Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution

by Rebecca Comay

This book explores Hegel's response to the French Revolutionary Terror and its impact on Germany. Like many of his contemporaries, Hegel was struck by the seeming parallel between the political upheaval in France and the upheaval in German philosophy inaugurated by the Protestant Reformation and brought to a climax by German Idealism. Many thinkers reasoned that a political revolution would be unnecessary in Germany, because this intellectual "revolution" had preempted it. Having already been through its own cataclysm, Germany would be able to extract the energy of the Revolution and channel its radicalism into thought. Hegel comes close to making such an argument too. But he also offers a powerful analysis of how this kind of secondhand history gets generated in the first place, and shows what is stake. This is what makes him uniquely interesting among his contemporaries: he demonstrates how a fantasy can be simultaneously deconstructed and enjoyed. Mourning Sickness provides a new reading of Hegel in the light of contemporary theories of historical trauma. It explores the ways in which major historical events are experienced vicariously, and the fantasies we use to make sense of them. Comay brings Hegel into relation with the most burning contemporary discussions around catastrophe, witness, memory, and the role of culture in shaping political experience.

Genres: Philosophy, History, French Revolution, Nonfiction, France, Theory, Politics

224 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 2010

Reviews

[Buck · Rating 5 out of 5]

probably one of the most lucidly written works of theory ive read this year. Memory, the constitutive function of trauma, and the retrospective logic grief and hopeful expectancy are all articulated here within the Hegelian response to both the french revolution and its german romanticist pacification/internalization.

[J. Moufawad-Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since I am not a Hegel scholar (as in that's not my rarified field, though I have read the Phenomenology, Logic, and Philosophy of Right), and thus not up on the debates in the secondary literature, I cannot comment on that aspect of the book, though her reading seemed quite compelling and very grounded in the tradition. However, Comay's discussions of modernity and and the historical apprehension of the French Revolution in Germany were excellent and compelling as well.

In fact, one reason I really enjoyed this book was because it was written with such beauty. Usually philosophy/theory books possess dry/utilitarian prose or opaque/obscurantist prose, or a combination of the two. Comay possesses a literary skill that most academics lack and I found myself reading through Mourning Sickness quickly because I was enjoying the reading experience, the way her sentences were crafted, etc. I was actually sad when it ended (especially considering the next theory book on my stack is of the opaque/obscurantist category), which is not something I usually say about a philosophy book.

[Bahman Bahman · Rating 2 out of 5]

بخشی از مقدمه‌ کتاب :

روايتِ به‌خوبي مرور‌شده‌ي حکايتِ روشنفکران آلماني در حول‌و‌حوشِ 1800 چيزي نظير اين است. فلسفه‌ي آلمان، که از وراي رود راين به آشوب و کشتار مي‌نگرد، به خود تبريک مي‌گويد که توانسته است از وقوع چنين تلاطمي در خاک خويش جلوگيري کند. آلمان به اين نوع انقلاب نيازي ندارد: اين سرزمين پيش‌تر انقلابِ بس کوبنده‌ترِ خاصِ خود را تجربه کرده است. آلمان از مدت‌ها پيش راديکاليسمِ خاصِ خود را در شکل اصلاح ديني پروتستان به انجام رسانده است و هم‌اينک، در سطحي روحاني و معنوي، از هر آن‌چه فرانسه مي‌تواند در عمل به‌دست آورد، پيشي جُسته است. آلمان که با موفقيت جوش‌و‌خروشِ خود را پشت سر نهاده است تصوير خود را در پيکارِ انقلابيِ فرانسه بازمي‌شناسد و آماده است تا از دل انقلاب نيرويي را بيرون کشد که دست‌رسي بدان براي کساني‌که در گردابِ انقلاب گرفتار شده‌اند ممکن نيست. اين قرابت و نزديکي به آلمان اجازه مي‌دهد تا همبستگيِ خود با انقلاب را تأييد کند و حتي از هيجانِ دهشت‌هاي آن به‌شکلي نيابتي لذت برد، و در همان حال از ضربه‌ي نهاييِ انقلاب بکاهد. آلمان درست در حالي‌که هر گونه پيوندِ بي‌واسطه با اين رخداد را انکار مي‌کند مدعيِ برخورداري از ميراث انقلابي است؛ و با پافشاري بر اصل و نسبِ راديکالِ خاصِ خود توانايي آن را مي‌يابد تا خود را سلف، خلف، و وفادارترين معاصرِ انقلاب فرانسه معرفي کند. آلمان مي‌تواند آن‌چه را که هرگز به‌صورت دست اول تجربه نکرده است، از دور، جشن بگيرد، پشت سر گذارد، و سوگوارش شود. ...

