archaic contamination

Archaic Contamination: Hegel and the History of Dead MatterAuthor(s): Elizabeth FaySource: PMLA, Vol. 118, No. 3, Special Topic: Imagining History (May, 2003), pp. 581-590Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1261528Accessed: 12/08/2010 20:56

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I 18.3

Archaic Contamination:

Hegel and the History of Dead Matter

I tell every body it [the Life] will be an Egyptian Pyramid in which there will be a compleat mummy of Johnson that Literary Monarch.

-James Boswell (qtd. in Wendorf 105)

MICHEL DE CERTEAU THINKS ABOUT READING AS AN ARCHAIC PRACTICE: "READERS ARE TRAVELERS; THEY MOVE ACROSS LANDS

belonging to someone else ... despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves" (174). Embedded in Certeau's romanticization of reading is a history of how Egypt has been read: as wealth to be plundered, as end- lessly available texts, as the ruin of time. Pose against this lostness Frie- drich Nietzsche's contention that all philosophy is just Egyptianism, the nostalgia for and reification of a past tense without a dynamic sense of history, so many "conceptual mummies" (35).1 Nietzsche reminds us to consider not lost origins but the possibility of endings, not the loss of history but its death-not death in the sense of apocalypse as Percy Bysshe Shelley's "now" and the release of new time in Prometheus Unbound but death as the archaic, the ruin, the mute, as Egypt's lost "now" and the end stop of archaic time. I will pursue the problems of the archaic, poetic ground, and translative readings Romantically through Hegel's Egyp- tianized account of aesthetic practices, for Nietzsche's post-Romantic Egyptianism mummifies thought. Although Hegel's Egyptianizing also concerns the dead matter of the past, his account renders that matter as dynamic. His revivification of the archaic Romantically accounts for its contaminative potential as a mysterious text whose translation can un- earth a curse, and/or a promise, for the new.

To think about the archaic as a problem of conceptual mummies might be to begin with archaeology and the unearthing of dead matter. Archaeology, the product of Enlightenment science wedded to antiquari- anism, began as more than the search for lost civilizations; it began as their measurement. Napoleon's team of savants, led by Vivant Denon, wanted to map Egypt's defunct history rather than to uncover it, their as- sumption being that what could not speak for itself or be read within a contextualizing semiotic could at least be materially determined.2 This

ELIZABETH FAY

ELIZABETH FAY, associate professor of English at the University of Massachu- setts, Boston, is the author of Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary ideal (Palgrave, 2002), A Femi- nist Introduction to Romanticism (Black- well, 1998), Becoming Wordsworthian: A Performative Aesthetics (U of Massa- chusetts P, 1995), and Eminent Rhetoric: Language, Gender, and Cultural Tropes (Bergin, 1994). She is working on a study of Romantic Egyptology.

? 2003 BY THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA 58I

582 Archaic Contamination: Hegel and the History of Dead Matter

dead matter had to be given new ground in the anesthetic of Enlightenment science.3 Hegel re- defines this anesthetic through art history, recu- perating Egyptianism by deobjectifying Egypt's ancient remains and positioning them in the first step of a dialectical theory of material translation. He thus repositions archaeology as comparative anthropology, science as dialectical aesthetics. He situates things as in process, as oc- cupying states of betweenness rather than as oth- ered, dead matter. In Hegel's three-stage history of art, the grounding civilizations symbolized spirit through form, the classical civilizations balanced spirit and form, and Romantic art sub- ordinates form to spirit. Thus, Greek things belong to the middle ground, since despite the finish of their matter-spirit engagements, such harmony suggests that the spiritual has not yet achieved its full translation in the material. Be- cause objects in Romantic art are dethinged by the fullness of their spiritual expression, they are not in process in the same way as symbolic and classical objects but are dynamically opposed to the deadening and mummifying subject-object segregation of the nondialectical world. In this respect, Hegel's treatment of thingness is not un- like John Keats's dialectical resolutions in his odes, which Keats's poetics renders dynamically synthetic, a presentiment of spirit.

