The Potential of World Philology

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philological encounters 1 (2016) 396-418

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The Potential of World Philology

Islam DayehFreie Universität Berlin

[email protected]

Abstract

Drawing on recent calls for a return to philology and on the experience of the interna-tional research programme “zukunftsphilologie: Revisiting the Canons of Textual Scholarship” this essay seeks to problematise these calls by examining some of the potential and fruitful avenues of inquiry as well as some of the challenges that lie ahead for a future “world philology.”

Keywords

world philology – zukunftsphilologie – philological encounters – meta-philology – contrapuntal reading – historiographical engraftments

…Jedenfalls aber ist unsere philologische Heimat die Erde; die Nation kann es nicht mehr sein.

(Our philological home is the earth. It can no longer be the nation.)ERICH AUERBACH, Philology and Weltliteratur (1952)

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397The Potential Of World Philology


Philology is presently enjoying a rediscovery.1 Although this rediscovery has been immensely gratifying for many practitioners of the craft, it should not be taken lightly. It is arguably no exaggeration that the history of philology can be narrated as a pattern of recurring returns. There have been as many returns to philology as there have been attempts to abandon it altogether. Philology is incessantly in a state of crisis and its recent history illustrates this point succinctly. Erich Auerbach’s plea for a return to a prenational mode of scholar-ship was a response to the nationalist impulse of German philological study in the first half of the twentieth century.2 Paul de Man’s return to a close reading attentive to the structure of language, by connecting the practice of criticism with the linguistics of Saussure and the genealogical criticism of Nietzsche, was meant to emphasise the subversive potential of reading and to break with preconceived meaning.3 Following the path of Erich Auerbach, E. R. Curtius and Leo Spitzer, Edward Said’s return to a democratic and emancipatory engagement with the text was intended as a resistance to cultural essential-ism and imperialism.4 Though not explicitly using the trope of ‘return,’ other

1 For an overview on recent discussions (particularly on Paul de Man and Edward Said), see Geoffery Harpham, “Roots, Race and the Return to Philology,” in Representations 106, No. 1 (2009): 34-62; (for a general survey) Michael Holquist “The place of philology in an age of world literature,” Neohelicon 38 (2011): 267-287; and also see the excellent introduction and survey by Marcel Lepper, Philologie: Zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 2012).

2 A widely-cited statement by Auerbach: “Wir müssen, unter veränderten Umständen, zurück-kehren zu dem, was die vornationale mittelalterliche Bildung schon besaß: zu der Erkenntniss, dass der Geist nicht national ist” (“We must return, in admittedly altered circumstances, to the knowledge that prenational medieval culture already possessed: the knowledge that the spirit [Geist] is not national.”) Auerbach, Erich, “Philologie der Weltliteratur,” in Weltliteratur: Festgabe für Fritz Strich zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Walter Muschg and E. Staiger (Bern: Francke, 1952), 39-50. Translated into English as “Philology and Weltliteratur” by Marie and Edward Said, Centennial Review 13 (1969): 1-17, here 17. For Auerbach’s ‘counter-philology,’ see James I. Porter, “Erich Auerbach’s Earthly (Counter-) Philology,” Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures 2, No. 2 (2013): 243-265.

3 De Man: “In practice, the turn to theory occurred as a return to philology, to an examina-tion of the structure of language prior to the meaning it produces,” Paul de Man, “Return to Philology,” in The Resistance to Theory (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 21-26.

4 Edward Said, “Return to Philology,” in his posthumously published Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 2004, on Said’s engagement with Auerbach, see his “Erich Auerbach, Critic of the Earthly World” in boundary 2 31 (2004): 2, and his seminal work Orientalism (Vintage, 1978). For Said’s use of the German philological tradition and how it serves his concept of resis-tance, see Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn, “Un humanisme nomade: Edward Said et la philologie allemande,” in Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn, ed., Théories intercontinentales. Voyages du com-paratisme postcolonial (Paris: Démopolis, 2014), 47-68.

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critical approaches, most notably the critique génétique and the New Philology or Material Philology, have called for a paradigm shift in the practice of edit-ing medieval manuscripts, by arguing for greater recognition of the material conditions and processes of textual production of individual texts, thereby lifting the fetters imposed on medieval texts by print culture and the heavy technical apparatuses of stemmatics that aimed to reconstruct the author’s original text.5

The current rediscovery of philology presents a perspective that is transna-tional, emphatic of the subversive and emancipatory potential of philology, and attentive to the individuality and materiality of a text and its variants. The consequence of this has been described as “(1) a commitment to extremely slow reading that results in (2) unfastening and opening the text to a vertigi-nous contingency.”6 But what does this “slow reading” entail? And does this contingency open up to the world, i.e. the non-European? Is the recent call for a “return to philology” nothing more than a self-serving attempt to restore an acclaimed golden age of erudition, indifferent to the imperialist past of philol-ogy or, does it adumbrate a more self-critical and pluralistic textual practice suitable for our world today?7

5 The critique génétique developed in the 1970s at the Institut d’étude des textes et manuscrits modernes (CNRS), the aim of which was to give way to the diachronic dimension of writ-ing that had been set aside by structuralism, which was triumphant in France at the time (http://www.item.ens.fr/index.php?identifier=l-item, Accessed May 21, 2015). For a detailed discussion, see the collection of essays in Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes, eds Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2004). On the “New Philology,” see Stephen G. Nichols, “Introduction: Philology in a Manuscript culture,” Speculum 65, No. 1 (1990): 1-10. For a critique of the Lachmann method of stemmatics, see the seminal work of Sebastiano Timpanaro, The Genesis of the Lachmann Method, ed. and trans. Glenn Most (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005) (Genesi del metodo del Lachmann, 1982). One of the pioneering efforts that not only seeks to preserve and document manuscripts but also to examine their unique forms of textual materiality is the “Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures” at the University of Hamburg (http://www .manuscript-cultures.uni-hamburg.de/netamil/index.html, Accessed March 25, 2015).

