In the preface to his book on Hegel, Charles Taylor recognized two ways that every Hegel commentator can go wrong: “Either one can end up being terribly clear and sounding very reasonable at the cost of distorting, even bowdlerizing Hegel. Or one can remain faithful but impenetrable, so that in the end readers will turn with relief to the text in order to understand the commentary.”Footnote 1 While it is hard to imagine ever turning to the Phenomenology with relief, Taylor's cautionary remark draws attention to the indirect relationship between the form and content of Hegel critique: either one attains formal clarity at the expense of material complexity or material complexity at the expense of clarity. The task of the critic, according to Taylor, is to find a balance between these two extremes. The various “Hegel revivals” of the past century, like that of Lukács and the Marxist humanists in the interwar years or Kojève and the existentialists in postwar France, have all struggled to find this balance. The latest Hegel revival is no exception, but both Rebecca Comay's Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution and Susan Buck-Morss's Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History remind us that insight also comes from the extremes.
The French Revolution, declares Comay, is the “burning center” of Hegel's entire philosophy.Footnote 2 In addition to its biographical significance for all Germans of Hegel's generation, the Revolution crystallized what would become the major themes of Hegel's Jena and Berlin systems. Struck by the disharmony between the political backwardness and philosophical advancement of the German lands vis-à-vis Revolutionary France, Hegel introduced “untimeliness itself as an ineluctable condition of historical experience.”Footnote 3 This perception of nonsynchronicity (Ungleichzeitigkeit) derived from Germans’ feeling of having achieved philosophical modernity through the work of Kant while having missed their opportunity for achieving political modernity. German thought existed as a modern anomaly in a premodern social order. The traumatic experience of the Revolution had brought the two nonsynchronous dimensions of thought and reality into open contradiction.
Comay presents Hegel as a psychoanalyst avant la lettre who diagnosed both the French Enlightenment and the German Aufklärung with “melancholia,” a condition somewhat like a post-traumatic stress disorder involving a displaced or “disavowed grief for the lost object.”Footnote 4 For the French, that lost object was religious faith: in championing the secularization of society, unreflective Enlightenment “fails to register faith's losses as its own.”Footnote 5 Pure insight or reason, wrote Hegel in the Phenomenology, is “devoid of all content.” When pure insight takes anything other than itself for its object—for example, when it adopts a political program—it compromises its formal, absolute negativity. The only thing that reason has to critique is therefore reason itself. Enlightenment without self-consciousness and without self-negation is “the negative of pure insight”: it is “falsehood, unreason, and . . . ill-intentioned, just as [it] regards faith as error and prejudice.” In declaring victory over the Church in the name of Reason, the French disavowed their lost object of faith. They deluded themselves into thinking that they could reshape society without spiritual legitimacy.Footnote 6
For the melancholic Protestant Germans, who had reformed faith enough for it to survive the onslaught of reason, the lost object varied according to politics. Liberals yearned for the failed revolution—the turning point where Germany failed to turn, as the historian A. J. P. Taylor would describe 1848. Conservatives, on the other hand, yearned for the traditional culture of Germany's medieval past as they imagined it once existed under the Holy Roman Empire. Napoleon had destroyed that culture, they believed, and the political restoration of 1815 was only a superficial salve. Although German conservatism and Romanticism were not always identical, the two tendencies shared an elective affinity for some lost, prerevolutionary past.Footnote 7
Hegel was skeptical of such nostalgia. For him, Enlightenment had indeed lost its “spiritual world” and could not persist without finding a replacement: “we shall see whether Enlightenment can remain satisfied; that yearning of the troubled Spirit which mourns over the loss of its spiritual world lurks in the background.”Footnote 8 But he also recognized that obsessive mourning distorts the lost object, deflecting it into a fetish. The pun “mourning sickness” of Comay's title is not trivial.Footnote 9 For Hegel, the solar morning was the “glorious mental dawn” of the Revolution, when man realized the principle that thought “ought to govern spiritual reality.”Footnote 10 Emotional mourning, on the other hand, represented the consummation of the Revolution in German philosophy, the true dialectical transcendence (Aufhebung) of the antinomy of faith and reason. In both cases, “sickness” was a reified, fetishistic perversion of morning/mourning: either the Revolution taken to unreflective extremes or the excessive internalization of thought at the expense of political practice. Karl Marx would dub this latter complex of obsessive mourning die deutsche Misere, a foundational element of the German ideology. The temporal dissonance and traumatic experience of Germany in the wake of the French Revolution, according to Marx, consisted in the fact that “we Germans lived out our post-history in thought, in philosophy. We are philosophical contemporaries of the present without being its historical contemporaries. German philosophy is the ideal extension of German history.”Footnote 11 German philosophy thus had no real extension, no practical historical consequences.