For Hegel, Egyptian art is exemplary symbolic art:

Egypt is the land of symbol, which proposes to itself the spiritual problem of the self- interpretation of Spirit, without being able successfully to solve it. The problems remain without an answer; and such solution as we are able to supply consists therefore merely in this, that we grasp these riddles of Egyptian art and its symbolical productions as this very problem which Egypt propounds for herself but is unable to solve. (Philosophy 74)

Symbolic art begins in the originating point of wonder and the resultant division from nature; it ends in the self-consciousness of artistry that is

classical art. Symbol ends when the balance between form and signifying presentiment pro- claims a self-conscious freedom-a freedom from mystification, from dark uncertainties, in short from all the things Keats claims for poetry in the Chamber of Maiden-Thought (Gittings 95; letter to J. H. Reynolds, 3 May 1818). Keats's poetics resembles Hegel's dialectic as an Egyp- tianizing of Western thought. The "embalming" of the poet's imaginings in "Ode to a Nightin- gale" ("I cannot see what flowers are at my feet / .. / But, in embalmed darkness, guess . . ." [lines 41, 43]) provides an apt version of He- gel's conceptual mummies, dead matter symbol- izing a dialectical process that affirms the first step as necessary precursor to the last, dead things assuming the agency of threshold, of en- trance into the third chamber of poetic thought, the third stage of matter-Spirit integration.4

This matter of agency, of dynamism, is important to Romantic art, as Hegel notes. If Friedrich von Schiller begins the contemporary debate about aesthetics, his theory as wrought through scientific thought achieves its place, its "absolute standpoint" as Hegel calls it, its conceptual body in Friedrich Schelling's Transcen- dental Idealism (1800).5 By contrast, Johann Winckelmann's theory of Greek aesthetics provides not a standpoint but a "new sense" and a "new organ" for developing insight into the spirit-matter relation in art; however, Winckel- mann's emphasis on body was, Hegel regrets, less influential. Hegel's project is to develop a decisive way to see and interpret the artistic revelation of Spirit by building on Winckelmann's and Schelling's conceptions a theory of the "Idea itself" (Aesthetics 1: 62-63), a deflection of sensory apprehension into its "true" content, "the universal" (Phenomenology 60). But if He- gel thus construes the precedents for his dialectical analysis, for living ideas, his word choice prefigures Nietzsche's conceptual mummies. What gets left behind in philosophical ideas, as Nietzsche notes, is history. For Nietzsche, Egyp- tianism equals the "hatred of even the idea of

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becoming," and it is synonymous with dehis- toricization. Mummies, he reveals, are the final death of the thing itself, the translation of the body or concept into an eviscerated and lac- quered shell stuffed with everything but organs, mummy as mummy case: "nothing actual has escaped from their hands alive. They [philosophers] kill, they stuff, when they worship, these conceptual idolaters-they become a mortal danger" (35). Indeed, the priestcraft of ancient Egypt provided both the art and the mummies of the dynastic dead and defined a preservation- ist mentality that furnishes an apt metaphor for standpoint philosophy.

Egypt's allure, by contrast, lies in its textual potentiality, its richness for poetic allusion. In thinking about the dynamic vitality of poetic language, Julia Kristeva revives Hegel's concept of negativity after Nietzsche's mortifying pro- nouncement, interpreting as a positive irruption the bodily semiotic's intrusion into the symbolic or conceptual order. The semiotic is a precondi- tion of symbolic language and thought but also intervenes "as a 'second' return of instinctual functioning within the symbolic, as a negativity .. ." (Revolution 69). This negativity is the transgression that combats the symbolic's deadening order, thus sustaining a dialectical movement that resolves in poetic language. It is the de-syn-thesizing of boundaries that is life. "He- gelian negativity, aiming for a place transversal to the Verstand [Understanding], completely disrupts its position (stand) and points toward the space where its production is put in practice," and it is "the trans-subjective, trans-ideal, and trans-symbolic movement found in the separation of matter, one of the preconditions of symbolicity" (116; interpolation in orig.). The negative both grounds and disrupts symbol, both endangers and reintegrates. For Nietzsche, contagion, "mortal danger," arises not from matter but from the philosophers as priests, mystifiers, and interpreters. For Kristeva, if the separation of matter is what kills in the preparation for the absolute order of symbol, then Hegel functions

as a priest and an interpreter whose negativity is the mortally dangerous but life-producing transgression of the symbolic's attempts to suppress bodily matter and temporal passage.6

The semiotic is life-productive, history- producing, birthed from the archaic, which is a prepresence, not a prehistory. Kristeva uses Nietzsche's division of chronology and monumental (or eternal) time and adds cyclical time, associating the two latter forms with women. Against these ways of experiencing history sits the archaic, representative of the Mother. Women encounter the archaic through childbearing, which draws them out of history and language and into a presence that prestages the child's so- cialization by housing the fetus in a body that now "conceals a cipher . . . [a] pre- and trans- symbolic memory," the child's reference back to the archaic Mother (Desire 241). The question is whether Egypt functions for Hegel as archaic ground, the ciphering Mother, monumental time, or, as in Kristevan negativity, potentiating agent.

