siraj ahmed, notes from babel: toward a colonial history of comparative literature

Notes from Babel: Toward a Colonial History of Comparative LiteratureAuthor(s): Siraj AhmedReviewed work(s):Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Winter 2013), pp. 296-326Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/668527 .

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Notes from Babel: Toward a Colonial Historyof Comparative Literature

Siraj Ahmed

In our culture, which lacks specific categories for spiritual transmission[,] it hasalways fallen to philology [alla filologia e da sempre affidato il compito] to guaranteethe authenticity and continuity of the cultural tradition. This is why a knowledge ofphilology’s essence and history should be a precondition of all literary education; yetthis very knowledge is hard to find even among philologists. Instead, as far asphilology is concerned, confusion and indifference reign.

—Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History

Philologism is the inevitable distinguishing mark of the whole of Europeanlinguistics. . . . However far back we may go in tracing the history of linguisticcategories and methods, we find philologists everywhere. Not just the Alexandrians,but the ancient Romans were philologists, as were the Greeks (Aristotle is a typicalphilologist). Also, the ancient Hindus were philologists.

—V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language

I know the philologists [Ich kenne sie]: I am myself one of them.—Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘We Philologists’

Recent attempts to make comparative literature respond to contempo-rary global conditions have taken their cue from Edward Said’s career-longengagement with the work of Erich Auerbach, which spanned from Said’s1969 cotranslation of ‘Philologie der Weltliteratur’ to his 2003 reintroduc-tion of Mimesis.1 Auerbach symbolized for Said both the possibilities and

I am grateful for the crucial responses of Anjuli Gunaratne, Richard Neer, and CriticalInquiry’s editorial board to an earlier version of this essay. Unless otherwise noted, alltranslations are my own.

1. See Aamir R. Mufti, ‘Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and theQuestion of Minority Culture’, Critical Inquiry 25 (Autumn 1998): 95–125 and ‘Orientalism andthe Institution of World Literatures’, Critical Inquiry 36 (Spring 2010): 458–93; VilashiniCooppan, ‘World Literature and Global Theory: Comparative Literature for the NewMillennium’, Symploke 9, nos. 1–2 (2001): 16–17 and ‘Ghosts in the Disciplinary Machine: The

Critical Inquiry 39 (Winter 2013)

© 2013 by The University of Chicago. 00093-1896/13/3902-0001$10.00. All rights reserved.

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the limitations of romance philology or, in other words, traditional ap-proaches to comparatism. On one hand, Said presented Auerbach’s phil-ological method as a model of ‘secular criticism’.2 Auerbach’s alienationfrom Germany in particular, nationalism in general, and orthodoxies of allsorts enabled him to transform humanism, making it responsive to con-tingency, exile, and minority experience.3 But, on the other hand, Saidacknowledged that Auerbach’s concept of literature was, nonetheless, Eu-rocentric, with its roots in the Christian incarnation and its first efflores-cence in The Divine Comedy.4 Where Auerbach famously wrote that ‘ourphilological home [Heimat] is the earth: it can no longer be the nation,’5

Said added an acid qualification: ‘his earthly home is European culture’.6

The calls for new approaches to philology, Weltliteratur, and compara-tive literature that have followed in Said’s wake have not directly addressedthe question that underlies his engagement with Auerbach: how can liter-ature, a concept with a strictly European provenance, ever hope to beadequate to non-European forms of writing? Jacques Derrida observedthat ‘when we say literature, . . . we speak and make ourselves understoodon the basis of a Latin root. . . . There is . . . no world literature, if such athing is or remains to come [aucune litterature mondiale, s’il en est, ou si ellereste a venir] . . . that must not first inherit what this latinity assumes’. Heasked, therefore, what we mean when we say literature: ‘Is it only a mode of

Uncanny Life of World Literature’, Comparative Literature Studies 41, no. 1 (2004): 10–36;Jonathan Arac, ‘Anglo-Globalism?’ New Left Review 16 (July–Aug. 2002): 40–44; Emily Apter,The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton, N.J., 2006), pp. 41–81; DjelalKadir, Memos from the Besieged City: Lifelines for Cultural Sustainability (Stanford, Calif., 2011),pp. 19–40; and Edward W. Said, ‘Introduction to the Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition’, in ErichAuerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, N.J., 2003),pp. ix–xxxii, rpt. ‘Erich Auerbach, Critic of the Earthly World’, Boundary 2 31, no. 2 (2004):11–34.

2. See Said, ‘Introduction: Secular Criticism’, The World, the Text, and the Critic(Cambridge, Mass., 1983), pp. 6–8; Orientalism (1978; New York, 2003), pp. xxiv–xv, 120, 261,hereafter abbreviated O; and ‘Erich Auerbach, Critic of the Earthly World’, pp. 13–17, 31.

3. See Mufti, ‘Auerbach in Istanbul’, pp. 96–98.4. See Said, ‘Secular Criticism’, p. 21 and ‘Erich Auerbach, Critic of the Earthly World’, p. 18.5. Auerbach, ‘Philology and Weltliteratur’, trans. Maire and Edward Said, Centennial

Review 13 (Winter 1969): 17; hereafter abbreviated ‘PW’.6. Said, ‘Secular Criticism’, p. 7.

S I R A J A H M E D is assistant professor of English and comparative literature atLehman College, City University of New York. He is the author of The Stillbirthof Capital: Enlightenment Writing and Colonial India (2012) and currentlywriting Archaeology of Babel: Critical Method and Colonial Law.

Critical Inquiry / Winter 2013 297



writing . . . specific to the little thing that is Europe [propre a cette petitechose qu’est l’Europe]? Or else is it already the Weltliteratur, whose conceptwas forged by Goethe?’7 In other words, do we understand our concept ofliterature to be spatially and temporally bounded, or do we believe it to beuniversal instead? Until we address this question, there is little reason tohope that any ‘new’ comparative literature will do more than repeat theprejudices of the old.

In this regard, the problem with philology—which Said described as‘the most basic and creative of the interpretive arts’—might be even deeperthan he was willing to acknowledge (O, p. xxiv). Auerbach claimed that hisfinal essays were responses to the homogenizing force of capitalism and thecold war:

The conception of Weltliteratur advocated in this essay—a conceptionof the diverse background of a common fate—does not seek to affector alter that which has already begun to occur[; my] conception ac-cepts as an inevitable fact that world-culture is being standardized.Yet this conception wishes . . . to articulate the fateful coalescence ofcultures for those people who are in the midst of the terminal phaseof a fruitful multiplicity: thus this coalescence, so rendered and artic-ulated, will become their myth. In this manner, the full range of thespiritual movements of the last thousand years will not atrophywithin them. [‘PW’, p. 7]

Said described Auerbach’s attitude toward the advent of modernity as‘melanchol[ic]’ and ‘tragic’.8 But, if so, this passage nonetheless revealsthat Auerbach had little interest in opposing the global tendencies he de-scribed: they are, he insisted, ‘inevitable’ (unentrinnbar). According to hisown historical vision, Weltliteratur—for Auerbach, the product of differ-ent cultures entering into ‘fruitful intercourse’—is not coming into exis-tence but, on the contrary, going extinct: it is now nothing more than ‘thediverse [mannigfaltigem] background of a common fate.’ Auerbach facedthe ongoing extinction of literary diversity with equanimity; his own con-

7. Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, in Derrida and Maurice Blanchot, ‘De-meure: Fiction and Testimony’ and ‘The Instant of My Death’ (Stanford, Calif., 2000),pp. 20–21, 19. The first comment prefaces a discussion of Auerbach’s one-time colleague, ErnstRobert Curtius. Derrida’s elaboration on the latinity of literature is relevant here: ‘Roman lawand the Roman concept of the State . . . [have] counted greatly in the institution and the consti-tution of literature’ (Derrida, Demeure, p. 21). The implication is that literature is an originallyWestern mode of writing that finds its meaning in the letter and the voice and, by extension, inthe logos and the law. See Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Balti-more, 1997), p. 17.

8. Said, ‘Erich Auerbach, Critic of the Earthly World’, p. 20.

298 Siraj Ahmed / A Colonial History of Comparative Literature



ception of world literature ‘does not seek to affect or alter’ its predestinedpassing away (hofft nicht mehr etwas bewirken zu können, was doch ge-schieht). The aim of his philological work was not to protect cultures en-dangered by global standardization (Standardisierung der Erdkultur) but,on the contrary, to document their end and so turn them into a ‘myth’(mythischen Besitz) that would provide an otherwise standardized human-ity ‘spiritual’ inspiration (‘PW’, p. 7; trans. mod.). In Auerbach’s work, inother words, philology resembles a New Age religion.

I would suggest that Auerbach accepted the supposed passing away ofworld literature not despite, but because of his philological vocation, atleast as he defined its limits. Like Said, he placed its origins in the eigh-teenth century, when philology underwent a fundamental mutation (seeO, p. 120).9 The European encounter with countless non-European lan-guages and archaic literatures initiated what Said called ‘the new’ or ‘mod-ern’ philology, which identified the history of each people with the historyof their language (O, p. 135).10 The new philology presumed, as a conse-quence, to reconstruct not only authentic texts but at the same time thegenealogy of different peoples. Philology’s task metamorphosed from therecovery of a single tradition—whether Judeo-Christian or Western clas-sical—into the reconstruction of all traditions.11 Hence, in Auerbach’sview, the new philology comprehended humanity in its historical com-plexity and ‘totality’: ‘Our knowledge of world literatures is indebted to theimpulse given that epoch by historicist humanism[, whose concern] wasnot only the overt discovery of materials and the development of methodsof research, but . . . their penetration and evaluation so that an inner his-tory of mankind— . . . of man unified in his multiplicity—could be writ-ten. . . . This humanism has been the true purpose of philology: because of

9. See also Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1993), p. 44, and ‘PW’, p. 4.10. See Said, ‘Islam, Philology, and French Culture: Renan and Massignon’, The World, the

Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), pp. 269–74. These terms name afield—originating with historical (or comparative) linguistics at the turn of the nineteenthcentury and culminating with Auerbach and Curtius’s literary criticism in the middle of thetwentieth—that aims to produce a total vision of human history by mastering its languages; seeGerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago, 2007), p. 69.

