ANGEL AK I

journal of the theoretical humanities

volume 10 number 3 december 2005

his paper considers life and death in natural

T beings in terms of ratios of acceleration and
deceleration, elasticity and rigidity. Indirectly, the
paper is intended to suggest a model for under-
standing the life and death of Hegelian philosophy.
The system falls into place in two ways: first, it
speeds up, as all the categories of logic reshape
themselves into one another in infinite ways;1
second, it slows down, as all the determinations fill
up a plenum. The experience of the absolute as an
acceleration to general life on the one hand and as a
deceleration to general death on the other can only
be two descriptions of the same event. Life cannot
be movement while death is inertness, nor can
life be stability while death is dissolution. For
movement can be stabilization and rigidity can be
momentum. In short, the life–death distinction
does not line up with a motion–rest distinction.
Rather, life is a certain structure of motion–rest
interaction and death is another such structure
that interacts with it, and the two kinds of motion–
rest interaction are at once in conflict and
indifferent to one another. We will have to
expect, then, that life will conquer death only by
also becoming it. Or perhaps that the life that
survives by conquering death is itself a kind of
death whereas the life that survives as life is one
where the barrier between life and death is
fluidized.
Animal life is defined in terms of self-
movement, and this is why death is only a problem
for animals. We will see later that the animal must
learn not to care whether it is alive or dead. Still,
while death is a problem only for animal life, death
becomes an issue precisely because the animal is
interpenetrated by inorganic matter. Death is a
problem for life, but it is a problem because of
matter that is not alive. The problem of death
arises because of physical structures that precede
jay lampert
SPEED, IMPACT AND
FLUIDITY AT THE
BARRIER BETWEEN
LIFE AND DEATH
hegel’s philosophy of
nature
life, structures that involve movement and the
obstacles to movement, speed and the ratios of
interacting speeds, densities and fluidities, and the
shifting balances between inertial stabilities, the
immaterializing effects of impact, and free fall. In
short, death becomes a problem for living beings
due to the forces of gravity.
There are as many deaths in store for the
organism as there are categories that define it,2 but
I am going to highlight three deaths analyzed in
Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature:3 death by impact
(the argument from gravity), death by superfluity
(the argument from sexuality), and death
by indigestion (the argument from disease).
Hegel’s examples are, of course, drawn from 1820s
science. This raises hermeneutical issues, but
I will not discuss them here. My focus is on

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/05/030145^12 ß 2005 Taylor & Francis and the Editors of Angelaki
DOI: 10.1080/09697250500424437

145
 speed, impact and fluidity
Hegel’s metaphysics. I will not try to update his
examples, but will draw illustrations from his own
example-field.
i death by impact (the argument
from gravity): ‘‘the man is struck dead
by space and time’’
There are many ways to characterize the point at
which a space-time configuration becomes alive.
From one side of the dialectic, life involves
maintaining a space-time configuration and death
is its dissolution. From the other side, life is space-
time flexibility and death is its rigidity. In either
case, death is the destruction of space-
time continuity. Space-time subjects die three
deaths: they die first from space-time itself,
they die again upon impact, and they die again
in free fall.
We begin with a definition of motion based on
the mutual indifference of space and time (260).
The indifference of space is time. There is nothing
about any point in space that determines the
content of the points around it. Therefore, the
spatial point is indifferent to where one moves
in the next temporal moment. Over time, any
concrete place will become ‘‘a now which has
been’’ (ibid.). Each place is therefore ‘‘external to
itself,’’ insofar as the place of the now is always in
‘‘another place’’ (261). In this way, the specificity
of places depends on the possibility of motion.
And since motion is the displacement of one
place into another place, motion appears as
mobile matter. Matter is not extrinsic to space
and time, but is the movement of space-time
itself.4
It is here that Hegel introduces the theme of
death. Hegel argues that force is understood both
in terms of mass and motion, so that, for example,
we could say that it is the mass of the force of
a falling brick that kills a man, or that it is the
velocity of the force of the brick that kills him. In
the latter formulation, we could say that ‘‘the man
is struck dead by space and time’’ (261). Space-
time is what he is made of, and space-time
reconfigurations are what kill him. The space-
time configuration of his head is displaced by that
of the brick. In this sense, Hegel says Zeno was
right; it is the same to say that a thing is in motion
and to say that it is at rest. We could say the thing
is in motion and that it changes place; or we could
say that the thing stays at rest in the same place but
that the place changes configuration. For the dead
man, in fact, it’s really more the latter. That is, it’s
less that the man got pushed out of the way by the
brick and is now somewhere else; it’s more that the
man stayed in the same place but now has a brick
for a head.
Either way, though, the man is killed by relative
velocity, and paradoxically, it is because of this
that ‘‘motion is [matter’s] life’’ (262).5 The
important point for the life and death of matter
is matter’s tendency not to exist in its own place
but in the spatiality of other matter. This tendency
for matter to exist not where it is but elsewhere
is gravity (ibid.).6
If gravity were entirely a function of attraction,
then matters would all fuse. Instead, gravity is
both attraction and repulsion, or better, it is
attraction that remains unfulfilled ‘‘yearning’’
(ibid.). This has two consequences. First, matter
is always pulled to where it isn’t; so there cannot
be a single center of gravity in general, but each
matter has a multiplicity of small other matters
whose centers it tends towards. Second, each
matter has its own location through an ‘‘inwardi-
zation’’ resulting from being attracted towards
others (ibid.). Its external relations determine its
internal characteristics.
