An Emotional Hegel

The task of Katrin Pahl’s Tropes of Transport: Hegel and Emotion is twofold. It both offers a new interpretation of Hegel’s thought by showing the heretofore underappreciated role that emotions play in the conceptual movements and textual rhythms of The Phenomenology of Spirit and, in so doing, argues for Hegel’s importance for contemporary theorizations of emotions. The result is a rendering of Hegelian thought that demonstrates its fragility, ambivalence, and corporeality. In displacing the grand teleological portrait of Hegel in favor of a critical, trembling, and nuanced one, Pahl’s reading stands in a line of interpretations informed by deconstruction, such as those of Judith Butler and Jean-Luc Nancy, that have largely led to a revitalization of Hegelian thought in the last two decades. What makes Pahl’s work new and exciting, even within this lineage, is the way it stresses and expounds the intimate centrality of emotional movements, or what Pahl calls “transports,” to Hegel’s speculative thought. In order to accomplish this, the book offers a reading at once literary, rhetorical, and philosophical of the Phenomenology that remains both close to the text and external to it (for example, there are enjoyable moments when Hélène Cixous and Clarice Lispector are used as theoretical frames to balance and elucidate Hegel’s text). Pahl’s particular methodological innovation lies in an acute attunement to the distinctions and interconnections between different levels that exist in the Phenomenology: “the syncopating measures of poetic rhythm, the virtual present of theatrical enactment, and the folded sequence of narrative” (tt, 6). Pahl shows how the teleological fulfillments promised by the narrative sequence of the Phenomenology are undermined by its rhythmic irregularities, revealing a speculative dialectics that is no longer a firm three-step march but rather a precarious and hesitant movement. The result is a reading of the work that is a movement back and forth across the text, one that pays attention to its nonhierarchical mingling and its tremulous cadences. Given the overwhelming tendency of interpretations of the Phenomenology to themselves directly reproduce the Phenomenology’s structure, such a nonlinear approach presents a highly welcome disorientation.

In Pahl’s hands, the Phenomenology becomes a fertile textual terrain upon which to explore critically many commonly held assumptions about emotions. One of the central aims of the book is to bring to light how the Phenomenology displays and performs the limitations, self-contradictions, and failures of the Enlightenment paradigm of understanding emotions in contrast to reason. In the first half of the book, Pahl shows that Hegel was the first rigorous philosophical critic of this paradigm that characterized emotions as immediate, interior, and subjective, effectively severed from the harsh realities of the objective world. As Pahl summarily puts it,

Hegel’s radical contribution to the philosophy of emotionality consists in suggesting that, in their self-tearing and self-embracing dynamic, concepts themselves are emotional. . . . Hegel rein-scribes the emotionality that traditional philosophy has severed from conceptual life back into the concept itself.

(tt, 104)

For Hegel, then, concepts are dynamic and emotional in themselves, and emotions, in turn, cannot be severed from reason. Hegel insistently rejected the shared Enlightenment and Romantic dissociation of emotions from concepts, interiority from the world; in such practices of division he detected not simple descriptive claims about the nature of things but a violent misapprehension that deformed what it attempted to describe. To understand emotions as sincere immediacies first possessed by a subject and subsequently made external only in a secondary, derivative way through the process of (self-)expression is to misunderstand their power. Emotions call into question the very subject that is supposed to possess them. They are not states but movements that transport and dispossess. Emotions are not interiorities to be expressed, but always already disturbing exteriorities that mark the self-othering, self-emptying, and self-alienation that for Hegel are to be embraced rather than resisted. Tropes of Transport shows how the speculative movement that arises from the...