Defaced Statues: Iconoclasm and Erasure in Hegel's Aesthetics

Rebecca Comay

Hegel’s description of the broken, bleached, and blank-eyed statues of Greek antiquity -- beauty distilled -- has an anxious, iconoclastic energy that points in at least two possible directions.  On the one hand, he defaces the idols to shore up the power of thinking: art’s deficiency becomes philosophy’s advantage.  On the other hand: art’s own failure becomes a cipher for the deformation of thought itself.  There are political repercussions.   Hegel not only offers a searing critique of the eighteenth century German aesthetic ideology of philhellenism, from Winckelmann through Schiller and beyond: any fantasy of finding in beautiful antiquity a model of social reconciliation is shattered. (The fantasy is not an idle one around 1800: it pertains to the German project of forging its own “special” -- non-revolutionary-- pathway to republican modernity.)  More startlingly, Hegel’s analysis also puts pressure on the norm of reconciliation itself.  It forces us to reconsider the stakes and logic of recognition.