We now want to consider whether gravity is
what pulls matter into life or into death. Hegel’s
first suggestion is that ‘‘gravity is not the dead
externality of matter but a mode of its inward-
ness’’ (ibid.). ‘‘Inwardness’’ is not in itself the
same thing as life, yet gravity covers all the ways
matter has of getting stuck, getting loose, getting
smashed, and so on, and all of these together
count as life. The second suggestion is that gravity
is expressed only when a thing falls (ibid.). But if
falling is the life of matter, then we begin to see
the ambivalence in the relations of movement and
life. For if falling is life, then death is not being
inert, which would have nothing to do with either
life or death; rather, death would be the fulfill-
ment of the fall, namely impact. And since the fall
is the tendency towards the coincidence of the one
object’s movement with the center of the other,
then death, namely impact, is the law of
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attraction that precedes fall. Impact is the death
that attracts life.
On impact, two bodies each tend to assume the
place of the other. The fact that two bodies collide
over a single space means that the space itself now
has an identity distinct from either of the two
bodies. It also means that each body has an
identity distinct from where and in what form it
appears at any given moment. Hegel calls this
identity in the face of impact the ‘‘ideality’’ of
matter (ibid.). It is impact, then, that removes the
ideal identity of a body from the matter of the
body itself. In the moment of impact the body
is both identical to itself and yet displaced from
itself.7 Impact thus has two effects on the bodies in
collision. At the surface of an impacted body,
something must give way. A surface is therefore,
by definition, hard and brittle. But since the
body’s identity is removed from itself, it posits
a life for itself independent of that ‘‘hard’’ surface,
namely as a ‘‘soft’’ interior that can be reshaped
under pressure (265). In short, the impacted
body’s death is always at its surface, whereas its
life, its ‘‘elasticity,’’ is inside (ibid.). Internal
elasticity allows each body to take the external
body’s shape into itself. Once we make this
distinction within a single crash between the
impact of bodies qua hard and the impact of
bodies qua soft, then we can say both that the
insertion of an externality into a body’s space is the
death of the body and that the same insertion
is the life of the body. Impact and fall equally
bring the body to elastic life, since both of them
release the body from its spatial determinacy.
In fact, even an inert body will already have to
be falling too. For an inert body would have
its center of gravity within itself, but unless its
extremities were regularly falling away from its
center it would collapse into that center point
(266). A truly inert body would in effect
already have been smashed by an implosive
impact. To resist implosion, a body must fall
outside itself.
The motion of a body towards its own extre-
mities is in one sense a motion that arises from
itself, but even here the source of motion is a kind
of outside. Motion is always projectile motion,
either a moving away, as when shot from a
cannon, or a being-moved-against, as when being
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shot by a cannon. The latter is equally important.
For even while fall is movement towards and into
another, a body is after all stopped by impact when
it actually gets to the other. While death comes
from outside, the dying, or the being-for-death, is
inside. For this reason, Hegel says in relation to the
cannonball that ‘‘A man can be struck dead, but
this external circumstance is contingent; the truth
of the matter is that the man himself dies’’ (266).
On the one hand, death occurs because life is the
tendency that moves things towards each other.
But on the other hand this means that death occurs
less because some actual thing happens to make
contact and more because the man is always
already both exploding and imploding. The
cannonball kills the man from outside but, in a
sense, that’s not what matters precisely because it
comes from outside. Death by impact does kill
from outside, but only because it constitutes the
death of the man’s ability to go towards the
outside. We might even say that death is the loss
of one’s ability to be killed by another. But then to
the extent that life is projectile motion and death is
impact, and death is the cessation of the integrated
body’s ability to make transitions from motion to
impact, then death involves losing the transitions
between life and death. But then if the transitions
between motion and impact always lead to losing
the transitions between life and death, and if that
loss of the transition between life and death is
death, then living will require overcoming in its
own way those transitions between motion and
impact before death overcomes them in its way.
Life will have to assimilate the impacting body and
maintain its motion internally, namely as an
animal.
A complete transition from gravity to organism
would require more detailed analysis. Most impor-
tant, there is the interim case of total release from
externality, namely in free fall, or ‘‘uniformly
accelerated motion’’ (267). This is still not quite
a case of self-movement, but since it would be
unsupported movement then Hegel considers free
fall the beginning of a ‘‘law of living natural
movement’’ (ibid.). Life begins not with a plan or
an ego but with a kind of unconditioned loss of
control. Indeed, life begins with a kind of speeding
up as such, breaking free from gravity. At first it
looks like something stars might do, Hegel says,
 speed, impact and fluidity
since they seem to be the closest thing to free fall.