11. On the normative tradition in Renaissance humanism and in Biblical hermeneutics, seeHans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. W. Glen-Doepel, Joel Weinsheimer, andDonald G. Marshall (New York, 2004), pp. 175–78, 198, 333–34. The new philology considers thevalue and meaning of history to be variety and consequently undermines the possibility of asingle, normative tradition; see pp. xxiii, 199–200, 321. See also Thomas M. Seebohm,Hermeneutics: Method and Methodology (London, 2004), pp. 35–39. In the case of Renaissancehumanism, though, the tradition may be normative, as in the work of Lorenzo Valla, orhistorically disjunct from the present, as in the work of Poliziano; see Anthony Grafton,Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450 –1800 (Cambridge,Mass., 1991), pp. 6–9, 33.




this purpose philology became the dominant branch of the humanities’(‘PW’, pp. 5, 4). In other words, the recognition of human diversity depends,paradoxically, on a single analytic method, which arrogates to itself the privi-lege of knowing history objectively: ‘The progress of the historical arts [dergeschichtlichen Geisteswissenschaften] in the last two centuries . . . makes it pos-sible to accord the various epochs and cultures their own presuppositions’.12

From this perspective, literatures bereft of historical consciousness areinherently ‘programmed to vanish’, superseded by a philological under-standing capable of containing them all imaginatively even in their mate-rial absence.13 It is, therefore, not only market economies and cold-warpolitics that render such literatures obsolete but also Auerbach’s ownmethodological premises: ‘Whatever we are,’ he insisted, ‘we became inhistory, and only in history can we . . . develop [entfalten] therefrom: it isthe task of philologists [die Aufgabe der Weltphilologen] . . . to demonstratethis so that it penetrates our lives unforgettably’ (‘PW’, p. 6).

Perhaps it should give us pause that Said’s many discussions of Auer-bach never identify this problem—that is, Auerbach’s belief in the neces-sary end of Weltliteratur—but instead offer his work as a model forcomparative literature.14 This essay locates the source of Auerbach’s prob-lem and Said’s silence in their understanding of philology. In order to callthat understanding into question, it returns to the eighteenth-century mo-ment in which both Auerbach and Said located the new philology’s origins,but which neither explored. It argues that those origins were more com-plicated than Auerbach’s descriptor ‘historicist humanism’ can grasp. His-toricist humanism aims, according to Auerbach, to create a concept ofman unified in his multiplicity.15 But eighteenth-century philology wasborn in an earlier moment, before historical method was dominant. Dur-ing this moment, as philologists began to study the full extent of globallinguistic diversity, the phenomenon of language appeared too dispersedever to be unified again. Auerbach’s account of the new philology is tele-ological: European secularization naturally produces historicist human-ism, which elaborates, in turn, a single method to understand alllanguages, literatures, and traditions. His history omits a crucial event: no

12. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 573.13. Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York, 2003), p. 15. The quotation describes

indigenous languages from a European colonial perspective.14. For Said, the problem with Auerbach was his exclusive focus on history at the expense

of geography; see Said, ‘History, Literature, and Geography’ and ‘Arabic Prose and ProseFiction after 1948’, ‘Reflections on Exile’ and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), pp. 453–73,47–51.

15. See Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays (1973;Minneapolis, 1984), p. 197.




less than Renaissance humanism, the new philology became the scholarlyprotocol of sovereign power.16 Only under this pressure would it engenderwhat Hans-Georg Gadamer called a ‘universal hermeneutics’.17 Hence,whereas Auerbach and Said presented the history of philology as a contin-uous development from its eighteenth-century origins to its nineteenth-and twentieth-century elaboration, this essay begins to disentangle thetwo.

While scholars as diverse as John Guillory and Sheldon Pollack havelocated the new philology’s roots in late eighteenth-century colonial India,the political consequences of such a matrix for historical method have notbeen considered.18 If we return to colonial India, we will find that thoughAuerbach and Said gave historicist humanism credit for the birth of thenew philology, it deserves little. Historicist humanism was the intellectualbasis, ironically, of the English East India Company’s approach to nativepopulations, and it was responsible, as a consequence, less for the newphilology’s birth than for its colonial subjugation. Where philological re-search into South Asian languages and literatures called European human-ism, historicism, and sovereignty radically into question, colonial ruledemanded those incommensurable languages and literatures be under-stood in terms of a unified secular history that could be the basis of coloniallaw.

Said’s secular criticism, no less than Auerbach’s philology, was silentlyprogrammed by a related ambition, the dream of a universal discourse thatwould contain the diversity of tongues—in Auerbach’s words, the ‘fruitfulmultiplicity’ (fruchtbaren Mannigfaltigkeit) of literatures now in their ‘ter-minal phase’ (Endstadium). Though this dream would take various formsin the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was in fact much older. Thedream of a universal discourse begins with Babel.

16. Nietzsche was more caustic: ‘Philologists are eager slaves of the state’ (FriedrichNietzsche, ‘Notizen zu “Wir Philologen”’, Nachgelassene fragmente, 1875–79, vol. 8 of SämtlicheWerke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari [Berlin, 1988], p. 57).On Renaissance humanism and the early modern state, see Grafton and Lisa Jardine, FromHumanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-CenturyEurope (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), pp. xiii–xiv, and Grafton, Bring out Your Dead: The Past asRevelation (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), pp. 102–5.

17. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 178.18. See John Guillory, ‘Literary Study and the Modern System of the Disciplines’, in

Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siecle, ed. Amanda Anderson and Joseph Valente (Princeton, N.J.,2002), p. 29; Sheldon Pollack, ‘Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World’,Critical Inquiry 35 (Summer 2009): 938; and Bernard S. Cohn, ‘The Command of Language andthe Language of Command’, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India(Princeton, N.J., 1996), pp. 16–56, 54.




1. The Ruins of Babel and the Rise of PhilologyBabel’s significance is obscure to us now because its meaning shifted

fundamentally in the early nineteenth century, when G. W. F. Hegel rein-terpreted the Old Testament chapter in which it occurs (Genesis 11) as theur-narrative of progress.19 While the people of Shinar fail to complete theTower of Babel, the attempt leads, however unintentionally, to their dis-persal across the earth and the production of linguistic and cultural differ-ence, which is, according to Hegel, the precondition of historicaldevelopment. In the process, humanity lost touch with the language it hadspoken before the tower’s destruction and its own diaspora. Hegel had aslittle interest in that language as he did in every other prehistory, claimingthat once Adam and Eve consume the fruit of knowledge, ‘Paradise is apark, where only brutes [die Tiere], not men, can remain’.20

But before Hegel, from the Middle Ages through the eighteenth cen-tury, the dream of a lost divine language had bewitched churchmen andheretics alike. Biblical hermeneutics was an attempt to decipher the signsof that lost language, regardless of whether the exegetes aimed to restorethe sacred text concealed within the rabbis’ allegedly corrupt Bible or theyintended instead to contest the church’s own misinterpretations. Theseattempts to recover the language that preceded the destruction of the towerand the confusion of tongues culminated in Bishop Lowth’s ‘Lectures on theSacred Poetry of the Hebrews’ (Latin, 1756; English translation, 1787), whichapplied the techniques of classical philology to the Old Testament in order tofree ‘Hebraic poetry’ from its supposed imprisonment within the syna-gogue and to recover its sacred power—to recover, in short, the originaland ‘mystically perfect’ language.21 From the Middle Ages to the eighteenthcentury, at any rate, the importance of Babel lay in its allusion to human-ity’s oldest language—in Umberto Eco’s words, ‘first-born and, conse-quently, supernatural’ (primigenia e quindi soprannaturale)—which as themirror of nature and of divine creation would enable humanity to tran-scend its linguistic confusion.22

While Hebrew was generally thought to be the oldest language through-out this period, ancient rumors still circulated in the seventeenth and eigh-teenth centuries of sacred languages as old as or even older than Hebrew

19. See Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress (Oxford,1995), pp. 341–44.

20. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (London, 1914),p. 333. See the discussion in Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, andPhilology in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York, 2002), pp. 9–10.

21. Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, p. 2.22. Ibid., p. 17.




and of revelations that had occurred outside the Judeo-Christian tradition,whether from the Magi, Chaldean oracles, Egyptian Thoth cults, or thePythagorean and Orphic traditions. European colonialism reactivatedsuch rumors, with missionaries and explorers sending detailed accounts ofexotic languages from the New World (for example, Nahuatl) to the FarEast (for example, Tagalog) and greatly expanding the European compre-hension of global linguistic and cultural diversity as a consequence.23 TheEurope-wide interest in languages such as these attested to a commondesire to replace or at least supplement the Christian scholarly practice ofwriting ‘universal histories’—which discounted all literatures outside theJudeo-Christian tradition—with other ways of conceiving humanity’s ma-terial and spiritual development.

It was, however, a singular event in late eighteenth-century colonialIndia that definitively transformed Europe’s understanding of Babel. In1783, William Jones (1746–94)—Europe’s leading Orientalist and arguablythe Enlightenment’s greatest polymath—was appointed to head the Eng-lish East India Company Supreme Court in Bengal. His time there enabledhim to add Sanskrit to the remarkably long list of languages—ancient andmodern, Oriental and European—in his grasp. Two years after he arrivedin Calcutta, Jones made the programmatic declaration that Sanskrit, Per-sian, Greek, and Latin were descended from a single common language asold as but apparently unrelated to Hebrew. His formulation of what hassince come to be known as the ‘Indo-European thesis’ helped Europeanintellectuals rethink their narrative of world history. The belief in He-brew’s primordial status had led to a unilinear concept of history. Thehypothesis of separate language families suggested instead a ramified ge-nealogy involving many different but coeval languages, peoples, andhistories. Hence, where Renaissance philology reinforced theories of his-torical monogenesis, Jones’s scholarship implied that each language con-stitutes its own history.24 The Indo-European thesis made history adimension inside language—defined differently by each language’s pat-terns of lexical, syntactic, and semantic change—and in this way engen-dered the new philology. It enabled comparative approaches across (andindeed beyond) the human sciences, from literature and history to religionand jurisprudence—‘the boast,’ as Said noted, ‘of nineteenth-centurymethod’ (O, p. 117), the source of a ‘quantum expansion of . . . European

23. See Joseph Errington, Linguistics in a Colonial World: A Story of Language, Meaning, andPower (Malden, Mass., 2008), pp. 48, 57, and Thomas Trautmann, Aryans and British India(Berkeley, 1997), p. 55.

