Philologesis in Adūnīs, al-Maʿarrī, al-Fārābī

Abstract

Abstract This paper offers a reading of texts—of Adūnīs, al-Maʿarrī, and al-Fārābī—and argues that for each, however differently, language declines the Bildungs-centric terms and reading practices into which it has been conscripted in literary and colonial modernity. The article opens with Adūnīs and considers the reflection on the singular and the plural given in his poem Mufrad bi-ṣīghat al-jamʿ, framing the reflection on language and interpretation on which the remainder of the paper turns. I then offer readings of Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī’s Risālat al-ghufrān (Epistle of Forgiveness), and several of the philosophical writings of Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī, to argue that what takes place with language in these texts is recalcitrant to the understandings and practices of language privileged in the modern state form and its fallout. Because of this recalcitrance, these texts interrupt the historical and hermeneutic terms privileged in reading practices in the literary humanities. Language, in the texts I consider, becomes an event that militates against its own interpretive domestication, a form of reading that declines its coercive stabilization as a coherent temporal form—what I call philologesis. In this sense, this is also a paper about philology and its ongoing consequences—for language, for reading, and for poetics—in the modern world.