Rebecca Comay’s Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution stakes a precise claim: that the philosophical architecture of German Idealism, and Hegel’s in particular, bears the imprint of a revolution experienced at once intimately and vicariously, as an event whose terror and promise were registered in Germany through displacement, delay, and symptomatic re-enactment. Its distinctive contribution lies in demonstrating how the conceptual energies of Hegel’s project crystallize around the Revolution’s aftershocks—how the very procedures of dialectical mediation, recollection, and reconciliation carry the mark of a trauma that keeps returning as missed timing, secondhand experience, and melancholic attachment. With a method that is philological, psychoanalytic, and historiographic in equal measure, Comay reconstructs a complex economy of enthusiasm and dread, mourning and repetition, in which Hegel’s texts both expose and transmit the unresolved temporality of revolutionary freedom.
The argumentative core unfolds from a simple yet stringent observation: for Hegel, the French Revolution constitutes less an object among others than a temporal operator within the very scene of philosophical witnessing. Comay insists that the Revolution is not merely narrated by Hegel; it conditions the form of narration that philosophy can assume after the shattering convergence of reason and violence in the Terror. The book establishes this thesis by making two moves that are methodologically inseparable. First, it shows that Hegel’s discussions of the Revolution—scattered across letters, youthful writings, the Phenomenology of Spirit, and the mature political philosophy—do not assemble into a single doctrinal pronouncement. They form instead a layered palimpsest in which formulations recur with altered valence, terms migrate across contexts, and diagnoses, once secured, reappear as symptoms in another register. Second, it argues that this textual plasticity is not noise but evidence: the Revolution’s afterlife in German thought consists in precisely these shifts, detours, and re-inscriptions that betray the structure of what psychoanalysis names Nachträglichkeit (deferred action), where an event becomes legible only in the wake of delayed reinterpretations that both clarify and distort.
The effect is to displace any tidy identification of Hegel’s “position” on the Revolution with a single set of claims. Comay’s analysis therefore tracks a sequence of condensations and displacements in the corpus, moving through what can be textually secured and marking, without disavowal, where the interpretive line advances by inference. The textually secured layer—documented in Hegel’s references to the Revolution’s passage from emancipatory enthusiasm to the abstract negativity of the guillotine—provides one axis. On this axis, Hegel names the catastrophe as the fate of a freedom that, in its purity, becomes indifferent to any determinate content and thus turns against singular life. The inferential layer—built from the rhetorical grain of Hegel’s writing, from the recurrence of certain figures, and from the drift of vocabulary across distinct argumentative junctures—provides a second axis. On this axis, Comay detects the persistence of an unresolved affect that cannot be fully consumed by Hegelian mediation: nostalgia without object, anxiety without determinate threat, a drive toward repetition that appears wherever reconciliation promises closure.
The book’s outer framing underscores this double movement. The Revolution is read as a historical scene that Germany “lived” by proxy and as a theoretical scene that Hegel works through by elaborating forms of recollection and Aufhebung (sublation) that simultaneously digest and perpetuate the wound. Comay attends to the composition sequence that this framing solicits. The opening movement establishes the Revolution as a problem of temporal address: to speak of 1789 and 1793 from a German vantage is to occupy a tense between belatedness and premature comprehension. The subsequent movement turns to the youthful Hegel, whose reflections on the “positive” institutions of religion and law register a field of practical blockage in which freedom can be imagined only as a festival or a mutinous enthusiasm, as if practice required theatrical enactments to compensate for political stasis. The argument then threads into the Phenomenology, where Comay locates both the most explicit treatment of revolutionary freedom and the most intricate coding of trauma’s temporality. A further movement, which the book constructs by cross-reading later political writings with retrospective glosses, clarifies that reconciliation never abolishes the trace of catastrophic beginning; rather, it institutionalizes the memory of that trace as an incessant pressure on the present. The closing movement returns to the affective tonality of mourning—in Hegel, in his readers, and in the philosophical culture that would indefinitely delay the work of grief by perfecting the art of mediation.
