If anyone meets the challenge of “dark times” in the German nineteenth century, it would seem to be Hegel. Hegel’s account of how the mind/spirit tarries—literally, “stays with”—the negative in attentive observation and recollection until it “turns it into being” [“in das Sein umkehrt”] (The Phenomenology of Spirit 19) amounts to a theory of psychic working through: how to introject objects, open the self to novelty, and render the present into the past. As Rebecca Comay and Katrin Pahl have shown,

Hegel’s philosophy is at once a psychology and a theory of history. Taken as a whole, it is also, famously, one predominant story that nineteenth century Europe tells to itself, the story of the gathering of revolution and restoration into a single process crowned by the modern European state. Acknowledging that the transitions on which individual and psychic history depend are painful, Hegel models how to tolerate the pain.

In the waning days of Napoleon, just after Waterloo, and toward the beginning of the “Vormärz”—desolate times for European radicals, when, as Heinrich Heine wrote with black humor, “all of Europe became a St. Helena”

—Hegel was engaged in demonstrating to himself and others how The Phenomenology of Spirit would fare in the years following the battle of Jena. As Hegel’s letters show, he is concerned in this “middle period” with the formalization and extension of his philosophy

—its not being downhill from there—and he thinks this issue, in turn, through his ability to live his own theory in the “dark times.” Crucially, Hegel makes establishing the reception of the Phenomenology into the same project as the psychic management of the restoration. He generates the effect that his previous philosophy is correct by interpreting it himself, highlighting what (in retrospect) it is already prepared to allow for; as Derrida points out, Hegelian spirit “in advance interiorizes all content” (22a) and as Adorno points out, that “advance” is also secured after the fact (History and Freedom 51). In self-interpretation, Hegel coordinates the future anterior with metalepsis in order to place his thought at their crossing, where a dynamic transition in the present would logically be. So if Hegel’s “middle period” is especially interesting, that’s also because generating a transition through self-interpretation is what all of the work is about anyway. Self-interpretation is its content and its procedure: “the subject of Hegelian thought only is insofar as it is engaged in the process of interpreting itself,” as Jan Mieszkowski phrases it.

Hegel’s techniques for arranging that his philosophy is not left on the battlefield at Waterloo are therefore necessarily the same techniques he uses to introject and transform postwar phenomena that otherwise threaten catastrophe. Incorporating the restoration through his philosophy both reinforces the philosophy and averts devastation.

For German radicals did experience the Vormärz as a disaster. It’s difficult to describe, and was difficult for them to describe, exactly what kind of disaster, because although they were of course disappointed that the modernizations of the Napoleonic era did not bring democracy,

there was also a positivity to which they objected that resists the conventional vocabulary for disaster. Critics register the difficulty when they call the postwar in England and Europe a period of “historical chaos” or “historical confusion.”

Rebecca Comay has argued brilliantly that the German postwar is characterized by trauma in the structural sense that it is organized by a spectral German revolution which is imagined as too early or too late, either having occurred already on a mental level and/or being (always) not yet necessary: “having already been there in theory, Germany could put off until doomsday the grab for practical fulfillment.”

As many have pointed out in this connection, the idea of a “restoration” doesn’t quite work as a descriptor in the absence of a revolution; other terms for the postwar period avoid describing it at all. Historians of England tend to call it the “aftermath of Waterloo,” and the term “Vormärz” complementarily anchors the time in something that hadn’t happened yet.

Afloat in a way that could only be called “transitional” in retrospect, German radicals could feel that they were on open political waters—not in a liberatory, but in an agoraphobic sense, in which it seemed possible that just about anything bad could happen to them. Yet, fundamentally, the disaster is also not “instability”; the “stability” that replaced this instability was the imperial German state. That was even more disastrous from a radical point of view, and can’t seriously be thought of as less “confused,” either, than the “historical confusion” that preceded it. Rather, radicals experienced the Vormärz as a positive present of conservative administrative control, embodied in police states in which even “liberals” opposed classless suffrage.

James Sheehan argues that the first three decades of the nineteenth century “deserve to be thought of as the apogee of the Beamtenstaat, therefore, not simply because bureaucrats had won decisive victories over their old enemies but also because their new antagonists had not yet begun to take shape” (441). Calling for the termination of the monarchy before the German “Pre-Parliament” in 1848 (and so looking back at the time I’m concerned with), the radical democrat Gustav von Struve began his address with: “A long period of the most profound degradation weighs heavily on Germany.”

