Event: Hannah Arendt in Chang’an The Making of the Homo Philologus in Early Imperial China
This talk explores the sociopolitical implications of what Xu Jianwei 徐建委 terms the “Textual Revolution” of the Western Han (202 BCE–9 CE). Under the helm of Liu Xiang 劉向 (79/78–8BCE) and Liu Xin 劉歆 (46 BCE–23 CE), scribes and scholars of the Han imperial library recast the fluid “open sources” (gonggong sucai公共素材) of the early Chinese textual tradition as closed texts with stabilized identities. Building on Xu’s work, I argue that such scholarly practices and institutions furnished the preconditions for the concept of literary immortality. In doing so, they allowed writings in privileged genres to take on a new role as the eternal embodiments of the emerging social elites, the scholar-officials. Textual production in its default state does not have natural beginning and end points, producing fluid materials that evolve across generations. Cataloging and similar endeavors, however, facilitate the individuation of the once fluid open sources, imposing upon texts a temporality analogous to the human lifespan. By adapting Hannah Arendt’s framework, I characterize this process as a transformation of text from products of “labor” to that of “work” and “action.” The coalescing of anthropomorphized texts and textualized human identities created a particular form of Arendt’s homo faber (the human as a maker) and zoon politikon (political animal), which I term the homo philologus (wenren文人).