Comay agrees with the Marxian interpretation insofar as it applies to Hegel's generation as a whole (and presumably to subsequent generations of Hegelians), but she also argues that Hegel's own philosophy in fact anticipated Marx's critique. What we get at the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit, which she considers Hegel's most advanced work, is not simply a “pacifying idealization” (pace Marx, Adorno, Derrida, et al.) but an “aporetic self-deconstruction.”Footnote 12 The moment of reconciliation with the past at the end of Spirit's itinerary—that profoundly positive moment of forgiveness that “leaves no scars behind”Footnote 13—was actually Hegel's own self-critical work of mourning that preserved the past in the form of a new beginning (again, Aufhebung). The Phenomenology offered a therapeutic formula for dealing with grief. Spirit could only “move on” by renouncing itself in a Christ-like moment of universal sacrifice.
How does Comay's “counter-fetishistic” intervention fit in with existing historiography and critique? Most obvious is her desire to rescue some version of Hegel from the synoptic narratives of interpreters like Karl Löwith and Herbert Marcuse, who defined Hegel teleologically according to his anticipation of later thinkers like Nietzsche or Marx.Footnote 14 Contrary to these interpreters’ method of presenting Hegel's philosophy as underdeveloped or in need of revision, she insists that there “is no need to upstage or ‘dialectize’ Hegel by flushing out the unprocessed flotsam of a reified tradition,” e.g. a Christian idiom.Footnote 15 Hegel's dialectic stands on its own two feet, and it does not need to “be turned right side up again” in order to “discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.”Footnote 16 Comay also objects to the political labeling of Hegel as a reactionary conservative. Marcuse is again the guilty party, having referred to Hegel as “the so-called official philosopher of the Prussian state and the philosophical dictator of Germany.”Footnote 17 Jürgen Habermas developed this interpretation further by diagnosing Hegel's idolization of the Revolution as a neutralizing defense mechanism that allowed him to revolutionize reality “without any revolutionaries.” According to Habermas, Hegel drew back in fear from the violence and popular democracy brought on by the Revolution. Philosophy was Hegel's means of commemorating the Revolution from a safe distance: “Only after he had fastened the revolution firmly to the beating heart of the world did he feel secure from it.”Footnote 18 Labeling Hegel a pseudo-liberal also has its proponents. Joachim Ritter, for example, interpreted Hegel's modern state as an ethical institution meant to actualize the freedom that only the Revolution made possible.Footnote 19
Comay's rejection of these various political interpretations of Hegel is well taken. Hegel resists any neat categorization as “conservative” or “liberal.” He fundamentally opposed the abstract individualism of the liberals, but unlike conservatives or communitarians such as Edmund Burke, he celebrated the Revolution's progressive break from the past. Freedom and progress were the linchpins of his political philosophy, but only when achieved through the authoritarian guidance of the modern, rational state. If liberal democrats pursued greater enlightenment through subjective political will and revolution from below (or at least from the middle), then Hegel believed in reform from above and the identification of subjective will with the objective raison d’état.Footnote 20
Hegel's writings about the Revolution allow Comay to differentiate his thought from the dominant philosophical and political trends of his time: idealism, liberalism, Romanticism, and nationalism. In contrast to Immanuel Kant, who condemned the sham trial and execution of the king in 1792–3,Footnote 21 Hegel considered the decisive turning point of the Revolution to be the passage of the Law of Suspects and the beginning of the Terror in September 1793. Guilt by suspicion, thought Hegel, is the consequence of a social order predicated entirely on the self. Hegel made a rather counterintuitive connection between concrete individualism (Kantian ethics) and abstract individualism (the Reign of Terror).Footnote 22 His most famous statements about the Revolution came in the section “Absolute Freedom and Terror” of the Phenomenology (§§582–95). The universal principle of absolute freedom, which he associates with abstract individualism, tolerates no particulars. When put into practice by Robespierre and the Jacobins, Hegel claimed, this pure formalism extinguished all heterogeneous particulars; that is, all supposedly dissident individuals. As pure negation, absolute freedom has a deadly aversion to positive existence. The rule of a revolutionary government devoted to purity of principle can mean only one thing: death for the individual, utterly meaningless death. Hegel illustrated this conclusion in one of his better-known lines: decapitation by the guillotine is “the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water.”Footnote 23 Given this context, Hegel's formulation of forgiveness at the end of the Phenomenology reconciled Absolute Knowing and meaningful death. It was the negation of the negation, the death of death.Footnote 24
