First passage: the religion of flowers.

Second passage: the phallic column of India.

(always looks sideways toward India to follow this enigmatic passage, that passes very poorly, between the Far West and the Far East. India, neither Europe nor ina. A sort of historical bottleneck. Tightly gathered like Gibraltar ‘steriel and costly rock,’ columns of Hercules the history of which belongs to that of the route to the Indies […]) [8]

Let’s bet – throw of the dice – that I have already chosen these two narrow passages, this angle or this strange strait in order to introduce, strictly to Hegel’s name. [10]

There have been many introductions into Hegel, you can buy them all in bookstores; and the problem of the introductions to Hegel’s philosophy is the whole of Hegel’s philosophy: already posed everywhere, in particular in his prefaces and forewords, introductions and preliminary concepts.

To work in Hegel’s name, to raise it up for the duration of a ceremony, I have decided to pull on one thread. It will appear too thin, strange and fragile. It i the law of the family, Hegel’s family, the family in Hegel, the concept of the family according to Hegel.

In the great expositions in the Encyclopedia or the Principles of the Philosophy of Right, ‘objective spirit’ is developed in three momnets, abstract right (Recht), morality (Moralitat), and Sittlichkeit), which is variously translated (ethics, objective morality, good customs) and which I will not try to translate in my turn. […] Now within Sittlichkeit, the third term and moment of synthesis between the formal objectivity of law and the abstract subjectivity of morality, a syllogism develops in its turn.

Its first term is the family.

Its second, civil or bourgeois society.

Its third, the State or the constitution of the State.

[…] one can see the stakes and the interest of this familial moment. The interpretation of it immediately engages with Hegel’s entire determination of right on on side, politics on the other. Its place is such in the structure and the development of the system, in Hegel’s encyclopedia, logic and onto-theologics that the displacements or disimplications it will be subjected to cannot have a simply local character.

[…]

A bastard path, then, which will have to pretend to follow naturally the circle of the family, either to enter it, or to share it: either to share it as one partakes in a community, a supper, or to share it out as one does by dividing up. [12]

I begin with love.

I begin by summing up the results of his [Hegel’s] analysis: the family speaks and does not speak; it is a family from the moment it speaks – passing from Klang, if you will, to Sprache, from resonance to language – but it destroys itself qua family as soon as it speaks and abandons the Klang. Like natural language, like language in general, it stops being what it is as soon as it posits itself as such, it denies itself as nature in becoming what it is natutally, just like nature itself moreover [du reste]. [14]

[…]

The thing (the referent) is sublated in the sign: raised up, spiritualised, magnified, embalmed, interiorised, idealised, named, since the name accomplishes the sign. In the sign, the (external) signifier is sublated by the signification, by the (ideal) signified meaning, the Bedeutung, the concept. The concept sublates the sign, which sublates the thing. The signified sublates the signifier which sublates the referent. [14-5] [cf. ‘The Pit and the Pyramid’]

‘Speech, then, is reconstructed in a people, in that although it is the ideal nullification of the external, it is itself an exterior that must be nullified, sublated, in order to become meaningful language, i.e. to bcome what it implicitly is according to its concept; thus language is in people like a total other, and becomes totality when it is sublated as an other, and comes to fruition in its concept.’ [15]

Language accomplishes itself, therefore, becomes meaningful only by sublating into itself the signifier (sensible, external), traversing it and denying it in view of the concept.

This becoming (tradition) of language, or rather of the linguistic, happens, then, in the heart of a people, of a spirit of a people that would not posit itself without it.

[…] it completes its essence as ‘natural’ language only by sublating itself, by sublating the natural limits of its own system, by de-limiting itself, by overflowing itself toward the universality of the concept. It is thus immediately a universal language that destroys the natural language in it.

The natural language of a people becomes what it is, thinks itself, expounds itself as what it was to be, what it will have to have been, by becoming other than itself, making itself artificial, rational, universal, at the moment when the people dies as a natural people. It dies as a natural people by universalising its products through language and labour.

