Inflected Spirit retraces the entanglements of modern European philology and racism, offering the first study to explore how “spirit” and language, poetics and textual culture, ancestry and “race” intersected systematically after the field’s secularization in the eighteenth century. It argues that philology—as the comparative study of linguistic forms, sign systems, and textual traditions—was not merely racialized through ideas imported from anthropology but was itself deeply bound up with notions of descent and contributed to the formation of racial paradigms.

At the same time, revisiting the work of major philological thinkers including Friedrich Schlegel, G. W. F. Hegel, Jean-François Champollion, Michele Amari, Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat, Ernest Renan, and August Schleicher it shows how the field drew on its own methods and assumptions to critically examine these claims. The book thus offers resources for a contemporary philology whose relevance must lie in confronting the dominance of naturalistic discourses about humanity, challenging the politicization of cultural difference, and grappling with the legacy of European universalism.