#cf.melancholy

If only we could live in a different time, ..if only the circumstances were right, etc. This again is another way of avoiding the encounter. ..One of the strategies used to avoid confronting the encounter is precisely that of positing it as this indefinite ideal which is eternally post­poned.”

For a brief time Hegel ..had been captive to the illusion that the French Revolution was the restoration of classical Athens in his midst, but by the December 1800 ..he was convinced that the ideal of reconciliation with an apparently alien world could not be achieved by recapturing a lost past

We remind ourselves repeatedly that our own loss is nothing compared to the loss experienced (or, the even worse thought, not experienced) by he or she who died

"Time is the experience of becoming,  a slowmotion succession of spirit." "Absolute knowledge is only possible by recollection." "By spirit Hegel means the entire developments of the world. Images have to be grasped internally by the self when substance becomes subject

Extremes meet: faith and enlightenment prove equals in the art of mindlessness, and the path to rationality is strewn with the corpse of thinking itself.

as if the object lacking were once possessed and then lost.

The world ..becomes, it passes away, but it has never begun to become and never ceased from passing away – it maintains itself in both – it lives on itself: its excrements are its food.

The mistake of the melancholic..is not simply to assert that something resists symbolic ‘sublation’ but, rather, to locate this resistance in a positively existing, albeit lost, object. ..The object was always already lost.