Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Rebecca Comay is Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, where she is also codirector of the Program in Literary Studies. She is the editor of Lost in the Archives (2001) and coeditor of Endings: Memory in Hegel and Heidegger (1999).

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

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MOURNING SICKNESS

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments..............................................................xiAbbreviations................................................................xiiIntroduction: French Revolution, German Misre...............................11. Missed Revolutions: Translation, Transmission, Trauma.....................8"... an impossibly speedy motion"............................................8Translatio imperii...........................................................14Copernican and Other Revolutions.............................................17"The Magic Wand of Analogy"..................................................20Noch nicht und doch schon ...................................................21Translation as Trauma........................................................242. The Kantian Theater.......................................................26Crimen inexpiabile...........................................................28Shipwreck with Spectator.....................................................31The Abyss of Form............................................................35Diabolical?..................................................................42Moral Revolution.............................................................46Another Scene................................................................503. The Corpse of Faith.......................................................55Revolution or Reform?........................................................55Dead Right...................................................................58Erasures.....................................................................60Terror as Melancholia........................................................64Of Kings and Cabbages........................................................67Horror vacui.................................................................744. Revolution at a Distance, or, Moral Terror................................81Philosophical Thermidor......................................................82"... another land"...........................................................85From Terror to Anxiety.......................................................87Morality as Slave Ideology...................................................91Kant as Terrorist............................................................93First Step: Morality as Perversion...........................................98Second Step: Perversion as Aestheticism......................................101Third Step: Aestheticism as Ideology.........................................103Vaporized Subjectivity.......................................................1095. Terrors of the Tabula rasa................................................118Antinomies of Forgiveness....................................................119"Rushing Toward Reconciliation"..............................................125Wounds of Spirit.............................................................129Politics of Forgiveness?.....................................................131World Soul on Horseback......................................................136"The Self-Moving Life of the Dead"...........................................139Gray on Gray (Hegel, Beckett, Richter).......................................142"As if it had learned nothing ..."...........................................145"We, the masters ..."........................................................149Notes........................................................................157Index........................................................................193

Chapter One

"... 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, Umwlzung, Umnderung, 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."

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 "Germanification" (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.

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. 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. 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." Even the Reich's admirers noted its...