Mourning Sickness

Hegel and the French Revolution

Rebecca Comay

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780804775731
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

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.

1 Missed Revolutions

Translation, Transmission, Trauma

“…an impossibly speedy motion”

In 1792, the Enlightenment writer Joachim Heinrich Campe noted 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. Despite the abundance of available German words conveying more or less the same idea (“upheaval,” “rebellion,” “overthrow,” “insurrection”), attempts at paraphrase kept faltering. “Revolution” was neither eindeutschbar or verdeutschbar: despite its age, it could not be integrated, and despite its familiarity, it yielded no precise synonym. Campe reflects on the weighty sonority of the various German synonyms: Umschwung, Umwälzung, Umänderung, Umschaffung— thickly packed consonants sitting like boulders in the mouth, needing effort, patience, time to roll them over. German sounds move as slowly as German constitutions change: they trudge 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 this “impossibly light and speedy motion.”¹

The remark appears in Campe's prize-winning essay submitted earlier that year to a contest, sponsored by the Prussian Academy of Sciences, on the question, “Is complete purity of language possible in general and for the German language in particular?” Campe's response is a steamy nationalist manifesto proposing to purge the German language of foreign contaminants, a proposal he would almost immediately put into practice with an ambitious dictionary project of “Germanifcation” (Verdeutschung), in which he sought to replace, wherever possible, every word of foreign extraction (which meant at that time mainly French and Latin) with an existing German equivalent or, where necessary, a neologism.²

The issue was not a new one, although the terms of the antagonism were constantly shifting. The specific resistance to the French language easily goes back to a reaction against the prestige of French in eighteenth-century German court culture, while a more general antipathy to things Latin dates at least from the Reformation. Luther's translation of the Vulgate had explicitly set out to liberate the living spirit of Scripture from the deadly literalism of the Roman Catholic Church. The very idea of Germanness, Deutschheit, was already linked here to the proto-Enlightenment ideal of clarity and accessibility, Deutlichkeit— a publicity bound to the immediacy of oral speech and to the open circulation of street and market.³ We might say that Deutschheit supplied the radiant middle term between the luminous poles of religion (Revelation) and reason (Enlightenment).

By the time Campe issued his salvo, the Revolutionary wars were raging, and Germany's situation was perilous. “Germany is a state no more,” Hegel would announce within a few years, adding that actually, strictly speaking, it never had been a state, not a real one, not a nation to live or die for, that it lacked the essential drive to unity, that at least since the Peace of Westphalia, if not before, the German nation had been in a condition of “organized statelessness”—a lifeless aggregate, a heap of stones—ravaged by its obdurate individualism, political fragmentation, and centrifugal tendency to dispersion.⁴ This had been a common theme well before 1800. As early as 1667, Pufendorf had already remarked on the “irregular and monster-shaped body” of the Holy Roman Empire—awkward, ungainly, incurably weakened by “disease and convulsion.”⁵ Even the Reich's admirers noted its moribund condition—a “clumsy mass” ( Johannes von Müller), a leaking ship (Friedrich Karl von Moser).⁶

Campe himself was no antirevolutionary. The same year the Prussian Academy commended his patriotism, the French Assemblée nationale paid tribute to his cosmopolitanism. in 1792, he was named honorary citizen of the newborn Republic for contributions to the genre humain (along with, among others, Friedrich Klopstock, George Washington, Thomas Paine, and a certain “sieur Giller, publiciste allemand”—i.e., Schiller). In the summer of 1789, as the first wave of French émigrés was already streaming in panic toward Germany, Campe had traveled upstream to witness firsthand the “astounding drama” unfolding in Paris. For one rapturous year, he had relayed his impressions in a widely read series of open letters published in the liberal Braunschweiger Journal. Campe describes himself repeatedly as swimming against the current—pushing against a barrage of warnings from friends and family and even against his own initial sense of revulsion as he forces his way through the dank and depressing outskirts of Paris toward the effervescent city center. He describes the Revolution as an irresistible food sweeping aside ossifed ideas and structures, and transforming Frenchmen overnight into virtuous Greeks and Romans.

By 1792, the tide had turned, the roads of Europe were swarming with émigrés, refugees, and soldiers, the flood had begun to erode linguistic as well as geographical boundaries, and the German language was awash with foreign borrowings. Meanwhile, back in Paris, the slaughter had begun, and Campe, like most of his compatriots, had long decamped from the scene. His manifesto of 1792 is itself a testimony to the irresistibility of the French attraction, and not simply by virtue of its passionate intensity. Wieland remarks on the “linguistic Jacobinism” of the project. The strange rigor of Campe's proposal derives in large part from the French idea of sovereignty, with its norm of homogeneity, transparency, and legibility, and exhibits the general ambiguity of German cultural nationalism around 1800: how to construct an autonomy forged in the image of the oppressor?

