Mourning Philology

Mourning Philology proposes a history of the 19th century national imagination as a reaction to the two main philological inventions of that century: “mythological religion” and the “native.” This history is illustrated with the case of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. The book offers an account of the successive stages (archeological, self-ethnographic, and aesthetical) of the implementation of orientalist philology, through which the nation came to existence. The last episode takes place in 1914 (a year before the general deportation and extermination of the Armenians of the Ottoman empire), in Constantinople, around Daniel Varuzhan, the proponent of “paganism” in Armenian poetry, who had devoted a large part of his work to the “mourning” for the dead gods, i.e. for the same mythological gods that had been given a new meaning by the philologists of the 19th century. The thesis behind this description is that the emergence of the nation is not primarily a political phenomenon. What is called here “aesthetic nationalism” has not been sufficiently taken into consideration by recent theories of nationalism. Mourning Philology is also part of a general reflection on the nature of the Catastrophe and the way it destroys the possibility of mourning. From the German philosopher Schelling to the Armenian poet Varuzhan, art was understood as a power of mourning for the death of mythological religion. Is this “art as mourning” capable of measuring up to the catastrophic event? This is the guiding question of the book. An appendix offers an English translation of all the Armenian texts mentioned or analyzed in the main text.