In fighting the effects of temporal change through mummification, Egyptian priests de- nied the becoming that is history, thus denying the body its progress through time. The mummy is hermetically sealed, stuffed, and preserved against erosion and decay, a thing without bodily significance or transcendent possibility. Hegel must reread this embalmment, as well as the Egyptians' own view of their history as monumental, in accordance with the gigantic scale of their memorials to the dead. Egyptian monumental time is not on the same scale as Hegel's tri- partite art history, but Hegel can revise Egyptian history because for so long it had been lost, had been represented solely by monuments or the comments of travelers lured by its allusive mys- tique. But the loss of Egyptian history is signifi- cantly the product of a loss of translatability, which is the key to change, to history, and to the liminal. Without a way to read the hieroglyphs, an erroneous dynastic history interpolated by Roman historians was taken as Egypt's incon- gruous and incomprehensible history. Not until

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Jean-Francois Champollion broke the hieroglyphic code in 1822 was a correct dynastic chronology available, allowing Egyptian time to be rescued from the monumental, the living death of Egyptian afterlife. Hegel believes he, too, can rescue Egypt from its ciphering monumentalism, producing a reading of its remains that translates it from its archaic ground. The archaic is the maternal ground from which the subject forms, potent matter for the transcendence of the Mother, necessary for achieving the sublime, a sublime that complements Hegel's negative sublime but is not equivalent to it. Egypt, for Hegel, is not lost history or prehistory but a monumental sublime in which the pyramid's empti- ness signifies the vacuum of Spirit, a memorial shell as monumental mummy, which nonetheless has potentiating force. That negating vacuum is a vital thing, driving history into its next stage.

If the archaic's normative relation to mythic time and monumental time, a grounding of counted time and of memory, stands the archaic in opposition to apocalypse, to the earth that would open up to swallow subjectivity (a swal- lowing that is the opposite of transcendence), the fundamental upheaval that apocalypse represents is the rising up of the archaic in the face of time. It is the revelation of this other face that Hegel sees in the ciphering Sphinx, the symbol of symbolism itself (Aesthetics 2: 83). Indeed, the Greek word apokalupsis means revelation, the making known of secrets-in short, translation. It is the conjoining of the unremembered and the counted in order to transfigure. In Shel- ley's Prometheus Unbound, Prometheus holds a secret from Jupiter about revolution and reor- dering; until he reveals this secret, time is kept captive as the repetition of pastness, bound-as he is-to the old order. Archaic Mother Earth can only weep in witness to the repetitions of historical time, but it is in the archaic that Shel- ley locates the agent of apocalypse: Demo- gorgon. Whether he is historical agency or the hermeneutic problematic, within or without philosophical conception according to Nietz-

sche's mordant humor, Demogorgon has been secreted in Mother Earth, exiled from heaven, and held outside time until Prometheus's revelation puts him-and new time-in motion. The problem of revelation and secrecy, as Shelley dramatizes it, is not far from the problem of the archaic and contamination. Secrecy is death, but revelation is the spread of a virulently revo- lutionary energy, a contamination of bodies through pure conception, and (for Kristeva) a transgression of the semiotic into the symbolic. Similarly, Hegel views the sublime as violently transformative, either a contamination of the Spirit-matter relation that produces an inward drive toward death or a transcendent realization of "the creative force of everything external," in which the form is "annihilated by the very thing which it would set forth." In Hegel's reckoning, the sublime is not "the subjective content of the soul" but rather a recognition of "the one absolute substance" as it is revealed to us, and Romantic art succeeds in formulating the ex- position of this revelation. Once the absolute substance is "revealed as elevated above all objective phenomena," it is purified from the form and "vanishes within it" (Aesthetics 2: 87).

