Secret and Community: the Place of History in Eleusis

Abstract

{The article presents a commentary on H.W.F. Hegel's Eleusis (1796). Boldyrev discusses a paradox: insisting on the ontological inadequacy of language, Hegel simultaneously emphasizes the need to keep secrets. The author discusses this seemingly senseless concealment from a philosophical-historical perspective, from the viewpoint of the decline of the present and the anticipation of a coming community of the consecrated. The dialogue between Hegel and Holderlin, and their discussion of mysteries that have no determined content, demonstrate how a vow of silence can become indistinguishable from the need to share a secret, and how this publicity is connected to the very essence of a speculative dialectics, with its vulnerability both literary and political.}