By 1806, Napoleon's army would have conquered the territories on both sides of the Rhine, annexed Austria and Prussia, and put an official end to the thousand-year-old Holy Roman Empire and thus to Germany's symbolic claim, such as it was, to world-historical significance. The stakes had mounted. A year after the battle of Jena, Campe issues a second manifesto. If the French troops cannot be ejected, the Germans can at least take a cue from their example; they can turn back the invasion of foreign words that have burrowed through the ramparts of the German language, and extract from the restored transparency of their own language a consoling image of national integrity. Disaster can be converted into an occasion for spiritual renewal. The shattered nation will find refuge in the plenitude of the mother tongue. “In our times, which are pregnant with misfortune, or rather have been in labor for years, bearing only ruin, [the German language is] the last remaining hope that the German name will not completely disappear from the annals of mankind, and the last reason to believe that future reunification in an autonomous people is a possibility.”⁷ Observe the gendered problematic: botched pregnancy and triumphant rebirth, grievous travail and fruitful labor—the miraculous regeneration of the body politic through an event of immaculate conception.⁸ The Fremdwort is an indelible residue of rape and miscegenation. To secure the name and honor of the fatherland requires restoring the virginal body of the mother tongue by ejecting the bastard progeny of the foreign assailant. Linguistic purity might thus compensate for the loss of political autonomy—both a surrogate for and a conduit to national self-determination.

The theme is familiar. It would run through the rhetoric of the Kulturnation in pre-Bismarck Germany: the substitution of cultural for political accomplishment and the sublime conversion of practical impotence into spiritual triumph. Germany's insistence on its linguistic and spiritual immunity to foreign influence became most vocal at the moment when Germany itself was most tangibly and materially affected. By 1792, Germany's history would be inextricably embroiled with that of France. For Goethe, it was the battle of Valmy that inaugurated a “new epoch in universal history,” insofar as the French Revolution would henceforth assume cosmopolitan, or at least European, and above all German proportions. The defensive Revolutionary war against “the king of Bohemia and Hungary” would quickly take an expansionist turn, which would continue unabated for some fifteen years. For Germany in particular the experience of the French Revolution would become inseparable from the experience of military occupation. Napoleon's announcement, after Brumaire, that the Revolution was “fnished,” its essential principles secured, would be swiftly followed by a series of conquests that paved the way for the imperial refashioning of Germany and its precipitation into a modernity as pervasive as it was unprepared.

After the defeat by Napoleon, the search for intellectual capital to offset Germany's political submission would take the form of a cultural nationalism that evoked the most potent of the Revolution's resources—universities would be restructured, museums would be founded, national heritages invented—and the ambiguities of the project would become manifest, above all in Prussia. By reinventing itself as a unitary spiritual collective, Germany would not only survive the humiliation of foreign occupation but profit from the unprecedented opportunity that this presented. Cultural reform would prepare the nation for the dramatic social innovations that accompanied Napoleon's arrival by forging a citizenry equipped for the liberal institutions of the modern age. It would allow Germany to absorb the fruits of the French Revolution without having to undergo the turmoil of actual Revolution. (This was the liberal version of German cultural patriotism around 1800. There were, of course, reactionary versions, but those are not important for my narrative.)

Fichte's notorious Reden an die deutsche Nation [sic], delivered in the winter of 1807/1808 in French-occupied Berlin, is exemplary and just the counterpart of his earlier Jacobin manifesto, which it vehemently repudiates. The burying of the dead letter of French culture—mechanization, stagnation, infection (the mixed metaphors are Fichte's own)—requires an incorporation of this culture, in that Fichte attributes to cosmopolitan German humanity the ability to love and comprehend the foreigner better than the foreigner understands himself. Nowhere is the ambivalence of this mimetic rivalry more palpable than in the German idealist reception of Rousseau, against whom Fichte would eventually fulminate, in the Staatslehre, for offering a haphazard and utterly unphilosophical solution to the problem of state power. “It is not surprising that, starting out from such principles, [the French Revolution] proceeded as it did.”⁹ By 1800, Fichte had declared the French Revolution burned out, its possibilities exhausted in a single explosive blast, leaving Germany as the sole agent of cosmopolitan (as usual in such discussions, this meant European) regeneration.