The problem presented by Hegel's schema is to understand how the anesthetic of negativity can turn away from the teleologically proces- sive, becoming contagious and fatal through the drive inward. Hegel's first and final stages of artistic development can be compared with other assessments from his time if we say that Ro- mantic art exhibits purification but symbolic art represents contamination. The normative con- frontation with Egyptian artifacts was one of alienated mystery, a threatening noninterface. Hegel reconfigures this threat as a psychological reality: a drive inward rather than out or up- ward, a return to the Mother as a recognizable human response to cosmic enormity. Egyptian architecture, specifically that of the pyramids, reveals the inward drive "kept firmly in view ... as the negative of life, as death"; these monuments are "prodigious crystals which conceal in

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themselves an inner meaning," a signification made up of the metonymies of death and invisi- bility, stand-ins for the Spirit that cannot yet be revealed (Aesthetics 1: 354-55, 356). Susan Stewart understands the gigantic as "a metaphor for the abstract authority of the state and the collective, public life" (xii). In Egyptianism, the monumentalism of ancient Egyptian art is what presents itself to the viewer. The gigantic is al- ways the abstract expression of state authority, whether expressed through architectural monuments, sculptures of the human or animal form, or funereal monuments. Taken together, monumental forms project a collectivity, a public culture that erases any possible hiding space for individual identity or internal experience.7 When we comprehend ancient Egyptian culture as other, the gigantic is successful in its outsized presence, remaining in situ despite the devasta- tions of time. At the same time it is unsuccess- ful, lost in the ruins of history. The fascination, the location of desire, for nineteenth-century viewers was in reflecting on how to recuperate the power without the ruin, how to bring the Egyptian monument home and incorporate it without threat of contamination.

Nietzsche's assessment of totalizing and deadening philosophical systems allows one to elide Hegel's conception of Egyptian death. The anesthetic's contagion does not have the same effect as objectification. It is not the death of the mummy after all but its afterlife that Hegel views as conceptually fundamental: "the invisi- ble has a deeper meaning for the Egyptians; the dead acquires the content of the living itself... and in this concrete shape it is made indepen- dent and maintained." Death is not merely sub- stantively the same as life: the Egyptians extend this "still natural duration of the dead," so that "[w]hat is preserved naturally is also interpreted in their ideas as enduring," for they are the first to imagine the soul's immortality. The Egyp- tians' immortality of the soul is precedent for comprehending the freedom of the spirit, since the self-knowledge required to imagine a disem-

bodied immortality is "the principle of freedom." "Therefore they [the Egyptians] have made the transition of mind to its liberation, although they have only reached the threshold of the realm of freedom" (Aesthetics 1: 355). Threshold: for Keats it is imaginative, the open door leading to the Chamber of Maiden- Thought; for Shelley it is cognitive, the decisive moment of conceptualizing revolt. For Hegel it transfigures the preserved dead from merely empty shell, from Nietzsche's mummification ("Be a philosopher, be a mummy.... And away, above all, with the body, that pitiable ideefixe of the senses!" [Twilight 35]). The transfiguration is to the body's liminality, its translucent potential, its capacity as cipher both to transgress symbolic order and to be a symbol. Threshold encompasses the drive toward Spirit, toward the sublime whether or not it succeeds as an articu- lation of transcendence. The view that threshold is a middle state, neither "being" nor "becoming," and not deadened in Nietzsche's sense of the encapsulated or lineated, is an interpolation of Hegel's discussion of the blocking of spiritual self-revelation in Egyptian art, but I understand his discussion of threshold in that art as dynamic in location and in its conceptual energy. Threshold in this sense is not the condition of the sublime but its precursor. In this moment of liminality, the mummy can either pose the riddle of Keats's capacity for "being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts" and for the "'burden of the Mystery"' (Gittings 43, 95, letter to George Keats and Tom Keats, 21 and 27 Dec. 1817; letter to J. H. Reynolds, 3 May 1818) or propose Shelley's apocalypse. I want to use this concept of liminal dynamism to understand Hegel's proposition of Egyptian art as textual riddle.

For Hegel, the riddle is a particular kind of symbol, a conceptual obscurant that apparently evinces truth but in fact exhibits a confusion about "the inner life": "even in Egypt knowledge of the inner life and the absolute meaning was still not free, still not released from the world of ap- pearance, and this provided the reason for the

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riddles and the obscurity of Egyptian symbolism" (Aesthetics 1: 362). But the riddle is not mystification; it is a productive confusion arising from an "intertwin[ing of] meaning and shape [that] presages... and therefore already comes close to that inner subjectivity which alone can develop itself in many directions." Thus, the ambiguity of riddles, which "contain implicitly much, explic- itly nothing," provides a fertile space for the Spirit's process of becoming (360). This is also the space to which the interpretive aporia of writing, translation, and interpretation belong, made more severe by the problem of the hieroglyphs. The riddle, which consists in the Spirit's bringing itself "into consciousness in precisely what is strange to it," represents the archaic version of the hermeneutic of writing and reading, a lost reading practice and only the traces of a lost writing practice (361). Interpreting hieroglyphs-the alphabet of statecraft, official history, religion, and the death cult-is the practice of priests, those who officiate at thresholds, who control the dissemi- nation of texts, who mediate the spirit's self- revelation. They also, to follow Nietzschean logic here, purvey contagion and spread death.

