Missed Revolutions, Non-Revolutions, Revolutions to Come: An Encounter with <i>Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution</i>, Rebecca Comay
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Rebecca Comay's new bookMourning Sickness sets its sights on Hegel's response to the French Revolutionary Terror.In this respect it provides the reader with both a detailed examination of Hegel's interpretation of the Terror and the historical and philosophical context of this interpretation.In and of itself this would be a valuable contribution to the history of philosophy in general and Hegel studies in particular, but Comay's book extends beyond the confines of a historical study.It explores Hegel's struggle with the meaning of the Terror and, as such, it explores the general relationship between event and meaning.By doing so this book forcefully draws Hegel into present-day discussions of politics, violence, trauma, witness, and memory.The following interview took place via email correspondence.The overall aim is twofold: to introduce the main themes of the book and to touch on some of its contemporary implications.JOSHUA NICHOLS: This text accomplishes the rare feat of revisiting what is, in many respects, familiar and well-worn philosophical terrain (i.e., Hegel's Phenomenology) and brings the reader to see the text from a new angle, under a different light, almost as if for the first time.-310 -PhaenEx Your reading of Hegel's notion of forgiveness as being "as hyperbolic as anything in Derrida, as asymmetrical as anything in Levinas, as disastrous as anything in Blanchot, as paradoxical as anything in Kierkegaard" is just one example of the surprising interpretive possibilities that this text opens (Comay, Mourning Sickness 135).But, before addressing the wider issues and implications, we will begin with the beginning.The entry point is Hegel's reading of the Revolutionary Terror in France.His interpretation of the events across the Rhine have often been read as echoing many of his contemporaries, in that-through witnessing the practical catastrophe in France-Germany is essentially able to skip over the need for such an event by undergoing a kind of spiritual revolution.This interpretation is reflected (and effectively reversed) in Marx's famous criticism that Germans "are the philosophical contemporaries of the modern age without being its historical contemporaries" (Marx, "Introduction to Contribution" 45).And yet, you read Hegel's interpretation as being unique.So, to begin, what is it that sets him apart on this count?REBECCA COMAY: At first glance, apparently nothing.It's Hegel, after all, who has done most to formalize the spectatorial fantasy that's floating about Germany around 1800.He does seem at times to identify a kind of cultural immunity to the Revolution: the idea is that Germany can safely watch the show because it's already undergone some kind of pre-emptive cultural transformation on its own turf.Having already experienced its own religious upheaval in the form of the Protestant Reformation, Germany appears to be exempt from the political cataclysms going on next door.Because it's already successfully overcome the religious alienation of the medieval world, Germany is in a position to negotiate the terms of its own political development peacefully, quietly, gradually, without the turmoil and bloodshed that is required in France.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".