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Comay, Rebecca.
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
‘‘historical monument.’’ 4 The 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 the museification 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.
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 violence
from the virulence of a rationality enthralled by the fanaticism it would beat
378 Rebecca Comay
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-
cism of insight’s uncomprehending attacks on the faith which it would extir-
pate—Hegel’s analysis in the Phenomenology is wicked, unflinching, and
not 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 now of 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 new naming system would be reversed, in 1794 Robes-
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 of missiles 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 [vergangene Geschichte], vanished one knows
not 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 Right will 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 between German philosophy and French
enlightenment—the difference between the Aufklärung (self-understood
as 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 between mourning and melancholia.
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 recycled within the ether of absolute knowing.
The Phenomenology thus concludes by toasting Schiller’s own poetic 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 or Verleugnung—even perversion (Verkehrung)—
characterizes insight’s relationship to what it assaults.11 Splitting, isola-
tion,12 the stubborn forgetting 13 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 constitutive melancholia 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 slumps morosely 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 kingdom has 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 purity 14—will expose itself
alternatively as the mystification of the lost object in the form of reified nega-
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 turgid materiality as exhibiting a ‘‘listless aimless movement’’
(dumpfes Weben) (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
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 ‘‘as
if 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 existence
hovers 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
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 a world
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 transition
from the lurid Baroque ‘‘festivals of cruelty’’ (the extravaganzas of public tor-
ture) to the modern production of the criminal’s body as an undifferentiated
instrument on which 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 new disciplinary regime. His target is the paradox of a murder 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). The machine 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 and machinality—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 by Hegel 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
world’’ in which German moral philosophy in working out its own problems
simultaneously discharges the legacy of the revolution and thereby mourns,
commemorates, and eventually redeems enlightenment’s own compulsive
attachment to a faith it must let go. The elaboration and eventual self-
overcoming of Kantian-style moral rigorism is therefore for Hegel 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, by Hegel’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 Kantian morality: 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-
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 problems will only be aggravated as morality 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
anarchic moral autarchy pioneered by Fichte’s revision of Kant slides, under
Dead Right 393
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 the
Declaration of Rights of 1789 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 72–113, and Keith
Baker, ‘‘Fixing the French Constitution,’’ in Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French
Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 261–71. For the key debates
leading 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, The
French Idea of Freedom, 108. Article 16 of the 1789 Declaration makes the connection
explicit: ‘‘A society in which the guarantee of rights is not secured . . . has no constitution.’’
3 For some of the visual representations (both revolutionary and royalist) of both the Decla-
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 Los
Angeles: 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 and Hans 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,’’ in Deutsche Literatur und Franzosische Revolution: Sieben Studien (Gottingen:
Vandenhoeck, 1974), 172–91.
8 Johann Gottfried Herder, Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität (1792), in Sämtliche Werke,
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 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Ox-
Dead Right 395
ford University 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 how Hegel 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 van Kley, ed., The French Idea of Freedom (Stanford: Stanford University 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 de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (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,’’ in Selected Writings, vol. 2, ed. Michael Jennings,
Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).