An Emotional Hegel

alex dubilet
A review of Katrin Pahl, Tropes of Transport: Hegel and Emotion
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2012). Cited in the text as TT.
The task of Katrin Pahls Tropes of Transport: Hegel and Emotion
is twofold. It both offers a new interpretation of Hegels 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 Hegels im-
portance for contemporary theorizations of emotions. The result
is a rendering of Hegelian thought that demonstrates its fragility,
ambivalence, and corporeality. In displacing the grand teleologi-
cal portrait of Hegel in favor of a critical, trembling, and nuanced
one, Pahls reading stands in a line of interpretations informed by
deconstruction, such as those of Judith Butler and Jean- Luc Nan-
cy, that have largely led to a revitalization of Hegelian thought
in the last two decades. What makes Pahls work new and excit-
ing, even within this lineage, is the way it stresses and expounds
the intimate centrality of emotional movements, or what Pahl calls
transports, to Hegels speculative thought. In order to accom-
plish 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
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when Hlne Cixous and Clarice Lispector are used as theoreti-
cal frames to balance and elucidate Hegels text). Pahls particular
methodological innovation lies in an acute attunement to the dis-
tinctions 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 fulllments
promised by the narrative sequence of the Phenomenology are
undermined by its rhythmic irregularities, revealing a speculative
dialectics that is no longer a rm 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 Phenom-
enologys structure, such a nonlinear approach presents a highly
welcome disorientation.
In Pahls hands, the Phenomenology becomes a fertile textual
terrain upon which to explore critically many commonly held as-
sumptions 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 Enlighten-
ment paradigm of understanding emotions in contrast to reason.
In the rst half of the book, Pahl shows that Hegel was the rst
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,
Hegels 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 them-
selves, and emotions, in turn, cannot be severed from reason. Hegel
insistently rejected the shared Enlightenment and Romantic disso-
Dubilet: An Emotional Hegel
179
ciation 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 de-
formed what it attempted to describe. To understand emotions as
sincere immediacies rst possessed by a subject and subsequently
made external only in a secondary, derivative way through the pro-
cess 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 breakdown of the perspective of individual in-
teriority hardened against the movements of self- emptying and ex-
ternalization is predicated on and articulated through the language
and rhythms of emotional transports.
The second half of the book isolates and eshes out multiple
emotional gurations of Hegelian negativity. Release, juggle, ac-
knowledging, tremble, and broken each receive a chapter. Taken as
a whole, they produce an emotional syntax of Hegelian thought.
Like the movement of experience that is so central to the states
and transitions that make up the Phenomenology, these emotional
transports refer to the variety of processes that trouble the consis-
tency of the subject, of consciousnesss own self- understanding. Ul-
timately, they reveal the necessity not of clinging to ones truth but
of following the paths of dissolution and emptying. In her elabo-
rations of these emotional gures of the text, Pahl pays attention
not only to the declared philosophical project or conceptual stakes
within a given section but its textual performance, the very rhetori-
cal and linguistic fabric of Hegels text. For example, her chapter
on release centers on the famous Absolute Knowledge section
of the Phenomenology in order to argue against reading it in ac-
cordance with the expectations of teleological closure. To do so,
she highlights the texts dramatic overemphasizing of the move-
ments of release, giving up, self- emptying, and open- endedness in
the guration of Absolute Knowledge. Throughout the section,
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as she notes, the signiers of release proliferate: versions of the
term self- emptying (Entuerung) alone appear twenty- eight times
in the nal fteen pages. But beyond the language of release that
permeates the chapter, Pahl shows how the textual nuances of the
nal section, including its poetic citation of Schiller and the gram-
matical incoherence of its nal lines, point less toward the grandi-
ose culmination of self- knowledge and more toward a letting go of
the very possibility of such fulllment.
1
Instead, she nds in Hegels
text an afrmation of dependence on others: on the one hand, in its
avowal of the irreducibly interpersonal nature of grief and lament
(which Pahl elucidates through a reading of Cixous and Terada); on
the other, in its avowal of acts of citation and reading as friendship.
