we are wounded by our temporal displacement; we are outsiders even to our own experience, to which we relate vicariously, enviously, indeed with an unmistakable trace of voyeurism. There’s always a melancholic remainder—an assimilation or identification that’s gone awry

our trauma-besotted, memory-obsessed “wound culture”

This uncoupling of forgiveness from confession may represent Hegel’s most intransigently Protestant maneuver, an updating of Luther’s attempt to purge worship of its “whorish Babylonian” opportunism, nowhere more viscerally expressed than in Luther’s attack on the spiritual marketplace of merit and remission and on the various corruptions he thought to have indelibly tainted the sacrament of auricular confession—an instrument of priestly coercion and a “breeding ground for profit and power.”

was not Hegel himself the first to insist that he liked his stockings mended but his consciousness torn.

What we desire more than anything is to keep on desiring

Hegel seems to defend the rabble’s right to rebellion. However one chooses to interpret this passage (readers disagree), Hegel is explicit that this would not be simply a “momentary right of distress” (Notrecht)—a provisional suspension of law under exceptional circumstances, for example, in self-defense or in the face of natural calamity (the starving man’s right to steal a loaf of bread, the drowning man’s right to the plank, etc.)—but expresses a permanent state of exception at the heart of the modern liberal regime. Poverty is an “infinite injury to existence” that challenges the founding principle of the bourgeois order: it presents a permanent emergency in the light of which even the bourgeois right to property becomes only a relative right

Society depends for its functioning on those excluded from any corporate affiliation or coherent class membership, and is thus premised on the existence of those whose right to existence it cannot acknowledge. The freedom to accumulate can be sustained only by generating a “rabble” sub-class for whom “freedom has no existence” (VPR 194). “Wealth and poverty increase simultaneously” (VPR 193): class polarization presents a contradiction insoluble within the terms of capitalism. none of the possible measures Hegel explores can solve the problems generated by a system of right premised on the eradication of right,

any attempt to justify poverty as merely collateral damage should, says Hegel, be “revolting [empörende] to every man.” 29 Hegel is not Marx. The rabble is not the proletariat, communism is not on the horizon, and revolution is not a solution. 30 (Marx’s own “discovery” of the proletariat came a few months after he had broken off his reading of Hegel’s political philosophy, and from other sources.)

forgiveness is the opposite: it transforms the work into a happening, and the happening into a nonhappening—an event that need not have occurred. it undoes what was done (Tat ). And it does or re-does what was not-done (Un­tat ). By activating missed opportunities, it not only recalls what failed to happen, but also releases to a new future what had petrified into a static fact. it revisits the crime (Untat). in its negativity, Spirit proves itself to be the “absolute master” (is Hegel talking about anything but the destructive energy of the death drive?): “[it] is lord and master over every deed and actuality and can cast them off and make them into something that never happened [alle Tat und Wirklichkeit abwerfen und ungeschehen machen]” (PhG §667)

The broken subject can no longer position itself as the creative origin of either itself or world. Spirit thus suspends the labor that had defined human history as the artisanal history of production and self-reproduction.

The wounded subject encounters history as a rubble heap, in which he intervenes only through his own destructive disfiguration

Freud will connect repetition with the death drive: the compulsion to repeat expresses a desire for inanimate existence and ultimately for nonexistence

the desire to return to a time before the beginning—to go back not for the sake of regressing but in order to take it over again, to do it otherwise. The desire for repetition is essentially the desire for difference. This is why Lacan will underline the link between the death drive and sublimation.