In the discourse of the late German Enlightenment, figures of the Orient from the Near East to China play a role in a wide range of discussions, from the anthropological to the theological to the political. In these discussions, however, notions about exemplary ethics tend to outweigh concerns with historical narrative. That is, the predominant aim in the late Enlightenment is to establish a universally valid ethical structure. It is to this project that notions about Oriental virtues and vices are subordinated. An Oriental culture can function, in the late German Enlightenment, as a potentially useful comparison or contrast with...

In this chapter, I illustrate the Orientalist application of medieval typology in German romanticism by examining crucial structural aspects of Friedrich Schlegel’s treatiseOn the Language and Wisdom of the Indians(Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier) of 1808.¹ Although German romantic invocations of medieval typology in an Orientalist modality do not, of course, all take the exact form of Schlegel’s argumentation and rhetoric, one could carry out readings similar to the following, with respect to a broad number of German texts, such as Novalis’sDisciples of Sais and Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Achim von Arnim’sIsabella von Ägypten, the...

The neo-Catholic Orientalism of Friedrich Schlegel constructs a typological narrative in which the Orient prefigures an Occident that, within itself, turns around a three-step sequence of Jewish-Protestant-(neo-)Catholic. This sequence is conceived in terms of an ontological-metaphysical rather than a chronological process, as I’ve spelled out above and in other writings on Schlegel. Goethe’s very different approach to the Orient is dictated by his entirely different relationship to the topic of human history and, within human history, to religion. This very different relationship conditions in Goethe a turn to a poetic medieval Persia as his privileged Oriental interlocutor in theWest-East...

On the basis of the preceding discussion of typology and the metaphysics of presence in the “Notes and Treatises,” we are now in a position to see how the poetry itself, the main body or act of Goethe’sWest-East Divan, belongs to the typological tradition but also displaces it. Goethe does not want to negate modernity and the discourse of the understanding (Verstand), as do some romantics, like Friedrich Schlegel, as we saw above. Indeed, Goethe indirectly attacks in theDivanSchlegel’s successive overvaluation and under valuation of the Orient in the form of ancient Indian culture.¹ He does not...

According to a very simple but still far-reaching observation of Jacques Derrida’s, the consequences of which he never tired of unfolding, with admirable if sometimes maddening tenacity: Any bordering frame that delimits an inside from an outside belongs simultaneously to both inside and outside, since it must be outside the inside and inside the outside.¹ The border is thus also inside and outside of itself; it is its own inside and outside borders. Moreover, each of these inside and outside borders of the bordering frame is constituted in turn ad infinitum by this self-displacing structure.

The understanding of this (il)logic...

Schopenhauer occupies a very important but also ambiguous place in modern Orientalist metaphysics. To circumscribe his place, I begin by delineating three interrelated displacements he effects within the German (and more broadly the European) philosophical tradition.

First, he makes explicit like no philosophical thinker before him (with the possible complex exception of Schelling) the confrontation with groundlessness that occasions modern Orientalism.¹ Indeed, at least up to a certain point, he is capable of affirming and assuming this groundlessness in its necessity. Let me expand on this point briefly before proceeding.

Schopenhauer assumes or accepts groundlessness under the figure of the...

As we have seen, across the long nineteenth century, German intellectuals such as Herder, F. Schlegel, Goethe, and Hegel develop modern, historicist Orientalism. Schopenhauer in turn, among others, calls ambivalently for an end to it.¹ In widely diverse philosophical, literary, and philological manifestations, the historicists apply figural interpretation to the project of positing and appropriating an Oriental cultural and metaphysical origin of the human spirit. Instead of being ungrounded by being grounded in what is outside of oneself (and what may itself lack substantial foundations), one is now grounded in oneself to the degree that one has appropriated the outside...

The invasion of barbaric nomads from the outside might be construed as having been a relatively metaphorical matter for Kafka, although he wrote about them during World War I and had his own extensive and painfulpersonal experiences with invasion by the Other, including the tuberculosis that would be diagnosed several months after he composed the Chinese Wall texts.¹ But the invasion is for sure a politically, militarily acute reality for Freud when, in his last Vienna years (from 1934 on) and then in exile in London after theAnschluß, he writesMoses and Monotheism, his major contribution to the ongoing...