Rebecca Comay’s Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution asks how historical lateness can be thought without presupposing the uniform, continuous time frame that would make lateness measurable in the first place. Its governing ambition is to treat trauma as a modal, temporal, and historical category, taking the discordance Marx named the German misery as its exemplary case and Hegel as its most exact theorist. The book’s value as an object of study lies in the way it holds three registers together that are ordinarily kept apart: a philological account of how the word revolution resisted German translation, a reconstruction of Kant’s contradictory writings on the regicide, and a reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit in which absolute knowing becomes the exposition of a delay rather than its cure.
The framing apparatus conditions how these registers are to be read, and it is worth registering before the argument itself, since several of its features function as interpretive constraints rather than as bibliographic decoration. The book appears in a series devoted to cultural memory in the present, edited by Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries, and the series title states in advance a commitment that the argument will complicate: memory is to be studied as something operative now, in its present functioning, which already implies that the past under discussion is available only through the forms in which it continues to press. An earlier version of the first chapter appeared in a journal of idealist studies, and portions of the third in a quarterly with a strong theoretical orientation; these prior publications indicate that two of the book’s five chapters had independent lives, which helps account for a feature of the composition that a reader will notice immediately, namely that the chapters differ markedly in density, in the ratio of historical to conceptual material, and in the degree to which they depend on what precedes them. The dedication page carries an epigraph from Benjamin’s Passagenwerk consisting of a single line identifying catastrophe with the missed opportunity. This line performs a function that no other paratextual element performs: it supplies, before any argument is made, the equation on which the entire book will operate. Catastrophe is defined here neither by magnitude nor by suffering nor by irreversibility, but by a modal deficiency—something that could have happened and did not. Everything the book subsequently establishes about the Terror, about the guillotine, about the German reception of the Revolution, and about the closing movements of the Phenomenology is an elaboration of that equation. The acknowledgments contribute a further, quieter datum: the author reports that the book was written fitfully and took a very long time to complete. Read against a book whose theme is untimeliness, this is a remark whose modesty is deceptive; it registers, without theorizing itself, the same discordance between the tempo of thought and the tempo of life that the argument will locate at the heart of historical experience. I mark this as an inference, since the text does not draw the connection; the warrant is the exactness of the correspondence between the confession and the thesis.
The abbreviations list, which precedes the introduction, carries a methodological instruction that governs every subsequent citation: where both German and English sources are given, the quotation follows the existing English translation, occasionally modified. The reader is thereby told in advance that translation is going to be an operative problem inside the book’s own procedure and not merely its declared theme. References to the Phenomenology will be given by paragraph number, a decision that produces a specific effect on the exposition: it allows the argument to move rapidly across the whole span of the work, gathering paragraphs from remote sections into a single sentence, without the reader ever being anchored to a page and therefore to a linear position in the book. The Phenomenology is thus made available as a field of simultaneously accessible passages rather than as a sequence, which is precisely the mode of access the argument will later claim is forced upon historical experience as such. The list also announces the range of the corpus: Kant is represented by eight distinct titles, Hegel by nine, alongside Freud’s standard edition, Schlegel’s critical edition, Novalis’s collected writings, and an anthology of early Romantic political writings. The distribution is informative. Kant’s presence in the abbreviations is as heavy as Hegel’s, which is a reliable index of what the book actually does, and which a reader working from the title alone would not predict.
The notes deserve separate mention, because their function shifts continuously between three modes. Some are purely bibliographic. A second group performs a scholarly service the main text declines: it supplies the state of a scholarly controversy, names the parties, and indicates where the author’s own reading sits among them, as when the disagreement over whether Hegel endorses a right to rebellion in the lectures on right is laid out with the opposing positions identified. A third group carries argument that the main text has deliberately excluded, sometimes at considerable length—an entire treatment of the aesthetic and social conditions under which the sublime becomes available, for instance, or a discussion of the second agenda operating in Kant’s argument concerning the extraction of republican principle from democratic letter. The effect of this stratification is to keep the main text moving at a pace that its subject requires while preserving the scholarly apparatus intact below it. It also means that a reader who consults only the main text will receive an argument that is faster, more assertive, and more exposed than the one the book as a whole actually makes. This is a compositional decision with philosophical consequences, and I take it to be deliberate: the argument concerns the costs of acceleration and the impossibility of arriving on time, and its own layered construction reproduces the problem, offering a surface that outruns its own grounds and a substratum that arrives too late to affect the reader’s first impression.
The introduction opens with a story it identifies as well rehearsed, and the identification is itself the first move of the argument. German philosophy around 1800, looking across the Rhine at carnage, congratulates itself on having preempted such turmoil on its own soil; having undergone the Reformation, Germany has already accomplished at a spiritual level what the French are attempting practically and clumsily. The story permits Germany to affirm solidarity with the Revolution while denying immediate connection to it, to claim the revolutionary legacy while insisting on its own radical pedigree, and thereby to occupy simultaneously the positions of predecessor, successor, and most faithful contemporary of an event it never underwent. What is decisive in Comay’s handling is that she does not treat this story as a false belief to be corrected. She treats it as a structure to be analyzed, and the analysis proceeds by asking what temporal arrangement makes such a self-positioning possible. Germany can celebrate, surpass, and mourn, at a distance, something that was never its own to experience directly. The project of German idealism becomes the virtual precursor and the prolongation of a political event. The three verbs—celebrate, surpass, mourn—are already doing conceptual work, since each specifies a different temporal relation to the same object, and their simultaneity is the phenomenon requiring explanation.
Marx’s diagnosis of this attitude supplies the introduction’s operative term. The German misery, in a phrase whose mixture of French and German is itself expressive, names a historical discordance: a conflict between national cultures, between theory and practice, between contemplation and action, and ultimately between historical epochs forced into a proximity Comay characterizes as allergic. The Revolution throws into relief a contrast between French modernity and German decrepitude, but it also exposes a persistent misalignment within German experience itself, a combination of intellectual precocity with political retardation that sets the pace of Germany’s peculiar transition to modernity. Marx’s formulation, that Germans are the philosophical contemporaries of the modern age without being its historical contemporaries, is quoted because it isolates the discrepancy with maximum economy. Comay’s insistence at this point is emphatic and shapes everything after it: the discrepancy reveals something more than ambivalence, inconsistency, or hypocrisy. It points to a temporal slippage that admits of no correction, in which German history presents itself as a counterpoint of divergent rhythms running along separate tracks, each set to a different tempo. Germany appears as Achilles to the tortoise, forever racing ahead of an event it can never catch, and thereby furnishing the perfect model of historical nonsynchronicity.
The introduction then executes the move that determines the book’s category. Misery names a modal disturbance as well as a temporal one. History ceases to present itself as the progressive actualization of potentials within a causal continuum and presents instead a field of counterfactual possibilities that become legible only retroactively, in the light of their repeated nonrealization. Possibility can appear only as lost, lapsed, ruined, even as impossibility, and the future can appear as already past. This is the point at which the Benjamin epigraph is cashed out, and Comay names the resulting predicament as close to what Benjamin identified as hope in the past. The correlative psychoanalytic formulation follows immediately: Germany occupies the melancholic position of mourning the loss of something it never experienced as such, and Comay notes the mechanism with precision—it is only in losing the object that a relationship with it is established in the first place. Derrida’s phrase for this, impossible mourning, is invoked once and then set aside. Marx again supplies the historical illustration, in his description of a Germany that suffers restoration without having undergone its own revolution and that encounters freedom only on the day of freedom’s funeral.
Everything to this point could be read as a strong thesis in intellectual history. The introduction now blocks that reading with a series of explicit disclaimers whose function is to convert the historical material into a philosophical instrument. The author states plainly that she is not a historian, and that her intention is not to explore the empirical features of German lateness—the delayed break with feudal absolutism, delayed bourgeois development, delayed industrialization, delayed unification, delayed exposure to liberal democracy. The infamous special pathway is named and set aside. So is the postwar literature on noncontemporaneity as a condition favoring the growth of Nazism, and so is the related discussion of divided memories, unmastered pasts, and unclaimed heritages in postwar and post-Wall German culture. The final disclaimer is the most consequential for reading the rest of the book: by trauma, she says, she means nothing psychological. The positive statement follows at once. Her interest is philosophical, and it consists in exploring trauma as a modal, temporal, and above all a historical category, with the German misery as its exemplary model and Hegel as its most lucid theorist.
The consequence of this disclaimer for the book’s method is substantial, and it is a consequence readers routinely fail to draw. Because trauma is being defined modally rather than clinically, the psychoanalytic vocabulary that saturates the subsequent chapters—disavowal, fetishism, the death drive, melancholia, repetition, castration, perversion, psychosis—cannot be functioning as a diagnostic apparatus applied to historical actors or to philosophical authors. Comay will make this explicit later, when discussing Hegel’s treatment of Kant, by saying that the pathology at issue is the pathology of thinking itself, and that Kant’s motivations are of no interest to the argument, only his logic. The vocabulary is being used to name structures of temporal and modal relation for which no other developed vocabulary exists. When she writes that morality has a perverse core, the claim concerns a formal relation between prohibition and enjoyment that can be specified without reference to any subject’s mental states. When she writes that Enlightenment is melancholic, the claim concerns an operation performed on a lost object which the operation itself constitutes. This is a methodological wager, and it carries an obvious risk: a vocabulary developed for clinical description carries connotations that resist evacuation, and there are passages where the reader will feel the pull of the psychological sense despite the disclaimer. The book’s discipline in this regard is uneven. The chapters on Hegel’s reading of Kant maintain the formal register with considerable rigor; the passages on Novalis’s tuberculosis and Hölderlin’s madness push against it, as Comay half concedes by marking one of her own claims there as speculation.
The universalizing move that follows the disclaimer is where the book stakes its largest claim, and it is stated with a lightness that partly conceals its magnitude. At the risk of abstraction, Comay hazards that the misery Marx identified is neither special nor German. The reformulation is memorable: every family is unhappy, but in its own special way, so that we are all special, which is to say that we are all miserable. The elaboration specifies what the generalization amounts to. We are temporal misfits, marooned from our own present, burdened with a legacy that is not ours to inherit, mourning the loss of what was never ours to relinquish, driven by secondhand desires, handed-down fantasies, and borrowed hopes. The German encounter with the French Revolution becomes an extreme case of a structural anachronism afflicting all historical experience. The clocks are never synchronized; every epoch is a discordant mixture of divergent rhythms, unequal durations, and variable speeds.
This universalization has a further consequence that the introduction draws immediately and that most subsequent commentary on the book underweights: the traumatic dissonance determines our fundamental sociability. Because the present is never caught up to itself, we encounter history virtually, vicariously, and voyeuristically, and we are burdened with the unfinished projects of others, which impinge with the opacity of what psychoanalysis calls enigmatic signifiers. The formulation is symmetrical, and the symmetry matters: we burden others in turn with the detritus of our own unfinished business. Historical experience is characterized as this grinding nonsynchronicity together with the fruitless effort to evade, efface, and rectify it. We measure ourselves against standards to which we cannot adhere and that do not themselves cohere, and we subject ourselves to timetables to which we cannot adjust and that we keep trying vainly to adjust. This last formulation will return, almost verbatim, in the fourth chapter, where it is applied to consciousness as such in the reading of the Phenomenology‘s introduction. The repetition is a structural device: a description offered as characterizing a historical predicament is later revealed to have been a description of the form of consciousness, and the retroactive identification of the two is one of the book’s principal argumentative maneuvers.
The introduction now turns to Hegel and states the thesis that organizes the remainder. The Revolution remains the burning center of Hegel’s philosophy because the event crystallizes the untimeliness of historical experience, and the task of philosophy is to explicate that untimeliness. Comay acknowledges at once that this is not the standard reading, and characterizes the alternatives with some precision. Absolute knowing is ordinarily either discarded as metaphysical flotsam, in what she calls the deflationary and usually liberal approach, or reviled as an exercise in legitimation, a final recalibration of the clocks in a unitary present where the burden of the past is discharged and uneven rhythms are adjusted to the measure of universal progressive history. Hegel’s Protestant interpretation of the Revolution has accordingly been taken as either foolishness or as symptomatic of the German ideology, an attempt to sublimate the event into a glorious mental dawn shining most splendidly in the twilight of reflection. Comay identifies the genealogy of this caricature—initiated by the left Hegelians of the 1840s and made popular more recently by Habermas—and summarizes it in a formula whose wit is doing argumentative work: Hegel loves the French Revolution so much that he needs to purge it of the revolutionaries.
The counter-position is stated in a way that determines the book’s entire relation to the concept of ideology. Hegel forces us to take seriously the logic at work in this ideology. He lays out the traumatic structure in the introduction to the Phenomenology and pursues its consequences to the end. Ideology arises from the very structure of experience; it expresses the opacity that binds us together as human. Consciousness is nothing but its own noncoincidence with itself, a repetitive struggle to define and position itself in a world that will not conform to it. Anachronism is its signature: experience continually outbids itself, making demands the world is unequipped to realize and unprepared to recognize, so that comprehension inevitably comes too late to make a difference, if only because the stakes have already changed. Absolute knowing is the exposition of this delay; its mandate is to make explicit the structural dissonance of experience. Philosophy’s claim to universality accordingly rests on formalizing the necessity of the delay together with the inventive strategies by which the delay is disguised, ignored, glamorized, or rationalized.
