subsumption, until it is recognized as an economic, social and histor-
ical agent, thus abandoning its independence, its singularity, in order
to be admitted to socialization, inscription and finally becoming a
subject.
Experience in Hegel is therefore the revelation of historical destiny.
Faced with the violent revelation of necessity, singularity has to bow to
this knowledge. In Hegel the reduction of experience to knowledge
is implemented through the historical process intended as the sub-
sumption of historical individuality within the productive, economic,
political and state collectivity.
This is how modernity develops, as the domination of social totality
over lived time.*****Hegel’s place in the history of Western thought is so big and essential
because it is with Hegel that Western philosophy conceptualizes a
process of annihilation of experience and the imposition of the his-
torical dialectic on a humanity without history.
The imposition of integral historicity coincides with the start
of a process of colonization (interminable, but implacable) that is
the colonizing process of experience by exchange value and money,
by a unifying principle, by a unidirectional and conventionalizing
temporality, thus by capital and by its dialectical abstraction, history.
Modernity begins when the historical reduction of becoming is
solidly installed in the heart of lived experience, corroding and caus-
ing it to disappear from within and emptying it completely into
the simulacrum. Becoming, now made historical, acts as an active
annihilation and subsumption of difference, as the colonization and
homologization of singularity by means of a pervasive and totalizing
principle.
The Hegelian system is constructed as a perfect universe that cannot
be upset or overcome because it assumes and implies contradiction and
overcoming, making of them its spirit, its sustenance and the very
sense of its process. It is said that the Hegelian system creates a system
of circles that encompass each others, and trying to overturn a circle is
a vain undertaking. The only gesture that can free thought from the
prospective game of Hegelianism is the gesture of abandonment, of dis-
solution in laughter.
Georges Bataille recognizes this liberating power of laughter in Inner
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