6 Sean Gurd, “Introduction,” in idem, ed., Philology and Its Histories (Columbus: Ohio State University 2010), 10.

7 Harpham (“Roots,” 41) writes: “The question . . . is not just whether scholarship would be well served by a return to philology, but whether an essential or authentic philology could be identified and rescued from its actual historical practice.” Similarly, Markus Messling cautions against an uncritical return to a philology that is based on a deterministic anthro-pology. See Markus Messling, “Text and Determination: On Racism in 19th Century European Philology,” Philological Encounters 1.



With Sheldon Pollock’s programmatic essay “Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World,”8 the debate over the contemporary significance of philology has taken a global turn with an orientation toward the future. Pollock has argued that philology has always been a global knowledge prac-tice not exclusive to Europe, although no such global account of its history has ever been written. He has also argued that in view of the excess of theory over the past decades, of new perspectives that favour the oral and the visual over the textual, the growing incapacity in foreign languages, the increasing tendency to study transnational, regional or world issues via the medium of only one language or within the limits and perspectives of one geography or one community, and most importantly, in view of financial constraints, the discipline of philology is, once again, in a state of crisis.9 Pollock’s diagnosis of the current state of philology is particularly true of the study of non-European traditions (the so called oriental languages and traditions) at western univer-sities, where the asymmetry is manifest in diverse ways and for a variety of reasons, the most common being the persistence of culturalist tropes and ori-entalisms that prevent an objective and responsible attitude to the study of non-western traditions. This asymmetry is evident in the privileging of imme-diate gain (i.e. the expectation of a social and political impact—ultimately, a reductionist view on scholarship), the study through the perspective of one community or language (i.e. the globalizing effect), and the poor funding and training, not to mention the occasional prejudicial and xenophobic scholar-ship produced to appease and justify the hegemonies and imperial ambitions of the day.10

8 Sheldon Pollock, “Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World,” Critical Inquiry 35, No. 4 (2009): 931-61, and idem, “Comparison without Hegemony,” in The Benefitof Broad Horizons: Intellectual and Institutional Preconditions for a Global Social Science, ed. Barbro Klein and Hans Joas (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 187-204.

9 Pollock “Future Philology,” 934-5.10 In the aftermath of the events of 11 September 2001, the invasion of Iraq and “the war

on terror,” the manufacture of a culture of suspicion and the rise of xenophobic atti-tudes in western societies, prompted largely by financial crises, led to the production of an Islamophobia in the guise of scholarly erudition. The field of Arabic-Islamic studies witnessed an explosion of philological research on the origins of Islam, including the Qur’an, which often resulted in a dismissal of traditional Muslim knowledge, in claims of forged origins, in accusations of a lack of critical reflection in contemporary Muslim scholarship and, consequently, in the need for “reform,” which seemed to justify mili-tary intervention abroad and xenophobic policies at home. The controversy triggered by Christoph Luxenberg’s The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran: A Contribution to the Decoding of the Language of the Qur’an (German edition 2000, English translation

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This state of affairs is what Edward Said once diagnosed as orientalism: the colonial representation and fabrication of the colonized, the dispossessed and marginal, in the name of enlightenment and progress. What Said criticized was not the accomplishments of European thought (esp. humanism and the enlightenment), which he argued were universal, and which he held dearly and advocated passionately in his writings, but rather the abuse and betrayal of enlightenment values by 19th and 20th century scholars—the philologists’ betrayal of their own vocation. Following the good tradition of his philologist-heroes, Auerbach, Curtius and Spitzer (all Germans who wrote in response to the totalitarian and essentialising tendencies of their time), Said champi-oned philology as a form of self-critique. Said argued that “self-knowledge is unattainable without an equal degree of self-criticism and the awareness that comes from studying and experiencing other peoples, traditions and ideas.”11 Similar to Said, Pollock suggests that the remedy to philology’s current malaise consists of three antidotes: (1) historical self-awareness, (2) conceptual univer-sality, and (3) methodological pluralism. He states that “if philology wants to adapt to the envisaged globalised university, then it will have to recover the initiatives, theories, methods and insights of scholars across time and across the world, for we learn more about why this discipline is important, and how to do it better, the more we pluralise it by learning how others have done it

2007) is a case in point. Although serious philologists were quick to dismiss the work as poor and tendentious, it nevertheless attracted great interest from specialists and non-specialists alike, including the international press, as those who promoted it perceived it as a response to an imagined Islamic triumphalism. For a critical response to some of the recurring themes in this so-called “revisionist scholarship,” see Walid Saleh, “The Etymological Fallacy and Qur’anic Studies: Muhammad, Paradise, and Late Antiquity,” in The Qur’an in Context, Historical and Literary Investigations into the Qur’anic Milieu, Angelika Neuwirth et al., eds. (Brill: Leiden, 2009), 649-698. Angelika Neuwirth’s schol-arship, still mostly in German, exemplifies a historical-critical approach that is in dia-logue with Muslim traditional scholarship and the concerns of contemporary debates. See Angelika Neuwirth, “Qur’ānic Studies and Historical-Critical Philology: The Qur’ān’s Staging, Penetrating and Eclipsing of Biblical Tradition,” Philological Encounters 1.

