The Philology of the Future

Essays in Honor of Jim Porter

Mario Telò

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2026
• eBook ISBN: 9781350473355
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: Literature

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

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

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• For Jim: Toward a Philology of (Im)possible Futures
• “The Utopian Perfectibility of the World in Reverse”: William Kentridge, Jim Porter, and Book Seven of the Iliad
• The Sounds of Sappho and the Sense of Philology
• Thucydides and the Comparativist Gesture
• Can This Be Less Boring?: In Praise of the Dissoi Logoi’s Rhetoric of Conflict and Contradiction
• The Soul in a Sunbeam: Aristotle on Democritus’ Fiery psukhē
• On the Sympathetic Community of the Body and the Soul in Book 3 of Lucretius: Loving Life and Learning to Face Death
• Cicero’s Regret
• The Immigration of Classical Antiquity: Border Trouble in Ovid, Dionne Brand, and Jenny Erpenbeck
• Longinus and the Light
• The Birth of Philology out of the Spirit of Pedagogy
• “Homer’s Contest” as Nietzsche’s Contest over Hellenism
• Marx and the Philology of the Future
• Moses and Monolingualism: Freud, Derrida, and the Philology of Exile
• The Classical Biome
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index