The Road to Hell is Paved with Dialectics: On Christopher J. Arthur’s <i>The Spectre of Capital</i>

What if we were actors in a play, and somebody saw it all tangled together.Wouldn't that be the confusions of all confusions!-Ludwig Tieck So fears the fictional spectator within the third act of Ludwig Tieck's Die verkehrte Welt (Tieck 1978: 87).By the time it nears its conclusion, the 1797 play has become a quadruple play-within-a-play-within-a-play-within-a-play, with the character audience unable to tell what is fiction and what is reality, with Tieck undermining conventional narration as a parable of poetic fantasy and Romantic irony, part of that comic heritage extending from Aristophanes and Cervantes, up to Ludvig Holberg and Laurence Sterne.A verkehrte Welt was a recurrent cultural motif, with a similarly titled play appearing in 1683 by Christian Weise, as well as another by Johann Ulrich von Knig in 1725, each of which also partook from the Italian tradition of commedia dell' arte.Heinrich Heine would later, in 1844, give the title Die verkehrte Welt to his satirical poem from the verse cycle Zeitgedichte.Yet the formulation of an 'inverted world' after Tieck would go on to acquire a meaning and seriousness through the German tradition altogether independent of his literary whimsy.Lingering for a moment on how the German verkehrt does not simply mean 'false' [falsch]-and that 'reversed', 'turned-around', 'upside-down', 'backwards', 'topsy-turvy', 'deranged', 'perverse' and 'contorted' are all superior renditionsilluminates the term beyond a simple duality between what is true and what is false. 1 It would be with Hegel and his adoption of the phrase within the third section of Phenomenology of Spirit, 'Force and the Understanding', that a physiognomic investigation on how appearances disclose an inverted world would provide the phrase with nuanced philosophical import.Hegel was indeed familiar with Tieck's work and lauded its use of irony in his introduction to the Lectures on Aesthetics