Title

"The non-humanist humanist" : Edward W. Said and his critical practice

Author(s)

Ng, Hau-man; T3]e

Citation

Issue Date

2008

URL

http://hdl.handle.net/10722/54543

Rights

unrestricted

The Non-humanist Humanist: Edward W. Said and His Critical Practice

by

Hau Man Ng

B.A. H.K.

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at The University of Hong Kong. August 2008

Abstract of thesis entitled

The Non-humanist Humanist: Edward W. Said and His Critical Practice

Submitted by

Hau Man Ng

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong in August 2008

This thesis is a critical and historical study of Edward W. Saids humanism; it examines the epistemic and moral foundation of his humanism theoretically and contextualizes his critical practice as a historically specific and politically conscious resistance against forms of cultural, intellectual, discursive and political oppression. As Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, Edward Said never taught anything but the Western humanities. However, his entire corpus of critical work covers a wide range of topics and topicalities which at times may appear contradictory. Despite his multifarious intellectual identities and concerns, Said has identified his entire intellectual and political work with humanism. Humanism is Saids intellectual and moral belief; it is the foundation of his literary and political practice. Although humanism is both the beginning and the end of Saids literary, intellectual, and political pursuits, it is seldom dealt with in itself or in relation to Saids entire corpus of critical work, especially with reference to the crisis of Western humanism in the context of postmodernism and postcolonialism. Many studies of Said aim only at examining his intellectual history cross-sectionally rather

than genealogically. This thesis sets out to discuss Saids humanism in order to show the continuity and coherence among some of the major Saidian themes, both in theory and in practice. What is humanism for Said? Why does he continuously advocate humanism as a praxis for intellectuals and critics? How does Said understand the human? What can we know about the human? What does humanism inform us as human beings in the world? The goal of humanism is to know our own self; to know ourselves is to know our own historywhat we make and what we do. For Said, humanistic or historical knowledge can only come from criticism. How one understands the human is consequent upon ones entire worldview. Said understands the human in terms of human existential actualities: language, knowledge, criticism, theory, and politics as historical. Each historical period or stage is understood as a whole in which all human activities intertwine with and interpenetrate one another. Said understands and judges a work of literature not just in terms of its cultural or national origin, but in close relation to its historical conditions. It is with this deep commitment to the historical knowledge of literature that Said practices his humanism. This study proposes to examine four major critical categories as classified by Said himself: literature, theory, politics, and aesthetics and attempts to show Saids humanism through his critical practice. By mapping out Saids humanism within the Vichian tradition of historicist/critical humanism, the thesis attempts to circumvent the crude distinction between Eurocentric humanism and poststructuralist antihumanism. It is hoped that a metacritical explication of Saids critical concepts and praxis will enable us to better understand who we are and what we should do, and also to provide a meta-epistemological reflection upon what literature, aesthetics and criticism arehow they are primarily cultural and political activities of great historical, cultural and political significance to our self-understanding and self-fashioning. (500 words)

Declaration

I declare that this thesis represents my own work, except where due acknowledgement is made, and that it has not been previously included in a thesis, dissertation or report submitted to this University or to any other institution for a degree, diploma or other qualifications.

Signed ................................................. Hau Man Ng

Preface

This thesis taught me to be grateful for but not satisfied with what I have. It would be impossible for me to acknowledge fully the intellectual and moral generosity and support of my supervisor, Dr. Q. S. Tong, who made this intellectual project possible in the first place. Throughout the years, Dr. Tong has never failed to be critically constructive and full of understanding and patience with my intellectual development. Having been entrusted with this project and the opportunity to engage with the intellectual and social world, my entire focus and life changed ever since. Dr. Tongs critical knowledge, local commitment and global vision will always be an important part in my intellectual and personal formation. His encouragement and trust in me have given me strength and courage to pass through critical moments. I am indebted to Dr. Jiwei Ci whose philosophical acumen and teaching have deepened my interest in philosophy. I have also benefited much from a number of courses by Prof. Douglas Kerr and Dr. Otto Heim. I would like to thank Prof. Kerr for his locally engaged commitment to and concern for the postgraduates, and Dr. Heim for his encouragement and kindness. In a course on the foundations of Euro-American critical theory, Paul Bov has led me through the study of critical theory and provided me important and personal information on Said. To him, I owe special thanks. Since the days of being her tutorial student, Ruth Hung has been an important intellectual and personal support; her toughness of mind and humanist conviction have been a source of aspiration and inspiration. The friendly and congenial postgraduate culture has allowed me to share with and learn from a lot of wonderful minds. I owe special thanks to Harshana Rambukwella who has generously taken the time and effort to comment on my writing and encouraged me during times of self-doubt and inconfidence. Helen Yang has been the most caring and compassionate colleague and friend of mine; I am always grateful for her care, generosity and support. Thank you Amanda for her belief in me and this wonderful friendship. I would also keep close to my heart the lively and passionate company of Skye Jin, the optimism and charisma of Tammy Ho, the personality and sisterhood of Rachel Huang,

ii

and many others: YJ, Jane, Jasmine, Xiaoli, etc. Thanks to my students Denton, Webster and Calvin for their kind words and eagerness to learn. I am especially grateful to my high school English teacher, Ms. Wong Oi Ki, and Chemistry teacher, Mr. Ng Chung Yiu, for their care and expectation of me. Their support and encouragement have been so important to my earlier personal and intellectual growth. Friendships from primary and high school have proven strong and valuable. 2008 is our 20th anniversary: I am so happy to always have Panpan, Siu Wai, Mui, Wing, Fan, Shun and Sarah to be there for me; special thanks to Siu Ki, Pui Yin, Nar, Bonnie, Kelly, Kit, Tso Nar, Chiu Yuen, Yuko, Wendy, Sharon Chan, Wai Man, Siu Man, Ching Ping and Dawning for their warm company. I have also been blessed with the loving and caring spirit of several couples: Ephod and Sharon, John and Joy, and Pamela and Patrick. I am forever indebted to Nehemiah Zaus and Wing Leungs wisdom, faith, love, hardship and spirit of generosity. Finally to my most-respected and beloved family: this thesis is dedicated to my father and mother whose education had been cut short but whose sacrifice, integrity and moral wisdom have affected and moved me tremendously. Thank you Kin, Hong, Hei and Pong for their sisterhood and brotherhood. You all love me the most. I am grateful to Cheong Ho for his love and sacrifice throughout the process of writing this thesis, and for being an indispensable part of my intellectual, musical and moral life.

iii

Contents

Declaration/ i Preface/ ii Abbreviations/ 5

1. Prologue: The Last Jewish Intellectual

2. Humanism and Secular Criticism

45

3. The Dialectic of Parallels and Paradoxes: Saids Critical Practice 4. The Resistance of Politics and the Politics of Resistance: Said as a Public Intellectual

71

117

5. The Moral of Genealogy: Reading Said between Presence and Absence, Historicism and Universalism

161

Epilogue: An Exiles Exile: The Question of Humanism

195

Bibliography/ 208

Abbreviations
The following abbreviations are used throughout to refer to Edward Saids works.

B CI Dispossession

Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Basic Books, 1975. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969-1994. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994. The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After. New York: Pantheon Books, 2000. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966. Freud and the Non-European. London: Verso, 2004 . Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Interviews with Edward W. Said. Edited by Amritjit Singh and Bruce G. Johnson. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. New York: Pantheon, 2004. On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. New York: Pantheon Books, 2006. Musical Elaborations. The Wellek Library Lectures at the University of California, Irvine. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

End Exile

Fiction

Freud HDC Interviews

Islam

Late Style Music

O Out of Place PA

Orientalism. 25th anniversary edition. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. Out of Place: A Memoir. New York: Knopf, 1999. The Palestine Question and the American Context. Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1979. The Pen and the Sword: Conversations with David Barsamian. Monroe. ME.: Common Courage Press, 1994. Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said. Edited and introduced by Gauri Viswanathan. New York: Pantheon Books, 2001. The Question of Palestine. New York: Times Books, 1979. The Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983.

Pen

PPC

QP RI

WTC

CHAPTER ONE

Prologue: The Last Jewish Intellectual

Of course. Im the last Jewish intellectual. You dont know anyone else. All your other Jewish intellectuals are now suburban squires. From Amoz Oz to all these people here in America. So Im the last one. The only true follower of Adorno. Let me put it this way: Im a JewishPalestinian.Edward Said1

My fate is to remain in New York. On a constantly shifting ground, where relationships are not inherited, but created. Where there is no solidity of home. Edward Said2

For a homeless person, the return to a home is not without its contingency, provisionality, irony and price. Homelessness or exile, by force or by will, is painful, debilitating and self-sacrificial. But exile for Edward Said is the ground of love and justice for all humankind; it is the ultimate intellectual and critical position of an intellectual because exile implies self-criticism and nonsubjectivity. No people endures and yet triumphs intellectually and economically in the predicaments of existential, cultural and intellectual exile like the Jews, a historically stateless and homeless people who has experienced and thought through exile as an existential condition of life. In response to Ari Shavits identification of his view on nationalism and exile with jewishness,3

1 2 3

Said, PPC, 458. Ibid., 457; emphasis added.

In an interview with Ari Shavit on the subject of the Jewish-Palestinian tension and of home and homelessness, Said criticizes the idea of home and origin to which Zionism attributes so much significance and authority. He rejects the ideology of home which aims

Said determinedly says, Of course. Im the last Jewish intellectual. You dont know anyone else. All your other Jewish intellectuals are now suburban squires. From Amoz Oz to all these people here in America. So Im the last one. The only true follower of Adorno. Let me put it this way: Im a JewishPalestinian.4 It is intellectually and politically so significant, paradoxical and almost dramatic for a Palestinian-American intellectual, who has been a political activist for Palestinian national self-determination and critic of the U.S. international policy and the imperialist rationale of Zionism, to openly acknowledge here in America his intellectual and cultural indebtedness and filiation to the Jewish intellectual tradition. Because of his continuous fight for the Palestinian cause and challenge to Americans globalism, nationalism and identity politics, Said was perceived by American Zionists and neoconservative critics as anti-American or anti-Western5 and a threat to the U.S. national interests, and he was subject to long-term FBI surveillance. 6 Why did Said say he was the last Jewish intellectual? What might be the intellectual and political implications of this personal statement? The Jews and the Palestinians symbolize a historically, geopolitically and identitarianly unresolved conflict and contradiction: the Jews are genealogically an indispensible participant of and contributor to Western civilization and are the historically stateless and rightless victims, the minorit par excellence7 of
to fortify ones cultural identity yet rejects other cultures. See Edward Said, My Right of Return, interview with Ari Shavit, in PPC, 458.
4 5

Ibid., 458.

Edward Alexander infamously calls Said the Professor for Terror for his criticism of Israeli Zionism and political struggle for the Palestinian rights and freedom. Alexander, Professor of Terror, Commentary 88, (August 1989): 49-50.
6

The FBI has a long, ignoble tradition of monitoring and harassing Americas top intellectuals, and Said has been one of them who become an interest to the FBI, which according David Price functions historically to suppress democratic solutions to the Israeli and Palestinian problems [and] monitor and harass American peace activists. Price, How the FBI Spied on Edward Said, from CounterPunch.org, created on January 13, 2006, clipped on February 24, 2006, <http://www/counterpunch.org/price01132006.html>.
7

The Jews are deprived of the fundamental human right to have right. Minorit par excellence means the only minority whose interests could be defended only by internationally guaranteed protection. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Western totalitarianism and anti-Semitism; the Palestinians are the victim of the victim, 8 exiled from and deprived of a home and subject to cultural, historical and political amputation. America, a discovered land of migration and affiliation, a country in which Said voluntarily stayed and pursued an academic profession after his higher education, represents for Said a place of non-identity, hybridity and multiculturalism. The Jewish, the Palestinian and the American, a tripartite locus of Saids cultural, geographical, historical and intellectual constitution, intertwine dialectically and contrapuntally to form his intellectual topography. Born in Jerusalem in late 1935, brought up in Egypt and Lebanon and educated in British colonial schools, Said and his family are members of a Christian minority in the Arab world of Islamic culture and religions. The tension amongst different cultures, religions, languages and identities in the formation and consciousness of Said began with his parents: two Palestinians with dramatically different backgrounds and temperaments [and interests] and an affinity and aspiration to Western culture and language. 9 Both Saids parents had received schooling from either British or American missionary institutions. Saids father, Wadie Said, was a successful businessman who hated Jerusalem10 and always averred that America was his country. 11 Saids mother, Hilda Said, who was profoundly interested in language, aesthetics and music, had been Saids closest companion for the first twenty-five years of his life.12 Said was sent to America to receive secondary and tertiary education as a schoolboy in 1951 and settled to teach English and comparative literature in America. Palestine ceased to be the homeland of Said and his family because of the exile and dispossession that took place in 1947-8 when Said was still a young boy. For Said, identity, including his bicultural
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), 289.
8 9

Said, PPC, 318. Said, Out of Place, 19. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 12.

10 11 12

and bilingual name and mother tongues, has always been an uneasy and contradictory question that could not be taken for granted, but it was the 1967 Israeli-Arab war which brought Said to an emotional, cultural and intellectual reflection on his Palestinian-American identity and the reconfiguration of his life as a young professor at Columbia University. Said says: I have retained this unsettled sense of many identitiesmostly in conflict with each other all of my life, together with an acute memory of the despairing feeling that I wish we could have been all-Arab, or all-European and American, or allOrthodox Christian, or all-Muslim, or all-Egyptian, and so on.13 The IsraeliArab war had such a life-turning impact on Said and his intellectual formation, not only because he was an Arab and the geopolitical existence of the Arab world was at stake, but also because what the Israeli-Arab war dawned on Said was the ironic and tragic realization that religious, cultural, national, historical and political conflicts in individuals and society could culminate in existential, cultural, historical, military and political subjugation, extermination and antihumanism. After the war, Said prolifically wrote beyond his disciplinary boundaries to reopen the correspondences and interchanges between literary criticism, politics and history. The long and winding history of the Israeli-Arab dispute together with divergent historical, geopolitical and theological interpretations should be too complicated for one to make definite moral judgment. However, the crosscultural dynamics between the Israeli Jew and the Palestinian Arab and between the West and the East in general provide a historical and political context in which the genesis and genealogy of Saids entire critical practice should be understood. Throughout his career, Said emphasizes and exemplifies the critical practice of secular humanism which comprehends the human world from a secular historical perspective: the human world is made historically by men and women themselves. Saids secular humanism arises from a critical and political reaction to and resistance against the rhetorical, ideological and strategic appeal to religious authority by Israel and the U.S.A. The Israeli
13

Ibid., 5.