24. See Grafton, April Shelford, and Nancy Siraisi, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power ofTradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), p. 33.




consciousness’ in Thomas Trautmann’s words.25 The famed nineteenth-century Orientalist Max Muller claimed that as a consequence of the Indo-European thesis ‘a complete revolution took place in the views commonlyentertained of the ancient history of the world’.26

In the short run, the ten ‘Anniversary Discourses’ (1784–93) Jones de-livered as president and founder of the Royal Asiatick Society of Bengal—published in the society’s annual volume Asiatick Researches—reappearedalmost immediately thereafter in pirated editions widely disseminatedacross Europe.27 They contained, alongside Jones’s proto-declaration ofthe Indo-European thesis, comparative studies of languages, literatures,and mythologies spanning from India to Italy, and they were met by acuriosity about [non-European] languages which was, according toRaymond Schwab, ‘seething everywhere’ in Europe.28 These essays bear inembryo essential premises of the new philology. First, the nature of a peo-ple is defined by the language they speak, as Jones explained in ‘An Essayon the Poetry of Eastern Nations’: ‘every nation has a set of images, andexpressions, peculiar to itself, which arise from the difference of its climate,manners, and history’.29 Second, human difference across space and time canbe understood, therefore, only by means of philological study. After Jones,philology would produce what Joseph Errington has called ‘language-centered images of the deep human past’.30 Honing in on the historicity oflinguistic structures, the new philology claimed to recover traditions withscientific rigor. Its skill in this regard predestined it to become the foun-dation of the human sciences. Jones prefigured this transformation a cen-tury before the fact: ‘Grammar is [an] instrument,’ he explained, ‘of trueknowledge’.31

Jones’s grammatical approach to history formed the basis of nineteenth-

25. Trautmann, ‘The Lives of Sir William Jones’, in Sir William Jones, 1746 –1794: ACommemoration, ed. Richard Gombrich (Oxford, 1998), p. 96. Michel Foucault and JuliaKristeva also locate the origins of comparatism here; see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things:An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. pub. (New York, 1973), p. 291, hereafterabbreviated OT; and Julia Kristeva, Language—the Unknown: An Initiation into Linguistics,trans. Anne M. Menke (New York, 1989), pp. 193–95.

26. F. Max Muller, The Science of Language: Founded on Lectures Delivered at the RoyalInstitution in 1861 and 1863, 2 vols. (New York, 1891), 2:513.

27. See Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (New York,2002), p. 32, and Trautmann, ‘The Lives of Sir William Jones’, p. 99.

28. Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East,1680 –1880, trans. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking (New York, 1984), p. 33.

29. Sir William Jones, ‘An Essay on the Poetry of Eastern Nations’, The Works of SirWilliam Jones, 13 vols. (London, 1807), 10:347.

30. Errington, Linguistics in a Colonial World, p. 48.31. Jones, ‘On the Literature of the Hindus, from the Sanscrit’, The Works of Sir William

Jones, 4:107.




century philology, the discipline that would presume to transcend the mul-tiplicity of tongues. According to Foucault, Jones was as important formodern philology’s emergence from the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century field of general grammar as Adam Smith was for political economy’semergence from mercantilist theory. Though Foucault barely discussesJones, he is—alongside Smith and the botanist Jussieu—nothing less thanthe transitional figure for Foucault in the development of modern knowl-edge (see O, p. 240). After Jones, language ceased to be the medium ofknowledge—the veridical discourse of the Enlightenment, the crystallinelens through which one sees the truth—and became instead the privilegedobject of knowledge. As the founding figures of nineteenth-century phi-lology—Friedrich von Schlegel, Jacob Grimm, Rasmus Rask, and FranzBopp—isolated the members of the Indo-European language family anddescribed their peculiar patterns of change, each language acquired aninternal history and hence its own type of opacity. Only after the newphilology had detached the phenomenon of language from external refer-ence on the one hand and linear chronology on the other could we enterwhat Foucault referred to as ‘the order of time’ (OT, p. 293). We could callit historicism instead; we have already observed Auerbach place it at theheart of philology and accord it the highest methodological privilege. Be-cause the new philology transformed the very terms by which we under-stand language’s relationship to knowledge, its consequences have been,according to Foucault, the most far-reaching of any of the modern sciencesand at the same time the most unperceived. It replaced Babel’s confusionwith a critical method that claimed to know humanity across space andtime.

While Auerbach and Said both placed the origins of the new philology inthe late eighteenth century, they located the birth of comparative literature inthe early nineteenth—like countless scholars writing in their wake—with Jo-hann Wolfgang von Goethe’s formulation of the term Weltliteratur (see ‘PW’,p. 2, 4, and O, p. xxiv).32 A strange choice: however attractive the term, it hasnever gained conceptual coherence, oscillating even for Goethe himself be-tween a supranational canon of great works on one hand and an inquiry intothe transnational conditions of literary production on the other.33 Neither ideawill take us very far into the history of comparative literary study. Their vague-

32. See also Said, ‘Erich Auerbach,’ p. 18; Vilashini Cooppan, Worlds Within: NationalNarratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing (Stanford, Calif., 2009), pp. 11, 13; andStefan Hoesel-Uhlig, ‘Changing Fields: The Directions of Goethe’s Weltliteratur’, in DebatingWorld Literature, ed. Christopher Prendergast (London, 2004), pp. 26–53, 27, 28.

33. See David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton, N.J., 2003), pp. 1–36, andHoesel-Uhlig, ‘Changing Fields’, pp. 31, 33, 36.




ness reflects, if anything, only how completely the category of literature hadbeen evacuated of its prior meanings by the early nineteenth century. Thedevelopment of experimental science had emptied literature (in the classicalsense of erudition or book learning) of its epistemological value, while Im-manuel Kant’s third Critique had emptied literature (in the eighteenth-century sense of beautiful or tasteful writing) of its aesthetic function.34 Weshould also keep in mind that while Goethe has been credited with a deepinterest in Eastern literature, he in fact declared that he had left the Easternstyle of West-östlicher Diwan ‘behind, like a cast-off snake skin’, the same yearhe coined the term Weltliteratur (1827).35

I suggest we turn to Jones instead; he not only occupies a seminal placein the history of philology but could also justifiably replace Goethe at thebeginnings of comparative literature. Within a two-decade span (1771–89),he translated the most important works of classical Persian, Arabic, andIndian literature, respectively: Ha�fez’s poetry (fourteenth century A.D.);the Mu‘allaqa�t (sixth–seventh centuries A.D.); and Ka�lida�sa’s Sakuntala�(c. fourth–fifth centuries A.D.). Jones’s versions were the earliest suchtranslations into any European language, and they had a profound effecton romanticism in Europe and beyond, shaping, for example, Goethe’soriginal interest in Eastern literature; the West-östlicher Diwan was mod-eled on the first and deeply indebted to the second, while the prologue ofFaustus was modeled on the last.36 Tracing the genealogy of comparativeliterature from these translations rather than Goethe’s mere formulationof the word Weltliteratur would have a number of ancillary benefits. First,it would force us to explore comparative method’s eighteenth-centuryroots rather than take them for granted, as both Auerbach and Said do.Second, instead of ‘revolving around the river Rhine,’ it would returncomparatism to its colonial context.37 And hence, third, it would disclosecomparative literature’s initial political utility.

While Goethe’s scattered speculations on Weltliteratur hardly consti-tute a project for the field, Jones defined the purpose of his translationsprecisely. They were, first of all, instruments of historical knowledge. He

34. See Hoesel-Uhlig, ‘Changing Fields’, pp. 39, 42–46.35. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann, trans. pub. (New York,

1901), p. 151.36. See Alan Jones, ‘Sir William Jones as an Arabist’, in Sir William Jones, 1746 –1794, p. 71;

Trautmann, ‘The Lives of Sir William Jones’, p. 100; A. J. Arberry, Asiatic Jones: The Life andInfluence of Sir William Jones (1746 –1794), Pioneer of Indian Studies (London, 1946), p. 33;Garland Cannon, The Life and Mind of Oriental Jones: Sir William Jones, the Father of ModernLinguistics (Cambridge, 1990), p. 313; and Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England,1780 –1860 (Princeton, N.J., 1967), p. 118.

37. Franco Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, New Left Review 1 (Jan.–Feb. 2000): 54.




described the Mu‘allaqa�t as ‘an exact picture’ of ‘the manners of the Arabsin that age’.38 He claimed that Persian poetry, such as Ha�fez’s Dı�va�n, con-tains ‘positive information’, which one cannot acquire, for example, aboutthe ‘unlettered’ Tartars; if one does not study its literature, one can ‘at mostattain a general and imperfect knowledge of the country’.39 And he ‘pre-sent[ed] [Sacuntala] to the publick as a most pleasing and authentick pic-ture of old Hindu manners’.40 In each case, Jones’s comments illustratehow profoundly the new philology’s historical ambitions motivated com-parative literary study. Literature is the expression of a nation—in the caseof peoples such as Arabs, Persians, and Indians who supposedly lacked thedisciplines of history and philosophy, the only means to know their past.In other words, after experimental science and Kantian critique had hol-lowed literature out, philology gave it a new epistemic value. If worldliterature now occupies an official space on the curricular and scholarlyagenda, we would do well, rather than simply to recall that Goethe coinedthe term, to understand how our approach relates to the original practice.