Comay wants to rehabilitate Hegel as an apolitical but critical observer of his time, one whose philosophical detachment from the world allowed him superior insight. Her interpretation gives Hegel's theory of forgiveness a “contemporary edge”: “Its starting point is the surd of inexpiable finitude [!] that both thwarts and stimulates every movement toward redemption. And it is disfigured by a traumatic temporality of delay.”Footnote 25 The reader of her book, however, will find it difficult to determine her intentions with any sort of precision. Her style betrays a frustrating disregard for clear exposition—frustrating because the reader senses that truly valuable insights lie hidden behind her often impenetrable prose. Ignoring Charles Taylor's advice about the form and content of Hegel commentary, she renders an interpretation of Hegel that threatens to be both unclear and unfaithful. In her account, Hegel becomes a sharp tool for cutting away the dissatisfying bits of Arendt, de Man, Foucault, and Derrida, while underscoring the validity of Badiou, Agamben, and Žižek. Comay has scores to settle and wades impulsively into contemporary debates. One cannot necessarily fault her for this mode of argumentation, not least because it merely keeps with the style of Stanford's Cultural Memory in the Present series. But the intellectual historian will dwell on the question whether such an instrumentalization of Hegel is justified. Comay anticipates this objection and preemptively shifts her ground from the “historical” to the “philosophical,” where presumably anything goes.Footnote 26 She defends her exaggerative style of argumentation with an appeal to an impressive set of authorities:
When Adorno writes, in his own typically exaggerated fashion, that “nothing is true in psychoanalysis except the exaggerations” [Minima Moralia], he could have been describing Hegel's method. Freud looks to the pathological to illuminate the normal: by making things coarser, he forces us to linger on what might otherwise escape our attention. Hegel illuminates the pathological within the normal. Exaggeration reveals uncomfortable features of experience that would otherwise be invisible.Footnote 27
Does critical exaggeration reveal truth? If coupled with an aversion to making summary statements, causal connections, or affirmative syntheses, at least, then exaggeration tends to hide more than it reveals.Footnote 28
Philosophically, Comay's most salient claims concern the nature of historical experience. The reader will struggle to unpack statements like “experience is the experience of the impossibility of experience.”Footnote 29 Suffice it to say that Comay extends her interpretation of Hegel and the traumatic experience of temporal delay (die deutsche Misere) to all of human experience. “The German encounter with the French Revolution,” she writes, “is an extreme case of the structural anachronism that afflicts all historical experience . . . every epoch is a discordant mix of divergent rhythms, unequal durations, and variable speeds.”Footnote 30 The foundation of human sociability is “traumatic dissonance,” and this “grinding nonsynchronicity” makes historical experience possible.Footnote 31 Hegel “defines history as transgenerational trauma: experience is the belated and vicarious experience of the missed experience of others.”Footnote 32
Comay's language of trauma, mourning, missed experience, and nonsynchronicity conjures the specter of 9/11 and the contemporary obsession with terrorist threats. In the most explicitly political lines of the book, she comments on Claude Lefort's contention that mourning is fundamental to modern democracy.Footnote 33 Hegel went even further, she claims, by demonstrating that
[w]ar on terror is democracy's way of abjecting what remains its own darkest secret to itself. Insight needs faith: modern democracy is just the unfolding of their violent symbiosis through the melancholic staging of an ungrieved loss . . . Revolutionary purity brings into view precisely what it most denies: the emptiness at the heart of the symbolic order.Footnote 34
Counterterrorism, embodied by the Thermidorean regime of 1795, shows the “essential reflexivity of terror.” Traumatic terror transforms into “preemptive anxiety” about possible attacks in the future.Footnote 35 In this sense, we can see how counterterrorism bears within it the seeds of terror itself. As Bronisław Baczko observed, the Thermidorean regime's counterterrorist tactics were little different from and sometimes more severe than those employed during the Terror.Footnote 36 Counterterrorism proceeds against terror just as unreflective reason proceeds against faith: blindly, intolerantly, and for the most part ineffectively. And in such a state of affairs, death seems like a foregone conclusion: “Transforming past into future, anxiety teaches us how to mourn in advance.”Footnote 37 Indeed, as tragic as terrorist attacks and mass murders since 9/11 have been, the act of mourning their victims seems to follow a script written in advance. We have trained ourselves to expect the president to deliver a solemn eulogy, mainstream media to provide round-the-clock coverage, grieving families to perform their grief, impromptu memorials to be constructed, police and firefighters to be honored, and of course national flags to be waved. In the United States, such ceremonies often invoke an ecumenical Christian God to bestow the final blessing on the fallen. But that too begins to sound as empty as the cliché “they’re in our thoughts and prayers.”
