Dubilet Emotional Hegel

8/11/2019 Dubilet Emotional Hegel

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An Emotional Hegel

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 Emotionis twofold. It both offers a new interpretation of Hegels thoughtby showing the heretofore underappreciated role that emotionsplay in the conceptual movements and textual rhythms of ThePhenomenology of Spiritand, in so doing, argues for Hegels im-portance for contemporary theorizations of emotions. The resultis 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 nuancedone, Pahls reading stands in a line of interpretations informed bydeconstruction, such as those of Judith Butler and Jean-Luc Nan-cy, that have largely led to a revitalization of Hegelian thoughtin the last two decades. What makes Pahls work new and excit-ing, even within this lineage, is the way it stresses and expoundsthe intimate centrality of emotional movements, or what Pahl callstransports, to Hegels speculative thought. In order to accom-

plish this, the book offers a reading at once literary, rhetorical, andphilosophical of the Phenomenologythat remains both close to thetext and external to it (for example, there are enjoyable moments


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qui parle spring/summer 2014 vol. 22, no. 2178

when Hlne Cixous and Clarice Lispector are used as theoreti-cal frames to balance and elucidate Hegels text). Pahls particularmethodological innovation lies in an acute attunement to the dis-

tinctions and interconnections between different levels that exist inthe Phenomenology: the syncopating measures of poetic rhythm,the virtual present of theatrical enactment, and the folded sequenceof narrative (TT, 6). Pahl shows how the teleological fulfillmentspromised by the narrative sequence of the Phenomenology areundermined by its rhythmic irregularities, revealing a speculativedialectics that is no longer a firm three-step march but rather aprecarious and hesitant movement. The result is a reading of the

work that is a movement back and forth across the text, one thatpays attention to its nonhierarchical mingling and its tremulouscadences. Given the overwhelming tendency of interpretations ofthe Phenomenologyto themselves directly reproduce the Phenom-enologys structure, such a nonlinear approach presents a highlywelcome disorientation.

In Pahls hands, the Phenomenologybecomes a fertile textualterrain upon which to explore critically many commonly held as-sumptions about emotions. One of the central aims of the book isto bring to light how the Phenomenologydisplays and performsthe limitations, self-contradictions, and failures of the Enlighten-ment paradigm of understanding emotions in contrast to reason.In the first half of the book, Pahl shows that Hegel was the firstrigorous philosophical critic of this paradigm that characterizedemotions as immediate, interior, and subjective, effectively severed

from the harsh realities of the objective world. As Pahl summarilyputs it,

Hegels radical contribution to the philosophy of emotionalityconsists in suggesting that, in their self-tearing and self-embracingdynamic, concepts themselves are emotional. . . . Hegel rein-scribes the emotionality that traditional philosophy has severedfrom 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. Hegelinsistently rejected the shared Enlightenment and Romantic disso-


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Dubilet: An Emotional Hegel 179

ciation of emotions from concepts, interiority from the world; insuch practices of division he detected not simple descriptive claimsabout the nature of things but a violent misapprehension that de-

formed what it attempted to describe. To understand emotions assincere immediacies first possessed by a subject and subsequentlymade external only in a secondary, derivative way through the pro-cess of (self-)expression is to misunderstand their power. Emotionscall 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 alreadydisturbing exteriorities that mark the self-othering, self-emptying,

and self-alienation that for Hegel are to be embraced rather thanresisted. Tropes of Transportshows how the speculative movementthat 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 languageand rhythms of emotional transports.

