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Helena Iara has a new game: "No".  She has come to love shaking her head back and forth with such velocity that trying to imitate her hurts the neck of stiffer, older people, and rotating her body in the opposite direction to keep her balance.  Sometimes, this game of "No, no, no" makes sense as a simple negation, like after she tries to do something dangerous, we tell her no, and then she responds with shakes of her head.  Other times, though, the head movements don't fit into times that we would expect a "no," like when she is standing alone, preparing to take a couple of wobbly steps toward Rita, or when she hears music she likes and begins to dance.

Helena's little game of negation inspired me to talk to her about Hegel... not so much because she would understand (who really understands GWF Hegel, after all?  Not I, not many philosophy professors, probably not the man himself!), but because talking with Helena helps me to get my ideas around messy problems.  That's the goal of this blog, after all, not to create a precocious philosopher, but that looking at the world through Helena's eyes might help me to understand.  And Hegel, who made his whole career around negation, seems like he might be helpful to understand the game of No.

Hegel famously said that history advances through a long series of Noes, of the negation of what is.  Judaism didn't so much create monotheism as a new and independent idea, as the postulation of a new, positive truth, but as the negation of the many gods of the Phoenicians and the Egyptians; this is certainly clear in the story of Elijah, in the book of Kings, and the stories of the reconquest of Judea after exile in Egypt.  Christianity, in its turn, may have tried to present love as central to its message, but that was hardly new to Judaism.  The novelty of the new religion lay in the way it rejected the centrality of Law to Hebrew through.  Luther is a No against Rome, Thomas Münster a No against Luther... and so we continue.

But here's where Helena's game of No helped me.  We often think of negation as that of an angry two year-old, a boy who says, "no, no, no, no!" and refuses to do anything.  This is also the no of Barlelby the Scrivener, Melville's character who simple says that he would "rather not do it."  Helena's "no" isn't that simple kind of negation, though.  She's not just digging herself into the dirt and saying "I will not move," but instead playing with the No, dancing with it.

In this way, resistance isn't just a reactionary, even conservative urge.  It's playful, dancing, maybe even productive.  When Hegel says that History advances through the negative, I think her attitude is exactly what he's talking about.