In part, then, the discipline of comparative literature was born along-side the new philology as an absolutely essential aspect of its method. As itelaborated Jones’s approach, nineteenth-century philology would eventu-ally claim that it could subsume and therefore supersede the diversity oftongues. It was the science that would make sense of everything human,turning linguistic confusion into total knowledge. It would become, in thisway, analogous to the dream of a divine language, which it would annuland preserve in a higher form. Its authority—which both Auerbach andSaid accepted—would ultimately depend on the obsolescence of all otherapproaches to language. But though we can observe the lineaments ofnineteenth-century philology emerge in Jones’s work, that field was nothegemonic yet. The late eighteenth century also staked out a differentlinguistic terrain, which the nineteenth century would abandon.

2. Aryanism and the UrspracheThe Indo-European thesis famously led to the Aryan myth. Nineteenth-

century philologists divided the world’s first inhabitants into two peoples:those who belonged to the Indo-European language family and those whodid not. The Aryans’ supposed conquest of countries stretching from

38. Jones, ‘The Fourth Anniversary Discourse, on the Arabs, delivered 15th February, 1787’,The Works of Sir William Jones, 3:59.

39. Jones, ‘The Sixth Anniversary Discourse, on the Persians, delivered 19th February, 1789’,The Works of Sir William Jones, 3:103, 107.

40. Jones, ‘Preface’ to Calidas, Sacontala; or, The Fatal Ring, trans. Jones, The Works of SirWilliam Jones, 9:367.




Western Europe to the Indian subcontinent and their invention of thecountless languages spoken across that expanse proved they possessed theprerogative of historical progress. In contrast, the Semites’ confinement tothe Near East and its few languages indicated a spatial and temporal im-mobility.41 The Indo-European thesis enabled in this way a categorical dis-tinction between Christians and Jews or, in other words, ruling and subjectpeoples, as Martin Bernal has argued at length in Black Athena.42 But its effectwas, more broadly, a new theory of race in which each language bespoke aunique racial heritage.43 From the perspective of nineteenth-century philol-ogy, variations in grammatical systems reflected differences in racial con-sciousness. Building on Johann Gottfried von Herder’s arguments aboutthe relation between language and race in his Treatise on the Origin ofLanguage (1772), Wilhelm von Humboldt declared that European nationallanguages were each an ‘involuntary emanation of the spirit [unwillkuh-rliche Emanation des Geistes], no work of nations, but a gift fallen to themby their inner destiny.’44 Hannah Arendt’s description of the philologicalbasis of Eastern European nationalism in The Origins of Totalitarianismcould easily be extended across the globe: these ‘liberation movements . . .started with a kind of philological revival . . . whose political function wasto prove that the people who possessed a literature and history of theirown, had the right to national sovereignty’.45 As a consequence of its tran-shistorical explanatory power, race eventually became the focus ofnineteenth-century philological research.

In its first modern iteration, then, the category of race was the strangefruit of the British conquest of Bengal, which enabled Europeans finally todecrypt Sanskrit and to begin uncovering the prehistory of the peopleknown in that language as the A� rya. Or perhaps it was not so strange afterall: Aryanism was almost as fundamental to colonialism as it was to na-tionalism and fascism. If ruling groups in Europe invoked Aryan geneal-ogies in order to legitimize their rule and distinguish natives from aliens,colonial administrators in outposts ranging from Ireland to Southeast Asiaused such genealogies or the absence thereof to produce knowledge aboutthe native populations they governed.46

41. See Olender, The Languages of Paradise, pp. 11–14.42. See Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 1 of

The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1987).43. See Trautmann, Aryans and British India, p. 2; Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language,

p. 344; and OT, p. 290.44. Wilhelm von Humboldt, On Language: The Diversity of Human Language-Structure and Its

Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind, trans. Peter Heath (Cambridge, 1988), p. 24.45. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1973), p. 271 n. 6.46. See Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race, pp. 6, 7, 32.




In either case, though, nineteenth-century philologists imagined that ifthey could reconstruct the morphological roots of the Indo-European lan-guage family, they would recover the thought of the early Aryans. Themyth of the Aryans involved, in other words, a quest for the Adamic lan-guage that preceded the confusion of tongues, when God, nature, and manexisted in an immediate relationship with each other.47 Hence, FerdinandSaussure identified nineteenth-century philology with the ‘almost con-scious dream of an ideal humanity’—he described the Aryans as the ‘peo-ple of the golden age brought back to life by scholarly thought [revu par lapensee]’—and he founded the ‘science’ of semiology in opposition to thisfalse historicism.48 Scholars who focus on the history of colonial philologyhave read this nineteenth-century quest back into Jones’s work, claimingthat he wanted to recover ‘the language spoken when Adam and Eve werecast out from the garden of Eden’;49 the ‘fundamental unity in humanthought, belief and action hidden under the veneer of linguistic differ-ence’50; and ‘ancient wisdom’ or ‘primitive monotheism’.51

In fact, though, if Jones set out in search of a primordial language, hisphilological studies only proved to him that it would never be found. Farfrom uncovering the common language of our earliest ancestors or evendividing them into separate Aryan and Semitic tribes, Jones uncoveredthree separate language families: he argued that ‘the whole earth was peo-pled by a variety of shoots from the Indian, Arabian, and Tartarianbranches’, thereby correctly identifying the lack of filiation among thelanguage groups now known as Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, and Altaic.He claimed that he could not ‘find a single word used in common by [thesethree] families’ and hence concluded that ‘the language of NOAH is lostirretrievably’.52 However it began, his research staked itself in the end onthe irreducible diversity of languages, whose consequences he claimedeven he could not fully comprehend: ‘Thus has it been proved . . . beyondcontroversy, that the far greater part of Asia has been peopled and imme-morially possessed by three considerable nations, whom, for want of better

47. See Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘Foreword’ to Olender, The Languages of Paradise, p. x;Oleander, The Languages of Paradise, pp. 8, 11; and Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language,p. 346.

48. Quoted in Olender, The Languages of Paradise, p. 8. See Ferdinand de Saussure, Recueildes Publications Scientifiques de Ferdinand de Saussure (Geneva, 1922), p. 395.

49. Errington, Linguistics in a Colonial World, p. 64.50. Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race, p. 30.51. Trautmann, Aryans and British India, p. 60.52. Jones, ‘The Ninth Anniversary Discourse, on the Origin and Families of Nations,

delivered 23d February, 1792’, The Works of Sir William Jones, 3:186, 199. See also Jones, ‘FourthAnniversary Discourse, on the Arabs, delivered 15th February, 1787’, 3:53, 65.




names, we may call Hindus, Arabs, and Tartars; each of them divided andsubdivided into an infinite number of branches, and all of them so differ-ent in form and features, language, manners and religion, that, if theysprang originally from a common root, they must have been separated forages’.53 Two centuries later, Jones’s dazzling twentieth-century counter-part, Georges Dumezil, would reiterate his precursor’s conclusions foranyone who still hoped to recover the Ursprache: comparative philologists(les comparatistes) ‘know that the dramatic, living reconstruction of a com-mon ancestral language . . . is impossible, since nothing can replace docu-ments and there are no documents’.54

Histories of philology identify Jones as the crucial figure in the emer-gence of ‘linguistic science’ from ‘prescience’.55 Even The Order of Thingspresents Jones’s work as transitional, as we have already observed, despitethe fact that Foucault generally abjured describing the history of science interms of progress narratives. But if Jones was a transitional figure in thedevelopment of modern knowledge, it necessarily follows that his workcannot be circumscribed within disciplinary protocols that emerged fullyonly after his death; it must contain other perspectives on language andliterature as well. In fact, Foucault acknowledged that the new philology is‘an arrangement of [knowledge] not yet definitively established by the endof the eighteenth century’. He considered it, like political economy, to bepart of the ‘great detour’ that defines modern thought, ‘the great quest,beyond representation, for the very being of what is represented’. In thework of Jones and of Smith, this detour ‘has not yet been made; only theplace from which [it] will become possible has . . . been established’. Thisplace is an ‘ambiguous epistemological configuration’ involving two differ-ent concepts of language: on one hand, language as a veridical discourse, thetransparent medium of knowledge; on the other, language as a historical sys-tem, the opaque object of knowledge. Jones’s work, like Smith’s, contains ‘aphilosophic duality’ at the point of ‘its imminent dissolution’ (OT, p. 240).Precisely because Jones’s work immediately preceded the institutionalizationof philology as an academic discipline, it should enable us to recover conceptsof language and literature that the new philology disavowed. On what subse-quently forgotten approaches is his work premised?

Both Derrida and Daniel Heller-Roazen have returned to Genesis 11 inorder to explore the peculiar concept of language implied therein. Whilerecognizing the moral of the story to be that linguistic plurality is, hence-

53. Jones, ‘The Fifth Anniversary Discourse, on the Tartars, delivered 21st February, 1788’,3:101–2.

54. Georges Dumezil, ‘Civilization Indo-europeene’, Cahiers du Sud 309 (1951): 222.55. Trautmann, Aryans and British India, p. 39.




forward, irreducible, they have also drawn more subtle inferences fromone of the chapter’s strange details: Genesis 11:9 redefines the word babel tomean ‘confusion’. The Old Testament thereby confounds a noun, proba-bly Akkadian in origin, signifying ‘the gateway of God’ with the Hebrewverb ב בלל , bilbel, ‘to confuse’. Ironically, this single alteration containsGod’s punishment within itself: God shatters the original language, mak-ing the people of Shinar unable to communicate with each other andthrowing them into confusion. Where Babel was the quintessentiallyproper name because it opened to God’s presence, it becomes the quintes-sentially improper (or fallen) word because it paradoxically signifies thenoncorrespondence of word and meaning. Both Derrida and Heller-Roazen have inferred that after Babel language and confusion becomesynonymous. Or to be more precise: because the people of Shinar wantedtheir language to be universal, God decreed that no linguistic experienceexcept confusion would ever be universal again. Derrida described ‘babel’as ‘the only idiom that . . . triumphed’ (l’emporter).56 The ‘triumph’ ofbabel implies that, in place of a universal discourse that would compre-hend all other languages, there are now only those other languages, differ-ent from each other and each one even from itself, subject to change acrossboth space and time.