11 Said, “Return to Philology,” 159. Congruent with his humanist views, Said never prohibited the study of the non-west, as has been mistakenly claimed by his detractors, some of whom have had the audacity to blame Said for the deterioration of “oriental philology,” as if he were responsible for the politics of higher education during the postcolonial and cold war era. Such views are generally politically motivated and ignorant of the geneal-ogy and broad scope of Said’s thinking. If anything, Said’s Orientalism was a polemic in defence of enlightenment thought—where philology is sovereign, not an attack against it. On the relations between Said’s Auerbachian humanism and his critique of oriental-ism, see Emily Apter, “Saidian Humanism,” boundary 2 31 (2004): 2.



differently.”12 Both Said and Pollock agree on the need for a self-critical and pluralistic practice of philology, a “world philology”, where the aim of studying other peoples, their traditions and ideas, their methods and practices, is to attain self-improvement. Yet can philology, given its past and present imbrications in racial prejudice,13 really transform itself into a self-critical and pluralistic endeavour? What are its potentials and where do the challenges lie?

World Philology

In early 2010, a group of Berlin-based academics launched an international research program entitled “Zukunftsphilologie: Revisiting the Canons of Textual Scholarship” to take up the challenge of world philology.14 The pro-gramme’s ambition was, to quote from our manifesto, to “support research in marginalized and undocumented textual practices and literary cultures with the aim of integrating texts and scholarly traditions from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East as well as from Europe itself, by way of a critical recuperation of the practice of philology.” Our aim was to realise the aforementioned perspec-tives and reflections by way of an international research programme.

The choice of the programme’s title was a deliberate and subversive ref-erence to the work of the classicist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff ’s Zukunftsphilologie! [“Philology of the Future!”] (1872), a short polemical text

12 Pollock, “Future Philology,” 949.13 Maurice Olender’s important work The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion and

Philology in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), illustrates how the discovery of Sanskrit’s relation to European languages, i.e. Indo-European linguistics, created new myths about Aryans and Semites that were fuelled by religious and racial prejudice. For an extensive study on the relations between indology, Indo-Germanic linguistics and anthropology, see Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn, L’Archive des origins: Sanskrit, philologie, anthropologie dans l’Allemagne du XIXe siècle, Préface de Charles Malamoud (Paris: Cerf, 2008).

14 The research program “Zukunftsphilologie: Revisiting the Canons of Textual Scholarship” began in early 2010 under the auspices of the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin and continues to be one of its main research programs. Since 2011, it has been associ-ated with the Freie Universität Berlin. Through its postdoctoral fellowship programme, its World Philologies Seminar series, workshops and conference and several international winter and summer academies, the research program aspires to create a context of intel-lectual synergy, where scholars from various textual and philological traditions can work together comparatively and develop a common academic language necessary for discus-sion about the future potential of philology. For more information, please visit the pro-gram’s website: www.zukunftsphilologie.de.

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written against his erstwhile fellow student Friedrich Nietzsche’s Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik [“Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music”] (1872). Nietzsche’s work had been dismissive of the celebratory attitude to Greek culture prominent in his time, arguing that his contemporaries had misunderstood the Greek genius, and ended with a song of praise to Richard Wagner, whose operas and musical works had greatly inspired Nietzsche. Wilamowitz’s derisive title played on Richard Wagner’s aspirations to create a Kunstwerk der Zukunft [artwork of the future]. Although Nietzsche did not respond to it himself, his loyal friend and classicist Erwin Rohde wrote a reply bearing the harsh title Afterphilologie (1872) [Ass’s Philology], and even Wagner joined by writing a letter in defence of his friend Nietzsche. The debate between the two German philologists was above all about the purpose and methods of philological studies. Upholding the ideals of Johann J. Winkelmann’s and F. A. Wolf ’s philhellenism,15 Wilamowitz and many of the leading classical scholars of his time were of the view that knowledge of classical texts could only be attainable by examining every feature of their historical contexts. Nietzsche, however, argued that the approach of the professionalized disci-pline of philology had perverted and even caused the death of antiquity.16 This debate brought out the tensions and contradictory tendencies in 19th century German classicism.17 This dispute lies at the heart of the European, particularly German, intellectual debate about the crisis of self-representation through the study of antiquity.18 Yet this dispute is hardly unique, as Pollock notes: it is “a struggle between historicists and humanists, Wissenschaft and Bildung, schol-arship and life, of a sort not unique to European modernity,”19 thereby making a significant move toward seeing the dispute as similar to debates from differ-ent regions and across time about the meaning and purpose of the study of ancient texts. Thus, the once seemingly limited dispute confined to German classicist scholarship has come to exemplify the political and cultural stakes inherent in philology.

15 Harpham, “Roots, Races and the Return to Philology,” 38.16 Pollock, “Future Philology,” 931-932. See also Christian Benne, Nietzsche und die historisch-

kritische Philologie (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005).17 For a study of this debate in the context of 18th and 19th century German classicism and

the relation between Nietzsche’s philosophy and philology, see James I. Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); on German classicism, see the important work of Suzanne L. Marchand, Down From Olympus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), esp. 124-133.

18 James Porter, Nietzsche and the Future of Philology, 126.19 Pollock, “Future Philology,” 931.



Taking these aforementioned debates about European classicism and ori-entalism as our points of departure, the research programme set about to recuperate a critical philology through two main strategies: firstly, by fostering research in marginalised and displaced textual practices and methods in order to expand the canon of philological scholarship; and secondly, by critically examining the genealogies and genetic conditions of philological practice throughout the world. It was our contention that a future world philology can only be possible if it combines the aim of expanding the canon of textual scholarship beyond national and regional boundaries with a historically con-scious and disciplinary critical scholarship.

