To close the book is to cancel the delay symptomatic of an unresolved gap between knowledge and its object. ..To “sublate” it, to release it to its higher truth, ..from a mere “container”..to the very substance or “filling” of Spirit’s project. ..What is absorbed is already determined as Spirit’s own essence, and thus every bite effectively a self-bite.. But since such suction has effaced the very opposition between inside and outside, what appears from one angle as ingestion or contraction must be viewed with equal cogency as an excretion or expansion whereby spirit “releases” itself towards a zone of untrammelled sensuous immediacy – time and space as “free contingent happening” – which it posits as a determinate negativity to be recuperated as its own other. The “continuing existence” of the outside thus reinstates the subject in its heroic sublimity – a self-possession forged in the act of self-dispossession. Thus the circle closes just where it breaks open: absolute knowing asserts its “supreme freedom and assurance” in its controlled regression to a natural prehistory which it embraces in a kind of..feigned amnesia regulated by the..“as if.” “Spirit has to start afresh as if for it all that preceded were lost and as if it had learned nothing” from past experience. ..“But recollection..of that experience, has preserved it and is the inner being and in fact the higher form of the substance. …” The truth of absolute knowing as recollection is thus the fiction of..an absolute forgetting.
REBECCA COMAY citing HEGEL
