Philology and Racism: On Historicity in the Sciences of Language and Text

Abstract

The philological turn in textual scholarship is rooted in the critique of literary theory and the search for objectivity in the understanding of texts. But if the idea of focusing on the immanent structures of texts has been at the origins of modern philology, problems of meaning and translation produced a surplus during the course of the nineteenth century that can be described in terms of cultural hermeneutics. Thus historical philology emphatically widened its praxis toward cultural understanding. Edward W. Said and followers have explored the implications of this in relation to the constituting of European discursive hegemony. If the return to philology is not to be the nostalgic expression of regret at the ongoing decline of classical scholarship, it must take this past into account. Analyses that have focused on the problem have been driven primarily by the experience of civilizational failure and have elaborated a model of the discursive production of power. But how can philology possibly develop perspectives about its status and praxis within contemporary debates if it continues to neglect the heterogeneity within its own historical discourse? The article sets out to identify and analyze traces of resistance against the imperial cultural model of historical philology.