Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic

The twentieth century has read the Phenomenology of Spirit as a coherent narrative of progress. It has commonly accepted that “the Phenomenology raises empirical consciousness to absolute knowledge,” understanding this “raising” as an improvement and “absolute knowledge” as the final mastery of truth.¹ Eugen Fink, for example, describes the itinerary of the Phenomenology as a straightforward movement with “a definite point of departure and a definite end. The point of departure is the ordinary conception of being, in which we lodge, as it were, in a blind and ignorant fashion…. The end of the path is for Hegel the attained insight in what being is, that is, the truth of being or absolute knowledge.”² Robert Solomon spells out the common assumption that this passage is a progression from darkness to light when he suggests that “the ‘root-metaphor’ of the entire Phenomenology [is development understood as] growth and education. Hegel several times uses the image of a growing tree or a growing child to illustrate his model of philosophy, but perhaps the dominant philosophical image is Plato’s metaphor of education, in which the philosopher leads the uneducated out of the shadows and into the light of truth.”³

The introduction to the Phenomenology, however, describes consciousness’s path toward Absolute Knowledge as a “way of despair” (Weg der Verzweiflung; 49/61).⁴ Quite contrary to the optimistic interpretations of many of its readers, “this path has a negative significance” for consciousness, which is the protagonist of this narrative of Bildung (49/61).⁵ The Phenomenology emphasizes repeatedly that the formation, or Bildung, of the subject means “the loss of its own self” (49/61). The way to Absolute Knowledge is blazed by the loss of self and the loss of truth, “for it does lose its truth on this path” (49/61). Consciousness starts its journey of formation righteously with a clear idea of the world. Then, not once, but many times, again and again, consciousness loses itself and is forced to abandon the certainty of its knowledge until it “achieve[s], through the complete experience [vollständige Erfahrung] of itself, the awareness of what it really is in itself”: a crushed and consumed subject (49/60, translation corrected).

The Phenomenology presents the way of despair as a spiritual and physical ruin (Zerrissenheit). The subject in despair loses its head, its every bone is broken, it self-digests, its heart breaks, its spirit is crushed but restless. One of the later figures of the protagonist, the self-alienated spirit of culture (Bildung), rather poignantly registers the despair of this way: it has the “feeling that it has been rolled upon the wheel through all the stages of its existence [durch alle Momente ihres Daseins hindurch gerädert] and that its every bone has been shattered [an allen Knochen zerschlagen zu sein]” (328/356, translation corrected). With all its bones broken, the protagonist feels like rubber. In that moment, the reader realizes together with the phenomenologist and the protagonist that Bildung is torture.

Yet the despair of the Phenomenology remains strangely impalpable. After the brief but powerful mention of it in the introduction, despair barely ever becomes a topic again. The feeling of despair is largely covered over by the teleological narrative that the phenomenologist tends to construct. It is for the most part lost on the protagonist as well. Consciousness does not have the face of despair. In fact, every time it is crushed, it cheerfully starts anew. The introduction to the Phenomenology announces that this is a text of despair. But once the text begins, it seems to forget this proclamation.

Nevertheless, despair affects the entire organization of the Phenomenology. It plays a structural and performative rather than a thematic role. In this article, I will attend to the significance of despair for the structure of the Phenomenology. I will follow a twofold approach. First, I will examine two of Hegel’s rather curious and, in the traditional sense, nonphilosophical mentions of despair: despair (Verzweiflung) as an etymological relative of doubt (Zweifel) and despair as an emotion of animals. Then, I will explore two structural operations of despair that Hegel does not name as such: the (dis)organization of rational thought and the (dis)organization of the Phenomenology’s narrative.

Throughout my discussion of Hegel, I will draw upon The Passion According to G. H., a novel by the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector that describes an unexpected crisis in the life of an upper-middle-class Brazilian woman: the encounter with a cockroach. An insignificant incident that is usually aborted by the quick killing of the cockroach takes greater, spiritually transformative dimensions for this woman who, for no particular reason, opens herself to the experience of the encounter. In my view, The Passion According to G. H. resonates across a productive distance with the Phenomenology of Spirit. It offers a poetic phenomenology of the (self-)crushing and (self-)consuming qualities of despair.

