Edward Said’s engagement with philology, throughout his ouevre, is repeatedly elaborated through both an intimate and agonistic posture. Rather than identifying a contradiction between Said's critique of Orientalist philology and his defense of, or repeated return to, humanist philology, as some of earlier critics and more recent detractors have done, I argue instead that this recurrent conjunction forms a constant and productive tension in his work, which hardly warrants a facile distinction between, say, Orientalism and Humanism and Democratic Criticism. Said's return to philology in late style in this sense is paradigmatic as a final philological work that doesn't allow for a simple closure or resolution. This inextricable tension makes it possible for Said to expatriate, from the discriminations and constraints of philological discipline, the possibility of a radical practice, a future philology and points to what an earlier boundary 2 issue identified as "the work of the critic": an open-ended, potentially interminable, dislocation of authority, a vocation or calling that compels a critical and historical examination of the political present.