This last clause repays close attention, because it specifies the object of the book. Comay is going to study strategies of disguise, and she will treat those strategies as constitutive of the phenomena rather than as accretions upon them. The inventory offered in the introduction—disguise, ignorance, glamorization, rationalization—maps with some exactness onto the sequence of the chapters that follow. Chapter one studies disguise in the form of translation, where the untranslatable word is domesticated by being declared already domestic. Chapter two studies glamorization, in the conversion of the spectacle of terror into an occasion for spectatorial self-enhancement. Chapter three studies rationalization, in the Enlightenment’s account of a superstition it can neither engage nor relinquish. Chapter four studies the strategy that combines all three, in the Kantian and Romantic postponement of a fulfillment whose arrival would abolish the postponing subject. Whether the correspondence is intended I cannot determine from the text; the introduction does not announce it, and the chapters do not refer to it. I offer it as an inference, warranted by the fact that the four terms appear in a single sentence at the point where the book states its mandate, and that each subsequent chapter is dominated by one of them.
The introduction then makes the negative determination that most sharply separates this book from the critical tradition it might be assumed to belong to. Comay acknowledges that her reading differs from conventional readings that deplore the capaciousness of absolute knowing, its ability to absorb and profit from the most recalcitrant material, and she names the standard examples of such material with a certain relish—evil, idiocy, excrement. Her stated ambition, however, is emphatically distinct from theirs. She does not aim to point to an inassimilable remainder in the system, a moment of excess or exteriority to reason. Her aim is to explore the ways in which the seeming exception constitutes the norm: revolutionary negativity is simultaneously a limit to experience and its paradigmatic logic. This is the reason the French Revolution appears at once unbridgeably distant and uncannily familiar.
The importance of this refusal for the book’s internal economy can hardly be overstated, and it should be registered as a methodological wager with costs as well as advantages. The dominant critical strategy for reading Hegel against himself, from the mid-twentieth century onward, has consisted in identifying something the dialectic cannot digest and in treating that indigestible element as the point at which the system breaks. Comay abstains from this strategy entirely. Her third chapter accordingly ends by asserting that the Terror does not function as an eruption of crazy excess or as an irrecuperable exception to the system, and she names the reading she is declining—one inspired by Bataille—before setting it aside. In this case the exception is the rule: unworked negativity is the prototype and the motor of Spirit’s dialectic rather than a distortion of it. Absolute freedom and terror illuminate the essential logic of the Phenomenology rather than deviating from its trajectory. The advantage of this position is that it makes the Terror philosophically load-bearing instead of scandalous, and it allows Comay to argue that Hegel is describing his own procedure when he describes revolutionary negativity. The cost is that it deprives her of the standard critical leverage, and she must therefore find her critical purchase elsewhere. Where she finds it—in the analysis of tempo, of untimeliness, and of the rush toward reconciliation—is the discovery on which the book’s final chapter depends.
There follows the formulation of the problem in its sharpest form, and it is worth reproducing the structure of the question because the entire book can be read as an attempt to answer it. Hegel’s philosophy poses an immediate challenge: how to conceptualize lateness without assuming the stable reference point of a uniform and continuous time frame from which the delay could be measured. Comay marks the issue as normative and restates it: can the concept of delay be thought without introducing a linear, additive, progressive model of time and history, a model she characterizes, with a joke that is also an argument, as in every way outdated. The answer is given in the introduction’s closing paragraph and constitutes the book’s foundational claim. If the Revolution is the epochal marker of modernity, a world event that sets the schedule and tempo against which past and future history are henceforth measured, this is because it introduces untimeliness itself as an ineluctable condition of historical experience. The measure is not a fixed or objective standard—Comay notes, in a parenthesis with considerable force, that such a standard would be strictly ahistorical. The French Revolution that provides the measure of German untimeliness is itself untimely.
The demonstration of this last claim is compressed and consists of two arguments running in parallel. The first is conceptual: there is no right time or ripe time for revolution, and Comay adds the reason in a parenthesis that functions as a small proof—if there were, there would be no need of one. The Revolution always arrives too soon, since conditions are never ready, and too late, since it lags forever behind its own initiative. The two failures are not alternatives; they are simultaneous, and their simultaneity is what the concept of untimeliness names. The second argument is historical and takes the form of a single, extraordinarily well-chosen example: the republican calendar, introduced belatedly, in the Year II, by order of the Convention, after weeks and months of vacillation about when the new era had actually started, what was to mark the beginning, what would establish the terms of measurement, and what exactly was to be commemorated. The short-lived decimal clock and the ten-day week accompany it. The example is decisive because the calendar is the instrument by which a revolution would establish its own temporal self-measurement, and the calendar arrived after the event it was to date, could not determine what it was dating, and became obsolete immediately. The Revolution, Comay concludes, immediately became obsolete. In this slippage both the finitude and the fecundity of the event come into view: anachronism produces both the singularity of the Revolution and its terrible insufficiency, both its irrepressible novelty and its insufferable need for repetition.
The pairing in that final sentence establishes the pattern that will govern every subsequent analysis in the book, and it is worth stating abstractly because it recurs so often that a reader may cease to notice it. In each case a single structure is shown to generate two opposed determinations simultaneously, and the argument consists in refusing to let either determination be subtracted. The Revolution is singular and insufficient. It is novel and requires repetition. The word revolution is untranslatable and always already translated. Terror is the culmination of freedom and its abolition. The guillotine is fascinating and boring. Forgiveness is impossible and has already occurred. Gray on gray marks utopian openness and repressive effacement. The book’s characteristic sentence does not resolve such pairs; it holds them and then specifies the mechanism by which one determination produces the other. This is the sense in which the exposition is tension-sensitive in a technical rather than a rhetorical way: the tensions are treated as productive mechanisms whose operation can be described.
The first chapter begins where a book about German idealism and the Revolution would be least expected to begin, with a lexicographical remark from 1792, and the choice of entry point is itself an argument. Joachim Heinrich Campe observed that after centuries of exposure the Latin loanword Revolution remained a foreign body in the German language, inassimilable, without exact equivalent, a stumbling block to translation and appropriation. German offered an abundance of words conveying more or less the same idea—upheaval, rebellion, overthrow, insurrection—and every attempt at paraphrase faltered. The word could be neither Germanized nor rendered in German; despite its age it could not be integrated, and despite its familiarity it yielded no precise synonym. Campe then reflects on the sonority of the German synonyms, a series of compounds built on the prefix for turning-about, and describes them as thickly packed consonants sitting like boulders in the mouth, requiring effort, patience, and time to roll over. From this observation he draws the analogy that Comay will spend the chapter unfolding: German sounds move as slowly as German constitutions change, trudging behind the open syllables of the romance language just as German political life lags behind the lightning speed of French revolutionary transformation. Neither deed nor word could keep pace with a motion Campe describes as impossibly light and speedy.
The context of the remark is supplied with care, and the care is philosophically motivated. The observation appears in a prize-winning essay submitted to a competition sponsored by the Prussian Academy of Sciences on whether complete purity of language is possible in general and for German in particular. Campe’s response was a nationalist manifesto proposing to purge German of foreign contaminants, which he immediately began to implement in a dictionary of Germanification designed to replace every word of foreign extraction with an existing German equivalent or, where necessary, a neologism. Comay then complicates the portrait in a way that prevents the material from being read as a simple case of reactionary linguistic nationalism. Campe was no antirevolutionary. In the same year the Prussian Academy commended his patriotism, the French National Assembly named him an honorary citizen of the new Republic for contributions to the human race, in company that included Klopstock, Washington, and Paine, and a certain German publicist whose name the French had garbled into Giller, meaning Schiller. In 1789 Campe had traveled to Paris to witness the drama firsthand while the first émigrés were streaming in the opposite direction, and for a year he had relayed his impressions in a widely read series of open letters, describing himself repeatedly as swimming against the current and describing the Revolution as an irresistible flood sweeping aside ossified structures and transforming Frenchmen overnight into virtuous Greeks and Romans.
The philosophical yield of this biographical complication is stated with precision. Campe’s manifesto of 1792 is itself a testimony to the irresistibility of the French attraction, and Comay specifies that this is so for a reason beyond its passionate intensity. Wieland’s phrase for the project, linguistic Jacobinism, supplies the key. The strange rigor of Campe’s proposal derives in large part from the French idea of sovereignty, with its norms of homogeneity, transparency, and legibility. The general ambiguity of German cultural nationalism around 1800 is thereby exhibited in a single case, and Comay formulates it as a question that the chapter will pose repeatedly in different materials: how to construct an autonomy forged in the image of the oppressor.
The 1807 sequel intensifies the structure. After Jena, with Napoleon’s army having conquered territories on both sides of the Rhine, annexed Austria and Prussia, and terminated the thousand-year-old Holy Roman Empire along with Germany’s symbolic claim to world-historical significance, Campe issued a second manifesto arguing that if the French troops could not be ejected, Germans could at least take a cue from their example and turn back the invasion of foreign words that had burrowed through the ramparts of the language, extracting from the restored transparency of their own tongue a consoling image of national integrity. Comay quotes the crucial sentence—the language as the last remaining hope that the German name will not disappear from the annals of mankind—and then directs attention to its figuration with an instruction that is characteristic of her method: observe the gendered problematic. Botched pregnancy and triumphant rebirth, grievous travail and fruitful labor, the regeneration of the body politic through an event of immaculate conception. The foreign word becomes an indelible residue of rape and miscegenation, and securing the name and honor of the fatherland requires restoring the virginal body of the mother tongue by ejecting the bastard progeny of the assailant. Linguistic purity thus compensates for the loss of political autonomy, functioning simultaneously as a surrogate for and a conduit to national self-determination.
That double function—surrogate and conduit—is the chapter’s first statement of a structure that will govern the entire book. A compensatory substitute for something absent is also the means by which the absent thing is to be attained, so that the substitute both defers and promises the fulfillment it replaces. Comay identifies the theme as familiar and traces it forward: the rhetoric of the cultural nation in pre-Bismarck Germany, with its substitution of cultural for political accomplishment and its conversion of practical impotence into spiritual triumph. She then adds the observation that gives the structure its diagnostic edge. Germany’s insistence on its linguistic and spiritual immunity to foreign influence became most vocal at the moment when Germany was most tangibly and materially affected. The claim to immunity varies directly with the degree of infection, which is why the claim can be read as a symptom of what it denies. The inference here is one Comay draws explicitly, and its warrant is chronological: 1792 and 1807 are the dates of Campe’s two manifestos, and they are also the dates of maximal French pressure.
Fichte’s addresses to the German nation, delivered in French-occupied Berlin in the winter of 1807 and 1808, are then handled in a way that exhibits the structure at its most acute. Comay characterizes the addresses as exemplary and as the exact counterpart of Fichte’s earlier Jacobin manifesto, which they vehemently repudiate. The decisive observation concerns the mechanism of the repudiation: burying the dead letter of French culture—mechanization, stagnation, infection, and Comay notes that the mixed metaphors are Fichte’s own—requires an incorporation of that culture, in that Fichte attributes to cosmopolitan German humanity the ability to love and comprehend the foreigner better than the foreigner understands himself. The structure of mimetic rivalry is thus complete: the assertion of superiority takes the form of a claim to understand the rival from within, which is to say a claim to have already internalized him. Fichte identifies Germany as the true heir of the Revolution by virtue of a drive to self-determination that he locates, in the absence of political unity, at the heart of language. The original German language, developing autonomously in supposedly uninterrupted continuity and unpolluted by foreign contaminants, incarnates the transcendental project of free self-fashioning and presents a collective analogue of the self-positing ego. Comay then draws the conclusion that the chapter has been building toward, and states it as a paradox that resolves nothing: in the act of asserting its immunity from French influence, the German language proves to be more French, in effect, than polyglot French itself.
The chapter now poses its own guiding question directly, and the parenthesis it contains is doing more work than its brevity suggests. What is it about revolution—the Revolution, and here the parenthesis asks whether it is one or many—that thwarts translation even as it seems to stimulate it. The question of number is the question of whether the Revolution can serve as an instance of a kind, and it will return in the discussion of Schlegel. The immediate answer concerns the word’s mode of insistence within the host language. The word implants a kernel of opacity within the purity of the mother tongue, functioning as a shibboleth that marks the limits of assimilation. While resisting every attempt at paraphrase, it is lodged within the host language with the tenacity of a native. Comay’s formulation for this condition is exact: a permanent outside on the inside, which can be neither granted citizenship, to use Campe’s own political metaphor for naturalization, nor deported. It persists in the manner of a guest worker, at once feared and needed, within the domestic economy of the mother tongue. It remains most foreign precisely where it appears most permanently installed. The conclusion follows: translation falters despite or because of the fact that it has always already occurred.
The construction “despite or because” recurs throughout the book and should be understood as a deliberate refusal to decide between two explanations that turn out to be the same explanation. The word cannot be translated because the translation has already happened; the prior occurrence of the translation is what makes the further translation both unnecessary and impossible. This is the modal structure of the introduction restated at the level of a single lexical item, and the restatement is the chapter’s argument for treating the philological material as philosophically load-bearing rather than illustrative. Comay states this claim herself, and with unusual directness: trivial as Campe’s hesitation may seem, and Comay notes that his pedantry was ridiculed within his own lifetime, it touches on a predicament at the heart of language. It points to a structural impediment to translation that may nonetheless prove to be the most stubborn presupposition of translation. Despite the startling literalism of the example, the issue extends beyond translation in the narrow sense and beyond language. It concerns the general problem of transfer, transference, transmission, and transport—the circulation of things, ideas, and power within the continuum of space and time—and it raises the question of boundaries. It complicates the geopolitical boundary between nations, the historical boundary between epochs, the metaphysical boundary between body and spirit, and the theological boundary between death and life. It points to a residue of materiality within language that complicates any fantasy of translation as a regulated metabolic exchange from idiom to idiom, from sense to sense, from matter to meaning, from letter to spirit, and back again.