[Edward Backman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know what to say. this was one of the most captivating, compelling and revelatory Hegel text I have ever read. Among the recent thinkers who work against the dominant notion of 'Hegel the theorist of progressive-historical unfolding', Comay is supreme in my eyes.

The specific Temporality she shows Hegel to be always grappling with is one of disjunctive, constant belatedness. We are always too late and our only access to a genuine future, that reservoir of (I would say eschatological) novelty is in our re-opening old wounds, retexturing the past, undoing and reweaving (the image of Penelope is very strong in the text), the past. Contrary to the dominant assumption that Hegel's thought is determined by the modern 'secular eschatology' of progress, it rather features in the end a "messianic structure of 'hope in the past'" (145).

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those "Hegel was way smarter than everyone on Earth" books, which is my least favorite philosophy to read. It's part of the reason why I'm not a bigger fan of Zizek. But I really enjoyed this book. Comay makes Hegel even more understandable by situating him in a very specific time period. The French Revolution.

While it occasionally lapsed into super crit-theory language with nouning verbs and verbing nouns and special invented words and word play, I never found it so distracting that I couldn't concentrate on what she was saying. Definitely not a Hegel primer / for beginners -- it's more of a "I've read the Phenomenology and Philosophy of Right" kind of text.

[Larry · Rating 1 out of 5]

Capital T Theory with Capital J Jargon. The few good arguments here and there get lost in the fanfare of dramatic metaphors and wordplays that introduce them, and the rest of it is down to the level of meaningless paradoxes put one on top of the other (such as: the guillotine sets the stage for a play that brings forth that of which it represents the disappearance, and: by decapitating the king, the French people manage to witness their own birth qua people).

[Amir Heidari · Rating 5 out of 5]

يكي از درخشان ترين ترجمات جنبش نظريه ترجمه(مراد فرهادپور، صالح نجفي و ...)، كه تصويري دقيق و روشن از هنر و فلسفه ي قرن هجدهم مي دهد.

[Brett Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

the void...is constitutive!
we can melancholically strive for some lost object that never was, or mourn it (more properly incorporate it?) into our conscious makeup.

This book mostly focuses on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit through the lens of the Kantian/French revolutions. It ostensibly sets out to determine whether the Germans, having had their spiritual revolution in the Reformation, would be able to absorb the political one of the French w/o the calamitous consequences.

There is the idea with Hegel that there are no ex nihilo beginnings, that the idea is explicated and understood concretely w/in the circumstances in which is arises. So what is a revolution? How regenerative is it truly? Does it mean to spin around repetitively ad infinitum as the earth does around the sun? Or does it mean to elevate oneself to a higher power of being, to undertake a fundamental radical change in something? Well, Kant and some of his Romantic contemporaries saw the political French revolution as the former, and their moral/aesthetic revolution the latter. Hegel calls bullshit!

Comay examines Kant through his writings on the revolution, esp the trial and execution of King Louis XVI; the horror Kant experienced at witnessing not just radical evil (that of our inextirperable finitude) but 'formal' evil: the law - as embodied by the absolute king - undoing itself...and what all of this says about the material fallibility that undoes the moral system of his transcendental idealism. Comany goes on to have Hegel dismantle some of the well known contradictions inherent in the spectator-driven, categorical, empty universalism therein.

But then we're back to the scene in Germany, finding out how they have absorbed the lessons of the French Revolution from afar. Turns out they bungle things mightily! I imagine the Germans tend to do things in a 'big' way when they do them, no? Anyway, theirs isn't the negative theology of endlessly discursive and destructive reason, but its empty subjective counterpart! aye carumba! The Germans are dreamy romantics and poets - 'beautiful souls' we are reminded more than once - whose 'vaporous' subjectivity hasn't the mettle to really engage in the world at all. They are performative moralistic solitary aesthetic geniuses (Schopenhauer's advocated renunciation of the world comes to mind where philosophy is involved) who are no better than their duty which is no better than their word which is no better than...well Holderlin and Novalis in their search for some pure form of Being come to mind, and look what happened to them! There is no purity in this impure world.

To Hegel, the subject is thoroughly enmeshed in the ethical-political community. Speech is, in fact, the act of subjectivity. It is a shared good and is passed from one to the next within the given framework. In fact, the subject commonly understood doesn't even fundamentally exist? How do we know this? Because of history: the future is always rewriting the past. In fact, do we ever really 'know' ourselves until...exactly...we have let the story unfold.

So of course we get some sort of happy amalgam, in the end, between the French political revolution and the German philosophical one: each sought new beginnings in a world already given to us, ready-made as it were, contingent-beings that we are. But our gray-on-gray world can be seen as either dusk or as dawn. As closure or opening. Empires come and go but continue on we do. The future is up for people to write, though they should be aware of the untimeliness of their plans once hatched. Or maybe by some cunning of reasons we shall suddenly see our ways of life turned upside down. It's the essential thought action problem all over again.