Yet priests are supposed to trade in purification rites, for thresholds cleanse: "Now the first decisive purification of the absolute ... is to be sought in the sublime. Sublimity lifts the Abso- lute above every immediate existent and therefore brings about the liberation which, though abstract at first, is at least the foundation of the spirit" (362). Contagion, by contrast, has to do with heretical practices, with unorthodox inter- pretations. The connections among purification, writing, and the problem of contagion can be seen in the association of Thoth and his Greek corollary, Hermes, also known as Hermes Tris- megistos, "Hermes-Thoth" or "thrice-great Her- mes." Hermeticism, a term later associated with poetry heavy in occult symbolism and interpretive mystery, originally referred to the Greek name for Thoth. Underlying the association between occultism and occult poetry is Egyptian symbolism as contagious writing, as exempli-

fying the mystical capacity of language, partic- ularly writing, to be pure symbol. Thoth, the representative of the sun god Re on earth, was founder of languages and the inventor of writing, the scribe of the gods as well as their interpreter and adviser, the god of reason and learning, and the founder of the social order. He participates in death by weighing the hearts of the dead and reporting the weights to Osiris, god of the dead. As Hermes, Thoth is revealed more fully as the messenger god, scribe and transmitter, the interpreter of symbols. He is the agent of thresholds and thus an agent of death, but as Hermes Trismegistos he is also the inventor of the magical hermetic seal, which keeps death and contamination out but in as well. Like the priests who presided over mummification rituals, sealing vital organs in magic jars to preserve them for the afterlife and sealing the emp- tied body in resined linen encoded with prayers for the dead, Hermes put a seal on the secrets of heretical doctrine. Indeed, Hermes Trismegistos was reputedly author of magical books, of oc- cultist doctrine, or, to be more historically accu- rate, the Gnostic gospels.

The link among the hermetic, the interpreter, the transgressive agent, and the orderer and sealer is that of aporia, between signifier and signified, semiotic and symbolic, language and meaning. Thoth aids Osiris in judging the dead; as Hegel notes, "Osiris means humanity itself" (Aesthetics 1: 359), but by extrapolation Thoth means human interpretive activity itself. Both deities symbolize the relation between life and death, presence and absence, writing and reading. Thoth is the first literary critic, Hegel his Romantic successor. The Egyptian hieroglyph is a problematic that contains the symbol as language sealed in archaic or cipher writing, an ex- emplum of Hegel's symbolic stage of art. The claim of the Aesthetics is to decipher the glyphs, to read them for their ability or inability to embody and contain Spirit. Hegel as Thoth is Nietzsche's Egyptianized philosophy: the cult of the dead as art history, literary criticism as

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occultism. This association is indeed contagion: death as life, life beyond the grave, philosophy as the hermetic of eros, morbus, and thanatos.

In his embalming of Samuel Johnson, cited above, James Boswell writes that monumental body into a continuance of spirit, like Keats's embalming translation into poetry of those for- gotten by history. Writing translates the hermetic seal into dynamic access. Without writing, the spirit may be dead history: had "other friends been as diligent and ardent as I was, he [Johnson] might have been almost entirely preserved," Boswell notes (qtd. in Wendorf 106). This is not contagion but purification, death as disembodied genius. The anesthetic of Hegel's Egyptianism allows for writing as translation- through the agency of Thoth as/and Hermes Trismegistos-to be the purifying recovery of lost history, of dead matter. Hegel apprehends the signifying power of the hieroglyphs as an extension of Egypt's monumental culture of the dead that allows him to respeak the past, to redi- rect the threat of dead materials. He recuperates Egypt's ancient past in the form not of Western historical schemas but of a spiritual history that speaks to the potentiality of the archaic for the future. Hegel's comparative anthropology, dis- guised as a discourse on aesthetics, gives voice to Thoth's writings as already readable into the not yet recuperated Gnostic texts.