The four boundaries listed there constitute a program, and the book observes it. The geopolitical boundary is the subject of the first chapter’s account of empire and of the second chapter’s account of spectatorship across the Rhine. The historical boundary between epochs is the subject of the introduction and returns in the fifth chapter’s analysis of the interval between the Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Right. The metaphysical boundary between body and spirit governs the fourth chapter’s treatment of consumption and madness as convergent hyperboles. The theological boundary between death and life organizes the third chapter’s analysis of the guillotine, where the distinction between dying and living is simultaneously reinforced and eroded, and it governs the fifth chapter’s treatment of a judge who is twice dead and not yet departed. That a list offered in passing in the first chapter should map so exactly onto the book’s subsequent divisions is evidence that the compositional order is more tightly controlled than the essayistic surface suggests.
The chapter’s account of imperial translation supplies the historical depth that the lexical analysis requires. Comay first notes that the metaphysical foundation of the transaction is disturbed by the undermining of commensurability, and that this aggravates every notion of semantic appropriation, troubling the imperial fantasy that has sustained the idea of translation since Jerome—translation as an act of military plunder, the transport of meaning from one language to another in the manner of a prisoner taken by right of conquest. Jerome’s own formulation, which describes the translator marching the original text as a captive into his native language, is quoted in the Latin and then glossed. For Germany around 1800, perched between the crumbling of one empire and the occupying forces of another, this plunderous fantasy was charged and complex, and the traffic moved hard and fast in both directions. Translation promised a retroactive fortification against invasion and a preemptive takeover of the assailant’s forces, hinting at a symbolic reversal of imperial power in which the vanquished become victors within the inverted empire of signs.
The demonstration of this reversal is the chapter’s most striking single passage, and it works by establishing a symmetry between two apparently incommensurable operations. While French troops carted off spoils of war by the wagonload, the German scholar hauled in foreign words. Campe’s dictionary presents the perfect mirror image of the revolutionary Louvre. Comay develops the parallel in detail: inventory against inventory, column against column, parade against parade. The looted artworks, boxed and labeled, encased in wax and plaster, traveled like sacred relics across land and sea and through the streets of Paris, where their arrival was celebrated as a victorious homecoming with the announcement that these immortal works were no longer on foreign soil. Through the serried ranks of the alphabet passed the triumphal procession of words, the foreign words lined up on the left in Latin typeface awaiting their ceremonial divestiture, their German equivalents marshaled on the right in Gothic font.
The passage then blocks the obvious objection, and the block is where the philosophical work is done. Comay writes that we need not be distracted by the superficial contrast between the physical relocation of things in space and the lexical transformation of words on the page, because the two movements of translation are symmetrical. The reason given is precise and is stated in two clauses that operate in opposite directions. The objects have already turned into their own effigies, while in their palpable foreignness the words exhibit the obduracy of hard matter. What was paraded before the crowds at the Champ de Mars was a card catalogue rather than the things themselves, since the artifacts were fragile and had to remain wrapped and crated—an acquisitions list, a series of titles organized by the scholars and curators of the Louvre with encyclopedic efficiency, arranged with military precision, and displayed aloft on signs and banners. And what is lined up alphabetically in the left-hand margins of Campe’s page is shards of physical being, since meaning is rapidly slipping out of view, leaving the remnants of signification, an array of atomized sounds and letters arbitrarily ordered and jostling for the reader’s attention. The chiasmus is complete: the plundered objects have become signs, and the plundered words have become things.
The medieval background is then supplied under the rubric of the transfer of empire, and its function is to establish that the structure at issue has a long ideological history whose forms the Revolution reactivates. The medieval ideology connected genealogical transmission to geographical conquest and temporal extension to spatial expansion, defining empire as the uninterrupted relay of dynastic legitimacy and authority, without leakage or loss of symbolic potency, across territorial lines. Comay gives the metaphysical characterization with an accumulation of negations—uncreated, imperishable, without beginning or limit, self-engendered, self-surviving, without predecessor or successor—and then the Latin tag asserting that the empire never dies. The qualification follows immediately and is the operative point: the empire travels and transforms. While remaining indestructible it undergoes multiple translations as its center keeps moving and as its shape and meaning shift. Two versions of the itinerary are distinguished, one inspired by Virgil and running from Troy to Rome and thence to Rome’s subsequent incarnations, restorations, and re-editions, the other inspired by Jewish and Christian apocalyptic sources and mapping the ages of the world onto the days of creation and the ages of man, with the torch passing from Babylonians to Persians to Macedonians to Greeks and once more to Romans, and thence from Byzantium to the Franks to the Lombards to the Germans.
The role assigned to translation in the narrow sense within this scheme is the point of the whole excursus, and Comay states it as a thesis. The translation of texts, the transmission of learning, and the diffusion of tradition play a special ideological role in the epic transfer: the construction of a continuous cultural legacy helps soften the abruptness of transition, fill the vacuum of interregnum, and mask the violence of conquest. Translation provides a transitional space in which the displacements of empire can be endured at a figural level, allowing loss to become virtual or metaphorical. Comay’s name for this operation is a translation of translation, and she then proposes, in a sentence offered with visible tentativeness, that we could consider this second-order translation a work of mourning.
The tentativeness is worth registering, because the proposal is the hinge on which the book’s title turns and it is introduced as a suggestion rather than asserted. What is being proposed is that the cultural work of constructing continuity across a violent rupture performs the same function that mourning performs with respect to a lost object: it renders an absence bearable by installing a substitute that both acknowledges and conceals the loss. If this is right, then the entire apparatus of cultural transmission is a mourning apparatus, and the failure of that apparatus—the condition in which the substitute fails to render the loss bearable and instead perpetuates it—would be melancholia at the level of a civilization. The book will make exactly this argument in its third chapter, where the French Enlightenment is characterized as melancholic and the German as capable of mourning, and the title’s pun will finally be cashed in the fifth. That the argument is announced here as a possible consideration rather than a thesis is characteristic of the book’s manner of proceeding, in which large claims are introduced obliquely at a point where they can be tested against small material and are asserted only much later, after the accumulated weight of instances has made them seem obvious.
Germany’s role within the drama of imperial legitimation is then given in four historical registers, and the sequence is constructed to show that the roles are incompatible and that all of them mingle discordantly around 1800. The Germans have defied empire, in the Teutoburg forest, where Hermann’s warriors repulsed the invading Roman troops and halted the conquest of northern Europe. They have transformed empire, since the Goths’ sack of Rome brought down the pagan universe and indirectly enabled the ideological transformation to universal Christendom. They have laid claim to empire, with the crowning of Charlemagne on Christmas Day of 800 and the accession of Otto I in 962, after which the empire found its explicit center in a Holy Roman Empire that would be named, as of 1512, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. And Germany has redefined the terms of empire, in Luther, who denounced the legal fiction of imperial translation while slyly adapting the scheme to promote his own vision of a German world-historical mission. Comay reports Luther’s ridicule of the fiction as a naked license to plunder, in which nominal prestige was handed to the German emperor while the goods returned to Rome, and then specifies what Luther retains. He countered the genealogical fiction of continuity with an announcement of spiritual rupture: what is transferred is no longer secular power but an exclusive claim to the Word. The quotation from Luther that follows—grace as a passing shower of rain that does not return where it has once been, which was with the Jews and then gone, brought by Paul to the Greeks and then gone, possessed by Rome and then gone—is given at length and is the only extended quotation in the chapter. Its content is a theory of transmission in which transmission is irreversible, non-repeatable, and terminal for those it leaves, and Comay’s placement of it at the chapter’s structural center indicates that she takes it to be the model for everything the chapter has been describing.
The chapter’s second movement takes up the specifically philosophical form of the German transfer, and it opens with a formulation that summarizes the ideology in a single sentence with all its verbs intact. According to the German ideology, a revolution in thought would have come, by varying degrees, to precede, succeed, enhance, temper, comprehend, accommodate, preempt, and eventually to upstage a political revolution whose defining feature had come to be identified with its irredeemable violence, in the inexorable slide from 1789 to 1793. Eight verbs are given, and their incompatibility is the point: to precede and to succeed are contraries, and so are to enhance and to temper, and so are to accommodate and to preempt. The ideology consists in the simultaneous maintenance of all eight relations to a single object. Comay names the tradition in which this ideology runs, from Schiller to Thomas Mann, and states its content: Germany could both domesticate and dispense with revolution by virtue of a previous spiritual upheaval that had already achieved the rationality to which the French could only aspire clumsily, violently, impatiently, through their precipitous acting out. Having already been there in theory, Germany could put off until doomsday the grab for practical fulfillment, and Comay’s name for that indefinite postponement is the infinite task.
The Lutheran mechanism enabling this arrangement is then specified with some care, and it constitutes one of the book’s most consequential historical claims. Having achieved freedom in matters of religion, Germans have no need to assert freedom from a religion whose institutional hold has become as diffuse as its secular authority is attenuated. The insurgence against Rome had already loosened the grip of absolutism, leaving the political realm to evolve immanently, without impediment or disruption, and confining dissidence to the sphere of thought. Luther’s separation of the two kingdoms had prepared the ground for the emancipation of conscience from institutional authority and simultaneously for the marginalization of conscience in the political arena. Comay draws the consequence that gives the arrangement its diagnostic significance: such a split enables a convergence of spiritual defiance with practical compliance, an inference she notes Luther had apparently taken to heart when he allied himself in 1525 with the ruling princes and supported the suppression of peasant uprisings his own rebelliousness had largely inspired. The dissonance defining the German ideology around 1800 is then compressed into a Kantian formula whose original context is the essay on enlightenment: argue, but obey.
The medical figure that follows is developed at length and repays attention because it will govern the book’s treatment of illness throughout. An advance dose of spiritual rebellion will have immunized Germany against further upheaval; Luther administered the first inoculation and Kant the most recent booster; vaccination measures are supplemented by the sanitary cordon of cultural difference. Comay defends the anachronism of the medical analogy by pointing out that it is entirely appropriate to the material, since on both sides of the Rhine and with both negative and positive inflections the Revolution was itself described as a natural disaster—an earthquake, a flood, an avalanche, a shipwreck, a hurricane, a fire, a comet, a meteor, a global climate change, a crashing mountain, a volcano, a horde of Hottentots or Amazons—and Comay notes in a parenthesis that the threat becomes raced and gendered almost immediately, and eventually as a ravaging epidemic whose feverish delirium threatens to overflow natural and national borders along with the social boundaries of class, gender, race, age, and status. The eruption of freedom is marked from the outset as an irresistible upsurge of blind, elemental nature, and Comay observes that the irony was not lost on Arendt, who identified in this short circuit between freedom and nature the inaugural antinomy of revolutionary modernity. The conclusion is then drawn in the register of the figure: having long been exposed to the bacillus, Germany is singularly poised to check the onslaught of the illness, even extracting from the disease a reserve of vital effervescence unavailable to those in its acute phase. Poison turns into gift. The toxin that triggered the illness would provide its cure. Luther had ignited the first spark of a conflagration from whose flames Germany might, from a safe distance, continue to draw warmth. Immune to the virus of revolution, Germany can become its sublime carrier.
The figure of the carrier is precise and should be held onto, since it names a condition in which immunity and transmission coincide: the carrier is unharmed by what it conveys and conveys what it is unharmed by. The whole German ideology is compressed in the figure, and the second chapter’s account of the reading public will show the figure failing, as the antidote turns into a new infection and immunity into autoimmunity. That the failure is legible in the terms of the original figure is one reason the figure is developed at such length here.
What the German transfer accomplishes philosophically is then stated: Germany sets out to quarantine the political threat of revolution while siphoning off its intensity for thought, so that crisis is harnessed to the project of critical critique. Around 1800 the Reformation is explicitly tethered to the agenda of preemptive cultural reform, and political revolution might be forestalled by a total revolution in sensibility, in Schiller’s phrase, or a revolution in thinking, in Kant’s—a radical reversal of orientation and agency in the light of which literal inversions of power in the social world appear at once catastrophic, bloodthirsty, and barbaric, and in the end curiously ineffective. Comay’s formulation for the resulting judgment is one of the book’s most economical: in this light the French Revolution is seen to be at once far too grandiose and far too modest, since risking everything, it dares nothing.
The demonstration of that judgment turns on the semantics of the word, and the analysis is the chapter’s conceptual center. What might appear as rapturous upheaval and rupture is repeatedly demystified as regressive and reactionary, a return to ground zero and a reversion of history to mythic nature: the chronic cycle of generation and corruption, the repetitive orbit of the stars, the perpetual circulation of days, years, and seasons, the Sisyphean return of the same. Comay supplies the theological premise that makes the demystification possible: to assume authorship of the laws is to defy the transcendence of Law, closing the metaphysical hiatus on which the law’s authority rests, and therefore to succumb to the tyranny of stagnant nature. Hence the regression of the willing subject to the state of nature and the reduction of human freedom to what Kant called the freedom of a turnspit. History collapses into nature, and nature in turn into farce. The modernist figure of revolution as unpredictable historical fracture slides into the traditional astronomical figure of revolution as irresistible cyclical recurrence, and this latter figure in turn shifts from a consoling image of stability into a mocking image of meaninglessness and futility: one more spin of the wheel, a vain overturning awaiting its own overturning. By the late eighteenth century the word pointed to both rupture and repetition, and the semantic strain was beginning to be felt. The idea of revolution began to oscillate, and Comay marks the pun—it revolved—between two irreconcilable extremes.
The response of the Jena circle to this oscillation is then described as an operation of rescue whose terms are self-undermining. Novalis declared progressive, constantly expanding evolution to be the very stuff of history, yet it was necessary to prevent the revolutionary’s burden, the stone of Sisyphus, from rolling back down the mountain, and to hold it at the summit by some kind of heavenly attraction. Comay states the resulting requirement in a sequence of four sentences whose parallel construction enacts the paradox: the Revolution had to be saved from its propensity to vicious circular recurrence by being transported into a territory and an idiom at once familiar and unknown; only in being repeated or rephrased could it salvage its unrepeatable kernel; only by submitting to translation could it achieve its singular and untranslatable truth; only by traveling could it be kept securely in place. The last of these is the chapter’s thesis restated at the level of a formula, and it will govern the fifth chapter’s account of absolute knowing as a repetition that clears the ground for a beginning.