10

Zionist movement derives from the biblical source to justify its reclamation of the Promised Land and its creation of the modern Jewish identity and nationality as members of the Chosen People. Religious references and narratives appear to be indispensable in the formation of a people and nation. Partly as a reaction towards the Third World decolonization movement and domestic multiculturalist movement for the rights of the cultural and social minorities, the neoconservative humanists in the U.S. context aim to rescue and defend the American national identity and cultural inheritance from the inroads of multiculturalism, postmodernist and postcolonial discourses and theories. The coherent American identity upheld and fortified by

neoconservative and state intellectuals is also ideologically constructed within a religious setting and dependent upon supernatural and religious authority and justification: [Americans] were a chosen people on an errand in the wilderness, creating the new Israel or the new Jerusalem in what was clearly the promised land. America was the site of a new Heaven and a new earth, the home of justice, Gods country.14 Many of those same [state] intellectuals now say that everything the U.S. does in the world is part of its defense of the Western way of life or, as the infamous Daniel Patrick Moynihan has put it (more aggressively) a flexing of the USs muscle, so that the small, silly dictatorships of the nonwhite world will understand that what the US does it does with Gods grace, and justice, truth and morality be damned.15 Saids secular criticism demystifies and deconstructs the religious and dogmatic effect of culture16 by historicizing and politicizing human production (culture, politics, discourse and literature) as made by humans themselves. For human history is made by men and women, it can also be changed by human
14

Samuel Huntington, Who Are We?: The Challenges to Americas National identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 64.
15 16

Said, PA, 21.

Like culture, religion therefore furnishes us with systems of authority and with canons of order whose regular effect is either to compel subservience or to gain adherents. Said, WTC, 290.

11

effort and agency. Insofar as secular criticism is anti-dogmatic, it is self-critical. Like Michel Foucault, Said is conscious and critical of the massive indoctrination to which he has been subjected. 17 His secular criticism subjects his own intellectual formation to genealogical examination. Educated in the Ivy League (A.B. in Princeton, M.A. and PhD in Harvard), Said received the best of Western humanistic education and became a humanist, a practitioner of humanism. For Said, Western humanism, a discourse of truth and power, both enables and disables ones critical consciousness. He says: I have tried to maintain a critical consciousness as well as employing those instruments of historical, humanistic, and cultural research of which my education has made me the fortunate beneficiary. 18 He stands at a critical distance from his existential and historical circumstances in order to develop a wider perspective of the whole humanity and world, otherwise he will be reduced to his own circumstantial constitution and determination. Saids Orientalism (1978), a critique of the complicity between culture and imperialism and a genealogical study of and disciplinary self-reflection on the politics and history of literary criticism, demonstrates how Western imperial power camouflages itself as disinterested knowledge of other cultures, and draws scholarly attention to the historical and discursive formations of literary criticism. Without conducting a self-examination of the political and historical context from which the discipline of literary criticism originates and develops, literary criticism aims to pursue apolitical and ahistorical knowledge of humanity and therefore becomes unworldly and detached from the reality of discourse and power. Literary criticisms quest for truth stems from the ahistorical and religious impulse of culture to lend an air of ontological stability and historical inevitability to the notion of human, culture, race, identity and literature: To say of such grand ideas [the Orient and the West] and their discourse that they have something in common with religious
Karlis Racevskis, Michel Foucault, Rameaus Nephew, and the Question of Identity, The Final Foucault, eds. James Bernauer and David Rasmussen (London: The MIT Press, 1994), 22.
18 17

Said, PPC, xvi.

12

discourse is to say that each serves as an agent of closure, shutting off human investigation, criticism, and effort in deference to the authority of the morethan-human, the supernatural, the other-worldly.19 Saids critique of Western humanism and humanistic disciplines can be mapped in the tradition of historicist and critical humanism whose precursors are Giambattista Vico, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Erich Auerbach and Michel Foucault. 20 In Orientalism, Saids employment of Foucaults notion of discourse to understand and analyze Orientalism as a discursive formation has led a number of critics to take Saids position as poststructuralist even though neither Foucault nor Said would see themselves as poststructuralist critics. William Spanos understands postmodern and more precisely post-structuralist theory [as] a broadly anti-humanist theory [whose purpose] has been to think the nothing (Heidegger), the aporia (De Man), the difference (Derrida), the differand (Lyotard), the absent cause (Lacan) that has always haunted the truth discourse of the West,21 and he sees Said as a poststructuralist critic22 attempting to dismantle Western discourse of truth and to deconstruct Western humanism and imperialism. However, Said does not see himself as a poststructuralist or postmodernist or postcolonialist, but rather as a humanist tout court whose goal is to complete work inaugurated by Auerbach, Adorno et al. that [Said considers] to be incomplete by virtue of its ethnocentrism and lack of interest in the part of the world where [he] grew

19 20

Said, WTC, 290.

Paul Bov has given a detailed and critical account of the genealogy of the tradition of critical humanism in Intellectuals in Power: A Genealogy of Critical Humanism (New York, Columbia University Press, 1986). While Foucault is most often seen as the spokesman of anti-humanism, Harold Weiss says, according to Bov he is to be seen as simply the most successful grappler with humanism, still inevitably repeating it, but with the best possible results. (There can be no such thing as pure anti-humanism.) See Harold Weiss, The Genealogy of Justice and the Justice of Genealogy: Chomsky and Said vs. Foucault and Bov, Philosophy Today 33, no. 1 (spring 1989): 92.
21

William V. Spanos, Humanism and the Studia Humanitatis after 9/11/04: Rethinking the Anthropologos, paper presented at the International Symposium on Culture, Politics and the Humanities, Nanjing University, China, May 2004, unpaginated.
22

Ibid.

13

up.23 Said prefers the anachronistic term non-humanist humanist 24 rather than post-humanist or anti-humanist because he is thinking between humanism and antihumanism or posthumanism dialectically, reciprocally, contrapuntally and relationally in spatial rather than temporal terms; there is no overcoming of any position across historical time but only criss-crossing dialectics and relations in the intellectual space. Said does not identify himself with postcolonialism but humanism despite the fact that many academics interpret Said as the founder of postcolonial studies and perceive his intellectual legacy as primarily postcolonial. The similarity between Said and postcolonialists is that he himself has experienced the postcolonial difficulty of self-definition throughout his entire life. W. J. T. Mitchell rightly and anachronistically describes Said as a high modernist intellectual.25 As Aamir Mufti says: The relationship of Saids critical practice to Enlightenment [or humanism] is dialecticalas expressed in his account of the dialectic of filiation and affiliation in modern consciousness. This relationship is routinely misread in poststructuralist readings of his work as the sign of a lingering humanism.26 [A]ttacking the abuses of something is not the same thing as dismissing or entirely destroying that thing. [] [I]t has been the abuse of humanism that discredits some of humanisms practitioners without discrediting humanism itself.27 Said critiques Western humanism, Americas politics of globalism and Jewish Zionism; but it would be crude and undialectical to pin down Saids position as being antihumanistic, anti23 24 25

Said, PPC, 128. Said, HDC, 77.

W. J. T. Mitchell, Secular Divination: Edward Saids Humanism, Critical Inquiry 31, no. 2 (winter 2005): 467. This article also appears in Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation, eds. Homi Bhabha and W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Aamir R. Mufti, Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture, Critical Inquiry 25 (autumn 1998): 111-2. According to Mufti, James Clifford and Aijaz Ahmad, have misread Saids humanist position from a poststructuralist perspective.
27 26

Said, HDC, 13.

14

American, anti-Jewish and anti-religious. The purpose of Saids critical practice is not to overthrow and replace Western humanism, American and Jewish culture but to fill up the absences he finds in the history of humanism and nations, i.e. to document the history of barbarism, in Walter Benjamins words, behind every history of civilization. 28 Crucially, therefore, Said departs from poststructuralist practice in that his desire to dismantle the authority of the subject of the West, or the West as Subject is also a desire to replace that subject or usurp its prerogative. Far from being empty, the place of the subject in Saids discourse is that of the postcolonial intellectual, one in which this intellectual can be at home with homelessness.29 Said himself acknowledges the relation of his secular criticism to the Jewish minority and to the American cultural and historical contexts. The Jews are historically a people of exile and dispossession. It is the condition of exile, an existential, cultural and geographical displacement and alienation from ones own cultural and national existence and consciousness, which has produced so many Jewish thinkers and writers: Walter Benjamin, Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, Theodor Adorno, etc. Said identifies himself with Jewish intellectuals because the Jewish condition epitomizes existentially and intellectually for him the critical state of homelessness and nonidentity in the Western world. The Jewish intellectual for Said is a worldly intellectual unconfined by his or her own cultural and national consciousness and identity who traverses the cultural and intellectual space as both the insider and outsider of Western society. The condition of exile and non-identity is intellectually productive and critically enabling since being at home with ones cultural and intellectual formation could lead to a dogmatic reverence for and over-reliance upon ones own culture and mode of thinking. The feeling at home with ones culture and self could impede ones sympathetic capacity to
28

Walter Benjamin says, There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 256. Asha Varadharajan, Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said, and Spivak (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 114.
29

15

transgress from ones contingent and limited subjective consciousness and perspective in order to understand other cultures and subjectivities from other historical perspectives for the purpose of cross-cultural interchange and coexistence. Criticism is the product of the dialectic of filiation and affiliation30 with ones own culture and subjectivity, nationalism and exile or presence (what is authorized and represented by culture) and absence (what is suppressed and marginalized by culture) of ones own culture. If, according to Said, Auerbachs Mimesis, which is a literary and philological study of the representation of reality in Western literature, owed its existence to the very fact of Oriental, non-Occidental exile and homelessness [in Istanbul, Turkey], 31 Saids entire critical practice derives from the intellectual and cultural absences of Western humanism, i.e. the cultural other that has been marginalized, suppressed and misrepresented by the Western discourse of truth. Apart from the Jewish intellectual tradition, there is also a native tradition of resistance and liberation in America which is important to Saids critical practice. Said says: it is the fact of New York that plays an important role in the kind of criticism and interpretation which I have done, and of which [Reflections on Exile] is a kind of record. Restless, turbulent, unceasingly various, energetic, unsettling, resistant, and absorptive, New York today is what Paris was a hundred years ago, the capital of our time.32 New York is the embodiment of the American experience and identity.33 Said says: What I
30

The terms filiation and affiliation are used by Said to describe different kinds of relationship between the critic and his or her culture. Filiation is a passively inherited relationship with the critics natal culture by virtue of being born within that culture; affiliation is the critics active engagement with his or her culture through the working of his or her critical consciousness or maintaining a critical distance to his or her culture. According Said, filiation and affiliation with ones culture are both necessary and coextensive. Criticism requires both the familiarity and defamiliarity with ones own culture. See Said, WTC, 15-24.
31

Ibid., 8. Said says: We have in Auerbach an instance both of filiation with his natal culture and, because of exile, affiliation with it through critical consciousness and scholarly work. Ibid., 16.
32 33

Said, Exile, xi. Said, PPC, 99.

16

like about New York City is its anonymity.34 The America nation is formed out of a multicultural setting and the American republic was originally founded upon humanistic values: individual human rights, freedom, justice and democracy not only for promoting individualism and independence but also communal coexistence as affirmed and protected by the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The history of America is also a history of the battle between the will to a coherent American identity (primarily Eurocentric) and the will to difference, multiculturalism and coexistence. For Said, however, the quest for better understanding of humanity and more freedom is made possible by the adversarial, libertarian, oppositional and antiwar tradition which has always been grounded in the very center of American life.
35

Said embraces the other America, which plays a

principled role in forming the national ethos; and from it derives opposition to compromise with the States foreign interventionary adventures, opposition to war in general, to human rights abuses wherever and whenever they take place, to the ethic of the corporate consumerist elite, to the generally widespread fraudulent consensus politics implemented by the media and the governmental experts in legitmation, to attempts to reduce the university, the law and the individualof whatever colour, race or creedto a position of subordination vis--vis the state, special interest groups, and a tyrannical majority.36 Said as a critical intellectual and his literary criticism are secular and worldly, because Saids criticism is dependent on and responsive toward the historical circumstances and political conditions under which it is produced, as Paul Bov says: the intellectual life has no independent identity or history but it is always, in all forms, a function of the material world in which it is inscribed. 37 Said willingly chooses to remain in exile, in a state of
34 35 36 37

Said, CI, xxvii. Said, PA, 25. Ibid., 27.

Paul Bov, In the Wake of Theory (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1992), 104.

17

homelessness in New York, even though he himself is existentially, intellectually, emotionally and morally bonded with and attached to his native place and has the option to return to Palestine: While I was writing my memoir, my dear friend Abu Lughod, who is a refugee from Jaffa, went back to Palestine and settled in Ramallah. But I realized this is something I cannot do. My fate is to remain in New York. On a constantly shifting ground, where relationships are not inherited, but created. Where there is no solidity of home.38 Said is not anti-Jewish or anti-American: his criticism stems from both the exile Jewish intellectual and the historically created nation of America to which he attaches great importance. He exhibits a consciousness that is at once critical-exilic and situational-historical. Said emphasizes the self-creation of human beings: culture, nation and identity are historically made by humans themselves in history, therefore everything made can be critiqued, resisted and changed, which is the raison dtre of humanistic and secular criticism: hence the importance of Foucaults genealogy or historical ontology of the modern human subject to Saids secularization of culture, nationalism, literary criticism, literature and identity. As Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, Said never taught anything but the Western humanities. Although his entire corpus of critical work covers a wide range of topics and topicalities and his multifarious intellectual concerns may appear heterogeneous at times, Said has identified his entire intellectual and political work with humanism. Humanism, as Akeel Bilgrami says, is perhaps the only ism that, with stubborn ideals, [Said] continued to avow, despite its being made to seem pious and sentimental by the avant-garde developments in the last few decades of literary theory.39 Said says, What concerns me is humanism as a useable praxis for intellectuals and academics who want to know what they are doing, what they are committed to as scholars, and who want also to connect these principles to
38 39

Said, PPC, 457; emphasis added. Akeel Bilgrami, Foreword to HDC, ix.

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the world in which they live as citizens.40 What is humanism and humanistic criticism for Said? Why does he continuously advocate humanism as a praxis for intellectuals, critics and academics? Why is humanism so essential in Saids understanding of the literary intellectual and literary criticism? Also, how does Said understand the human? What can we know about the human? After poststructuralism and deconstruction, what is the intellectual and

political significance of Saids humanistic critical practice in the historical and political context of contemporary literary criticism? What does it inform us as human beings in the world? Are there any limits to and presuppositions behind his humanistic criticism? Humanism is Saids intellectual and moral belief; it is the foundation of his critical, literary and political practice. His humanism is a historically specific and politically conscious resistance against forms of cultural, intellectual and political oppression. However, the importance of the dialectical relation of Saids humanism to his entire corpus of critical work has yet to be fully understood, especially with reference to the crisis of Western humanism and humanities in the context of postmodernism. The advent of critical theory and postcolonial and multicultural studies in the 1960s and 1970s has critically undermined and challenged the legacy and legitimacy of Western humanism and humanistic studies or the Western discourse of truth. With the poststructuralist pronouncement of the death of man and death of the author, the humanist belief in the human subject and individual consciousness, will and freedom appears to be an ideological or a discursive construction. [S]tructuralism kicks away the twin pillars of humanism: the sovereignty of rational consciousness, and the authenticity of individual speech. I do not think, I am thought. You do not speak, you are spoken. Thought and speech, which for the humanist had been the central substance of identity, are located elsewhere, and the self is a vacancy. I, as the poet Rimbaud put it, is an other.41 The whole set of relations amongst human
40 41

Said, HDC, 6. Tony Davies, Humanism (London: Routledge, 1997), 60.

