Tropes of transport: The work of emotionality in Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit

This dissertation offers a reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit that locates the labor of reflection, or, as Hegel calls it, the "work of the Concept," in the figures of love, fear, despair, and grief. In dialogue with texts by contemporary women writers, particularly Helene Cixous and Clarice Lispector, I provide a feminist rereading of the Phenomenology and argue that these emotions organize the development of the Phenomenology by transporting consciousness across its various shapes.;In accordance with its understanding of emotions as tropes of transport, the dissertation begins with a focus on Hegel's language. I propose that this language accommodates the work of emotionality when it combines two different logics---the logics of the judgment and of the speculative proposition---in rhythmical interaction. Further defining the nature of this interaction as a mutual reflection, or conversation, I locate the origin of speculative logic in the idea of love that Hegel develops in his early fragments. My analysis approaches Hegel's speculative thinking by way of Holderlin's turn to "conversation" in the poem "Andenken" while discussing Holderlin's term Andenken (remembrance) in dialogue with Hegel's notion of Erinnerung (recollection). The communication that love affords is also invoked in the confrontation of Hegel's notion of experience with Kant's theory of aesthetic judgment.;I proceed with a discussion of the points of transition in the Phenomenology as moments of absolute fear. This chapter focuses on trembling, the bodily and textual movement of fear that Helene Cixous helps to understand as a double pull away from and toward the other. With the observation that the experience of absolute fear is lost on consciousness, my dissertation turns to a discussion of despair. In contrast to the common assumption that the Phenomenology is a triumphant story of progress culminating in absolute knowledge, I argue that the development of consciousness is a movement of repeated loss, a path of despair. The conclusion shows how the Phenomenology itself, in its final pages, begins to mourn its own self-dispossession, and addresses questions regarding our role as readers of Hegel, today.