The section on the Copernican analogy assembles the evidence that Kant’s revolution was retroactively interpreted to have both anticipated and eclipsed the political cataclysm. Heine’s remark that Kant surpassed Robespierre in intellectual terrorism is quoted with its joke intact—the guillotine had killed only a pathetic fat king who had lost his head anyway, while the axe of reason had already slain deism throughout Germany. Fichte’s version is given: deliverance from the tyranny of the thing in itself, the last residue of unmediated positivity, would both prefigure and outstrip any deliverance from social bondage. Schlegel regarded the French Revolution as the marvelous allegory of another, greater, more rapid, and more comprehensive revolution taking place in the innermost part of the human spirit. Comay then specifies the operation that the analogy performs on its object: the Revolution would be both magnified and miniaturized, dispersed into an infinite array of repetitions and reflections, drawn into an unbroken chain of inner revolutions—and she notes the oxymoron in the phrase, since a chain of ruptures is a continuity of discontinuities—while discontinuity itself would be absorbed into the absolute continuum of art.
The aesthetic correlatives are then surveyed with an eye to a specific structural feature. Schiller sets the agenda in the letters on aesthetic education by discovering in the experience of art the freedom that founders in every leap into immediate political action, so that only through beauty do we inch toward freedom. Schlegel and Novalis extend the claim by transferring this freedom from the artist or spectator to the artwork itself, which learns to display itself as uninterrupted productivity, pure initiative and infinite becoming, since the essence of the modern consists in a creation out of nothing. The artwork bursts forth in unprecedented originality, severed from all antecedent grounds, conditions, and conventions, staging an endlessly protracted act of self-generation. Comay then draws the consequence, and the consequence is the point of the whole survey: logically speaking, this amounts to a process of unceasing self-mortification, since the work can demonstrate its inexhaustible incipience only by marking its own structural incompletion. Unending birth is indistinguishable from a perpetual stillbirth, an ongoing miscarriage, an infinite abortion. Agency is in one blow both aggrandized and strangely humiliated. In the Romantic fragment, sketch becomes ruin, and every project turns into an advance testimony to its own defeat. The final sentence of the analysis converts this into a strategy: catastrophe can also serve to preempt an even greater disaster, since the ruin forestalls the apocalypse by marking it as always already under way.
That last formulation is the exact structural counterpart of the introduction’s account of the German ideology, and the parallel is worth making explicit since Comay leaves it implicit at this point. Germany forestalls revolution by declaring it already accomplished; the Romantic fragment forestalls catastrophe by declaring it already under way. In both cases a threatened future event is neutralized by being transposed into the perfect tense. The fourth chapter will identify the same operation in the Kantian postulates, where fulfillment is neutralized by being transposed into an indefinitely deferred future, and the fifth will find it in the Philosophy of Right, where a state not yet built is already painted gray on gray. The operation, in its several tenses, is the book’s most persistent single finding.
The chapter’s remaining survey of what revolution could mean in the Romantic lexicon is compressed and serves to demonstrate the term’s semantic dispersal: a formal liberation of language from syntax, grammar, plot, character, genre, and medium, in Schlegel’s image of a republican speech which is its own law and end, in which all the parts are free citizens with the right to vote; an emancipation from the burden of reference, in which the work recoils from every context and turns toward its own production; a release from the privileges and fetters of individual authorship, in the notion of philosophizing together and in the largely failed collaborative journal projects at Jena. Whatever the emphasis, the new age defines itself in terms of a radical self-invention oriented toward the eventual production of a book of universal significance, and Comay quotes the formula in which Schlegel’s literary agenda slides into an explicitly theological one, to the effect that the new Bible must be for the Germans what the Revolution was for the French. She notes the ineluctable Lutheran pedigree that the formula reveals, and closes the section with Schlegel’s most compressed statement of the transfer: the French Revolution will become universal only through the German.
The section that follows, titled with a German phrase meaning not yet and yet already, states the paradox in its finished form. The Revolution presents itself as both relative and absolute, at once incomparable and uncannily familiar. Schlegel pronounced it both the model of revolutions and the Revolution as such, both exemplary prototype and inimitable exception—and Comay draws out the logical form of the combination in a phrase that answers the parenthetical question posed earlier about whether the Revolution is one or many: a class that seeks to embrace everything and yet ultimately admits only itself as its sole member. The consequences are then specified. The Revolution provokes repetition even while it exhausts its own concept, rendering subsequent renditions at once mandatory, superfluous, and insufficient. Novalis’s magic wand of analogy in one blow domesticates the Revolution and underscores its recalcitrance to assimilation. Like an enigmatic signifier, the event stimulates a drive to translation—the phrase again is Novalis’s—that it necessarily frustrates. The unprecedented strangeness of the Revolution, its novelty, its contingency, its shocking incongruity, is exaggerated and denied at once as Germany seeks to absorb this peculiar crisis, in Herder’s phrase, within a prior and future upheaval of thought.
The temporal analysis that follows is the chapter’s most concentrated passage and states the modal thesis of the entire book in four clauses. The new is the already seen is the perpetually not yet. Always familiar and forever awaited, the present unfolds into both a memory and a promise. The Revolution splays out simultaneously toward past and future, and Comay’s image for the effect on the present is exact: a cataract diverted from the cliff edge of a present left vacant, invulnerable, and intact. The two consoling propositions are then given in parallel, and their parallelism is the demonstration. The crisis is already over: we have already had our revolution, and there is nothing left to fear. Or the crisis is forever pending: the real revolution is yet to come, and there is nothing yet to fear. Already here, forever elsewhere. Translation in one blow asserts the inassimilable foreignness of the Revolution and disarms it by repatriating it as already long under way.
The affective register accompanying this structure is documented rather than theorized, and the documentation is telling. Klopstock’s refrain, them but not us, is intoned with admiration, with envy, with shame, and eventually, as the heads start falling, with an unmistakable tinge of the pleasure taken in another’s misfortune; 1793 would be the year of his official recantation, which he titled with the German for my error. Novalis, whose own ambivalence would eventually lead him, unlike most of his compatriots, to repudiate the Revolution precisely for having prolonged the atomizing individualism of the Reformation, cannot conceal a tinge of proprietary pride in writing that the best the French have gained from their revolution is a portion of Germanness. Comay’s comment on the pairing is the operative claim: these two gestures, exclusion and appropriation, are reciprocally entailed.
The chapter’s account of what the specular relation accomplishes for each party is then given with unusual balance. Germany comes to define itself in relation to France as simultaneously precursor and survivor. Having long rehearsed an event it can forever continue to anticipate, Germany offers the French a mirror in which to discern an image of a counterfactual past and future—what might have happened, or not have happened, if France had gone through the Reformation, which Comay notes will be the question obsessively posed by French liberal historians during the Restoration. And conversely: France offers Germany a screen memory of its own traumatic history, a Medusa shield to ward off the petrifying legacy of an undischarged past. The elaboration is historically precise and philosophically pointed. The ransacked cathedrals of revolutionary France become a repository for the debris of Germany’s own unfinished battles, still visible in the ruins of the religious wars scarring the German landscape. The Revolution thus provides a way to extend the official amnesia that had marked the end of the Thirty Years’ War, and Comay quotes the second article of the Peace of Westphalia mandating that everything that has passed shall be buried in eternal oblivion. The vicarious experience of bloodshed beyond its own borders helps Germany forget its own history of atrocities along with the territorial and confessional schisms that continue to torment it. The jurist Möser’s remark that post-Westphalian Germany seemed to be composed of nothing but boundaries is quoted, and the conclusion follows: the external border between Germany and France serves to elide the internal fissures dividing Germany from itself, allowing it to construct a fiction of its own unified national past. The construction of the Revolution as a Roman Catholic debacle will help Germany put an end to what Hegel described as the long, eventful, and terrible night of the Middle Ages, and philosophy will come to identify Germany as a Protestant nation and freedom itself as a northern principle.
The chapter’s psychoanalytic formulation of the resulting arrangement is then given, and it is the passage most often extracted from the book. Germany is to the French Revolution as Achilles to the tortoise, forever postponing its encounter with an object it has already overtaken, and constantly running ahead of a thing with which it can never quite catch up. The Revolution functions, psychoanalytically, as the inaccessible and impossible Real, and the German ideology as the fantasy that keeps circling around it. Philosophy nourishes itself by continually displacing the obscure object of desire—too far, too close, eternally remembered and perpetually anticipated, forever unattainable because always already achieved. German idealism is in this sense nothing but the staging of a chronically missed encounter, and Comay’s closing sentence converts the whole analysis into the book’s operative equation: what Marx calls German ideology might be understood as a kind of trauma.
The equation should be examined rather than accepted, since it is doing a great deal of work and its warrant is structural rather than evidential. What licenses the identification is the coincidence of two features. Ideology, in the sense Comay has developed, consists in a systematically distorted relation to an event that is simultaneously affirmed and denied; trauma, in the modal sense she has stipulated, consists in a relation to an event that is registered only through its missing. If the distortion characteristic of ideology just is the modal structure characteristic of trauma, then the two terms name one phenomenon under two descriptions, and the critique of ideology and the theory of trauma become the same enterprise. This is a strong claim with an evident advantage: it removes the critic’s privileged position, since if ideology is the form of experience rather than a defect in it, no vantage outside ideology is available. It also carries an evident risk, which the book acknowledges without fully disarming: if everything is ideology, the term loses its critical edge, and the analysis of particular ideological formations loses its point. Comay’s answer, developed across the remaining chapters, is that the critical work consists in distinguishing among modes of relating to the same unavoidable structure—between mourning and melancholia, between recollection that opens the past and recollection that seals it—rather than in escaping the structure. Whether that answer suffices is a question the fifth chapter poses against itself, and it is to the book’s credit that the question is posed there in the sharpest available form.
The chapter closes with a section on translation as trauma that supplies the psychoanalytic apparatus explicitly and that establishes a textual rather than a clinical warrant for its use. Schlegel’s celebrated fragment juxtaposing the French Revolution, Fichte’s doctrine of science, and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister as the greatest tendencies of the age is quoted, along with its rebuke to whoever takes seriously only a revolution that is noisy and materialistic, and its observation that in our shabby cultural histories, which usually resemble a collection of variants with running commentary for a lost classical text, many a little book has played a larger role than anything done by the noisy multitude. Comay identifies the reversal the fragment performs: major and minor, primary and secondary, switch roles, in a reversal of chronological and phenomenological sequence that challenges the ontological priority of the origin as such. History becomes a variorum edition in which the text disappears under the weight of its own marginalia. The rhetorical figure is named—the preposterous figure of last things first—and connected to the early Romantic theory of criticism, in which a work proves to be a by-product of its own aftermath, subsequent to its own supplement, generated retroactively by the textual overflow that will eventually efface it. Schlegel’s remark that in many commentaries the text is only the obstacle, or the not-I, is quoted, and Comay identifies the unmistakable allusion to Fichte’s self-positing ego. The Romantic text generates endless onion skins of commentary just as reflexive self-consciousness secretes layers of self-reflection, a reflexivity captured in Schlegel’s image of the text as an infinite succession of mirrors. The obstacle, like Johnson’s stone, proves to be less a shocking intrusion of irrefragable immediacy than a metaphysical stage prop enabling ever greater feats of metatextual virtuosity.
The application to Freud is then made, and the terms of the application matter more than its content. The structure illustrates the psychoanalytic logic of trauma: the dissolution of the event into a missed event, together with the hypertrophic investment in the trivial, the nonevent, the negligible remainder. Freud will discern in this delay the basic rhythm of human experience, a perpetual syncopation between originary inscription and subsequent transcription, translation, or re-edition. Comay then makes the methodological claim that governs her use of psychoanalysis throughout the book: the textual metaphors are Freud’s own and should be read as literally as possible. The demonstration is lexical and depends on a family of German terms sharing a common root—translation, the occupation or investment of psychic energy, and the overinvestment or excessive occupation that names hypercathexis. Translation implies both a spatial relay of psychic energy from one occupation zone to another and an economic inflation, an overinvestment in the trifling aftermath of an intensity originally unmarked. Trauma marks a caesura in which the linear order of time is thrown out of sequence.
The chapter’s final claim is the one that connects its philological material to the political analyses that follow, and it is stated in two sentences that should be read together. We compound the temporal disorientation every time we try to quarantine trauma by displacing it to a buried past or a distant future. The event is by this strategy at once acknowledged and disavowed, its pressure both registered and elided by being either consigned to the depths of the immemorial or pushed off to a future forever pending. Translation registers this strictly perverse relationship to an imperative all the more urgent for coming always too late.
The word perverse in that final sentence is being used in its technical psychoanalytic sense, which the fourth chapter will make explicit through the formula acknowledging castration while remaining unaffected by the acknowledgment. Its appearance here, at the end of a chapter otherwise devoted to lexicography and imperial history, indicates the degree to which the book’s apparatus is installed from the outset and awaiting the material that will let it operate. The two strategies of quarantine identified in the closing paragraph—consignment to the immemorial past, deferral to the pending future—will be the objects of the third and fourth chapters respectively. The Enlightenment’s relation to the faith it has destroyed will exemplify the first, and Kantian morality’s relation to its own fulfillment will exemplify the second. The chapter thus concludes by naming its two successors’ subjects without naming them as such.
