Abstract

ABSTRACT:

Taking as a point of departure a costume the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel wore to a New Years’ party in 1808, this paper considers the significance of clothing for theorizing a historicist criticism. Clothing serves Hegel as both a figure for superficiality and the accidental, as in the Philosophy of History, but also, in the Lectures on Aesthetics, a key mode of situating representations of individuals within historical time. Through this reading, clothing emerges as a symptom of Hegelian historiography in ways that highlight the mutual reliance of aesthetic and historical categories in thinking the category of the plastic, that is to say the spiritual or intellectual character of sensuous form.

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