But their movement still remains in the form
of gravitation, and they count only as ‘‘dead
repulsion’’ (268). Life beyond gravity will have
to take the form of something more like the light of
imagery, or the sound of a voice. Still, free fall
is a clue. Plummeting towards maximum impact,
acceleration towards collision, speeding up so as to
violate the natural transitions between hard
surface and elastic insides – if this all sounds like
death that’s because we still aren’t moving fast
enough.
ii death by superfluity (the argument
from sexuality): ‘‘the lung is in danger
of turning into liver’’
Hegel introduces the category of animal as a self-
movement ‘‘severed from gravity’’ (351). The
animal has a capacity for reshaping itself, a ‘‘free
vibration within itself’’ (ibid.). Whereas a plant is
content to let its parts die and fall off, the animal
tries to make its parts adapt and move around
separately. ‘‘The animal is its own negativity’’
(353). By getting up and moving, the animal does
something to itself that would for a plant count as
death. An animal lives a kind of plant-death;
it kills its own plant-like nature.8
The self-movement of the animal is a reshaping
movement in relation to other movements. First,
the animal can get irritated by stimulants. Second,
it can assimilate external movements through its
senses, letting their aftershocks ring around inside
it. Third, it can take in movements in the form of
energy, burning them up as fuel for itself, and
expelling as superfluous some of what it takes in.
In all these cases, the animal’s movement consists
in ‘‘interrupting’’ (unterbrechen) the flows of other
movements (351). The animal lives by being an
obstacle that slows down projectiles at its absorp-
tive surfaces, redirects falling or driving bodies
from their natural paths, rearranges spatial config-
urations, cycles energies through new uses, and
assimilates qualitative intrusions. And then the
animal passes the reconverted bodies and energies
out its other side. Animal life is not a single
continuous movement but a combination of move-
ments and interruptions, some fast and some slow.
The question of whether an animal is alive or dead
will have to do with which proportions there are
among those movements (hence Hegel ends up
with puzzles like what to say about the rabbit
whose head is cut off but whose blood continues to
flow (356)).
The animal is simultaneously an assimilation of
outsides and an expulsion of insides. On this
model, the animal survives external threats by
dirempting itself, tearing itself apart, granting the
intruder admittance not only quantitatively but
also by qualitatively changing itself in the process.
Hegel calls this ‘‘pain,’’ ‘‘the privilege of higher
natures’’ (359).
Before we get to sexuality, there are two issues
for animal life and death: the problem of the bone
and the problem of overheating.
Since movement is space-time, adaptive move-
ment involves proportions of lines and curves.
Muscles, for example, are lines that give way,
contract, and reassert themselves (354). But the
body must also have some less malleable lines,
some lines with less life to them, and this is the
function of the bones: ‘‘Bone is this dead
neutrality’’ (356). So if the bone is a dead piece
that the living body relies on for shape, it follows
that a live body has to have some of its own death
inside it, as the animal transfers its hard surface to
the inside. Death is housed in the body in the form
of a specific body-part.
Whereas bone is an already dead piece that
stays inside, the logic of body-heat involves
creating dead matter and expelling it. We can
only touch here on Hegel’s discussion of the
pulmonary system as a cooling agent, the blood
and its ‘‘quivering’’ rotatory circulation of heat
and cold, and the liver as the organ that burns up
the body’s otherness (354). The liver is ‘‘volcanic’’
(ibid.), and it needs the lungs to cool the blood
back to equilibrium. The problem is that the
lung’s cooling function is itself another way of
reshaping the body, and hence in principle another
way of heating it up. This is why Hegel makes the
odd statement that ‘‘the lung is in danger of
turning into liver’’ (ibid.). Even the cooling agent
tends to overheat; the organ that burns fuel could
be burned as fuel. To consume material drawn into
the body from outside begins a process that
would end with the body’s consumption (auszeh-
ren) of itself (356). The body only lives when its
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self-consumption is slowed down. The organism is
always half eaten, but no more than half. This is
also why Hegel makes another odd statement,
namely that the movement of the blood is ‘‘animal
time’’ (354). It is not just that blood circulation
creates the rhythm of the inner organs; it is also
that life is defined as the delay of the tendency
towards an acceleration of overheating. Self-
shaping animal movement is a reshaping of
relative speeds as much as a reshaping of lines
and curves.
We can now articulate a general theory
of organic superfluity. Hegel says that lower
animals use up all the nutrients they eat in self-
transformation, but higher animals produce
‘‘superfluity’’ or ‘‘overflow’’ (Überfluss) in the
form of excrement and bile (365). This allows for
such helpful features as flexible diets, since such an
animal can eat relatively arbitrarily and then
‘‘expel from itself’’ whatever is irrelevant to its
life. But the excrement itself is not so much a dying
inside, like bone, but a kind of extra-life; nor is it so
much an excess of life, like overheating, but rather
a useless surplus generated in the life-act. Yet these
superfluities are precisely the origin of the soul.9
For in bile, material that ought to be expelled flows
back into the body, which lets repulsive material
build up inside it, and even gets enjoyment out of
being repulsed; this conversion of repulsion into
being-for-self is the origin of anger and the other
affects (ibid.). In that way, the higher animals, by
being able to make use of useless things, are able to
take death itself and reshape it. The higher animal
extracts a surplus of consciousness out of its non-
living contents. It makes its own death-element
into an abstract death, a usable death, so that its
own life, as we will see later, will be a spiritual and
not merely organic one.
Indeed, already in the notion of the ‘‘form-
drive’’ (nisus formativus), Hegel says: ‘‘organic
being became a dead product’’ (368). For not only
are the relations between the various organs (lung
and liver, for example) reduced to a kind of
fluidity once they are in operation. In principle, no
single shape belongs to an animal as such. The
animal should do without particularized organs as
far as possible.
Self-movement is the animal’s drive to reshape
both its environment and its own body. It thus
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involves self-equipment, self-enjoyment and self-
reproduction. In these three ways, the form-drive
culminates in the genitals (365).