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beings, the human world, and cultural and historical production have to be reexamined and reevaluated. Being one of the first literary critics to introduce French avant-garde theory into American academia after the publication of his theoretical and genealogical critique of Orientalism and the discipline of literary criticism,42 Said is seen by his critics as one of the poststructuralist literary critics who challenge, delegitimize and discredit the cultural and intellectual heritage of the Euro-American civilization as Eurocentric, imperialistic, identitarian and racist. Most of the criticism of Said focuses on his critique of the Western representation of the Middle East and foregrounds his cultural and biological filiation with Arab culture at the expense of his dialectical relation with Western culture and humanism. Consequently, many of Saids critics discredit Said as self-contradictory simply for his advocating the importance of humanism in the context of Western society and academy, and they thus consider Said to be in an oppositional relationship with Western humanism. In the context of contemporary Western and international university education, literary, postcolonial and avant-garde theories have become a popular academicized and institutionalized subject itself to be taught and studied in the humanities. On his experience in the U.S. academy, Said says: in the years since I wrote Beginnings in the early seventies, theory has become a subject in and of itself. It has become an academic pursuit of its own. 43 In this academic trend of theoretical discussion, reproduction and reception, when theory is objectified, extracted and extricated from its historical situation and political origin as an academic subject itself, the idea of humanism and historical and genealogical studies are all too readily dismissed as unfashionable by the contemporary knowledge industry, and the critical possibilities offered by humanistic studies are thus ignored. Saids return to
42

After the publication of his book on Conrad (1966), Said wrote B (1975) which discussed the notion of beginning with reference to the literary and cultural theories of various French critics and theorists such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Said published O (1978) which employed Foucaults notion of discourse in his criticism of Orientalism.
43

Said, PPC, 216.

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humanism is easily misinterpreted by some theoretically preoccupied critics as an anachronistic and perhaps nostalgic retreat to the tradition for authority and validation. More generally, most studies examine Saids literary and political criticism locally, specifically, identitarianly, and cross-sectionally as a literary critic or the author of his famous works such as Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993). No systematic study of his humanism in relation to his ever-evolving criticism, which inevitably extends beyond the boundaries of academia, has been carried out. 44 If we are to see Saids intellectual history as his personal history of self-understanding and selfrealization, it is necessary to study his entire corpus of critical work whose ever-changing topics range from literature, theory, and politics to aesthetics collectively and genealogically. While most of critical studies are devoted to his more high-profile and influential cultural, literary and political criticism before his death, it is important to note that in his late career Said is attracted
44

Several monographs and edited collections of critical essays on Said and his works have been published. But these works do not deal specifically and genealogically with the dialectic of Saids humanism and his entire critical corpus including his posthumously published works on aesthetics and music. These books are all written before Saids death in September 2003. They are mainly concerned with the theoretical dimensions of Saids criticism rather than its humanistic underpinning and with Saids involvement in Middle Eastern politics and fight for Palestinian self-determination. See Keith Ansell-Pearson, Cultural Readings of Imperialism: Edward Said and the Gravity of History, eds Keith Ansell-Pearson, Benita Parry and Judith Squires (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1997); Bill Ashcroft and Pal Ahluwalia, Edward Said: The Paradox of Identity (London & New York: Routledge, 1999); Valerie Kennedy, Edward Said: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2000); William D Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effect of Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin, The Edward Said Reader, eds. Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin (London: Granta Books, 2001); Abdirahman A Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society (New York: Verso, 2002); and Mustapha Marrouchi, Edward Said at the Limits. Albany (State University of New York Press, 2004). Recently published books on Said after his death are also edited collections of essays by different writers and interviews with Said. See Homi Bhabha and W. J. T. Mitchell, Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation, eds. Homi Bhabha and W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Sylvia Nagy-Zekmi, Paradoxical Citizenship: Edward Said, ed. Sylvia Nagy-Zekmi (New York: Lexington Books, 2006); Ali, Tariq. Conversations with Edward Said. New York: Seagull Books, 2006); Ferial J. Ghazoul, Edward Said and Critical Decolonization, ed. Ferial J. Ghazoul (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2007); and Muge Sokmen and Ertur Basak, Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward Said, eds. Muge Sokmen and Basak Ertur (New York: Verso, 2008).

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to aesthetic criticism. In the wake of his leukemia and coming to terms with his impending death, Said wrote an account of his life as history in Out of Place: A Memoir (1999) and aesthetic criticism of literature, music and opera in his posthumously published On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (2004). For Said, humanism cannot do without the category of aesthetics. He believes that one should connect aesthetics with politics without reducing the former to the latter nor studying art outside its political context in the name of aesthetic appreciation. His posthumously published books on aesthetics would further illuminate Saids conception of the aesthetics in relation to his humanism.45 Art is not simply there: it exists intensely in a state of unreconciled opposition to the depredations of daily life, the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor. 46 Said sees the possibility of artistic autonomy, which provides resistance to political and discursive hegemony. Music has been an important theme in Saids criticism. The idea of late style Adorno uses to describe Beethovens music composed at the latest phase of his career is also applicable to Saids humanistic criticism, especially his late critical works as they are antagonistic to categorization, theorization, and definition. From this perspective, I would argue that aesthetics is as central to Saids humanism and humanistic criticism as his literary and political praxis. I would therefore consider Saids aesthetic criticism and specifically his idea of late style in addition to his literary and political criticism. Said in his later writing assumes a very strong authorial voice which I think shows his humanistic belief in the critical and individual consciousness that is not coopted by any system and the weight of discourse. This thesis aims to map out Said and his humanism within the cultural and historical contexts of his intellectual and critical practice in order to tease out the intellectual and theoretical underpinnings of his criticism and to show
45

Five years after his death, Edward Saids Music at the Limits (2008) is published by Columbia University Press. The book is an edited collection of Saids essays on music, literature and opera. Throughout his career, Said wrote prolifically and regularly on music for The Nation and other journals.
46

Said, HDC, 63.

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his humanism through an analysis of his critical work. It is hoped that an explication of Saids critical concepts and praxis would enable us to better understand who we are and what we should do and to provide a metaepistemological reflection upon what literature and criticism arehow they are primarily cultural and political activities of great historical importance and political significance to our self-understanding and self-fashioning.

Know thyself: the history of the human subject As I have stated in the previous section, the raison dtre of humanistic and secular criticism is that humanity is a self-creation of human beings, and because it is historically created, it can also be resisted and changed in history. In order to understand the relevance of Saids humanism to the poststructuralist critique of the Western humanistic tradition, it is important to first delineate the historical creation as well as deconstruction of the modern human subject and the Western humanistic discourse of truth which informs and disciplines the subject. Human beings give birth to themselves as human subjects in modern society. The subject, as discursively constituted and informed by the discourse of humanism or regime of truth, is constructed and represented by humanism as agent with free will, individual consciousness and moral conscience to distinguish between truth and falsity, between right and wrong. The subject is invented by Western humanism to conform to a set of epistemic, discursive, institutional and moral rules, imperatives and protocols, which also enable the interpretation of the subject as free agent in the act of conformism. Foucault says: humanism is everything in Western civilization that restricts the desire for power: it prohibits the desire for power and excludes the possibility of power being seized. The theory of the subject (in the double sense of the word) is at the heart of humanism and this is why our culture has tenaciously rejected anything that could weaken its hold on us.47 Modern society is more repressive than ever: we have to know, interpret, teach
47

Michel Foucault, Revolutionary Action: Until Now, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 222.

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and take care of ourselves as subjects in order to be free, sane and good, but the idea of subject is not to enlighten and free us but imprison and repress us within the regime of knowledge/power. The classic and noble humanistic desire for and pursuit of self-knowledge and freedomthe Delphic dictum know thyself48have been co-opted and adapted by humanism to become a function of the will to knowledge/power. The formation of the modern subject is a corollary of the regime of capitalism, its political economy and its institutions. The self-consciousness, self-knowledge and self-mastery of the human being as subject are formed within the material grid of modern political institutions and capitalistic systems of knowledge production. However, prior to the formation of self-knowledge and the rule of know thyself, there is the care of oneself: You must attend to yourself, you must not forget yourself, you must take care of yourself.49 Before we know ourselves, we care for ourselves: the care of the self makes it necessary and imperative to know the self. Knowledge of the self actually depends on the guiding framework of the care of the self.
50

This individualistic, egocentric and anthropocentric

perspective of humanity, which is derived from ones desire to care about and know oneself, gives rise to the idea of the individual self as self-sufficient and independent agent; it obscures the dialectical, reciprocal and interdependent relationship between the individual human being and humanity as a whole and leads to the ahistorical and hierarchical classification of races, cultures and genders. Human beings give birth to themselves as subjects but not to life. According to Said, Foucaults position is that language in use is not natural; discourse does violence to nature, just as the use of words like ohm, coulomb, and volt to describe electrical qualities does violence to an otherwise
48

Know thyself is an ancient Greek aphorism inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.
49

Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collge de France, 1981-82, ed. Frdric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York; Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 5.
50

Arnold I. Davidson, Introduction, in Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, xx.

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undifferentiated physical force. 51 Therefore, the linguistically, discursively and institutionally constituted human subject does violence to human being and to life itself. Social and cultural standards and systems of value are coercive and repressive. Foucaults and Saids treatment of the historical selfcreation of the human subject and the (Orient) object is to show how we can resist and reverse power relations, and how we can think and act differently. Though it is created and could be changed, the human subject is not an entirely arbitrary formation; the subject comes into existence at a particular historical moment, under specific socio-historical circumstances to serve certain political purposes. As Said says, discourse must treat human life as an accident in order to legitimize its existence as nonaccidental, natural and necessary. The critique of something as arbitrary must be based upon the belief in something unarbitrary. However, even the discursive formation of the human subject has its historical raison dtre; human life is not an accidental and arbitrary formation. Theodor Adorno says: Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.52 An arbitrary life cannot be lived unarbitrarily. The question as to whether there is a fixed unchanging human nature according to which human life, knowledge and society should evolve forward is a very complicated one. I would situate and discuss this question within different intellectual contexts in Chapters Two, Four and Five of this thesis. Said sees human history, culture and society as being historically and secularly made by humans themselves. Therefore, for Said, humanistic and literary criticism, which deals with the historical formation of humanity, culture, literature and art, is historical, worldly and secular. Chapter Two discusses Saids historicist view of humanity and deals with this historical dimension of human production (culture, literature, art and criticism). Saids literary method is a synthesis of historical perspectivism, philological hermeneutics and cultural materialism. This chapter provides an explication of some major

51 52

Said, B, 289.

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: New Left Books, 1978), 39.

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concepts in Saids humanistic criticism such as worldliness, secular criticism and Gramscian geographical consciousness as opposed to Hegelian historical consciousness. Chapter Three charts the genealogy of Saids critical work as well as the interconnection and relevance of his work to his humanism. It proposes to examine four major critical categories as classified by Said himself: literature, theory, politics, and aesthetics. The theoretical, historical and formal analysis of these four critical themes of Said demonstrates the dialectic of his belief in humanism and the historical development and intellectual trajectory of his humanism. The relation between aesthetics and politics can be understood as the tension between resistance and power; this chapter will argue that in the case of Saids late-style writing his anti-political aesthetic criticism is a form of political resistance. Chapter Four delves into Saids idea and practice of the intellectual within the context of the debate over the role of the intellectual and human nature between Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky. The Foucault-Chomsky debate on human nature and the social function of the intellectual vis--vis power has attracted scholarly attention and polarization between Foucault and Said based on Saids critique of Foucault and defense of Chomsky in Traveling Theory (1983). Through an analysis of Foucaults and Saids conception of power and resistance, this chapter shows that the difference between Foucault and Said is primarily a political and strategic rather than an epistemic one. Saids differentiation from Foucault and adoption of Vicos historicist humanism could be understood as a situated act of resistance against the detachment of some poststructuralist literary theory and practice from worldly and political situations. Chapter Five resituates Saids criticism of Western humanism within the tradition of critical humanism. By

demonstrating that the critique of power/knowledge is also the moral critique of conceit in the Vichian sense, this chapter argues for the unity of the critical and the moral consciousness. Critical consciousness, which is the epistemic and moral basis of Saids secular humanism, circumvents the distinction between historicism and universalism, part and whole, atomism and

26

determinism. The morality of Saids humanism therefore is not based upon universal moral principles which are in turn predicated upon the belief in universal human nature, but on the historical-critical consciousness. This chapter crystallizes the conception of Saids humanism as a dialectic of opposites. Saids position, intellectual, cultural and political, is more complicated than something that can be simply described as humanist-cum-

poststructuralist, Foucauldian, postcolonialist or Palestinian nationalist. I do not intend to resolve the paradox and contradiction of Saids identity and criticism. Said himself is made through antagonistic and paradoxical forces which require no reconciliation. One must understand Said not in terms of his identity but in terms of his history and intellectual genealogy. Said is not simply is. The simple identification between Said and one identity by the metaphorical device is involves the suppression of heterogeneity in the name of identity,53 and it does violence to Saids life and history. When Said says: Im a Jewish-Palestinian, he exhibits an anti-identitarian generosity of spirit. Jews and the Palestinians are historically intertwined in such a way that it is impossible to separate them intellectually, historically, culturally and geopolitically. Saids understanding of himself as a Jewish-Palestinian is synecdochial of his understanding of himself as a humanist, a literary critic and a public intellectual. Saids intellectual masters include: Vico, Auerbach, Adorno, Gramsci, Foucault, and Conrad, who communicate with each other dialectically and contrapuntally in Saids own intellectual symphony; there is no historical and chronological overcoming of anyone, and each of these intellectual masters exists geographically and anachronistically 54 within a network of power relations with each other. It would be important, therefore, to examine these masters not for the purpose of understanding who they are
53 54

See Martin Jay, Adorno (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 68.

I use the word geographically because temporal and historical experience and acquisition of knowledge exist geographically rather than historically (thus anachronistically) in the intellectual space of the mind. This is what Said calls the geographical consciousness of history which will be discussed and elaborated in Chapters Two and Three.

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but how they have become important for Said. However, it is beyond the scope and limits of this thesis to examine each of these masters in detail; for my purpose here I can only study those intellectual masters central to the understanding and explication of Saids humanism and critical practice.

A dialectic of Said and Vico Giambattista Vico, a central figure in Saids intellectual biography and also this thesis, plays a significant part in Saids entire humanistic practice. He is the first philosophical historian or historical philosopher to study the entire human history scientifically and natural and human science historically in The New Science (1725). For his study of history, Vico sets up a number of philosophical and scientific principles and the first foundational principle of his science of history is: the world of nations is clearly a human creation, and its nature is reflected in the human mind. 55 Human beings can know the human world and history because they make them. By asserting the unity of creation and knowledge, Vico refutes the Cartesian belief in the ability of the human rational faculty to have a clear and distinct idea of the mind through mere thinking and observation because the mind can only perceive what it itself makes and since the mind does not make itself, it cannot have a clear and distinct idea of itself. In fact, thinking is the sign, and not the cause, of my being mind.56 The primary premise I think, therefore I am57 that Descartes establishes is only the certainty of consciousness of ones existence, it is not knowledge, which is the knowledge of causes or how a thing is made (i.e. the cause of ones existence). Although Vicos science studies the empirical facts of history, it is an attempt to circumvent both the rationalist and empiricist
55

Giambattista Vico, The New Science: Principles of the New Science Concerning the Common Nature of Nations, trans. David Marsh and intro. Anthony Grafton (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 349.
56

Giambattista Vico, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians: Unearthed from the Origins of the Latin language: Including the Disputation with the Giornale de Letterati dItalia, trans. and intro. L.M. Palmer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 56.
57

See Ren Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, ed. and trans. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 16-7.

