Philology’s abstraction turned language into a sightless realm ruled by race and nation

Evidence

By becoming philology, the study of words as once practiced by Vico, Herder, Rousseau, Michelet, and Quinet lost its plot and its dramatic presentational quality, as Schelling once called it. Instead, philology became epistemologically complex; Sprachgefühl was no longer enough since words themselves pertained less to the senses or the body (as they had for Vico) and more to a sightless, imageless, and abstract realm ruled over by such hothouse formulations as race, mind, culture, and nation. In that realm, which was discursively constructed and called the Orient, certain kinds of assertions could be made, all of them possessing the same powerful generality and cultural validity. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 379

Categorization

• XREF: The shift from embodied (Vico) to abstract (race, nation) language knowledge feeds directly into later biopolitical and imagined-community readings. — connects to: Formalist language, emptied of content, gives rise to nominalism as bourgeois thought — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 66; Language game shows disjoint language into mere lexical skeleton detached from meaning. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 522
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 379