Now this passage within the language of a people had already opened the path from family to people. The movement whereby the family posits itself as such, gives itself a head, groups itself into a family of families, a sort of hierarchised clan that becomes a people – this movement is also an Aufhebung […] [16]

[…]

There remains, then, the general question: how can the idiom of a familial generation be thought, i.e. denied by erecting itself into speculative-type universality?

It supposedly starts with love.

Love is an essential predicate of the concept of the family, i.e. an essential moment of Sittlichkeit.

How is the passage from Moralitat to Sittlichkeit brought about?

In Moralitat, a Kantian-type subjective area, the Good, universal substance of freedom (no freedom without relation to the Good and vice versa) still retains its abstract form. Reciprocally, moral consciousness, the demand for universal objectivity, remains formal and virtual, and therefore immoral.

[…] The two sides face each other without being able to come together or complete each other, like two halves or the two abstract walls of one and the same spiritual body. They mus negate their unilaterality in the concept, reconstitute in it their menaced or morselled integrality.

The first synthesis that allows them to be linked or read together […] is Sittlichkeit.

In it, the idea of freedom becomes actually present, it is not merely in the heads of subjective individuals.

Sittlichkeit, of which the family constitutes the first moment, is the idea of freedom, then, but of freedom as living, present, and concrete Good in the present (vorhandenen) world, which implies actual elaboration , action, operation.

At that moment, the concrete substance of mores (Sittlichkeit), such as it is produced and remains in the Vorhandensein of the world, exceeds Meinen (according to Hegel’s play on words between the subjective vacillation of the opining I and what is ‘mine’); It constrains subjective caprice and vague intention. It finds its consistency in laws, enduring organisations, institutions. [18]

In the family, love forms the first moment of this rationality. There is no love or family in physical or biological nature.

APPROPRIATION

Far from being simply restricted and strangled in it [Sittlichkeit], the proper essence, the propriety of individual subjectivity appropriates itself, becomes what it is, possesses itself in the form of its contrary or its negation. It possesses itself: besitzen is very strong and one must not erase this sense of possession, of private property, of goods or possessions that constructs the whole problematics of the family.

The subjective appropriates itself in the objectivity of Sittlichkeit, the individual possesses himself in the generality of the institution, freedom in the obligatory regularity of a law. [19-20]

[…] the law of the law: individual subjectivity fulfills in truth its freedom in the universaslity of the Sittlichkeit that negates it.

The family is the first moment of this process.

What is the family?

‘The ethical substance, as containing self-consciousness which has being for itself and is united with its concept, is the acutal spirit (wirklich Geist) of a family and a people.’

The concept of the Idea is spirit, but spirit insofar as it knows itself and insofar as it is actual. Now it can know itself and become actual only to the extent that it objectivates itself.

This objectivation happens through ‘the form of its moments’. Becoming an object for itself, spirit departs from itself. But it does so in order to remain (to) itself, return to and equal itself. This very general procession of Hegelian spirit here has Sittlichkeit as its principle stage or station.

In the objectivating movement of actual spirit, Hegel indeed discerns three moments:

‘ A. immediate or natural ethical (sittliche) spirit – the family.

this substantiality passes over into loss of unity, division and the point of view of relativity, and is thus

B. civil society, i.e. an association of members as self-sufficient individuals in what is therefore a formal universality, occasioned by their needs and by the legal constitution as a means of security for persons and property (Eigentums), and by an external order for their particular and common interests. This external state

C. withdraws and comes to a focus in the end and acutality of the substantial universal and of the public life which is dedicated to this – i.e. in the constitution of the state.’

These are the three, dialectically linked moments through which sikklichkeit penetrates and gathers itself, returns into its proper substance.

People are most often interested in the final two phases of the movement (civil society and the State), for good reason. The problems of right, politics and political economy appear in them in a thematic form that can be easily recognised. But such a privilege has no philosophical foundation.

Love – the relation of the Mitgleid, of the articulated member to the family body – therefore determines the unity of the feeling-itself as self-adherence of the family. But what allows the family to constitute itself, to hold to itself, is also what holds it back in naturality and would prevent it, on its own, from proceeding towards civil society and towards the State. On its own, affect would prevent it from negating itself qua family and thus from sublating itself; by the same token affect would itself negate the family.