The second chapter turns to Kant, and it is the longest and most intricately argued in the book. Its scale is worth registering at the outset, since a reader arriving from the title would expect the Kantian material to be preparatory. It occupies roughly a fifth of the whole and supplies the conceptual apparatus—the crime that cannot be expiated, the spectator at a safe distance, the formal execution, diabolical evil, moral conversion as revolution—on which the two Hegel chapters then draw continuously. The chapter’s governing observation is a textual discrepancy, and Comay’s handling of that discrepancy determines the method of everything that follows.
The discrepancy is between two texts written within a few years of each other. In the Conflict of the Faculties, composed in 1795, the enthusiasm of distant spectators for the revolutionary drama furnishes proof of humanity’s moral predisposition and of its uninterrupted advance toward the better; Kant applies to the contemporary situation of Germany a logic he had already formalized in the third Critique, whereby terror experienced at a slight distance yields the sublime satisfaction of moral self-enhancement. Germany gazes across the river with disinterested interest at misery and atrocities from which it draws the moral capital of its own rational humanity, and Kant records the exaltation with which the uninvolved public looking on sympathized without the slightest intention of assisting. In a convoluted footnote to the Metaphysics of Morals of 1797, by contrast, the same event culminates in something abyssal, unrepresentable, unthinkable, and impossible: the coldly legalized illegality of the king’s execution threatens a diabolical inversion of the social order, a complete overturning of the concept of right, a suicide of the state, an abyss in which reason threatens to lose itself, an ineffaceable stain, a crime described as immortal and inexpiable, a transgression so absolute that it seems to preclude forgiveness in this world or the next. Kant emphasizes that what strikes horror in a soul filled with the idea of human rights is the formal execution of the monarch, and that this horror is felt repeatedly, as soon as and as often as one thinks of such scenes.
Comay’s analysis of the temporal structure of that horror is the first indication that the chapter will be doing something more than intellectual history. In the face of this spectacle, time both contracts and shatters. It shrinks into a pure present in which there is no delay between stimulus and response and no interval to buffer the relay from idea to affect, and it splinters into an unending series of repetitive traumatic flashbacks, since both image and emotion keep arising unbidden, simultaneously, repeatedly, and often. The two determinations are contraries—contraction to a point and dispersal across an unending series—and their simultaneity reproduces exactly the structure the introduction identified in the Revolution’s untimeliness. The demonstration that Kant’s own description of his affective response has the modal form of the historical event it responds to is the chapter’s opening move, and it is made without commentary, by attending to the tense and aspect of a single footnote.
The refusals that follow determine the chapter’s method. The disparity between the two texts cannot be written off as ambivalence, inconsistency, or as a function of political caution and self-censorship—and Comay adds, with an economy that is also a rebuke to a certain literature, that some readers have suggested senility. It cannot be attributed to a difference in focus, such as a split between a philosophy of history tethered to a pacifying vision of progress and a political philosophy unhinged by contemporary events. Kant’s hesitancy around the Revolution instead crystallizes a broader tension pervading the system as a whole, and Comay specifies that tension as a conflict between competing metaphysical commitments running through every domain of the philosophy—moral, scientific, aesthetic, political. On one side stands an evolutionist commitment to gradualism, which she characterizes as a Leibnizian attachment to the great chain of being in various guises: the infinite divisibility and absolute indestructibility of the spatial and temporal plenum, biological preformationism, the imperceptible shadings between species, the inevitability of continuous historical progress. On the other stands a creationist commitment to discontinuity and discreteness, a fascination with beginnings out of nothing, precipitous ruptures, and unforeseeable transitions: biological epigenesis, moral regeneration, aesthetic genius.
The qualification Comay attaches to this schema is more important than the schema itself, and it is the point at which she declines the tidiest available reading. It might be tempting to split the differences by assigning one side to the beautiful plenitude of nature and the other to the sublime spontaneity of freedom, but, she observes, things do not always align quite that way. The observation is decisive for the chapter’s subsequent argument, since the whole demonstration will consist in showing that the same structure appears on both sides of the supposed division: political revolution leaps away from a history organized as second nature toward a freedom indistinguishable from the most anarchic nature, and moral revolution leaps away from the natural order into a freedom that turns out to have the inextinguishable force of nature. Extremes meet. Had the gradualist and the discontinuist commitments been distributed neatly across the nature-freedom divide, the tension would have been a division of labor. Their cross-cutting distribution is what makes it a systematic instability.
The analysis of the inexpiable crime proceeds by a comparison whose purpose is to isolate a species of indelibility that exceeds the one Kant is famous for. There is a generic sense in which all transgression is inextirpable and in which every misdoing is, in a manner Comay characterizes as relatively straightforward and hyper-Protestant, inexpiable: no penitential ceremony, sacrificial ritual, or confessional performance can wipe out the infinite debt incurred by a free and rational decision to embrace evil. Arising from our own freedom, every moral debt is by definition irredeemable; discharging it demands nothing less than a total change of heart. Comay then draws the consequence that makes radical evil a resource rather than a scandal within the Kantian system. Irreparability is the very key to morality, since it is the persistence of evil that sustains human freedom by supplying a permanent whetstone on which duty can continually sharpen its own unappeasable demands. Evil exerts a ceaseless counterpressure, without which morality would collapse into the freedom of a turnspit.
Against this background, the regicide’s indelibility stands out as a different kind. Where radical evil both permits and demands moral regeneration, the regicide blocks every possibility of such redemption, because the crime obliterates every residue of self-identity that could be carried over as the basis for a new beginning: it severs the thread of life of the body politic. This is why Kant compares the event to a suicide, and why the crime introduces into the continuum of history the void of a permanent interregnum, involving a principle that would make it impossible to regenerate a state that had been overthrown. Comay then states the resulting double determination in the form that will recur throughout the book: revolution is at once the principle of reversibility, meaning total overturning or catastrophe, and the principle of irreversible fixation, so that it introduces the twin specters of irrecuperable transience and monumental persistence.
The turn that follows converts the analysis from a diagnosis of Kant’s difficulty into an account of his strategy. The stony fixity of the crime presents a negative image of another form of intransigence: it conjures up the ineffaceable authority of moral freedom itself, the inscrutable, irresistible, and indelible fact of reason, together with its political analogue in a republic regulated by the eternal norm of human rights. This imprint is precisely what the Conflict of the Faculties attempts to read beneath the ineffaceable inscription of the crime. Comay’s formula for the operation is exact and worth holding: traumatic persistence is overwritten by the ineffaceable insistence of the moral law within. The requirement is therefore not a purification, cancellation, or undoing of the deed, nor a clearing of the slate or an effacement of traces, but a rewriting and even an overwriting—a question of multiplying rather than erasing the stigmata, shifting focus from one scriptural register to another, from one indelibility to another, from one memory trace to another. From the riveting spectacle of the crime, described as an abyss that irretrievably swallows everything, the reader’s gaze is redirected to a palimpsest of marks, signals, and mnemonic inscriptions, each vying for exegetical attention.
The apparatus by which the redirection is achieved is then specified. Memory is to be transfigured from a mechanical, stammering compulsion into a free act of judgment, passing from traumatic repetition to reconciling remembrance. Time comes unstuck as it unfolds into an array of past and future possibilities. In its synoptic clarity the sign functions as an analogical presentation of a totality strictly inaccessible to sensible experience, which would otherwise require an impossible providential perspective. The present moment becomes vivid to itself in offering a glimpse of a future—a fragment—in the light of which history suddenly presents itself as an unbroken totality and past and future are simultaneously redeemed. The triple designation of the sign as commemorative, demonstrative, and prognostic is quoted in Kant’s own Latin and Greek, and Comay marks the passage from crime to sign with a philological observation whose consequence she then draws: as so often, the intrusion of Latin suggests the pressure of something alien, inexplicable, and inassimilable, and this strangeness is unequivocally negative in neither case—it is indeed this very equivocation that will prove most disturbing.
The account of Kantian spectatorship that follows is the chapter’s most sustained historical reconstruction, and it establishes several claims that the book depends on later. The basic logic derives from the analytic of the sublime: to experience fearfulness without fear is to entertain the counterfactual possibility of the impossible, engaging the fantasy of self-annihilation from a safe place that permits one to traverse the fantasy, to go the whole way, and thus to transcend the limits of experience through the moral affirmation of a supersensible vocation. Kant thereby extends the aesthetics of terror advanced in Burke’s earlier enquiry, converting terror into invigorating delight and impotence into a swelling of internal power. Comay marks the class position implicit in the arrangement—the perspective is slightly patrician, belonging to one already released from the anxious coils of self-preservation—and quotes the principle in its most economical formulation, that it is impossible to like terror we take seriously. The religious counterpart is then given: the difference between fearfulness with and without fear corresponds to the difference between superstition as a slave morality and a religion within the bounds of reason, since craven trembling before a deity reified as irresistible natural domination is superseded by an exultant identification with the potency of thought. In the subject’s shiver of self-affirmation, Comay observes, we see at once a victory over and a vestige of the body’s primordial shudder before thunderous nature.
The Lisbon material supplies the developmental account that turns this static analysis into a history. Kant had originally attempted to contain the theological shock waves of the earthquake by erecting a metaphysical barrier between the physical and moral universes, setting out in 1756 to demystify the disaster by referring it directly to the laws of physical causality. By purging natural catastrophe of moral significance he had secured a foothold for scientific investigation in the heaving landscape, extracting opportunity from the wreckage while protecting the creator God from charges of malignancy or incompetence; Comay quotes his conclusion that our feet are on the cause. In the third Critique Kant returns to the scene with a more ambitious agenda. Content no longer with explaining the catastrophe, he tries to harness its energy—a shift from the naturalist to the moralist, and a transformation of the protective barrier into a dam that not only staves off the ravaging flood but manages to channel, extract, and store its virulence for future profit.
The transposition of this apparatus onto the political landscape is then described, and its stake is stated with precision. In the Conflict of the Faculties, Kant moves beyond the Alpine hike to consider the moral investment in historical catastrophe as the chance for humanity to affirm its inalienable predisposition to moral improvement, and within a few short years the rocky landscape of the third Critique has been transposed into the political landscape of contemporary Europe. What now requires capture is a danger more thrilling than mortality: freedom itself contains the seeds of its own destruction, and Comay’s formulation for the resulting situation is one of the chapter’s most compressed—the wilderness is within. History threatens to collapse into the brutality of lawless nature, and the task is to neutralize the political actuality of terror, the seemingly seamless slide from revolutionary activism to anarchic bloodshed, such that the republican experiment can be sanitized of its founding violence, if only in the eyes of its beholders. From shock to awe: the trauma of the phenomenal event is telepathically bound in the viewer’s admiration for the moral law within, and it is the disinterested sympathy of spectators before the games of great revolutions that furnishes the sign that history is unfolding in a continuous advance. Comay notes in a parenthesis that Kant’s text makes it clear who the spectators are and who the players.
The material on the reading revolution supplies the sociological substrate for this arrangement, and Comay handles it with an eye to a specific structural feature rather than for its own interest. Witnessing the Revolution presupposes a revolution in reading, and the explosion of print culture in the late eighteenth century was nowhere more self-consciously experienced than in Germany, where in the absence of a developed industrial economy consumer culture tended to favor the virtual and vicarious consumption of texts and images, and where geographical dispersion and political decentralization made strict censorship of the literary market nearly impossible. The features of the transformation are enumerated—proliferation of publications, multiplication of distribution channels, expansion of literacy across class and gender boundaries and beyond urban centers, diversification of genres, and a transformation of reading practices from intensive, meaning slow, concentrated, and reverential, to extensive, meaning speedy, distracted, and disenchanted—along with an accelerated sense of time’s passage and even the fashioning of a new kind of reader’s body, sedentary, immobile, voracious.
What Comay extracts from this material is a paradox in the constitution of the enlightened public. Every reader is distant not only from the events in France but from every other reader, and this second separation provides the critical distance that is to protect him from the deceptions of oratory and the seductions of demagoguery. The very medium that seems to isolate every reader in solitary reflection is precisely what unifies the public as a virtual collective whose gaze is directed simultaneously outward, to the historical drama unfolding elsewhere, and inward, to the sign of cosmopolitan humanity imprinted within its own interior. The reading public produces itself performatively as an enlightened public by presenting itself in the act of reading, thereby supplying its own reading material and ensuring that it never runs out; the text it produces is infinitely self-reproducing.
The danger attaching to this publicity is then analyzed, and the analysis is among the chapter’s most acute. The publicity generated is fraught with danger—Comay notes that Kant repeats this twice—and accompanied by that mixture of discomfort and opportunity implicit in every encounter with disaster. The spectator risks serious disadvantage should his participation be discovered, and Comay’s comment is that herein precisely lies his ultimate advantage. Danger is thereby neither contained within the borders of another country nor rendered entirely virtual by conversion into printed matter; the whiff of repression allows the reader to display his indifference to the exigencies of self-preservation. Her name for this second-order operation is sublimity to the second power, and she adds the parenthesis that completes the demonstration: were the press to be a palladium of human rights, there would be no opportunity for such heroics. The freedom Kant celebrates elsewhere as the sole palladium of the people’s rights would, if actually secured, destroy the conditions of the moral spectacle he is describing.
The account of what the spectator’s operation accomplishes is then given in a formula that condenses the whole. Revolution is relinquished, mourned, and resurrected. Renounced at a local level, no longer constrained by national frontiers, partial interests, or partisan commitments, and no longer trivialized by the contagious effects of fanaticism or empathy, the event is reinstated in the spectator’s surge of moral self-exaltation. Revolution in one country expands into revolution as such, in general, as an Idea, and Comay borrows Schlegel’s phrase for the expansion. The noumenal content of the Revolution is salvaged from its ragged phenomenal expression: freedom is transported from the realm of appearances, where it seems destined to keep foundering, to the realm of morality, where it finds a secure footing. The idea of universal human rights and dignity becomes legible to the spectator in a way blocked to the participants by virtue of their pathological self-interest. The consequence is then stated in a sentence that will govern the book’s entire treatment of witness: the revolutionary event is eclipsed by its own witnessing, since the spectatorship of the event is already, says Kant, the event, and witnessing is in turn eclipsed by its own self-witnessing. Comay marks the etymological convergence between the German for event and an older form meaning something like a coming-before-the-eyes, noting that Kant used the latter term in an early draft.