In the introduction to the Phenomenology, Hegel links the two rather conceptually disparate terms Verzweiflung (despair) and Zweifel (doubt, skepticism). As is often the case with Hegel, his attention to the linguistic material determines the thrust of his conceptual operation here. Bringing to bear the prefix ver- (which can express the thorough accomplishment, but also the negation of the action expressed in the verb it modifies) and the suffix -ung (English: “-ing”; regularly used to turn verbs into nouns, it emphasizes the continuous aspect of the action expressed) on the root zweifel, he describes despair as a thoroughgoing self-doubt or a “self-accomplishing skepticism” (sich vollbringende Skeptizismus; 50/61; translation corrected).⁶ With this phrase, Hegel draws attention to three characteristics that make him validate despair over skepticism. First, with the use of the reflexive pronoun “self” in the phrase “self-accomplishing” (sich vollbringend), he affirms the self-reflexivity of despair. In contrast, he critiques the skeptical “I” for directing its negativity solely toward the outside, that is, for being skeptical about everything except its own power to negate.⁷ Second, he considers despair as more genuine than skepticism. While skepticism pretends to negate accepted opinions and prejudices, it ends up reenforcing them.⁸ Despair actually accomplishes what skepticism claims to do. Finally, Hegel underscores the extent to which despair is a process: the gerund “self-accomplishing” (vollbringend) presents despair as an ongoing movement that does not come to completion.

The subject in despair negates itself and disarticulates the certainty of its own (positive or negative) opinions. Yet, despair ruins the self without ever completely annihilating it. Mere negations are too simple for a hyperactive consciousness in despair. That is why despair doesn’t open onto an abyss of nothingness:

Nothingness is specifically [bestimmt] the nothingness of that from which it results…. In that case it is itself a determinate [bestimmtes] nothingness, one which has a content. When … the result is conceived as it is in truth, namely, as a determinate [bestimmte] negation, a new form has thereby immediately arisen. (51/62)

The subject in despair keeps changing its form and it does so to no end (no purpose, no limit). Despair is unending (the self). On (or rather, under) the wheel of determinate negations, the despairing subject rolls through its various shapes, on and on. It is crushed by the wheel, but it never falls apart completely, because the self-reflexive energy of despair’s determinate negations holds together the different shapes or shreds of the subject. While despair ruins the original unity, it also prevents the shreds from settling into a shape completely of their own. For the protagonist of the Phenomenology is “an ‘I’ that in its simplicity is genuinely self-differentiating [sich wahrhaft unterscheidendes], or that in this absolute differentiation remains identical with itself [sich gleichbleibendes]” (119/136). “Qua self … [the ‘I’] is absolute elasticity” (die absolute Elastizität; 314/341): a rubber subject.

The elasticity of its rubber nature governs consciousness. Despairing, it always ruins its current existence, but this self-loss never keeps it down for long. Consciousness always bounces back. It neither stands nor falls: it does both at the same time, and so it wobbles or hovers. Like a rubber tumbler, consciousness is easily tipped, but it cannot lie down. Even though it feels heavy with despair, it always flips up again. This is not its own freely exercised decision. Consciousness simply does not have the choice to find peace on the ground. While it keeps its head up high, it is ruled by its butt. And even though its butt is heavy, it touches the ground only ever so slightly, and this makes its head always flip up again, without a purpose.⁹

Consciousness keeps staggering and flipping up until, almost by accident, it realizes that it cannot stop. That does not mean that it has reached its goal. Despair is unending in the active sense; it undoes the final teleology of the Phenomenology. When the protagonist realizes that it cannot stand still, all it has understood is that going beyond itself and being beside itself are parts of itself. On the path of despair, the protagonist “achieve[s] … the awareness of what it really is in itself”—a self in despair (49/60).

Despairing, consciousness loses the legs that provide stability. It begins to float. Despair lets consciousness lo(o)se: it unleashes consciousness’s (self-)destructive forces. It is a liberating way of despair that has its own pleasure: “a very difficult pleasure; but it is called pleasure.”¹⁰ When the path of despair opens onto the pleasure of despair, this pleasure consists in the difficult bliss of living the elastic tension between two irreconcilable yet unending pulls: to unify (without ever reaching complete unification) and to fragment (without ever reaching complete dissolution).

The word “despair” might carry too much pathos for the lighthearted despair that the Phenomenology produces. The term tends to leave us with our false imaginations of the worst. As an elastic transport, despair keeps its subject bouncing back and forth between its torturous and its pleasurable poles. The German word is perhaps more felicitous in that it draws us playfully into the double twist of Ver-zwei (two)-fl-ung.¹¹ In the Phenomenology, despair doesn’t take itself seriously. From the start, it is aufgehoben, or ironic, in the sense that the early German Romantics developed of irony as the double gesture of simultaneously affirming and negating. Consciousness remains quite unpossessed by despair; it experiences not the absolute depth of nothingness, but different degrees of despair that it is ruined from the onset.

