Research

See also https://mun.academia.edu/ShannonHoff and  https://www.mun.ca/hss/research/researcher_of_the_month/2019/01_2019_shannon_hoff.php

CURRENT PROJECTS

How to Read Hegel Now

I’ve just finished a book called How to Read Hegel Now, which will come out in Spring 2026 with University of Chicago Press. This book is a demonstration of how to discern in the philosophical tradition the capacities it has to speak to problems of oppression, offering original theses concerning why and how to do so. Each chapter offers a lucid description of one of the ideas central to Hegel’s philosophy—recognition, ethical life, conscience, and objective spirit—and pairs it with contemporary thinkers who are particularly apt at revealing practices of oppression and exclusion that disavow these aspects of experience. The idea of recognition is discussed in tandem with Frantz Fanon’s analysis of vulnerability to racist perception and Jessica Benjamin’s analysis of the sexist disavowal of relationality. Ethical life is paired with thinkers of settler colonialism and decolonial critics of feminist imperialism in their condemnation of the colonial disavowal of the experience of (what Hegel calls) ethical life. The idea of conscience is linked to Fanon’s critique of the imperialist, liberal disavowal of the relation between ideal and its expression. Finally, Hegel’s notion of objective spirit is paired with analyses of capitalist and ableist restrictions of the material coupling of body and world that is the essence of free activity. In its passage through these concepts, the book builds a critical response to the abstractions of liberal political life, which does not adequately acknowledge the historical, interpersonal, material, and determinate terms of our construction.

     Table of Contents

     Introduction: How to Read Hegel Now

     Chapter One: How We Live Now

     Chapter Two: The Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness

  • The Struggle to the Death
  • Mastery and Servitude
  • Fanon and Racist Perception
  • Benjamin on the Mother-Other
  • Coda: Hegel on Gender

     Chapter Three: Ethical Life

  • Greek Ethical Life
  • Ethical Life and Philosophy
  • Freedom
  • Coulthard, la paperson, and Settler Colonialism
  • Mahmood, Abu-Lughod, and Colonial Feminism

     Chapter Four: Conscience

  • Conscience
  • Fanon, Merleau-Ponty, and Liberalism
  • Absolute Spirit
  • Dramatic Poetry

     Chapter Five: Objective Spirit

  • The Dimensions of Materiality
  • Canguilhem, Garland-Thomson, and Ableism
  • Sartre and Counter-Finality
  • Hegel on Civil Society, State, Constitution, and Government 

     Conclusion

Beyond Sex and Gender

My new project spans phenomenology and gender. In the history of philosophy, significant effort has been made to describe the relationship between free human beings and nature. On the one hand, we are natural beings, with bodily processes that operate inside of and governed by the nature we find around us. On the other, however, we also experience ourselves as shaping the trajectory of our own lives and thus “making” our nature, able to reflect on any natural process and to answer to meaning and not just biology. The second step has been particularly important for feminist, trans, and queer opposition to the idea that women and men should perform different roles appropriate to the specific processes of female and male bodies, but neither has particularly mobilized the insights of the history of philosophy’s discussion specifically of nature and the ambivalent status it has in human life.

Harnessing the insights particularly of Hegel and Merleau-Ponty, the project aims to redress this gap in contemporary scholarship and to develop a trans/queer/feminist metaphysics, in the following steps:

To develop, drawing from Hegel and Merleau-Ponty in particular, an interpretation of the intimacy of object and experience, nature and “ideality” (Hegel), perceived and perceiving (Merleau-Ponty), particularly as they are manifest in the body, which as object puts us in reality, while as experience is that by which we “have” reality in our perspective.

To ground two theses on the basis of these interpretations of Hegel and Merleau-Ponty:

  • that ideality and materiality are originally joined in the body;
  • that body and world are also originally joined, such that experience reflects material structures.

To mobilize these theses for feminist, trans, and queer theory:

  • with the first, challenging the traditional distinction between sex and gender, while developing a non-dualist account of the import of bodily determinacy to feminist/trans/queer theory;
  • with the second, showing how the types “woman” and “man” are entrenched because of worldly forms of organization, and how they admit of transformation.

To mobilize these theses, and Hegel’s and Merleau-Ponty’s critiques of consciousness and reflection, to develop self-critical reflection on the activity of philosophy as such.

Theoretically, I want to show how the ideality and meaning associated with human experience emerges in and from nature; that bodies, as a piece of the natural world and as the home of experience, are the pivot between objectivity and experience; and that our approach to bodily determinacy should not commit us to the idea that discourse and nature are fundamentally separate: the domain of discourse is not pure, and the domain of nature is not brute.