The demonstration closes with the observation that makes the whole apparatus indifferent to its object. Given such self-witnessing, the contingent success or failure of the actual revolution becomes for Kant somewhat irrelevant, as does the possibility of its repetition. The passage in which Kant states this is quoted at length, and it is one of the few extended quotations Comay permits herself: the revolution of a gifted people may succeed or miscarry and may be filled with miseries and atrocities to the point where a right-thinking man would never resolve to make the experiment a second time at such cost, and it nevertheless finds in the hearts of all spectators who are not engaged in the game itself a wishful participation bordering closely on enthusiasm, the very expression of which is fraught with danger, so that this sympathy can have no other cause than a moral predisposition in the human race. Comay’s gloss on the structure of the proof is the section’s punch line: it is not the Revolution but the neighbor’s near enthusiasm for it that furnishes the ultimate proof of humanity’s advance, and she marks the critical function of the word almost, since we are already at two degrees of separation. In a single blow Kant absorbs revolutionary rupture into the continuous reform of the moral spectator while dispensing with any need to import democratic principles onto German soil.
The chapter then follows Kant’s attempt at a bolder tactic in the Metaphysics of Morals, and the reconstruction is philosophically productive because the tactic fails in an instructive way. Kant experiments with saving the Revolution for the revolutionaries themselves by injecting continuity into the political front as well, deferring the actual onset of revolution proper to the latest possible moment in an effort to confine the crisis to the king’s trial and execution in the winter of 1792 and 1793. Everything preceding that—the storming of the Bastille, the self-creation of the National Assembly, even the suspension of monarchy and the inauguration of the republic in 1792—is to be absorbed into the causal continuum of history. Louis simply made an enormous error of judgment in 1789 when, to solve a fiscal crisis, he convoked an assembly of the people whose co-presence would logically annihilate him as ruler, thereby authoring his own misfortune by initiating an irreversible transfer of sovereignty. Comay draws out the consequence with evident enjoyment: despite appearances, the people’s seizure of sovereignty is by this argument less a revolution than a reaction, a passive event in conformity with preexistent legality, already regulated by the king’s prior speech act of convocation. He invited them. Everything that would follow, with one little exception, could be contained within the king’s original performative; they could change the guest list, the venue, the agenda, whatever, and the king remains author of his self-dispossession, so that even his abdication, stupidly self-initiated, remains his own.
The line of thought that Kant declines to pursue is then identified, and the identification matters because it names a possibility the book will keep in view. What Kant has opened is the possibility of a transformation internal to monarchy itself, a reversal initiated from above, legal and self-inflicted—Comay’s phrase for it is a revolution without revolution. Kant entertains this momentarily and dismisses it without argument on grounds she characterizes as decidedly un-Kantian, namely expediency: even if the sovereign decided to transform itself into a democracy it could still do the people a wrong, since the people could abhor such a constitution and find another form more advantageous. Having found no plausible accommodation, Kant exiles the event to the purgatory of footnotes, where it is subjected to further sanitizing measures.
The analysis of why revolution is impossible for Kant is then conducted with unusual care, and it establishes a result the book will use repeatedly. The impossibility rests on performative self-contradiction rather than on utilitarian considerations, and Comay is candid about the quality of the arguments: they are various and scattered, and none is very good, appealing to everything from positive law to divine commandment while invoking an ascending series of formal tautologies centered on issues of jurisprudence. She notes in a parenthesis that Kant himself makes the formalism explicit, so that the arguments apply equally to counterrevolutions, coups, and restorations, and that some readers have claimed that his chaotic attack on revolution is actually a veiled attempt to protect the Revolution from counterrevolutionary reaction. The core claim is then stated in a formulation whose exclamation mark carries the argument: revolution is against the law—against actually existing laws, against lawfulness as such, against the very idea of public law, against the irresistibility of the moral law, and ultimately against the sacral authority of the Law in its unbreachable transcendence. It is illegal both in fact, since there can be no positive legislation authorizing the suspension of legislation, and in principle, since there can be no right to suspend right as such. It also violates the transcendental formula of public right, Kant’s version of the political categorical imperative, according to which actions relating to the rights of others are wrong if their maxim is incompatible with publicity, since every revolution requires clandestine efforts that undermine the commitment to transparency on which any appeal to legitimacy rests.
The logical form of revolutionary claim-making is then specified with precision, and the specification is the chapter’s most important technical contribution. Because every revolution is an explicit normative claim, a contest not only over particular predefined rights but over the very terms of right, its implications are inherently universal. Resistance to a given regime involves a negative infinite judgment directed at the premise of governance as such: to defy this particular sovereign is to deny the principle of sovereignty on which the social contract rests, and to rebel against this particular constitution is to annihilate any constitution and to eradicate the condition in which alone people can possess rights at all. Revolution thus marks the place where the distinction between legality and legitimacy, between positive law and rational law, becomes indiscernible, as does the distinction between law itself and the divine commandment to which Kant also, uncharacteristically, ends up appealing.
The theological register of the prohibition is then documented, and Comay’s comment on it opens the psychoanalytic dimension. At moments revolution becomes a quasi-theological impossibility with the distinct whiff of an Oedipal transgression, since Kant warns that even to investigate the historical genesis of sovereign power, to suspend the grip of law long enough to contemplate the idea of law’s illegal origin in a founding act of violence, is already to place oneself outside the law, to occupy the position of the original legislator, to become one’s own progenitor, and thus to commit something tantamount to blasphemy and treason. The passage in which Kant declares such subtle reasonings pointless and threatening to the state is quoted at length, ending with the representation of a law so holy that it is a crime even to call it into doubt practically, which is what the saying about all authority deriving from God means. Comay’s summary of the resulting position is a formula that reproduces the modal structure of the whole book: the Revolution both did not and could not, and yet did, irrefragably, occur.
The account of the trial that follows is the chapter’s densest historical passage and its philosophical center. Comay first records Kant’s attempts to find an accommodation, noting that in the very footnote in which he appears to exile the event he continues to downplay its significance, wondering whether the unthinkable might somehow be accommodated and whether there are circumstances in which even regicide might be reconciled with continuous evolutionary reform. Kant emphasizes that the simple fact of the king’s murder is not what strikes horror in a soul filled with the idea of human rights, and Comay marks the peculiarity in a parenthesis: curiously, the only objection to the revolution that Kant takes seriously is one inspired by the principles of the revolution. A random assassination attempt could be accommodated as the exception proving the rule, a pathological eruption of natural drives posing no real challenge to the hegemony of the moral will or to the constitution modeled in its image. An execution motivated by fear of counterrevolutionary reprisal could be tolerated as a lapse motivated by self-interest. Neither crime would undermine the organizing rationality of the state, which can easily survive an attack on the monarch’s physical body by virtue of the political theology of the king’s two bodies. The Latin tag asserting that dignity does not die is quoted, and the principle spelled out: in a state in the strict sense of the word, law itself rules and depends on no particular person, so that the spiritual institution of monarchy should be as little jeopardized by the contingency of the king’s murder as by the inevitability of his fleshly demise.
What defies thought is then isolated by contrast. The formal execution of the king, authorized by a legally sanctioned process that in its very punctiliousness can only overturn by assuming the formality of the law as such, presents an abyss that irretrievably swallows everything. It was not only this or that king, or even kingship in general, but lawfulness itself that was put to death. Comay then draws from this the possibility that gives the section its title, and the formulation is one of the book’s most consequential: Kant’s analysis suggests a kind of sublime in reverse, in which a rigid adherence to form can only culminate in the wasteland of the formless. This signals the reversal of the idealist itinerary, since the purest freedom collapses into the moral desert of appearances. A principled commitment to anarchic groundlessness, a formal commitment to the formless, releases a crescendo of escalating abstractions, and the escalation is then traced in a single sentence with four terms: the death sentence suffices to turn what would otherwise be the incidental murder of an individual monarch into the eradication of a dynasty, the destruction of a particular dynasty into the abolition of monarchy as an institution, the destruction of a state institution into the obliteration of the state as such, and the defiance of the law into the demolition of the possibility of any law—an irreversible reversion to the state of nature.
The theological analysis of the execution that follows is the chapter’s most concentrated passage and states a structure the third chapter will develop at length. With the regicide the gap closes between the king’s two bodies, and the king’s death can mean nothing less than the self-inflicted death of the state, a suicide of reason from which, however, a surd of sovereignty seems magically to have been extracted. The event is invested with all the prestige and mystery of the incarnation. Comay then states the paradox in a chiasmus whose symmetry is the argument: absolute monarchy is retroactively consummated at the moment of the king’s ever-so-ordinary execution, since Louis becomes absolute monarch the instant he dies convicted as Citizen Capet—in becoming nothing, he becomes everything. The king has to die both as king, for the monstrously exceptional crime of having been king, and at the same instant as the insignificant banality named Louis Capet—in becoming everything, he becomes nothing. The execution is thus the demonstration of a miracle, making publicly visible what is unviewable, unthinkable, and strictly impossible: the self-production of sovereignty out of nothing at the very moment of its self-destruction. With the public execution of the monarch the people bear witness to the impossible and become witnesses at their own birth. Since they derive their entire legitimacy from the devastated sovereignty of the monarch, however, what they are viewing is also the spectacle of their own annihilation, so that they become witnesses at their own funeral.
The claim about where the traumatic kernel lies is then made explicitly, and it is counterintuitive enough to require the demonstration that precedes it. For Kant, it is the king’s trial that presents the traumatic kernel of the French Revolution, and Comay’s compressed formulation is that the real terror predates the Terror. The evidence is negative and telling: Kant shows no particular interest in the carnage, the chaos, or even in the explicit dismantling of the legal apparatus beginning in March 1793, when the Convention instituted an extraordinary revolutionary tribunal and unleashed the chain of emergency measures climaxing in the law of 22 Prairial, the point at which procedural niceties became officially dispensable and even the formal semblance of justice superfluous. The trial of Louis, with its juridical minutiae and meticulous dramaturgy, preoccupies Kant far more than atrocities perpetrated by spontaneous mob action or committed once the regime had explicitly jettisoned legality for reasons of expediency.
The reconstruction of the trial’s logical structure that follows is exceptionally precise, and it introduces a form of retroactivity the book will use repeatedly. The preliminary discussions in the Convention posed the question with obsessive clarity: how could one judge a king who was by definition above the law, and according to a legal system that would both in fact and in principle rule out his conviction. What the trial needed to establish, infinitely more important than the contingent guilt of the accused, was the retroactive justification of the trial that would presume to judge him. Comay is careful to distinguish this from the standard dilemma arising in international criminal law when previous regimes are judged for crimes against humanity, the principle that there is no crime without a prior law, which she notes was the objection made by one of Louis’s counsels in December 1792. The retroactivity at work was far more severe, and its severity is specified in three stages: the judgment had to generate the law to which it appealed in identifying a crime that could not have preexisted the conviction; it also had to establish the sovereign ground of legislation; and it had to establish the authority of the Convention to judge and even to accuse the king in the first place. Regicide was in this sense not just an optional expedient for the revolutionaries. It alone secured the legitimacy of the trial by extracting from the body of the accused the sovereign authority necessary to have arraigned him. The circle is then stated in its finished form: only Louis’s execution could justify his conviction, and only his conviction could justify the fact that he had been put on trial.
The revolutionaries’ own recognition of this circularity is documented through Saint-Just and Robespierre, who dismissed the swirl of constitutional and procedural debate raging throughout the autumn of 1792 as hair-splitting casuistry. The formulations quoted are chosen for their theoretical content: that a people does not judge in the manner of courts of law, handing down sentences, but hurls down thunderbolts; that there is no verdict to give for or against a man, only a measure to take for public safety. To give Louis the dignity of an ordinary trial would already be to concede too much, effectively acquitting him of the ultimate crime of having been king in the first place, and thus, in Robespierre’s phrase, to want revolution without a revolution—to want revolution while leaving the terms of sovereignty intact, a concession that would put the revolution itself on trial. Saint-Just’s announcement that no man can reign innocently completes the sequence.
Comay’s own account of what fascinates and repels Kant in this material is then given, and it is the pivot on which the chapter turns toward its conclusion. What the trial reveals is an illegality that seems to be both internal to the law and the key to its foundational authority, staking out the precarious border zone between two incommensurable orders at the fragile point where justice hangs in the balance between legitimacy and power. What the trial exposes is the future anterior of a rule that will have been invented only upon being executed, and the circularity of a syllogism that will have justified its antecedent only from its conclusion. She then locates the danger with reference to Benjamin: the distinction between law-founding and law-maintaining power, which corresponds to the republican distinction between legislative and executive power, is in danger of collapsing. The logical and juridical syncope that reproduces the verdict in the charge is within a hair’s breadth of the swift, severe, inflexible justice—the phrase is Robespierre’s—that would within a year accelerate the passage from denunciation to death to the instant of a falling blade. The temporal characterization that closes the section is the chapter’s most important single claim: chronological sequence, the linear and irreversible time of nature, is not merely suspended, as when the mathematical sublime does violence to inner sense; time is not just contracted, arrested, or interrupted, since it is twisted and reversed. The Revolution marks a traumatic fold in the order of experience.