One of our core interests was consequently in the dynamics of textual traditions both ancient and modern. In this regard, we found the role of the mobility of people and ideas—often accompanied by or perceived as calamity and crisis—particularly relevant. At times of accelerated mobility and crisis, scholars often raised questions regarding the validity and futility of their own vocation, usually expressed in the desire for renewal and innovation or in the form of polemic, and accompanied by the development of new taxonomies and classifications in order to reorganise accumulated knowledge according to a new scholarly programme. Philology is not an exception to this dynamic. Philology deals with the unravelling of linguistic difficulties and obscurities, with textual fragmentation, cultural loss and alterity. Philological projects are revivalist in essence; they seek to make the unavailable available, to preserve and to bring back to life. For example, the various ad fontes move-ments in the Arab-Islamic world, such as those that took place in the four-teenth and the nineteenth centuries, triggered partly by an increased mobility and by a variety of social and political calamities, led to a rejuvenation of philological practice. A great number of the now standard philological ency-clopaedias were written in the tumultuous social and political upheavals from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. The renewal of Arabic philology at the hands of Syrian-Lebanese scholars took place in the nineteenth century at a time when colonialism produced a disruption on the one hand, but enabled new movements on the other. What strategies does philology offer to preserve and rejuvenate knowledge at times of risk and scarcity?

Adopting the model of the research seminar, with its close attention to texts, their languages, contexts, and material conditions, the goal of our regular “World Philologies Seminar” was to create a space for research that facilitated discussion on the most recent debates on philology across the humanities. We avoided privileging a particular theoretical approach over others or focus-ing on the concerns of a particular discipline. Instead, we oriented ourselves around textual documents and problematics that arise across disciplines,

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thereby combining the demands of regional and disciplinary expertise with more overarching conceptual and methodological questions. Our seminars were ultimately interdisciplinary and “metaphilological,” that is, we took philology as our object of study, questioning its practice from a theoretical and historical point of view.20 These metaphilological questions included the clas-sification of philology as a discipline, the definition of its realm, its relation to historiography, theology, science, and jurisprudence; philology and the univer-sity; the relation of philology to nation and empire; the ethical dimensions of philology; and last but not least, if philology is a global knowledge practice, what forms and purposes did it take across the globe?

While philology is largely concerned with the literary, we must acknowl-edge that philology may also concern itself with historical, legal or philosophi-cal writing. This is because philology is the study of what is written. Philology asks from where the text came? How was it transmitted? Can we rely on the transmission? What of the language of the text? Philology makes texts avail-able. It documents them, examines their materiality, and preserves them in encyclopaedias, anthologies and archives. The philological question is also a philosophical question. Is it possible to understand the language of the text? How do the conditions of its transmission affect our understanding of it? What are the limits of philological inquiry? However, unlike philosophy, which deals with universal truth claims, philology treats contingent facts and it conceives of human knowledge dialectically and historically. Philology, in this regard, shares with legal casuistry its care for fine distinctions and its propensity to differentiate judgements depending on the case at hand. Philology is called for to lift the material, linguistic, historical impediments to accessing and under-standing a text, and to preserve the text in such a way as to guarantee the conti-nuity of its relevance and use within a community of readers. Philology is thus not a discipline in the narrow sense but rather a practice or a craft that should be the basis of any endeavour to make sense of texts.

I have noted that the history of philology is inseparable from the practice of philology itself, and that a recuperation of philology necessitates a critical study of its history, but it is just as important to stress that sound historical scholarship is not possible without philology. All good historical scholarship requires excellent philological competence. Since philology is entrusted with the scholarly interpretation of texts, many of which are “canonical” texts intimately linked with strong notions of cultural identity, it is exposed

20 Hummel, Pascale, “History of History of Philology: Goals and Limits of an Inquiry,” in Metaphilology: Histories and Languages of Philology, ed. Pascale Hummel (Paris: Philologicum, 2009), 24.



to a constant temptation to use supposedly philological methods in order to construct and maintain cultural exclusivity. Such an approach is evident, for instance, in the historiographical trope of the “decline” of the non-Western world as opposed to the triumph of Western culture, which can take a wide variety of guises—from the alleged death of philosophy in the Islamic world with the death of Ibn Rushd (Averroes) to the supposed ossification of intel-lectual production in pre-modern China. Take for example the important work of historians, such as George Saliba, who argue against the narrative of cul-tural decline and intellectual atrophy in the non-European worlds in the early modern period, the so-called “Needham Question”: Why had China (or India and the Islamic world) been overtaken by the west in science and technology, despite earlier successes? On the basis of philological investigations, including the careful reading of marginal manuscript notes, colophons and ownership marks, Saliba has argued that there was an organic relationship between the scientific thought that developed in later centuries in Muslim societies and the science that came into being in Europe during the Renaissance. His counter-history details the innovations made by astronomers from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, and offers evidence that Copernicus could have known of and drawn on their work.21 Philology provides powerful hermeneutical and historical tools that make it possible to challenge such facile constructions. Indeed, this kind of critical historical scholarship is only possible by means of philological competence.

Textual Practices beyond Europe, 1500-1900

If we broaden the scope of philology to include the study of all that is written, what forms did this discipline take across the globe before the encounter with European philological schools in the early modern period?22 How do salient aspects of the philological method, such as care for textual difference and vari-ation, attention to contingency and change, and the need to make texts acces-sible and available, appear in these non-European philologies?

21 George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance, (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007).

22 This was the theme of Zukunftsphilologie’s first international Winter School, which took place in 2010 in Cairo in cooperation with the American University in Cairo. The meeting focused mainly on the recovery and recuperation of instances of marginalised textual practices beyond Europe at a time of vast European imperial expansion and the forma-tion of national canons within the context of the history of Orientalism.

