Radically Neutral

Revisiting Susan Buck-Morss’s work on Hegel and Haiti, the chapter considers the political and epistemological implications of romantic middling. Buck-Morss imagines a universal history that comprises lateral, virtual connections in the place of static differences and identities. Universal history challenges the coercive thinking represented by Hegelian dialectics and celebrates instead free circulation and connection around a middle ground of radical neutrality. Central to this promise is the trope of “syncretism”—harmonious mixture and exchange of properties across porous borders. A counter-image can be found in Kleist’s “Betrothal in Santo Domingo,” whose tale of betrayal exposes the violence that remains repressed but legible in the term “syncretism,” first introduced into the modern European languages to describe closing-off rather than an opening-up of borders. The chapter considers Kleist’s critique of medial thinking alongside some passages from The Phenomenology of Spirit to show how the medial is already, even for Hegel, fraught with contradiction.