The dissonance between Hegel's symbolic art and other early-nineteenth-century assessments of Egypt's mysteriousness lies in the ability of writing, both the hieroglyph symbol and the legible sign, to be like Plato's pharmakon- cure and poison. The difficulty of any medicine is that it is positive and negative, restorer and de- priver of life, a transformative. Writing, medicine, magic: poison purifies, and the Egyptian prayers of the dead are incantations that awaken the dead subject into the afterlife. This awaken- ing is the promise of the Egyptian pyramid. In Hegel's system, contamination and purification are both translative agents, his negative sublime potentializing the transformative and expressive

movement of spirit through form. The force of negativity, threatening, voiding, irruptive, makes it productive-for Kristeva, productive of poetic language. But Hegel treats poetic form as elevated art, not in keeping with symbolic art's riddles, hieroglyphs, hermetically sealed mysteries, which are comprehended better through/in the architectural. In not accounting for Egyptian prayers of the dead and their magical capacity to bring to life-not transcendence but the resurrec- tion inherent in all poetry-Hegel as Thoth translates monumentalism into the formula "spirit in form" as an occulting of Egyptian practice. Writ- ing as spirit becomes writing as mystery, writing as riddle: the anesthetic of Egyptianism, which threatens human progress through mystification, rather than a part of the hermetic and antiseptic process of mummification.

In his analysis of spirit in form, Hegel takes on well-known monuments: pyramids, sphinxes, the Memnon colossi. Taking his information from Tacitus rather than from French scientists, he nevertheless refutes mystifications of the Memnons' sound effects, speculating scientifically to unrid- dle, to translate, spirit-contaminative matter. The Memnons "resting in themselves, motionless ... numb, stiff, and lifeless, are set up facing the sun in order to await its ray to touch them and give them soul and sound," a sound that may "be ex- plained by assuming that... the voice of these stone monuments proceeds from the dew and the cool of the morning and then from the falling of the sun's rays on them, if small rifts arise conse- quentially and vanish again" (Aesthetics 1: 358). Hegel's liberated ratiocination resolves the mystery without evidentiary proof, translating super- stitious belief: "taken as symbols, the meaning to be ascribed to these colossi is that they do not have the spiritual soul freely in themselves," re- quiring "light from without which alone liberates the note of the soul from them" (358). Emphasiz- ing their symbolic signification, Hegel reads Memnon as instilled spirit, encased but able to transgress boundaries by being drawn out, its hermetic seal cracked by nature so that seepage of

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spirit is possible. The colossi stand in monumental opposition to the pyramids as crystals and in form to mummies as dead matter; their sounding forth symbolizes the mystical threshold being su- perseded by the historical process: ancient wor- shipers, classical scholars, medieval travelers, enlightened scientists, liberated philosophers.

The Memnon passage in the Aesthetics im- mediately follows the discussion of pyramids and a short section on animal worship, a se- quencing whose categorical logic could be challenged. The two paragraphs on animal worship end with a catachrestic (irruptive?) reference to hieroglyphics, the symbolic writing that Hegel explains authoritatively by using Champollion's deciphering theory. This theory, that the hieroglyphs combine both ideographic and phonetic symbols, is delivered summarily without any reference to Champollion, a summation autho- rized by Hegel's Thoth standpoint (357).8 The either-or of hieroglyphic writing (symbol as either image or letter) translates into a both-and confusion in animal worship. This confusion "debase[s]" by sacralizing the bestial form, and in Egyptian conception it mingles human and animal body parts. Nevertheless, the live animal holds something over the cult statue because the animal has "something inner" that its form only "hints" at and that "remains" (semiotically?) "inner and therefore rich in mystery" (357). He- gel's first step in dialectical knowing, "sense certainty," the pure and unreflective apprehension of the object posited in Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), is challenged by the living object in a way that "inorganic externality" cannot do (Aes- thetics 1: 357).9 The "something that hints" resists the dialectical, identificatory exchange that eventuates in knowledge. At some point, at a standpoint, in the progression of coming to know the object, its inhabiting spirit "remains inner," resists being known. This is the mystery that the West suspected ancient cult objects of being rich in. Hegel demystifies such objects-the sphinx, the Memnons-through recognizing in them the

Idea. The sphinx and emanating colossi are public monuments that organize knowledge in relation to the unknowable, to an archaic ground. But the hint and mystery of riddles symbolized by them remain ultimately undecipherable, not fully knowable in themselves, because the monuments retain the essential spirit in form of symbol. Egyptian symbols alternate ambiguously between direct representation of nature ("proper meaning") and of spirit (the extrication of the inward). Moreover, that extrication is troubled by the boundedness of the spirit, which is "subordi- nate in this sphere" to its form, so that "the symbol in Egypt is at the same time an ensemble of symbols," a confusion of form and content (359- 60). A seeming dead end, these symbols imply much but explicate nothing, so the confusion is dynamic, productive of "that inner subjectivity which alone can develop itself," liberate itself. Egyptian art, then, belongs to the symbolic stage of art history, but it is the highest achievement of that stage, embodying a "mysterious symbolism" as "riddles" in themselves: "the objective riddle par excellence." This is "the proper meaning of the Egyptian spirit," best represented by the Sphinx, which is, "as it were, the symbol of the symbolic itself" (360).