The treatment of diabolical evil that follows takes up the deed’s peculiar modal status and develops it into an account of revolutionary regeneration. The trial points to a constitutive anarchy within the law itself, a misdeed or even a non-deed which, while remaining strictly un-doable, is nonetheless not undo-able. Comay’s formulation of the aporia is exact: it cannot be done, and yet it cannot be undone. She then connects this to the paradox unleashed when the project of regeneration, in Mona Ozouf’s phrase, drops its genitive—when it ceases to be the regeneration of the monarchy, of the nation, of the administration, and becomes regeneration pure and simple, infinite, intransitive, untethered from every object. The consequence is stated with precision, and it constitutes one of the book’s principal explanatory claims. If there is no limit to what can and must be renovated, if the calendar will be reset and cities renamed and everything republicanized, this is because in order to sustain its own generativity the revolution must keep destroying whatever it generates, calling into question even its own most prodigious powers of self-invention. The audacity of the project is thus already a confession of failure, since no object can survive the revolutionary act and no such act can outlast the moment of its own invention. Comay then extracts from this a genealogical consequence with considerable force: this monstrous productivity accounts for the paradox that was to obsess the Revolution and underpin its strange sense of patrimony, since the judgment that stripped the last king of France of his paternity was precisely what created the possibility of a revolutionary lineage.
The account of what the regicide destroys is then given in terms that connect the chapter back to the first. The regicide inflicts a fatal wound on the body politic, rupturing the vital process of reproduction and transmission on which both the survival of the French state and the living chain of progressive universal history depend. Seen from abroad, the performance interrupts not only the ceremonial procession of the Bourbon dynasty but the epic pageantry of imperial translation on a cosmopolitan scale. It ruins the genealogical drama of legitimation in which the spectator might see his own image reflected in the ongoing destiny of the collective. The formulation that follows states the double bind that the whole chapter has been constructing: it blocks that self-image even as it puts on view what must remain strictly unviewable.
The analysis of diabolical evil proper then proceeds by specifying what makes it more disruptive than radical evil. With this apparently disinterested act of subversion—insubordination for its own sake, without mitigating motive—there arises the unthinkable possibility of evil for the sake of evil, pointless or useless evil, formally indistinguishable from an act of duty, in which Saint-Just’s willing executioners make the free choice of the evil maxim their categorical and unconditional principle. Kant had already introduced this possibility in the Religion only to dismiss it as absolutely impossible. Comay’s gloss on what diabolical means for Kant is careful and does technical work: a negativity internal to reason itself, a disturbance more explosive than the negativity that had already fractured reason by making the choice of evil a free and rational decision, which is what makes evil radical or inextirpable, since it is rooted in our very humanity. Diabolical evil goes beyond a simple bifurcation within reason, a negativity that would still be secured within reason’s limits; it is a self-repulsion of reason against reason, an internal fissure that turns reason inside out, an evil reason as it were. Comay marks the German distinction between evil as such and a particular mode of evil, and then supplies the list of attributes that produces the section’s decisive effect: a desire to transgress for the sole purpose of transgression, unperturbed by pathological incentives, uncontaminated by self-regard or self-gratification, indifferent to consequences, undistracted by temptation, clear-eyed, unsentimental, scrupulous in its honesty, unswerving in its commitment. The predicates are those of moral purity, and Comay states the conclusion they compel: this is the very image of moral purity and rigor.
The function Kant assigns to this impossibility is then reconstructed, and the reconstruction shows the concept to be load-bearing rather than dismissed. Diabolical evil is impossible because it contains too much, implying an integrity of which no human being is capable, and Comay observes that it is precisely this inhuman excess that must surely be maintained, if only to safeguard the idea of pure moral duty on which the very idea of humanity depends. Only fidelity to the impossible, to the idea of a strictly unrealizable moral purity, prevents morality from sliding into hedonism, eudaemonism, fanaticism, or, in her summary phrase, collusion with the existent. The idea of the most extreme evil thus functions as a negative regulative Idea, without which the law’s essential purity would be oriented, filled in, or rendered substantial—which is to say defiled. The purity of diabolical evil not only mirrors but sustains the purity of moral duty, purging purity itself of all positive content or determinacy, including the idea of moral destiny and even the determinate opposition of good and evil. Comay then states the two things this purgation prevents, and the pairing is the point: it prevents duty from becoming reified as a transcendent force over which I have no power and to which I bear no responsibility, and it prevents freedom from becoming hypostatized as a transcendent goal or destiny for the sake of which, rather than from which, I act.
The historical illustration that follows is given in a parenthesis and is among the book’s most pointed. Fouquier-Tinville’s self-defense in 1795, disclaiming responsibility on the grounds that he had acted only in the spirit of laws passed by a Convention invested with all powers, is set beside Eichmann’s celebrated formulation about doing his duty. The juxtaposition demonstrates the practical stake of the Kantian purgation without argument: precisely the reification of duty that Kant’s regulative fiction was designed to prevent is what the defense invokes. Deleuze’s account is then adduced to state the positive result: prying the moral law away from divine commandment means that the law no longer has its foundation in some higher principle from which it would derive its authority, and is self-grounded and valid solely by virtue of its own form. Comay then draws the consequence that the trial made visible, and it is the section’s most important claim. Only by maintaining the formal indiscernibility between good and evil can the performative force of law be maintained in the absence of specific ordinance—a commitment to law as such, to the form of law, to law in general, to the barest possibility of law, and also to the monstrous prodigality of a law that must be rearticulated every time it is applied, rejustified and reinvented whenever it is executed. Her name for the resulting condition is a lawfulness in excess of law, or, phrased differently, lawfulness without law, and she gives the German formula.
The application to the trial completes the argument. What the king’s trial made painfully visible was the originality of a law that had to invent itself in the absence of any precursor, and from this performative self-fashioning derived the event’s essentially theatrical character. New laws were generated in the very moment of being executed, and it was only the formal or ceremonial quality of the trial that sustained, by institutionalizing, the revolutionary fiction of self-generation. Comay then makes the claim that binds the revolutionaries to Kant rather than opposing them: in staging a show trial where the law was invoked as pure form without antecedent content—force of law without signification, to recall Benjamin’s discussion of Kafka—the revolutionaries were observing to the letter what Kant himself had emphasized when insisting on the unbridgeable disconnection between legality and morality. By insisting on the need to follow the letter of the law while acting from a disinterested respect for its spirit, Kant had also confirmed that at the visible level of particular actions our fidelity to the law is only an attachment to the letter. The literalism thereby introduces into the domain of appearances its own kind of purity, a theater of form and a formalization of appearance in which the staging of appearance for its own sake allows the law to display its inaugural power of self-invention. Stripped of preexistent meaning, the law can appear only as a cipher for which the key has been lost or not yet discovered, and in its formality it is no more than a dead letter whose opacity points to the traumatic pressure of a not yet legible demand and an already vanishing authority. The section closes by identifying the theatricality thus exposed with the very theatricality from which Kant elsewhere derives the sublime pleasure of spectatorial enthusiasm.
The reading of the footnote’s closing movement is the most delicate piece of textual work in the book, and its result is a genuine aporia rather than a resolved reading. Comay records that Kant in the end leaves it undecided whether the trial was show or real, whether the regicide was murder or execution, and finally what the difference might be. In the last lines of the footnote Kant declares that the ultimate motive for the crime must have been fear rather than cold-blooded principle—ordinary murder dressed up in the cloak of justice. She reports the standard reproach, noting that it comes from the small minority of Kant’s readers who take diabolical evil seriously: that in pathologizing the criminals he trivializes their act and shrinks back from the abyss opened up by his own formalism, exorcising the demon he has just conjured. The turnabout is then documented. Kant adds that even this verdict fails to protect either actors or spectators from the abyss, since the disguising of the deed miscarries, and such a presumption on the people’s part is still worse than murder, involving a principle that would make it impossible to generate again a state that had been overthrown. Comay’s account of the resulting reversal is exact: another onion skin has been unpeeled, and the situation is now inverted, since it turns out to be a case of legality hiding behind the appearance of pathology, an appearance Kant himself has discerned. Despite its pathological appearance the crime can never be quite impure enough, the murder never quite murderous enough, since even the veneer of legality is enough to contaminate the deed with a tinge of disinterestedness—a taint of purity—that makes it worse than murder.
The unsettling implications Kant declines to draw are then drawn, and they constitute the chapter’s most rigorous piece of argument. If the very appearance of legality is enough to make the crime diabolical, then almost any transgression would qualify, since radical evil—ordinary, everyday evil—is defined precisely as the moral masquerade that hides pathological motivations behind a façade of righteousness. Comay poses the resulting question directly: is it only bad luck that pushes the crime from the radical to the diabolical, from the realm of all-too-human pathological perversity into the abyss of unspeakable disaster? The consequence would be a shift in the criterion of moral evaluation from inner to outer, from agency to outcome, from intention to contingent consequence—which is to say a turn to moral luck, a position with which Kantian ethics is standardly taken to be incompatible. A second question follows, and it is even more destructive. What exactly was the misfortune, and how was it that the disguise misfired? Was the ruse unconvincing, so that in this case murder brazenly revealed itself as such? Or did the disguise succeed all too well, to the point where appearance became everything, dissolving the act into ungrounded, empty apparition without a residual core of meaning or intention? Comay’s conclusion is that in either case the founding opposition between appearance and reality, between legality and morality, between theatrical performance and inscrutable moral intention, between the visible and the invisible, would become incoherent.
The status she assigns to this result is worth noting, since it exhibits her characteristic scruple. She does not claim that Kant draws these conclusions, and she records that he leaves the thought hovering. The final quotation—that as far as we can see it is impossible for a human being to commit a crime of this kind, and yet it cannot be passed over in a system of morals—is given, and the closing characterization is one of the chapter’s finest sentences. Neither inside nor outside, the Revolution hovers at the margins of the system, untranslatable, intransmissible, unsurpassable. Although logically incoherent and even rationally nonexistent, the crime can be neither ignored nor superseded, neither passed over nor passed on. Excluded from every legacy, it is left to linger, without proper burial, in the underworld of footnotes.
The image of the unburied corpse in the footnote is doing structural work and should be registered as such. It connects Kant’s textual disposition of the Revolution to the third chapter’s account of Polyneices as the prototype of what remains unburied in every struggle for legitimacy, and to the same chapter’s characterization of the Enlightenment as leaving the stench of the unburied dead as its legacy to posterity. That a philosopher’s decision about where to place material in the physical layout of a book should be legible as a failure of mourning is a strong claim, and Comay makes it by figure rather than by argument. I mark this as an inference on her part which the text supports rather than states: the warrant is the exactness with which the vocabulary of burial, legacy, and transmission is deployed at this point, and the fact that the same vocabulary organizes the analyses of Antigone and of Enlightenment in the following chapter.
The chapter’s penultimate movement takes up moral revolution, and its argumentative function is to show that the discontinuity Kant prohibits politically is precisely what he requires morally. Comay records that for all Kant’s attempts to quarantine the event’s virulent negativity, he is still not prepared to relinquish the Revolution’s resources, and in a further move attempts to siphon revolution away from the homogeneous spatiotemporal continuum in order to reclaim its potency for morality. She quotes the maxim that nature makes no leaps and then states the consequence: if freedom must be accumulated gradually in the domain of experience, this is ultimately so that it can be acquired in one blow, though at every instant, in the noumenal domain. Strictly speaking every act is like a revolution, bursting through the linear continuum of time with the explosive potency of a new beginning. Just as every transgression has the gravity of the original Fall, detached from every antecedent and judged as if the human being had just fallen into it directly from the state of innocence, so every moral action has the inaugural significance of a rebirth or resurrection. Comay then notes the terminological fact on which the whole section turns: Kant explicitly describes this act of conversion as a revolution.
The derivation of this requirement from Kant’s rigorism is given carefully. There are no moral intermediates, nothing more-or-less, approximate, piecemeal, mixed, eclectic, or indifferent about the value assigned either to the act or to the moral condition of the agent. Every verdict must adhere to a strictly binary measure, and an absolute caesura separates the before and after of what Comay names, with a formulation that captures the difficulty, the transitionless transition to autonomy. Regardless of the requisite degree of cultivation, training, habituation, or effort, the decisive moment of change is as abrupt and unrehearsable as the transition from nonexistence to existence. The passage to maturity defies every naturalistic model of development, growth, or maturation. There are no partial installments, halfway measures, or gradual stages; short of total transformation, all efforts at improvement are fleeting and evanescent, a shadow-play of constantly disappearing impressions. Kant’s own figure from the Anthropology is quoted: education, examples, and teaching cannot bring about firmness and persistence in principles gradually, but only by a kind of explosion happening one time.
Comay then develops the scriptural figure that connects this analysis to the chapter’s earlier account of indelible inscription, and the development is one of the book’s most economical demonstrations of how a single figure can carry an argument. We might compare the conversion to an act of writing. I acquire a character. I fix or imprint upon the wavering instability of feeling, mood, or natural temperament the firmness of coherent principle, imposing a formal consistency on my willing without which all my actions remain episodic, contingent, and ungrounded, as fleeting and formless as a swarm of gnats. It is character that ultimately overcomes the amorphous vagueness of the foul stain. Radical evil remains ineffaceable, an ever-present obstacle to achievement, but it fades into a shadowy background against which the indelible imprint of my character stands out all the more clearly. The conclusion is stated in a sentence of six words that completes the figure introduced pages earlier in the analysis of the crime: the stain becomes a blank page on which I trace my signature. The moment of conversion is also like a signature in its radical performativity, having the solemnity of an oath together with its ineffaceable singularity, and Kant is quoted on the grounding of character as a kind of rebirth, a certain solemnity of taking a vow to oneself, which makes the moment of the transformation unforgettable, like the beginning of a new epoch. The eruption of morality into the flux of temporal experience leaves a permanent mark on time and bears its indelible stamp, and Comay closes with Kant’s demographic observation that perhaps only a few have attempted this revolution before the age of thirty and fewer still have firmly established it before forty.
