Figuralizing the Oriental, Literalizing the Jew: On the Attempted Assimilation of Letter to Spirit in Friedrich Schlegel's Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier

Abstract

The doctrine of figura, as Erich Auerbach so usefully explains it, has dominated relations between Jews and Christians from the time of St. Paul and the early Church Fathers to its restatement by Luther, and continues to do so to the present.1 This very powerful and yet highly unstable doctrine organizes the Jewish and Christian religious-cultural group identities in terms of a set of homologous binary oppositions that underlie, above all, the fields of rhetoric, logic, and ontology. Thus, the Jew is determined as (pre)figurative letter and the Christian as literal, spiritual fulfillment; the Jew is seen as (self)different, the Christian as (self)identical; the Jew is associated with the materiality of existence, the Christian with the spirituality of essence. Further, in order to justify the predominance of the second term in each of these binary oppositions, both are placed in a teleological relation, such that the first is temporally prior to, but oflesser value than, the second, which the first however always already implies and to which it inevitably leads. Judaism (and all that it stands for) embodies in advance its unity with Christianity (and all that it represents), but it embodies this unity only in the mode ofprefiguration, self-difference, and letter. And Christianity in turn embodies its unity with Judaism in the mode ofliteral, self-identical spirit. This teleological structure gives the model of figura formidable persuasive power, because it appears to provide a thorough account of both the disjoined and the conjoined aspects of the binary oppositions it invokes. The model of figura remains marked, however, by a radical instability: every ostensibly final synthesis of prefiguration and literal fulfillment, differential letter and identical spirit, is haunted by the possibility that, in the synthetic identification of the binary oppositions involved, the l teral realization (spirit, etc.) has been reduced to the figural anticipation (letter, etc.) and not vice versa. In what follows, I shall illustrate both the tenacious power and the extraordinary fragility of this structure in a detailed reading ofFriedrich Schlegel's treatise, Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier of 1808.2 Schlegel's paradoxically adulatory disparagement of ancient Indian culture there must be understood, I argue, as an attempt to confirm the historical-philosophical model offigura against his very acute sense of its radical instability. More specifically: in order to envision figural-literal unity as Jewish-Christian unity under the sign of the literal truth of Christian spirituality, i.e., in order to envision the total assimilaion of (pre)figural letter to fulfilling spirit, Schlegelfiguralizes ancient Indian culture, while he literalizes Jewish culture. He makes of ancient Indian culture a supplement3-a replacement and repetition-of the Jewish, material (pre)figuration, in order to enable (and this means also to force) Jewish culture to disappear into what he