Now that we have touched on the pleasurable aspect of despair, it might not be surprising anymore that Hegel describes as despair what we usually consider to be an enjoyment, namely, eating. His first explicit example of a despairing act is the literal consumption, the eating up, of that which has no stable being. Sense Certainty, the first and most immediate figure of consciousness, must, according to its own notion of truth, conclude the unreality of sensuous objects. For Sense Certainty, true reality means unchangeable, everlasting being. Therefore, this figure of consciousness that has staked all its certainty on the reality of sensuous things will have to despair:

We can tell those who assert the truth and certainty of the reality of sense-objects that they should go back to the most elementary school of wisdom, viz. the ancient Eleusinian Mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus, and that they still have to learn the secret meaning of the eating of bread and the drinking of wine. For he who is initiated into these Mysteries not only comes to doubt the being of sensuous things, but to despair of it. (65/77)

Hegel in no way says here that sensuous things are in and for themselves unreal. Rather, he says a consciousness that views reality as everlasting being must come to the conclusion that sensuous things are not real.¹² This does not preclude the protagonist of the Phenomenology from changing its understanding of what counts as truth. In fact, after a long process of self-education, consciousness will begin to appreciate the notion of a dynamic and transient truth. At that point, the status of sensuous things will be reevaluated. This said, we can turn our attention to the puzzling fact that Hegel describes the consumption of sensuous objects—“the eating of bread and the drinking of wine,” for example—as a way of despair. In the introduction, Hegel contends that despair actually annihilates what skepticism merely “resolves” to negate. In the first chapter of the Phenomenology, this actual annihilation takes the form of a physical or sensuous negation: the gobbling-up of the object. Often, this kind of negation disagrees with the voice of human conscience. Therefore, those who are presumed to have no conscience, such as animals, are better at it:

The animals are not shut out from this wisdom [of the Eleusinian Mysteries] but, on the contrary, show themselves to be most profoundly initiated into it; for they do not just stand idly in front of sensuous things as if these possessed intrinsic being, but, despairing of their reality, and completely assured of their nothingness, they fall to without ceremony [ohne weiteres] and eat them up. And all Nature, like the animals, celebrates these open Mysteries which teach the truth about sensuous things. (65/77)

Hegel considers animals to be able to despair but unable to doubt. In speculative circularity, a step forward is a step backward. Animals don’t doubt because doubt requires a distancing from the object of doubt, a separation that creates the other as an object, as a Gegenstand, as something that stands stationary opposite (gegen) the subject. But animals don’t freeze the frame and “do not just stand idly in front of sensuous things.” Instead, by eating the other, they acknowledge their own and the other’s changeability and their interrelatedness with the other. To eat the other means to abolish the separation between subject and object; it means to become or to exist as the other: Man ist, was man isst. Eating the other alive draws both parties into a mutual, death-and-life-giving relation. Animals can openly engage in a behavior that humans must keep a secret. They grasp the truth that remains a mystery to humans. Lispector suggests that the moral categories of victim and executioner do not exist in the animal realm precisely because they are based on the distance between subject and object.

The most profound of murders: one that is a mode of relating, a way of one being existing the other being, a way of our seeing each other and being each other and having each other, a murder where there is neither victim nor executioner but instead a link of mutual ferocity.¹³

Partaking in the cycle of eating and being eaten, animals consume in despair. “Without ceremony,” they expose themselves to the whirl of consumption and thus show that they not only grasp the truth about sensuous things, namely, that sensuous beings (including animals) are transient, but that they also accept the higher, speculative notion of truth, namely, that truth itself is dynamic. For these animals, changeability does not mean unreality, and negation does not end in nothingness.

The element of self-reflexivity that distinguishes despair from doubt might not be immediately obvious in the context of the Phenomenology’s first chapter, on sense-certainty, but it becomes clearer against the background of Hegel’s discussion of life at the beginning of the Phenomenology’s second part, on self-consciousness (107–110/122–127). Here, Hegel describes the “cycle” (Kreislauf) of life as a “circulation” of (self-)consumption, where eating the other means eating oneself, and devouring means giving birth (108/125).

Hegel at first distinguishes between life in general and individual life. Organisms, animal and otherwise, are individual forms of life, while life in general exists physically as inorganic matter. Living organisms eat life matter. Here, consumption functions as separation: the animal “preserves itself by separating itself from this its inorganic nature, and by consuming it” (107/124). The organism defines and sustains itself as individual living being over against life in general. When the living being eats life, “what is consumed is the essence” (was aufgezehrt wird, ist das Wesen; 108/124). The animal isst, was es ist. It negates its own essence. It incorporates that against which it means to stand out and thereby undoes the separation. Es ist, was es isst. In other words, the essence negates the individual; life consumes the living. The negation is mutual, not only in the sense that every animal that lives on others is in turn eaten by another, but also because in the very act of eating the other, the animal is unable to maintain its own individuality. Thus, consumption means both the destruction of the other and the ruin of the self.

Conversely, the suppression of individual existence is equally the production of it…. [W]hen this substance places the other within itself [das Andre in sich setzt] it supersedes … its simplicity … i.e. it divides it, and this dividedness of the differenceless fluid medium is just what establishes individuality. (108/124)

Life eats the living. Life in general—that is, inorganic and undivided matter—literally swallows the individual and thereby introduces a difference into the general fluidity, which in turn individuates life. The mutual (self-)negation is a mutual (self-re-)production. Each part of the cycle of life has its essence in the other. In the end, it becomes clear that the distinction between life in general and individual life doesn’t hold: “The fluid element … is actual only as shape; and its very articulation of itself is … a dissolution of what is articulated into form” (Das flüssige Element ist … nur als Gestalt wirklich; und dass es sich gliedert, ist wieder ein Auflösen [des Gegliederten]; 108/125, translation corrected). To say that the living eats life and that, in the same act, life eats the living, is therefore just another way of saying that the living eats itself. Animals (and not only animals) eat each other alive. This “alive” is to be taken in both the attributive and the predicative sense. Animals eat living animals and they make what they eat come alive.

Lispector articulates the same thought in different terms. The first person narrator of The Passion According to G. H. has caught a cockroach between the two doors of a wardrobe. For G. H., the cockroach exemplifies eternal life, impersonal, unindividuated life matter that has survived millions of years on earth unchanged.

A cockroach is an ugly, shiny being. The cockroach is inside out. No, no, I don’t mean that it has an inside and an outside; I mean that [it] is what it is. What it has on the outside is what I hide inside myself.¹⁴

The cockroach is what it is: undivided, divine being. Its absolute nakedness reveals without revealing since it knows not even the trace of a secret. G. H. keeps many secrets. She is capable of lying.¹⁵ In other words, G. H. has a heart. She is the proud proprietor of an interiority, in which she can hide “behind the appearance” (52/63).¹⁶ And yet she begins to see herself, if inverted, in the cockroach: “What it has on the outside is what I hide inside myself.” Then, G. H. watches how white pus slowly oozes out of the cockroach’s cracked body: “The cockroach’s pulp, which was its insides, raw matter that was whitish and thick and slow, was piling up on it.”¹⁷

Mother, I only pretend to want to kill, but just see what I have cracked: I have cracked a shell! Killing is also forbidden because you crack the hard husk and you are left with viscous life. From the inside of the husk, a heart that is thick and white and living, like pus, comes out, Mother, blessed be you among cockroaches, now and in the hour of this, my death of yours, cockroach and jewel.¹⁸

The whitish pulp—life in general—slowly dissolves the boundaries of the individual, that is, of G. H. G. H. sees herself in the cockroach. She has projected her heart onto the cockroach, which has no heart but wears its insides out. “A heart that is thick and white and living, like pus, comes out” of the first person narrator G. H.—Georg Hegel, perhaps—who abandons the attachment to interiority: “As if saying the word “Mother” had released a thick, white part in me … like after a violent attack of vomiting, my forehead was relieved.”¹⁹ Cockroach and G. H. are each other. They eat each other and birth each other. G. H. not only lets herself be touched by the neutral, nonindividual eyes of the cockroach; she also tastes the white pus, the thick matter of life. In doing so, she abandons the defining traits of her persona, the adornments of her ego, the initials that mark her property.²⁰ To kill the other means to kill the self. She gives the cockroach her death: “my death of yours.”

Both—the narrator and the cockroach—are but different pieces of “hard husk” or dried surface from the same continuous fluidity of life. G. H.: two pieces from the alphabet, that’s all, nothing behind it. The same goes for the “I.” I is an exchangeable letter. “I, neutral cockroach body, I with a life that at last is not eluding me because I finally see it outside myself—I am the cockroach,” says G. H.²¹ To eat is to give life, says Georg Hegel.

So much attention has been paid to the supposedly life-devouring character of knowledge in Hegel that the inverse operation has been overlooked: eating is a form of self-reflection, a way of sharing in some truth and sharing it. By eating each other and themselves alive, animals grasp some truth about sensuous beings. For Hegel, eating is a way of thinking.

“All of nature, like the animals, celebrates these open Mysteries,” this “link of mutual ferocity.” But man likes to separate from the feast. While animals “show themselves to be most profoundly initiated” into the mysteries of despair, man emerges from the revel of mutual reflection (gegenseitiges Erkennen) by way of a peculiar kind of stupidity (65/77). He fixes his gaze, wherever he looks, on the dull but stable opacity of self-identity.

