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The disturbing object of philology

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Abstract

This essay investigates a certain disturbance that appears at the moment that philosophy is confronted with philological practices, as foreshadowed in Paul de Man’s seminal work on the ‘return to philology.’ This disturbance appears vividly in Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics with the sudden appearance of the ‘nonsense word’ kzomil. Heidegger’s invented word suggests that philology is not immune to its own unsettling techniques, as is also evident in Gerald M. Browne’s study of the Old Nubian language. Ironically, we can characterize the object of philology more precisely by turning away from ancient texts and toward Nathaniel Mellors’s absurdist television series Ourhouse.

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Notes

  1. Objeu is the object that preserves in play its freedom not to ossify into the object of a subject. It is the counter-play against the objectification of a thing by naming it’ (Hamacher, 2009, 33) [‘Objeu ist das Objekt, das im Spiel seine Freiheit bewährt, nicht zum Gegenstand eines Subjekts zu erstarren. Es ist das Widerspiel gegen die Vergegenständlichung einer Sache durch ihre Benennung’] (Hamacher, 2010, 52).

  2. According to Jacques Derrida, the Introduction to Metaphysics is the moment from which ‘Heidegger renounces the project of and the word ontology’ (Derrida, 1976, 22), leading all the way to the crossing out of the word ‘Being’ in the Question of Being. The onset of this movement is already apparent in this passage.

  3. Another option would be to situate a certain accessible Absolute outside the realm of language (as several contemporary philosophical movements suggest).

  4. See the work of Avital Ronell, throughout an affirmation of the potential of strategies of deliberate over-reading (1989, 2007).

  5. For example, Martin West: ‘Textual criticism is not something to be learned by reading as much as possible about it. Once the basic principles have been apprehended, what is needed is observation and practice, not research into the further ramifications of theory.’ And E.J. Kenney: ‘the theorists … have generally speaking not edited texts or have not done so with much distinction; the best practitioners have fought shy of methodizing and mechanization’ (both cited in Gurd, 2005, 41).

  6. The sequence can be viewed on Nathaniel Mellors’s Vimeo page: https://vimeo.com/53407537 (from 24’00’ onward). See also Ronell (1989) for an analysis of telephony on which we silently rely.

  7. I wholeheartedly affirm here Werner Hamacher’s dictum ‘Language is imperative’ (1996, 201).

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Van Gerven Oei, V. The disturbing object of philology. Postmedieval 5, 442–455 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2014.32

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