In the same vein, Heller-Roazen has written: ‘As the element fromwhich all languages departed and by means of which they ceaselessly mul-tiplied both temporally and geographically, “confusion” would remaininseparable from the idioms to which it gave rise’.57 After the tower’s de-struction, it is no longer the Word but rather confusion itself that is theorigin of language. Alluding to a passage from the Babylonian Talmud thatclaims ‘the air around the [ruined] tower makes one lose one’s memory’,Heller-Roazen has suggested that each of us may still unwittingly inhabitthe ruins of Babel, fated to forget not only the Ursprache, but also everyidiom we have spoken from our first words to the present (quoted in E, p.227; see also pp. 230–31). It is this unavoidable forgetting that makes lan-guages multiply—or, in other words, ‘that . . . allow[s] all languages to be’(E, p. 12).

To embrace our linguistic condition—the noncorrespondence of lan-guages, which ensures their multiplicity—we would need, therefore, to beopen to each language on its own terms. Such an attitude toward the

56. Derrida, ‘Des tours de Babel’, Psyche, vol. 1 of Inventions of the Other, trans. PeggyKamuf et al., ed. Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, Calif., 2007), p. 196; hereafterabbreviated ‘B’.

57. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language (New York, 2008),p. 225; hereafter abbreviated E.




noncorrespondence of languages would draw near the concept of ‘diereine Sprache’ or ‘pure language’ that Walter Benjamin described in hisown meditations on Babel’s legacy: ‘On the Language as Such and on theLanguage of Man’ (1916) and ‘The Translator’s Task’ (1921). Benjamin’s reineSprache is less a language itself than an approach to language in general thatrejects the possibility of understanding any language by means of another.Elaborating a suggestion from the Kabbalah, Benjamin identified alien-ation from God with the belief that language is a medium of somethingoutside itself, such as truth or knowledge, a concept of language that makesit, according to Benjamin, empty and withered, mere ‘prattle’ (Ge-schwätz).58 In contrast, pure language ‘no longer signifies [nichts mehrmeint] or expresses anything’; it refers instead to ‘the expressionless andcreative word [schöpferisches Wort] that is the intended object of everylanguage’.59

Benjamin’s approach to language presupposes that the confusion oftongues neither can nor needs to be redeemed, and in this way it opens thedoor to the divine once more. When languages are no longer limited byany overarching analytic discourse, they experience ‘sacred growth’ (hei-lige Wachstum), moving increasingly close to the ‘incomprehensible, thesecret [Unfa�bare, Geheimnisvolle], the “poetic”’—or even, Benjaminnotes, to forms of life that exceed ‘organic corporeality alone’. The ‘supra-historical kinship [Verwandtschaft] of languages’ takes place in this un-worldly realm, which in Benjamin’s thought potentially interrupts ourown at every moment. The attempt to decipher the pure language of anytext is, in other words, an approach to the confusion of tongues that doesnot attempt to transcend it. Benjamin explains that though ‘the great mo-tive of integrating the plurality of languages into a single true language ishere carrying out its work’ (erfullt seine Arbeit), ‘individual propositions’from different languages ‘never arrive at agreement’. Instead, ‘the lan-guages themselves . . . agree,’ ‘reconciled with each other’ in their commonresistance to any form of reference.60 Nineteenth-century philology had toexile precisely this attitude of acceptance toward the confusion of tonguesif it wanted to become the master discourse.

It is no coincidence, then, that Umberto Eco, George Steiner, and Ge-rard Genette each locate the origins of such an attitude in the long eigh-teenth century (though Eco acknowledges that outside Europe such an

58. Walter Benjamin, ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’, Reflections:Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz (NewYork, 1986), p. 328.

59. Benjamin, ‘The Translator’s Task’, trans. Steven Rendall, TTR 10, no. 2 (1997): 163.60. Ibid., pp. 157, 152, 153, 156, 159.




attitude existed much earlier), when the interpretation of Babel underwenta fundamental, if short-lived, transformation.61 According to Eco, theeighteenth-century reinterpretation of Babel hinged on Genesis 1, whichsuggests that the multiplicity of tongues was prior to the destruction of thetower and must have been therefore humanity’s primitive condition. Nolonger God’s punishment, the confusion of tongues can be seen, finally, asa gift. Once it reappears in this way, Eco observes, ‘the very sense of themyth of Babel has been turned upside down’ (c’e il rovesciamento di segnonella lettura del mito babelico).62

We should recall, in this regard, that Jones considered Babel an actualevent—‘the fourth important fact recorded in the Mosaick history’—anddisavowed the possibility of ever recovering humanity’s original lan-guage.63 He insisted instead on the irreducible diversity of languages.Jones’s writing occupies a peculiar moment, when the confusion oftongues suddenly and briefly ceased to be a curse. To understand his work,we will need, in other words, to untie the eighteenth-century encounterwith diverse language families from the nineteenth-century ascendancy ofhistorical method. Though they are both episodes in the history of philol-ogy, they are fundamentally different from each other.

3. The Confusion of Languages and the Concept of LiteratureWhen philology dissolved the Enlightenment concept of language, it

enabled language, Foucault argued, to assume myriad forms. A conceitabout Babel tacitly structures his discussion of philology in The Order ofThings: ‘when the unity of [Enlightenment discourse] was broken up, lan-guage appeared in a multiplicity of modes of being, whose unity was prob-ably irrecoverable’ (dont l’unite, sans doute, ne pouvait pas etre restauree)(OT, p. 304).64 As philology began to uncover the historical complexity oflanguage, gradually excavating the depth and breadth of Babel’s ruins, itensured that its own method would never be equal to the task of recon-struction. Every analytic discourse that claimed to comprehend languagein general would, like the tower, fall to pieces before it was finished.

In Foucault’s account, the concept of literature is born in the West only

61. See George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford, 1975), pp.73–86; Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, pp. 9–10, 338; and Gerard Genette, Mimologics,trans. Thaıs E. Morgan (Lincoln, Nebr., 1994), pp. 115–41.

62. Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, p. 339.63. Jones, ‘Ninth Anniversary Discourse, on the Origin and Families of Nations, delivered

23d February, 1792’, 3:194; first italics, my emphasis; see also 3:196–97.64. See Foucault’s discussion of Babel, ‘Language to Infinity’ (1963), Language, Counter-

Memory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, ed. Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.,1997), p. 66.




after eighteenth-century philology discloses language’s multiple ‘modes ofbeing’: ‘there has of course existed in the Western world, since Dante, sinceHomer, a form of language that we now call “literature.” But the word is ofa recent date, as is also, in our culture, the isolation of a particular languagewhose peculiar mode of being is “literary”’ (OT, pp. 299–300). When dif-ferent modes of language inhabit the same place, they create what Foucaultrefers to as ‘an unthinkable space’ (OT, p. xvii). Literature is Foucault’s namefor the language practice and the theoretical concept that occupy this space. Ifeighteenth-century philology is literature’s antecedent, nineteenth-centuryphilology becomes its adversary because literature must differentiate itself notonly from the Enlightenment’s veridical discourse but also from the new phi-lology’s historical systems: ‘Literature is the contestation of philology (ofwhich it is nevertheless the twin figure): it leads language back from gram-mar to the naked power [pouvoir denude] of speech, and there it encoun-ters the untamed [sauvage], imperious being of words’ (OT, p. 300). Inother words, literature is language that makes no reference outside itself:‘At the moment when language . . . becomes an object of knowledge, we seeit reappearing in a strictly opposite modality . . . where it has nothing to say butitself, nothing to do but shine in the brightness of its being’ (OT, p. 300).

It is perhaps no coincidence, then, that while Jones presented grammaras the instrument of ‘true knowledge’, his own studies of Arabic, Persian,and Indian literatures question the very possibility of such knowledge. Heemphasized, for example, that the nomad poetry of the Mu‘allaqa�t deniesthe stability of human existence: the Bedouin ‘pour out [these poems]almost extempore, professing a contempt for the stately pillars, and sol-emn buildings of the cities’. Here Jones undertook the paradoxical task ofreading what was, in his words, ‘originally unwritten’, the poetry of an oralculture. The poems’ extemporaneous form implied, for Jones, a languagethat exists, as he noted, only in ‘memory’. Memory is the trace of what hasalready passed away, like tracks in the desert sand. Such tracks are the mostrecurrent topos of the Mu‘allaqa�t; they are the poems’ ultimate signified,what human building always comes to in the end. According to Jones, thelanguage of the Mu‘allaqa�t does not merely express but enacts the nomad’slove of freedom: for the Bedouin, ‘“delighting in eloquence,”’ ‘“disclaim-ing . . . dependence on [the] monarch,”’ and ‘“exulting in their liberty”’were one and the same act.65 Jones argued, in other words, that the ancientlanguage of the Bedouin existed in ethical, political, and ontological op-position to the state-centered empires that surrounded them.

65. Jones, ‘Fourth Anniversary Discourse, on the Arabs, delivered 15th February, 1787’, 3:67,66, 69, 68–69.




Jones’s essays ‘On the Persians’ and ‘On the Mystical Poetry of thePersians and Hindus’ discuss literatures that, more radically still, denyexternal reference altogether. The first essay notes that Sufi writing advisesits practitioners to ‘break all connexion . . . with extrinsick objects, and passthrough life without attachments’.66 The second essay includes Jones’sprose translation of a poem by Ismat Alla�h Bukha�rı� that contains an ex-emplum of Sufi thought. When Ismat pursues the pagan daughter of Vint-ner, she commands him,

Cast thy rosary on the ground; bind on thy shoulder the thread of pa-ganism; throw stones at the glass of piety; and quaff wine from a fullgoblet; / After that come before me, that I may whisper a word in thineear; thou wilt accomplish thy journey, if thou listen to my discourse.