For love, qua affect, still belongs to nature.

‘But love is a feeling, that is, ethical life in its natural form. In the state, it is no longer present [in natural form]. There, one is conscious of unity as law; there, the content must be rational, and I mist know it. The first moment in love is that I do not wish to be an independent person in my own right and that, if I were, I would feel deficient and incomplete. The second moment is that I find myself in another person, that I gain recognition in this person, who in turn gains recognition in me.’

Contradiction: I do not want to be independent, I do not want to be what I am, I experience autarchy as a lack; but what I am worth in love, the price of what I disposses myself og, is fixed by what the toher finds in me. I am only inasmuch as I am worth […].

This contradiction is unintelligible. [24]

[…]

The family is party to the system of spirit: it is a part and the whole of the system.

The system repeats itself in it. Geist is always, in the very production of its essence, a sort of repetition. Coming round to itself after having lost itself in nature and in its other, spirit constitutes itself as absolute spirit through the negative process of a syllogism the three moments of which ate subjective spirit (anthropology, phenomenology of spirit, psychology), objective spirit (right, morals, Sittlichkeit) and absolute spirit (art, religion, philosophy).

Each of the three moments of the three moments itself involves three syllogistic moments. So the family is the first moment of the third moment of objective spirit, the first moment of Sittlichkeit. It forms Sittlichkeit’s still most natural instance and fulfills itself by destroying itself in three stages: marriage, estate, education.

The family is marked over twice.

It is a determinate, very narrowly particular moment. Its place is inscribed in the encyclopedia and in history as history of spirit. It is a finite moment and one never goes through it more than once.

But simultaneously one must keep another account of it, in another register, another charter. This determinate moment of the family, this finity figures (for now I’ll leave this word very open) the totality of the system. A certain family scheme, a certain family scene befits the infinite totality of the system. The infinite totality of the system is thought, produced and reflected in it. [28]

[…]

Infinite freedom, the other name of spirit inasmuch as it gives itself its proper element and thus dwells ‘at home.’

How is this ‘at homeness’ of spirit represented? Why does it stand out in the family hearth itself, at the centre of its circle? Why would being at home come down to ‘being en famille‘, infinitely or indefinitely en famille?

[…]

What is the relation between this being-at-home-with-oneself (another way of saying being) and the family?

When one says that spirit is – alone – that it has its own essence, its own centre and its own unity in itself, this is not a simple tautological assertion. This proposition is speculative in the Hegelain sense of the word, it states the dialectical identity of identity and non-identity. […] Spirit becomes for-itself, at home with itself, only be actively negating everything that limits its freedom from the outside.

[…]

The process of idealisation, the constitution of ideality as the milieu of thought, of the universal, of the infinite, is the suppression of the impulse. Aufhebung is thus also a suppressive counter-impulse, a counter-force […]

Hegel goes on: idealisation, inseparable from suppression, is just as inseparable from the relation of spirit to itself as the relation of father to son in a trinitarian structure.

The automobility of the animal is absolute only to the extent that it remains external or sensory automaticity, a pure constraint as far as spirit is concerned. Inhibiting animal automobility in himself, man liberates the automobility of spirit, freedom.

The qualitative leap is supposedly made with the human individual: dividing himself radically, he is conscious of himself as of the other. No longer, by reason of this division, having his natural movement within him, he constitutes himself by his Bildung, his culture, his discipline, his symbolic formation. More than the plant or animal, he issues from his own seed. He conceives himself. It is because he has interrupted the natural impulse and deprived himself of automobility that he has given himself the law. He has called himself autonomously. [37]

[…] the (human) father/son relation is only a (finite) example of the infinite father/son relation, of the relation of infinite spirit freely relating to itself as its own rebound, its own resource.

[…]

THE TRINITY

But can not God – of himself – fall into the finite, become incarnate, become his own example, play with himself as infinite becoming finite (dead) in order to reappropriate his infinity, repeat the spirit, i.e. have a man-son who would be his own seed, his own product, his own result, his best return?