The second half of the book isolates and fleshes out multipleemotional figurations of Hegelian negativity. Release, juggle, ac-knowledging, tremble, and broken each receive a chapter. Taken asa whole, they produce an emotional syntax of Hegelian thought.Like the movement of experience that is so central to the statesand transitions that make up the Phenomenology, these emotionaltransports 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 figures of the text, Pahl pays attentionnot only to the declared philosophical project or conceptual stakeswithin a given section but its textual performance, the very rhetori-cal and linguistic fabric of Hegels text. For example, her chapteron release centers on the famous Absolute Knowledge sectionof 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 inthe figuration of Absolute Knowledge. Throughout the section,


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as she notes, the signifiers of release proliferate: versions of the

term self-emptying(Entuerung) alone appear twenty-eight times

in the final fifteen pages. But beyond the language of release that

permeates the chapter, Pahl shows how the textual nuances of thefinal section, including its poetic citation of Schiller and the gram-

matical incoherence of its final lines, point less toward the grandi-

ose culmination of self-knowledge and more toward a letting go of

the very possibility of such fulfillment.1Instead, she finds in Hegels

text an affirmation 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 andanonymous. The implications of this insight are stark: Hegelsthought is not humanistic or anthropocentric, but pushes to therealm of the non-individuated and non-humanand perhaps eveninhuman. Extending Pahls explicit statements a bit, one could saythat emotion, thought, and life cannot be ascribed to the individualwithout being surreptitiously appropriated, deformed, and invert-ed, since fundamentally they are what breaks down and exceedsall individuality. This is why the most powerful and productiveparts of Hegelian thought lie in his articulation and defense of theindispensability of movements that break down the subject, itspossessions and self-possessions, in order to open onto somethingmore common, more anonymous and infinite. Drawing upon these

movements of troubling and emptying, Pahl seeks to revitalize anethics (of existence, but also of reading) based on a radical sympa-thy that does not connect the self to the other, but troubles the verydistinction between them, undoing their difference (TT, 116).

Pahl insightfully contrasts Kierkegaards insistence on the unsur-passability of the individual to Hegels articulation of the passingof 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 individualand its perspective, Hegel formulates a position that takes emo-tions, thought, and even life itself as impersonal, in excess of all


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forms and subjects that appropriate, enclose, and possess them. Toput the distinction between Kierkegaard and Hegel in this way isuseful insofar as it resists two other possible ways of articulating it.

The first, originally offered by Kierkegaard himself, sees in Hegela demented (ontotheological or egological or pantheist) metaphy-sician unable to deal with individual existencea caricature de-ployed by many critics of Hegel to this day. The second, the morerecently popular position, seeks to show that many of Kierkeg-aards movements were already prefigured, in an unacknowledgedand subterraneous way, in the Phenomenology, thereby eliding thedifference 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 anda semantics for a thought coming after the waning of the subject.

Pahl convincingly argues that Hegel marks the movement froman expressive model to a textual model of emotion, from, that is,a model based on an interiority expressing outward to a modelof pure exteriority in dissemination, unrestricted by intentional-ity and no longer possessed by a subject. At the same time, onewonders whether, given Hegels many avowals of a Spinozan lin-eage (which frequently goes underappreciated in contemporaryscholarship for various methodological and ideological reasons),one could read Hegels elaboration of self-emptying and external-ization as converging with expressionist thoughtalbeit not the

one that presupposes a fully constituted subject of expression. In-stead, Hegel could become linked with the theory of expression-ism that affirms dynamic movements of immanence that subvertall transcendence, desubjectivation that breaks down constitutionand self-possession, and externalization that undoes all interiority.Which is to say, it is precisely in the movements in which Pahl sees adevelopment of textuality that one also finds points of convergencewith Deleuzes immanent and expressionist thought (in a way that

Deleuze, arguing against the anthropological Hegelianism, wouldnever have himself allowed).3The dynamic, impersonal, immanentHegel that emerges in the text would then become an interlocu-


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tor to, and an innovative iteration of, the tradition of immanentexpressionist thought that Deleuze articulated throughout his life,most memorably in Expressionism in Philosophy. Pahls decision

to read Hegel in opposition to Deleuze, however, is justified insofaras, for Pahl, the discourse of emotionality we find in Hegel is notone of intensity of affect but of mediation, one that always includeswithin 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-externalizinggap 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 infinite judgment, theI becomes a thing and not just another I. Emotions, then, are bothsingular and common, both real and constructed.