Historians David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley argued in the 1980s that Cold War histories of Europe composed in the West promoted the hindsight perception that as Struve spoke, an even longer period of even profounder degradation lay ahead of him, one that seemed to culminate at Auschwitz. Clearly, “grand narratives” are part of the problem; the very discipline of “history” is part of the problem and part of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalism that followed the aftermath of Waterloo. Since Blackbourn and Eley, historians have approached the German nineteenth century more as a way of life in itself, sometimes discussing how it may have been “liberal” in a different way after all.

Although such a discussion avoids problems with the notion of historical failure, it still misses the point. Eley’s point is not just that we should stop being judgmental about the German nineteenth century, but that we should ask who gains from our judgments. The twentieth century theory of the development of democracy from “liberalization” gains by blaming German exceptionalism for its “failure” to make it work. Similarly, radicals’ experience is not disastrous because of what it’s not—a revolution or liberalism—and “revolution” and “liberalism” are not real in some way that the early German nineteenth century is unreal. But—and here I may or may not be departing from the anthropological reflexivity that Blackbourn and Eley bring to their study—that does not mean that the Vormärz was really fine. In the most interesting descriptions, it is positively awful enough in itself, awful in being a way of getting along, and these subjective descriptions also merit our anthropological respect if our reading is to be more than an account only of what works about a society. Going beyond anomaly, disaster here goes in a way beyond disaster. This impression of disorienting open-endedness, more than anything else, disabling any sense of historical exceptionality, particularizes this disaster and Hegel’s model for working through it.

Much of Hegel’s and Niethammer’s conversation pertains to the educational system for which they both worked and which was an endless source of aggravation for them both. Briefly, Niethammer was a “neohumanist” who wanted to modernize education while defending it against “utilitarians” who were narrowly interested in professional schools, and he had appointed Hegel rector of a Gymnasium in Nuremburg because he knew he would be a political ally.

Niethammer’s enterprises never ran all that smoothly, and as Napoleon’s downfall began to seem increasingly likely, he interpreted the newly emboldened attacks on his projects that then occurred as evidence of an overwhelming and indeed insuperable pressure from conservative and utilitarian forces (i.e., conservative anti-democrats and modernizing anti-democrats). Although he can seem to be overdoing his rhetoric (though not to me), Niethammer was basically right: democratization—parliamentary or otherwise—was not coming to Germany in spite of all the “liberalization” and “modernization” that had been accomplished under Napoleon. Niethammer’s anticipation of this conclusion sometimes led him to describe his political future in apocalyptic terms.

Notice that, although things weren’t going too well, Napoleon is still in Paris on the night of Hegel’s dream.

In fact, Hegel had been feeling caught between apes and pigs the entire time at Nuremberg. As soon as he got there, commiseration about assaults on the educational system (including the chronic, passive assault of underfunding) becomes one of the main motifs of his correspondence with Niethammer.

As early as 1810, we find Hegel complaining that “Nobody complains . . . . the object is simply to procure treasure, and those who suffered real distress and injustice are used to the view that everything has gone to the dogs anyway” (Butler, letter 229, April 10, 1810); more than any reference to repression, the complaint that no one is complaining registers the collapse of political space. Throughout this time Hegel regularly refers to the Allied forces with dripping irony as “our Liberators”: “if par hasard there are any liberated individuals to be seen I myself will stand up and watch” (Butler, letter 225, December 23, 1813). But the Napoleonic administration has not left enough room for complaint either. Likewise, the moderator’s “insistence that the issue was merely preference” is absurd in light of the lack of distinction and merit among the choices. Only the possibility of an unseen, deeper rationality in his behavior (“ob er es denn so meine”) furnishes some ballast against the non-events that crowd the dream.