Only the figure of Christ can, therefore, regulate the productive exchange – amortization and profit – between rhetoric and onto-logic. Investment of the Holy Family, or rather of the Trinity:

‘The most sublime example is to be found in the nature of God himself; strictly speaking this is not an example in the sense of one casual instance among others, but rather the universal truth itself, of which all other things are examples. […] In Christianity […] God is revealed as Spirit. In the first place, he is the Father, a power which is universal but abstract as yet veiled. Secondly, he is his own object, another version of himself, dividing himself into two so as to produce the Son.’

The Christian God manifests concrete spirit, which remained still veiled and abstract in Judaism; but he manifests it only by becoming a father. The father – the Jewish God was of course one – remains an abstract universal form so long as he has no recognised son. A father without a son is not a father.

As this son is infinite – son of God – he is not the other of God. He gives God his image. But as this son of God is human – finite – he is God separated from himself and appearing to himself as passage from the infinite to the finite, from the finite to the infinite. […] God knows and recognises himself in his son. […] The knowledge-relation that organises this whole scene is a third, a third term, the element of the relation of the infinite to itself: this is the holy spirit.

‘But this other version is just as immediate an expression of him as he is himself; he knows himself and contemplates himself in it – and it is this self-knowledge and self-contemplation which constitutes the third element, the Spirit as such.’ [39]

The spirit is neither the father nor the son, but filiation, the relation of father to son, of son to father, of father to father by the mediation of the son, of the son to the son by the mediaiton of the father. The spirit is the element of the Aufhebung through which the seed returns to the father.

‘It is this doctrine of the Trinity which raises Christianity above the other religions. If it did not have this doctrine, the other religions might well provide more material for thought than it does. The Trinity is the speculative part of Christianity, and it is through it that philosophy can discover the Idea of reason in the Christian religion too. [40]

Christianity thus offers the example of a naturally speculative religion. Philosophy – speculative dialectics – will have been the truth of this religious representation of the speculative.

[…] just as Christianity is only represented and anticipated in Judaism which is its Vorstellung, so the absolute religion that Christianity is remains the Vorstellung of Sa as philosophy. The structure of Vorstellung opens the scene of the Holy Family onto Sa. [40]

That explains why people were able to read Hegel’s philosophy – which is through and through a philosophy of religion – as an effect of Christianity as well as an implacable atheism. Religion fulfills itself and dies in philosophy.

The truth – the thought-past – is alwyas the death (raised up, erected, buried, unveiled, dis-banded) of that of which it is the truth.

What is the function of this Christian model? In what way is it exemplary for speculative onto-theology?

Inside the system, the program of the so-called early texts on Christianity will have laid down the law. With a significance as powerful and invariable as the opening words of the gospel of John for the history of the West.

The passage from Judaism to Christianity is interpreted as the advent of love, in other words of the family, as sublation of formal and abstract morality (Moralitat) (in this respect Kantianism is, structurally, a Judaism).

So was there no family before Christianity? Before Christianity, the family had not yet posited itself as such. […] The true father/son relation was waiting for Christianity […]. Dating from Christ, love is put in place of law and abstract right: in general and not just in relations between spouses.

In truth, he [Jesus] suspends and lifts abstract right into love. [42]

[…] The schema of the Philosophy of Right is in place: love as sublation of right and abstract morality, i.e. of a split between objectivity and subjectivity.

[…] The interiorisation of the interdiction, the interiorisationof objective law (right and duty) by love, the assimilation that digests objective debt ans abstract exchange, the devouring of the limit is thus the economic effect of the Aufhebung.

If one is to say that the interdicting limit has simply passed from outside to inside, without being transformed by that passage, desire in the Christian marriage would have to be limited, and limited first of all to a finite bing. But this is not as all the case. The finite is being traversed towards the infinite. One is no longer limited to loving a finite being: one loves a finite being as infinite.

In moving to the inside, the limit becomes infinite: so there is no longer any finite limit, therefore no longer any limit or, what comes to the same thing, an infinite limit.

