Reading Orientalism by Daniel Martin Varisco

Author:Daniel Martin Varisco
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 2017-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

A TONGUE LASHING FOR PHILOLOGY

Indeed, it is not too much to say that Renan’s philological laboratory is the actual locale of his European ethnocentrism;but what needs emphasis here is that the philological laboratory has no existence outside the discourse, the writing by which it is constantly produced and experienced.

—EDWARD SAID, ORIENTALISM

Representation is a product of language, but philology as the methodological handmaiden for the discourse of Orientalism is singled out by Said for much abuse. In a negative way, this precursor of modern linguistic study is represented solely as a pedantic pastime of dilettantes out of touch with the reality outside texts. Said’s sophomoric dismissal of the crucial impact of philological breakthroughs and methods in shaping the modern intellectual world is breathtaking and at times sudorific. The study of Oriental languages as something other than the profusion of tongues initiated in a fit of Jehovian jealousy at Babel unloosed the grip of a biblio-centric Christian theology over Western thought. Yet Said finds this shift from a dogmatized divine-origin model of language to early exploratory steps in a scientific approach problematic rather than a positive leap forward.

Said’s spin on the origins of philology is a rhetorical slashing that well illustrates his skill in persuading the reader that evil intent lurks even in the dry-as-dust tomes of philology’s modern founders:

What is the category, Nietzsche will ask later, that includes himself, Wagner, Schopenhauer, Leopardi, all as philologists? The term seems to include both a gift for exceptional spiritual insight into language and the ability to produce work whose articulation is of aesthetic and historical power. Although the profession of philology was born the day in 1777 “when F. A. Wolf invented for himself the name of stud. philol.,” Nietzsche is nevertheless at pains to show that professional students of the Greek and Roman classics are commonly incapable of understanding their discipline: “they never reach the roots of the matter: they never adduce philology as a problem.” For simply “as knowledge of the ancient world philology cannot, of course, last forever; its material is exhaustible.” It is this that the herd of philologists cannot understand. But what distinguishes the few exceptional spirits whom Nietzsche deems worthy of praise—not unambiguously, and not in the cursory way that I am now describing—is their profound relation to modernity, a relation that is given them by their practice of philology.29

This lengthy excerpt from Orientalism follows a quote from Balzac’s Louis Lambert, which sets up the three quoted excerpts taken by Said from Nietzsche’s “Wir Philologen.”30 The thrust of the paragraph is to explain why philology, the discipline of guild-maker Renan, was anything but “inconsequential word-study.” It leads to a pronouncement that philology, analogous to his view of Orientalism, is “a way of historically setting oneself off, as great artists do, from one’s time and an immediate past even as, paradoxically and antinomically, one actually characterizes one’s modernity by so doing.”31 In this scenario the early Enlightenment philologists might as well have been medieval, denying the imperially designed motives surrounding their own emerging modernity.

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