Mourning Sickness ─ Hegel and the French Revolution

"Comay has written a stunning and powerful book. She offers a Hegel who is more radically modern and intransigently difficult than his supporters or critics have imagined. Mourning Sickness will become as important to reading the second half of the Phenomenology of Spirit as Robert Pippin's work is to reading the first half."---J. M. Bernstein, New School For Social Research

"Masterful in its analysis of Hegel's arguments and unparalleled in its sensitivity to the subtleties of his texts, Mourning Sickness offers a new and compelling account of the "burning center" of Hegel's work. It is also a penetrating study of the intractably historical dimensions of philosophical invention, which brilliantly demonstrates how ambiguous---and yet how crucial---the relations between thought and historical experience can be."---Daniel Heller-Roazen, Princeton University

This book examines Hegel's response to the French Revolutionary Terror. Like many of his contemporaries, Hegel saw a parallel between the political upheaval in France and the up-heaval 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: having already been through its own cataclysm, Germany could channel the Revolution's radicalism into thought. Hegel comes close to making this argument, too. But he also offers a powerful analysis of how this kind of secondhand history gets generated, and shows what is at stake. This makes him uniquely interesting among his contemporaries: he demonstrates how a fantasy can be simultaneously deconstructed and enjoyed.

Mourning Sickness explores the ways in which traumatic historical events are experienced vicariously, and the fantasies we use to make sense of them. Comay's bold new reading brings Hegel into relation with the most burning present-day discussions around catastrophe, revolution, witness, and memory. More

Rebecca Comay is Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature and co-director of the Program in Literary Studies at the University of Toronto.