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The technology of script is one aspect that is worthy of systematic study from a comparative perspective, particularly its role as a means for the production, diffusion, archiving and exchange of knowledge.23 If we examine scripts from a transregional perspective, we will observe phenomena such as the spread of Arabic and its script across diverse regions, including hybridizations such as the representation of Melayu or Urdu or Ajami in Arabic script. How did these world scripts, such as the Arabic and the Roman Latin scripts, act as con-duits for the transfer of other forms of textualised knowledge? Related to the issue of the hegemony of scripts, we must also consider the role of local scripts and minor practices of writing. More effort has to be made in the examination of the politics of script transformation and implementation and the role of (national) philology in this context. Why do some scripts travel far and are completely adopted while others are confronted with resistance and rejec-tion? How and why have script forms become the site on which ideological debates about progress, reform and modernity are fought? Can the invention of new script forms or the adoption of foreign forms contribute to cultural loss or political emancipation and progress?

The study of scripts and writing cultures on the African continent deserves particular attention. In this context, philology acts as a remedy to a distinct orientalist image of Africa as a land without writing, an orientalism fixated on orality. As Shamil Jeppie explains: “There was a sort of reaction against textual research, as if such work was always a version of Orientalism, i.e. attention to texts led automatically to reductionism and essentialism. But in the case of work on Africa it was precisely the attention to texts that was a move against the essentialist perspectives about the continent as a place without writing.”24 Such discussions that look at the deeper political and social aspects of such philological debates about orality, literacy and writing should be part of any thinking of a future world philology.25

23 This is the theme of a Zukunftsphilologie Summer Academy, entitled “World Scripts: Concepts and Practices of Writing from a Comparative Perspective,” which took place in 2015 in Cape Town in cooperation with the University of Cape Town and the French Institute of South Africa, Johannesburg.

24 Shamil Jeppie, “Calligraphic Africa: Notes Toward the Location of Philology in Africa,” in Philological Encounters 1.

25 For a useful introduction to script change from a comparative perspective, see Stephen D. Houston, ed., The Shape of Script: How and Why Writing Systems Change (New Mexico: School for Advanced Research Press, 2012). On the politics of script reform, see, regarding Turkey, Serif Mardin, “Notes on an Early Phase in the Modernization of Communications in Turkey,” in Comparative Studies in Society and History 3, No. 3 (1961): 250-271; regarding Iran, see Kia Mehrdad, “Persian nationalism and the campaign for language purification,”



Recent efforts have begun to research systematically the question of phil-ological knowledge and textual practices beyond Europe before the colo-nial encounter, including Sheldon Pollock’s international project “Sanskrit Knowledge Systems on the Eve of Colonialism.” The implications of Pollock’s project go beyond the study of Sanskrit and may change our knowledge about the way European philology itself evolved as a result of the encounter with non-European forms of philology.26 Some of this research has even arrived at alternative genealogies, such as the work of Rajeev Kinra who has illus-trated this issue succinctly by revisiting the claimed origins of comparative Indo-Persian. By locating the latter’s origins in the seventeenth and eighteenth century world of Indo-Persian interactions, and particularly in the writings of the north Indian intellectual luminary, Sirāj al-Dīn Alī Ārzū (1687-1756), Kinra challenges the normative Orientalist view that locates such origins in the European academies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and particu-larly in the works of the great Orientalist William Jones (1746-1794).27

in Middle Eastern Studies 34, No. 2 (1998): 9-36; regarding the Indian Ocean and the Malay world, see Ronit Ricci, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); on Africa, see Meikal Mumin and Kees Versteegh, eds., The Arabic Script in Africa: Studies in the Use of a Writing System (Leiden: Brill, 2014), and Shamil Jeppie, “Calligraphic Africa: Notes Toward the Location of Philology in Africa,” forthcoming in Philological Encounters; regarding the early modern European encounter with non-European scripts, on Mexican writing, see Adrien Delmas, “Imperial and Philological Encounters in the Early Modern Era: European Readings of the Codex Mendoza,” forthcoming in Philological Encounters; Markus Messling, Pariser Orientlektüren: Zu Wilhelm von Humboldts Theorie der Schrift. Nebst der Erstedition des Briefwechsels zwischen Wilhelm von Humboldt und Jean-François Champollion le jeune (1824-1827) (Paderborn: Schöningh (Humboldt-Studien), 2008), and Markus Messling, “Écrit, écriture,” in L’interprétation: Un dictionnaire philosophique, eds. Christian Berner and Denis Thouard (Paris: J. Vrin, forthcoming).

26 Directed by Sheldon Pollock, “the Sanskrit Knowledge-Systems Project investigates the structure and social context of Sanskrit science and knowledge from 1550-1750. The period witnessed a flowering of scholarship lasting until the coming of colonialism, when a decline set in that ended the age-old power of Sanskrit thought to shape Indian intellec-tual history.” The project ran between 2001 and 2004. Further information can be gleaned from the project’s website: http://dsal.uchicago.edu/sanskrit/index.html, Accessed July 20, 2014. The new collective work entitled “World Philology” [World Philology, ed Pollock, et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015] edited by Sheldon Pollock and oth-ers is a significant contribution to these efforts.

