Reddit mentions of Genesis and Structure of Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit" (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy)

What is it that you don't feel like you understand? It would be helpful if you could ask a more specific question. Hegel uses "consciousness" in the Phenomenology both in the more typical sense (meaning something like "an individual's awareness of the external world and of his/her own thoughts") and as a name for the "protagonist" of the Phenomenology, who progresses from Consciousness to Self-Consciousness to […] to Absolute Knowing. As we read the Phenomenology, we are watching as consciousness (in the second sense) makes a series of attempts to understand itself and its world, and we are watching as each of these attempts fails. Or do you specifically mean the "Consciousness" chapter (i.e., the chapter including the sections on "sense-certainty," "perception," and "force and the understanding")?

I'm not sure what else to add without knowing what, specifically, you're struggling with. As a general rule when you're talking about Hegel's philosophy of mind, it would certainly be helpful to know some Kant--particularly (and kind of unfortunately since it's probably the hardest part of Kant) the "Transcendental Deduction." Kant's ideas regarding the transcendental unity of apperception were hugely important to the post-Kantian idealists, including Hegel.

It would also help to know a little bit about K.L. Reinhold's Elementarphilosophie, and his analysis of representation as consisting in three parts: (roughly) 1) the representation, 2) a relating of the representation to a subject, and 3) a relating of the representation to an object. I think you can detect the Reinhold picture when Hegel says things like, "consciousness distinguishes something from itself and at the same time it relates itself to it. Or, as this should be expressed: There is something for consciousness; and the determinate aspect of this relating, that is, of the being of something for a consciousness, is knowledge. However, we distinguish being-in-itself from this being for an other; what is related to knowledge is likewise distinguished from it and is also posited as existing external to this relation; the aspect of this in-itself is called truth" (¶82).

Knowing some Fichte would be good too; ditto Schelling. Honestly, though, I'm afraid that I might be making reading the Phenomenology seem like an extraordinarily daunting task for which you need to spend years preparing yourself, but that's because your request for help is so broad that I don't really know where to focus my recommendations. The Phenomenology is definitely super hard, but you don't need to have memorized the whole history of philosophy to make any sense of it or something.

As I always do when people ask about the Phenomenology, I'll also recommend that you check out from your library or buy Michael Forster's Hegel's Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit and Jean Hyppolite's Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. The Forster is a great overview of what the Phenomenology as a whole is trying to do, though it won't help much with specific sections. The Hyppolite is a straight-up chapter-by-chapter commentary which you can read as you read the Phenomenology: read a chapter, then read the Hyppolite, then go back and read the chapter again--it's a bit time consuming, but you'll get a lot out of doing that. If you can't get the Hyppolite for some reason, go for either the Stern or the Kalkavage texts that do roughly the same thing.

If you want to respond or edit the OP with a more specific question, then I can try to address that more directly.

No. Kojeve was influential, but he read a lot of his own philosophy into Hegel. You'll want to go with Genesis and Structure of Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit" by Jean Hyppolite or The Routledge Guidebook to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit by Robert Stern. Gregory Sadler has an ongoing series on Youtube called Half Hour Hegel which is very helpful. Why Theory's episode on the Preface to the Phenomenology will also help you get started.

This book won't help you understand the Hegel passages as such, but it provides a different translation of that section that might be helpful. It also gives you a sense of how Lordship-Bondship section finds purchase in later (mainly 20th Century) thinkers.

As for reading Hegel, try to get hold of Jean Hyppolite's Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.

The book is written as a companion to the Phenomenology, so the order of the chapters is the same. Also, Hyppolite is a remarkably clear writer who does a nice job of summarizing the entire chapter first, then breaking down specifics.

Start with this and this. However, the two best books on the phenomenology are this and this. Personally, Quentin Lauer's commentary really helped me get a handle on Hegel and I think it is the best that is published. However, this will be the best commentary when it gets published (in full disclosure I was a student of Houlgate when doing my MA and learned Hegel from him and had access to the manuscript of this text learning a lot from it).

I've only read The Phenomenology of Spirit and some of Hegel's theological writings, but I used the following commentaries. I also used the Miller translation, which has paragraph-by-paragraph summaries in the back; these aren't terribly helpful, but they're there.

Werner Marx, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirt: A Commentary Based on the Preface and Introduction.

Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.

I haven't gotten the the impression that Hyppolite is popular in the Anglophone world. That perception may be way off, but I thought it was worth mentioning a bit more about him. His commentary also includes a quality essay on the history of Hegel's reception in France, particularly in the 20th century. The whole commentary is incredibly helpful, but that essay itself is a gem.

From Amazon's description:
>Jean Hyppolite produced the first French translation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. His major works--the translation, his commentary, and Logique et existence (1953)--coincided with an upsurge of interest in Hegel following World War II. Yet Hyppolite's influence was as much due to his role as a teacher as it was to his translation or commentary: Foucault and Deleuze were introduced to Hegel in Hyppolite's classes, and Derrida studied under him. More than fifty years after its original publication, Hyppolite's analysis of Hegel continues to offer fresh insights to the reader.