A Philology of the Future

A theorization of the “philology of the future” through a series of engagements with the work of a scholar who has stretched disciplinary boundaries by putting classics and the very notion of “philology” in dialogue with critical theory.

This book gathers a group of scholars whose work has been influenced by the distinctive dialogue between ancient philosophy (and rhetoric) and critical theory promoted by the scholarship of James I. Porter. A classicist who has pushed classics beyond itself – beyond its traditional boundaries – Porter has demonstrated that antiquity cannot be studied without participating in what is sometimes dismissively labeled “reception.”

The collection here does not simply celebrate the work of a major figure in the field of classics through a series of writing experiments, but locates the futures of classics in its predisposition to endless transformation, alteration, reconfiguration, and fugitive or exilic deterritorialization. Philology is a practice of philosophy in that contact with the ghosts of antiquity and its diachronic manifestations in modernity confronts the interpreter with opportunities for unlearning as well as learning, unthinking as well as thinking, and for engaging with impossibilities as well as possibilities. The essays gathered here, unified by these themes, include contributions on ancient philosophy and literature (Homer, Sappho, Democritus, the sophists, Aristotle, Lucretius, and Cicero); reflections on the sublime, which Porter has pivotally elucidated; interventions on the theme of philology and exile (in Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and Derrida); and theoretical musings on the “agony of immanence,” the “biomatic,” the “atmospheric,” and the relationship between immigration and classical reception.