What Remains of the Person: Civil Death and Disappearance in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

Abstract

ABSTRACT English-language commentary on the role of the French Revolution in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit tends to equate the so-called “fury of destruction” (Furie des Verschwindens) with the violent dialectic of rival factions’ rush for power. Here it is argued that “Absolute Freedom and Terror” ought instead to be read in the light of a “fury of disappearance”, namely in terms of the extinction of dissenting citizens’ legal personhood. This is achieved by recourse to civil death, a criminal sentence that declares the individual, who is very much alive, legally dead. While there are some actual and quite painful consequences for recipients of such a sentence, civil death is effective mainly on the philosophical and constitutional planes, where it maintains the illusion of a unanimous general will, fleetingly securing the state from failure. A focus on personhood and civil death also taps into the larger Hegelian dialectic of legalism and tradition, and into the various shapes community life takes therein, beginning with Greek Ethical Life, and ending in Absolute Freedom and Terror.