This mode of reflection relies on the rational work of the understanding: “The activity of separating [Tätigkeit des Scheidens] is the power and work of the Understanding, the most astonishing and mightiest of powers, or rather the absolute power” (18/25, translation corrected). Men—including Hegel—take great pride in this rational faculty, which nevertheless stops short of the speculative movement of reflection that animals are capable of. By cultivating the power of differentiation and analysis (Scheiden), man protects himself against the destabilizing effect of despair’s self-reflection-by-another. He refuses to join the cycle, run around in circles, and lose his head in despair.

This rational dissection of and withdrawal from fluid life has a deadly ring to it (Scheiden also means “to depart this life,” “to die”):

This is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy … of the pure “I.” Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality [Unwirklichkeit], is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength. (19/26)

The source of man’s power is his ability to analyze, that is, to detach elements from the fluid whirl of life and to assign object status to these elements, which as such really don’t exist. “That … what is bound and is actual only in its context with others, should attain an existence of its own and a separate freedom—this is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy … of the pure ‘I’” (19/26). By sheer hypnotic force—by facing death and staring the nonactual in the face, as it were—man gives this nonactuality a face.²² By fixing the gaze on abstractions he confers upon them an objective identity: “This tarrying … is the magical power that converts it into being” (19/26). The same prosopopoietic operation will also be applied to its source: the “pure ‘I’” is itself an abstraction with no actuality; it comes into being by way of a concentrated self-contemplation, a form of autosuggestion. “To hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength”: man flaunts his self-importance by giving himself his own death.

He keeps a cool head and abhors nothing more than to “roam about as a crowd of frenzied females [als ein Haufen schwärmender Weiber], the untamed revelry [der ungebändigte Taumel] of Nature in self-conscious form” (437–438/472). Hegel here combines women, animals (via the adjective “untamed”), and gods (Dionysos, Demeter) in one dizzying semantic field of ecstasies and rebellions against the authority of the rational “I.” Lispector reclaims this potentially misogynous trope for a feminine phenomenology of the intensity of neutral life: “Living life instead of living one’s own life is forbidden. It is a sin to go into divine matter. And that sin has an inexorable punishment: the person who dares go into that secret, in losing her individual life, disorganizes the human world.”²³ Neutral life, life in general, which is indifferent to the individual’s life and death, cannot be owned; its ecstasy is improper and unpossessed. Lispector calls this impropriety of living neutral life “immund” (immundo in Brazilian Portuguese).²⁴ With this word she retrieves connotations not only of “unclean” (for example, animals that are unclean in the sense that the adherents of a given religion are not allowed to consume them), but also of “unadorned” (the Latin adjective mundus can refer to a woman’s dress and ornaments, in that case meaning “elegant”) and of “chaotic” (the Latin noun mundus means “world”; it translates the Greek cosmos, which represents the world as an orderly arrangement; the antithesis of cosmos is chaos). Since this unclean nakedness of chaotic life cannot be attributed to the individual, the punishment for this sin strikes not a single individual, but human society as a whole: it “disorganizes the human world.” Living neutral life instead of living one’s own life ruins the intelligibility of the anthropocentric world. The cosmos becomes unpredictable. We fall into despair. We stagger.

To prevent this staggering and to remain in control as best as possible, man analyzes his world. But rational analysis produces fragmentation. Tarrying with the negative, the Understanding gives object status and separate existence to what in itself exists only as a passing moment in a fluid movement. The analysis was meant as an intellectual exercise and a rational self-disciple, but it has literal and physical effects. Against its intention, the Understanding creates despair by scattering the dynamic whole. Rational analysis brings about precisely the ruin or disruption (Zerrissenheit) that characterizes speculative, despairing self-reflection. The locus of agency in man’s “activity of parting” (Tätigkeit des Scheidens), thus, turns out to be rather uncertain. As doer, man is done. Avoiding despair, he falls into despair. Pentheus, who separates from Dionysian revelry, will have his head torn off by his mother, and, like him, every king will lose his head on Hegel’s path of despair. Hegel is ready to tear to pieces anyone who “should … ask for a royal road [königlichen Wege] to Science” (43/51).

The protagonist of the Phenomenology, however, is not ready to be transported by a lighthearted despair. It resists despair’s unending movement. Instead, it develops a “tremendous power” (ungeheure Macht; 19/26) to hold fast to the purely intellectual and therefore unreal elements that it abstracts from a concrete context. It employs the same power to hold fast to itself even though, or precisely because, each of the Phenomenology’s figures (Gestalt) of consciousness is only an abstraction of the whole way. Not one of the figures of consciousness wants to change. In their desire for stability, they fear the truth: “Its fear of the truth may lead consciousness to hide … from itself and others behind the appearance” (52/63). Or, as the narrator of The Passion According to G. H. puts it:

I’m terrified of that profound disorganization…. I know that I can walk only when I have two legs. But I sense the irrelevant loss of the third one, and it horrifies me, it was that leg that made me able to find myself, and without even having to look.²⁵

When it absolutely has to change, consciousness goes blank. It slips into oblivion. Then, it looks rather comical on its path of despair. Consciousness repeatedly gets knocked down, but it always gets up again. As soon as it is back on its feet (however many) or (for those who grew up in the United States of the 1950s and 1960s) as soon as it is back on its wheels, the protagonist is happier than ever:

For Hegel, tragic events are never decisive…. What seems like tragic blindness turns out to be more like the comic myopia of Mr. Magoo whose automobile careening through the neighbor’s chicken coop always seems to land on all four wheels. Like such miraculously resilient characters of the Saturday morning cartoon, Hegel’s protagonists always reassemble themselves, prepare a new scene, enter the stage armed with a new set of ontological insights—and fail again.²⁶

After each crisis, consciousness is more than happy to start anew. Each time it is convinced that it has found the truth now and that this time it will last forever. This enthusiasm is a version of despair and differs from the difficult pleasure of despair only in that it stakes all its bets exclusively on oblivion, rather than affirming the dismembering effect of remembering. Because none of the figures of consciousness remembers its previous life or recollects the many torturous self-negations that have led it to where it is, the protagonist of the Phenomenology falls apart into many protagonists. Analytic thinking is a way of eating the self.

The fragmenting force of despair at work in the narrative of the Phenomenology of Spirit is supported by the hermeneutic activity of most of its readers, who, as mentioned at the beginning of this article, assume that Spirit’s self-formation (Bildung) ends in stability. Like the protagonist(s), most readers prefer a happy ending to the path of despair. They lose the sense of despair by integrating it quickly into an economy of sacrifice or into the machinery of teleology.

And yet, the pathbreaking sentence of the Phenomenology’s preface—“Spirit … wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment [in der absoluten Zerrissenheit], it finds itself”—does not mean that finding itself undoes the dismemberment (19/26). Spirit finds itself in dismemberment, that is, it finds itself as dismembered. Its self-remembrance is self-dismembering. Therefore, the way of despair that concerns us here is not an avoidable breakdown along the lines of “don’t despair now, we are almost there.” Without despairing, we would never be there. Despair transports Spirit, and each section of the road springs from the despair of the readers, the protagonists, and the phenomenologists.

The despair of the Phenomenology is structural. And so, the attempt to produce a coherent story of progress has the ironic effect of tearing the exposition into pieces. The Phenomenology in its entirety is a path of despair because despair shreds the dynamic “whole” that is the True into separate chapters, figures of consciousness, or “stations” (Stationen):

This exposition … can be regarded as the path of the natural consciousness which penetrates to true knowledge; or as the way of the Soul which journeys through the series of its own configurations as though they were the stations [Stationen] appointed for it by its own nature, so that it may purify itself into the Spirit [daß sie sich zum Geiste läutere]. (49/60, translation corrected)

The word “stations” (Stationen) echoes the Stations of the Cross. The passage, then, figures the Phenomenology as the passion of the Christ, the passion of the phenomenal aspect of God in the process of purifying physical existence into the Holy Spirit. This is the Passion according to G. W. F. Hegel—according to most of his readers. But the word “stations” also evokes the stations through which the Mystai were required to pass on their initiatory travels to Eleusis.²⁷ The cult of Demeter and Dionysos taught its followers the secrets of death, resurrection, and life. It effectively absolves the initiated from the terror or panic that death induces (Pan is a companion of and at times another name for Dionysos):

This cultus … is based on serenity. The path of purification is one that is traveled (physically) [durchwandert]…. The physical traveling [Durchwanderung] of the road (is regarded) as an actually accomplished purification of the soul, an absolution.²⁸

The description of the Phenomenology’s path as purifying the soul into the life of the Spirit resonates with the rites of the Eleusinian mysteries. The myths of Dionysos’s double birth and repeated dismemberment and of Persephone’s rape-rapture-capture by the underworld and her periodic reemergence from it remind Hegel of Spirit’s mediation with itself.²⁹

The chief basis of the representations of Ceres and Proserpine, Bacchus and his train, was the universal principle of Nature; representations mainly bearing on the vital force and its metamorphoses. An analogous process to that of Nature, Spirit has also to undergo; for it must be twice-born, i.e. abnegate itself [sich in sich selbst negieren]; and thus the representations given in the mysteries called attention … to the nature of Spirit.³⁰