Comay’s reconstruction depends on a meticulous engagement with Hegel’s language. Her method treats key motifs as conceptual switch-points where historical and psychic temporality intersect. “Enthusiasm,” for example, appears as a privileged sign of the Revolution’s contagious force. In Hegel’s early reflections, enthusiasm names the rapturous experience of collective self-transcendence, registered in festivals and symbolic acts that promise to inaugurate a new beginning. Comay shows how this term gathers contradictory impulses without collapsing them: it testifies to liberation’s sensuous immediacy while announcing the danger of abstract universality unmoored from determinate ethical life. The textual warrant for this balancing act lies in Hegel’s vacillation between praise and suspicion whenever enthusiasm surfaces. The inferential step, which Comay signals, is to treat this vacillation as symptomatic of a deeper structure: the Revolution as an “image” (Bild) that compels identification while resisting assimilation, a scene that binds by fascination precisely where comprehension fails.
A parallel analysis organizes Comay’s reading of “terror.” The literal description of the Terror as the revolutionary state of exception that sacrifices singular lives to the purity of principle provides one secure anchor. Hegel’s own narrative of absolute freedom turning into absolute fear lends textual weight to this claim. Comay then re-reads terror as a modality of temporality: a conversion of revolutionary time into a homogeneous succession of interchangeable moments, each equally exposed to the blade that makes examples of all. The guillotine, in this reconstruction, functions as a conceptual machine that equalizes by annihilating, a mechanism of abstract equality transposed into the register of death. The inference here—indicated as such—is that Hegel’s recurrent insistence on abstract universality’s indifference to individuality is not only a political critique; it also stages a more general anxiety about any form of rationality that would abolish contingency in the name of consistency. This double reading allows Comay to argue that Hegel’s dialectic cannot disown its proximity to what it condemns. The movement that rescues freedom by embedding it in institutions bears the mark of the terror it claims to overcome, because institutionalization too risks homogenization, routinization, and the suppression of singularity.
This line of thought converges on what Comay identifies as the central temporality of mourning. In Freud, mourning has a task and a terminus; in melancholia, the work stalls and the lost object returns as an incorporative symptom. Comay borrows this structure to illuminate Hegel’s presentations of recollection and remembrance. Her strongest textual purchase is on the Phenomenology’s recursive procedure, where shapes of consciousness repeat in transformed guise, each a “memory” of the previous lodged in a new configuration. The Revolution becomes a paradigm of a loss without simple object, since what is lost is at once a regime, a symbolic order, a promise, and a fantasy of transparency. Comay’s wager is that Hegel’s most rigorous gestures of reconciliation acknowledge this complexity. Reconciliation neither evacuates loss nor abandons the claim of universality; it situates universality in practices of mutual recognition, law, and institutional mediation. Yet at the precise point where the text articulates this settlement, Comay detects a countercurrent in which recollection shades into fixation. The historical trauma refuses passage into concept without remainder. Institutional life must continually replay, in attenuated form, the inaugural violence whose memory it seeks to pacify.
This diagnosis carries consequences for how one reads the movement of Hegel’s book. Comay draws attention to the compositional rhythm by which discussions of enthusiasm, festival, conscience, faith, and absolute knowing slide into one another, each absorbing the unresolved pressure of the previous scene. The passage through “virtue and the way of the world,” for instance, introduces the pathos of moral purity meeting the obduracy of actuality. In Comay’s analysis, this moment foreshadows the catastrophe of abstract freedom by exposing the structural temptation to purify the world rather than reform oneself. The Revolution radicalizes this temptation by positing a self-authorizing universal will that can purge the recalcitrant as its other. When the text later turns to the “beautiful soul,” the theme of purity returns as a pathology of inwardness, an inability to act because action would sully moral translucence. The displacement is decisive. What initially appeared as an external catastrophe—a political terror that consumed its children—reemerges as an interior deadlock in which the subject mortifies itself rather than engage the world’s stubborn particularity. Comay reads this recursive transformation as the book’s own way of acknowledging that the Revolution’s crisis is inseparable from the subject’s fantasy of immediacy.