Abandoning my heart and rapt in ecstasy, I ran after her, till I cameto a place, in which religion and reason forsook me. / At a distance Ibeheld a company, all insane and inebriated, who came boiling androaring with ardour from the wine of love; / Without cymbals, orlutes, or viols, yet all full of mirth and melody; without wine, or gob-let, or flask, yet all incessantly drinking.

When the cord of restraint slipped from my hand, I desired to askher one question, but she said: Silence! / This is no square temple, to thegate of which thou canst arrive precipitately: this is no mosque to whichthou canst come with tumult, but without knowledge. / This is the ban-quet-house of infidels, and within it all are intoxicated; all, from thedawn of eternity to the day of resurrection, lost in astonishment. / Departthen from the cloister, and take the way to the tavern; cast off the cloak ofa dervish, and wear the robe of a libertine.

I obeyed; and, if thou desirest the same strain and colour with ISMAT,imitate him, and sell this world and the next for one drop of pure wine.

Jones commented: ‘Such is the strange religion, and stranger language ofthe Sufis; but most of the Asiatick poets are of that religion . . . If we thinkit worth while to read their poems, we must think it worth while to under-stand them’. Staying with the Sufi’s ‘strange’ language, Jones translated thewords of Ru�mı� to gloss Ismat’s poem: the Sufis ‘profess eager desire, butwith no carnal affection, and circulate the cup, but no material goblet;since all things are spiritual in their sect, all is mystery within mystery’.67 Aswith Arabic poetry, Jones’s discussions of Persian and Indian literatures

66. Jones, ‘Sixth Anniversary Discourse, on the Persians, delivered 19th February, 1789’,3:130–31.

67. Jones, ‘On the Mystical Poetry of the Persians and Hindus’, The Works of Sir WilliamJones, 4:229–30.




emphasize the ways in which they reject objective knowledge and accordlanguage ontological power instead. Jones’s commitment to understand‘Asiatick’ literature on its own terms forced him, in other words, to con-front the language of ‘infidels’, who do not believe in the preconceivedmeanings of words, for whom the word has become dissevered from thething and recovered its own creative force. This language, where every-thing is ‘mystery within mystery,’ approaches both Benjamin’s reineSprache and Foucault’s definition of literature.68 Such concepts—which donot recognize a difference between ontic and phenomenal existence—areprecisely what historical method must denigrate because it is premised, asJean-Pierre Vernant observed, on ‘a sharp and definitive division [cou-pure] between the strictly rational approach [demarche] and the naive fan-tasies of the mythological imagination [imaginaire]’.69

But these concepts of language are also precisely what Jones’s essays andtranslations made available to the romantic generation. More than anyother figure, Jones inspired the ‘Oriental Renaissance’ that shaped lateeighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European literature, as Schwabexplained at length.70 Here is Jones’s often-quoted explanation of the im-pulse behind his comparative studies: ‘our European poetry has subsistedtoo long on the perpetual repetition of the same images, and incessantallusions to the same fables: and it has been my endeavour for several yearsto inculcate this truth, that, if the principal writings of the Asiaticks [wereprinted] and if the languages of the Eastern nations were studied in ourgreat seminaries of learning[,] a new and ample field would be opened forspeculation; . . . we should be furnished with a new set of images andsimilitudes’.71 What European writers have to gain, though, from ‘the im-ages and similitudes’ of Eastern poets is more than a new set of tropes.Whereas contemporary European writing is, according to Jones, ‘the like-ness of a likeness’, ‘Eastern poetry’ does not represent something else butinstead realizes ‘that rich and creative invention, which is the very soul ofpoetry’.72 Jones wanted European literature to share Eastern poetry’s on-tological power. In Jones’s account, Eastern poetry emerges not from thealready constituted relationships between word and thing but rather fromthe acceptance of linguistic confusion, which necessarily constitutes thatrelationship anew.

68. Foucault also uses the term ‘pure language’ (un pur langage)—and ‘the brute being’ oflanguage—to define ‘literature’ (OT, pp. 89, 119).

69. Vernant, ‘Foreword,’ p. viii.70. See Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance, pp. 35–36, 38, 51, 56–61.71. Jones, ‘Essay on the Poetry of Eastern Nations’, 10:359–60.72. Ibid., 10:355.




According to anthropological studies, the Hindu and Islamic traditionsthat preceded the advent of colonialism were based not on texts but ratheron rituals in which language was inseparable from physical experience.73

Such language cannot be understood on the model of the sign, the signa-ture, or any other European theory of correspondence between word andthing.74 It was thought instead to transmit the being of the one who origi-nates it and, consequently, to transform the being of the one who receivesit. A sacred language was, in other words, a material substance and anactive force; its simple articulation altered the unfolding of time.75 Withinthese traditions, therefore, one could not stand outside language and makeit the object of historical knowledge.

It is philology that first separates language from the material world.76

Wherever and whenever it has emerged, from the Vedic schools and Aris-totelian thought to Renaissance humanism and the higher criticism, phil-ological scholarship and education has abstracted language from livingspeech and reconstituted it in terms of linguistic categories (such as syntaxand grammar) and, ultimately, rules of development (whether phonolog-ical or morphological). By formalizing language in these ways, philologyturns itself into a science. Indeed, once history has become a dimension

73. See Cohn, ‘The Command of Language and the Language of Command’, pp. 18–19, andTalal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, Calif., 2003),pp. 224, 249–52. As Asad notes, the Arabic word for such embodied traditions is sunna. Herelates it to the concept of habitus; see Marcel Mauss, ‘Techniques of the Body’, Economy andSociety 2 (Feb. 1973): 70–88, and Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. RichardNice (Cambridge, 1977). A Sanskrit-based analog is ‘adhyan’; see Spivak, ‘Translator’sAfterword’, in Mahasweta Devi, Chotti Munda and His Arrow, trans. Spivak (Oxford, 2002),p. 289.

74. Benedict Anderson and Cohn make this point; see Benedict Anderson, ImaginedCommunities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991), p. 14, andCohn, ‘The Command of Language and the Language of Command’, p. 18.

75. According to Michel de Certeau, the birth of science and linguistics depends on ‘thedeontologizing [desontologisation] of language’ (Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, trans.Michael B. Smith, 2 vols. [Chicago, 1992], 1:123). Giorgio Agamben claims, similarly, thatlanguage’s ‘ontological’ (ontologico) or ‘performative’ power has been replaced by a purely‘denotative structure’ managed by logic, science, and law. He considers ‘the death of God’ oneevent in this transformation: ‘Once the performative power of language was concentrated in thename of the one God[,] the individual divine names lose all efficacy and fall to the level oflinguistic ruins [macerie], in which only the denotative meaning remains perceptible.’ The ruinof language—the loss of its ontological power—‘promotes a spectacular and unprecedentedproliferation [of] legislative apparatuses that seek obstinately to legislate on every aspect [of]life’ (Giorgio Agamben, The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath [Stanford,Calif., 2010], pp. 56–59, 70).

76. See V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejkaand I. R. Titunik (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), pp. 71–79; Gadamer, ‘Text and Interpretation’, TheGadamer Reader: A Bouquet of the Later Writings, trans. and ed. Richard E. Palmer (Chicago,2007), pp. 156–91, 170; and Kristeva, Language, pp. 44, 145–47, 156–57, 197.




inside language, philology can claim to be the only method that producesknowledge about the human past—and hence that still has access to any(and every) tradition.

But when a language is made to illustrate laws of historical change, itceases to be an active part of the present. The new philology’s sophisticatedeffort to reconstruct the relationship between language and history doomslanguage, in Foucault’s words, ‘to be re-apprehensible only within history’(OT, p. 294).77 Hence, we need to see the new philology not as the preser-vation of tradition but rather as its destruction; the physical experience oflanguage is superseded by abstract knowledge. When we assume the per-spective of the new philology, we lose access to any tradition in whichlanguage is thought to form the very basis of being and hence could not beobjectified. Regardless of the European philological premise that literaryworks become intelligible only when one places them within a historicalorder, precolonial Indian traditions conceived them instead as constitu-ent elements of present experience, according to both Bernard Cohnand Kamil Zvelebil.78 Jones’s translations of and essays about Sanskrit,Arabic, and Persian literature attempted to inhabit language practices thathistorical method would leave in ruins. In his work, we encounter a com-paratism that operated outside the prison house of academic philology.

Scholarship across the humanities tends to associate philology with thepractice that developed after Jones, founded squarely on the kind of his-torical method Auerbach advocated. But in Jones’s work, before the con-stitution of philology as a quasi-scientific discipline, diverse and radicallyopposed concepts of history, language, and literature coexisted and inter-rupted each other. The play of such oppositions exemplifies what JonathanCuller considers to be philology’s most profound lesson: the contradictionbetween its desire to reconstruct history and its attention to linguisticdetails that resist ‘the aesthetic and ideological assumptions’ on whichhistorical reconstruction depends. Culler concludes his essay ‘Anti-Foundational Philology’ by emphasizing that ‘the play of the term philol-ogy . . . is valuable insofar as it captures the crucial tension between thereconstructive project and that critique of construction which philologyought to have as its goal’.79 His point about philology’s subversive potential

77. Gadamer reiterates this point; see Gadamer, ‘Man and Language’, PhilosophicalHermeneutics, trans. and ed. David E. Linge (Berkeley, 1976), pp. 59–68, 61.

78. See Cohn, ‘Command of Language and the Language of Command’, p. 56, and KamilZvelebil, Tamil Literature (Wiesbaden, 1974), pp. 2–4.

79. Jonathan Culler, ‘Anti-Foundational Philology’, in On Philology, ed. Jan Ziolkowski(University Park, Penn., 1990), p. 52. See Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 334: ‘criticism andphilology can attain their true dignity and proper knowledge of themselves only by beingliberated from history’.




mirrors Foucault’s argument that when eighteenth-century philology lib-erated the mode of language he called literature it brought historicalmethod itself into question. According to Foucault, literature operatesoutside the historical rules that have been devised for language. It is dis-tinguished by the insistence that though bereft of divine sanction it con-tains a creative force that cannot be adequately interpreted by any of theanalytic discourses that have been imposed on it. Against the reduction ofphilology to such a discourse, we need to recall other philological practicesthat accept the irreducible diversity of languages and hence preserve lan-guage’s ontological power.

Before it was housed in academic institutions, philology dwelt for a timein the ruins of Babel. Perhaps those ruins—symbols of irreducible linguis-tic diversity—would serve as a more fitting foundation for the new compara-tive literature than philology’s subsequent development, which disavowedBabel in diametrically opposed ways. While nineteenth-century philologistssuch as Ernest Renan and Muller dreamed of recovering the Aryan Ursprache,twentieth-century philologists such as Auerbach and Curtius wanted to find acritical discourse that would be equally fundamental. The destruction of thetower was meant to condemn all such aspirations, every attempt, conscious ornot, to affiliate one’s own tongue with the imitative perfection of the Adamiclanguage. Babel was the prototypical punishment for colonial projects; ifthe construction of the tower was the attempt of early ‘Semites’ to jointogether and establish an empire, which entailed a universal language, thedestruction of the tower was meant to interrupt what Derrida called their‘linguistic imperialism’ (‘B’, p. 199). As soon as they express their desire tobe a single people with a single tongue (Genesis 11:4), God confounds theiridioms, making them mutually unintelligible. He thereby transforms Babelfrom a colonial project to a figure for ‘the inadequation of one tongue toanother’ (l’inadequation d’une langue a l’autre) (‘B’, p. 191). He turns it, inother words, into the babble—or gift—of world literature.

4. Colonialism and ComparatismAny new comparatism that wants to be adequate to the alterity of world

literature but still remain faithful to philological protocol will come to anold impasse, as one could argue both Auerbach’s and Said’s work did. If wereturned to the eighteenth-century history of philology and comparatism,before they were systematized, we might find a way out of this impasse.Jones’s work does not definitively privilege any single theory of language orliterature. Here language takes the form, variously, of each of the threetypes Foucault described in The Order of Things: a veridical discourse; anobject of historical analysis; and an ontological force that denies the au-




thority of truth and history. These diverse forms reflect the different pos-sibilities late eighteenth-century philology made available when it calledEnlightenment premises about the transparency of language into ques-tion: the ‘fragmentation’ and ‘dispersion of language’ was an ‘event’ (eve-nement) that, Foucault claimed, occurred ‘towards the end of theeighteenth century’ (OT, pp. 307, 238).

But if Jones’s formulation of the Indo-European thesis initiated a dis-persion of language, we, unlike Foucault, must nonetheless recall thatJones was the head of the East India Company’s Supreme Court. His stud-ies occurred within a colonial context and were meant to serve colonialrule. Hence, while Jones’s linguistic and literary research put diverse con-cepts of language into play, his juridical work made a fixed concept oflanguage the basis of native law. Even before the company formally estab-lished a colonial administration, its officials understood that a historicalapproach to the Subcontinent’s various languages would be the precondi-tion of colonial hegemony. One of the first governors of Bengal, J. Z.Holwell, wrote in 1767: ‘A mere description of the exterior manners andreligion of a people, will no more give us a true idea of them, than ageographical description of a country can convey a just conception oftheir laws and government. [One must be] skilled in the languages ofthe people . . . sufficiently to trace the etymology of their words andphrases, and [be] capable of diving into the mysteries of their theol-ogy’.80 Prefiguring the new philology, Holwell implied that once companyofficials understood that each Indian language has its own history, theywould unlock the truth of their native subjects. During the final threedecades of the eighteenth century, in the wake of Jones’s pioneering studyof Persian (1771), company scholars created an extensive philological ap-paratus for South Asian languages, including textbooks, literary and lin-guistic treatises, dictionaries, and grammars.81 These studies formed the

80. John Zephaniah Holwell, Interesting Historical Events, Relative to the Provinces of Bengal,and the Empire of Indostan, 3 vols. (London, 1765–71), 2:9.

81. See Jones, A Grammar of the Persian Language (London, 1771); George Hadley,Grammatical Remarks on the Practical and Vulgar Dialect of the Indostan Language, CommonlyCalled Moors (London, 1772); Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, A Grammar of the Bengal Language(1778; Menston, 1969); John Richardson, A Dictionary, English, Persian and Arabic (Oxford,1780); Francis Balfour, The Forms Of Herkern Corrected from a Variety of Manuscripts, Suppliedwith the Distinguishing Marks of Construction, and Translated into English: With an Index ofArabic Words Explained and Arranged under Their Proper Roots (Calcutta, 1781); WilliamKirkpatrick, A Vocabulary, Persian, Arabic and English; Containing Such Words as Have BeenAdopted from the Two Former of Those Languages, and Incorporated into the Hindvi: Togetherwith Some Hundreds of Compound Verbs Formed from Persian or Arabic Nouns, and in UniversalUse: Being the Seventh Part of the New Hindvi Grammar and Dictionary (London, 1785); andJohn Gilchrist, A Dictionary, English and Hindustanee, 2 vols. (Calcutta, 1787–90).




groundwork for the numerous legal and religious texts Jones and his col-leagues reconstructed from archaic originals—which in turn enabled thecolonial state to claim knowledge about Indian history and present itself asan extension of native sovereignty.82 Philology had been apprenticed tocolonial rule.

In fact, the British colonial government’s approach to India was philo-logical in the modern sense: it made native history a dimension internal tolanguage. Company scholars viewed Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian—theprestige languages of the Brahmanical and Islamic legal canons—as thevessels of Hinduism and Islam’s true histories. Hence, they were able toreduce Indian society, which they found forbiddingly complex and heter-ogeneous, to a discrete number of legal and religious texts, which theyrendered legible and coherent.83 In the process, they turned native lan-guages into markers of human difference, dividing individuals into groupsthat had previously not existed and fixing social practices that had beenfluid, as Cohn explained in ‘The Command of Language and the Languageof Command’.84 In fact, colonial jurisprudence gave natives an ethnolog-ical character; it redefined not merely the property relations but even therituals and beliefs that counted as ‘“traditional”’.85

The colonial utility of philology lay here. Because it identifies traditionwith texts alone, it provides sovereign power a ‘traditional’ lineage fromwhich native experience itself is exiled. Jones intended his legal codes toachieve this end in colonial India.86 In his view, ‘native lawyers and schol-ars’ who had the power to adapt religious law to local circumstances could

82. See in particular Halhed, A Code of Gentoo Laws or, Ordinations of the Pundits, from aPersian Translation, Made from the Original, Written in the Shanscrit Language (London, 1776);Charles Wilkins, The Bhagvat-Gccta�, or Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon (London, 1785); AyeenAkbery; or, The Institutes of the Emperor Akber, trans. Francis Gladwin, 3 vols. (Calcutta, 1783–86); Charles Hamilton, The Heedaaya, or Guide: A Commentary on the Mussulman Laws(London, 1791); and Jones’s works listed below. See also Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law:Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India (Delhi, 1998), pp. viii–x, 81–82.

83. See Upendra Baxi, ‘“The State’s Emissary”: The Place of Law in Subaltern Studies’, inSubaltern Studies VII, ed. Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey (Delhi, 1992), pp. 247–64,249–50, 252, and Nasser Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule ofLaw (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2003), p. 41.

84. See Cohn, ‘Command of Language and the Language of Command’, p. 22.85. John Comaroff, ‘Colonialism, Culture, and the Law: A Foreword’, Law and Social

Inquiry 26 (Spring 2001): 306 see also p. 309.86. See Jones, Al Sirajiyyah; or, The Mohammedan Law of Inheritance (Calcutta, 1792) and

Institutes of Hindu Law or, The Ordinances of Menu, According to the Gloss of Culluca, trans.Jones (Calcutta, 1794); A Digest of Hindu Law on Contracts and Successions, trans. H. T.Colebrooke, 4 vols. (Calcutta, 1798); Cohn, ‘Law and the Colonial State in India’, Colonialism andIts Forms of Knowledge, p. 71; Trautmann, ‘The Lives of Sir William Jones’, p. 102; and David Ibetson,‘Sir William Jones as Comparative Lawyer’, in Sir William Jones, 1746–1794, p. 21.




not be trusted.87 Jones aspired, as a consequence, to replace the embodiedlearning of the Brahmin pandits and Muslim maulavis with the textual andhence scientific knowledge of the colonial state. His explicit aim was torefound the Hindu and Islamic legal traditions solely on ‘original textsarranged in a scientific method’—not on native experience, therefore, butrather on its destruction.88 His codes enabled the colonial state to overwritethe ungovernable babble of the newly conquered with ‘the language of thelaw’.89 Jones used the philological skills he developed in his translations ofthe Mu‘allaqa�t, Ha�fez, and Sakuntala� to produce versions of Shari‘a andthe Dharmasa�stra that would reconstitute native law and have an inesti-mable effect on Indian colonial and postcolonial history. Nineteenth-century Indians—and eventually colonial subjects around the world, Saidincluded—would learn to read standardized texts and understand theirhistories in terms of the scholarly protocols bequeathed to them by colo-nial philology.90

The study of world literature would be more attuned to its own geneal-ogy, if it acknowledged how profoundly both its materials and its methods area colonial legacy. Colonial philology disembedded native literatures from theirtraditions so that it could dissever native subjects from their forms of life. Itinitiated a transformation so massive that no tradition now remains un-touched. Historicist humanism authorized this transformation. It arguedthat philologically reconstructed texts contain the truth of tradition moreauthentically than people themselves do. It became hegemonic—the basisof both critical method and colonial domination—because it enabledmodern institutions to impose analytic and bureaucratic order on multi-lingual terrains. According to Michael Herzfeld, it ‘transmuted the poly-glot agonies of Babel into a cult of transcendent European erudition’.91

Auerbach’s presupposition that world literature would exist in the fu-ture only as a subject of philological scholarship and Said’s silence on thisscore reflect the privilege they placed on historicism above all other ap-proaches to language. They aligned philology and comparatism with this

87. Jones, letter to the first marquis of Cornwallis, 19 Mar. 1788, The Letters of Sir WilliamJones, ed. Garland Cannon, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1970), 2:795. See John Strawson, ‘Islamic Law andEnglish Texts’, in Laws of the Postcolonial, ed. Eve Darian-Smith and Peter Fitzpatrick (AnnArbor, Mich., 1999), p. 122, and Jon Wilson, The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governancein Eastern India, 1780 –1835 (New York, 2008), p. 80.