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epistemology. Human beings perceive the external world through the five senses and in turn make sense of the unfamiliar (external stimuli) through extending their understanding of the familiar (the corporeal body) to the comprehension of the unfamiliar (the world). Vico says: In his ignorance, man makes himself the measure of the universe. [M]an has reduced the entire world to his own body. Now, rational metaphysics teaches us that man becomes all things through understanding, homo intelligendo fit omnia. But perhaps with greater truth, this imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding, homo non intelligendo fit omnia. For when man understands, he extends his mind to comprehend things; but when he does not understand, he makes them out of himself and, by transforming himself, becomes them. 58 Humans make the world by language which becomes the third realm mediating dialectically between the material world and the spiritual world. Raymond Williamss historical account of language also demonstrates that language plays an active role in making the reality: Language is then, positively, a distinctively human opening of and opening to the world: not a distinguishable or instrumental but a constitutive faculty.59 For Vico, a word is like a rock which is embedded within a particular historical and geological climate and circumstances and thus reflects the historical and cultural processes of that epoch. Therefore, for Vico, and for Said, philology is the foundation of humanistic knowledge. Philology is the humanists love of words as bearing within them human knowledge, thoughts, feelings, history and life. By treating words as a constitutive part of artifactual reality, philology transcends the binary distinction between idealism and materialism as language is the third realm which mediates and traverses between mind and world. Said does not believe in the death of the author:60
58 59

Vico, The New Science, 405.

Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 24; emphasis added.
60

The death of the author is a poststructuralist thesis of Roland Barthes which is generally understood as an argument for the triumph of the linguistic system over individuals will, consciousness, creativity and originality and that the power relation between language as a system and the writer is that between system of subjection and the

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the author is neither completely independent or sovereign nor is he/she a passive scribe of the discourse of power; the author can stand in a dialectical and antagonistic relationship to his or her historical circumstances. A literary text is therefore both the history of the author and his or her circumstantial reality encoded in idiosyncratically and consciously chosen words, sentences, parataxes: a set of dialectical relationships reenacted by hermeneutical philology. By examining the shades of meaning61 of each articulation, how it is used and challenged, philology pays full attention to the individual particular without losing sight of the dialectical relation between the individual literary text and the worldview of that historical age concerned. For Said, therefore, the structuralist conception of language as a totalizing system fails to take into account the fact that words can be used as an active agent for historical and political change. In the end, it is this philological attention to words that can contest the languages of universalism, standardization and specialization and transcend disciplinary boundaries. Historicist philology, which is fundamental to Saids secular and oppositional criticism, has been seldom examined by critics who are preoccupied with the theoretical paradigms and apparent inconsistencies of Saids critical practice. Chapters Two and Three of this thesis would study the example of how the philological reading of literary texts by disclosing the dialectical and reciprocal relationship between language/literature and world/reality, can turn literary studies and the humanities as a whole into a socially meaningful and politically potent enterprise. Saids reliance on Vicos metaphysics has profound moral implications in addition to epistemological ones. Vicos rejection of Descartess

subjected subject in Althuserrian term. However, the historical context and politics of Barthess The Death of the Author proclamation itself contradict the literal meaning of the thesis as Barthess argument for the death of the author was also a political reaction which aimed to free meanings from the sovereignty and intention of the author. Barthes, The Death of the Author, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fotana/Collins, 1977), 142-8.
61

Said, B, 385.

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understanding of the ego (I) as the subject and foundation of knowledge62 is based on epistemological as well as moral reasons. The metaphysical and historical shift from Platonic idealistic emphasis on the absolute True and the Good to be discovered by us to Descartess focus on the self as the ground of epistemological certainty lends the epistemological primacy from the ideal reality to the thinking self. What I think becomes the only criterion by which to distinguish between truth and falsity and between what is right and what is wrong; everything and everyone else becomes mere object subjected to ones egoistic epistemic and moral judgment. Epistemological primacy of the ego necessitates a moral precedence of the self over others. Vico, on the contrary, is highly skeptical of the rational faculty of human beings. He asserts that humans only know the world by making it (through imagination, extension, juxtaposition, association, schematization, etc.). The human world is a collective creation of the entire mankind. Through studying the common nature of nations, Vico understands that bestial instinct, selfishness and communality are parts of human nature, but he argues that it is the communal nature of human beings that makes common sense, moral law and order, and communal coexistence possible: Since human judgment is by nature uncertain, it gains certainty from our common sense about what is necessary and useful to humankind; and necessity and utility are the two sources of the natural law of nations.63 Unlike the individualists, Vico along with other humanists, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Constant confirm the fundamental sociability of mankind (man without society is not man, contrary to Occams contention).64

Descartess search for certainty culminates in the conclusion that as long as one thinks, the existence of ones ego is self-evidently and self-verifyingly true, irrefutable, necessary and certain, therefore, the rational ego forms the basis of clear and distinct idea. See Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, 16-7.
63

62

Vico, The New Science, 141. According to Vico, common sense is an unreflecting judgment shared by an entire social order, people, nation, or even all humankind. Vico, The New Science, 142.
64

Tzvetan Todorov, Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism, trans. Caral Cosman (New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2002), 33.

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Vicos principle, knowing is making, corresponds to Nietzsches notion that knowing is interpreting or the will to power as knowledge: facts are precisely what there is not, only interpretations. 65 However, Vicos metaphysics stems from the physical or corporeal and his epistemic methodology is atavistic, which pushes words, texts and ideas back to the material and corporeal circumstances from which they arise to serve certain human practical needs: The anthropomorphization of knowledge, against which Nietzsche was later to rebel, is Vicos project, even if civilization progresses (if that is the word) from the body to impersonal institutions.66 Again, Vicos anti-Cartesian return to the material and physical has profound epistemic and moral implications. Through demonstrating how human knowledge is constituted and fabricated by language which originally derives from the human body, and its parts, or from human senses and emotions,67 Vico unlocks the system of correspondence between the physical and the metaphysical. The body is the richest and most powerful source of metaphors and knowledge which provides the necessary structure and design for Vico to schematize, animate and unify his New Science: To organize the material outlined in the Chronological Table [of Three Epochs of World History], I propose the following axioms, both philosophical and philological in nature [] Like the life-blood of a living creature, these principles run throughout my Science and enliven every part of my discussion of the common nature of nations.68 The mind is inextricably linked to the body. Vico emphasizes the unity of mind and body and rejects the separation of intellectuality from corporeality: But I who think am mind and body, and if thought were the cause of my being, thought would be the cause of the body. Yet there are bodies that do not think. Rather, it is because I consist both of body and mind that I think; so that body and mind united are the cause of thought. For if I
65

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (N.Y.: Random House, 1967), 267.
66 67 68

Said, Vico on the Discipline of Bodies and Texts, in Exile, 85. Vico, The New Science, 405. Ibid., 119.

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were only body, I would not think. If I were only mind, I would have [pure] intelligence.69 Saids literary criticism worlds the literary text back to the culture and society from which it arises. Saids atavistic method of understanding the meanings of a text according to its socio-historical circumstances is predicated upon Vicos holistic view of humanity, which resists the disjunction between the phenomenal and the corporeal. The detachment of subjective meaningpositing from the objective existence of human beings and life culminates in a relativism of moral values. Meanings are not arbitrarily created, posited and changed by human subjectivity but also in the dialectical correspondence between mind and body. Common sense or meaning is socially created and mutually understood by a community. According to Vico, the instinct of piety in human nature, which is the fear of and respect for otherness, causes and facilitates the transformation from primitive society to a modern society based on common reason and social law. This socio-historical function of human piety would be further discussed in Chapter Five. The first interpretation of the world in the earliest human civilization originates from piety not the will to power: according to Vico, when the primitive men in history saw and heard a thunderbolt, they out of pious fear of the unknown other created the sign Jovefather of men and Godsto designate the sight and sound of a thunderbolt. The myth about Jove is the first human thought which stems from piety and also produces fear in men and serves to discipline mens instinctdriven behavior. The myth gives birth to political structures and institutions which bestow order, law, and organization upon human society and thereby enables communal existence. Piety is an indispensable element in the human making of an orderly communal world based upon common sense and communal interests. Vico establishes that the common nature of all nations incarnates historically in the universal tripartite structure of the history of all nations. All human civilization begins from the first age of primitivism to the second age of moderate rationalism and to the third age of overdeveloped
69

Vico, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, 56.

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intellectuality, which culminates in a kind of irrational and excessive skepticism and finally returns to primitivism. 70 This is the ideal eternal history through which the history of every nation passes in time.71 However, the conceit of nations and scholars, a violation of the principle of piety, results in all the erroneous views which entire nations and all scholars have entertained concerning the beginnings of civilization. For when nations first became aware of their origins, and scholars first studied them, they judged them according to the enlightenment, refinement, and magnificence of their age, when in fact by their very nature these origins must rather have been small, crude, and obscure.72 The moral problem of conceit is consequent upon epistemology and historiography. This thesis attempts to show how Vicos philosophy plays a foundational role in Saids humanism. As the relation between Vico and Said is both genealogical and dialectical, it would be methodologically ungrounded and historically inattentive for any discussion of Saids humanism to be made without tracing Saids ideas back to Vicos science. I would argue that a critique of the epistemic basis of Saids humanism is also a critique of Vicos historicist humanism. For instance, Saids cultural and literary critical works such as Orientalism (1978), Culture and Imperialism (1994) and Reflections on Exile (2000) adopt a multiculturalist and anti-identitarian worldview which challenges, upsets and delegitimizes the Eurocentric humanistic curriculum founded upon Western canonical philosophical and literary works. However, some critics take Saids multiculturalism as cultural relativism. Keith Windschuttle says: One of the seminal texts of the relativist movement is the literary critic Edward Saids 1978 book Orientalism. 73 He accuses Said of being a history-killing cultural relativist, one amongst the gang of the
70

See Vico, Section I Three Kinds of Human Nature, in The New Science, 916-918. According to Vico, history is cyclical rather than linear and progressive.
71 72 73

Ibid., 349. Ibid., 123.

Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past (N.Y.: Free Press, 1997), 274.

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postmodernists, deconstructionists, and poststructuralists, who advocates a kind of regressive exclusivist multiculturalism shielding off metanarratives, and questioning the foundation of truth grounded by Western historiography, epistemology and anthropology. He argues that multiculturalism which justifies the relativism of value is the source of cultural conflicts in the contemporary world.74 In addition, Ernest Gellner questions Saids disbelief in evolutionism for he thinks that multiculturalism is ontologically impossible without grounding itself in an evolutionary view of humanity and culture: Nineteenth-century evolutionism, which Said repudiates, offered an ingenious solution, which on the one hand recognized cultural variety, yet on the other provided a basis for judgment: cultures were ranked on an evolutionary ladder, and the upward struggle along it endowed life and history with meaning. All cultures were legitimate but later ones more so. This imposed a ranking on cultures, which is unacceptable to Said, though ranking, as such, can be separated from the Eurocentric versions once prevalent, and a non-Eurocentric form of the theory may yet find favour. 75 Historicist humanism, which judges different cultures not according to absolute and ahistorical values and standards but based on the historical and social conditions under which a culture develops, provides a basis for Saids historical and multicultural perspective. I would demonstrate this historical perspectivism in Saids literary and cultural criticism in Chapter Two. As a historicist humanist, Said like Vico does not believe in progress, because he does not consider the rational faculty to be the most important
74

See Windschuttles Cultural Relativism and the Return of Tribalism, in The Killing of History, 270-283. Critics like James Seaton also criticizes Saids position as a secular critic for being elusive and relativist: Saids own allegiance, however, is to a secular world in which the authority of religion and even of cultures gives way to a recognition of the arbitrary, contingent nature of all traditions. On the basis of such skepticism, even when enriched with the decentering doctrines of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche, there does not seem to be any principled means of opposing any point of view, even exterminism. Perhaps the widespread support for the exterminism that Said deplores derives at least partially from the relativism that he finds so liberating. Seaton, The Critic as Exile: On Edward Said, Cultural Conservatism, Political Liberalism: From Criticism to Cultural Studies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 179; emphasis added. Ernest Gellner, The Mightier Pen? Edward Said and the Double Standards of Insideout Colonialism, Times Literary Supplement, February 19, 1993, 3.
75

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human essence and the development and refinement of such faculty to be the teleological destination of the historical development of humankind. The modern age of reason and intellectuality is just one phase of the entire historical development of mankind. Humans can only know what they themselves have made. No certainty of truth concerning the human mind could be attained because humans do not make but only observe their own minds. Nonetheless, the process of observation of humans themselves and the world also to a certain extent affects and determines how humans make the civil world in history. Vicos historicist view of human culture recognizes the universal structure and property of the history of all nations or cultures, i.e. the ideal eternal history, and also the universal human capacity for knowledge (human history) because humans make their own history. Since the civil world is certainly the creation of humankind [] consequently, the principles of the civil world can and must be discovered within the modifications of the human mind.76 According to this view, the faculty of knowledge, which is ahistorical, metaphysical and universal, incarnates itself in human history temporally, materially and culturally. Although Said is not concerned with the ahistorical structure of the mind as the basis of universal human nature, like Vico, Said understands that each nation has its own history of development, therefore, should not be judged according to ahistorical and absolute intellectual and moral standards. Multiculturalism, relativism and evolutionism do not necessarily go together. [N]ational differences are important, not for their (hierarchized) uniqueness, but for their interactive contribution to the formation of humanity, that is, for their individual roles in the general drama of the transnational process of humanization.77 It is ahistorical and erroneous to judge and hierarchize cultures, and as Vico would say, such judgment or interpretation stems from conceit. An historical phenomenon is not fully known until its effects can be described.78 The science of evolution is part of
76 77 78

Vico, The New Science, 331; emphasis original. Bov, Intellectuals in Power, 166.

Esteve Morera, Gramscis Historicism: A Realist Interpretation (London: Routledge, 1990), 77.

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history: it emerges out of specific historical, ideological and political conditions. Evolutionism can be seen as an ideology which would justify and legitimize cultural chauvinism, imperialism, colonialism, elitisim, globalism and progressivism, the capitalistic system, the free market, and ultimately the care, preservation and enhancement of the self. As Vicos science demonstrates, piety (the respect for otherness) and the ability to understand the whole truth of humanity are also dialectical. His science of the entire course of human history as the temporal development of the human mind provides a democratic understanding of the entire humanity. The tripartite structure of every nation is as historical and natural as the developmental and biological growth of every human individual. Since the mind of a nation is historical, idea or knowledge is attained through the independent development and modification of the mind rather than through the passive intake of data and information. Knowledge unlike commodity is irreproducible. Vico argues that ideas are propagated not by diffusion, like articles of commerce, but by the independent discovery by each nation of what it needs at any given stage in its own development.79 Modern rationalism and intellectualism are therefore not restricted to Western civilization but are a historical stage to be passed through by all nations according to their own historical development. However, in contemporary egoistic, narcissistic and highly developed society, people cannot even tolerate the cyclical order of life and the idea of aging. One generation withers and another generation thrives: the cycle of life from cradle to grave is democratic. The retirement of the preceding generation seems to do justice to the development of the successive generation by relaying and passing down responsibility and giving way to the growth and enhancement of the new generation. According to Christopher Lasch, the fear of old age is closely associated with the emergence of the narcissistic [and conceited] personality.80 Narcissism is the pathology of the

79 80

R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), 71.

Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1978), 210.

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will to subjectivity. This contradicts the personality of a humanist who is convinced that his [or her] personality is not limited to himself [or herself] as a physical individual but is an active social relationship of modification of the cultural environment.81 For Vico, the dialectic of philology (the study of the historical particular) and philosophy (the study of universal general) unlocks a series of relationships between part and whole, and the corporeal and the intellectual, which circumvent the either-or logic of binary thinking. Almost all criticism of the contradictions, paradoxes and relativism of Saids humanistic practice is predicated upon this binary logic framed within the ungenealogical and undialectical dichotomy of self and other, intellect and body, reason and emotion, and particularity and universality. The human is after all a unity of will, reason, emotion, instinct, senses, the conscious and the unconscious. Vico himself reads the human as human as a human from a historical perspective which understands the human as both intellectually enabled and limited by each stage of historical development. This explains Saids deep interest in and intellectual involvement with Vico as a humanist and his historicist humanism. The intellectual and moral generosity or magnanimity of Vico lies in his humanistic sympathetic understanding of and identification with each kind of human nature of every historical epoch (from the instinctual and poetic angle of the primitive men to the reasonable and intellectual slant of modern men) in his macro-understanding of the human history and knowledge. Vico did not rely exclusively on pure logic and reason to understand the entire human history since humans are not simply subjects of knowledge, objects of the will to power, emotion and unconscious but a unity of all modalities. Although Said asserts that humanity is historical and a self-creation of humankind, and therefore history could be changed and life be otherwise, he does not think that the historicality of human nature is the basis of a kind of moral relativism. The human subject is a reification and subjugation of the human being by humans themselves. What we know and think about ourselves
81

Paul Bov, In the Wake of Theory, 37.

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is determined by what is already selected and reified in the first place, as Adorno says: Anything that is not reified, cannot be counted and measured, ceases to exist.82 History teaches us that the concern for ones subjectivity and freedom will not bring freedom in the real and practical sense; it is only the concern for the freedom of others that could truly bring freedom to humanity at large. The intellectual and moral task of the humanist is not to recreate a new human nature and new world for oneself and ones nation but to resist, negate and contradict ones socialized, institutionalized and

indoctrinated thinking. The whole intellectual corpus of Said is not a linear development; according to Said, intellectual development is possible through contradicting himself and his own work. By unlearning the inherent dominative mode83 and what we thought we know, we would be open to new possibilities and alternative mode of critical thinking. Humans only see injustices based on what they know without doing justice to what they do not know. To be critical is to maintain a critical distance to our knowledge and to search for knowledge of our ignorance. As Vico would say: humans take their own human perspective as the perspective of the whole world.84 To critique is to unlearn rather than relearn and to undo rather than redo for humans impose violence unto the natural order of life through imposing their subjective interpretation upon the world. For instance, the progressive view of history distorts the natural cyclical order of history.85 Another paradox of Vicos science of humanism and Saids secular
82

This statement summarizes the nihilistic experience of an exiled Jew. The life of an exile is reduced to nonexistence once his or her nation and national identity cease to exist under the condition of exile and dispossession. See Adorno, Minima Moralia, 47.
83 84

Raymond Williams quoted in Said, O, 28; emphasis added.

With reference to Vicos view of the anthropocentric nature of knowledge, Said also says: both [the philologists and philosophers] saw what they found in texts through a purely textual perspective, as if that perspective was the world. Said, PPC, 19.
85

According to Vico, the history of all human civilizations has a tripartite structure which begins from the first age of primitivism to the second age of moderate rationalism and to the third age of overdeveloped intellectuality which culminates in a kind of irrational and excessive skepticism and finally returns back to primitivism. I would discuss this conception of human history in further detail in Chapter Two. See Vico, Section I Three Kinds of Human Nature in The New Science, 916-918.

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humanism is related to Vicos view of the universalism of humanity. Vicos study of human history is a scientific and philosophical search for universal principles which govern the history of all nations. At the same time, Vicos science also historicizes and secularizes human authority. The question is: upon what authority is Vicos universalism of humanity based? Based on what is literally written in Vicos New Science and his Autobiography, universalism is grounded in the Divine Providence, which manifests and incarnates itself in the human spiritually, intellectually, morally, historically and materially. Vico calls his humanism a study of Divine Providence revealed: a rational civil theology.86 Said is an atheist and a secular humanist. His employment of Vicos historicist humanism has both epistemic and political justifications. Said maintains two visions of the unknown. On the one hand, Said believes that since everything in human history is made by humans, it can be understood; therefore, he criticizes those scholars who alienate, objectify, reify and mystify human production such as language and the capitalistic system as something impenetrable by and inaccessible to human understanding. On the other hand, he is also aware of the inexhaustible possibilities for humans to change and improve the world. With reference to Raymond Williams, Said says that no existing system of subjugation is so totalizing and hegemonic that no resistance and alternatives to that system is possible.87 The two visions of or attitudes towards the unknown, of which the former surrenders intellectually to the unknown and the latter reveres and strives to understand the unknown, are secular and critical. I would discuss the tension between the sacred and the secular in Vicos humanism and provide a historical interpretation of Saids adoption of Vico in Chapter Five.

The politics of knowledge: Saids political legacy

86 87

Ibid., 2.

See Said and Raymond Williamss discussion in Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interview with New Left Review (London: New Left Books, 1979), 252.

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Criticism has a price to pay. If the critic does not have to pay and sacrifice for his or her belief, it is not a belief worth believing and defending. Said writes criticism because criticism matters existentially and organically to him as a human being in the world. Said practices an exilic criticism which necessitates the sacrifice of ones own subjectivity. Criticism for Said is a matter of life and death, freedom and imprisonment, love and power, nonsubjectivity and subjectivity, and will to coexistence and will to power; it is not just a job that one does or a position that one takes. In brief, criticism is existentially, intellectual, morally and politically consequential. In the academic and intellectual context of America and other parts of the world, the integration of postcolonial and multiculturalist literary studies into the primarily Eurocentric humanistic curriculum of American universities and universities worldwide testifies to the intellectual influence of Said. Moreover, Saids academic influence also exerts political and institutional impact and bears political and legislative consequence. His critique of Eurocentric literary criticism and inclusion of multiculturalist literature are again interpreted by state and neoconservative intellectuals as an intellectual and academic intolerance and illiberalism. In 2003, Stanley Kurtz, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, testified before the Subcommittee on Select Education of U.S. House of Representatives, on the bias and ideological imbalance of academic area studies, Middle East Studies in particular, in contemporary educational programs in American universities.
88

Kurtz criticizes the

popularity and dominance of postcolonial theory in the academy under the influence of Said and accuses postcolonial and postmodernist theories of being illiberal, anti-American and dangerous: The ruling intellectual paradigm in academic area studies (especially Middle Eastern Studies) is called postcolonial theory. Post-colonial theory was founded by Columbia University
88

Kurtz concludes that significant change has to be made by Congressional intervention. Kurtz, Testimony before the Subcommittee on Select Education of the House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce, U.S. House of Representatives, from the U.S. House of Representatives Web Sites, created on June 19, 2003, clipped on January 30, 2008, <http://republicans.edlabor.house.gov/archive/hearings/108th/sed/titlevi61903/kurtz.htm>.

41

professor of comparative literature, Edward Said. Said gained fame in 1978, with the publication of his book, Orientalism. In that book, Said equated professors who support American foreign policy with the 19th century European intellectuals who propped up racist colonial empires. The core premise of post-colonial theory is that it is immoral for a scholar to put his knowledge of foreign languages and cultures at the service of American power.89 In the name of liberal education and academic freedom, Kurtz says: I dont want to exclude the followers of Said. I want to bring the followers of [Bernard] Lewis back in.90 For Kurtz, anti-American and pro-American scholars should occupy equal space and attention in the contemporary programs of Middle East Studies. Of course, the academic liberalism and freedom Kurtz defends and illiberalism he condemns is not the same as the kind of intellectual and critical freedom Said concerns. But the political and congressional action taken by Kurtz substantiates the underlying argument of Orientalism that there is no absolute distinction between pure and political knowledge.91 The academy and knowledge production are situated within a network of power relations and political interests. In the name of liberalism, Kurtzs reaction is nevertheless motivated by political interests as Saids criticism questions and threatens the legitimacy of Eurocentric humanistic curriculum, and bears material, institutional and intellectual consequences.92

89 90

Kurtz, Testimony before the Subcommittee, unpaginated.

Kurtz, Reforming the Campus, from National Review Online, created on October 14, 2003, clipped on January 30, 2008, <http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NDk3Nzg4ZjFiMTdhOGJjOTBjN2IxNTVhNTNmYzFjZjA=#more>.
91 92

Said, O, 9.

It should be noted that a liberal and tolerant society could be more repressive and cooptative than an authoritarian and totalitarian society as everything is intellectually, morally and politically acceptable and relative, and consequently inconsequential and insignificant. One suffers from the powerlessness and meaninglessness of life as a result of not having to pay for and not being able to judge the value and significance of what one does.

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Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation (2005), published after Saids death in 2003 as a tribute to his academic and intellectual accomplishments and contribution, is particularly humanistic. In the spirit of reading, learning and writing the human as human, Saids friends, colleagues, acquaintances commemorate Said as a living presence, a humanist critic, and an activist intellectual. These personal essays reveal a deeply interpersonal relationship that is built upon intellectual and personal conversations and humanistic mutual learning between Said and their authors. Saids influence is profound and his critical legacy can not be reduced to an understanding of it as one particular form of critical practice. Said does not speak as a professional literary critic who is concerned with teaching people how to become a professional academic but as a responsible intellectual, reader, and human being in the world. No theoretical paradigm or method of reading can substitute my personal and individual experience of reading and being moved by Said. In the following chapters, I will discuss Saids humanism and critical practice critically and historically. This thesis sees Saids intellectual legacy as primarily humanistic and therefore comprehends and analyzes Saids critical practice from a humanistic perspective. The entire corpus of critical works of Said will be analyzed and examined historically, contrapuntally and antagonistically. Saids works are historically particular and intellectually diverse. And at the same time, there is always something Saidian about Said himself and his works. The past and the present, and the historical particular and the universal general dialectically depend on, redefine and rediscover each other. The essence of Said is inexhaustible as the genealogy of his past is an ongoing process in the same way as the evolution of his humanism; every critical articulation by Said relates to and revolves around his humanism, which is simultaneously reinterpreted, multiplied and diversified by his writings. The ultimate concern of Saids humanism is the human being and humanity: How have humans become what they are in history? How may a self-understanding of the historical self-creation of the human enable a better

43

understanding of the role and responsibility of the human in society? Saids intellectual biography is a dialectic of his general concern for the human and his particular response, reaction and resistance to the historical and political circumstances of his time. It is through the intellectual and political interaction with the historical particular that Said exemplifies what it is to be a human being, a humanist and a public intellectual who is deeply anchored in and concerned with the historical material world, which in turn is the condition under which a life is lived. It is the aim of this thesis to show the continuity of Saids belief in humanism through his individual and diversified writings.

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CHAPTER TWO

Humanism and Secular Criticism

It is, therefore, a source of great virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about invisible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether. The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his.Hugo of St. Victor 1

Saids humanism In an interview with Imre Salusinszky, Edward Said gives a vivid account of himself, his history and his intellectual and critical practice: My background is a series of displacements and expatriations which cannot be recuperated. The sense of being between cultures has been very, very strong for me. I would say thats the single strongest strand running through my life: the fact that Im always in and out of things, and never really of anything for long.2 Said is literally and metaphorically a traveler between cultures, ideas, thoughts, theories and does not have a fixed identitylinguistic, national or institutional. His conglomerate cultural backgroundan Arab Palestinian who lived in various places in the Middle East, received both British and American
1

Hugo of St. Victor, Didascalicon, trans. Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 101. Said refers to this quote by Hugo of St. Victor to demonstrate his conception of worldly criticism. See Said, CI, 335.
2

Said, PPC, 70.

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education, and eventually settled in the cosmopolitan city of New York, as a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Columbiamirrors his heterogeneous intellectual interests in culture, history, literature, theory, and politics, which cross and transcend cultural, national, disciplinary and institutional boundaries. It would be difficult to present a neat intellectual genealogy of Said by attempting merely to identify various dominant influences on him by thinkers that he admires or by demonstrating how they are played out and applied in Saids critical work. Such a project would be unnecessary or even undesirable, for to do so one would have to treat thoughts and theories of those thinkers as something that could be transmitted through a timeless space and be employed and reproduced at willwith no reference to their historical and contextual specificities. It would be untrue to both Saids history and history itself, as he never followed any school of thought, stayed with any thinker blindly and he constantly changed his academic topics, critical preoccupations and political concerns. Saids intellectual life is a lifelong refusal to be dogmatic. 3 A study that attempts to homogenize Said would thus undermine the ever-evolving historical and political basis on which Said conducts his criticism. The challenge for Saids intellectual biographer is therefore to connect Saids works with his humanism and organize his critical practice into a unity, which acknowledges the significant intellectual influences on Said without being reductive. The continual outpouring of cross-disciplinary academic journals, books, critical essays, interviews, documentaries and political commentaries on the man and his ideas testifies to Saids intellectual influence and his social and political relevance. Most critical work on Said is mainly concerned with his influence and legacy in postcolonial studies, his active political involvement in Palestinian self-determination and the peace process, and his
3

I use the term dogmatic to refer to intellectual and political inflexibility. Said holds a position that would enable critique. Within the Vichian humanist tradition, absolute positions are untenable because they exclude the possibility of critique and therefore limit the human capacity to question and think differently.