The demonstration that evolution and revolution are logically inseparable then follows, and its symmetry is the point. A moral revolution requires as its phenomenal counterpart an incremental acculturation of the embodied agent, so that the birth of freedom out of nothing presupposes the slow and steady improvement of the sentient subject as it develops in partial installments from worse to better. And conversely, the uninterrupted disciplining of the embodied subject presupposes for its orientation and consistency the constant possibility of a noumenal self-transformation, so that moral conversion is at once total and in need of incessant reactivation. Moral revolution is thus compatible with and implies affective, libidinal, behavioral, and political reformation, just as freedom of thought both accommodates and calls for political obedience—and Comay notes in a parenthesis that a Lutheran premise no doubt sustains this last inference, which returns the analysis to the first chapter’s account of the two kingdoms.
The perspectival mechanism that reconciles the two commitments is then set out, and it is presented as a theatrical device. The dialectic rests on the opposition between noumenon and phenomenon, eternity and time, being and becoming, as on the perspectival split between divine and human spectatorship. It is again a question of theater, a shift of viewpoint as we pass from the drama of great revolutions to the great drama of religious change on earth. What from a finite standpoint can be grasped only as continuous amelioration reveals itself under the aspect of eternity as a matter of perpetual discontinuity. Comay then states the double conversion in a chiasmus that constitutes the section’s result: the cosmopolitan spectator of the Conflict of the Faculties absorbs political agitation as the occasion for his own uninterrupted self-enhancement, so that in the eyes of man, revolution is rewritten as reform; the divine spectator negates this negation by discerning in the seamless continuum of self-improvement the incessant pressure of moral interruption, so that in the eyes of God, reform is rewritten as revolution. The lengthy passage from the Religion on the necessity of a revolution in the mode of thought and a gradual reformation in the mode of sense is then quoted in support.
The conclusion Comay draws from the juxtaposition is the section’s whole point, and it is stated without elaboration because the demonstration has already been made. Kant condemns political insurrection in the Metaphysics of Morals in almost exactly the same terms in which he celebrates morality in the Religion. Despite their opposing valences, both ruptures are described identically as a radical break with the order of experience, an event of untrammeled originality in which we witness the self-production of the law in its pure spontaneity. Freedom appears in each case as a moment of sheer heterogeneity, a break with the natural order in which nature nonetheless surprisingly manages, for better or worse, to reassert itself. The symmetry is then spelled out in two sentences whose parallel construction is the argument. Political revolution leaps away from a history organized as second nature toward a freedom that turns out to be indistinguishable from the most anarchic nature: striving to reinvent the law, revolution breaks with law only to fall back into the abyss of natural necessity. Moral revolution leaps away from the natural order of experience into a freedom that turns out to have the inextinguishable force of nature: extremes meet as unconditional morality surges forth to match the terrifying indeterminacy of the state of nature. Comay observes that Kant’s description of the unmediated transition from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom echoes the biblical language of the French revolutionaries, and quotes the passage on the new man arising through a kind of rebirth, as it were a new creation, with its citations of John and Genesis.
This result should be stated in its full strength, since it is what the chapter has been constructed to establish and it determines the reading of Hegel that follows. Kant’s prohibition of political revolution and his requirement of moral revolution have the same formal structure, employ the same vocabulary, and encounter the same difficulty, namely that a freedom defined by its break with nature turns out to be indistinguishable from nature at its most lawless. The prohibition and the requirement are therefore two applications of a single unstable structure rather than two positions to be reconciled. Hegel’s charge, which the fourth chapter will develop at length, that Kantian morality prolongs the Terror by other means, has its warrant here: the two are formally identical, and Kant’s own texts supply the demonstration. Comay’s construction of the chapter thus performs a service to the Hegelian argument that Hegel himself never performs, since Hegel, as she will observe, quotes Kant directly only once in the relevant chapter of the Phenomenology. The Kantian evidence for Hegel’s charge is assembled here, in advance, from Kant.
The chapter’s final movement returns to the theater and traces the collapse of the spectatorial arrangement it has spent so long reconstructing. Klopstock’s refrain returns as the refrain for an entire generation, and Comay names the operation it performs: the conversion of the trauma of the missed opportunity into the fortunate fall of disaster forestalled. The logic is identified as ultimately Aristotelian, with terror purged through a vicarious catharsis secured by aesthetic distance, and Kant’s analytic of the dynamic sublime is characterized as perhaps the first fully modern theory of the tragic, linking the experience of catharsis to the heroic self-production of the subject by way of the fantasy of its own annihilation. By 1790 the arrangement was already showing signs of strain, and as the theater of revolution turned into a theater of war there was an increasingly anxious effort to maintain spectatorial distance through the construction of an increasingly tenuous national, political, and cultural frontier. The effort subjected the idea of the sublime to its most severe challenge, and Comay poses the challenge as a question: how to contain or localize the experience of unboundedness within the boundaries of the nation. She identifies this as an instance of the most compelling aporia of the sublime, the necessity of demarcating the conceptual limits of an event defined by limitlessness, noting that minimally the problem arises already with the initial task of distinguishing the sublime from the beautiful. The aporia of revolution in one country is one aspect of this problem.
The analysis of the guillotine that follows prepares material the third chapter will develop, and its emphasis falls on a paradox of visibility. As terror institutionalized itself as the official order of the day, the scene of suffering formally contained in Aristotelian tragedy threatened to pervade the totality of the spectacle, and the radiant transparency of the revolutionary festival gave way to the perfunctory, banal nonspectacle of the guillotine. Comay specifies the democratic collapse of the distinction between actor, role, and spectator with a parenthesis that carries the analysis: on the scaffold everyone can be a player, but each player performs the same role, and only once. This requires the elimination of illusionistic distance and the blockage of every spectatorial response. The paradox is then stated: the guillotine both inspired theatricality, since as an instrument of mass edification it required full visibility and spectatorship, and yet resisted every attempt at visualization, stimulating a desire for spectacle that it systematically frustrated and calling for a witnessing that it forcibly prohibited.
Foucault is invoked to situate this within a historical transition between scopic regimes—the moment when the spectacular juridical apparatus of absolute monarchy gave way to the disciplinary mechanisms of modern bureaucracy, when sovereign power relinquished its need to display itself everywhere, like the sun, and learned instead to operate invisibly, microscopically, anonymously, and efficiently through the machinery of surveillance. Comay then supplies the empirical detail that makes the paradox vivid. The elaborate dramaturgy of the public executions—the procession of the tumbrel, the approach to the scaffold, the hush of the crowd, the display of the severed head—could not conceal the fact that the guillotine offered precious little to feed the gaze. Even as the idea of decapitation proved endlessly inspiring to the popular visual imagination, with images of ghostly apparitions, severed heads, and hungry cannibal machines circulating in prints and posters, in sideshows and phantasmagoria, in puppet shows and magic lanterns, in children’s toys and women’s fashion, in paperweights and kitchen gadgets, the drabness of the spectacle was becoming depressingly clear. Onlookers complained that they could see nothing, that the executioners blocked the view, that it was all over before it began, that there was no time for moral uplift. Restif de la Bretonne is quoted to the effect that there is no tragedy for them and they do not have time to be moved. The prodigious efficiency of the operation simultaneously drew crowds eager to see justice done and speed records broken, and provoked an increasingly disappointed response. Desmoulins is quoted predicting that the show’s success would spell its failure, and his rebuke to Marat—that he slits the throat of every character in the play, right down to the prompter, and that excess in tragedy goes flat—supplies the section’s most economical statement of the aesthetic problem.
The transformation of the tragic pair that follows is the section’s conceptual result. The sublime Greek couple of pity and terror gives way to pitiless terror, and Comay marks Michelet’s judgment that the king’s execution marked the day when pity had become a mockery. The further and more disturbing possibility is then stated: a pity indistinguishable from terror. Hugo is cited detecting in Robespierre’s tenderness the self-annulment of pity, pity perfecting and consuming itself as the inexorable cruelty of the blade, and his lines about abhorring through excess of love and being inexorable through mercy are quoted in the French. Arendt’s argument is then given: it is just this terrifying surfeit of pity, Robespierre’s unwavering and selfless compassion for the wretched—the people united, indivisible, indistinguishable in their virtuous misfortune—that ultimately distinguishes the Jacobin revolution from its American precursor, and it is the ideology of pity that spells the fatal collapse of political rationality into sentimental passivity and the regression of freedom into the sphere of natural compulsion. Comay’s conclusion states the aesthetic consequence in a formula: the revolutionary convergence of pity and terror marks the limit of the tragic, since at this zero degree of identification catharsis becomes indistinguishable from purge.
The chapter’s closing pages document the failure of the protective apparatus, and the documentation is the empirical counterweight to the whole preceding analysis of distance. While the games of analogy proliferated, the nonsynchronicity was becoming burdensome and the intellectual contortions painful, and Comay adds the awkward little detail that the French troops were advancing and the German Jacobins getting restive. By 1792 the official discourse of dispassionate observation did not manage to drown out an increasingly excited outpouring in the German press describing in lascivious detail cannibalistic orgies in which raging furies, usually women, were observed thronging around the guillotine as they gorged on the still warm flesh of victims. The provenance of the report is given with pointed exactness: a German eyewitness account published in 1792 in a prominent German liberal periodical to which Hegel and many others subscribed. Comay records that these widely circulated reports were taken seriously, noting that even Fichte, who objected to the manipulative sensationalism of the media, did not cast doubt on their basic veracity, and that they inspired anything but a disinterested response. Klopstock’s worry that Germans might become so consumed by the spectacle of such atrocities that they would forget everything that once attracted them to the Revolution is quoted.
The conclusion drawn from this material inverts the entire Kantian apparatus, and it is stated in a series of short sentences whose accumulation is the argument. Reading about the terror did not always neutralize it. Consuming and being consumed by the culture industry would become a vicarious extension of revolutionary cannibalism. The publicity machine that was to have buffered the disruption was threatening to run amok, and revolution was brewing through the channels that were to have contained it. As the new dawn turned into a hurricane, an earthquake, a swarm of Hottentots, a horde of Amazons—and Comay notes in a parenthesis how effortlessly fantasies of a vengeful nature fuse with anxieties about race and gender—the protective barrier had sprung a leak. The medical figure introduced in the first chapter is then completed: the antidote against the infection was turning into a new kind of infection, remedy into illness, immunity into a kind of autoimmunity, in which the body politic had begun to turn against itself, destroying its own means of self-protection through overexposure and addiction.
The contemporary evidence for this diagnosis is drawn from the period’s own anxieties about reading. A character in an unfinished novella of Goethe’s from 1792 announces that the real fever of the time is newspaper fever, a malignant airborne virus threatening to contaminate the foundations of both family and state; the German pun on the two words is the joke and the argument. Friedrich Gentz, Burke’s German translator and promoter, joined a chorus of culture critics from across the political spectrum in lamenting the reading disease that had overtaken the German populace, and Comay gives the four contemporary German words for it, denoting reading rage, reading addiction, reading fever, and excessive reading. The grounds of complaint are enumerated: the swirl of quickly consumable books and periodicals whose availability gave everyone an air of easy expertise, whose blurring of fiction and reality made it easy to dream up new societies overnight, and whose impermanence mirrored the chronic instability of a world in which constitutions were continually introduced and thrown away like a change of clothing. Comay notes that the new is the eternal return of fashion, and that as so often there was a gender as well as a class subtext to the anxiety. The chapter’s most consequential citation then arrives: in what Comay identifies as a transparent dig at Kant, Gentz remarks that the hysteria of the contemporary reading scene undermined any secure position from which the spectator might exercise his capacity for critical reflection.
That contemporary observation is the chapter’s demonstration that the Kantian arrangement was recognized as untenable by Kant’s own contemporaries and on Kantian grounds. The safe place from which fearfulness could be enjoyed without fear presupposes a medium of transmission that does not itself transmit the danger. Once the medium becomes a vector, the distance it was to secure collapses, and the spectator’s disinterested enthusiasm becomes indistinguishable from the contagion it was to observe. The book has thereby established, before turning to Hegel, that the German ideology’s central mechanism was failing in the period of its formulation, and that the failure was legible in the period’s own terms.
The final paragraph performs a transition whose economy deserves notice. Germany would soon enough find itself embroiled in its own war on terror. In 1819 Karl Sand, a radical member of a patriotic student fraternity, assassinated the conservative satirist and playwright August von Kotzebue, and the event crystallized a fatal ambiguity of German nationalism in the post-Napoleonic period, exposing an intractable split between an emergent German nationalism and the forces of Prussian reaction. The tension between democratic and dynastic models of sovereignty was already palpable in the competing German names for the wars against Napoleon, one meaning freedom wars and the other liberation wars, and it revealed the ambiguous legacy of the Revolution in Restoration Germany. The resulting crisis was taken as a pretext, in the Carlsbad Decrees of that year, to outlaw among other things demagoguery, defined as academic practices subversive of the principles of the existing political institutions. Counterterrorism would become the order of the day. The chapter’s last sentence—that no one would grasp the meaning of this crackdown better than Hegel—performs three functions at once: it introduces the book’s principal subject at the very end of its second chapter, it locates him institutionally as a professor working under a censorship regime directed at professors, and it anticipates the fifth chapter’s characterization of the Philosophy of Right as an endless negotiation with the censors. The delay in Hegel’s arrival is itself expressive. A book about lateness has withheld its title figure for two chapters, introducing him only through the apparatus he will be shown to inherit.
Simon Gros 
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