Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is not only one of the most difficult texts in the history of philosophy, but also a text that seems to have given rise to a greater variety of interpretations than other great works in philosophy. This is doubtlessly due to the literary devices that Hegel employs in order to present the reader with the forms of thought that one way or another have left their traces on the self-understanding of his contemporaries. Recently, various interpreters, all women, have proposed readings of the Phenomenology that highlight the literary aspects of the work. Moreover, they oppose efforts to portray Hegel as someone who was primarily concerned with progress, closure and totality. Finally, they, one way or another, explore the emotions they take to be at issue in the text. Thus, in Hegel and Shakespeare on Moral Imagination (SUNY 2011) Jennifer Bates reads the Phenomenology in tandem with Shakespeare's plays. Focusing on Hegel's account of the French Revolution, Rebecca Comay's Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford UP 2010) reads Hegel in light of contemporary trauma theory.

Like Comay's and Bates’ works, Katrin Pahl's Tropes of Transport not only includes analyses of literary texts in her account of Hegel's Phenomenology, but also highlights elements of the text that in her view have been ignored by traditional interpretations. Drawing on Nancy and Butler, among others, Pahl proposes that we read the Phenomenology as ‘a path of despair’ (182) rather than as an account that culminates in absolute knowing. Yet despair is far from the only emotion she discusses. One of her reasons to explore Hegel's text is to find support for her view of the intricate relation between reason and the emotions as such. The terms ‘immediacy’ and ‘mediation’, she argues, do not map onto emotion and reason, because Hegel shows ‘that every certainty that seems immediately evident and fresh to a particular consciousness proves…socially and historically mediated’ (4). Accordingly, she uses Hegel to explore to what extent emotionality is constituted by mediation—which she takes to mean, first, that any emotion is both real and a manipulation of the real (5) and, second, that emotion and reason are entangled to such an extent that neither necessarily dominates the other (13).

Seen from this perspective, Pahl offers an interesting contribution to recent interdisciplinary studies of affect and emotion. Yet apart from this systematic strand her book consists of two other strands. The second strand, closely related to the first, is concerned with sections of the Phenomenology that deal explicitly with emotions. In this context, Pahl primarily examines Hegel's critical account of feeling and pathos (chapters 1 and 2). The third strand—probably the most challenging one—concerns the question as to how we should understand the transitions between the various chapters of the Phenomenology (chapters 3 to 7). Pahl introduces the term ‘transports’ to argue that the transformation each mode of consciousness is forced to undergo is propelled not so much by a process of self-reflection as by a trembling that is primarily emotional. As she sees it, this transformation is characterized not by ‘the organic unfolding of an inner core’, but rather by ‘self-loss and discontinuity’ (32). This means that she considers the various modes of consciousness in view of what they lose on the way (their initial purported identity) rather than in view of the result (a less one-sided mode of consciousness).

The first chapter, titled ‘Heart’ sets the stage by arguing that Hegel's assessment of emotionality is much more positive than has often been assumed. According to Pahl, Hegel's discussion of feeling in the section on ‘the law of the heart’ does not depreciate the role of feeling as such, but criticizes the conception of feeling represented by German pietism and Rousseauian sentimentalism alike. Against Rousseau's portrayal of feeling as immediate, natural, authentic and immune to both external influences and reflection, Hegel is said to bring to the fore ‘the self-differentiating, self-disrupting—even self-lacerating—and self-reflecting quality of emotion’ (22). As Pahl convincingly shows, Hegel does this by demonstrating that the culture of sensibility collapses because of a double bind that constitutes its very essence: this culture demands, on the one hand, that the values of the heart be realized and, on the other hand, that they not be tainted by the public realm, that is, remain locked within the realm of interiority. Examining Hegel's account of ‘the beautiful soul’ in this light, Pahl argues that Hegel here and elsewhere deconstructs the assumption of an interior realm that subsequently expresses itself in the element of exteriority. For Hegel, it is only through exteriorization and mediation that something like interiority can be brought about.

While Pahl's claim that Hegel undoes the inner-outer opposition is not exactly new, it is original in that she does not conceive of Hegel's alternative in terms of sublation. As she sees it, Hegel is at least as much concerned with the impossibility of establishing the unity of contrary moments. Her approach is also original in that she explores the implications of this view primarily with regard to the various emotions at play in the Phenomenology.

