In contrast to Heidegger's fastidious placement of death in Being and Time, Hegel stages several encounters with death throughout the Phenomenology of Spirit. This textual dispersion of death, along with the complexity of Hegel's text, makes understanding the role of death in the Phenomenology difficult. Death can be found in every section except consciousness, which I will argue below is a significant exception. The encounters with death that we will examine in this section occur in 1) the ‘struggle for recognition’ and 2) the ‘master and servant’ sections of the chapter on self-consciousness, 3) the ‘ethical order’ and 4) ‘terror’ sections of spirit, 5) the ‘revealed religion’ section of the chapter on religion, and 6) ‘absolute knowing’. In each of these encounters death takes on a different shape according to the type of community that encounters it. Thus, rather than the single account of death that we find articulated in Being and Time, Hegel presents death as being continually transformed throughout the Phenomenology.

I will argue that the continual transformation of death throughout the Phenomenology is indicative of a fundamentally different relation to death. As we saw in Heidegger's account of death, the individuating relation that Dasein has with its own death and the existence of Dasein as always being towards death suggest the structure of melancholia.