Here is the argument from sexuality. An animal
interrupts flows of movement, becomes thereby a
discrete individual, and maintains its individuality
by expelling superfluities of otherness. The animal
in general is the drive to reshape the realm of the
other. It follows that the animal transcends its
immediate shape in favor of a more flexible
identity, a ‘‘generic’’ identity (368). That is, the
individual life of the living being has to be
replaced by its generic life; it has to die not only
in parts (in its bones), not only in redistributions
(in its excrement), but in its entire individuality.
And this is the definition of sex: a difference,
expressed in animal shape, which provides the
individual’s ability to replace itself with the life of
the genus, precisely by making its entire individ-
uality the superfluity which sex expels. It is not
only in general that sex is death. In particular,
death is the surplus effect of sexual reproduction.
In fact, there are four deaths introduced here.
The first is sexual death per se, the way in which
the individual of a species dies once it has
reproduced itself in another individual. The
second death begins with the fact that reproduc-
tion occurs within a single species. Animals within
one species appear to members of another species
not originally as other lives, i.e., not as other
beings to reshape with, i.e., not as other beings to
have sex with, but rather appear as animal others
simply given in the environment – they appear not
quite as inorganic but not entirely as life-sharing
either. And because of this barrier between species
in the sphere of life-formation, there is an
inevitable violence in the confrontation between
species, and hence a natural form of death that
arises at the hand of individuals from other
species. The third death concerns the way each
individual by itself already has the battle between
individual and genus going on inside it. This is
more a problem of disease than sexuality as such.
Disease is a matter of superfluities extending the
body into something else that takes over what it
used to be. The fourth death occurs when the
individual dies a natural death, and, in the form of
its genus, survives. This is the death that will take
us from natural to spiritual existence. I will treat
 speed, impact and fluidity
the first two deaths, death by genitals and death by
claws, as sexual deaths. Then I will treat the death
by disease separately.
There is a lot we could say about sex and speed,
starting with the formation of the genitals. Hegel
suggests that the male and female genitals have
essentially the same shape, except that certain
parts of one stop growing while equivalent parts
of the other continue. Hence Hegel says ‘‘it is
quite understandable that one sex should turn
into the other’’ (368). Sex is defined in terms
of certain movements stopping while others
continue – this would hold both of genital
formation and of the reproduction of a species in
new members.
But now, if sex is the cessation of an individual’s
movement in order to set the genus in motion, the
major problem concerning death by sexuality is
why the individual member of the species doesn’t
just die as soon as it procreates. Lower animals,
like butterflies, do after all ‘‘die immediately after
generation’’ (369). It would be a kind of bad
infinite if life had no other meaning than to ‘‘pass
on to death’’ (369). But while Hegel raises this as a
problem, it is actually difficult to find a solution in
the text. Why do animals postpone their deaths?10
The time we spend living after we procreate seems
to be just surplus life, yet this may itself be the
explanation. We said before that the kind of sex we
die from is surplus sex, the sex that sends other
motions and movers into space after the original
motions and movers stop. Life after sex is the
useless overflow of movement that is not entirely
used up by the drive towards death and by the
generification of the individual.11 Death is the
overflow of sex, and life is the overflow of that
overflow.
Sex within the species kills us but leaves us with
leftover time. Sex across species is more violent.
Since an animal can’t express its genus with
members of other species except as hostility,12
i.e., except by reducing the other species to a
relative inorganicity, it shapes its body relative to
the other species not in the form of reproductive
organs but in the form of weapons: claws and teeth
(370). If we remember that the bone is the dead
matter that the living being builds its shape with,
we can see here that when the animal shapes its
dead bone into claws and teeth, it kills other
animals with its own dead parts.
The way in which animals of other species are
inorganic is, of course, relative. This is a kind of
inorganicity that only an organic being can confer.
But because of this, there is only a fine line
between dying when parts of ourselves become
inorganic from within, and dying when something
we constitute as inorganic infiltrates from without.
But in that case, other beings are by definition the
inorganic aspect of ourselves. The other animal’s
claw is our own death, whether it scratches our
skin or not. For the other animal is our inorganic
other. It remains outside of us, but its inorganic
nature is our death. Just as a body’s center of
gravity is not in itself but in another body, so each
animal’s death takes place not in its own body but
in another animal’s body.
It is not only that there are hostile animals here
and there. Since a genus can never be perfectly
expressed within any one individual animal, the
drive to genus ensures endless attempts in nature
to proliferate and perfect species. Hence, ‘‘the
fruitfulness of the earth allows life to break forth
everywhere, and in all kinds of ways’’ (ibid.). In
any given being there is a gap between its
individual characteristics and the species it exem-
plifies. This means that there will always be more
than one species which a given individual could be
a member of. And this means that an individual
can never know exactly which species it is
reproducing. The violence across species is carried
on within each given individual, a battle within the
organism to decide which species will shape it.
Each animal life is therefore in various ways
stunted, mingled, and intermediate, giving rise
to ‘‘monstrosities’’ and alien contingencies (ibid.).
