Raising the veil of history: Orientalism, classicism and the birth of western civilization in Hegel's Berlin lecture courses of the 1820's

While the architecture of Hegel's system posits a singular world-historical Subject evolving from China to Berlin, it punctuates this ascent with sharp divisions and fractures. In the most pronounced caesura, Hegel enshrines a cultural and historical polarization of East and West, distinguishing the two realms as despotic and free. Although Hegel's antithesis of Asia and Europe sometimes assumes the proportions of an invariant and atemporal duality, this bifurcation actually ensues from a dialectical process of de-familiarization and estrangement. Hegel's narrative of self-consciousness is founded upon the assumption of a determinate Eastern origin, an origin whose heteronomous character becomes intelligible only once it has been surpassed and intro-reflected by the Occident. Genealogically traced to its Eastern source, Hegel's Subject simultaneously incorporates and disavows the Orient recuperating and renouncing its own internal alterity.;Explicitly thematizing the problems of Orientalism and historicism, this dissertation examines Hegel's relation to contemporary scholarly research in Asian and Classical studies. In particular, I assess the problems that these nascent disciplines pose for the writing of history and for the concept of a monist historical subject. By reawakening the memories of lost civilizations and reclaiming their forgotten voices, the European "will to knowledge" ultimately reshaped and dislodged the quasi-mythical paradigms sustaining Hegel's grand narrative. For good dialectical reasons, the meta-subject epistemologically self-destructed. It is the purpose of this dissertation to think through the predicament of delegitimation and to indicate strategic domains in which Hegel both resisted and accommodated the encroachment of history upon his narrative of self-consciousness. Insofar as the source material permits, I will distinguish between the older master narratives from the early 1820's as well as Hegel's efforts later in the decade to repolarize an East and West opposition once he realized that this difference had ceased to be tenable.