CHRONOPOLITICS OF CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY THROUGH THE NON SEQUITUR

Alexandra Lianeri

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

This article argues that classical philology can play a vital role in debates about the importance of philology now and configures a genealogy that may contribute to the quest for alternative philologies. Building on Werner Hamacher's definition of philology as “love of the non sequitur,” I turn to founding texts of Western classical philology by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Friedrich August Wolf, and August Böckh in order to interrogate their identification with modern classicism and historicism. Examining the science of philology as Altertumswissenschaft, I focus on a language of ambiguity and undecidability with regard to philology's classical object (Greek and Roman pasts) and the discourse of philological science that constructs it. This is grasped as the relation between a transcendental temporality that enunciated classical antiquity's wholeness and a kind of perturbation of time that destabilized philology's alignment with classicism and historicism. For Winckelmann, Wolf, and Böckh, the philologist's task required a conceptual and temporal leap toward the past that signaled the absence of philology's grounding. In this sense, it differed from evocations of a seamless movement across a unified horizon of time linking antiquity and modernity. This was conveyed by stressing the past's mutilation, absence, and accidental expression as the vanishing ground on which philology could build its classical vision. By configuring these notions as the self-hollowing basis of its knowledge, classical philology came to be divided by a paradoxical appeal to sequential time and the non sequitur. Tensions produced in this context bring classical philology to the center of debates that seek to interrogate modern historical intelligibility and time. Far from perpetuating ideas of irreversible and linear time, classical philology claims to engage with an absent past, and as such, it disrupts sequential temporalities by desiring something that is always beyond presence or reach and therefore always available for times to come and for future emancipation from regimes of present time.