Hegel spends several pages charting the various
classifications of animals, but such classifications
can never be complete, due to the superfluities of
form implicit in the gap between individuals and
their underdetermined species. And the unclassifi-
able superfluity constitutes the monster within the
individual that tries to kill not only members of
other species but also its own. In the first death
from sex, the question was why the animal does
not hurry up and die; in this second death from
sex, the question is why the animal does not
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proliferate into reproductive monstrosities. In
fact, it does, namely in disease.
iii death by indigestion (the argument
from disease): ‘‘it is the fingertips of
the mesmerizer which fluidize the
organism’’
The individual can never entirely ‘‘correspond’’ to
its genus (371). In that sense, it will always have
within it material that is relatively inorganic
relative to its own organic individuality. An
animal is nevertheless in a state of health as long
as the relations of organic and inorganic matter
within it are ‘‘proportional,’’ i.e., as long as ‘‘all
its organs give free play to the fluidity of the
universal’’ (ibid.). Health is a question of ‘‘fluid-
ity’’ (Flüssigkeit), overcoming the movements
capable of ‘‘overflow’’ (Überfluss), by means of
the free fluidity of organs. On the one hand, deadly
diseases arise because of the ‘‘over’’ (über): when
the stomach ‘‘overloads,’’ the bile ‘‘overacts,’’ or
the blood ‘‘overheats’’ (ibid.). Disease arises when
one organ brings the rest of the organism crashing
down around its particular overactivity. But on the
other hand, ‘‘the restoration of health can consist
only in the overcoming of this particularization’’
(ibid.). The particular organ tries to do too
much with too little; the body then has to exceed
that excess, letting the other organs flow back
into it.
We find proportions of life and death within the
same organism (which in turn is a proportion of
organic and inorganic matter). The odd feature
about most diseases is the way they are only cured
by driving them towards their own maximum, a
feature that goes under the general name of
‘‘fever’’ (372). Fever is the process of recovery
that totalizes an isolated activity in such a way that
the cure is paradoxically the universalization of the
disease. At first, the fever simply makes the
problem explicit. But it will never be enough to
isolate the body’s drive towards the death of
disproportion; expelling the death drive just kills
the body faster by leaving other death-dealing
movements in its place. To be sure, during the
early stages of a disease it might be possible to
diagnose the disease, isolate it, and cut it out. But
in later stages, a disease involves the whole of the
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body living a double life, so a simple cure is out of
the question. The only solution is to help nature
out, to spread the disease throughout the entire
body, and regenerate the entire body as a new
process of the whole (373).
We can now see how difficult it is to line up the
dualisms of life and death, movement and rest,
internality and externality, organic and inorganic,
and health and disease. Insofar as life is internal
fluid movement, we could say, apparently natu-
rally, that health is life, movement, internal and
organic. But since the individual’s life is the
inorganic relative to the genus, then health is life
and movement, but external and inorganic. But
again, since life is the surplus of movement after
the death of the procreative individual, then health
is internal movement, but inorganic and dead. Or
again, since life is a movement of inter-species
violence expressed within a single body, health
is a cessation of movement, an inorganic and dead
internality. Or since fever cures by increasing the
threat of violence in order to defeat it, health is the
movement of externality, the inorganic overcom-
ing of life. The point is that each of the pairs of
terms varies independently, and the animal has to
be able to act out every variant if it is going to
restore itself from all the disproportioning isola-
tions of its own life-relations and death-relations.
The key to all healing is not just that something
be restored, but that something foreign to life be
used to restore life. In that sense, every medicine
must be ‘‘indigestible’’ (373), so that ‘‘the organ-
ism is forced to counter its effect by drawing itself
together’’ (ibid.). And if health involves not
succumbing to the foreign animal that always
lives within, it follows that every animal is a
‘‘hypochondriac’’ (ibid.). The external is always
inside, yet it is loathsome; today we might call this
paranoia, but in fact it is the essence of medicine.
Medicine must force the body to ‘‘duplicate’’ itself
(ibid.), to see itself once as a diseased body and a
second time as a vital body. To force the body to
recognize itself in its healthy version, medicine has
to convince the body that it has fallen under the
illegitimate power of another – in effect, to
convince the body that it is a soul. Since Locke,
self-consciousness has been defined as the resis-
tance against falling under the power of another
(i.e., against slavery).13 Medicine instigates the
 speed, impact and fluidity
body’s willingness to struggle to the death against
its other self.
But now, if we remember that what functions as
the alien disease can be not only a foreign animal
inside the body but also one’s own overactive
organs, or even one’s own individuality, it is clear
that the body cannot win the battle with disease by
simply expelling some substance. For it is the
entire process of life as proportional internal and
external speeds and interruptions that generates
the disease conditions. And this is what the
hypochondriac knows: that every movement with-
out exception is a symptom of a new disease. On
the one hand, this means that almost every kind of
movement is also a cure, as long as it makes the
body active. Some cures are positive and homeo-
pathic, turning the disease into an energy that
works for the body instead of against it; others are
negative and indigestible, mobilizing the body into
action to expel the medicine, thereby increasing
the body’s strength for expelling the disease as
well (373).
But on the other hand, in a passage that is both
brief and yet conclusive, Hegel suggests a still
different model for curing those diseases that have
already affected the whole organism. In such a
case, there remains no sense in which the organism
has its own self within – the inner–outer reciprocity
has already gone too far. In such a case, Hegel
recommends mesmerism. ‘‘As the simplicity of
the self falls outside the diseased organism, it is the
fingertips of the mesmerizer which fluidize the
organism by conducting magnetism throughout
the whole of it’’ (ibid.). In fact, much earlier in the
text, Hegel has associated fluidity with magnetism.
