Orientalism, Philology, and the Illegibility of the Modern World

Orientalism, Philology, and the Illegibility of the Modern World examines the philology of orientalism. It discusses how European (and in particular German) orientalism has influenced the modern understanding of how language accesses reality and offers a critical reinterpretation of orientalism, ontology and modernity.

This book pushes focusses on the global history of knowledge, entangled between European and non-European cultures. Drawing from formal oriental studies, epigraphy, travel literature, and theology, Henning Trüper explores how the attempt to appropriate the world by attaching language to the notion of a ‘real’ reference in the world ultimately produced a crisis of meaning. Thus, received understandings of the intellectual genealogies of oriental scholarship and its practices are challenged.

This study is a meaningful contribution to current discourses about philology and adds to our understanding about the relationship between discursive practices, cultural agendas, and political systems. As such, it illuminates not only the history of Europe and the modern world, the history of philology, but also serves to historicize the prevalent debates in theory.