In the Phenomenology, Spirit is not just born twice, but with each transition to a new chapter and a new figure of consciousness, Spirit is born anew. This parceling out of Spirit’s truth, as Hegel states in one of his early works, “can easily cause the wanderer to lose sight of the path over its bends and distracting or scattering stations [zerstreuende Stationen].”³¹ None of the Phenomenology’s chapters, stations, or figures of consciousness speaks the absolute truth (not even the chapter on “Absolute Knowledge”). Their truth and reality are relative. Each chapter presents an incarnation of the absolute subject and, as such, reaches a certain independence or station; but not one, in the end, can stand on its own. Butler puts her finger on the comical aspect of this textual despair; she even finds it sexy:

We begin the Phenomenology with a sense that the main character has not yet arrived…. Our immediate impulse is to look more closely to discern this absent subject in the wings; we are poised for his arrival. As the narrative progresses beyond … the various deceptions of immediate truth, we realize slowly that this subject will not arrive all at once, but will offer choice morsels of himself, gestures, shadows, garments strewn along the way, and that this “waiting for the subject,” much like attending Godot, is the comic, even burlesque, dimension of Hegel’s Phenomenology.³²

The subject is segmented; truth is offered up in morsels. This has its sex appeal. We can linger on each part of the textual body. While reading, we disjoint the body of this truth that is figured as an “organic unity” (2/4). The sex act has a dismembering effect.³³ Some might be disappointed in the end. Those who were not distracted enough by the activity of taking the narrative apart and tasting its bits might actually realize that Godot never came, that the grand subject never arrived, that their love for Absolute Knowledge was never consummated. Or was it? The sexiness of this text, if it exists, lies not in deferred gratification, but in the orgiastic pull at any bend of the way: “The True is … the Bacchanalian revel [Taumel] in which no member [kein Glied] is not drunk” (27/35).

Hegel superimposes the path of the Phenomenology of Spirit on the passion of Christ and the initiation rites of the Eleusinian mysteries. I take the liberty to add The Passion According to G. H. In all four cases, some body will have been torn apart and consumed. Christ breaks the bread that is his body and gives it to his disciples to eat. Dionysos is torn to shreds by the Titans and incorporated by the human race.³⁴ G. H. cracks and tastes the cockroach. The readers of the Phenomenology are supposed to digest and recollect the stations of this book. It’s always us, the mortals who are to swallow the pieces. But can we make them whole?

According to one topos of our cultural imaginary, true love can heal fragmentation: “To reconstruct ‘this shipwreck of fragments, these echoes, these shards …’ needs a special love…. ‘Break a vase,’ says Walcott, ‘and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than the love that took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.’”³⁵ This statement symptomatically expresses the idea that desire is fed by lack and that we therefore love the imperfect more than the perfect. It also presupposes the idea of a proper shape (genuine and symmetrical) and bespeaks a strong investment in its restoration. The commitments to lack and integrity, to the whole and the cracks are equally strong. This topos presents love as the (never-ending) desire to heal (in both the transitive and the intransitive sense). But it puts the burden again on us, asking us to unify emotional energies and to focus them exclusively on the one god, the one work, or the one life.

Hegel does not opt for this notion of love. Instead, he invites us to disperse emotional energy in the crushing, consuming, and negativity-sharing movement of a lighthearted despair. There is no reason that we should indulge the desire to heal when we read Hegel. Rather than labor to restore a presumed (w)holiness, my aim is to read the Phenomenology in a way that remains faithful to the emotionality of the text, to its lighthearted despair.³⁶

The logic of lighthearted despair makes the processes of remembering and dismembering overlap. To remember (to incorporate—to consume—to join and hold together—to learn by heart—to keep secret) and to dismember (to shatter—to scatter and become scattered—to distract and get distracted—to forget—to open—to reveal) play each other and echo one another. “Dismembering” literalizes “remembering,” and “remembering” spiritualizes “dismembering.” Despair is fragmentation and stickiness. For the rubber subject of the Phenomenology, falling and getting up are one and the same movement. The elastic self stretches until it tears; and when it tears, its pieces still stick together, without pathos or ambition. The cracks of the cockroach heal without leaving scars. This healing is just as little triumphant as the cracking is dramatic. And yet, a humble and unexcited emotionality pervades and propels all of these movements.

1. Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. 39.

2. “hat einen bestimmten Ausgang und ein bestimmtes Ende. Der Ausgang ist das alltägliche Verstehen von Sein, in dem wir gleichsam blind und unverständig hausen…. Das Ende des Weges ist für Hegel die erreichte Einsicht in das, was Sein ist, eben die Wahrheit des Seins oder das absolute Wissen” (Eugen Fink, Hegel: Phänomenologische Interpretationen der Phänomenologie des Geistes [Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977], p. 42).

3. Robert E. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel: A Study of G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 277.

4. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1988); Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). For this and subsequent references, page numbers are included in parentheses—English followed by German.

