Modernity and Europeanness are only legible against an alien past culture.

Evidence

Philology problematizes—itself, its practitioner, the present. It embodies a peculiar condition of being modern and European, since neither of those two categories has true meaning without being related to an earlier alien culture and time. What Nietzsche also sees is philology as something born, made in the Viconian sense as a sign of human enterprise, created as a category of human discovery, self-discovery, and originality. Philology is a way; of historically setting oneself off, as great artists do, from one’s time and an immediate past even as, paradoxically and antinomically, one actually characterizes one’s modernity by so doing. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 352

Categorization

• XREF: Directly scaffolds the Orientalism toolkit — the self/other dialectic where European modernity defines itself through an alien East. Connects to how later Islamophobia readings frame Europe’s self-definition against Islam.
• DEFINE: Defines philology as a practice of self-distancing that paradoxically constitutes modernity.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 352