Fluidity is the tendency of certain matter to form
globules, that is, to reshape itself by canceling all
its internal determinate shapes (311). And magnet-
ism is ‘‘the tendency towards figuration which has
not yet come to rest’’ (312). Magnetism rearranges
the implicit shapes within a fluid. If we now bring
this back to the mesmerist’s fingertips, we can say
that healing depends on bringing ‘‘the organism as
an implicit entirety’’ (373) into just such a fluidized
implicitness. Hegel’s argument has less to do with
nineteenth-century mesmerism per se14 than with
the logic of organic wholes and parts. The general-
izable point is that any new obstacle that the
physician throws up against a full-body disease will
only create a new target for attack. Whatever the
specific treatment regime, the physician has to
make the body into a moving target, to fluidize the
body at the surface so that the distinction between
brittle outside and soft inside will no longer hold.
And if the physician can’t do it, then the patient
will have to do it alone, by giving up the struggle of
body vs. disease. The patient will instead relax into
the idea of being a multi-species hybrid. The body
will no longer care whether or not it resists impact,
since it will declare any given change of shape its
own. This passage in the text is brief, but it can be
seen as the solution to disease as such, and indeed
as the beginning of the transition from nature to
spirit, which occurs just six pages later. For it is
precisely the loss of a certain kind of interest in
whether one is alive or dead that will make the
transition to spirit.
Disease is the end of a long series of divisions
between inner and outer movements. The final
cure for these divisions is to fluidize the super-
fluities back into the animal, to fluidize the very
dichotomy between all of the life-forms and all of
the death-drives. To the extent that life and death
are two sides of an external dichotomy, the entire
organism is defined in terms of this externalism,
and since fighting something external involves
struggling with an incurable disease, then we die.
In short, as long as death is one of two options, it is
always the winning option.15 Death can be
sublated only if neither of the two sides of
internality and externality is exactly death – only
if the two sides of the dichotomy become two other
features of the thing in question, for example if
internality becomes the thing’s subjectivity and
externality becomes its objectivity (376).
To review the argument from disease: disease is
a disproportion in two movements – the vital
movement and the inorganic movement.
Hypochondria is the endless movement away
from the external, inorganic movement. Reacting
to the outside involves digesting it, fighting it
by introducing more and more indigestible stimu-
lants, eventually and inevitably ingesting enough
to die from. Hence, the cure cannot be the
constitution of a new impermeable inside but
must consist of fluidizing the very relation between
life and death. As a result, the death that comes
from without depends on the organism first
152

allowing its own fluid unity to degenerate into
rigid divisions. It is in this sense that the
individual dies ‘‘of its own accord’’ (375).
Usually when we hear that life carries the
‘‘inborn germ of death’’ (ibid.), we think of life
as a kind of winding-down, but for Hegel it is the
opposite. For Hegel, the transition from individual
to genus, from nature to spirit, requires an active
self-fluidization; spirit has to destroy its own
tendency towards ossification and habit (ibid.) –
i.e., towards bone and health – in short, to destroy
its tendency to make use of death merely for the
sake of living.16
As with all of the important transitions in
Hegel’s dialectic, the most explosive transforma-
tions occur with old age. Old people, Hegel says,
settle into generic attitudes and habits, and exhibit
a ‘‘dying away of tension or interest’’ (ibid.). It is
as if the drama of death takes place in disease,
whereas old people set in their habits have some-
how skipped the death phase and have prema-
turely been overtaken by their genus. Yet the
‘‘dying away of interest’’ plays a second role in
Hegel’s argument, namely as an indifference to
nature that makes spirit possible. It is the
bracketing of natural death.17
Furthermore, it can take the utmost energy to
cultivate the lack of interest in whether one is alive
or dead. In the Phenomenology, Hegel argues that
self-consciousness emerges when the ‘‘fluidity’’ of
life (Phenomenology 171) collapses the shape of
the organism in favor of the pure ‘‘I,’’ which is no
longer interested in the integrity of its own body
(175). And when the self-consciousnesses later
struggle to the death against each other, the
struggle is not so much to see who will live but
to see who can put life at stake most rigorously. To
‘‘stake’’ one’s life is not just to risk it, it is to put
into question the value of the category of Life itself
(187). Similarly, to ‘‘seek the other’s death’’ means
less to end the other’s life than to create a battle
where the other will not be allowed to value his life
any more than I do mine. The struggle shows
precisely that both participants ‘‘held [life] of no
account’’ (188). In that sense, the struggle was
never strictly over death at all. Instead, the
struggle is a question over what one is ‘‘for’’:
whether one will be ‘‘for-self’’ or ‘‘for-another’’
(190). The fluidity of the barrier between life and
153
lampert
death is a prerequisite for the intentionality that is
a being-for.18 If death is overcome, it is in the sense
that we know how to switch to categories in which
death is not the issue.19
Just as medicine has to be indigestible, the
recognition of the fluidity at the barrier between
life and death is not an easy movement but a
‘‘violent detachment’’ from human ties
(Aesthetics 547). The latter is Hegel’s description
of art, and it helps explain why art in the ancient
world devoted itself to the ‘‘debasement’’ of
animals (the sacrifice, the hunt, the metamor-
phosis (Aesthetics 445–49)), and in the Christian
world to martyrdom and the physical torment of
the human body (Aesthetics 544–45).
