He [Hegel] formalizes a model of genealogical succession: the transition from revolutionary France to philosophical Germany is inscribed within the trajectory of universal history. In the Philosophy of History, he will describe history as a “great day’s work of Spirit,” which takes its bearings from the solar trajectory. We must read the figure literally: the traveling is literally both a journey (a day-trip) and a labor (a travail). History is the story of continuously expanding epiphany— a perpetual relay of enlightenment through the global continuum of time and space. Like a torch transferred from hand to hand, like the sun moving across the firmament, like the imperial pageantry of the oriens Augusti, the Idea migrates over the centuries from one hegemonic center to the next— from Asia to Europe, from Greece to Rome, from Rome to France, and finally to the German present.
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But Hegel comes close to dismantling the German ideology even as he embellishes it. He points to a traumatic kernel at the heart of this well rehearsed teleology. The deferral that drives the movement of imperial expansion will also void any possibility of eschatological fulfillment. In the Philosophy of History, Hegel links Spirit’s mobility to a dangerous morbidity. If the Idea must continually relocate, if the torch must be constantly handed on, this is because its incandescence burns, or rather, to shift the metaphor, the poison must continually be expelled; history is the administration of a time-released toxin whose consumption is fatal to those who secrete it. “The life of a people ripens a certain fruit; its activity aims at the complete manifestation of the principle which it embodies. But this fruit does not fall back into the womb of the people that gave birth to it and ripened it; on the contrary, it becomes a bitter drink to it. It cannot leave it alone, for it has an infinite thirst for it; the taste of the drink is its annihilation.”
The image gives a startling twist to Hegel’s more familiar description of experience as the organic growth of meaning from seed to blossom to fruit and back again (PhG §6). It is actually a small dose of death that is transmitted. The gift becomes, in the present, a kind of poison. To consume the fruit of the present, to experience one’s own experience, would entail a mad jouissance within the short-circuit of time—at once thought’s craving and its ruination. Hegel here essentially defines history as transgenerational trauma: experience is the belated and vicarious experience of the missed experience of the other.