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criticism of Zionism and Palestinian fundamentalism.4 Said is one of the first literary critics to introduce French avant-garde theory into American academia. His incorporation of Michel Foucaults concept of discourse in his ground-breaking Orientalism (1978), which is considered to be the disciplinary and theoretical foundation of postcolonial studies,5 has generated debates and controversies over the question of moral legitimacy and political relevance of Western humanism and humanistic studies. Humanism and the humanities, the cultural and intellectual heritage of the Euro-American civilization, have been discredited and deconstructed as Eurocentric, imperialistic, identitarian and racist. On one hand, Saids genealogical critique of Western humanism and its disciplinary manifestations such as Orientalism, which attempts to expose the imperialist ideology of cultural and racial supremacy of the West by deontologizing and detheologizing both the Western subject and the non-Western object, appears to carry a poststructuralist cast, for it is in line with the deconstruction and disavowal of pure, transcendental, and politically disinterested knowledge, and the humanist belief in man as rational subject of knowledge presupposed by Enlightenment epistemology. On the other hand, Said is a self-declared humanist who openly espouses and admires the tradition of critical historical humanism and the founders of comparative literature such as Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach. This apparent contradiction, which is understood by some critics of Said in terms of a rather simplistic opposition between traditional humanism and poststructuralist antihumanism, constitutes the basis of various critiques of
This relates to my earlier point about Saids refusal to be dogmatic. While committed to Palestinian nationalism as a means of achieving self-determination for the people of Palestine, Said was critical of the hard-line Palestinian groups that threatened to orient the nascent nationalist project in a fundamentalist direction. The following quote is indicative of Saids belief that while one supports a particular political project or ideology, one should also reserve a space for the critique of ones belief and political position: it must be incumbent upon those of us who support nationalist struggle in an age of unrestrained nationalist expression to have at our disposal some decent measure of intellectual refusal, negation and skepticism. See Said, Identity, Negation and Violence, New Left Review 171 (1988): 46-60. The origins of postcolonial studies remain open to debate. While many take Orientalism as a foundational text, others trace it to the writing of the Martinequean-born psychiatrist Frantz Fanon and to many other sources.
5 4

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Said for being inconsistent and self-contradictory. 6 Humanism, which is not only the beginning but also the end of Saids literary, intellectual, and political pursuits, is seldom dealt with in itself or in relation to his entire heterogeneous yet unified corpus of critical works. Many critiques of Said only examine his intellectual history cross-sectionally rather than genealogically and therefore fail in the Vichian sense to begin with the genesis or beginning of the matters they examine. In this chapter, therefore, I set out with Saids humanism, in an attempt to provide an overview of major Saidian themes. Doctrines must take their beginning from that of the matters of which they treat.
7

From a philosophical and theoretical perspective, Saids

humanism implicates the fundamental existential question lying at the heart of humanism: What is the human? or What are we? Humanism singles out human beings as its object of epistemological, moral, historical and political inquiries and is premised upon the distinction between human beings and nature, between the historical world as made by humans and the natural world as made by God. Saids humanism operates at both the philosophical and historical levels: it is grounded in a metaphysical understanding of humanity and responds to cultural, historical and social changes. The humanism that Said avows should not be understood as a nostalgic, ahistorical and anachronistic return to the classic or traditional humanism advocated by neoconservative humanists and state intellectuals in the U.S. Such a return is ahistorical as the cultural and political changes in contemporary social conditions would require a new historically specific understanding and
Many critics of Said find his so-called postmodernist-cum-humanist position problematic and paradoxical. James Seaton, for example says, If Said often criticizes Western values, he also appeals to them. See Seaton, The Critic as Exile: On Edward Said, Cultural Conservatism, Political Liberalism: from Criticism to Cultural Studies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, c1996), 172. Aijaz Ahmad also says in his critique of Orientalism, What is remarkable about this at times very resounding affirmation of humanist values is that humanism-as-ideality is invoked precisely at the time when humanism-as-history has been rejected so unequivocally. Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), 164. See also James Clifford, Review of Orientalism, History and Theory 19, no. 2 (February 1980): 204-23; Rosalind OHanlon, Cultures of Rule, Communities of Resistance: Gender, Discourse and Tradition in Recent South Asian Historiographies, Social Analysis 25 (1989): 94-114.
7 6

From Vicos New Science quoted by Said in the epigraph of B.

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analysis of the society. Also the ahistorical and essentializing impulse of traditional humanism and its imperialist ideology in its attempt to understand and comprehend the world of cultures and peoples have led to the deconstruction of humanistic values and denial of human will and agency.8 Saids humanism rests upon Vicos historicism or historicist humanism, a theory or philosophy of human nature that recognizes the historical nature of humans and of all things human, i.e. the totality of the historical world as made by humans themselves. It is true that humans have no fixed nature or essence because according to Vico, humans are nothing other than their history. They are always in history in which they make, act, think, and change. Human nature is human history: human history is essentially the development of the human mind. The existential inevitability of historical development and change makes the reification and objectification of human beings as transcendental an epistemological impossibility. Historicist humanism by virtue of understanding the human as historical inaugurates a whole new tradition of humanistic studies which predicate upon an epistemology and aesthetics that are radically different from those established by traditional humanism. 9 How one understands the human is consequent upon ones entire worldview; Said thus understands all human existential actualities: the human being, history, knowledge, criticism, language, politics,
8

The term traditional humanism is genealogically and semantically complicated and has different connotations and references in various historical and rhetorical contexts. For my purpose here and in the following chapters, I would employ this term specifically to refer to the kind of Western ontological and metaphysical thinking which is predicated on being rather than becoming, identity rather than history, and fact rather than process. Metaphysics and politics also support each other: Western humanism is complicitous with Western imperialism and colonialism. For a detailed and theoretical study of Western humanism and its imperialist logic and project, see William V. Spanos, The End of Education: Towards Posthumanism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). For a decolonialist critique of Western humanism and imperialism, see Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004). Saids humanism is intellectually and genealogical grounded in Vicos historicist humanism. Interestingly, in a study of Vicos humanism, Sandra Rudnick Luft discusses the anachronism of Vicos humanism in his time and its incompatibility with traditional humanism as well as the intellectual connection between Vicos and postmodern thoughts. See Luft, Vico's Uncanny Humanism: Reading the New Science Between Modern and Postmodern (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 2003).
9

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culture, will, agency and identity in historical rather than ahistorical and identitarian terms. The historical consciousness of human nature underpins Saids critical thoughts and praxis, which by disclosing the dialectical and reciprocal relationship between language/literature and world/reality occupies a unique place in the history of literary and cultural criticism and theory. Saids humanistic practice demonstrates the critical and political importance of renovating literary studies and for that matter the humanities as a whole into a socially meaningful and politically potent enterprise. The historical nature of humanity obliges the humanist not only to be a historian but also to be aware of his or her own historicality. Saids historicist humanism circumvents the crude distinction between traditional Eurocentric humanism and poststructuralist anti-humanism, because they are both antihumanistic in the sense that they are ahistorical or even antihistorical in seeing the human being as subject or non-subject and fail to take into account the historical nature of the human being. Historicist humanists are wary of this ahistorical thinking, which is associated with the philosophical pursuit of truth as dehistoricized entity. This ahistorical mode of thinking popularized by the Cartesian conviction in clear and distinct ideas has been critically contested by Vicos historicism. Said is very critical of ahistorical and decontextualized adoption and application of specialized literary theories and methods (structuralism, formalism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, semiotics, and poststructuralism) which reign in the humanities since the 1970s. Ahistorical thinking is not a mere school of thought or attitude; it is a form of power or what Vico calls conceit 10 that wishes to claim the status of truth by suppressing the historicality of the thinker and his or her thinking. To be humanistic, for Said, is to be historical and critical.

According to Vico, the desire to go beyond or make oneself appear to be outside of the ideal eternal history of mankind is a kind of conceit; claiming to be the most ancient civilization is the conceit of nations whilst asserting what they know is as old as the world is the conceit of scholars. See Vico, The New Science, 122-127. I would return to the relation between conceit and power in Chapter Five.

10

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In reading and interpreting Said, we must be as historical as Saids humanism intends to be. Said conceives his own self as a cluster of flowing currents, 11 which is probably the most proper description of the transient, volatile and temporal nature of history: a cluster of parallel and contradicting events transpiring in temporality not unidirectionally according to a teleological form of history but in a back-and-forth, in-and-out manner. Though he is an exile-critic who never stays with any particular topic, subject for long and always shifts his locus of interest and constituency, Saids critical work nevertheless stems from his historical and cultural circumstances. He is self-conscious and self-critical of what he is doing throughout his career; he changes his subject of criticism and even his language of criticism, not because he rejects what he was doing, but because changes in his own cultural, socio-political, and institutional conditions have necessitated and motivated a whole new series of self-relocations and intellectual reorientations. By the time he wrote his posthumously published book, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004), a metacritical reflection on humanism which aims to restore the social and political relevance and intellectual significance of humanism and humanistic studies, Said has already moved beyond such issues as human nature and human subject and begun to reform humanism into a philosophy of praxis that aims at transforming men and the conditions that surround them 12 for the purpose of enlightenment and emancipation. A praxis of humanism which addresses specifically social and political problems in his contemporary context: the political and ideological domination of the US as the last remaining superpower in the world, the US-led war against terrorism, cultural and political intolerance and separatism, globalization, cultural and geographical displacements and reconfiguration, elitist and neoconservative academic practice, self-insulation and self-alienation within the academic circle. Saids work is written more for a political and critical constituency than

11 12

Said, Out of Place, 295.

Joseph A. Buttigieg, The Exemplary Worldliness of Antonio Gramscis Literary Criticism, boundary 2 11, no. 1-2 (fall 1982): 23.

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an academic or theoretical one. This is the socio-historical context in which Saids defense of humanism against inhumanity is most meaningful to himself at the time he produced Humanism and Democratic Criticism. In this chapter and the following chapters, I will discuss Saids humanism metacritically and theoretically in a way that is most meaningful and relevant to my own historical, academic and institutional contexts. The purpose of my exploration of Saids humanism is to explain his understanding of the human (humanism), human history or knowledge (epistemology), and literature (aesthetics), which constitute the basis of his cultural and literary criticism. I shall begin with Saids conception of human history or knowledge and move on to the issue of how criticism constitutes a basis for human knowledge.

Humanistic knowledge and criticism The goal of humanism is to know our own self. To know ourselves is to know our own history (what we make and do) rather than seeing ourselves as a transcendental subject with an absolute and fixed nature. For Said, humanistic or historical knowledge can only come from criticism. According to Vicos verum/factum, knowledge and creation are the same thing, which means that we can only know what we make or to know is to know how a thing is made, to see it from the point of view of its human maker.13 Since history or the historical world is made by human beings, it can be understood by human beings themselves. In contrast the natural world can never be understood fully by humans; since God made it, he alone knows it. The nature or truth of human or historical things is to be discovered in their genesis or making,14 i.e. their coming into existence at certain times and under certain conditions.15 Criticism in this sense understands through the gathering of all the elements

13 14 15

Said, HDC, 11. Morera, Gramsci's Historicism, 14.

Erich Auerbach, Vicos Contribution to Literary Criticism, Studia Philologica et Litteraria in Honorem L. Spitzer, eds. A. G. Hatcher and K. L. Selig (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1958), 33.

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of a thing in order to form a perfect idea of the thing. 16 However, such humanistic knowledge is always open to contestation because the faculty of understanding is itself historical and the process of understanding is always to a certain extent inventive and imaginative despite the development of human reason or rational faculties: For when man understands, he extends his mind to comprehend things; but when he does not understand, he makes them out of himself and, by transforming himself, becomes them.17 In understanding how a thing comes into existence within a particular historical circumstance, one can easily extend what one already knows to comprehend what is unknown. Because criticism is itself a situated act, Said believes that it must be performed with the historical awareness of the critical self as being without exception historical, i.e. with a sense of historical perspectivism in order to eschew the imposition of ones own perspective on reality onto the subject of ones study which is historically and culturally different from ones own. The understanding of human history has two dimensions: the historicist and the historical. On the one hand, Vicos postulation of natural cyclical order of history in distinct ages and epochs and the analogy between the development of civilizations and the development of the human mind from infancy to adulthood are historicist as such comprehension is an abstraction of history into a structural concept. According to Vico, human nature changes across periods and epochs. The developmental aspects of the human mind, which evolves from an infantile state, to adolescence and to adulthood, are echoed in the evolutionary trajectory of the history of all human civilizations, which, according to Vico, must pass through in a cyclical fashion the age of primitivism, moderate rationalism, to high intellectuality, and back again to barbarism. Historical perspectivism understands that each stage of historical development is a cultural whole18 and as such is necessary, perfect in itself,

16 17 18

Morera, Gramsci's Historicism, 12. Vico, The New Science, 405. Bruce Mazlish, The Riddle of History (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 39.

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and good.19 Each historical age has its own distinct and unique perspective on reality and established beliefs which manifest themselves materially through every activity and every stratum of the social world within a particular time period: politics, science, art, language, religion, and metaphysics. The historicist view of history is super-historical20 in Nietzsches term, which describes the attempt to grasp human things in terms of their essence rather than existence, in terms of being rather than becoming, in terms of identity rather than difference. On the other hand, the historical understanding can be understood in terms of a materialist view of history which, according to Walter Benjamin, pays full attention to the forgotten, hidden and superseded moments of history and resists to be abstracted and reified by triumphalist historiography.21 However, Vicos historicism should not contradict historical materialism for it is the aim of Vico in his New Science to establish a dialectic of historicism and materialism or, in Auerbachs formulation of Vicos historicism, a dialectic of philosophical philology or philological philosophy.22 The historical dimension is predicated upon the historicist view of history which is in turn modified by historical and materialist examination. The historical understanding that everything human has a historical existence, i.e., it stems from a particular historical circumstance and therefore all human things must be understood from the historical point of view of their human makers, underpins Saids humanistic criticism. That is Saids epistemological stance in his understanding of history, culture, and literature. This historical understanding enabled by Vicos historicism is manifest in all of Saids critical work. It is opposed to the antihistorical understanding of which Said is very critical. Antihistorical understanding judges culture and a literary and artistic work by the standards which are dehistoricized as absolute
19 20

Auerbach, Vicos Contribution to Literary Criticism, 33.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, trans. Adrian Collins (N.Y.: Liberal Arts Press, 1957), 69.
21

See Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 253-264.
22

Auerbach, Vicos Contribution to Literary Criticism, 37.

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and universal rules, consequently the critics historical situatedness or historicality is also superseded by the application of absolute and ahistorical standards and values. Historical understanding is inherently comparative because it involves the transition from ones own perspective to another perspective on reality of a different historical period in order to understand and judge the thing in terms of its historical genesis. Culture or work of literature or art from an earlier time must not be judged as underdeveloped according to some absolute rules of goodness or beauty because everything in history has its own raison d'tre and comes into existence in order to serve the needs of the men whose minds have corporately created it.23 Unity is epochal, not national;24 each historical period or stage is conceived by historicist humanism as a cultural whole in which all human activities intertwine with and interpenetrate each other. Said understands and judges a work of literature not in terms of its cultural or national origin but in relation to its historical period. Saids literary criticism is integrative and synthetic as he never separates literature from culture, politics, institutions because they originate from the same conditions, i.e. the specific state of the human mind at a given time; his historical criticism shows the dialectic of part and whole as the understanding of one of these parts of human activity at a certain stage of the development necessarily provides the key for the understanding of all the other parts.25 Based on the understanding that every human thing originates from a particular historical circumstance and is subject to cultural and historical change, Said brings forth the concept of worldliness which, related to the words world and worldly, concisely means that human production stems from, pertains to and is consequent upon the world. In the domain of literary criticism, Saids life-long practice, the text, the critic, and criticism are in the world and therefore cannot be treated in isolation from the historical and material circumstances from which they arise. For Said,
23 24 25

Collingwood, The Idea of History, 77. Paul Bov, Intellectuals in Power, 137. Auerbach, Vicos Contribution to Literary Criticism, 32.