The highlight of the dream is the part that Hegel selects for attention by calling it out of place, the “super-clever” remark that attempts to get beyond the immediate debate to the game played “from time immemorial.” The super-clever man’s observation differs from the others: it’s a question, at least rhetorically; it’s murmured by a liminal participant, “more to himself” than to anyone else—which is how Hegel lectured, and how Adorno believes his writing proceeds;

and it makes an effort to think beyond the scene, to connect pasts and futures, surfaces and depths. It’s tempting to see this curious intervention as the most Hegelian one. The super-clever man asks the moderator whether, in his role as “fate,” he bars “juridical” topics because of the likelihood that the outcome would only play into the hands of aristocrats—at least, whether this likely outcome is the true meaning of his intransigence. A kind of realist calculation and foresight is implicit here. Although the dream thus seems to align itself with super-cleverness, however, Hegel’s reported thoughts on waking imply that his own position, or at least his feelings, is not identical with that of the super-clever man within. It seems difficult—literally, it “hits him hard”—that he has to go on with his lectures on law. Now we know that Hegel sees rational law as the only possible means of managing the conflicts of society, and he was soon to take an interest in the particulars of the new constitution, especially with regard to the parameters of franchise.

Yet in the dream “juridical” matters already seem like mere packaging and fooling around, and as he wakes it seems terrible to have to discuss them in public, perhaps to be expected to reconcile them with the kind of legality (the “natural” law of superior force?) exercised in the Devil’s name. The strain of the debate reflects and forestalls the strain of the coming lecture; the dream temporarily defers the tension and tedium of keeping up appearances, already pressing upon the dreamer from the side of the morning, by voicing a complaint that can’t be voiced during the day.

Something is beginning to happen in Hegel’s dream that he opposes philosophically. We might think of this process, as Melanie Klein has taught us to do, as that of splitting “good” and “bad” parts of the self as a way of handling uncomfortably mixed feelings.

In fact, Klein is one of the most Hegelian thinkers of the twentieth century: she advocates an integration that ideally does not describe anything as ontologically good or bad, and uses the ideas of goodness and badness only as temporary organizations that must be eventually be brought together in the same space. Klein continually points out that splitting off bad pieces of reality necessarily commits aggressions against the self that produces that reality, which must also become bad in the same moment and therefore become mired in persecution, guilt, and retaliation.

Klein’s critique of splitting recalls Hegel’s description of the mirror reifications of empiricism and idealism: ‘Logic shows that the subjective which is to be subjective only, the finite which would be finite only, the infinite which would be infinite only, and so on, have no truth, but contradict themselves, and pass over into their opposites. Hence this transition, and the unity in which the extremes are merged and become factors, each with a merely reflected existence, reveals itself as their truth.’ ‘The understanding, which addresses itself to deal with the Idea, commits a double misunderstanding. It takes first the extremes of the Idea (be they expressed as they will, so long as they are in their unity), not as they are understood when stamped with this concrete unity, but as if they remained abstractions outside of it. It no less mistakes the relation between them, even when it has been expressly stated . . . . But, in the second place, the understanding believes its “reflection”—that the self-identical Idea contains its own negative, or contains contradiction—to be an external reflection which does not lie within the Idea itself. But the reflection is really no peculiar cleverness of the understanding. The idea itself is the dialectic which for ever divides and distinguishes the self-identical from the differentiated, the subjective from the objective, the finite from the infinite, soul from body. Only on these terms is it an eternal creation, eternal vitality, and eternal spirit. But while it thus passes or rather translates itself into the abstract understanding, it for ever remains reason. The Idea is the dialectic which again makes this mass of understanding and diversity understand its finite nature and the pseudo-independence in its productions, and which brings the diversity back to unity.’ ‘[Wenn der Verstand zeigt, daß die Idee sich selbst widerspreche, weil z. B. das Subjektive nur subjektiv und das Objektive demselben vielmehr entgegengesetzt, das Sein etwas ganz anderes als der Begriff sei und daher nicht aus demselben herausgeklaubt werden könne, ebenso das Endliche nur endlich und gerade das Gegenteil vom Unendlichen, also nicht mit demselben identisch sei, und so fort durch alle Bestimmungen hindurch, so zeigt vielmehr die Logik das Entgegengesetzte auf, daß nämlich das Subjektive, das nur subjektiv, das Endliche, das nur endlich, das Unendliche, das nur unendlich sein soll und so ferner, keine Wahrheit hat, sich widerspricht undin sein Gegenteil übergeht, womit dies Übergehen und die Einheit, in welcher die Extreme als aufgehobene, als ein Scheinen oder Momente sind, sich als ihre Wahrheit offenbart.’ ‘Der Verstand, welcher sich an die Idee macht, ist der doppelte Mißverstand, daß er erstlich die Extreme der Idee, sie mögen ausgedrückt werden, wie sie wollen, insofern sie in ihrer Einheit sind, noch in dem Sinne und der Bestimmung nimmt, insofern sie nicht in ihrer konkreten Einheit, sondern noch Abstraktionen außerhalb derselben sind. Nicht weniger verkennt er die Beziehung, selbst auch wenn sie schon ausdrücklich gesetzt ist; so übersieht er z. B. sogar die Natur der Kopula im Urteil, welche vom Einzelnen, dem Subjekte, aussagt, daß das Einzelne ebensosehr nicht Einzelnes, sondern Allgemeines ist. - Fürs andere hält der Verstand seine Reflexion, daß die mit sich identische Idee das Negative ihrer selbst, den Widerspruch, enthalte, für eine äußerliche Reflexion, die nicht in die Idee selbst falle. In der Tat ist dies aber nicht eine dem Verstande eigene Weisheit, sondern die Idee ist selbst die Dialektik, welche ewig das mit sich Identische von dem Differenten, das Subjektive von dem Objektiven, das Endliche von dem Unendlichen, die Seele von dem Leibe, ab- und unterscheidet und nur insofern ewige Schöpfung, ewige Lebendigkeit und ewiger Geist ist. Indem sie so selbst das Übergehen oder vielmehr das sich Übersetzen in den abstrakten Verstand ist, ist sie ebenso ewig Vernunft; sie ist die Dialektik, welche dieses Verständige, Verschiedene über seine endliche Natur und den falschen Schein der Selbständigkeit seiner Produktionen wieder verständigt und in die Einheit zurückführt.] (Logic: being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, §214; Enzyklopädie I §214)’