The Christian thesis, the axial thesis that replaces the Jewish thesis by opposing it, overturns it, overturns mastery. By substituting love for mastery, for the Jewish relations of violence and slavery, Jesus founded the family. The family constituted itself through him: ‘To the Jewish idea of God as their Lord and Governor, Jesus opposes a relationship of God to men like that of a father to his children.’ Such is the ‘exact antithesis’ that gives the family its infinite foundation.

Nature is not a determinate essence, a single moment. It covers all forms of self-externality of spirit. It therefore appears – progressively disappearing – at every stage of the becoming of spirit.

There was – then – a Jewish family deprived of love, and it had itself broken with a more primitive and natural family.

[…]

[…]

The Jew is a heart of stone. He is insensitive. Now sentiment, feeling has been determined to be the focus, the living unity of life in the family. […]

This insensitivity, this incapacity to form a true family is not an empirical trait, it is a structural law that organises the figure of the Jew in all the forms and all the places of its manifestation. [57]

The irruption of the infinite, and therefore of reason, rages in Jewish destiny. But it remains abstract and desert-like, it does not become incarnate, does not unite concretely and effectively with the forms of the understanding, imagination or sensibility.

[…]

For the sublation of this destiny, of this stone of death, we have to wait for Our Lady, the Messiah, another supper, another stone, a living one this time, Pierre [Peter], the Church built upon it, a certain Holy Family.

[…] we are entering into the analysis of Christianity and the Christian family worked out by the young Hegel as the conceptual matrix of the whole systematic scene to come.

THE CHRISTIAN SUPPER

The Father is the Son, the Son is the Father; and the Wesen, the essential energy of this copulation, its unity, the Weseneinheit of the first and the second, is the essence of the Christian supper.

Jesus’s revolution consisted in opposing the subjective principle, which means the principle of freedom, to the enslavement of objective laws or, more precisely, of objective commands.

[…] Now in preaching love, Jesus is proposing neither laws nor a transgression of the laws: he is recommending a sublation, an Aufhebung of the law, of the formal legality of the law.

Jesus is not preaching the dissolution of the laws but on the contrary the fulfillment of what is lacking in them. Rising above cold formal universality, living love thus describes the great syllogistyic movement of the Philosophy of Right: objective morality (Sittlichkeit), the third moment that begins with the family, and in it with love, emerges with the sublation of abstract right and of formal subjective morality. [69]

The schema is very quickly put in place: one can understand the principles of the philosophy of right and grasp its conceptuality only in the echo of the historico-speculative event constituted by the sermon on the mount.

[…]

The ‘fine example’ is, then, that of Mary the sinner who comes to Jesus during a meal with the Pharisees. […] Jesus forgives her. Because she loved so much, of course. But above all, says Hegel, because she did something ‘beautiful’ for Jesus: ‘this is the only thing in the whole story of Jesus which goes by the name of ‘beautiful”.

To what beauty was Jesus sensitive? To that of the outpouring of love, of course […], but above all, if we are to believe Hegel, to that perfumed oil, that cream with which she anointed his foot. It is as though in advance she were taking care of his dead body, adoring it […]

Love is the pleroma of the law. But the logic of pleroma leaves nothing at rest.

Anticipation of the Philosophy of Right: love (felt unity of the family) sublates subjective morality which had itself sublated abstract right or domination; but love (the family) is still nature, the first moment of an incomplete Sittlichkeit, and will therefore have in its turn to be sublated. [75]

When Hegel says that Jesus opposes to the Jewish figure of God the relaiton of a father to his children, what discourse are we dealing with here? […] the very possibility of the question is […] uncertain. To bring out its presuppositions, we must first take into account what Hegel himself says about this comparison in the Supper.

What is consumed on that occasion?

The oppositions between (the) contraries (universality/particularity, objectivity/subjectivity, whole/part, etc.) is resolved in love.

If love has no other, it is infinite. To love is necessarily to love God. One can love only God. To love God is to feel oneself in the whole of life ‘without limit to infinity’.