Music

A second project in the works is an album of music to be recorded with Toronto musicians Tania Gill, Chris Banks, Don Scott, and Aidan McConnell. These songs engage philosophical and literary texts from Plato to Aristotle, Hegel, and Merleau-Ponty; from Annie Dillard to Euripides and Virginia Woolf.

BOOKS

The Laws of the Spirit: A Hegelian Theory of Justice (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014)

The Laws of the Spirit argues that for a society to be just it must answer to three priorities: the essentiality of formative cultural contexts that Hegel identifies under the name of “ethical life”; the priority of individual self-determination reflected in liberal conceptions of positive law; and the ways in which we find ourselves singularly answerable to moral and spiritual meanings that are irreducible to our contexts of cultivation and our existent legal structures, or “conscience.”

ESSAYS

“White Gaze as a Concept in Phenomenology,” Springer Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, edited by Nicholas de Warren and Ted Toadvine (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47253-5_417-1. This paper distinguishes three distinct layers in the white gaze: the encounter; the inherited world that backs it up; its own being-at-home. It uses phenomenology’s analysis of these three categories to illuminate the tensions of human experience, and Fanon’s analysis of the white gaze to show how these tensions are disavowed in bad faith by racism.

“Hegel and Wynter on the Problem of Human Self-Cognition,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 78, no. 309 (2024): 71-90. This paper brings Wynter's idea of “homo narrans” and her critique of Man1 and Man2 into dialogue with Hegel's notion of absolute spirit, particularly his thoughts about tragedy.

“A Phenomenological Account of the Conditions of Transnational Feminism,” Symposium 27, no. 2 (Fall 2023): 66-82. https://doi.org/10.5840/symposium202327215. This paper puts Russon’s phenomenological analysis in Sites of Exposure in conversation with Serene Khader's efforts to furnish a set of core values for transnational feminist praxis that, while universal in their opposition to sexist oppression, are not imperialist, and with Saba Mahmood's critique of the parochial character of Western conceptions of freedom.

“The ‘Civilization of the Universal’: Intersectionality, Decoloniality, and the Phenomenological Revision of Philosophy,” Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology 6, no. 1 (December 2023): 19-42. https://doi.org/10.61372/PJCP.v6i1.2. The intersectionality argument challenges “single-axis thinking” (Crenshaw) and the decolonial critique of Eurocentrism challenges the assumption of “zero-point hubris” (Castro-Gómez). This paper brings decolonial and intersectional thought into conversation with Merleau-Ponty so as to consider how philosophical thinking should operate in light of these risks.

“Intimate Exposure: A Feminist Phenomenology of Sexual Experience and Sexual Suppression,” Hypatia 38, no. 1 (Winter 2023): 198-218. https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2023.10.  Accounts of sexual experience, sexual oppression, and sexual violation, if they are not to lend support to the problems they are invoked to address, require the foundation of a phenomenological description of the character of experience. Relying on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I aim to provide this foundation, arguing that sexual experience is a domain not of detached, individual autonomy but of intrinsic susceptibility and exposure to the world.

“Ethical Life and the Feminist Critic,” in Handbook on German Idealism and Feminist Philosophy, edited by Susanne Lettow and Tuija Pulkkinen (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), pp. 293-308. This paper shows how Hegel's notion of ethical life can shed significant light on both the nature and demands of feminism, particularly in relation to intercultural feminist praxis.

“Desiring Law, Desiring Meaning: Kristeva on the Nature of Freedom,” Anekannt: A Journal of Polysemic Thought 8 (2021): 5-17. This paper draws from Kristeva’s various writings a general picture of her approach to the character of freedom.

“A View from an Apartment: Hegel on Home and Homelessness in Romantic Art,” in Hegel and Art, ed. Stefan Bird-Pollan and Vladimir Marchenkov (Bloomsbury 2020). This paper discusses Hegel's analysis of romantic art and its illumination of the distinction between objective and absolute spirit, showing how inhabitation of both “objective” and “absolute” domains shapes the character of human existence.

“Hegel on Tragedy and the Character of Freedom,” Festschrift in honour of Lambert Zuidervaart, ed. Michael DeMoor, Peter Enneson, and Matt Klaassen (Wipf and Stock 2019). This paper uses Hegel’s analyses of ancient and modern tragedy to illuminate the importance of developing an account of the freedom of social participation in addition to individual freedom.

“The Right and the Righteous: Hegel on Confession, Forgiveness, and the Necessary Imperfection of Political Action,” in Phenomenology and Forgiveness, ed. Marguerite La Caze (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019). With the help of Hegel's discussion of forgiveness, I argue here for an approach to political action that embraces its necessary specificity and political judgement that affirms this, choosing solidarity over righteousness.

