Alemania mira a la India: una visión postsaidiana del orientalismo alemán

Abstract

One of the most criticized aspects of Edward Said’s Orientalism, the great classic in the field of postcolonial studies, has been its remarkable oblivion of German Oriental studies. This article proposes to analyze German Orientalism in order to allow a re-evaluation of Said's conclusions. To this end, we will focus on the areas referred to as India. In the first part, the text gives an account of the character of the early German contacts with the Indian world. Here we will see how German Romanticism begins to approach India under the strength of its enthusiasm. We will revisit the major intellectual bearers of this Indian bias (Herder and F. Schlegel) and some other attitudes to this phenomenon (Goethe, Schelling or Heine). Without a clear perception of how German Romanticism envisaged India it is impossible to understand the very roots of Orientalism. The point of connection between the enthusiastic love of German Romanticism for India and the acid denigration of the Indian and the Oriental3 Other2 in the works of Hegel lies in the position that this Other was reaching in the historical thought of that time. Herder’s or F. Schlegel’s deep Orientalism, in Said’s sense, is not hidden in their poetical works but in their reflections on Philosophy of History, which will prepare the field for Hegel’s wild attack in his Vorlesungen iiber die Philosophie der Geschichte. History, inextricably linked to ethnocentrism, will be from then on the real underpinning of Orientalism. But India would also become a battlefield for post-Romantic German thinkers. We can see it paradigmatically in the works of Schopenhauer and, above all, in those of Hegel, whose strike against India can also be seen as a vicarious strike against the Romantics.