Yet if nature comes to an end violently when
conscious subjects kill living things in order to
stop caring about life, it also comes to an end
through the cessation of interest, in the way that
one wakes up from a long sleep to find the disease
on the wane. And, of course, while this sleepy and
violent spirit ‘‘supersedes the death of nature’’
(Philosophy of Nature 376), the many deaths we
have spoken of do not cease taking place. We still
need to survive the cannonballs, the claws and the
poisons. And our dread of death may be all the
more feverish. Hegel’s theory is not that we die
and then we live again in another, spiritual body.
Nor is it that we don’t really die. It’s rather that
every form of movement is already both a kind of
life and a kind of death, and that it doesn’t matter
which side of the fluid boundary we take ourselves
to be on, because life is ultimately no more what
we ourselves are at any given moment than death
is. Natural life is by definition always killing itself,
so the consciousness that loses interest in both life
and death is by definition ‘‘immortal,’’ the
‘‘Phoenix’’ that rises not so much out of its own
death but by accelerating equally
away from its life and its death
(376). To survive death is to kill the
inner–outer distinction that kept us
alive: to commit suicide at the
hands of the foreigner.20
notes
1 Hegel describes the‘‘Concept’’ (Begriff ) as a kind
of brush fire that suddenly detonates the whole
field of being: ‘‘[The notion] is form spiritually
 speed, impact and fluidity
impregnated, in which the finite, through the
universality in which it relates itself to itself,
spontaneously catches fire [sich in sich entzu«ndet],
posits itself as dialectical and thereby is the
beginning of the manifestation of reason’’ (Science
of Logic 43). The conflagration of the system is not
so much an ‘‘already’’ as the beginning of an infinite
acceleration.
2 In 1800, Xavier Bichat, in his Traite¤ de la vie et de
la mort, began with the principle, ‘‘Life consists in
the sum of the functions, by which death is
resisted’’ (10). Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature refers
to various passages in Bichat’s texts, beginning at
‰ 354, and it would be interesting to explore the
various ways in which the principle above plays a
role in Hegel’s text. Bichat’s principle also plays an
important role in Michel Foucault’s reading of the
history of biology: ‘‘Bichat relativized the concept
of death, bringing it down from that absolute in
which it appeared as an indivisible, decisive, irre-
coverable event: he volatized it, distributed it
throughout life in the form of separate, partial,
progressive deaths, deaths that are so slow in
occurring that they extend even beyond death
itself’’ (The Birth of the Clinic 147^ 48). Gilles
Deleuze emphasizes this passage in his treatment
of Foucault’s late work (Foucault 145). Bichat thus
provides one of the important lines of transition
between Hegelian and postmodern philosophies
of nature.
3 References to Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature and
Phenomenology of Spirit are according to section
number.
4 Graham Priest contrasts Russell’s extrinsic defi-
nition of motion (as ‘‘the occupation of different
places at different times’’ (339)) with Hegel’s intrin-
sic account in which a thing can at the same time
be both here and not here (340). Priest’s argument
for Hegel is based on particle physics and ‘‘para-
consistent’’ logic (342). His argument comes down
to the idea that ‘‘In a continuum distinct points
themselves merge together’’ (341) and that points
‘‘spread’’ ‘‘over very small temporal distances’’
(342). Priest chooses to describe points on conti-
nua even though he notes that he hasn’t discussed
Hegel’s account of the ‘‘contradictory unity of
the discrete and the continuous’’ (342), and
this omission at times makes it seem that Priest
is presupposing the dialectical origin of time
and motion that the spread on a continuum is
supposed to explain.
5 ‘‘Motion is the Notion of the true soul of the
world’’ (261).
6 There are a number of helpful articles on Hegel’s
conceptions of gravity in Petry’s Hegel and
Newtonianism. None of these bears directly on the
issues of the present paper. However, the article
by Dieter Wandschneider, ‘‘The Problem of Mass
in Hegel’’ (249^ 65), has a particularly useful discus-
sion of circular and gyratory motions in relation to
temporality.
7 To the extent that motion is the tendency
towards impact, ‘‘motion consists in being in one
place while at the same time being in another, and
yet not being in another, but only in this place’’
(265).
8 Of course, we know in general about the
dialectic that each level of being kills its precedent,
and that each in turn seeks its own proper death.
9 John N. Findlay reads in this passage an
argument for self-reflection through defecation.
First, if assimilation is aggression towards the
environment, then defecation is the expulsion of
one’s own aggression. Second, expulsion defines
the expelled items as preliminaries, so that what
is retained will have the status of polished results,
‘‘like writers tearing up drafts after their manu-
script has been typed’’ (98) (this would not be the
first observation to suggest a connection between
word processing memory and anal retentiveness).
Third, if defecation is the model for ex-pressing
oneself through language, it would follow that in
defecation one ‘‘adds a little gratuitous beauty’’ to
what is expelled (98), as bees produce honey, or as
children take pleasure (as Findlay notes through
Freud). Hegel’s own suggestions concerning the
soul in defecation focus more on anger than plea-
sure, but Findlay’s suggestions have a similar force.
Mark C.E. Peterson construes the argument
from defecation to selfhood somewhat differently.
