#cf.alterities

[rebecca-comay]

it is only on these terms that reconciliation is thinkable—guilt is universal and the whole world must shatter—and yet guilt remains singular, asymmetrical, and nontransferable. “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive others

REBECCA COMAY

[rebecca-comay]

The confessant "expects that the other will" will seal the deal by answering confession with confession, and it is this expectation that initially seems to dignify the transaction: it protects the confessor from debasement or degradation, at least in his own mind (§§666).

REBECCA COMAY citing from HEGEL’s PhG

[rebecca-comay]

The will clings to itself..  ..In nietzschean terms, the reflexive circuit of the will-to-will replaces the aggressive extroversion of the will-to-power.

REBECCA COMAY - [cf. Babette Babich, Flame Am I - on will and nihilism in Nietzsche and Maurice Blondel]

[rebecca-comay]

Anxiety teaches us how to mourn in advance. To “stare the negative in the face,” ..I confront a death that through my own gaze acquires a face, a shape, a human countenance, thus reflecting back the image of my own freedom.

REBECCA COMAY citing HEGEL

[rebecca-comay]

The will no longer seeks external objects to which to apply itself, ..a destructiveness so pure it has no need of anything to destroy. radical loss thus congeals into the sublime acquisition of a subject who finds self-possession in its dispossession.

REBECCA COMAY - [can someone explain to me what it is Comay and Hegel are saying here?]

[rebecca-comay]

in my zeal to see through appearances, to render the world transparent, i have all the while been staring beyond it: what i have been gazing at with such fascination is the virulence of my own denunciatory desire.

in “seeing through” the object, i have already twice destroyed it: first, by reducing it to an object of utilitarian consumption (in using the object, i overlook its singular claim to existence); next, by peeling away its patriotic veneer (in unmasking its treacherous interior, i deprive the object of the very right to exist). Whether utilizing or scrutinizing the object, i reduce it to the transparent vehicle of my own self-encounter. Absolute freedom thus reveals itself as pure speculation—nothing but the “gazing of the self into the self, the absolute seeing of itself doubled” (PhG §583). - HEGEL, cited by REBECCA COMAY 

[rebecca-comay]

Mirabeau’s letter to the king, less than a year into the revolution: ..“the modern idea of a single class of citizens on an equal footing” should help provide a smoother surface on which royal power might all the more easily apply itself.

COMAY on the French Revolution as phenomenon of arrested enlightenment, citing from Tocqueville

[rebecca-comay]

With the installation of mass sovereignty as a sovereignty of immediacy the die is irreversibly cast: reading Rousseau in 1789 is already enough to commit you to an “endless reversibility of democracy and dictatorship” within a fellowship of terror

REBECCA COMAY citing ALAIN BADIOU on how the melancholy of immediacy, of having no obstacles, undermines enlightenment and democracy with the terror of an unmediated freedom