The analysis gains further traction when Comay treats “spectatorship” as a philosophical problem. Germany watched the French events with intense attention; the German public sphere was saturated with images, reports, and arguments. Comay uses this to frame what she calls secondhand history: a history lived through representation. The textually secured evidence for this framing includes Hegel’s commentaries on publicity, on the educative role of public debate, and on the philosophical task of translating experience into the universal medium of thought. The inferential extension is to read spectatorship as a structure of desire: to see and to be seen by history, to occupy the place of witness without the burden of action, to enjoy the image of revolution while being spared its cost. Comay’s point is not to moralize against spectatorship, but to show how it becomes a laboratory for philosophical procedures. The Phenomenology’s insistence on exposing each form of certainty to its own undoing bears the stamp of a pedagogy that trains the reader to endure the loss of a cherished image without collapsing into cynicism or zealotry. In this sense, the very shape of Hegel’s book performs a treatment of mourning that is neither denial nor endless lamentation.
Comay’s psychoanalytic orientation is most luminous when she explicates the relation between repetition and retroactivity. The Revolution appears to Germany as an event forever already mediated by commentary, rumor, and retrospective judgment. Hegel’s strategy, as Comay reconstructs it, is to integrate this belatedness into the concept itself. Understanding does not follow experience; it constitutes experience by the way it organizes temporal succession. The work of the concept is to make sense of what has happened by installing a structure within which the event can count as what it is. This gives retroactivity a philosophical dignity. Yet Comay shows how this dignity remains precarious. The danger is that retroactivity becomes a cover for fantasy: the past is domesticated by narratives that posit inevitability where there was contingency, that reconcile too quickly by allegorizing the terror as a necessary moment. Comay’s counter-proposal, which she attributes to Hegel at his best, is that retroactivity should sharpen rather than dull the sense of contingency. To say that the Revolution had to pass through terror for its truth to appear is a different claim from saying that terror was the necessary price of reason. The first names a logical articulation in which negativity discloses a limit; the second risks becoming an apology for violence. Comay makes this distinction the hinge on which the ethical stakes of Hegelian mediation turn.
The reading of “absolute knowing” follows the same logic. Comay refuses the commonplace that treats the Phenomenology’s conclusion as a serene reconciliation that absorbs every difference. She recovers within Hegel’s conclusion a residual attentiveness to rupture: absolute knowing names a form of self-relation that can keep faith with negativity without converting it into a storehouse of lessons. The difference is subtle and decisive. On the one hand, absolute knowing as memory would treat the Revolution and its terror as pedagogical episodes, to be “overcome” and “recalled” with gratitude for the instruction they provided. On the other hand, absolute knowing as exposure would acknowledge that such episodes leave scars that no education can efface; the function of philosophy would then be to dwell with these scars as markers of the concept’s finite encounter with its other. Comay’s argument, grounded in the text’s vocabulary of recollection and reiterated gestures of beginning again, draws out the second option. Her claim is not that Hegel renounces reconciliation; it is that he redefines reconciliation as the capacity to sustain the pressure of what resists assimilation.
This emphasis on the residual and the refractory allows Comay to revisit Hegel’s judgments on the Reformation, civil society, and the state without reading them as a simple exchange of revolution for reform. She assembles the textual evidence that Hegel privileges the Reformation as a spiritual revolution that interiorized freedom, thereby laying the groundwork for ethical life. She then shows how this claim becomes legible only against the background of the French events. The state’s rationality is not a prophylactic against revolution; it is the fragile achievement of a historical process that has experienced its own self-abolition. The philosophical representation of the state—law, constitutionalism, mutual recognition—carries within itself the memory of terror, which both threatens and motivates the hardening of institutions. The inferential step, presented with care, is to suggest that Hegel’s defense of the modern state is haunted by an anxiety about relapse. Institutions stabilize, and in stabilizing they risk congealing into what earlier chapters named positivity. The specter of positivity returns here as the possibility that the cure reproduces the disease: reconciliation that forgets its history becomes a new form of abstract universality.