27 Rajeev Kinra, “Cultures of Comparative Philology in the Early Modern Indo-Persian World,” in Philological Encounters 1. See also Muzaffar Alam, “The Pursuit of Persian: Language in Mughal Politics,” Modern Asian Studies 32, No. 2 (1998): 317-349, and

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The Global Sites of Philology

In addition to exploring the sorts of philological practices and textual technol-ogies that were present prior and during the encounter with European forms of knowledge, a critical philology must also examine the role of textual practices in forging and maintaining intellectual relations across vast and distant territo-ries.28 While exploring the role of textual practices in connecting Africa to the Arabophone and Ottoman worlds, the Mediterranean region and through the Indian Ocean to South and Southeast Asia, the emphasis on cross-Asian and African encounters should not aim to undermine European encounters, but rather to consciously provincialise and relativise them; that is, to view them as one among a host of historical experiences of Asia and Africa. How, for exam-ple, was the seventh and eighth century Greco-Syriac-Arabic literary culture viewed by Indo-Persian intellectuals in the early modern period? What role did Arabic script or Arabic intellectual traditions play across various locations—from the Mediterranean to the Malay world—to help bring about a sense of intellectual cosmopolitanism? The fundamental question that we should ask is: what would a history of Asia or Africa without Europe as its single point of reference actually look like? Is there a way to make a claim for world philology without a detour through Europe—or without a dependence on the critique of Eurocentrism? What would it look like, for example, if philology did not need Europe at all?

If part of the current debate about world philology is a re-examination of pre-national systems of knowledge, then it is also a reconsideration of the potential of philology to reconnect parts of an erstwhile homogenous yet diverse whole. If our goal is to transcend the national paradigms of philology, what literary geographies emerge as a possibility for philological and literary analysis? Michael Allan and Elisabetta Benigni postulate the Mediterranean context as a promising field of research. They write:

“The Culture and Politics of Persian in Precolonial Hindustan,” in Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, Sheldon Pollock, ed., 131-198 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

28 This was the theme of Zukunftphilologie’s second international Winter School, which took place in Delhi in 2012 in cooperation with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. Entitled “Philologies Across the Asias,” the meeting focused on the transla-tion of texts and the encounter of languages and textual practices across the cultural geographies of Asia—focusing on Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, Armenian, Turkish, Sanskrit, Kashmiri, Persian, Urdu, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Malay, and Tamil texts and textual practices, among other linguistic and cultural realms.



Where previously the nation-state was the category through which texts would be contextualized, scholars have begun focusing trans-nationally on literary geography, shifting from national territories to consider mari-time regions, trade routes, and intersecting zones of cultural interaction. The Mediterranean world literalizes many of the concepts now integral to literary study, especially as it overlaps with transnationalism, transre-gionalism and ocean studies.29

Similarly, it may be worthwhile to consider the Malay world much as Sanjay Subrahmanyam views the Mediterranean, namely as an idea that “allows us to transcend or refashion national boundaries in the search for meaningful objects for historical analysis, a procedure that is absolutely essential when one moves back in time to an epoch when the nation-state was not as yet a distinct prospect.”30 More recently, Sumit Mandal,31 Ronit Ricci32 and others have viewed the Indian Ocean as a shared space of philological encounter before the colonial arrival and the rise of the nation-state. Their work illus-trates how the production and circulation of texts, in various languages and scripts (Sanskrit, Arabic, Javanese, Malay, Tamil, etc.) across religious and traditional boundaries allowed for multiple transregional interactions. Their work also exemplifies the current need for philological expertise and linguistic skills to rediscover these rich cultural and intellectual interactions across the Indian Ocean.

29 Michael Allan and Elisabetta Benigni, “Introduction” in “Special issue: Lingua Franca: Explorations of the Literary Geography of the Mediterranean World,” forthcoming in Philological Encounters.

30 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Notes on Circulation and Asymmetry in Two Mediterraneans, c. 1400-1800,” in Claude Guillot, Denys Lombard and Roderich Ptak, eds., From the Mediterranean to the China Sea: Miscellaneous Notes (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1998), 42.

31 Sumit Mandal, position paper, zukunftsphilologie conference entitled “Global Conjunctions in the Indian Ocean: Malay World Trajectories” in Berlin in 2011. Papers of the conference appeared in a special issue of Indonesia and the Malay World 41 (2013): 120. For a concise discussion, see Sumit Mandal, “Cultural Geographies of the Malay world: Textual Trajectories in the Indian Ocean,” in Philological Encounters 1.

32 Ronit Ricci, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). See also, Alton. L. Becker, Beyond Translation: Essays toward a Modern Philology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).

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A Global Perspective on European Philology? Philological Encounters, Contrapuntal Readings and the Historiography of Engraftment

Does the prospected world philology, with its concern for the expansion of the philological canon and the recuperation of textual practices, entail that the study of European philology, its history, methods and concepts, is no longer necessary? Of course not. In fact, one of the significant outcomes of this global perspective on philology is the renewed interest in the history of European phi-lology, not as a national philology but because of its impact on non-European scholarship, that is, the aftermath of European philology in India, China, the Arab world and Africa. European philology is no longer the concern of only the Europeans. The study of European intellectual history is necessary for any criti-cal study of the humanities, and particularly of so-called oriental studies (colo-nial and post-colonial). Approaching such towering figures such as Friedrich Schlegel (d. 1829), Alexander von Humboldt (d. 1859) and Franz Bopp (d. 1867) from the perspective of world philology would mean to study their legacies not within the national traditions or European context but with attention to the consequences of their scholarship outside of their own national paradigms, that is, what we may call the philological encounter. Scholars are beginning to examine the ways in which Bopp’s historical linguistics have been adopted and appropriated by South Asian scholars. Similarly, the impact of the introduc-tion of European Semitic philology (and the essentialisms and racisms that occasionally accompanied it) to Arab Universities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and its gradual adoption by Arab scholars is a small yet steadily growing field of research.