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almost all humanistic criticism is literary criticism because [h]istorys records are primarily verbal: language itself is the foremost historical document.26 Language is a human creation which was to make mans impressions of the world intelligible to him,27 and therefore words are not passive markers or signifiers standing in unassumingly for a higher reality, they are, instead, an integral formative part of the reality itself.28 Saids humanistic understanding of the worldliness and historicality and inseparability of words from the material reality gives precedence to the practice of literary criticism as a socially relevant and politically potent enterprise. Criticism, according to Said, is philology: it involves getting inside the process of language already going on in words and making it disclose what may be hidden or incomplete or masked or distorted in any text we may have before us.29 Said believes that the use and function of language are tied up with historical and material reality. Words are created and used by human beings within certain historical circumstances, and they in turn constitute the artifactual human reality. As Vicos study of primitive civilization demonstrates, the historical world was brought into existence by the poetic and imaginative creation of signs by the first men in history. Words or ideas have a material or corporeal origin in sense experiences: [ideas] were once passionate imaginings stemming from responses to physical existence.
30

Take for example the sign Jove which is created to designate the sight and sound of a thunderbolt. The myth about Jove is the first human thought which produces fear in men and serves to discipline mens instinct-driven behaviors. The myth gives birth to political structures and institutions which bestow order, law, and organization to human society and thereby enables communal existence. Human or historical knowledge, which is fabricated with and in
26 27 28 29 30

Said, Vico: Autodidact and Humanist, 348. Ibid. Said, HDC, 59. Ibid. Said, Vico on the Discipline of Bodies and Texts, in Exile, 87.

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language, can never be separated from the cultural struggles and the maintenance of political and cultural institutions which keep human beings inside order and system of meaning. Myth, according to this historicist understanding, originates from primitive imagination and instincts and is therefore not simply a fiction that has nothing to do with reality; it produces a supervening realitythe political structure in primitive society. The interpretation of myths as symbols of political and economic struggles and developments 31 rather than as objective signs of a linguistic or ideological system reopens the dialectic between literature and historical and social reality. When words are pushed back into the material and social fabric from which they come, they are no longer mere words or unknown symbols .[T]they enact the combination of past and future woven into the historical fabric of language. A mute term, relatively anonymous, has given rise to a special condition of mind and has evoked the poignancy of time [] thus a term is converted into reconstructed history, a unit into a synthesis.32 The philological and materialist view of words as bearers of historical reality contrasts sharply with the structuralist and formalist interpretation of signs as discrete linguistic units within a transhuman self-sufficient sign-system. The structuralist paradigm is scientific rather than humanistic, and it aspires toward scientific precision and certainty at the expense of self-knowledge or history. Once the linguistic structure is objectified as a system independent of human making and consciousness, language is dehistoricized and dehumanized; language then is no longer an archeological source of historical and humanistic knowledge. The scientific slant on language denies human agency. Structuralist and formalist theories of language have resulted in certain critical practice that reifies the literary text and celebrates the aesthetic and formalistic qualities of language. Striving to achieve pure objective knowledge secured by an objective system, method, and protocol, some of

31

Erich Auerbach, Vico and Aesthetic Historism, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 8, no. 2 (December 1949): 117.
32

Said, B, 69.

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those formalistic literary theories transform literary criticism into an ahistorical and apolitical academic practice. The irony is that dehistoricized and depoliticized literary criticism is itself historically situated and inscribed in cultural, political and institutional relations. As a cultural and historical phenomenon itself, the theoretical and abstract language produced by these theories betrays the ahistorical and scientific objective of these theoretical studies of language and literature as separate from cultural and historical transformations. The historical change of humanity in every age brings about the change to the cultural and social whole. Men of fully-developed reason from the third age33 are prone to over-refined intellectualizing in search of certain and transcendental knowledge. Theory and method become their means and products in this quest for epistemic certainty. However, the mind applied to reflective understanding and abstract theorizing can forget its own history and can never explain its own origin: the causes of ones thought. But without some knowledge of himself, his knowledge of other things is imperfect: for to know something without knowing that one knows it is only a half-knowing, and to know that one knows is to know oneself;34 the theorist should not only produce theory but also understand how his/her historical situatedness has enabled his or her thinking. Therefore, theory should be studied as history of theory, otherwise it would only be an unguarded statement of a partial truth;35 when philosophy becomes theory, there is no

As mentioned above, based on the tripartite structure of history, the third age refers to the modern and developed social condition under which overdeveloped intellectuality is resulted. See Vico, Section I Three Kinds of Human Nature in The New Science, 916918.
34 35

33

Collingwood, The Idea of History, 205.

Method as an intellectual and applicable tool could be critically disenabling, as Alfred North Whitehead says, Every method is a happy simplification. But only truths of a congenial type can be investigated by any one method, or stated in terms dictated by the method. For every simplification is an over-simplification. Thus the criticism of a theory does not start from the question, True or false? It consists in noting its scope of useful application and its failure beyond that scope. It is an unguarded statement of a partial truth. Adventures of Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 221.

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truth of the whole or of the self to be had.36 The language used by literary theoreticians and critics becomes more and more abstract and specialized, which is in full accordance with the abstract theorizing and intellectualizing state of mind and becomes detached from social reality and ineffective in communicating with the general public outside their own academic discourse. Language once co-opted and reified through institutionalization has limited social and political agency to change the material and historical reality. The emergence of jargon and specialized language testifies to the notion that language is a cultural and historical phenomenon, as Gramsci says: language is transformed with the transformation of the whole of civilization, through the acquisition of culture by new classes and through the hegemony exercised by one national language over others.37 Saids historical view on language affirms his belief in human will and agency, because for him even words have their histories and are constitutive of the human historical reality at large. As Richard Poirier states, semantic transformation is steered by active agents, conventions of language are adapted and resisted, and new literary forms themselves become conventions to be challenged by later uses of language.38 Conventions of language are not merely linguistic and syntactic rules and regulations but are an important cultural apparatus in maintaining conventions of social and political life. Familiarity with language as the repository of history is the first step toward challenging and overthrowing social and literary conventional forms. Words, for Said, are more than inert signs having no meaning outside the system of signification but are active agents for bringing about historical and cultural changes. Literature and language are not simply cultural heritage but are a series of resistance against tradition and convention. Concerning literature as a
36

Donald Phillip Verene, Philosophy and the Return to Self-Knowledge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 227.
37

Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, eds. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 451.
38

Richard Poirier, The Renewal of Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 138.

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cultural category, Richard Poirier says: Literature exists to challenge the inherited forms of language.39 With reference to the literary text itself, Said states that the choice of each word, metaphor, the highly idiosyncratic, irreducibly concrete structure of sentences, periods, parataxes 40 are all marked with the individual imprint of the writer. This is why Said pays scrupulous attention to and respect for the specificity of the experience of the individual writer and firmly believes in individual authority (yet not absolute sovereignty) over language and agency in challenging social and political conventions. To read a literary work is to understand how it is made from the point of view of the writer, and as Auerbach says, a mans work stems from his existence and consequently everything we can find out about his life serves to interpret the work,41 the interpretive process of literary criticism for Said can only begin in the individual particular42 before gradually moving to the general. Before it entered the realm of apolitical literary theory and criticism, literature was once an organic part of cultural and social reality. It is itself an interpretation of the world. The purpose of literary criticism is to understand from what historical circumstances such literary interpretation arises. Historicist philologywhich is much more than studying the derivation of wordsis the discipline of uncovering beneath the surface of words the life of a society that is embedded there by the great writers art.43 Philological criticism aims to reopen the dialectic between literature and history by demonstrating how they inform each other: in the end literary studies are historical studies, and literary history is cultural history. Although literature and art are worldly and are a part of the social world, human life, and of course the historical moments in which they are

39 40 41

Ibid., 129. Said, History, Literature, Geography, in Exile, 456.

Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Routledge & Kegan, 1965), 37.
42 43

Said, HDC, 80. Said, History, Literature, Geography, 456.

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located and interpreted,44 they can never be reduced to history and politics. Saids historical view of literary and aesthetic criticism is similar to Gramscis historically and politically conscious literary criticism. Criticism of a work of art cannot privilege either form or content exclusively, as according to Gramsci, both content and form besides having an aesthetic meaning have also a historical meaning. 45 Even formal analysis is inseparable from cultural and historical analysis because technical arrangements of words and sentences, narrative and plot structures are bound to human and cultural struggles. The realist conception of an empirically accessible universe transmuted into a well-structured tripartite plot is overturned by the modernist anti-narrative or anti-linearity position. The change of narrative structure symbolizes not only a transformation of aesthetic taste and style but also a significant historical and cultural changea change of worldview. Aesthetics as a cultural and institutional category must therefore be maintained not for the sake of a kind of pure and disinfected criticism, which aims to distinguish what is art and what is not and legitimate a kind of apolitical and elitist aesthetic criticism indifferent to the cultural and historical processes; it should be responsible for, as Cochrans puts it, forming [a] critical culture 46 to resist and challenge cultural and political hegemonies. Said closes the gap between creative and critical literature and stresses their similarities rather than their differences,
47

because both criticism and literature require

philological scrupulosity toward and familiarity with language, its form and structure, to resist and overthrow rigidified, naturalized, institutionalized, and unconscious uses of language. Therefore, Said does not believe in historical determinism which reduces individual literary works to their historical situations. The individual literary text is not written anonymously nor entirely
44 45

Said, WTC, 4.

Gramsci quoted by Joseph A. Buttigieg in The Exemplary Worldliness of Antonio Gramscis Literary Criticism, 27. Terry Cochran, Culture in its Sociohistorical Dimension, boundary 2 11, no. 1-2 (fall 1982): 156.
47 46

Hayden White, Criticism as Cultural Politics, Diacritics 6, no. 3 (autumn 1976): 9.

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determined by the discourse of knowledge/power. Without philological and literary criticism to discern cultural and political resistance and creation at intertextual, textual, formal, and syntactic levels, the writing of history can easily be hijacked by focusing on discourses of power.48 Literary criticism should be committed to reopening and establishing the dialectics of literature, history, culture and politics without reducing the aesthetic category of literature to a mere function of culture and politics or privileging the aesthetic realm as culturally and politically autonomous and disinfected; only in such a way would literary criticism be socially relevant, morally responsible, politically effective and intellectually resistant to the weight of the discourse of power. Very often even the literary form and style of criticism can also be a form of resistance to culture and system as exemplified in Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Antonio Gramsci whose fragmentary and episodic critical writings, instead of systematic unified writings, could become a body of resolved ideas that would exercise their dominion over the critic himself and the reader.49 Literary criticism must not succumb to the danger of what Said calls aestheticized powerlessness50political disengagement and conformism cloaked in the name of aesthetics, which results from an optimistic denial of literatures involvement with culture, history and politics or a pessimistic collapsing of individual consciousness into the material network of culture and politics.

Secular criticism Based on the simple fact that a mans work stems from his existence and that consequently everything we can find out about his life serves to interpret the work,51 humanistic criticism underlines the dialectical, reciprocal and organic
48 49 50 51

Gauri Viswanathan, Introduction, in PPC, xiii. Said, History, Literature, Geography, 467. Said, Representing the Colonized, in Exile, 313. Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public, 37.

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relationship between human beings and their historical existential world. It then becomes extremely intriguing that Said in his introduction to secular criticism in The World, the Text, and the Critic ruminates on the exilic experience as the enabling condition for the critical masterpiece Mimesis Erich Auerbach wrote in exile in Turkey. Said contends that Mimesisa critical narrative of humanism itself as a phase of history in which literature plays a special roleis made possible by Auerbachs non-Occidental exile; it is a work whose conditions and circumstances of existence are not immediately derived from the culture it describes with such extraordinary insight and brilliance but built rather on an agonizing distance from it.52 Exileas a disruption of the organic continuity between the past and present and of the relation between consciousness and historical existenceprompts humanity to become self-conscious of its own self-making or humanizing process by destabilizing and defamiliarizing ones habitual sense of self. Exile ironically becomes for Said the enabling condition for the secular critic to perform Geistesgeschichte (history of ideas) on himself or herself in the state of metaphysical homelessness, 53 in order to save the self from being reduced to non-existence in an alien existential circumstance. The self-realization of the contingency of human existence on historical and material circumstances prevents one from taking anything for granted and seeing things as they are but as they have come to be that way. 54 In Saids critical vocabulary, therefore, the term secular means historical, worldly or earthly. However, secular in the context of Saids formulation of secular criticism bears an anti-religious connotation with a particular emphasis on the epistemically knowable and genealogically traceable historical process of human beings making themselves and their civil world. Metaphysical exile as the spirit of
52 53

Said, WTC, 8.

For the secular critic, the ideas of home and homeliness are metaphysical rather than physical and material; the critics subjectivity, for instance, is a dwelling house from which the critic has to remain at a distance. Metaphysical homelessness is a form of intellectual freedom achieved at the expense of ones subjectivity, i.e. metaphysical homelessness is the nonsubjectivity of subjectivity.
54

Said, RI, 60; emphasis added.

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secular criticism is the eschewal of the reifying, essentializing, theologizing preponderance of culture, hegemony, ideology, institution, theory, and even words and ideas, which pose threats to a truly historical view of human beings and the human world of institutions and ideas. Secular criticism historicizes things that appear to be timeless, naturalized and given and establishes affiliative relations amongst things that appear to be separate entities at the expense of the dialectic of part and whole. Exile is also the opposite of feeling at home. Said who is against all kinds of dogmatism and religious totalitarianism shows us that not only overarching concepts such as culture, nationality, identity, subjectivity, and profession can become a home in which one can feel safe and secure and take it for granted, even an idea could become a home, a barrier to thinking historically and critically by soliciting our acquiescence and perpetuation. All ideas are not naturally given but are produced in history and always affiliated with politics and power. Said says: Words and texts are so much of the world that their effectiveness, in some cases even their use, are matters having to do with ownership, authority, power, and the imposition of force.55 Ideas aspire towards ideology which is drained of all living historical forces56 and makes things appear to be sacred, authoritative, and unquestionable. The history of humankind has been disfigured by all forms of tyranny, cultural, political, and intellectual, which aim to put a stop to historical and critical thinking and investigation. Secular criticism by virtue of historicizing, de-reifying everything human attempts to traverse and transcend nationalistic, cultural, institutional, disciplinary, and identitiarian boundaries. Secular-exilic critical transcendence according to Said cannot be understood as being predicated on an abandonment of and cynical scorn for humanity and the human world but rather on a profoundly generous love for all humankind:

55 56

Said, WTC, 48.

Alan Swingewood, Cultural Theory and the Problem of Modernity (New York: St. Martins Press, 1998), 86.

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It is, therefore, a source of great virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about invisible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether. The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his.57

Said quotes this passage by Hugo of St. Victor cited by Auerbach to exemplify the non-nationalistic and non-egoistic spirit of humanistic studies. Humanistic knowledge is achieved through the transition from ones own perspective and selfhood to another in order to understand things from the point of view of the maker across cultures and epochs; the discovery of what people believe to be true in different cultures and periods by a historical perspectival and sympathetic understanding allows a better way to see and understand the reality of our own culture and time. Said says that only by being able to transcend and go beyond ones limited subjectivity with a proper and generous love for mankind can a historian begin to grasp human experience and its written records in their diversity and particularity; otherwise he or she will remain committed more to the exclusion and reactions of prejudice than to the freedom that accompanies knowledge. But note that Hugo twice makes it clear that the strong or perfect man achieves independence and detachment by working through attachments, not by rejecting them.58 It is therefore the job of the secular critic or the critical humanist historian to inventory and preserve the history of humanity. It may be true that our existence and sense of self are not always endangered by geographical exiles and dispossessions, but we are nevertheless continuously faced with the threats of forgetting our own history posed by modernitys reification, commodification, standardization of all forms of human life, including the assimilation, homogenization, marginalization, globalization of various cultural and ethnic communities. Whatever we are, we became in history, and

57 58

Hugo St. Victor quoted by Said in CI. Said, CI, 335. Ibid., 335-6.

