Orientalism, Philology, and the Illegibility of the Modern World

Henning Trüper

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350117396
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Historia de la arquitectura

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 an innovative focus on the global history of knowledge as 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. In the process, Trüper convincingly challenges received understandings of the intellectual genealogies of oriental scholarship and its practices. This ground-breaking study is a meaningful contribution to current discourses about philology and significantly adds to our understanding about the relationship between discursive practices, cultural agendas, and political systems. As such, it will be of immense value to scholars researching Europe and the modern world, the history of philology, and those seeking to historicise the prevalent debates in theory.

1

After Philology, a Wild Goose Chase

1. Stratigraphy of a Name

Edward Said, in his landmark study, marginalized the history of philology as a constituent of Orientalism, which he regarded as dominated by patterns of imagination that followed a fantasmagoria of power. The scholarly and literary fields coincided. Many of the ensuing polemics followed his lead. This choice was in keeping with general tendencies. At the time of the publication of Orientalism, disdain of “philology” was widespread. The term had come to represent a misplaced and dated confidence in methodological objectivity and a narrow-mindedness in the choice of objects of research that was a prime target of criticism as well as ridicule. Not only did the methodological precepts of philology appear profoundly flawed, previous scholarship had also discredited itself from a political point of view, especially by the reckless promotion of nationalism, anti-Semitism, racism, and imperialism. To boot, philology seemed fatally entangled in the outdated ideal of politics as national education that had been the hallmark of nineteenth-century classicist “humanism,” but had, in spite of its high-minded rhetoric, only ever produced authoritarian characters.

Nonetheless, a modicum of respect for philological tradition had never quite faded. Philological method, as it was criticized, was also refined and driven to new extremes, as for instance in the critique génétique movement that sought to disassemble the very notion of a finite text and shifted edition to all available manuscript stages.¹ Moreover, in certain institutionally smaller fields, such as indeed many “Orientalist” ones, the establishment of literary studies as an autonomous sub-discipline, in imitation of the secession of linguistics in the 1850s–70s,² never quite occurred. The messy commons of traditional philology always remained under the till, no matter the disregard of those who had fenced off sizable properties of their own. As an almost ironical outcome of these (and, no doubt, further) ambiguities, in an influential posthumous intervention from 2003, Edward Said, a representative of autonomized literary criticism, even saw fit to call for a “return” to philology, with a phrase that continues to resound in the textual disciplines.³

Leaving aside all the objections the discipline of history would traditionally raise against the very concept of “return”—the inexorability of change, the distastefulness of nostalgia—nonetheless, the volte-face in the overall debate also indicates that something about philology itself has remained in a dead angle. This defect of vision also impairs, I will seek to show, the historical understanding of Orientalism. Hence, as a first step, it appears imperative to explore the historical drift of the meaning of the concept of “philology.” This exploration will pass through a veritable stratification of meanings. It will reveal, successively, why it is requisite, for understanding the modern history of philology, to look at the German context; at the referential meanings of names; at theorization in philology; at the role of Orientalism; and at semantics tout court and its relations with grammar.

This procedure requires a certain definitional openness. Decidedly, philology cannot be taken to be a stable set of procedures of such generality—say, comparison, contextualization, interpretation—that the epistemological side of the discipline is exiled into ahistoricity and its changes can only be grasped as externally induced forms of institutional or political differentiation.⁴ At the same time, the exploration ought not to be satisfied by limiting itself to the history of the growth of a discipline, the emergence of a profession, or the often heinous political and cultural impact of philological discourse in the modern era. Certainly, these are important topics, but their prominence has often meant that discussion eschewed the basic question that concerns the history of the founding of a “science”—in the broader sense of German Wissenschaft or, also, French science—on the processing of linguistic meaning, that is to say, semantics.

2. Returning Returns

With what I think is best regarded as deliberate irony, for his lecture on the “return to philology,” Said appropriated a title that had already been coined by Paul de Man (1919–1983) in 1982.⁵ According to de Man, philology actually coincided with “theory”: “[I]n practice, the turn to theory occurred as a return to philology, to an examination of the structure of language prior to the meaning it produces.”⁶ The enmity toward semantics here expressed, namely the deeply counter-hermeneutic notion that reading is about decoding something more fundamental than mere meaning, in this case the insurmountable semiotic instability of text itself, has a long and complex history, to which de Man here hardly alludes. His notion that philology coincides with a concern for linguistic “structure” (i.e. beyond textual meaning) constitutes a serious historical distortion since the very program of studying “structure” in language and text had emerged in the context of late-nineteenth-century aggressions against philology. The “return” de Man proposes therefore does not entail recurrence to past method by way of conscientious historicization. His notion of the instability, the “flight” of meaning aims to subvert historicity.⁷ Similarly, he ought not to be credited with “the apparent advocacy of a new and improved form of philology,”⁸ which would have been similarly subject to ironical displacement. Rather, the target of “return” was a biographical moment of epistemic and academic initiation. For de Man, theoretical interest in textuality was grounded, or so he maintained in 1982, in the experiences of Reuben A. Brower’s (1908–1975) “slow-reading” exercises at Harvard in the 1950s. What was at stake, in other words, was a subtly ironized moment of personal nostalgia.

