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Tropes of Transport: Hegel and Emotion is an original, closely argued, and rigorous engagement with Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit, an engagement that remains true to the Hegelian text by transforming it in consistently surprising and provocative ways. To begin, let me lay out some of the ways Pahl deftly negotiates what she defines as the “double bind” of her reading practice (84), a practice whose method of transformative reading is derived from the text’s own economy, so that, as she writes “(paradoxically) I remain true to the Hegelian text by transforming it. As a result, no matter how much I alter the text, my reading will still be Hegelian—but hopefully I will have been a good friend and will have introduced a shift in the meaning of ‘Hegelian’” (84). Like everything else upon which the study touches, the notion of friendship is given a very particular twist in Tropes of Transport; this is most apparent in the discussion of the end of the Phenomenology where Hegel cedes the last word to Schiller, quoting his poem “Friendship” (94–96). As Pahl brilliantly argues, it is at the very limit of the Phenomenology, at the moment the text is expected to state what spirit knows when it has come to know itself, that systematic discourse instead breaks into song (95).

Such a shift confirms Pahl’s contention that absolute knowledge, having been nothing but the path toward absolute knowledge, cannot be reduced to a statement. Not only does the citation of Schiller hold the text open at its close but, in doing so, it gives place to a scene in which the very notion of “friendship” is redefined. Here Pahl shows herself to have been a “good friend” by demonstrating how “friendship” involves a complex citational practice (94–99). Letting Schiller speak in his place, Hegel in one sense abandons control over the book. Yet, in another sense he continues to speak through the passage he quotes, speaking like a ventriloquist through Schiller. At stake here is not only the status of the poem “Friendship” and its equivocal placement at the end of the Phenomenology but a renegotiation, more generally, of the relationship between philosophy and poetry. According to the terms of this new friendship, neither philosophy nor poetry speaks alone. Instead, each gains its voice through the other, through a certain twisting of the other’s words. While Pahl traces further twists in this increasingly contorted interrelationship, twists whose subtlety and dialectical rigor are truly admirable, it must suffice here to note how almost every [End Page 300] term initially used in a straightforward sense—terms such as “Hegelian,” “friendship,” and “quotation”—comes in Pahl’s reading to be surrounded by quotation marks. I take the proliferation of these marks to be emblematic of her approach, of the way she remains true to the “Hegelian” text by transforming it.

This transformative process in which Pahl participates begins, she argues, with Hegel’s own engagement with tradition, with a philosophical language he has been sent [geschickt] that is not suited [nicht geschickt] to express speculative truths (108). Hegel, she notes, does not “argue with tradition” nor does he simply “desist from presenting or exposing the speculative” (108). Striking an unsteady compromise between two ways of philosophically constructing propositions—speculatively and argumentatively [räsonnierend] (109), a compromise that will be ceaselessly renegotiated in the course of the Phenomenology—Hegel develops an expositional rhythm wherein these different modes of construction “take part in one another while taking each other apart” (109). As always, Pahl takes pains to unpack what might at first appear as slick word play. Thus, she continues, “[t]raditional logic does not persist untouched; it is shaken by the speculative rhythm. Similarly, by embracing the very logic that rejects the speculative, Hegel invites trouble in the heart of his philosophy” (109).

Rhythm is a major theme of Pahl’s study and it is the great virtue of her approach that it resists the...