Throughout, the idea that there is no question for the healthy self of the impossibility of assimilating negativity depends on the idea that a negativity, or “lack,” “is a lack only in so far as the lack's overcoming is equally present in the same thing, and contradiction is, as such, immanent and explicitly present in that thing “[Mangel aber ist sie, insofern in einem ebenso das Darüberhinaussein vorhanden, der Widerspruch als solcher immanent und in ihm gesetzt ist]” (Philosophy of Nature / Encyclopedia II §359). So, things necessarily contain some of their opposite because they exist within the space of unity, and that space matters to us because it is our space. By this logic, it is not possible to believe without error in a negativity that comes from an “outside,” since there is no outside of the mediating space

: ‘Pain has therefore not reached mind from the outside as is supposed when it is asked in what manner pain entered into the world. Nor does evil, the negative of absolutely self-existent infinite mind, any more than pain, reach mind from the outside; on the contrary, evil is nothing else than mind which puts its separate individuality before all else. Therefore, even in this its extreme disunity, in this violent detachment of itself from the root of its intrinsically ethical nature, in this complete self-contradiction, mind yet remains identical with itself and therefore free . . . . Thus, for example, the idea of “house” is completely contradictory to my “I” and yet the latter endures it. But mind endures contradiction because it knows that it contains no determination that it has not posited itself, and consequently that it cannot in turn sublate.’ ‘[Der Schmerz ist daher nicht von außen an den Geist gekommen, wie man sich einbildete, wenn man die Frage aufwarf, auf welche Weise der Schmerz in die Welt gekommen sei. Ebensowenig wie der Schmerz kommt das Böse, das Negative des an und für sich seienden unendlichen Geistes, von außen an den Geist; es ist im Gegenteil nichts anderes als der sich auf die Spitze seiner Einzelheit stellende Geist. Selbst in dieser seiner höchsten Entzweiung, in diesem Sichlosreißen von der Wurzel seiner an sich seienden sittlichen Natur, in diesem vollsten Widerspruche mit sich selbst, bleibt daher der Geist doch mit sich identisch und daher frei . . . . Alles Bewußtsein enthält vielmehr eine Einheit und eine Getrenntheit, somit einen Widerspruch; so ist z. B. die Vorstellung des Hauses ein meinem Ich völlig Widersprechendes und dennoch von diesem Ertragenes. Der Widerspruch wird aber vom Geiste ertragen, weil dieser keine Bestimmung in sich hat, die er nicht als eine von ihm gesetzte und folglich als eine solche wüßte, die er auch wieder aufheben kann. (Philosophy of Mind / Encyclopedia III §382, trans. modified; my italics)]’ Here, bearing negativity depends on containing it as self-contradiction: since the mind is able to bear self-contradiction because it knows it has posited the negativity, the way to make something bearable is to bring it into that position. The bearability of contradiction depends on the debatable assumptions that we find more bearable anything that emanates from ourselves, and that the action of one part of the self at the expense of another does not violate self-identity and therefore freedom. In my view, there are fatal logical and psychological problems with these argumentative moves. Once they have been established, however, Hegel can assume that anything that has once been posited can be sublated if we bear with it, living forward and painfully changing the self into one that can bear it better.