One may presume that it was less deliberately ironical of de Man to use the label of “philology” in order to mark this period of initiation. Brower, who had spent most of his teaching career at Amherst before eventually moving to Harvard, had received his academic training in England, at Cambridge, under the tutelage of I. A. Richards (1893–1979). Richards’s own brand of “criticism”—indeed the very introduction of the label of “criticism” for literary studies in Britain—was driven by the desire that had emerged during the First World War, to purge literary studies from “philology.” Philology as a label and, however vaguely, a practice had come to appear too German, too pedantic, too historical-contextual, too culturalist, too unable to understand the true, humane, psychological, transhistorical, and multivalent meanings of literary texts that were supposed to be read on their own account.⁹ “Close reading,” as advanced by Richards and others, was not a “text-immanent” existentialist hermeneutics, as e.g. proposed, in a distantly cognate move, by the Swiss Literaturwissenschaftler and Heideggerisant Emil Staiger in the 1950s.¹⁰ Rather, the Cambridge program pursued a pragmatist-leaning, partly empirical-psychological study of what happened during the interpretation of texts, especially if these were stripped of contextual and para-textual information.¹¹ Richards removed titles and author names from poems and gave them to his students to read in this format, then published their responses. In its choice of opponent, this almost experimental-empiricist understanding of literary form corresponded to other, better-known interwar period trends of anti-historicism including, especially, multiple variants of structuralism.

Nonetheless, de Man failed to see, or so it seems, the threads connecting the various anti-philologies that had informed his education. When the British brand of criticism—fused with the contemporaneous American “new criticism” and toned down by a less polemical and more German-influenced academic environment in the United States—was imparted to de Man in the 1950s, apparently it was easy to mistake for “philology.” Admittedly, it also seems possible that de Man deliberately sought to undermine the tradition to which he had been initiated at Harvard; and yet, the relative absence of a theorization or even just a problematization of “philology” from his oeuvre is remarkable. Philology, arguably, remained a blind spot for the theorist of “blindness” in reading.¹²

The implicit conflation of divergent traditions of “philology” and “literary criticism” may also have been due to one of the eternal returns of Nietzsche, whose works provided indispensable points of reference for de Man.¹³ The “definition” of “philology” reproduced in the “Return” article was that of Roman Jakobson, who had stated that philology was simply the “art of reading slowly.” This aphorism, which appears to have circulated orally rather than in written form, probably had originated in a Nietzschean “idea,” as Sheldon Pollock has suggested.¹⁴ In a famous passage at the end of the “Preface” of Morgenröthe (Daybreak), Nietzsche remarks:

besides, both of us are friends of the lento, I and my book. One has not been a philologist in vain, and perhaps one still is, that is to say, a teacher of slow reading:—finally, one also writes slowly. At present it is not only part of my habits, but also part of my taste—a malicious taste perhaps?—to write Nothing that does not drive to despair any man who is “in a hurry.” For, philology is that venerable art which exacts from its admirers one thing above all, to step aside, to take one’s time, to grow silent, to become slow.¹⁵

