812021, issue 2
Thijs Lijster
With the ink of the Phenomenology of Spirit still wet, Hegel famously remarked, in a
letter to a friend, that he saw the world-spirit on horseback in the shape of Napoleon, as
the Emperor and his troops marched into Prussia. It is highly doubtful whether it would
have been a consolation for Napoleon’s victims to know that their suering was a
necessary stepping-stone in the history of progress, but also for the man himself Hegel’s
remark can hardly be considered a compliment: the “cunning of reason”, after all, implies
that the individual acts not on its own volition, but as a mere instrument. Theodor W.
Adorno understood that well when, in the 33rd aphorism of Minima Moralia, he saw the
world-spirit in a V2 rocket:
Had Hegel’s philosophy of history embraced this age, Hitler’s robot-bombs
would have found their place beside the early death of Alexander and similar
images, as one of the selected empirical facts by which the state of the world-
spirit manifests itself directly in symbols. Like Fascism itself, the robots career
without a subject. Like it they combine utmost technical perfection with total
blindness. And like it they arouse mortal terror and are wholly futile.
Each era gets the world-spirit it deserves. In the summer of 2021, Amazon founder
and CEO Je Bezos, in his rocket-ship called New Shephard, made his rst successful
ight outside the earth’s atmosphere. Ocially, it was not the rst private-commercial
spaceight on record (Richard Branson beat him to it by a few weeks), but it was
certainly the one that was most discussed. This was, amongst other things, due to the
shape of the rocket which, even to those not into Freud, left so little to the imagination;
due to Bezos’ cynical words of thanks to the exploited Amazon employees to which
he owes his billions; and due to the mind-blowing superciality of the rst words he
uttered in space (“who wants a Skittle?”).
The dark irony in Adorno’s appropriation of Hegel lies in the image of the
world-spirit personied, but blind and without will, “not on horseback, but on wings
and without a head”. According to Adorno, this “refutes, at the same stroke, Hegel’s
philosophy of history”, for it demonstrates not a progress in self-consciousness and
freedom, but merely of instrumental reason, a cunning that merely perpetuates the
blind struggle for power that reason attempted to escape. (As he later put it in Negative
Dialectics: “No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one
leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb”, a realization he considered as “the
horror that veries Hegel and stands him on his head”).
Unlike Hitler’s robot-bombs, Je Bezos does in fact have a head, as well as a face,
although (just like Zuckerberg’s) it is a rather generic one. As faceless as these men may
seem, and as devoid of soul and character traits (almost making one feel nostalgic for
the oligarchs and aristocrats of yore, the Bourbons and the Romanovs, the Rockefellers
and Carnegies, who were just as ruthlessly exploitative but at least appeared to have
personality and taste, and paid for their indulgences in the shape of art and culture),
and as much truth there is in Marx’s conviction that we cannot blame the individual
822021, issue 2
capitalist (since “he is only capital personied”), as well as in Adorno’s famous statement
that “wrong life cannot be lived rightly”, this also should not keep them o the hook;
they are, in fact, subjects.
Perhaps for this very reason, and so as to add a grain of personality to his other-
wise mundane appearance, Bezos might have felt compelled to wear a cowboy-hat
during the press conference following the spaceight, by far the most fascinating and
haunting element of the entire spectacle. The hat, moreover, also provided yet another
image, in which the world-spirit manifested itself as a symbol. In the popular imagina-
tion of the twentieth century, the cowboy, hero of the wild west from John Wayne to
Toy Story’s Woody, became the personication par excellence of the discovery and con-
quest of the “new world”, the go west that had encompassed modernity, and according
to Hegel even the entire human history; but with that also the retroactive legitimization
of white-settler colonialism and the primitive accumulation of which history Marx
remarked that it is “writtenin the annals of mankind in letters ofblood andre.” This
relay-race of domination which had started in ancient Athens, and went via the Roman,
Frankish, Dutch and British Empires to the United States, had to end at the West Coast
(lest one ended up in the “Far East” again). On the coast of California, the horizon of
the so-called “western world” reached its natural, albeit not its actual, limit. As W.J.T.
Mitchell wrote: “The ‘westward’ imperative has no more literal or concrete meaning,
and can only be replaced by something gurative: cosmic or inner space, Star Wars or
self-actualization.” Hence, the US West Coast became the habitat of both Hollywood
and NASA, and of Burning Man as well as cyberspace.
In Bezos’ cowboy hat, this entire history crystallizes as in a symbol: not only
capitalism, colonialism, ecological destruction, and patriarchy seem to be condensed in
this single image, but also the entanglement of inner and cosmic space mentioned by
Mitchell. In the oligarch’s overblown ego Star Wars and self-actualization go hand in
hand. Capitalism’s accumulation, expropriation, and expansion acknowledges no natural
limits, and hence “it will not die a natural death”, as Benjamin rightfully remarked. If
Napoleon was the world-spirit on horseback for Hegel, and the V2 rocket for Adorno,
then we have seen the world-spirit in the shape of a Beverly Hills space cowboy, step-
ping out of a gigantic phallus, and spraying the crowd with champagne.
Biography
Thijs Lijster is assistant professor philosophy of art
and culture at the Faculty of Arts of the University
of Groningen, and member of the Krisis editorial
board since 2007.
