Griffith and Femto: From Weltgeist to Weltverstofflichung

Abstract

The Hegelian concept of Weltgeist (World Spirit) is contrasted with the category Weltverstofflichung, a neologism coined by the author to name, in materialist terms, the historical process through which an initially subjective determination acquires objective existence and autonomous material effectiveness. The study starts from Hegel's philosophy of history, in which world-historical individuals realize, without full awareness of it, the ends of a Spirit that transcends them, the cunning of reason. Against this idealist explanation, the dialectical materialism of Lenin, Stalin and Mao Zedong is mobilized to argue that this same type of process requires no metaphysical subject, needing only the persistence of concrete material relations and the internal movement of contradiction. The thesis is tested on the Griffith/Femto pair, from Kentaro Miura's Berserk: the character's trajectory is read as the passage from a particular subjective will (Griffith, the Weltgeist moment) to an objectified, autonomous power (Femto, the Weltverstofflichung moment), with Mao's theory of contradiction, Lenin's method, and the Marxist concepts of autonomization and fetishism operating as reading instruments. Weltverstofflichung allows describing phenomena of objectification of subjective determinations without recourse to any teleology or spiritual subject, displacing the Hegelian cunning of reason toward a material, contradictory and historically contingent logic.