The unsteadiness of Nietzsche’s qualifications of the discipline in which he had himself been educated is admittedly notorious: philology, the life-throttling pursuit of irrelevant antiquarianism; philology, the relentless teacher of “Pyrrhonic” skepticism and epistemic reticence (epokhe); philology, the only possibility of uncovering the forgeries of “will” that make up so-called reality; philology, the author of such forgeries in turn.¹⁶ In any case, in the Morgenröthe preface, what Nietzsche means by “slowness” is not the same as what the slow-reading “new critics” pursued, but rather a manipulation of the sense of time, of rhythm (lento),¹⁷ of the malign provocation of an “age of ‘work,’ that is to say of haste, of indecent and sweaty alacrity, which wants to ‘get done’ with anything instantly.”¹⁸ This critique of hastiness in reading and writing could then appear as ultimately addressing a modern condition of alienated labor. Such a politicization of “slowness,” though hardly an accurate reading, provided a way of identifying Nietzsche’s “art”¹⁹ of philology with the destination of an imagined return in the 1980s or the 2000s. In this process, perhaps abetted by the aphoristic abbreviation Jakobson had introduced, all the warning signs Nietzsche scattered over the passage were ignored: the personification of the book next to the author, the allegation of the impotence of philology-as-reading without philology-as-writing, the necessity of being contrarian and minoritarian, the need for manipulating the sense of time, the primacy of music and rhythm over text—it was not to any of these aspects that de Man proposed to return. Again, this was in keeping with his education. Brower, when describing his method as “reading in slow motion,” used a cinematic metaphor rather than a musical one, thus emphasizing the readerly gaze over the holistic temporal sentience Nietzsche had pursued. De Man’s overall aim, even in the short and, so to speak, popularizing “Return to Philology” article, was connected to his project of disabling the “aesthetic ideology”²⁰ of the modern period: the Kantian notion of the foundational character of aesthetics within systemic philosophy as a prime site of judgment that had to bridge the gulf between theoretical and practical reason; the autonomy of artistic play as a foundation for sociability, as found in Schiller’s “aberrant” reading of Kantian aesthetics; the ensuing notion of aesthetic education; and its translation into projects of national disciplining and violent state-building that led de Man to conclude his lecture on Schiller’s reception of Kant with a quotation by the failed literary writer and failed academic Germanist Joseph Goebbels.²¹ After all, a subterranean similarity to Said’s relative suppression of the history of philology in Orientalism may be discerned in de Man’s political adumbrations. Both authors sought to salvage philology from the wreckage of modernity.

Said, who famously opposed deconstruction and its ideas about reading and “theory” and, as a literary critic, nurtured a certain degree of professional hostility toward de Man,²² nonetheless shared the embrace of Nietzsche as well as the reliance on Jakobson’s formula, and he, too, explained his attachment to the name of philology by reference to his own education: “Philology is, literally, the love of words, but as a discipline it acquires a quasi-scientific intellectual and spiritual prestige at various points in all of the major cultural traditions, including the Western and the Arabic-Islamic traditions that have framed my own development.”²³ If philology is taken to be a goal-directed historical process, its telos is the production of readers, disciplinary and disciplined and “framed.” Philology amounts to civilization through tradition, civilization as acquired through “acts of reading done more and more carefully.”²⁴ Such reading forms

the abiding basis for all humanistic practice. That basis is at bottom what I have been calling philological, that is, a detailed, patient scrutiny of and a lifelong attentiveness to the words and rhetorics by which language is used by human beings who exist in history: hence the word “secular,” as I use it, as well as the word “worldliness.”²⁵

This basis is moral, it is the “humanism” Said advocates in the lectures collected in the volume, and it is biographically acquired and sustained, therefore a virtue, whose acquisition and sustenance is not merely a matter of one’s own investment of time and effort, but a matter of initiation, a rite of passage, hence education in institutions. It is readerly “responsibility,” the ethos of philology, that arguably marks the difference to de Man. For Said, the art of reading carefully promises the possibility of convergence across cultural boundaries. Reading is not an epistemic product of “the West.” Further, it is not merely a technology of empire, but an escape. Indeed, it is hardly surprising that at least in such cultural contexts where the authoritative use of textual documents is of great importance, certain forms of textual study emerge. The circulation of encryptions and decryptions between imperial domination and Orientalism coincided with a kind of reading that was both technical and legal. Yet, at its best, if it halted on the details and figures of text, such reading practice allowed for its own subversion. Philology was to open an emergency exit to humanism.

Said, here and elsewhere, relied on the authority of Leo Spitzer (1887–1960) and Erich Auerbach (1892–1957), who over time, especially in American literary criticism, have come to be regarded as veritable embodiments of philology.²⁶ These scholars, however, pursued very specific, one might even say idiosyncratic, approaches to the study of literature that deliberately broke with procedures and practices that had previously been regarded as constitutive of philology. Spitzer, in particular, whose background was in linguistics and whose early studies concerned patterns of spoken discourse and its pragmatics, built much of his work on a rejection of standing procedures and values of philology, such as the prioritization of canonical writers and of classical antiquity. Auerbach’s concerns for “figuration,” for the theory of “representation” in literature, for the roles of detail and temporality, likewise have little to do with what was perceived, in Germany, as typically philological in the 1920s. Admittedly, their overall understandings of reading and interpretation drew on the notion of a circular movement between part and whole that had been a dominant theorem of German philological hermeneutics since the 1800s. Yet, in their explicit embrace of the modern, the aesthetic, and the semiotic, Spitzer’s and Auerbach’s positions initially were iconoclast and directed at the overcoming, or else the refoundation of philology on new theoretical terms.²⁷ The...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: History in Meaning
• 1 After Philology, a Wild Goose Chase
• 2 The Suicide of Naffa? wad ?Etmân
• 3 The Archive of Epigraphy
• 4 Burdened with Gods
• 5 A Trade in Shadows
• Conclusion: Logos, to Have and Have Not
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint