The Powers of Philology: Dynamics of Textual Scholarship (review)

In this small and adventurous volume, Hans Gumbrecht reprints five essays originally delivered as closing talks at the admirable series of Heidelberg colloquia on philological problems organized and subsequently edited for publication by Glenn W. Most. By way of deliberate contrast with his colleagues' contributions – rigorous and intensive case studies in the history of several traditions of scholarship – Gumbrecht was invited to apply his theoretical acumen and his considerable eloquence to the colloquium topics on a far more general plane.

Both a highly credentialled romance philologist and a serious student of critical theory – he studied with, among others, Hans Robert Jauss – Gumbrecht has avoided, in this case, that bracing dialectic of historical detail and expansive interpretation that marks his other publications, from his early Functions of Parliamentary Rhetoric in the French Revolution (Funktionen parlamentarischer Rhetorik in der Französischen Revolution, 1978) to the recent and excellent Life and Death of the Great Romance Philologists (Vom Leben und Sterben der grossen Romanisten, 2002). Here, theory holds the stage alone; everything happens as if the author were determined to speak about philology from a position resolutely removed from philology. Even without Gumbrecht's own occasional references to Nietzsche – above all in the final chapters of The Powers of Philology – the reader would wonder about the antecedents, and the potential future directions, of this new orientation.

Yet few will find Gumbrecht's interventions here shocking in their content – fewer still who have sampled the vast recent literature, especially in English and in German, on the histories of reading, literary reception, and literary scholarship in Western Europe. While his philosophical conversations with Gadamer, Lacan, Heidegger, Jauss, and Iser are conducted with speed and dexterity, Gumbrecht himself concedes that his conclusions are at best reinflections of far more lively discussions between actual philologists that have gone on now for decades, not least in the Heidelberg volumes in which Gumbrecht's own essays first appeared. For example, Gumbrecht's second chapter, on the reconstitution of textual fragments, largely thematizes desire, lack, and the imagination. The account is internally consistent, but not altogether unexpected, even if Gumbrecht had ventured a useful definition of any of these terms. Other chapters, on textual editing, commentary, historicization, and university teaching, unfold for the most part with a comparable movement from ambitious expositions to curiously measured conclusions.

Gumbrecht appears at his best in his final essay, a sophisticated and idiosyncratic jeremiad on the academic humanities. Here, Gumbrecht engages incisively with texts by Weber, Dilthey, Wilamowitz, Jaeger, and Nietzsche – a reminder of Gumbrecht's fearless and protean brilliance as a reader and interlocutor. Elsewhere in this volume, however, Gumbrecht's arguments tend to go on unmoored from the sorts of examples that might have enriched them, whether exemplary scholarly problems or exemplary works of scholarship. As a result, it is hard to avoid thinking of Gumbrecht's own argumentative practice here when he speaks, in chapter 4, of philological inquiry as proceeding from 'a will to complexification.' While the word 'detour' appears at no point in Gumbrecht's text, it is likely to occur irresistibly to many of his readers.

In Heidelberg, by all accounts, these talks were received as provocative and valuable. In the present volume, lacking the company of their original peers, their effect is unusual, if not by any means unpleasing. Like a meal composed exclusively of prawn sorbets, The Powers of Philology cleanses a palate it has done nothing to sully, replying with an elegant virtuosity to what has not been said. Despite their large conceptual scope, therefore, Gumbrecht's essays will probably not be recommended by many to undergraduate or graduate students as introductions to philology. Gumbrecht apparently envisaged an audience of experts or near-experts, assuming that his readers possessed not only a basic historical understanding of Romance and classical philology but also a substantial familiarity with German and French philosophy in the twentieth century. Any such person should certainly be made aware of Gumbrecht's new book...