We may be trained to mourn in advance, but the catastrophic event itself always takes us by surprise. Comay notes that the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 provided Immanuel Kant with the first opportunity to practice his spectator ethics on a major world event. The cosmopolitan spectator observed at a safe “aesthetic distance” and attempted to “demystify the disaster” by attributing to it natural rather than divine causality.Footnote 38 Hegel had a far less empirical understanding of earthquakes, asserting in the Philosophy of Nature, “It is quite evident that an earthquake . . . belongs to the living totality of the Earth.”Footnote 39 More easily than Kant, Hegel was able to draw holistic parallels between seismic reverberations and social revolutions. Susan Buck-Morss might have done the same had she published her book Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2009) one year later. On 12 January 2010, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake devastated the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince and its surrounding cities. Powerful aftershocks lasted for weeks. This disaster, which resulted in well over 100,000 deaths and displaced millions of people, brought the poorest country in the western hemisphere back to the world's attention. In tracing the influence of the Haitian Revolution on Hegel's thought, Buck-Morss wanted to do likewise: move Haiti out of the (post)colonial periphery and into the center and “living totality” of world history.
Her two-part book begins with a reprint of her article “Hegel and Haiti,” which caused a minor sensation when it first appeared in the year 2000.Footnote 40 She notes how scholars have always considered it peculiar that Hegel never mentioned the slave revolt that began in 1791 in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, at the time the world's largest exporter of sugar and coffee and one of the largest slave economies. Observers in Europe and America looked on with fascination and terror as black slaves and mulatto freemen overthrew their white colonial rulers and, in 1804, established the independent nation of Haiti.Footnote 41 Buck-Morss calls the Haitian Revolution “the crucible, the trial by fire for the ideals of the French Enlightenment,” and argues that “every European who was part of the bourgeois reading public knew it.”Footnote 42 It remains, in fact, the most successful slave revolt in history. As Sibylle Fisher writes, the Haitian Revolution functioned “as trauma, utopia, and elusive dream”Footnote 43—not unlike Rebecca Comay's description of the French Revolution. But Hegel was apparently no different from his European contemporaries in assigning the highest value to freedom in theory but turning a blind eye to real slavery in practice. He did not write about the Haitian Revolution because black slaves in the Caribbean were inferior relics of a primitive human past and thus irrelevant to the “Germanic World” at the vanguard of history.Footnote 44
Or did he? Buck-Morss has done some impressive historical research to demonstrate, however circumstantially, that Hegel actually followed the events of the Haitian Revolution very closely. The sources that she has uncovered are so rich that one wishes she had elaborated on them more in the book rather than simply reprinted her decade-old article with only minor revisions. From reading the journals Minerva and the Edinburgh Review and fraternizing with the Freemasons, she argues convincingly, Hegel must have been keenly aware of what was happening in Haiti during the years 1804–5, just before he wrote the Phenomenology.Footnote 45 She concludes that he did in fact write about Haiti in his magnum opus, only in the veiled form of the section “Lordship and Bondage” (§§178–96).The famous master–slave dialectic had as its reference not the ancient slaves of Aristotle's Politics and Ethics, as is traditionally believed, but the really existing slaves of Saint-Domingue.Footnote 46 These slaves functioned not as primitive relics of an oriental or feudal economic system but rather as a crucial and contradictory part of modern civil society itself.Footnote 47 “The Haitian experience,” she insists, “was not a modern phenomenon too, but first.”Footnote 48 And whereas most of his contemporaries tolerated real slavery in the New World and indeed justified it as necessary, Hegel in 1806 held out the possibility of emancipation and expanded his concept of universal freedom to include the black former slaves of Haiti.Footnote 49
