experience of the Terror

that forces Kant to the ordeal to which he is subjectednot itself without a

great degree of crueltyin the Phenomenology: the revolution itself inictson Kants own text a kind of retroactive trauma.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Hegels overcoming of Kant and

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

nally escapes the asceticism he so severely challenges. But with this ges-

ture he both prolongs and reigns back, if only for a moment, the inevitable

temptation to slide from a phenomenology of embodied freedom to a nou-

menology of the will. As such he returns thought to the order of experi-

enceeven if, perhaps, it is ultimately a question of a missed experience, a

lapsed experience, or even, in the end, anothers experience: an experience

394 Rebecca Comay

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

it in a rather dierent context) that we, the masters [wir, die Herrschaft],were not home.

Notes

1 For some of the details of this decision, see Dale van Kley, Origins of an Anti-Historical

Declaration, in Dale van Kley, ed., The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and theDeclaration of Rights of 1789 (Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 1994), 72113, andKeithBaker, Fixing the French Constitution, in Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the FrenchRevolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 26171. For the key debatesleading up to the adoption of the rst Declaration of the Rights of Man, see Antoine

de Baecque, Wolfgang Schmale, and Michel Vovelle, Lan 1 des droits de lhomme (Paris:Presses du CNRS, 1988).

2 Comte Stanislas de Clermont-Tonerres report on July 27 to the constitutional commit-

tee of the Assemble Nationale is here emblematic when he identies the inclusion of a

declaration of rights as the only dierence between the cahiers that call for a new consti-tution and those that call for only the reestablishment of what they regard as an existing

constitution (Archives parlementaires [27 juillet 1789]) vol. 8: 283, cited in van Kley, TheFrench Idea of Freedom, 108. Article 16 of the 1789 Declaration makes the connectionexplicit: A society inwhich the guarantee of rights is not secured . . . has no constitution.

3 For some of the visual representations (both revolutionary and royalist) of both theDecla-

ration and the Constitution as tablets of the ten commandments, see Jonathan P. Ribner,

Broken Tablets: The Cult of the Law in French Art from David to Delacroix (Berkeley and LosAngeles: University of California Press, 1993), especially chapter 1, 628.

4 See J.-P. Babelon, Archives nationales, Muse de lhistoire de France, vol. 4 (Paris: Publisher,1965), 84. The decree, presented by Gilbert Romme in the name of the Committee on

Public Safety, is quoted by Ribner, Broken Tablets, 15 (together with some photographs ofboth the mutilated Declaration and the similarly vandalized Constitution of 1791, which

was exhumed by the same order in 1793).

5 Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe, vol. 2, ed. Ernst Behler andHans Eichner (Munich/Paderborn: Schoningh, 19581987), 366.

6 Friedrich Schlegel, Ernst und Falk, in Kritische Ausgabe 3:96.7 Compare Friedrich Schlegel, Ideen, in Kritische Ausgabe 2:259. See the near-identical

formulation in Novalis, Christendom oder Europa, in Friedrich von Hardenberg, Werke,Tagebucher, und Briefe, vol. 2, ed. Hans-Joachim Mahl and Richard Samuel (Munich:Hanser, 1978), 724. For a discussion of some of the German romantic eorts to inte-

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

Revolution, in Deutsche Literatur und Franzosische Revolution: Sieben Studien (Gottingen:Vandenhoeck, 1974), 17291.

8 Johann Gottfried Herder, Briefe zu Befrderung der Humanitt (1792), in SmtlicheWerke,ed. Bernhard Suphan (Berlin: Weidman, 18771917), 18:366.

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

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

Dead Right 395

fordUniversity Press, 1977), paragraph 545. All subsequent citations are given in the text,

by paragraph number.

11 On Verkehrung, see Hegel, Phenomenology, paragraphs 551, 563; on Verleugnung see para-graphs 551, 555, 556, 565, 580.Verleugnung is also howHegel describes faiths own relationto an object.

12 On Isolierung see Ibid., 567, 571; on Trennung, 565; and on Entzweiung, 579.13 On insights forgetfulness, see Ibid., 564, 568.

14 It is the . . . the delement of Enlightenment through the adoption by its self-identical

purity of a negative attitude, that is an object for faith, which therefore comes to knowit as falsehood, unreason, and as ill-intentioned, just as Enlightenment regards faith as

error and prejudice (548).

15 On some of these tensions, see the essays by J. K.Wright, National Sovereignty and the

General Will, and Keith Michael Baker, The Idea of a Declaration of Rights, both in

Dale vanKley, ed.,The French Idea of Freedom (Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 1994),as well as Marcel Gauchet, La Revolution des Droits de lhomme (Paris: Gallimard, 1989).

16 On volitional atoms see Hegel, Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover,1956), 445.

17 This whole formulation owes much to Alain Badiou, Abrg de la metapolitiqu (Paris:Seuil, 1998).

18 Simon Schamas Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1989)makes the connection in a particularly amboyant fashion, but the linkage is implicit in

both Jacob Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker and Warburg,1952) and Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1981).

19 For an excellent account of some of the paradoxes of Thermidor and the structural pro-

longation of terror in the name of counterterror, see Bronislaw Baczko, Ending the Terror:The French Revolution after Robespierre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

20 Hegel, Philosophy of History, 447.21 Alexis deTocqueville,TheOldRegime and the FrenchRevolution, trans. StuartGilbert (New

York: Anchor, 1955), 8.

22 Daniel Arasse, Le guillotine et limaginaire de la terreur (Paris: Flammarion, 1987), 70.23 Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 1988).

24 This is the one time that the narrative of Spirit takes an explicitly nonchronological form;

this might bae readers who have come to expect a t, at least at this stage of develop-

ment, between phenomenology and chronology.This wrinkle of latency at the very heart

of the present is precisely where the traumatic structure of history as a whole becomes

for the rst time fully visible.

25 Walter Benjamin, The Image of Proust, inSelectedWritings, vol. 2, ed.Michael Jennings,Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).