The book’s constructive convolution—its choice to keep the argument problem-laden—serves a principle. Comay resists the temptation to stabilize the text by extracting a final doctrine. The method is guided instead by the conviction that the object itself—Hegel’s discourse under the pressure of the Revolution’s temporality—prevents clean separation of diagnosis and symptom. This is most evident in the way Comay intertwines rhetorical analysis with conceptual reconstruction. She attends to tonal inflections that signal the proximity of enthusiasm to dread, to repetitions that function as protective rituals as well as argumentative devices, to images that persist beyond their immediate utility. The Phenomenology’s famously baroque style becomes in her reading an index of the subject matter’s volatility; the prose swells and contracts in response to the difficulty of keeping negative experience within the bounds of a constructive trajectory. If the book at times seems to say too much—and Comay acknowledges this as a hazard—it does so out of fidelity to a scene where the very measure of “too much” and “too little” is at stake.
The distinction Comay draws between textually secured claims and inferential constructions is maintained with exemplary discipline. When she asserts that Hegel identifies the Terror as the culmination of abstract freedom, she points to the explicit articulation of absolute freedom’s equivalence of subjects as pure will and the consequent erasure of the determinate. When she proposes that Hegel’s description of the guillotine encodes a theory of time, she marks the claim as a conceptual extrapolation that reads the equalizing cut as a figure for homogeneous, empty temporality. When she says that absolute knowing is best understood as a philosophical ethic of exposure rather than triumph, she situates the claim in the text’s insistence on recollection’s incompleteness and on the renewal of beginning, while conceding that some readers will continue to hear in the rhetoric of reconciliation a promise of closure. This scruple—naming where the argument stands on firm textual ground and where it ventures into hypothesis—gives Mourning Sickness a methodological clarity that matches its thematic ambition.
A decisive thread in Comay’s narrative concerns the status of images and monuments. The Revolution’s iconoclasm and its compensatory production of new symbols generate a dialectic of destruction and memorialization that Hegel cannot avoid. Comay shows how Hegel’s reflections on art, religion, and collective memory insert the revolutionary scene into a longer story about the fate of images in modernity. The textually secured element involves Hegel’s claim that modern art loses its highest vocation, because the unity of content and form belongs to a religious life no longer ours. The inferential elaboration is that this “loss” is refracted through the Revolution’s practice of effacing and installing images with unprecedented speed. Monuments are both targets and instruments; they collect the weight of history while incubating a desire to erase. Comay’s concluding reflections therefore present mourning as an economy of images: to mourn is to arrange images such that the past can be borne without either sacralizing or annihilating it. The state, the museum, the archive—all emerge as techniques for managing the Revolution’s visual afterlife, for distributing attention and indifference across a field of relics.
In developing this thread, Comay opens onto a more general proposal about philosophical writing. If images mediate mourning, and if philosophy after the Revolution is obliged to mourn, then philosophical prose must renounce the fantasy of transparency. Comay takes Hegel’s own practice as exemplary: the zigzag of the Phenomenology, with its revisitations and side passages, its odd reappearances of motifs thought to be surpassed, instructs the reader in a discipline of patience. The point is neither to enjoy delay for its own sake nor to fetishize complexity; it is to register that the object requires time to show itself, and that the showing will include failures that belong intrinsically to the process. This poetics of philosophical writing is, in Comay’s view, the ethical correlate of Hegel’s reconciliation. The prose that can bear its own detours models a polity that can bear conflict without panic. The continuity is speculative, but the text’s rhythm provides support for the claim that the style is part of the argument.
One consequence of this account is a revaluation of “German superiority,” the conceit that philosophy achieved in thought what France enacted disastrously in politics. Comay dismantles this consoling story by exposing its structure as an anxious compromise. The secure textual basis for this dismantling is Hegel’s insistence that only in modern ethical life—law-governed, mediated, institutional—can freedom be real. The inferential addition is that the speed with which German discourse avers that it already possesses the truth of freedom betrays a defensive haste. The fantasy of having already done the Revolution in theory becomes a way not to see the deficits of practice. Comay’s “mourning sickness” names precisely this refusal to complete the labor of grief. The sickness consists in a perpetual attachment to the image of the Revolution as both danger and guarantee, held at arm’s length so that it can be enjoyed and reproached in equal measure. The cure would not be to jettison the image but to integrate it into institutions that can tolerate the contradictions it exposes.