5. Cynthia Chase foregrounds the “disarticulation of the figure of progression” in her rapprochement of Hegel with Baudelaire in “Getting Versed: Reading Hegel with Baudelaire,” in Decomposing Figures: Rhetorical Readings in the Romantic Tradition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).

7. “The skeptical [sic] self-consciousness thus experiences in the flux of all that would stand secure before it its own freedom … the unchanging certainty of itself” (124/142).

8. “Skepticism engages only in a shaking of this or that presumed truth, followed by a return to that truth again, after the doubt has been thoroughly dispelled” (49/61, translation corrected).

9. The German word for “stagger” (taumeln) evokes the Bacchanalian revel (Bacchantischer Taumel) in the notorious phrase of the preface: “The True is thus the Bacchanalian revel in which no member is not drunk” (27/35).

10. Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G. H., trans. Ronald W. Sousa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. i.

11. The prefix ver- (which can mean both thorough accomplishment and negation) adds an additional and ambiguous twist to the word Zweifel, which is etymologically related to Zwiefalt (twofold).

12. For the importance of deriving the concept of truth from the consciousness, one observes instead of judging that consciousness is based on an external standard of truth, see 52–55/63–66.

15. For Lacan, nonhuman animals are incapable of lying. See Jacques Lacan, Seminar II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1988), pp. 244–245.

16. See the beginning of the section on “Narrative (Dis)organization” later in this essay.

20. “Eating of living matter would expel me from a paradise of adornments”; and “learn from this one who has had to be laid completely bare and lose all her suitcases with the engraved initials” (ibid, pp. 64, 107).

22. “Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face” (19/26).

24. “I had committed the forbidden act of touching something impure [immundo]” (ibid., p. 64).

26. Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 21.

27. Hegel is well aware of the historical link of Christianity to the Greek cults of Demeter and Dionysos.

28. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, vol. 2, Halbband 1, ed. Georg Lasson (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1974), p. 179; Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 2, Determinate Religion, trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 180.

29. In Greek myth, Dionysos/Bacchus was taken out of the burned body of his mother, Semele (first birth), and inserted into his father Zeus’s thigh, out of which he was born again once fully developed, according to the authoritative source on Greek mythology during Hegel’s time (Benjamin Hederich, “Bacchus,” in Gründliches Mythologisches Lexikon, a photographic reprint of the first edition from 1770 [Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1996]). According to another version of Greek myth, he was the child of Zeus and Persephone/Proserpina. Zeus’s jealous wife, Hera/Juno, incited the Titans to lacerate the child and devour the pieces. Athena saved his pulsating heart and brought it to Zeus, who gave it Semele to eat, which caused her to become pregnant with Dionysos (second birth). Under the entry “Dithyrambus,” Hederich explains that one epitaph of Dionysos was Dithyrambus (“double door” or “twice-born”) because he was torn apart by the Titans and then put back together by Ceres/Demeter. Dionysos’s dismemberment as a child is repeated in the stories of raving female followers (Maenads) who dismember those who refuse to worship Dionysos. Like all her siblings, Ceres/Demeter was eaten by her father, Saturn/Kronos, but he vomited her out again after Metis had given him an emetic (Hederich, “Ceres”). During the time of her grief for Persephone/Proserpina/Kore, Ceres hides in a cave. According to Hederich, this was meant to symbolize the seed in the earth, before it comes to light or sprouts (when Pan discloses Ceres’s dwelling place to Jupiter). Persephone/Proserpina spends part of the year in the underworld and part of the year with her mother, Ceres, above ground. Her name has been taken to mean “concealed fruit,” which can refer to the seed in the ground or to the harvest stored in the barn during winter (Hederich, “Proserpina”).

30. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen zur Philosophie der Geschichte, vol. 12, Werke in zwanzig Bänden (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), p. 303; Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), p. 248.

31. G. W. F. Hegel, “Die Positivität der christlichen Religion,” in Frühe Schriften, vol. 1, Werke in zwanzig Bänden (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), p. 116; “The Positivity of the Chrisitian Religion,” in Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), p. 79.

33. Elizabeth Grosz, “Animal Sex: Libido as Desire and Death,” in Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (New York: Routledge, 1995).

34. According to the Orphic variant of the myth, the first humans emerged from the ashes of the Titans, who were burned by Zeus’s lightning after they had devoured Dionysos. Thus humans are made of pieces of Titans and pieces of Dionysos. See Encyclopædia Britannica, 2008, s.v. “Dionysus”; Encyclopædia Britannica Online, March 18, 2008, www.britannica.com/eb/article-9030551.

35. Derek Walcott, quoted in Geoffrey Hartman, “Public Memory and Its Discontents,” in The Longest Shadow (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), pp. 111–112.