“Hegel and the Possibility of Intercultural Criticism,” in Hegel and Canada: Unity of Opposites?, ed. Neil G. Robertson and Susan M. Dodd (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), pp. 342-367. In discussion of feminism's historically charged approach to the religious and cultural practices of Muslim women, this paper argues for the necessity of recognizing both the cultural specificity that colours all of our systems of meaning (“ethical life”) and the imperative that that specificity be itself answerable to the demand for intercultural communication (“conscience”).

“Pain and Agency: A Critique of Liberal Political Ontology,” in The Self in Pain: Essays in Cultural Ontology, ed. by Siby K. George (Heidelberg: Springer, 2016), pp. 211-223.

“Politics in Public: The History of Identity and the Aspiration to Universality,” in Public Sphere from Outside the West, ed. V. Sanil and Divya Dwivedi (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 259-274.

“Locke and the Nature of Political Authority,” The Review of Politics 77, no. 1 (Winter 2015): 1-22. This paper discusses Locke’s pivotal account of political authority and consent, showing its implicit commitment to cultivating the social conditions that enable individual agency.

“Translating Principle into Practice: On Derrida and the Terms of Feminism,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy SPEP Supplement 29, no. 3 (2015): 403-414. Using the tension between the unconditional and conditional in Derrida, specifically in his analysis of hospitality, I argue that the very concept of “woman” definitive for feminism must itself be open to challenge within feminism, discussing specifically its relation to trans issues and to the issue of reproductive freedom.

“Rights and Worlds: On the Political Significance of Belonging,” Philosophical Forum 45, no. 4 (2014): 355-373. Heidegger’s notion of “world” is used here to show that commitments to individual rights require accompanying commitments to the worlds of significance upon which individuals rely for the development of meaningful lives.

“Inheriting Identity and Practicing Transformation: The Time of Feminist Politics,” philoSOPHIA 2, no. 2 (2013): 167-193. Here I discuss the history of feminist theory, arguing that its internal diversity is essential to it and should be affirmed by feminist practitioners: it must answer to liberal ideals, but also to the elements of human experience by which they are constrained: the significance of human interdependency and care, and the importance of holding identities open to creative re-enactment.

“The Colonization of Significance and the Future of the Nation: Fanon, Derrida, and Democracy-to-Come,” PhaenEx 8, no. 1 (2013): 59-90. With Fanon and Derrida, this paper defends a specific kind of nationalism in the face of the oppressive employment of Western “universalism” in the context of colonization.

“On Law, Transgression, and Forgiveness: Hegel and the Politics of Liberalism,” Philosophical Forum XLII, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 187-210.

“Law, Love, and Life: Forgiveness and the Transformation of Politics,” Philosophy Today SPEP Supplement 54 (2010): 153-62.

“Wendy Brown and the Critique of Tolerance,” Radical Philosophy Review 11, no. 1 (2008): 35-50.

“Restoring Antigone to Ethical Life: Nature and Sexual Difference in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit,” The Owl of Minerva 38 (2007): 77-99.

“Confession, Forgiveness, Solidarity: Hegel's Theory of Law in the Phenomenology of Spirit,” Philosophy Today SPEP Supplement 50 (2006): 31-38.

“Introduction: Witnessing,” Studies in Practical Philosophy 3, no. 2 (2003): 1-9.

“Artificial Respiration: On Life, Environment, and Machine,” in Wood: A Compendium of the Blackwood Gallery's Exhibitions and Projects in 2009 (Toronto: C. J. Graphics, 2011).

BOOK REVIEWS

Mary Rawlinson, The Betrayal of Substance: Literature, Death, and Sexual Difference in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), in philoSOPHIA 12 (2022): 225-29.

Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda, The Dash—The Other Side of Absolute Knowing (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018), in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (2019). https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/the-dash-the-other-side-of-absolute-knowing/

Mary Rawlinson, Just Life: Bioethics and the Future of Sexual Difference (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), in Symposium (2018). https://www.c-scp.org/2018/07/22/mary-rawlinson-just-life-bioethics-and-the-future-of-sexual-difference

RESEARCH GRANTS

2019-2024: SSHRC Insight Grant ($124,664), “Being Gendered: On Women, Feminism, and Philosophy”

November 2017-April 2019: SSHRC/VP Research Grant ($6,988.36), “Feminism and Philosophy”

2015-2018: Start-Up Grant ($14,553.90), Memorial University of Newfoundland

October 2002-June 2004: Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) Scholarship (€15,000), Universität zu Köln