This monstrosity is not a triviality. It would be one thing if Hegel were simply another priest of the nineteenth-century bourgeois state, a purveyor of platitudes about civility. Instead, Hegel formulates the problem ‘ruthlessly’, neurotically, making the ‘antinomy more intelligible than ever before’. He points to something beyond himself. Adorno: ‘In unresolved opposition to the pathos of humanism, Hegel explicitly and implicitly orders human beings, as those who perform socially necessary labour, to subject themselves to an alien necessity. … Hegel disdains the illusion of freedom, the individual who, in the midst of universal unfreedom, behaves as though he were already free and universal.’
Hegel becomes Oedipus. Driven to despair by the onslaught of Yaldabaoth, he constructs as his defence the golem of the State-Idea. But it is precisely through this golem that the hitherto mythical Yaldabaoth enters into history; like Hegel himself, who was in the habit of wearing a nightgown over his formal clothes, the golem is dripping with infectious darkness. We may only wonder whether Negarestani’s recuperation of German Idealism will not perform the same function.
If Yaldabaoth is the figure of gloom, the infection of the pure light of the One, this says nothing of the purity of the darkness itself. Indeed, in the Gnostic universe, it is only light that needs to worry about a descent into the gloom. The cold darkness of nihil, by contrast, is deep and unending. Yaldabaoth’s realm is merely the portal: there are stranger things that lurk in the abysses, noumena, as Kant termed them, but noumena that move beneath their cloak of imperception. The defeat of Yaldabaoth comes not, as Hegel thought then, from the luminary State that dissolves the ‘chaos of phenomena’, the triumphant Idea. Yaldabaoth dies in the fangs of the noumena themselves.