The world is experienced as ‘negative’ when self-consciousness makes ‘pleasure’ its particular goal. The other is only recognized as something to be consumed and enjoyed, not as productive activity, nor as universal law, nor as ethical life. Hence the transitoriness of consumption, the contingent and intrinsic impossibility of continually satisfying the desire for pleasure, is experienced as an utterly alien and incomprehensible law or necessity. This necessity or law is experienced as a blind fate, ‘irresistable and imperturbable’, whose work is the destruction of individuality, for it thwarts its only goal, that of pleasure.

Consciousness experiences its intention or goal to enjoy pleasure as completely perverted. It does not enjoy life, but experiences the denial of its demands to be as dreadful as death, because it has no other aim or goal than the enjoyment which is denied. Consciousness thought it would plunge into life, a life of pleasure, but it has

really only plunged into consciousness of its own lifelessness and has as its lot only empty and alien necessity, a dead actuality.

However, consciousness does not understand that by defining actuality as pleasure, as passive enjoyment, it has itself brought about its own necessity, which it considers to be an absolutely inexplicable fate.

Gillian Rose, Hegel contra Sociology

(the Verso edition is fantastic, by the way)