Love, the sensory focal point of the family, is infinite or it is not. [76]

One can no longer rigorously distinguish between a finite family and an infinite family. The human family is not something other than the Holy family. The human relaiton of father-to-son is not something other than God’s relation of father-to-son. As these two relations cannot be distinguished, and above all cannot be opposed, one cannot pretend to see in one the figure or the metaphor of the other. […] One cannot know outside Christianity what the relation of a father to his son, or even (but let’s keep this extension in reserve) to his children is. One cannot even know – we’re coming to this – what the is in general is outside of Christianity. Such is the Hegelian thesis on the spirit of Christianity, that is, on rhetoric.

What is he doing, the anointed of the Lord? Is he using a signifier? A symbol? An image? What about the this when he holds out the bread and the wine? When he talks about intaking and undertaking in the place of his body, his individuality, his finity? [77]

We are not dealing here with a sign, nor a comparison, nor an allegory. In the sign, the relation between signifier and signified, between sign and designatum remains a relation of conventional externality. What ties the two members of the signification together still remains an objective ligament. ‘[…] To eat and drink with someone is an act of communion and is itself a felt communion, not a conventional sign.’

In communion, the third term disappears, it is properly consum(mat)ed. The sign is swallowed up.

[…] something extra happens in transubstantiation. This extra, to put it briefly, is a judicative proposition of the type S is P (this is my body, the wine is blood, the blood spirit) and a certain intervention of the father in the discourse. [78]

[…] Jesus ads something to this communal consumption. What? What is this extra (das Weitere)? A declaration, a clarification, a discursive manifestation, an Erklarung that explains, is stated in the form S is P, and thence constiutes an objective judgement, an objectivity that opens, although still incompletely, the space of religion.

He says ‘this is my body, this is my body given for you’.

At the moment when through this sharing and this predication, the disciples are dealing with definite objects (this is that), their friendship, the union in the one they recognise as their midpoint and their master becomes more than sensory, more than internal. It is visible, obvious on the outside, objectivated, as the thing itself that it is. It is no longer merely ‘represented’ in an ‘image’ or in an ‘allegorical figure’.

And yet this object is not an object like any other. […] There is in them something more than what is seen. This is the ‘mystical operation’ which can be understood only from the inside.

[…]

Jesus does not say merely ‘wine is blood’, he also says ‘blood is spirit’. The common cup, the fact of drinking together, of swallowing in one gulp the same liquid substance, is in spirit a new binding […].

It comes down to allowing oneself to be penetrated (the word durchdringen occurs three times) and identified. The identificatory penetration of Jesus into his disciples – first John, the cherished disciple – of the Father into Jesus and through him into his disciples – John first – first subjectivates, then objectivates, then becomes subjective again by ingestion. Consummation interiorises, idealises, sublates. [81]

[…]

The religious is not satisfied with this feeling of impotence and diviion after enjoyment. After an ‘authentic’ religious operation, the soul should be appeased, i.e. continue to enjoy. The Supper is not yet religion. Its remains – i.e. a dead body – must be sublated. After the resurrection, building the church of stone will properly institute religion. But stone itself will give rise to another fracture, another ruin, another mourning, another sublation. [84]

[…]

Hegel takes into account the textual fact but also the need to sublate is: if the reader receives the gospel text passively, without spiritual activity, without living repetition, he will see only formal contradiction, but if on the contrary he knows how to read, no longer being content to read, things will go quite differently. Everything depends on the reader’s spirit: ‘This always objective language hence attains sense and weight only in the spirit of the reader.’

[…]

What Hegel translates as relation, rapport, is the name. What man discovers as most proper in him, in his proper name, is God and God as his father. The truth thus comes to the world, or rather reveals itself as the structure of the kosmos [a notion narrower than that of panta, designates the totality of human relations] in the nomination of the filial relation. The name, the relation, the spirit is the structure of what comes back to the father.

This nomination is not an event. Not simply. It is an event insofar as it is new, the absolutely new. But this newness lights only light, brings the day to daylight.