Thus, the hermetic seal of the mummy, of the cult statue, preserves dead matter resistant to the Idea of a rational, systematizable history, yet the seal contains thresholds, fissures that open and reseal with the light of understanding, permitting the emanation-contamination dynamic to intrude into the subjective struggle among reason, history, and spirit. The aim of symbolic art is the Idea, the "unenigmatic clarity of the spirit which shapes itself out of its own resources," its own matter and form. That clarity necessitates a first step, as in dialectical knowing, "a first decisive purification of the absolute [meaning] and its express separation from the sensuous present." That purifying expression is the lifting up, the liberating, of the absolute into the sublime. The step is a first one because al-

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though the spirit is "not yet apprehended as concrete spirit"-formed into, comprehended by, made, concrete-it is "regarded as the inner life" seen, read, decoded, known, even though "by its very nature [it] is incapable of finding its true expression in finite phenomena" (362). It can be regarded, apprehended, immaterially because the sublime is "contained .. . only in our minds" and only when "we become conscious of our superiority to the nature within us and therefore to nature without" (362-63). Art, then, is also a threshold between nature and mind, between matter and truth, between sense certainty and absolute knowledge. The voiding of spirit, the negativity of the pyramid, mediated as it is by the boundedness of spirit in the Memnons and by the living symbolism of the riddling Sphinx, embeds, seeds, the "decisive purification of the absolute"; its dangerous threat ex- presses the absolute from dead matter into a positive sublimity. The sublime's job is to "at- tempt to express the infinite" (363), so that the voiding of history in negativity is counterbal- anced by the progression into infinity. From this history of the Spirit comes poetic language, the irruption of the semiotic into the symbolic, which produces poetry as a Romantic, third- stage effect, an expression of spirit free to itself.

The threshold locates the difference between hermetic and hermeneutic, between the purification of transcendence and the contagion of the negative sublime, between resistant matter and close reading. The heretical nature of Hegel's analysis, covered over by assurances of the superiority of Western art, culture, and most specifically religion, leads his readers to a differ- ent understanding of transcendence in relation to archaic matter. It is an understanding of the apocalyptic power of Spirit's self-expression, the purifying power of Romantic art. Shelley's apocalyptic now and Keats's synthetic now ver- ify Hegel's belief in the transfiguration of dead matter by revelation through the dialectic of heretical writing. This is not the death of history

or philosophy but rather a standpoint that, in a somewhat priestly act (contra Nietzsche's dire postmortem), activates riddle into revelation and translates archaic and classical time into the possibility of an infinite end.

NOTES l I am indebted to David Clark for this reference and for

his generous comments on an earlier draft of this essay. 2 Hegel has been reading their publications: "the funda-

mental character of this huge architecture [of the ancient Egyptians] has been made familiar to us recently principally by French scholars" (Aesthetics 2: 644). The principal work is that of Denon's team, with 907 plates, The Description of Egypt, 9 volumes (1809-22). Hegel's first lecture notes for the Aesthetics were begun in 1823.

3I intend "the anesthetic" literally, as the incapacity for or insensitivity to feeling, thus as a rejection of the object's potential to hold spirit.

4 For Keats's understanding of Egypt as archaic and embalming, preliminary to Hellenic imagination, see Bew- ell, as well as Kelley's use of Bewell's argument (220-21). English-language translators of the Aesthetics usually capi- talize Idea, Concept, and the Ideal to indicate the transcendent sense, but they often use the term absolute spirit. I use Spirit instead for consistency and to prevent confusion with human spirit.

5 Schelling mortifies, using, e.g., Hegel's phrase caput mortuum to discuss the resistant opaqueness of dead matter to spiritual light, disregarding Hegelian dynamism (Clark 117-19).

6 For a discussion of Hegel's conception of contagion, see Krell 145-60.

7 For Hegel's thinking about the state's expression of individual death and the problem of purity, see Phenomenol- ogy 311-12.

8Champollion's decisive victory over Thomas Young, Johan Akerblad, and Silvestre de Sacy in the struggle to de- code the Rosetta Stone occurred in 1822 and was announced in his Lettre a M. Dacier (Bon-Joseph Dacier, a renowned Hellenist, was director of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres; Champollion's brother, an Egypt scholar, was Dacier's private secretary). See Wortham 49-56; Ad- kins and Adkins 57-66, 155-81.

9 Sense certainty is the "first immediate opposition" between the subject and its object, after which subject and object engage in a dialectical process between universals and particulars that ends in absolute knowledge of the object (Phenomenology 58-66).

i i 8.3 3

Archaic Contamination: Hegel and the History of Dead

WORKS CITED Adkins, Lesley, and Roy Adkins. The Keys of Egypt: The

Obsession to Decipher Egyptian Hieroglyphs. New York: Harper, 2000.

Bewell, Alan J. "The Political Implication of Keats's Classi- cist Aesthetics." Studies in Romanticism 25 (1986): 220-30.

Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.

Champollion, Jean-Francois. Lettre a M. Dacier. . . relative a I'alphabet des hieroglyphes phonetiques.... Paris: Didot, 1822.

Clark, David L. " 'The Necessary Heritage of Darkness': Tropics of Negativity in Schelling, Derrida, and de Man." Intersections: Nineteenth-Century Philosophy and Contemporary Theory. Ed. Tilottama Rajan and Clark. Albany: State U of New York P, 1995. 79-146.

Gittings, Robert, ed. Letters of John Keats. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1970.

Hegel, G. W. F. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. 2 vols. Trans. T. M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975.

. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. Ox- ford: Oxford UP, 1977.

. The Philosophy of Fine Art. Trans. and notes by F P. B. Osmaston. Vol. 2. London: Bell, 1920. 4 vols.

Matter PMLA

Keats, John. "Ode to a Nightingale." The Poetry of John Keats. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Cambridge: Belknap, 1978. 369-72.

Kelley, Theresa. "Keats, Ekphrasis, and History." Keats and History. Ed. Nicholas Roe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.212-37.

Krell, David Farrell. Contagion: Sexuality, Disease, and Death in German Idealism and Romanticism. Bloom- ington: Indiana UP, 1998.

Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1980.

.Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols. Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. 21-112.

Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.

Wendorf, Richard. "Ut Pictura Biographia: Biography and Portrait Painting as Sister Arts." Articulate Images: The Sister Arts from Hogarth to Tennyson. Ed. Wendorf. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. 98-124.

Wortham, John David. The Genesis of British Egyptology, 1549-1906. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1971.

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Issue Table of ContentsPMLA, Vol. 118, No. 3, Special Topic: Imagining History (May, 2003), pp. 410-712Front Matter [pp. 410-709]Presidential Address 2002: "Stay, Illusion". On Receiving Messages from the Dead [pp. 417-426]Introduction: Imagining History [pp. 427-435]Relocating Inwardness: Historical Distance and the Transition from Enlightenment to Romantic Historiography [pp. 436-449]The Poverty of Context: Historicism and Nonmimetic Fiction [pp. 450-469]Advantage, Affect, History, "Henry V" [pp. 470-487]The Sins of the Father: Colonialism and Family History in Diderot's "Le fils naturel" [pp. 488-501]"Children of Liberty": Idealist Historiography in Stal, Shelley, and Sand [pp. 502-520]Jews on Ships; Or, How Heine's "Reisebilder" Deconstruct Hegel's Philosophy of World History [pp. 521-538]Beyond the Panopticon: Victorian Britain and the Critical Imagination [pp. 539-556]Metaphoric History: Narrative and New Science in the Work of F. W. Maitland [pp. 557-572]Talks from the Convention"I Miles Philips": An Elizabethan Seaman Conscripted by History [pp. 573-580]Archaic Contamination: Hegel and the History of Dead Matter [pp. 581-590]However Imperceptibly: From the Historical to the Sublime [pp. 591-596]Afterword: Speaking with the Dead [pp. 597-603]

Nobel Lecture 2002Heureka [pp. 604-614]

ForumPsychoanalysis and Literary Criticism [pp. 615-617]

Report of the Executive Director [pp. 618-639]Professional Notes and Comment [pp. 656+658+660+662+664+666+668+670+672+674+676+678+680+682]Abstracts [pp. 710-712]Back Matter

archaic contamination

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