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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1555 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 11, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

I'm attempting Ahmed's Archaeology of Babel: The Colonial Foundation of the Humanities, so far a seemingly interesting open access find, interesting because it seems critical of common names in anti-colonial thought, who he thinks have adopted colonial forms of thinking in philology.

The philological revolution against anciens régimes in both East and West turned immediately, in other words, into the rule of this historical consciousness, which was consequently identified with human liberation. Philology still possesses that identity in Erich Auerbach’s and Edward Said’s dialectically opposed concepts of comparatism. Colonialism’s first trick is to make language appear to be the colonizer’s possession. Its second trick, per Jacques Derrida, is the idea of “liberation,” which internalizes the colonizer’s concept of language within the colonized. As the chapters that follow demonstrate, this colonial trick explains phenomena as apparently disparate and politically opposed as language-based racism, Islamic fundamentalism, Hindu nationalism, and the global discourses of environmentalism and indigeneity, all of which descend from colonial philology.

Maybe 80% of the way through The Story of the Lost Child. The, uh, titular event has occurred, but there's still more than a hundred pages left.

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