The second, and main, part of the book consists of chapters with titles such as ‘Release’, ‘Tremble’ and ‘Broken’. Chapter 3, titled ‘Release’, examines the ‘emotional syntax’ she takes to be at work in the final chapter of the Phenomenology. For Pahl, this chapter is by no means the culmination of the quest of consciousness for absolute knowing. ‘Rather than close the circle of spirit's self-explorations once and for all’, she writes, this chapter ‘finds more and more ways to indicate openings’ (83). On her account, the last pages of the work are concerned with acts of release (entlassen) and externalization (entäußern) rather than with sublation, completion and closure. Pahl even takes the conclusion of the Phenomenology to represent ‘an abortion of the project of self-knowledge’ (85). Yet whereas her references to terms such as entlassen are suggestive, she actually does not consider in detail the passages in which Hegel uses this term. As I see it, these passages refer to the ‘free’ decision of speculative philosophy to leave the sphere of pure thought—that is, the sphere of the Logic—and move to the sphere of thought insofar as it exhibits its essential determinations in (our knowledge of) nature and spirit. If there is abandonment, one might argue, then it is only for the sake of achieving a more complete form of absolute knowing. In line with her overall approach, Pahl, by contrast, focuses on those elements of the text that she takes to testify to a form of abandonment that is not put in the service of self-actualization. In her view, this obtains first and foremost of the final lines, in which Hegel presents a modified version of a few lines from Schiller's poem ‘Friendship’. Abruptly interrupting his last sentence on how absolute knowing achieves itself through recollecting and preserving particular modes of spirit, Hegel writes of absolute spirit (according to Pahl's translation):

Pahl is particularly interested in the kind of fluid at stake in these lines, suggesting, because of a similar image in Schiller's ‘Ode to Joy’, that the foaming something might refer to sperm resulting from a lonely ejaculation (85) or to a fluid that Hegel elsewhere calls universal blood (87). More in keeping with her general theme, emotionality, she writes a few pages later that the self-emptying that Hegel discussed earlier on in terms of entlassen in the last sentences ‘takes the form of a shedding of tears’ (95). Moreover, Hegel is said to empty himself here and to abandon control over the book (95). But why? Why can the passage not simply be taken to mean that absolute spirit, at the end of its consideration of finite modes of spirit, is presented with its proper infinity for the first time? Pahl's reading here seems to sever all ties with rational argumentation and contextualization. There are some references to passages by Hélène Cixous on tears, but it is hard to see how these can be used to support a meaningful account of the text. Whereas I can follow Pahl's effort to read the Phenomenology in view of what is lost on the way rather than in view of what is allegedly gained in the process, in pages such as these she goes much further than that. Her effort to break away from rational discourse and so to perform what she defends will probably be appreciated by a number of literary theorists, but is likely to meet with resistance on the part of philosophers working on Hegel.

Addressing the section on Mastery and Servitude, the chapter titled ‘Tremble’ is no less indebted to Cixous. Pahl here argues that no individual consciousness is able to experience absolute fear, but that moments of absolute fear rather emerge from the transitions between the various chapters of the Phenomenology. Reading these transitions ‘in dialogue with’ Cixous’ L'Ange au secret (1991), she highlights that each mode of consciousness is at some point confronted with the impossibility of maintaining its initial conception of itself. Pahl uses the term ‘tremble’ to refer to the state in which consciousness can neither go back to its initial position nor can move on to the next, in other words, ‘oscillates between two shapes or figures of itself’ (168). For her, ‘the moment of synthesis in Hegel's dialectic does not consist in the next higher form of consciousness, but precisely in this turning point, this blank, this flash of an instant that cannot be grasped because it is the concept itself that trembles and turns at this instant’ (177). Pahl rightly argues, it seems to me, that Hegel's treatment of these moments defies a logic of continuous progression. Yet I am not sure that this is a reason to conceive of these moments as locuses of absolute fear.

The final chapter, apart from an epilogue, is titled ‘Broken’ and reiterates themes discussed in preceding chapters, especially as regards the role of despair. Pahl here addresses, among other things, the sections on the hard heart and phrenology. More explicitly than elsewhere, she aims to bring out the discrepancy between, on the one hand, the teleological thrust of the work that the reader is supposed to endorse and, on the other hand, the despair that befalls each of the protagonists of the Phenomenology. Whereas we are supposed to interpret their development as a form of ‘cultural maturation’, seen from their perspective it is rather a matter of being tortured or dismembered (182). Pahl thus challenges the priority of the alleged teleological strand of the text and invites us to pay attention to those elements of the work that run counter to our expectations.

Put this way, Tropes of Transport offers a valuable contribution to continental readings of Hegel. Pahl defends the relevance of Hegel's philosophy against critics who take his work to be totalitarian in an original way. Yet her embrace of the Hegel that fascinates her makes it very hard to keep an eye on aspects of his work that in my view do call for critical reflection. Pahl presents her reading ‘as remaining true to the Hegelian text by transforming it’ (14). Few readers will doubt the transformative nature of her work. Whether it still makes sense to refer to truthfulness in this context is another matter.