The speculative truth, revealed in movements of self- emptying,
dispossession, and exposure, is that emotions are impersonal and
anonymous. The implications of this insight are stark: Hegels
thought is not humanistic or anthropocentric, but pushes to the
realm of the non- individuated and non- human and perhaps even
inhuman. Extending Pahls explicit statements a bit, one could say
that emotion, thought, and life cannot be ascribed to the individual
without being surreptitiously appropriated, deformed, and invert-
ed, since fundamentally they are what breaks down and exceeds
all individuality. This is why the most powerful and productive
parts of Hegelian thought lie in his articulation and defense of the
indispensability of movements that break down the subject, its
possessions and self- possessions, in order to open onto something
more common, more anonymous and innite. Drawing upon these
movements of troubling and emptying, Pahl seeks to revitalize an
ethics (of existence, but also of reading) based on a radical sympa-
thy that does not connect the self to the other, but troubles the very
distinction between them, undoing their difference (TT, 116).
Pahl insightfully contrasts Kierkegaards insistence on the unsur-
passability of the individual to Hegels articulation of the passing
of the individual into transport through the movements of self-
emptying and becoming- other that undo the integrity of the indi-
vidual. Against the Kierkegaardian prioritization of the individual
and its perspective, Hegel formulates a position that takes emo-
tions, thought, and even life itself as impersonal, in excess of all
Dubilet: An Emotional Hegel
181
forms and subjects that appropriate, enclose, and possess them. To
put the distinction between Kierkegaard and Hegel in this way is
useful insofar as it resists two other possible ways of articulating it.
The rst, originally offered by Kierkegaard himself, sees in Hegel
a demented (ontotheological or egological or pantheist) metaphy-
sician unable to deal with individual existence a caricature de-
ployed by many critics of Hegel to this day. The second, the more
recently popular position, seeks to show that many of Kierkeg-
aards movements were already pregured, in an unacknowledged
and subterraneous way, in the Phenomenology, thereby eliding the
difference and making the two thinkers speak one voice.
2
Pahls
merit is to retain the singularity and difference of Hegels perspec-
tive, and, in so doing, to show how its stress on undoing, empty-
ing, alienation, and transport remains highly relevant for contem-
porary theoretical discourses that seek to articulate a lexicon and
a semantics for a thought coming after the waning of the subject.
Pahl convincingly argues that Hegel marks the movement from
an expressive model to a textual model of emotion, from, that is,
a model based on an interiority expressing outward to a model
of pure exteriority in dissemination, unrestricted by intentional-
ity and no longer possessed by a subject. At the same time, one
wonders whether, given Hegels many avowals of a Spinozan lin-
eage (which frequently goes underappreciated in contemporary
scholarship for various methodological and ideological reasons),
one could read Hegels elaboration of self- emptying and external-
ization as converging with expressionist thought albeit not the
one that presupposes a fully constituted subject of expression. In-
stead, Hegel could become linked with the theory of expression-
ism that afrms dynamic movements of immanence that subvert
all transcendence, desubjectivation that breaks down constitution
and self- possession, and externalization that undoes all interiority.
Which is to say, it is precisely in the movements in which Pahl sees a
development of textuality that one also nds points of convergence
with Deleuzes immanent and expressionist thought (in a way that
Deleuze, arguing against the anthropological Hegelianism, would
never have himself allowed).
3
The dynamic, impersonal, immanent
Hegel that emerges in the text would then become an interlocu-
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182
tor to, and an innovative iteration of, the tradition of immanent
expressionist thought that Deleuze articulated throughout his life,
most memorably in Expressionism in Philosophy. Pahls decision
to read Hegel in opposition to Deleuze, however, is justied insofar
as, for Pahl, the discourse of emotionality we nd in Hegel is not
one of intensity of affect but of mediation, one that always includes
within itself a way of speaking, a self- relation to oneself as another.
Unlike the non- conscious intensity of affect, emotions require self-
estrangement to take place, an alienation and a self- externalizing
gap within all interiority. To cite but one formulation, We can la-
ment only when we relate to ourselves as something else (TT, 93).
Emotions transform us into an impersonal other, into a something,
in a process that repeats the truth of Hegels innite judgment, the
I becomes a thing and not just another I. Emotions, then, are both
singular and common, both real and constructed.
As with any interpretation of Hegels thought that focuses spe-
cically on the Phenomenology, the question arises whether it re-
mains supportable in Hegels later systematic works. It is of course
true that critiques of interiority and the necessity of self- alienation
persist throughout Hegels writings, but how exactly are the tropes
of transport recongured in Hegels subsequent writings, and what
theoretical role does the syntax of emotions play in Hegels work
as a whole? One moment where this question arises with particular
force is in Pahls insistence on the importance of reading Hegels
account of action in terms of theatricality. In contrast to readings
that stress the centrality of tragedy and tragic conict, Pahl sees
Hegel as ultimately proposing a theory of action as theatrical per-
formance combining lightheartedness, distance, and gravity. For
Pahl, it is the Greek gods who inhabit existence with a theatrical
lightheartedness and tragic pathos, a kind of oscillation that retains
both the seriousness of passion and ironic self- diremption, mov-
ing between heavenly and earthly terrains: Like Nietzsche, Hegel
needs both: irony and sincerity, tragedy and comedy (TT, 79). Pahl
convincingly shows that one cannot reduce Hegels theory of action
to tragedy, but such a stress on theatricality might be more plau-
sible for the Phenomenology than for Hegels thought as a whole.