Returning to Hegel’s correspondence with Niethammer, we can see this therapy for bearing change at work and in contrast to its alternative. While Hegel wishes to locate response to dark times in the capacity to stay with and transform them through self-transformation, Niethammer wants to maintain the consistency of his identity in a way that can be at odds with persisting. In November 1815—a few months after the Congress of Vienna, and again with regard to the ongoing controversies in educational administration—Niethammer writes to Hegel to “mobilize” him, he says. For “just as worms, frogs, and other vermin often follow the rain,” he writes, “so the Weillers

and their ilk follow the dark day now spreading over the entire civilized world” (Letter 254).

As in Hegel’s dream of apes, pigs, and Pippel the previous year, part of the panic is that Niethammer does not seem to be dealing with happenings that are easily classifiable as human. Nonhumanity is of course the usual insult to anything that seems unintelligible, and an inflammatory charge within a polemic; Niethammer’s rhetoric, however, serves to indicate that what has happened is already on the other side of a line for him. They are living with what “follow[s]” after the dark day, and this time is figured as a shift from a natural cycle (a day, a rain) to something totalized (a day that swallowed the world, a time that wouldn’t end).

There is a tension between Hegel’s claim that he keeps his eye on giant forces to keep his mind off the senseless reaction, and the possibility that what seems to be the accidental outcome of the scenario is actually its goal: that conjuring the giant figure, and casting Restoration politics as a non-event in comparison, allows Hegel to continue working in this society. Even though his attention to its work is divided and limited, his participation in the social enterprise to which he objects acknowledges it in a way that Niethammer isn’t up to (as Niethammer’s outrage is something Hegel isn’t up to). The causal arrow is two-way: Hegel’s identification with transition not only enables, but is formed by actual contact with the negative, unlike Niethammer’s indignation, which prevents him from making full contact with it. Niethammer fantasizes purity; he will be the last man polluted by vermin. Hegel has participated in “the enterprise that is being taken so seriously,” and demonstrates how to do so. He can stay close, even touch with his hands the active unfreedom that is at least as dangerous as the advancing giant—unlike the beautiful soul who “flees from contact with the actual world [flieht es die Berührung der Wirklichkeit]” (Phenomenology of Spirit / Phänomenologie des Geistes §685). Participation, even of this divided kind, has its benefits: remaining on the scene, seeing what people are doing, knowing you are able to do it if you want; also being “safe . . . externally and internally,” being amused, and in a certain way remaining incognito.