As a result of colonial expansion and the technologies that made long-distance communication and travel possible, the 19th and 20th centuries witnessed an accelerated rate of individual interactions across the globe, including philological encounters.33 Yet the encounter also brought about an articulation of difference. The study of philological encounters proposed here aims at exploring the personal (and especially self-reflective) dimensions of academic knowledge production by studying scholars (i.e., producers) and their contexts (i.e., institutions and societies) in relation to their objects of

33 The theme of 19th and 20th century philological encounters was explored at a confer-ence organised by the research program Zukunftsphilologie in partnership with the Leiden University Centre for the Study of Islam and Society, the Freie Universitaet Berlin, the CNRS Paris and Utrecht University, and took place at the University of Leiden, 4-5 June 2014.



study. Knowledge is always embedded in institutions and is produced by indi-vidual scholars whose choices are shaped by their biographies as much as by the subjects they study.

Philological encounters engages in the study of the discovery of difference that came about due to the real-life encounters between professionals and interpreters of texts, languages and cultures across the globe. This approach out-lines an avenue of research dedicated to the study of tensions, antagonisms and polemics—as well as fascination, cooperation, appropriation and friendship— that transpired as a consequence of the meetings of scholars and the conver-gence of their modes of textual scholarship, made possible through interna-tional cooperation in the form of conferences, journals, academic associations and student exchange. This attention to philological encounters is comparable to the contrapuntal readings recommended by Edward Said: “the point is that contrapuntal reading must take account of both processes, that of imperialism and that of resistance to it, which can be done by extending our reading of the texts to include what was once forcibly excluded.”34 The objective of studying philological encounters is thus not strictly hagiography, but rather to histori-cise seemingly monolithic categories, abstract concepts and methods—such as ‘orientalism,’ ‘philology’ and ‘history’—by localizing the role of individual actors in the process of knowledge formation, in the colonial and post-colonial periods. We can do this by looking at first-person accounts of conferences, reports, travel writing, correspondences, memoirs, auto/biographies, polemi-cal essays, and translations, among other writings.

Furthermore, the study of philological encounters is not meant to flatten out asymmetrical situations caused by colonialism, but rather to historicise them and to account for them. It is not about juxtaposing philological traditions side by side in an encyclopaedic fashion,35 or comparing them on structural and theoretical grounds—although there is much merit to this exercise—, but rather to examine real and concrete exchanges and tensions between scholars and their theories and practices in the fullness of history. In other words, the

34 Said, Culture and Imperialism, (Vintage: 1994) 66-67.35 Auerbach famously argued that the philologist’s struggle for synthesis should not be

achieved by mere encyclopeadic collecting, but rather by focus on the Ansaztpunkt (the point of departure) or the literary problematic. See Auerbach, Philologie der Weltliteratur, 12. In expanding the notion of the Anstazpunkt, I am suggesting that the attention to philological encounters, contrapuntal readings and historiographical engraftments may aptly substitute the temptation to create even greater textual corpora, given that what is at stake is philology’s positionality among the humanities as a mode of critical inquiry rather than as a set of auxiliary methods for textual accumulation and documentation.

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exercise of studying philological methods and traditions from across the globe, important as it is for expanding and recuperating our philological practices today, should not be negligent of the historical asymmetries and cultural hege-monies that often make use of the comparative method to prejudicial ends. As Pollock warns:

if comparison is necessary, the will to domination that sometimes seems built into the comparative method is certainly not. It is possible to produce comparison without hegemony across the human sciences. We begin to do this by making our inevitable but implicit comparisons explicit, explain what role they are playing in the interpretation of our primary object, and exercise sufficient reflexivity to avoid demanding symmetry when there is only synchronicity, turning difference into defi-ciency, or expanding particularity into paradigm.36

The quest for cognitive justice can only be undertaken with appropriate atten-tion to the historicity of these encounters, which is to acknowledge that these encounters were contingent and predicated on local forms of knowledge. In order for us to properly comprehend these processes, what is required is, as Dhruv Raina has argued, an historiography of engraftment, which views European knowledge as having been grafted upon local forms of knowledge, as opposed to a historiography of rupture, which sees local forms of knowledge as having been cut and discontinued with the arrival of European knowledge.37 One of the challenges of a historically conscious world philology is to exam-ine these processes of engraftment. How were Bopp’s historical-linguistics grafted upon Ibn Jinnī’s (d. 1002) morphology, or Saussure’s structuralist grammar grafted upon ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī’s (d. 1078) theory of composi-tion (al-naẓm)? How was the modern Arabic reading of Dante’s Divine Comedy grafted upon the reading tradition of Abu al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī’s (d. 1058) Risālat

36 Pollock, “Comparison without Hegemony,” 202.37 The term “cognitive justice” was first used by Shiv Visvanathan in his article entitled “The

Strange Quest of Joseph Needham” in a volume edited by Irfan Habib and Dhruv Raina entitled Situating the History of Science: Dialogues with Joseph Needham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). I am grateful to Dhruv Raina for bringing my attention to this term and for the reference. For a discussion on how modern science (including philol-ogy) was grafted on Sanskrit and Arabic-Persian knowledge, see Dhruv Raina, “Chapter 15: The Naturalization of Modern Science in South Asia: A Historical Overview of the Processes of Domestication and Globalization,” in The Globalization of Knowledge in History, ed. Jürgen Renn, 345-366, http://www.edition-open-access.de/studies/1/19/index .html, Accessed November 1, 2014.



al-Ghufrān?38 What do these cases of engraftment tell us about the nature of these philological encounters? These questions move our focus away from concerns over purity and origins to an inquiry into the processes and condi-tions of knowledge translation, assimilation and adaptability.

