THE OTHER DEMOSTHENES. ON POSSIBLE FORMS OF PHILIATION BETWEEN ECOLOGY AND PHILOLOGY

Abstract

Beginning with the oratorial askesis of Demosthenes and its use of nature as a tool for the amplitude and clarity of the human voice as a ‘Vexierbild’, this article suggests that the appropriation of philology to serve a particular end (rather than being an end in itself) risks repeating the very injustice that ecocritical discourses are trying to correct due to the way they restrict the potential of what texts can tell us. To bring out ecological aspects of philology, this article pursues a notion of language that understands it to be intrinsically linked with the opening up of the potential for affiliations, as found in Aristotle, August Boeckh, and Werner Hamacher. This article emphasises language's potential for kinships rather than its ability to make decisions and judgements about the right form for our relationship with the world. It also makes a plea for a philology that is not focused on extracting immediately usable meanings from its interpretations. Instead, philology should open itself up towards linguistic ‘wildness’. By doing so, it can provide us with a model for an ethics of co-responsibility that seeks to bring about open and inclusive forms of resonance across times, places and species.