IN ONE OF THE MOST AUDACIOUS yet widely accepted incursions of philosophy into the literary field, a long line of Faust criticism insists on an analogy between the role of negation in Goethe's drama and in the first masterpiece of the great dialectician Hegel. In this assessment, repeated by such eminent thinkers as Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, and Karl Löwith, Faust travels through ever-wider fields of activity that parallel the step-by-step development familiar to readers of the Phänomenologie des Geistes. Faust's ascension to heaven at the end of Faust II would indicate a divine blessing of this journey that marks the successful Bildung of a subject who finally finds himself. In this article I argue that the interpretive logic of this school of Faust criticism has its unacknowledged model in Hegel's own citation of the drama in the Phänomenologie des Geistes. Engaging Hegel's appropriation thus makes an important contribution to our understanding of its role in the drama's reception history. At the same time, the very process of explicating this model reveals an important contrast between the type of negation staged in Faust, which leaves its victims exposed, and the type described in the Phänomenologie, which processes the injuries of spirit as stages in the emergence of a reflective subject.

A brief sketch of the Hegelian line of criticism from its idealist to materialist incarnations allows us to see what is at stake in the way it links negation and violence in Faust.