Moreover, although such a reading does perform a decentering, it
Dubilet: An Emotional Hegel
183
does not address the possible reading of Hegel that stresses neither
tragic annihilation nor theatricality of performance, but the move-
ment of death and regeneration, those speculative rewritings of
Christianity and the death of God that become central in the Re-
vealed Religion section of the Phenomenology. For it is precisely
at those conceptual moments that the movement of self- emptying,
externalization, and disindividuation become key for speculative
thought. It is precisely there that the self- humbling, self- emptying,
and self- transforming of spirit (TT, 34) that are central to Pahls
theorization of transport are again articulated. The question that
remains, then, is, what is the relation between the virtual presence
of theatricality and the dynamic of spirits innite movement of
self- emptying that stresses the necessity of dispossession and the
production of anonymous emotion, life, and thought? Even despite
this question, however, Tropes of Transports exploration of the
role of theatricality and mediation convincingly shows that both
tragedy and sincerity are insufcient categories for understanding
Hegels thought and thus becomes a valuable new addition to an
increasing array of contemporary Hegelian variations.
Overall, Tropes of Transport offers a complex and non- reductive
engagement with the Phenomenology. As such, much of the insight
and pleasure that it affords the reader comes from its detailed read-
ings and micro- explorations. A book review cannot do justice to
the pleasure of the text. So, by way of conclusion, allow me to
point to two particularly enlightening instances among such intri-
cate interpretations. In the fth chapter, Pahl makes a convincing
argument that the famous Anerkennen of the master- slave dialectic
should be rendered not as recognition or recognizing but as ac-
knowledging, because the prex An- signies a movement toward
and not a doubling back that carried in the English by re- . Just as
important, she argues, is to retain the term in the form of a gerund
in order to ensure its being understood not as a state but as a con-
tinuous process. Another instructive moment is hidden in one of
the footnotes, where Pahl insightfully explains that Hegel uses the
singular Concept rather than the more traditional concepts
in the plural because the Hegelian Begriff turns xed separations
into permeable differences, it creates an ontological immanence
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184
where all differences can be viewed as differences within the con-
cept and not between distinct concepts (TT, 245). This reference
to ontological immanence, reminiscent of the late interpretations
of Jean Hyppolite, is a useful reminder that the Hegelian Con-
cept is not merely a static description of the object but a dynamic
self- movement that incorporates into itself, through an immanent
inter- relationality, the multiplicity of what we think of as con-
cepts in a regular, non- Hegelian idiom.
4
Notes
1. In recent years, many have defended such non- imperial readings
of Hegel. See Rebecca Comay, Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the
French Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010); and
Jean- Luc Nancy, Restlessness of the Negative, trans. Jason Smith and
Steven Miller (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
2. Shrinking the distance between Hegel and Kierkegaard has taken a
variety of forms. For example, Slavoj iek has argued that the sup-
posed radical break between Hegel and post- Hegelians like Kierkeg-
aard is premised on the false caricature of Hegel. For a recent exam-
ple of this discussion, see chapter four of Less Than Nothing: Hegel
and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012),
193 240. For iek, the seminal rupture of the nineteenth century
is less the one with Hegel enacted by Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer,
and Nietzsche than the one that Hegels thought itself performs. As
a result, in many of ieks interpretations, Kierkegaardian insights
are folded back into a generalized Hegelian theoretical framework.
From a different perspective, Judith Butler has offered a reading of
Kierkegaard that gures his thought much closer to Hegels own;
see Kierkegaards Speculative Despair in The Age of German Ide-
alism, ed. Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins (London:
Routledge, 1993), 363 95.
3. For Deleuzes expressionist thought, see Gilles Deleuze, Expression-
ism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone,
1990). For Deleuzes most clearly anti- Hegelian pronouncements, see
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson
(London: Continuum, 2002).
4. Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, trans. Leonard Lawlor and
Amit Sen (Albany: suny Press, 1997).