Difficult read but well worth it.

[Dionysius the Areopagite · Rating 5 out of 5]

One changes whether or not one one wants to and thus one does not ever change.

[Ben Davis · Rating 1 out of 5]

Books about Hegel should illuminate Hegel, not make Hegel’s notoriously difficult thought even more obscure, which is the unfortunate outcome of Comay’s awful book. I had high hopes for this book, none of which were realized.

There’s just no substitute for reading Hegel himself. Start with Philosophy of Right and/or Lectures on Religion. Hegel’s Phenomenology is the pinnacle of his thought, but I would caution anyone from diving head first into that deep water without having first learned to swim in Hegel’s less demanding work. Like Kant or Heidegger or Wittgenstein, reading Hegel well requires certain skills and habits of mind that must be acquired and honed over time.

For books about Hegel, look to Pippin, Brandom, Charles Taylor’s earlier work, Desmond, and Westphal. For a unique if equally difficult book on Hegel’s use of “Spirit” and its connection to Christian theology, look at Heterodox Hegel by Cyril O’Regan. For a more comprehensive book that situates Hegel’s life and thought in his time, see the recent book by Klaus Vieweg, Hegel: The Philosopher of Freedom.

[Cheng Wen Cheong · Rating 2 out of 5]

I bought this expecting to learn something more Hegel's true opinion of French Revolution. It turns out that there is nothing new here - much of Comay's Hegelian commentary of the Revolution were implicit in Phenomenology, and since I have read Phenomenology for a few rounds, I find her elaboration meandering and somewhat self-indulgent. At times, she cross-references other theorists by namedropping their concepts but ends up just making things murkier. I do admit that her sentences are quite aesthetically pleasing, but it's a little overdone.

[Jordan Sheppard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Comay's thinking and writing. She gives an incredibly interesting account of Hegel's take on the French Revolution and its real-world manifestation of instrumental reason of philosophy put into practice. The duality of the political revolution in France with the philosophical revolution of Germany at the time, a dual face of a moving tide of history, is perhaps better captured nowhere other than Hegel's thought and in particular the latter half of his wondrously interesting and fluid Phenomenology. Comay brings this interesting thesis to the surface.

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Presents Hegel's reading of the French Revolution through the context of Germany's national position in continental Europe at the time, contrasts Hegel's take on the matter of Germany's relation to its neighboring peers to those of his German contemporaries, and offers implications of Hegel's treatment of the French Revolution on his system as a whole, but fails to provide a particularly novel reading of Hegel.

[Marvin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sehr, sehr eigenwillige Interpretation Hegels (und Kants) mit einigen, sehr steilen Thesen. Insgesamt allerdings interessant, Ritters Buch ist allerdings besser, wenn man etwas über Hegel und seine Philosophie im Kontext der französischen Revolution wissen will.

[Sean Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic, concise, and entertaining theory on revolutionary violence and dialectical materialism. I wish Lacan was in this book a bit more, given the title. A fantastic read for newcomers to Hegel but those well versed in Marx and Lacan.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommend to any fellow Hegelian

[Jaakko · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ihan hippusen liian hankalaa kieltä omalle kielitaidolle, mutta muuten oikein mainio!

Erityisesti keskustelu anteeksiannosta jäi mieleen pidemmäksi aikaa.

[Tara · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got this book at the Harvard bookstore when I was there in January. I thought it would help me understand what Althusser refers to as Marx's epistemological break from Hegel. More generally, I wanted a better understanding of the German Ideology, Materialism and Idealism.

It seems that Comay attributes more to Hegel than the purely Idealist position that Althusser is discussing in For Marx. The book puts the German Ideology into the historical context of the French Revolution. To me, this perspective made Althusser's point clear.

The upheaval caused by the revolution and the implications for all social order were so traumatic, that a story or narrative developed that attributed the calamity of France in part to Catholicism and that the German states already experienced their revolutions and calamities during the Reformation and the 30 years War.

A lot of the book is devoted to Kant and Hegel and other German philosophers. Some of the analysis is interesting, but I think the book might be a better read for people who are interested in Kant or Hegel

[Tonia]

Difficult read. Especially if you don't have some understanding of Hegel. But, even if you've read some of his stuff, you will be able to get at some of the topics in here as Hegel's ways of thinking move across all his areas, art, history, phenomology. His Phenomology text is what this book is based on though.

[a]

3.5 stars. becomes increasingly capital T theory as it goes on, i.e. turns into 'riffing' rather than philosophy, but good material to pick out, depending on how you want to read it