For people who leaf through Tropes of Transport, I would want to bribe the goddess of chance to let the pages part at one of the points where I discuss the effects of free indirect discourse. For example this one, on page 196:Then again, Hegel’s use of free indirect discourse gives him the liberty to swing all the way back to a sympathizing identification with the phrenologist. Hegel gives him credit, suggesting that the future of spirit harkens back to the phrenologist when he feels some embarrassment about his position. The thing that is the phrenologist’s mind knows embarrassment – a promising fact, one would think…A mix of sincere identification and ironic distance characterizes all the discussions in the Phenomenology. Philosophical texts traditionally make atemporal truth claims in the name of the author. The Phenomenology’s conceit is that we are accompanying the self-assessment of exemplary worldviews. This conceit temporalizes truth and creates a complex temporal plasticity. The Phenomenology presents its epistemes by oscillating often imperceptibly between the voice of “natural consciousness” and the phenomenologist’s voice. Hegel thus uses a philosophical version of free indirect discourse—a narrative technique that blurs the distinction between the voice of the narrator and the voice of a character.I find it crucial to attend to the workings of free indirect discourse in Hegel because such a practice of reading brings into view the situatedness of his truth claims and foregrounds the plasticity of emotional subjectivity. The topic of emotion is often used to buttress an unelastic first-person perspective. Free indirect discourse presents the difference between internal and external exchanges as hard to pin down. It thus facilitates an ethics of sympathy.The fact that the Phenomenology has a protagonist (“consciousness”) and a first-person plural narrator (“we” – the phenomenologist/s) demands that the reader attend to the difference between the perspectives of the author, the narrator, and the protagonist. When Hegel discusses, for example, “feeling” or “pathos,” he doesn’t develop his theory of emotion. Instead, he offers a critical analysis of the assumptions at work when one conceives of emotion as feeling or as pathos. Free indirect discourse thus produces distance, but at the same time it allows for identification. It creates an intimacy with commonly dismissed positions that would be precluded by a more straightforward approach.Hegel’s voice resonates through all of the shapes of consciousness and is in none of them. That is what makes him the villain of the history of philosophy. The villain is the figure who deceives, who assumes other identities—usually to get ahead. Hegel wears the masks of his protagonists in order to propel the development of self-consciousness. Consciousness makes its way through the phenomenological narrative by relentlessly rising above its station. All the subject positions of the Phenomenology—even the author and the reader—are villains in this sense. And the ethics of sympathy has just received a rather ironic touch.I hope that Tropes of Transport encourages readers to develop the speculative tools, the attitude, and the awareness required to respond to the awkward, confusing, and equivocal demands of emotionality. I show that Hegelian dialectic serves as an important resource in this endeavor because it is precisely not a regulated process of calm resolution through the mediation of stable terms. Rather, it is a messy dynamic where each pole is folded into its opposite so that both continually and internally modify one another, and where knowledge or awareness doesn’t follow with necessity but “bursts forth” as if by accident.Through the concepts of transport and emotionality, Tropes of Transport generates accounts of affective life that are attentive to both its materiality (foregrounded by affect theory) and its self-reflexivity or subjectivity (usually associated with emotion). The book, thus, treats the concepts of emotion and affect not so much as oppositional terms than as part of a series of terms that modulates questions of subjectivity, materiality, movement, relationality, and becoming.While I insist on subjectivity, I am not trying to resurrect the notion of the subject that has been successfully deconstructed. Far from conjuring up the unified subject, I develop an account of emotional subjectivity as plural and torn. Less interested in the subject as person or autonomous agent, I turn my attention to impersonal forms of subjectivity—where subjectivity simply means self-reflexivity and self-reflexivity need not be conscious.Transports transform and they create a multiplicity of selves along the way. The emotional subject is never an individual—it is divided or multiplied within by the history of its previous figurations that are aufgehoben or folded into the story of its future unfoldings.Every seemingly independent individual that forms emotional relations to others is itself already mediated, that is to say, it is the result of a history of emotional self-transformations that, each time, involve the identification with others and that also, each time, deposit a remainder of otherness within the self.Hegel finds subjectivity on both sides of the conscious human individual: in the self-reflexivity of plants, for example, as well as in the worlds generated by spirit. In Tropes of Transport, I attend, in particular, to text and textuality as forms of impersonal self-relations.If all goes well, the account of emotion proposed in this book encourages hearts to stop laboring at dramatizing passion and to embrace lightheartedness instead.