In the Hegel-Niethammer letters it becomes difficult to tell health from defense; Hegel’s therapy of self-transformation can seem pathologically healthy. In one of the most privileged documents of his interpretation of the restoration, Hegel’s reaction to the “tragic” and “frightful spectacle” is to claim that the future of the German nation was what he was always describing in The Phenomenology of Spirit: ‘Great events have transpired about us. It is a frightful spectacle to see a great genius destroy himself. There is nothing more tragic [in Greek]. The entire mass of mediocrity, with its irresistible leaden weight of gravity, presses on like lead, to the same level as itself or even below. The turning point of the whole, the reason why this mass has power and—like the chorus—survives and remains on top, is that the great individual must himself give that mass the right to do what it does, thus precipitating his own fall.’ ‘I may pride myself, moreover, on having predicted this entire upheaval. In my book, which I completed the night before the battle of Jena, I said on page 547: “Absolute freedom—which I had previously described as a purely abstract formal freedom of the French Republic, originating, as I showed, in the Enlightenment—passes out of its own self-destructive actuality over into another land—I had in mind here a specific land—of self-conscious spirit, in which, in this inactual form, it passes for truth itself, and in which it takes refreshment in the thought of this spirit, inasmuch as such spirit is and remains thought and knows this being contained in self-consciousness to be the perfect and complete essence. The new form of moral spirit is at hand.”’ ‘From the streams of blessings necessarily flowing from these great events, just as showers must follow lightning, that brown rivulet of coffee already flows from the pot for the likes of us, and indeed does so with more taste and perk than ever. For we have now been liberated from substitute drink, and from our supplementary income as Councillors we can now procure real Java coffee.’ ‘[Es sind große Dinge um uns geschehen. Es ist ein ungeheueres Schauspiel, ein enormes Genie sich selbst zerstören zu sehen. –Das ist das τραγιχωτατον, das es gibt. Die ganze Masse des Mittelmäßigen mit seiner absoluten bleiernen Schwerkraft drückt ohne Rast und Versöhnung so lang bleiern fort, bis es das Höhere herunter, auf gleichem Niveau oder unter sich hat. Der Wendepunkt des Ganzen, der Grund, daß diese Masse Gewalt hat und als der Chor übrig und obenauf bleibt, ist, daß die große Individualität selbst das Recht dazu geben muß und somit sich selbst zugrunde richet.’ ‘Die ganze Umwälzung habe ich übrigens, wie ich mich rühmen will, vorausgesagt. In meinem Wekre (in der Nacht vor der Schlacht von Jena vollendet) sage ich p. 547: “Die absolute Freiheit (sie ist vorher geschildert; es ist [die] rein abstrakte, formelle der französischen Republik, aus der Aufklärung, wie ich zeigte, hervorgegangen) geht aus ihrer sich selbst zerstörenden Wirklichkeit in ein anderes Land (ich hatte dabei ein Land im Sinne) des selbstbewußten Geistes über, worin sie in dieser Unwirklichkeit als das Wahre gilt, an dessen Gedanken er sich labt, insofern er Gedanke ist und bleibt und dieses in das Selbstbewußtsein eingeschlossene Sein als das vollkommene und vollständige Wesen weiß. Es ist die neue Gestalt des moralischen Geistes vorhanden.”’ ‘Von den Segensströmen, die jenen großen Begebenheiten wie die Regenschauer dem Blitze folgen müssen, fließt für unsereins denn doch bereits das braune Bächlein des Kaffees schmackhafter and geistreicher aus der Kanne, da wir es Surrogatsaufens enthoben und aus dem Referatsbezug doch nun einen ordentlichen Java anschaffen können.] (Letter 233, April 29, 1814)’ In his Lectures on World History (1822) Hegel develops the idea he sketches here of the restless movement of freedom. Famously, Hegel explains that freedom is expanded and finally exploded by its realization; therefore, it cannot be stopped and must transform. In the present instance, the “self-destructive actuality” of the French Republic “passes out [geht aus]” and then “passes for truth [als das Wahre gilt]” in a new moral and inactual form.

This argument for the momentum of the Napoleonic years supports two of the three paragraphs here before coming up short against the anticlimax of the third: it can’t begin to explain why Hegel writes so ironically of “streams of blessings” from the tragic events comparable to the ability of middle-class educators to buy coffee. Absolute freedom’s “refreshment” in the thought of the spirit trickles down into the “brown rivulet of coffee [that] already flows from the pot for the likes of us . . . with more taste and perk than ever.” Hegel had been complaining for years about the economic and intellectual straits for people like them, how impoverished in “taste and perk” the offerings were—in fact, “colorless, tasteless” as of November 1814, let’s recall. It isn’t saying much for Hegel to claim that moral spirit will be perkier than what he’s been drinking.

