ABSTRACT
It is curious that Hegel's Phenomenology, a text that explicitly embraces philosophy as a system and aims to “sublate” the thinking of representation, ends with a literary image borrowed from Schiller's poetry. Many authors have tried to come to terms with this issue. This chapter contextualizes Hegel's editing work on what he quoted—for he both paraphrased and misquoted Schiller's text—and contrasts several interpretations of these interventions. While Robert Pippin uses this editing work to argue that Hegel's citation practices follow the speculative logic of/as accommodation and transformation, John McCumber, Rebecca Comay, and Katrin Pahl show in various ways how a series of shifts made by Hegel in misquoting Schiller imply both the resistance of literary imagery to dialectical appropriation and the possibility that his optimistic speculative project would fall apart. Together, these readings demonstrate how differently Hegel's phenomenological project can be judged and interpreted today in its relation to literature and history, as a totalizing system or a precarious enterprise. It also shows how a more detailed reading, which builds on these interpretive efforts, could reveal closer—and broad sweeping—affinities between Hegel and Schiller, both in their speculation and punctuation.
