Changing the Landscape of Emotion through Hegel’s Phenomenology

Paving the way for a new reading of a substantial philosopher is a difficult task to accomplish, and this difficulty is compounded the more complicated the philosopher, and the more famous the text. Given that Katrin Pahl attempts such a feat with a philosopher as difficult as Hegel on a text as influential and revered as the Phenomenology, makes her interpretive endeavors in Tropes of Transport all the more impressive. What makes Pahl’s encounter with Hegel so engaging is the care she takes in problematizing one of the few features of the Phenomenology that does have rather wide ranging agreement, even if there is disagreement about its success, namely, that the Phenomenology charts a logical and necessary progression that culminates in absolute knowing. What’s more, she uses the very problem of how the phenomenology “moves” (its readers, the shapes of spirit, and even the language of the text itself) as the vehicle to put forward an innovative theory of emotion with wide-ranging implications that reverberate well beyond the field of Hegel scholarship proper.