Hegel began the “Lordship and Bondage” section of the Phenomenology by observing that we only become conscious of ourselves through acknowledgment by other people.Footnote 50 Far from benign or commonplace, as contemporary philosophers of mind might assume, this intersubjective construction of identity for Hegel takes the form of a life-and-death struggle between oneself and another. Independent self-consciousness and thus freedom come “only through staking one's life.”Footnote 51 But the actual death of one or the other would prematurely terminate the dialectic of mutual recognition. In order to sustain life and the dialectic, one party must relinquish its autonomy and submit to becoming an object for the other. And here Hegel identified the protagonists of this unequal relationship: the master (Herr) and the slave (Knecht).Footnote 52 Although subordinate to the master, the slave labors directly on things and thereby produces and shapes his objective world. The master, in contrast, only consumes the things that the slave has produced (e.g. sugar, coffee). Moreover, while the slave recognizes the master as an independent consciousness, the master finds himself confronted only with reified objects and dependent consciousnesses. The imbalance of this mutual recognition favors the slave: the master's existence and self-consciousness depend, in fact, entirely on the slave's labor, whereas the slave depends on his own labor, i.e. his interaction with the objective world. In a great dialectical reversal, Hegel claimed that only servitude generates a truly independent self-consciousness.Footnote 53 The slave and not the master plays the role of (potentially) emancipatory subject. The scholarly debate about the meaning of this section centers on the question whether Hegel believed that the slave's inferior status was necessary and permanent. Hegel suggested that it was unlikely for the slave to be free, in however limited a sense, without work and “[w]ithout the discipline of service and obedience.”Footnote 54 The section broke off there, with the possibility of a slave revolt and full emancipation hanging tantalizingly in the air but never put in print.
By the time of his lectures on The Philosophy of History (1821–31), however, Hegel had ruled out any such possibility. He banished Africa and the indigenous cultures of the New World to prehistory and even went so far as to blame Africans themselves for having become slaves. Buck-Morss makes the provocative claim that “the more faithfully his lectures reflected Europe's conventional scholarly wisdom on African society, the less enlightened and more bigoted they became.”Footnote 55 As Hegel developed his philosophy of history and grew comfortable at the University of Berlin, that burgeoning center of the Germanic world, he decided that sub-Saharan Africa and by extension the black slaves of the African diaspora were “unhistorical” and unchanging.Footnote 56 The glorious mental dawn of the Atlantic revolutions had dimmed everywhere in Restoration Europe. Buck-Morss nevertheless believes that the radically inclusive universality of the younger Hegel is worth recovering. She devotes the second part of her book to the task of reviving this universal humanism for the twenty-first century.
In accord with a recent fashion among historians,Footnote 57 Buck-Morss identifies as the primary agents of her “new humanism” syncretic cultures, cosmopolitans, and transnational border-crossers. Haiti fits the first of these categories: it attempted to realize French Enlightenment and Revolutionary ideals in the exploitative conditions of the New World, spoke the mixed language of Creole, and practiced a new religion, vodou, which combined West African animism, Catholic theology, and Masonic symbolism. Cultural syncretism differs from multiculturalism, according to Buck-Morss, insofar as it remains oriented toward human universality rather than toward a collection of diverse particularities. And it differs logically from Hegel's method of dialectical synthesis because it resists homogenization into a single, dominant culture (i.e. the higher, dialectical unity).
Buck-Morss relies heavily on the work of historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker to describe the cosmopolitan and transnational agents of her new humanism. In their book The Many-Headed Hydra, Linebaugh and Rediker redefine the early modern Atlantic proletariat as a multiethnic “motley crew” of sailors, pirates, slaves, vagabonds, etc.Footnote 58 For Buck-Morss, these agents represent a “universalism from below” that rebuffs national particularism and cultural exclusion.Footnote 59 They make even Marx's industrial proletariat look provincial by comparison: Linebaugh and Rediker's book poses
in fact a major challenge to Marxist orthodoxy in its whole conception of the proletariat as preindustrial and Atlantic in scope, its emphasis on the importance of women leaders, sympathy for Christian radicals, concern with race as much as class, and aversion to vangardism as a form of political organization.Footnote 60
No one collective agent or revolutionary subject has ever possessed a monopoly on universality. This is, of course, another challenge to Marxist orthodoxy, which criticized abstract universalism as bourgeois ideology. Buck-Morss urges us to conceive of an inclusionary collective subjectivity that encompasses all of humankind, even and perhaps especially the riffraff and membra disjecta of modern society. With this replay of the New Left's idealization of Randgruppen, she wants to universalize the radical antislavery pioneered during the Haitian Revolution so that it includes, among other things, resistance to modern capitalist wage slavery.
