""Was it for this?": Brandom, Hegel, Wordsworth, Žižek, and the Terror"

<div class="line" id="line-17"> In this essay I compare Robert Brandom's and Slavoj &Zcaron;i&zcaron;ek's interpretations of G. W. F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. I do so directly, in terms of what they say about Hegel, and indirectly, in terms of what they say about William Wordsworth's The Prelude. One aim of the essay is to assess &Zcaron;i&zcaron;ek's claim that Brandom fails to account for Hegel's conception of absolute freedom as revolutionary terror. Another is to show that Brandom's and &Zcaron;i&zcaron;ek's different ways of thinking about what it would mean, for Hegel, to successfully confess and forgive revolutionary terror amounts to a restaging of the Phenomenology's dialectic of confession and forgiveness.</div>