In response to "What would a "return to philology" be a return to?", Omri Ceren proposes a simple explanation for Paul de Man's assertion that literary "theory" was just a return to philology:
You might be overthinking the de Man thing.
He did the same thing with "philology" that he did with "rhetoric." It's just the bald assertion that he's doing the same thing you're doing, except he doesn't want to put in the time learning specialized methods or doing the empirical grunt work (sustained effort, especially in de Man's case, not being the hallmark of the deconstructionists).
Philologists analyzed the evolution of words to study the structure of language; de Man mentioned words and noticed that language has structure; hey, they're doing the same thing so he must be a philologist too!
It's like summer camp. You get to be whatever you want to be. He pulled the same nonsense with rhetoric. Rhetoricians analyze tropes to understand how language becomes persuasive; de Man mentioned tropes and noted that language is persuasive; hey, they're doing the same thing so he must be a rhetorician too!
You'd think he's just trying to hijack the ethos of philology for whatever hand-waving he's engaged in, and you'd be mostly right. But there's also a more pernicious move, which becomes more noticeable when it's applied to scientific rather than humanistic disciplines (though it's applied by this crowd to both). It's the same double-move every time: "rigorous methods don't have any privileged access to knowledge" (the you're-not-doing-anything-special move) and "postmodern methods are just as rigorous as any other methods" (the what-we're-doing-is-just-as-special-as-what-you're doing move).
Later:
Or more tersely, now that I've read his philology essay: "hey, philologists think about language; I Paul de Man think about language; I'm doing philology too!"
The move requires a strange combination, driven by a con man's confidence but insulated by ignorance.
If we take some uncontroversial 30,000ft view of knowledge — disciplines split off when particular methodologies align nicely with particular objects of study, so that we can squeeze out new insights — then you can see how total ignorance of specialized methodologies would help. If you don't actually know what someone is doing, you can say with confidence you're doing the same things they are. So Lacanians who can't do math or logic claim they're doing analytical philosophy. Literary scholars who have not the foggiest clue about phonology or morphology are doing philology. And per Richard Rorty, we're all doing science, because after all that's just a narrative too.
There's an anti-intellectual version of this conceit, which is buoyed by the kind of journalism that insists experts ain't all that smart anyways. There's a version found in the workaday academy, which is usually cashed out as complaints about boundary policing. But if you're a former Nazi sympathizer with a European accent taking in the rarefied air of the 1960s humanities, it goes all the way to being the height of sophistication.
I'll add another perhaps-relevant factor: the supreme intellectual prestige of "philology" in Europe through the middle of the 19th century, and to some extent until WW I. Thus de Man implicitly positions post-modernism as a return to pre-modern verities. The publisher's blurb for James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (2014) explains:
Many today do not recognize the word, but "philology" was for centuries nearly synonymous with humanistic intellectual life, encompassing not only the study of Greek and Roman literature and the Bible but also all other studies of language and literature, as well as religion, history, culture, art, archaeology, and more. In short, philology was the queen of the human sciences. How did it become little more than an archaic word? In Philology, the first history of Western humanistic learning as a connected whole ever published in English, James Turner tells the fascinating, forgotten story of how the study of languages and texts led to the modern humanities and the modern university.