To help explain how this transnational proletariat embodies a universal humanism, Buck-Morss introduces the concept of “porosity.” Drawing on the work of the historian Paul Gilroy, she observes that the black African diaspora traveled “across cultural binaries, moving in and out of conceptual frames and in the process, creating new ones.”Footnote 61 One-dimensional ethnic thinking or narrow ascriptions of racial identity simply did not capture the complicated, crosshatched reality of the black Atlantic. She prefers the term “porosity” to Gilroy's “hybridity” because it suggests “that the lived experiences of the New World for the colonial dominators and the slaves (as well as indigenous populations) . . . challenged preexisting conceptual distinctions.”Footnote 62 The porous boundaries of New World cultures allowed and continue to allow for the formation of new identities. Whereas the mutual recognition of Hegel's master and slave stayed within familiar bounds, the New World created “[c]onstellations of people whose mutual recognition was unprecedented.”Footnote 63
Does Buck-Morss's universal humanism answer Rebecca Comay's question, “What are the normative grounds of human sociability in the absence of the transcendent authority of the divine”?Footnote 64 For Comay, authentic mourning for the lost object of religious faith means incorporating faith into the present and abandoning unreflective reason. The process of secularization will complete itself, but a new faith must arise out of the secular world. The fall of communism has made it more difficult to imagine new secular faiths, regardless of whether one interprets our age as “the end of utopia” or identifies human rights, for example, as “the last utopia.”Footnote 65 Buck-Morss is keen to distinguish the universality of her new humanism from, on the one hand, neoliberal paeans to the triumph of humanistic civilization,Footnote 66 and, on the other, contemporary human rights discourse, which is ridden with hypocrisy and “enemy exceptions.”Footnote 67 She wishes to overcome the “cultural racism” and the “idea of progress [that justify] the imposition of democracy on others as a military project.”Footnote 68 Universal humanism exists rather as an ethical norm that should guide all human affairs. But how can this norm possibly be enacted or enforced?
Briefly for Hegel and again for us the Haitian Revolution shows that
[u]niversality is in the moment of the slaves’ self-awareness that the situation was not humanely tolerable, that it marked the betrayal of civilization and the limits of cultural understanding . . . At the same time, we are pushed to the point where Hegel's dialectic of master and slave falls silent. Self-awareness must lead to action, and yet action endangers precisely what is at stake in the idea of universal humanity.Footnote 69
This paralyzing moment, this dilemma that recognizes how active resistance to injustice could bring about the very kind of violence that it opposes—as in Haiti, for example, when Jean-Jacques Dessalines ordered the massacre of all remaining whites in the country—informs Buck-Morss's own stated political stance of “radical neutrality.”Footnote 70 But how can such neutrality transcend the “prisonhouse” of academic debates in which she claims “[c]ritical theoretical practice today is caught”? How can it transform the “cynicism” that has “seduce[d] the younger generation of academics”?Footnote 71 Her desire to raise the stakes of contemporary critical theory by assigning it a positive program—something to fight for, namely an inclusive universal humanism—is certainly a worthy project. But this kind of engagement will sooner or later require political commitment, and commitment entails particular aims that may run contrary to the universalism she advocates. Her book ends with a flourish: “The project of universal history does not come to an end. It begins again, somewhere else.” But one cannot help feeling a bit unsatisfied.
Like Rebecca Comay, Buck-Morss sees rhetorical value in exaggeration, taking her argument “to the point where we cannot think Hegel without Haiti.” By extension, we cannot think a new universal humanism without Hegel. She notes how Aimé Césaire “understood that the truly productive, ‘universal’ experience of reading Hegel is not through a summary of the total and totalizing system, but through the liberation that one's own imagination can achieve by encountering dialectical thinking in its most concrete exemplification.”Footnote 72 Both Comay and Buck-Morss share this dialectical imagination, the primary Hegelian Marxist inheritance of the critical-theory tradition. And both seem to agree that even if Hegel did not solve the problems of modernity, he had at least identified them.