On his reading, the animal first digests the other,
then identifies itself with that digestion process,
thereby distinguishing itself as self-reliance from
itself as digester-of-other. Hence its expulsion of
what it has eaten counts as expelling its digestive
process from itself, hence expelling the simplicity
of its dependence on externality (57). Peterson
uses this argument to show how empiricism
should understand externality not as theoretical
data to cognize but as real things to assimilate. (In
fact, the aspect of eating that makes the animal
into a true empiricist is not the act of injecting
154

the object into its body, but the act of turning
parts of the object into excrement.) Peterson
concludes that digestion ‘‘sets the stage’’ for
sexual differentiation and species reproduction
(62). He doesn’t go into detail concerning this
move, but in fact the ‘‘stage’’ is an apt metaphor
for the way he has been construing the argument.
For defecation appeared as the animal’s mode
of presenting its self-subsistence to itself. As it
re-presents or re-enacts its digestive process
externally, it makes itself visible in another
individual of the same ideal type, namely as species
reproduction.
10 Hegel does suggest an explanation for why
animals don’t give birth as soon as they are born.
(That’s because higher species have stages of
growth in their own lives that correspond to
lower species, therefore it takes a higher species
some time to get to the stage of life corresponding
to its own species, from which it can then
reproduce that species.) But that explains only
our slowness to procreate, not our slowness to
die afterwards.
11 A different answer to this question can be
found in de Beauvoir, who suggests that for
women the menopause ‘‘breaks the iron grasp of
the species’’ (32). Like Hegel, she describes the
body (particularly the female body) as having the
otherness of the species within it. We might think
of the reconciliation of self and otherness in the
body, after menopause, as the de-utilization of
the body that makes a kind of ‘‘third sex,’’ a free-
dom from generification within the structures of
sexuality.
12 ‘‘In this hostile relation to others, in which they
are reduced to inorganic nature, violent death
constitutes the natural fate of individuals’’ (370).
13 John Locke, The Second Treatise on Government,
chapter 4. See also my paper, ‘‘Locke, Fichte and
Hegel on the Right to Property.’’
14 In other contexts, Hegel exhibits more
caution about mesmerism. In the Philosophy of
Mind, ‰ 406Z (116), Hegel is skeptical about its
effectiveness for diseases involving states of
consciousness. For the key to mesmerism is
that it requires an external person’s mind taking
control of the patient’s mind. The mesmerist
may fluidize the other person’s organism, but
mesmerism is a hindrance to fluid intersubjective
relations between the two.
155
lampert
15 Eric von der Luft refers to this as the ‘‘anti-
nomy’’ of medicine (34). It tries to cure the person
at the physical level, the level at which it is ill,
despite the fact that at that level the person can
only die (ibid.).Von der Luft suggests that medicine
plays a role similar to that of phrenology, namely as
a transition point where idealism has become
expressed in empirical facticity, but then must
give rise to Spirit once again.
16 Koje've also emphasizes this point, though in a
different way.When he says that for Hegel ‘‘man is
a mortal sickness of the animal’’ (137), his point is
that human self-transcendence always takes place
within the finitude of natural mortality. In this
way, he argues for an equivalence of dialectical phi-
losophy, a ‘‘philosophy of death,’’ and atheism (124).
The capacity for suicide, namely the capacity to
expose oneself to death by an act of will (151), is
the act that for a brief time allows humans to
differ from Nothingness (156).
17 If we were undertaking a complete account of
death in Hegel, this might be the place to analyze
the phenomena of mortuary architecture, cults of
the dead, and the mourning of ancestors.
According to Freud in ‘‘Mourning and
Melancholia,’’ the work of mourning succeeds if it
transforms hetero-affection into auto-affection.
Mourning is thus a way of hastening the death of
others in order to delay it for oneself, to arrive at
a stage at which the dead can bury the dead. Here
again it takes an effort to lose interest in dead
categories.
18 This argument would, of course, have to be set
in the context of the unfolding of the theme of
death throughout Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.
For a sketch of that development, see John
Burbidge’s seminal paper concerning Hegel and
death, ‘‘Man, God, and Death in Hegel’s
Phenomenology.’’
19 Something like this takes place when, having
woken up in the middle of the night in a cold
sweat with the thought of non-existence, we
make ourselves think about something else.
Switching categories in this way is a line of escape
that clearly does not make death less inevitable.
But neither is it simply a comfortable self-
deception. The fact that a human can choose
to stop caring about death itself indicates the
separability of the categories of life and interest.
20 This will explain how to reconcile Hegel’s
statement at the end of the Philosophy of Nature
 speed, impact and fluidity
that the individual ‘‘dies of its own accord’’ (375)
with the following statement from his Philosophy
of Right: ‘‘Just as life as such is immediate, so death
is its immediate negation and hence must come
from without, either by natural causes, or else, in
the service of the Idea, by the hand of a foreigner’’
(‰ 70). Death by one’s own hand and death at the
hands of another turn out to be the same thing
insofar as the hand that kills is by definition the
externality of one’s own life. This would make a
kind of tautology out of the situation. Suicide will
count as dying from an intrusion of externality and
being murdered will count as a lack of resilience
within the victim. But that is the kind of self-
contradictory tautology that all of the life and
death barriers will express. Disease, similarly,
always comes from an external source in spite of
also always being the complaint of a malingering
hypochondriac.
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Jay Lampert
Department of Philosophy
University of Guelph
Guelph
Ontario N1G 2W1
Canada
E-mail: jlampert@uoguelph.ca