As with any interpretation of Hegels thought that focuses spe-cifically on the Phenomenology, the question arises whether it re-mains supportable in Hegels later systematic works. It is of coursetrue that critiques of interiority and the necessity of self-alienationpersist throughout Hegels writings, but how exactly are the tropesof transport reconfigured in Hegels subsequent writings, and whattheoretical role does the syntax of emotions play in Hegels workas a whole? One moment where this question arises with particularforce is in Pahls insistence on the importance of reading Hegelsaccount of action in terms of theatricality. In contrast to readingsthat stress the centrality of tragedy and tragic conflict, Pahl sees

Hegel as ultimately proposing a theory of action as theatrical per-formance combining lightheartedness, distance, and gravity. ForPahl, it is the Greek gods who inhabit existence with a theatricallightheartedness and tragic pathos, a kind of oscillation that retainsboth the seriousness of passion and ironic self-diremption, mov-ing between heavenly and earthly terrains: Like Nietzsche, Hegelneeds both: irony andsincerity, tragedy and comedy (TT, 79). Pahlconvincingly 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


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does not address the possible reading of Hegel that stresses neithertragic 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 preciselyat those conceptual moments that the movement of self-emptying,externalization, and disindividuation become key for speculativethought. It is precisely there that the self- humbling, self-emptying,and self-transforming of spirit (TT, 34) that are central to Pahlstheorization of transport are again articulated. The question thatremains, then, is, what is the relation between the virtual presence

of theatricality and the dynamic of spirits infinite movement ofself-emptying that stresses the necessity of dispossession and theproduction of anonymous emotion, life, and thought? Even despitethis question, however, Tropes of Transports exploration of therole of theatricality and mediation convincingly shows that bothtragedy and sincerity are insufficient categories for understandingHegels thoughtand thus becomes a valuable new addition to anincreasing array of contemporary Hegelian variations.

Overall, Tropes of Transport offers a complex and non-reductiveengagement with the Phenomenology. As such, much of the insightand pleasure that it affords the reader comes from its detailed read-ings and micro-explorations. A book review cannot do justice tothe pleasure of the text. So, by way of conclusion, allow me topoint to two particularly enlightening instances among such intri-cate interpretations. In the fifth chapter, Pahl makes a convincing

argument that the famous Anerkennenof the master-slave dialecticshould be rendered not as recognition or recognizing but as ac-knowledging, because the prefix An- signifies a movement towardand not a doubling back that carried in the English by re-. Just asimportant, she argues, is to retain the term in the form of a gerundin order to ensure its being understood not as a state but as a con-tinuous process. Another instructive moment is hidden in one ofthe footnotes, where Pahl insightfully explains that Hegel uses the

singular Concept rather than the more traditional conceptsin the plural because the Hegelian Begriffturns fixed separationsinto permeable differences, it creates an ontological immanence


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where all differences can be viewed as differences within the con-cept and not between distinct concepts (TT, 245). This referenceto 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 dynamicself-movement that incorporates into itself, through an immanentinter-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 readingsof Hegel. See Rebecca Comay, Mourning Sickness: Hegel and theFrench Revolution(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010); and

Jean-Luc Nancy, Restlessness of the Negative, trans. Jason Smith andSteven Miller (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).

2. Shrinking the distance between Hegel and Kierkegaard has taken avariety 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: Hegeland the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012),193240. For iek, the seminal rupture of the nineteenth centuryis less the one withHegel enacted by Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer,and Nietzsche than the one that Hegels thought itself performs. Asa result, in many of ieks interpretations, Kierkegaardian insightsare folded back into a generalized Hegelian theoretical framework.From a different perspective, Judith Butler has offered a reading of

Kierkegaard that figures 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), 36395.

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, seeGilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson

(London: Continuum, 2002).4. Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, trans. Leonard Lawlor and

Amit Sen (Albany: sunyPress, 1997).

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Dubilet Emotional Hegel