As Comay makes clear, in the traumatic structure the revolution is both too early and too late. The healthy self in Hegel is the one that has encountered reality in all its unwelcome violence, has traded part of itself in for new parts now required, and as a result of its transformation can administer experience so that it will not be too bad or good, meaning that future transformations will always be possible in order to salvage the minimally good world as it is (at each time). The world will never be too bad or good because, as indicated by the record of exposure and transformation that builds up the self, there is an “infinite” potential for subjectivity to overcome any of its own unwelcome presentations by changing again and again. Freud brushes against this scenario in Analysis Terminable and Interminable when he asks whether it could be possible for a self to develop “immunity” to future disorders: as though “as though it were possible by means of analysis to attain to a level of absolute psychical normality.”

While Freud imagines that such normality would mean that it was as though “the analyst ha[d] had such a far-reaching influence on the patient that no further change could be expected to take place in him if his analysis were continued” (Freud 219), Hegel follows the complementary possibility that it would consist in an inexhaustible stream of changes, each rising to the challenge of a different self-presented negativity; but this would be possible for the same reason that Freud imagines, that one “had succeeded in resolving every one of the patient’s repressions and in filling in all the gaps in his memory” (Freud 220)—liberating all of what Hegel would call the mind’s subjective resources. The ability to process events in real time without remainder would be pathological healthiness and healthy pathology, and Hegel seems close to that.

Blackbourn and Eley argue that the hypothesis of a “failed bourgeois revolution” promoted a myth of German exceptionalism, valued positively in the idealist proposal that Germany had had something better than a revolution and negatively in theses of German pathology. For Blackbourn and Eley, German exceptionalism underwrites the assumption of “liberalism as the natural property of a ‘rising’ bourgeoisie” (The Peculiarities of German History 58). The mistake is “compounded,” Eley adds, “by the still riskier equation of ‘liberalism’ and ‘democracy’” (80).

Blackbourn and Eley hypothesize instead a nineteenth-century Germany in which the foreclosure of democracy is a desired feature of a “new social order” (145), straightforwardly in the interests of many involved in its creation. In this scheme, the German bourgeoisie didn’t want more rights as much as they wanted others not to have them. By dispensing with exceptionalism, Blackbourn and Eley show what it’s like to perceive the foreclosure of democracy from the point of view of a rationalized society that does not see anything absent. Kant reflects on nature “as the poets see it,” that is, just as sensuous shapes. What is frightening about Blackbourn and Eley’s vision of society “as the bourgeois see it” is that it is free of defense—just a shifting of factors. (Hegel: “the extremes are merged and become factors” [Logic, Being Part One of the Encyclopedia §214]). This kind of freedom constitutes that liberality that can be found within the police state. Suggesting that the foreclosure of democracy is grounded in defense—in Germans, bourgeois populations, or whomever—is a little like hypothesizing German exceptionalism; perhaps, instead, these groups don’t get so far as to have a need for defense. To grasp this, in turn, is to remove many of the pejorative connotations of “defense.”

Their glimpse of the way their contemporaries see panics some post-Waterloo radicals; Hegel is different, unpanicked, to the extent that he is confident about assimilating and still having an identical self left to assimilate with. At stake in the phenomenology he practices is his ability to absorb and interact with what he sees even as it poisons him to blindness. Together, Hegel’s and Niethammer’s interlocking strategies describe a double bind: the one who can’t bear to dwell in the new reality will be unlikely to understand it, but the one who can bear it has already been changed by the very bearing of it into a participant who may no longer perceive its disadvantages. Hegel confides that focusing on the work of spirit allows him to feel “satisfaction” and “Schadenfreude” under political pressure, and he recommends it as a therapy for the times (Letter 272). Working on the basis of exactly the same perceptions, romanticism, as Hegel knows, perceives how appealing it may be not to withstand a transition, even if it means feeling the full impact of political catastrophe.

One aspect of this impact, I’ve suggested, is having to give up on the idea of the minimal goodness of the social world. An impasse between “positive” and “negative” politics persists to the present day. Exploring the disorientating indistinction of this time, we can see that the impasse constructed by romantics is not the disaster, but a response to the disaster—a way to begin organizing an otherwise undifferentiated space in which actively undergoing transition provides the only acknowledged value. Correlatively, the romantic conclusion that the capacity to bear what goes by the name of “Waterloo” is a health worse than death is not based on finding Hegel’s system, or European politics, closed as opposed to breathtakingly open. It is based on the perception of a world in which the closed and the open are becoming impossible to tell apart.