88. Cannon, letter to C. W. Boughton Rouse, 24 Oct. 1786, The Letters of Sir William Jones,2:721.

89. Comaroff, ‘Colonialism, Culture, and the Law’, p. 309.90. See Cohn, ‘Introduction’, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, p. 3 and ‘An

Anthropologist among the Historians’ and Other Essays (Oxford, 1987), pp. 124, 228–29, 618.91. Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology through the Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography in the

Margins of Europe (Cambridge, 1987), p. 31.




concept of language rather than with an openness to all language practices.Hence, while Said criticized the Eurocentrism of both Orientalism andromance philology, he could not question the concept of language at theirmethodological foundations.92 Rather than distancing himself from thatconcept, Said advocated it throughout his career (see O, p. 136).93 In fact, heprojected it from nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship back intoJones’s work, where it manifestly does not belong. According to Oriental-ism, ‘William Jones stated in his Anniversary Discourses . . . that the divinedynasty of language was ruptured definitively and discredited as an idea. Anew historical conception, in short, was needed’ (O, pp. 135–36). Such astatement finds little support in the ‘Anniversary Discourses’; it reflectsinstead Said’s general conception of modern philology, which he be-lieved had determined the origin of language once and for all: ‘the newphilology[’s] . . . major successes include . . . the final rejection of thedivine origins of language. . . . [It] held language to be an entirely humanphenomenon’.94

Paul de Man argued that we should conceive philology not as the hu-manistic discipline it ultimately became but rather as what it is in essence:an ‘examination of the structure of language prior to the meaning it pro-duces’. If we did, then philology itself would undermine the assumptionsof academic literary study, which has operated as a ‘historical and human-istic subject’ since its late nineteenth-century inception.95 Jones’s philo-logical studies proved to him only that, after Babel and as itsconsequence, the origin of language—whether divine, secular, or a differentontology altogether—must remain undecidable. His translations of Ha�fez, theMu‘allaqa�t, and even Sakuntala� suggested, furthermore, that literature is theform of writing that plays with this undecidability, denying that language hasany reference, foundation, or origin outside itself. These works corresponduncannily to Foucault’s description of literature as a mode of language thatis ‘folded back upon the enigma of its own origin [repliee sur l’enigme de sanaissance] and existing wholly in reference to the pure act of writing’—

92. For example, he pointedly criticized nineteenth-century philology’s politics, not itsepistemology; see Said, ‘Raymond Schwab and the Romance of Ideas’, The World, the Text, andthe Critic, p. 264.

93. See also Said, ‘Raymond Schwab and the Romance of Ideas’, p. 260; ‘Islam, Philology,and French Culture’, pp. 273–74, 278; and ‘Erich Auerbach, Critic of the Earthly World’,pp. 13–15.

94. According to Agamben, the origin of language cannot be historicized because it ‘foundsthe possibility [of] . . . any “history”’. Theories that consider language’s origin to be divineacknowledge this impossibility (Agamben, Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience,trans. Liz Heron [London, 1993], p. 56).

95. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis, 1986), pp. 24, 25; my emphasis.




opposed in other words to any form of knowledge that claims to havetranscended the confusion of tongues (OT, p. 300). Jones’s work can serveas the starting point for a critical history of comparative literature preciselybecause it took place prior to the hegemony of historicist humanism.

Colonialism involved the conquest of an epistemic space, by means ofwhich the physical experience of language was turned—as Ranajit Guhahas explained—into ‘abstract legality’.96 The human sciences have rewrit-ten this act of conquest as the gift of historical sensibility. Its legacy lives onin the privilege that Auerbach and Said placed on realism and secularcriticism, respectively. In a primer for his Turkish students, Auerbach de-scribed philology as an expression of the civilized desire to preserve tradi-tion: ‘The need to establish authentic texts arises when a people of anadvanced civilization become aware of this civilization and want to preservefrom the ravages of time the works that constitute its spiritual heritage.’97 But,for Auerbach, this ‘spiritual heritage’ comprised texts amenable to historicalanalysis. The European tradition was intelligible to him only to the extent thatit progressively engendered historical thought, thereby fulfilling the figure ofChrist’s incarnation and realizing, in Hayden White’s words, ‘humanity’sdistinctive mode of being’, that is, historicity.98 The ‘real’ (or Wirklichkeit)with which Auerbach aligned both European realism and his own criticalmethod is, in other words, an effect of the new philology’s concept oflanguage-history.

Like Auerbach, Said considered philology the method by which di-asporic scholars avoid ‘falling victim to the concrete dangers of exile: theloss of texts, traditions, and continuities that make up the very web of aculture’.99 In his view, the new philology laid the foundation for secularcriticism, which likewise denies that language has an origin outside historyand presupposes instead that it provides epistemic access to the humandomain.100 What remained invisible to Said is the genealogy and politics ofsecularism itself. It emerged, according to Asad and others, not with thereplacement of divine providence by human agency, but rather with theremoval of divine presence from the material world to a transcendent

96. Ranajit Guha, ‘Chandra’s Death’, in Subaltern Studies V, ed. Guha (Delhi, 1986), p. 141.97. Auerbach, Introduction aux etudes de philologie romane (Frankfurt, 1949), p. 9.98. Hayden White, Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore, 1999), p. 99.99. Said, ‘Secular Criticism’, p. 6. See Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’, ‘Reflections on Exile’ and

Other Essays, p. 185.100. See Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York, 1975), pp. 315–16, 364, 366; O,

pp. 120–21, 138–39; ‘Secular Criticism’, p. 24; ‘Islam, Philology, and French Culture’, pp. 273–74,278, 288; ‘Raymond Schwab and the Romance of Ideas’, p. 260; Culture and Imperialism, p. 161;and ‘Erich Auerbach, Critic of the Earthly World’, pp. 29–30.




realm.101 Once the earth has been secularized in this way, it can be exploitedwithout limit. In fact, the term secularism began its life as the name for anineteenth-century political movement that wanted to transform Euro-pean society in line with demands of industrial capitalism. Secularists con-tested the Christian church’s traditional authority by reconstructing thelaw. But if this is the function of modern law in Europe, it served an evenmore fundamental purpose in the colony: it made non-European societysecular for the first time. One could argue that, in his advocacy not only ofhumanism but also of secular criticism, Said remained trapped within thevery language of colonial rule.

To extricate ourselves from that trap, we would need to begin a colonialarchaeology of historical method. Modern literary studies developed notonly in academic institutions but also in colonial legal and print cultures;the latter have had much more global influence. At some point, therefore,our critiques of literary studies must venture beyond the walls of the acad-emy in order to analyze the spread of colonial law across the earth. We mayfind that the development of historical method has less to do with thenineteenth-century research university than with the reconstruction ofindigenous life on a planetary scale. Jones’s philological research was notexclusively historicist in its approach, but his colonial jurisprudence was,because historical knowledge was the necessary foundation of colonialsovereignty. Like colonial jurisprudence, secular criticism assumes thathistorical method is the precondition of political competence.102 In con-trast, an archaeological approach would not take historical method forgranted; it would acknowledge that philology’s colonial function was toappropriate and efface—in a word, destroy—the diverse language experi-ences that preceded it. Such an archaeology would trace not only the co-lonial arrangement of knowledge that shaped historical method—andsecular criticism as well—but also the precolonial language practices that

101. See Asad, Formations of the Secular, pp. 23–27, 37–43, 211–15, 235–36, 253; Jan N.Bremer, Greek Religion (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 5–6; Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of theEuropean Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 88–93; and Eric Waterhouse,‘Secularism’, in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings, 12 vols. (New York,1908–27), 11:347–50.

102. See Said, Beginnings, p. 6, ‘Secular Criticism’, p. 3, Culture and Imperialism, p. 61,‘Islam, Philology, and French Culture’, p. 288, ‘The Future of Criticism’, ‘Reflections on Exile’and Other Essays, pp. 165–72, 170; and Timothy Brennan, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politicsof Left and Right (New York, 2006), pp. 109, 114. Recall Claude Levi-Strauss’s argument thatJean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason remained Eurocentric despite its bestintentions; historical method, though identified with reason as such, reflects Europe’sdevelopment alone and excludes people without history from the category of the human. SeeClaude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, trans. pub. (Chicago, 1966), pp. 248–56, 262.




existed outside this arrangement. An archaeological project of this kind is,as Agamben has emphasized, philology turned against itself—or ‘“the de-struction of destruction”’.103 This project must be part of the comparativeliterature to come, whose task involves unearthing the approaches to lan-guage the new philology buried in its colonial past.

103. Agamben, Infancy and History, p. 161. Nietzsche’s vision was similar: ‘The philologistof the future [must be] the destroyer [Vernichter] of the discipline of philology’; ‘I dream of ahuman collective [that] wants to be called “destroyer”’ (Nietzsche, ‘Notizen zu “Wir Philologen”’,pp. 56, 48).




siraj ahmed, notes from babel: toward a colonial history of comparative literature

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