THE STAKES OF PHILOLOGY

REALITIES, ORIGINS, FUTURES

Helge Jordheim

History and Theory 64, no. 4 (2025)
“Philology Now” Theme Issue

What does philology mean today? And what can it do in the future? In this article, I respond to these questions by performing—again—a “return to philology,” as Paul de Man proclaimed in the 1980s. To engage with the present and future of philology, I return to nineteenth-century Germany and to some of the controversies that played out between the main proponents of the new discipline, including Gottfried Hermann, August Boeckh, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf. This was the time and place where philology came into its own and some of the discipline's stakes were spelled out for the first time. These stakes were both methodological and theoretical, phenomenological and ontological, and can be discussed according to their three main concerns: the struggle for the real, the possibility of origins, and the futures of the past. Invoking “Philology Now,” I argue, means bringing these stakes back into our discussion about history and theory.