Fichte identifies Germany as the true heir of the Revolution by virtue of a drive to self-determination—life itself—that he locates, in the absence of political unity or autonomy, at the heart of language.¹⁰ Developing autonomously in supposedly uninterrupted continuity, and unpolluted by foreign contaminants, the German Ursprache incarnates the transcendental project of free self-fashioning: it presents a collective analogue of the self-positing ego. Fichte had already noted the elective affinity between this foundational freedom and that recently inaugurated in France.¹¹ In the act of asserting its immunity from French influence, the German language proves to be more French, in effect, than polyglot French itself.

What is it about Revolution—the Revolution (is it one or many?)—that thwarts translation even as it seems to stimulate it? Revolution is at once the occasion, the inspiration, and the impediment to Germany's own spiritual self-affirmation. The word itself implants a kernel of opacity within the pellucid purity of the mother tongue—a shibboleth marking the limits of assimilation. The perceived sluggishness of the German tongue is, in this context, more than just another symptom of the nation's infamous belatedness—its stalled development, its retarded modernity, the anachronism that has reduced it to a dusty stage prop—a “powdered wig within the historical junk room of modern nations.” The delay also reveals something crucial about the rhythm of translation. While resisting every attempt at paraphrase, the word “Revolution” is lodged within the host language with tenacity of a native kind. A permanent outside on the inside, it can be neither granted citizenship (eingebürgert), to use Campe's own ubiquitous political metaphor, nor deported. It persists like a Gastarbeiter, at once feared and needed, within the domestic economy of the mother tongue. it remains most foreign just where it appears to be most permanently installed. Translation falters despite or because of the fact that it has always already occurred.

Trivial as it may seem (even within his own lifetime his pedantry was ridiculed), Campe's hesitation 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 is not only translation in the narrow sense, or even exclusively to do with language. It concerns the more general problem of translatio: transfer, transference, transmission, transport, the circulation of things, ideas, and power within the global continuum of space and time. And it raises the question of boundaries and borders. It complicates the geopolitical boundary between nations, the historical boundary between epochs, the metaphysical boundary between body and spirit, the theological boundary between death and life. It points to a residue of materiality within language—an “instance of the letter” that complicates any fantasy of translation as a regulated metabolic exchange, transfer, or passage, metapherein, from idiom to idiom, from sense to sense, from matter to meaning, from letter to spirit, and back again. It disturbs the metaphysical foundation of such a transaction by undermining the very notion of commensurability or equivalence, and in this way aggravates every notion of semantic appropriation. It troubles the imperial fantasy sustaining the idea of translation since Saint Jerome—translation as an act of military plunder, the transport of meaning from one language to another like a prisoner taken by right of conquest. “Like some conqueror, [one] marches the original text, a captive, into [one's] native language [quasi captivos sensus in suam linguam, victoris jure transposuit]…”¹²

Translatio imperii

Rome is no longer in Rome…

Song composed for the triumphal entry into Paris of plundered art from Italy during the 1798 Fête de la Liberté

For Germany, around 1800, perched between two empires, between the crumbling of the Holy Roman empire and the occupying forces of Napoleon, this plunderous fantasy was both charged and complex. The traffic was moving hard and fast in both directions. Translation promised not only a retroactive fortification against invasion, but a preemptive takeover of the assailant's forces. It hinted of a symbolic reversal of imperial power: the transformation of vanquished into victors, colonized into colonizers, within the inverted empire of signs. While the French troops were carting off spoils of war by the wagonload, the German scholar hauled in foreign words.¹³ Inventory against inventory, column against column, parade against parade: Campe's dictionary presents the perfect mirror image of the Revolutionary Louvre. Boxed and labeled, encased in wax and plaster, the looted artworks traveled like sacred relics across land and sea, down canal and river, through countryside and village, and eventually through the streets of Paris, where their arrival was celebrated as a victorious homecoming. “These immortal works are no longer on foreign soil.”¹⁴ Through the serried ranks of the alphabet passed the triumphal procession of words. Ranked and ordered, the foreign words were lined up on the left in Latin typeface as they awaited their ceremonial divestiture, their German equivalents marshaled on the right in Gothic font.

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. The two movements of translation are symmetrical. The objects have already turned into their own effigies, while in their palpable foreignness the words exhibit the obduracy of hard matter. It is a card catalogue that is paraded before the crowds thronging the Champ de Mars: not the things themselves (the artifacts are fragile, and must remain wrapped and crated), but their names, an acquisitions list, a series of titles organized by the scholars and curators of the Louvre with encyclopedic efficiency, arranged with military precision...