[…]

What do the Jews make of Hegel? What do they do when they hear it said that the son is one with the father? […]

They count, they do accounts. And they cry scandal. How can Jesus identify with God, equal him and think that’s possible when he calls him father. They understand this unity in terms of numerical equality, which Hegel never stops denouncing, even when it has to do with the Trinity. Given this, the father/son relation becomes impossible, unthinkable for them. They consider the familial nominaton of the relation of God to man or to Jesus as images, in the most external sense, turns of speech or imagination. They thus disqualify what the advent of Christianity might involve that is essential in the history of spirit. [98]

[…] Jesus is the diaphragm of divine light. His body subtly blocks its passage. So his death is indispensable. John pointed this out: the waters can flow from the body only after the vine itself is cut. In the future.

[…] When Jesus explains to his disciples that he must die, that his death will not leave them orphaned but on the contrary will give them back filiation, that they will receive as much as what they think they are loing, they are frightened.

They are scared like abandoned children but this is because they are not yet true children. Their faith is still addressed to an external God.

[…]

The most general question would now take the following form: how does the sublation of religion into philosophy happen?

At the end of the syllogism (natural religion, aesthetic religion, revealed-manifest religion), Christianity, the absolute religion, is itself developed according to the following syllogism: 1. Spirit within itself: the Trinity; 2. Spirit in its alienation: The Kingdom of the Son; 3. Spirit in its plenitude: the Kingdom of Spirit.

Through the death of the mediating term, the reconciliation still remains affected by the competing opposiition of a beyond; it remains far distant, in the distance of a future (the Last Judgement for the religious community) and in the distance of a past (the Incarnation of God). It is not present.

[…] what is at stake in Sa [absolute knowledge] resembles a transformation of the familial relation.

Philosophy issued, as its proper object, from Christianity whose truth it is, from the Holy Family (out of) which it sublates.

[…]

Death & Warfare

Now the people itself accedes to Sittlichkeit and becomes free qua ethical totality (sittliche) only by putting its life at stake, rising up above its natural determinations in a strict movement. Bezwingung, the infinite and therefore non-constraining striction of death, produces the strict: what is called spirit, freedom, ethis, etc. The people must risk its life, not hesitate to allow itself to be destroyed  qua empirical people in order to become a free people, i.e. a people stricto sensu. This is possible only in warfare.

As condition of the ethical, war no longer belongs to the order of natural phenomena (as it does in Rousseau, for example): it manifests consciousness, spirit, culture. A people afraid of war returns to animality, it wants to save its life, its natural biological health; but it adulterates its spiritual life and its ethical health. [117]

[…]

After possession (Besitz) has become property (Eigentum) [check etymology – Ereignis?), after the institution of right and of formal ethical life, we come to the third stage, ethical life, absolute Sittlichkeit. The organising schema of the Principles of the Philosophy of Right is legible, according to the problematic already we know about: abstract right that deals with property, formal subjective morality (Moralitat), objective or ethical morality (Sittlichkeit), given its rhythm by the three totalities formed by the family, civil or bourgeois society, the State. ‘Above these two is the third, the Absolute or the ethical’. Everything that precedes it, possession, property, work, abnstract right, formal justice ‘concerns the individual and thus does not include the danger of death.’

[…]

What Hegel says about the structure of the Potenz – which will also be true of the dialectical moment – explains to us how he, Hegel, intended to be read. One can transpose what he states about each Potenz to each organised totality of his text, which both repeats and anticipates, and yet marks a leap, a jump, a rupture in repetition, all the while ensuring the continuity of the passage and the homogeneity of a development.

[…] In each particular totality, as such, the absolute totality arrests itself, arrests its necessity. The particular totality then, qua part, takes on a certain independence, a certain subsistence. […] The infinite totality inhibits itself in the Potenz. It limits itself, gives itself a form, comes out of a certain aperion, suspends itself, puts an end to itself, but the delay it thus takes on itself […] is the positive condition of its appearing, its glory.Without it, without the suspensive and inhibitory striction, the absolute would not manifest itself. [122]

‘The absolute totality restricts itself as necessity in each of its powers, produces itself out of them as a totality, and recapitulates there the preceding powers just as it anticipates the succeeding ones.’

[…] the natural element has no history, the ethical element is historical through and through. [122]

Now this history, although it deploys the divinity of the telos, happens in discontinuous and painful bounds. The penetration of the divine can obey only this rhythm.