Comay’s text makes a further, rarer contribution by treating the Phenomenology’s closing gesture as a beginning rather than a terminus. If reconciliation is the capacity to begin again without denial, then the history that follows the Revolution must be imagined as a sequence of adjusted re-beginnings. This deflects the temptation to read the nineteenth-century synthesis of state and civil society as a lock on political imagination. The textual warrant lies in Hegel’s insistence that spirit is its own result, that actuality is process, that substance is subject. From within this grammar, Comay extracts the proposition that institutions are living practices that remember their origins by keeping them active. The Revolution thus does not retire into a museum of dangers avoided; it remains a pressure on the present to renew the forms in which universality appears. Reading Hegel in this way does not dissolve his conservatisms; it situates them within a conceptual discipline that can be made to answer to future crises without betrayal of its terms.
The book’s engagement with psychoanalysis never overreaches its textual brief. Comay does not impose a Freudian grid on Hegel; she uses psychoanalytic vocabulary to crystallize what Hegel himself makes available. Nachträglichkeit clarifies the retroactive constitution of meaning that Hegel theorizes as recollection; mourning and melancholia sharpen the difference between determinate loss and indeterminate attachment that Hegel tracks across shapes of spirit; repetition compulsion names the tendency of forms of life to reenact the very deadlocks they seek to overcome. Where the analysis risks allegorization, Comay reins it in by returning to Hegel’s own procedures. The Phenomenology teaches the reader to separate a form’s self-understanding from its truth; Comay applies this lesson to psychoanalysis itself, allowing the analytic vocabulary to illuminate the scene without granting it mastery.
Because the book is oriented toward problems rather than summaries, its internal composition continually redistributes emphasis. Early discussions of enthusiasm and festival that initially appear to set the tone are later absorbed by a darker meditation on terror’s temporal logic. Mid-course analyses of moral purity that seem diagnostic of individual conscience are displaced by a collective pathology of abstraction. Late reflections on reconciliation that promise rest are inflected by renewed attentiveness to the non-identical. This choreography is deliberate. Comay means to show that Hegel’s text survives the Revolution’s pressure only by consenting to become a record of the pressure. What looks like a system congealing is in her presentation a sustained act of listening in which the categories are adjusted to accommodate what exceeds them. The result is a description of Hegel’s achievement that honors the ambition of systematic philosophy while vindicating the dignity of the remainder.
Throughout, Comay’s prose exhibits a rigorous economy. She avoids slogans. She declines both the pieties of celebration and the simplicities of denunciation. The argument is paced so that each step prepares the next without anticipating it. A reader comes away with a sense that the Revolution’s philosophical afterlife cannot be shortened without damage. The sustained attention to the exact places where Hegel falters—where tone betrays impatience, where an image recurs too conveniently, where an analogy does too much work—counts as the book’s ethical signature. The analysis does not humiliate its object; it enacts the respect due to a text that has taken on the most difficult of tasks: to think freedom in the knowledge of its catastrophe.
The closing clarification gathers the threads. Mourning Sickness does not produce a new doctrine of Hegel and the Revolution; it enacts a way of reading in which the Revolution is allowed to remain an open problem inside the philosophy that seeks to comprehend it. The textual record secures the central claims: that Hegel understands the Terror as the culmination of abstract universality; that he seeks reconciliation in institutions that mediate universality and particularity; that he treats recollection as constitutive of truth. The inferential amplifications give these claims their contemporary bite: that terror exposes a dangerous fantasy inherent in any claim to purity; that institutions carry within themselves the memory of violence they tame; that reconciliation worth the name preserves negativity as a living force rather than a museum piece. Comay’s achievement is to hold these levels together without confusion. The Revolution thus persists, in her reading, as what both wounds and animates philosophy: an event that philosophy must keep remembering if it is to avoid repeating what it cannot afford again.
Simon Gros 
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