Challenges to World Philology

World philology is the name given to the attempt to achieve a balance between the global perspective on intellectual history and the meta-philological scru-tiny of the theories and techniques of textual practice. It is a scholarly perspec-tive that is conducive to methodological pluralism and conceptual innovation. Yet as liberating as this new perspective appears, world philology is an elusive affair with several conceptual and practical challenges, which it shares with fields such as world literature and global history.39

Methodological pluralism and the question of philological universals. The desire to achieve methodological pluralism requires the collaboration of schol-ars from various regions, languages, traditions, mirroring different positions and perspectives. Thus, the shift is made from a restricted concern with the object of study, e.g. a given text, to the diverse ways in which that text is read, preserved and problematised, in different times and places. The German soci-ologist Wolf Lepenis expressed this strategy through his motto: “Forschung mit, statt Forschung über” (“research with, rather than research on.”)40 Yet the

38 Elisabetta Benigni explores some aspects of this process of philological encounter and engraftment in her article “Dante and the Construction of a Mediterranean Literary Space: Revisiting a 20th Century Philological Debate in Southern Europe and in the Arab World,” forthcoming in Philological Encounters.

39 Sebastian Conrad discusses the limits of global history writing in his Globalgeschichte: Eine Einführung (München: Beck Verlag, 2013), 87-111. See also Frederick Cooper “How Global Do We Want Our Intellectual History to Be?” in Moyn et al., Global Intellectual History, 283-294. On the limits of world literature, see Emily Apter’s Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013).

40 This dialogically-oriented approach to the study of the Middle East, Judaism and Islam, was the driving principle behind three successful Berlin-based research initiatives: “Working Group Modernity and Islam” (1997-2006), “Jewish and Islamic Hermeneutics as Cultural Critique” and “Europe in the Middle East, the Middle East in Europe” (2006-to date). Wolf Lepenis, “Arbeitskreis Moderne und Islam: Empfehlungen für eine zukünftige Forschungsförderung der Islamwissenschaften,” in Ekkehard Rudolph, ed., Bestandsaufnahme: Kultur- und sozialwissenschaftliche: Forschung über die muslimische Welt in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Hamburg: Dt. Orient-Ins, 1999), 5-14, here 9.

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bringing together of philologists and historians of various geographical and linguistic worlds, who all study texts but with different means and to different ends, underscores the ambiguity inherent in the call for a “return to philology.” How can we engage in a comparative inquiry, while taking into account the particular contexts of the texts in question, their problematics and the tradi-tions of knowledge that they are part of?

The aforementioned challenge of methodological pluralism leads to an inquiry into philological universals. Are philological concepts and practices such as ‘text,’ ‘author,’ ‘narration,’ ‘critic,’ ‘understanding’ and ‘collecting’ uni-versal? The opening up of philology to the world will inevitably lead to a multi-plication of philological concepts and practices. Are they translatable?41

The language of philology. Can world philology be carried out in a lan-guage other than our global lingua franca, English? If the return to philology is a return to language as a reflection of culture and the plurality of human experience, what is the effect of trying to achieve these noble goals through the medium of one language, especially given this language’s colonial past?42 What would a global perspective on philology look like if it were written in Arabic or Chinese, representing a particular Arabic or Chinese perspective?43

Digital Humanities and the Allure of Accessibility. While it has always been one of philology’s main tasks to preserve texts and make them accessible (although the lesser-known case of philology’s appalling role in concealing and obfuscating texts is not to be ignored), a philology of the future will continue to bear this same role, although the challenges might no longer be the scarcity of documentary material, the poor storage conditions and the labour of cata-loguing, which made previous archiving processes challenging. Philology may have to deal with the very contrary, namely, the lure of accessibility and the abundance of texts. How will the world philologist cope with this abundance? What quantitative and qualitative reading strategies will she need to develop to make sense of these texts?44

41 An important contribution to this debate is the Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philo-sophical Lexicon, ed. Barbara Cassin et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).

42 For a discussion, see Jürgen Trabant, “Linguistic Justice v. Linguistic Diversity,” in Philological Encounters 1, and idem, Globalesisch oder was? Ein Plädoyer für Europas Sprachen (München: Beck, 2014).

43 For a study that compares various “global histories,” see Dominic Sachsenmeier, Global Perspectives on Global History: Theories and Approaches in a Connected World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

44 Marcel Lepper proposes a heuristic approach that accounts for the changes in global text production, is conscious of the material-political conditions that determine the accessibility to texts, and creates a bridge between quantitative (distant reading) and



Conclusion: Plato’s philologia

It is believed that Plato was the first to have used the word philologia to desig-nate the love of dialectic and learned conversation, before it came to be used as the name of a discipline concerned with the interpretation and restoration of texts.45 In his famous dialogue on the nature of knowledge, Theaetetus, Plato depicts Socrates inviting his friend Theodorus and the young Theaetetus to a philologia, a learned dialogue on the nature of knowledge [Theaet., 146a].

“What do you say?” asks Socrates. “Who of us will speak first? And he who fails, and whoever fails in turn, shall go and sit down and be donkey, as the children say when they play ball; and whoever gets through without failing shall be our king and shall order us to answer any questions he pleases. Why are you silent? I hope, Theodorus, I am not rude, through my love of dialogue (φιλολογίας; philologia) and my eagerness to make us converse and show ourselves friends and ready to talk to one another.”46

The dialogue then proceeds. It is perhaps this sense of philology that needs restoration: the love of dialogue, the eagerness to listen, the patience in under-standing, the playfulness of learning, civic responsibility, and the humility that embraces it all. Socrates’s question is with us once again. Will the promise of a future, world philologia “show ourselves friends and ready to talk to one another”?

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The Potential of World Philology