Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (review)

Spirit, according to Hegel’s Phenomenology, is manifest in action, when thought and existence can shed their historical and conceptual antithesis. Such action is, however, often traumatic, sometimes criminal, and in its failure can elicit mourning or even melancholia in the actor. Conversely, mourning and melancholia can arise within the spectator, when trauma is experienced with the loss of an object one never possessed. Beginning with Hegel’s critique of the French Revolution in the Phenomenology, Rebecca Comay’s Mourning Sickness sets out “to explore trauma as a modal, temporal, and above all a historical category” (4). In particular, this trauma is read as a “structural anachronism” or “dissonance,” exemplified by the “German encounter with the French Revolution” (4). It is constitutive of what Marx called “German ideology”—the attempt to mitigate the misère (or “mourning sickness”) engendered by witnessing the political and economic revolution abroad one is incapable of realizing at home. More fundamentally, this vicarious trauma is claimed to be a structural condition that “afflicts all historical experience” and, indeed, “determines our fundamental sociability” (4). Trauma is thus a historical category that reflects the essentially wounded and imperfect condition of the self, which exceeds the historical (and thus phenomenological) experience of self-inflicted violence or the well-known labor of the concept. It is absolute spirit, “condemned to be forever straining to catch up to itself” (127). Contra Hegel, who argued that the “wounds of Spirit heal and leave no scars behind” (1977, 407), absolute knowing is “just the subject’s identification with the woundedness that it is” (130). History is the eternal recurrence of loss in a community of selves out of sync, so at best we can engage in the commemoration (Erinnerung) of damaged life, rather than experience its erasure.

Mourning Sickness is a brief and erudite text, consisting of five chapters (two previously published) on the overlapping concerns of trauma, terror, forgiveness, spectatorship, mourning, and melancholia. There is no overarching thesis toward which the chapters unfold, but the missing center is consistent with the Derridean and psychoanalytic bent of Comay’s meditations. Kant is the protagonist in this story, as his moral revolution—the account of which immediately follows Hegel’s analysis of absolute freedom and terror in the Phenomenology—is said to be the cathartic, sublimating result of spectatorship (Comay’s second chapter is entitled “The Kantian Theater”). “In a single blow,” she writes, “Kant absorbs revolutionary rupture into the continuous reform of the moral spectator, while dispensing with the need to import democratic principles onto German soil” (35). Yet terror lives on as the moral view of the world—Comay writes of “Kant as Terrorist” (93)—whose masochism Sade, Nietzsche, Freud, and Adorno among others have noted with satisfaction. The categorical imperative as superego is, says Freud, the “direct inheritance of the Oedipus complex,” and it can be “harsh, cruel and inexorable against the ego which is in its charge” (1961, 164).

The central motif of Comay’s text is loss—of objects, opportunities, the in-itself, etc.—and the notion that philosophy is constituted by the incessant return to the resultant emptiness: death drive as ideology. This engendering lack is found in Freud, Benjamin, Derrida, and Hegel’s notion of absolute spirit. Yet Hegel failed to recognize its indelible nature, Comay argues, for he thought spirit could undo past harm, sacrifice, and failure in what she describes as a (Benjaminian) messianic moment of cessation. Spirit, Hegel writes, “has to start afresh to bring itself to maturity as if, for it, all that preceded it were lost and it had learned nothing from the experience of the earlier spirit” (1977, 492). To this sentiment, which echoes the aforementioned claim that spirit leaves no scars behind, Comay responds: “Hegel is being either stupid or ideological or both: the real wounds don’t heal, or have yet to do so, and in any case scars don’t and shouldn’t just disappear” (129...