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only in history can we remain the way we are and develop therefrom;59 a truly historical view of humanity is essential to save us from historical extinction and impasse. Such a view understands that each cultural and national community in the world, having its own course of historical development, is an indispensable part which contributes to the historical development of humanity as a whole. As an exile himself, being forced out of his homeland in Palestine with his whole family because of the Zionist movement, Said is extremely conscious of his heterogeneous historical and cultural situations. There is always a very personal dimension to his critical work whose subject matter is always himself: to know himself by inventorying the infinite traces deposited in himself by history,60 and to not be himself by reserving a critical distance from his history. Starting from his own personal perspective and circumstance, Saids work predicates on a large humanistic horizon which concerns the truth about humanity and history of humankind. With the whole of mankind as its humanistic horizon, Said evokes the Goethean and Auerbachian notion of Weltliteratura universalist conception of all the literatures of the world seen together as forming a majestic symphonic whole 61 which does not merely refer to what is generically common and human; rather it considers humanity to be the product of fruitful intercourse between its members.62 The encounter of cultural and historical differences in both geographical and metaphorical exile enables one to achieve self-consciousness, emancipation from nationalistic assumptions and

mystification of human cultures, and therefore partake in the struggle for a new culture.

59

Erich Auerbach, Philology and Weltliteratur, trans. Edward Said and Maire Said, Centennial Review 13 (1969): 6.
60

Paraphrase of a quote by Antonio Gramscis Prison Notebooks: The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is knowing thyself as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. See Said, O, 25.
61 62

Said, HDC, 95. Auerbach, Philology and Weltliteratur, 2.

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Secular criticism opens up new possibilities for the development of human civilization; it engenders differences rather than consolidates ones nationality by suppressing or dissolving differences and contradictions in favor of oneness and identity. The present multiplicity of global human conditions all over the world makes it impossible for anyone to think in monolithic terms. The interaction and interconnection between different cultures due to cultural and social actionsempire, travel, trade, globalization, modernity, technologyurges every culture to redefine the self not in terms of an ontologically stable entity but as a volatile historical process interweaving with the larger network of world history in action. History redeems mankind from reification. As Benjamin says: To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its pastwhich is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. 63 Based on this notion of historical redemption, Said sees historical criticism as a redemptive and recuperative project whose aim is to provide a multiperspectival, dynamic, and holistic way of representing history and reality.64 The writing of history has been faulted by the corrosive nature of culture, imperialism and colonialism based upon the belief in absolute standards in judging and comparing human nature and cultures, and in history as progress towards an affirmed identity; the imperialist and triumphalist territorial and intellectual appropriation and domination encroach upon the historical presence and geographical existence of the native, the colonized, and the dispossessed. Said himself has lent voice to dispossessed Palestinians who face the threat of nonexistence by the triumphalist history of Israeli Jews who attempt to anchor their existence in textual history and public memory when the actual material and geographical place of the Palestinian is lost. In the end, how we view, interpret, and write history will determine how critical resistance to the dogmatic effects of culture, power, ideology, theory, language, and ideas can take place in history and how humanistic
63 64

Benjamin, Illuminations, 254. Said, HDC, 111

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criticism could provide humanistic models of coexistence among various cultures. Saids secular criticism rests on the secular notion that man makes his own history and man is his history and that nothing in the human world is given or natural, everything is made by human will and choices. The truth about human history is that it is an ever-changing and dynamic process in which multiple centers of individual, historical, cultural, the decentered geographical consciousness interact and struggle for power, hegemony, knowledge, and freedom. It is not determined unidirectionally, onedimensionally by some transhuman and transhistorical force, be it discursive, political or linguistic. The history of human cultures and society according to Said has to be comprehended materially and geographically as exemplified in Gramscis geographical conception of history rather than the Hegelian or Lukcsian understanding of history as a temporal process in which contradictions and differences will be resolved and a new identity achieved and consolidated. Humanity in general and the human mind in particular are historical. In the temporal sense, an historical event that happened in the past cannot exist physically and materially in the present; however, in the spatial or geographical sense, ideas, experiences, and feelings generated by that past event can coexist dialectically with present thoughts and experience. The mind in this sense is both historical and geographical. Therefore, a geographical conception of history entails comprehending the temporal process of history geographically without privileging the present over the past and self over the others. Gramsci sees history as a collective cultural and political struggle and contest over hegemony and territory between different opposites: the ruler and the ruled, the center and the periphery, the majority and the minority. His historical consciousness transcends binary thinking and does not give precedence to identity over difference or stability over instability: His terms always depart from oppositionsmind vs. matter, rulers vs. ruled, theory vs. praxis, intellectuals vs. workerswhich are then contextualized, that is, they remain within contextual control, not the control of some hypostasized,

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outside force like identity or temporality which supposedly gives them their meaning by incorporating their differences into a larger identity.65 Gramscis critical or geographical consciousness which foregrounds the movement, processes and volatility of human history and geography is secular, i.e. antireifying and anti-identitarian. It makes possible the historical presence of subaltern groups66 and subsequent political resistance against the ruling class through rewriting the history of social and political reality. History is therefore not a finished and settled past memory in which battles are won and lost forever. Because the past and present would feed off, remake, and contradict each other dialectically in the geographical mosaic of the human mind to produce new ideas and understandings, which will change, make and become history. Therefore, history is still unresolved, still being made, still open to the presence and the challenges of the emergent, the insurgent, the unrequited, and the unexplored67 as long as the historical and geographical consciousness of human beings persists. Postmodernist and poststructuralist theories of history and human agency are revolutionary and politically resistant; however, once these theories were academically neutered and extracted from their contexts, the postmodernist understanding of history and agency is susceptible to becoming totalizing, unsecular, and unhistorical. History is not simply a record of a political tug-of-war between the powerful and the weak in which the former always wins and the weak incorporated and homogenized by the powerful. Different cultures might not coexist in one sovereign space but they can in the intellectual space complementarily and contradictorily on equal footing to achieve better self-understanding. Cultures can only exist in relation with each other, and such relation is intellectually productive. Intellectual and cultural eclecticism forms the basis of multiculturalism and intercultural coexistence. This is the underpinning premise of Saids conception of crosscultural studies. The egalitarian spirit of the Gramscian geographical
65 66 67

Said, History, Literature, and Geography, 467. Ibid., 468. Said, HDC, 26.

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consciousness resonates with the magnanimous attitude of Vichian historical perspectivism and Goethian Weltliteratur. Human agency is made possible by the human capacity to be conscious and critical of what humans themselves make; the self-consciousness of how they make humanity enables the human freedom to choose alternatively and make new history.68 Changes of history and historical changes prevail as life endures. History is being made and unmade by human beingshow we understand and view history determines how we view the present conditions and future developments of humanity, and the meanings of the past are continuously redefined by the present. A secular history is and should be the history of the unceasing overthrow of the objective forms that shape the life of man.
69

Secular criticism is the ceaseless process of performing

Geistesgeschichte (history of idea) on our own self, historical realities, products, ideas and institutions for the purpose of self-understanding, selfmaking, self-unmaking, self-remaking and self-emancipation.

68

In short, Vico seems to be saying, only when man knows, that is, when his reason controls his brute passion, or, to put it even more succinctly, when man is self-conscious, is he free and able to make his own history. See Bruce Mazlish, The Riddle of History, 48.
69

Georg Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1971), 186.

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CHAPTER THREE

The Dialectic of Parallels and Paradoxes: Saids Critical Practice

Humanism engenders its own opposite.Edward Said1 Orientalism is theoretically inconsistent, and I designed it that way. Edward Said2 I have tried to maintain a critical consciousness as well as employing those instruments of historical, humanistic, and cultural research of which my education has made me the fortunate beneficiary.Edward Said3 Late style is in, but oddly apart from the present. Edward Said4

In the last chapter, I attempted to go beyond the crude distinction between traditional Eurocentric humanism and poststructuralist antihumanism by explicating Saids notion of humanism as central to his engagement with all aspects of human life: the existential, epistemological, historical, cultural, literary and aesthetic. According to humanism, self-knowledge is the most valuable form of knowledge that is constituted by self-criticism, which in turn is the sole activity in which human beings can exercise their critical faculty and consciousness and thereby express themselves as active agents whose thinking and action make and interpret, intervene and change human history. Men make their own history [and] what they can know is what they have

1 2 3 4

Said, B, 373. Said, PPC, 80. Ibid., xvi; emphasis original. Said, Late Style, 24; emphasis original.

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made.5 For Said, anything that obstructs the historical inventorying of ones self or history is an oppression to human agency and freedom. We live in what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer call an administered6 societylife itself is reified and compartmentalized. Various spheres and domains of human life are made separate from one another. Social and human relations are obscured and hidden. Within the capitalistic mode of production, the organic relationship between man and his labor or work is lost. Intellectual labor has also become professionalized, institutionalized, and specialized. The quest for objective and certain knowledge has given rise to all sorts of theories, methods and systems, such as the American New Criticism, semiotics, formalism and structuralism, which are antihumanistic not only because they seem to inhabit a timeless, other-worldly vacuum not made in history, but also because they are reproducible and reusable and therefore their practitioners no longer stand in an organic relationship with their criticism. Knowledge like art has become mechanically reproducible. Systematic, methodical, and theoretical interpretation of literary texts very often divest both the text and criticism of their aura in Benjamins terms.7 Saids humanism is in every sense antagonistic toward the compartmentalization of the human world into different independent but in reality interdependent cultures, geographies, histories and cultural and political spheres and towards the specialization and systematization of human knowledge. We need to ask: Can one divide human reality, as indeed human reality seems to be genuinely divided, into clearly

5 6

Said, O, 5.

In an attempt to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism, Adorno and Horkheimer state in a philosophical critique of the history of Western humanism, Enlightenment ideology and bourgeois civilization, [W]hat matters today is to preserve and disseminate freedom, rather than to accelerate, however indirectly, the advance toward the administered world. The Enlightenment and modernity of humanity culminate in the reification, commodification and administration of mankind. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and trans. Edmund Jephcott (Standford, Calif.: Standford University Press, 2002), xii-xiv.
7

Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Illuminations, 217-251.

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different cultures, histories, traditions, societies, even races, and survive the consequences humanly?8 Saids critical practice presents a strong case for the intellectual possibility and moral urgency to be critical of humanism in the name of humanism.9 He says: I have tried to maintain a critical consciousness as well as employing those instruments of historical, humanistic, and cultural research of which my education has made me the fortunate beneficiary. 10 Historicist philology requires the critic to move beyond ones limited perspective to the authors own and to interpret a literary text re-evoking and recreating the whole writing process under the historical and existential circumstances that enable the writing of a particular text. This kind of intellectual practice moving from the interpreters point of view to the authors and to that of another historical and cultural domainproduces non-coercive humanistic knowledge for the purpose of mutual understanding between two persons, ages or cultures and fosters a hybrid, mobile identity or magnanimous subjectivity that is open to include the foreign other. The transition from ones subjectivity to anothers in the act of humanistic understanding can be a form of intellectual and existential freedom not to be narrowly understood as the privilege of subjectivity or agency. Most important of all, Saids humanistic criticism is deeply anchored in human actualities and experiences. In order to see man as the true origin of social change,11 criticism must interpret mans work (as a laborer, literary critic, engineer, or whatever) as radically and organically connected with what man is.12 In this chapter, I shall contextualize Saids intellectual formation and critical practice in his own worldliness to demonstrate how Saids criticism is personal, subjective, and individual stemming from his own
8 9

Said, O, 45. Said, HDC, 10. Said, PPC, xvi. Said, B, 41. Said, PPC, 17.

10 11 12

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cultural experience rather than from a school of thought or theory that is dynastically inheritable and reproducible. What makes his criticism Saidian is that it is underpinned by an all-encompassing self-consciousness in every sense of the word selfidentity, nationality, professionmaking his critical work metacritical and self-referential. Saids work typically begins with and reflects on topics that are of existential and experiential relevance to himself: the Palestinian experience, exile, the literary critic, the intellectual, and the human being. In an interview with Dexing Shan, Said classifies his intellectual inclinations and critical practice into four different phases chronologically: literature, theory, politics, and aesthetics. 13 This chapter would follow this intellectual trajectory to establish an organic relation between Saids personal experience and critical practice, to demonstrate the historical reasons of his intellectual and historical shifts of interests and to relate these topics to his idea and practice of humanism. Although these topics can be conceptually categorized, they are not separate academic concerns. It is the aim of this chapter to foreground the intertextuality, interrelatedness and interdependence of these topics and the intellectual and political necessity to enact a humanistic praxis that is predicated upon the dialectical and reciprocal relations between things and people. The explication of Saids actual humanistic practice presents a living example to substantiate Saids argument against such antihumanist theses as the death of man and the end of history,14 showing
13

Dexing Shan, Introduction (1), in Edward Said, Xiang guan he chu: Sayide hui yi lu (Out of Place), trans. Peng Huaidong (Taibei Shi: Li xu wen hua shi ye you xian gong si, 2000), 11. My translation. See also Saids categorization of his intellectual career into literary, theoretical, political, and aesthetic periods in An Interview with Edward Said, in Interviews, 124-5.
14

This is a rather crude and triumphalist assertion of the neo-conservative philosopher Francis Fukuyama who argues in the aftermath of the disintegration of the USSR, and the seemingly omnipotent global presence of the US, that capitalism is the final destination of human history. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man. (London: Penguin, 1992). It is not coincidental that these assertions about the end of history and the erasure of the human are echoed in certain types of structuralist and poststructuralist criticism. Though these theoretical formulations seem to emerge from a different context to that of Fukuyamai.e., not from politics or economics, but rather from intellectual concerns about meaning and languageone can sense a close parallel

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how critical consciousness and individual resistance may be enabled at various levelstextual, narrative, structural, literary, aesthetic, historical, political, culturalbecause of the human capacity for understanding oneself and human history without succumbing and conforming to a predetermined set of discursive rules imposed by culture or institutions.

Joseph Conrad: Existential and literary criticism Joseph Conrad is the only English language writer who has a particular claim on Saids life-long critical attention. Written at the time when New Criticism and high formalism were the dominant forms of critical practice, 15 Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966), Saids first and only monograph devoted entirely to a single writer, is an attempt to go beyond contemporary literary theories and methods such as psychoanalysis and formalism by situating Conrads writing in the context of his historical circumstances and accounting for the existential complexities of Conrads life, both as a man and a writer. Various themes and problematics of Conrads personal and literary life that Said deals with in the book, such as the question of identity, subjectivity and history, self-exile, self-consciousness, selfdefinition, language and reality, and truth and power, foreshadow Saids later intellectual and critical preoccupations with colonial and orientalist writing, the affiliation between literature and politics, the exilic critical consciousness, and the history of ideas and institutions. Said studies Conrads literary works from a secular humanistic point of view. His criticism is based on the understanding that Conrads fictions are written as a result of Conrads own self-conscious efforts and choices to rescue meaning from his undisciplined experience.
16

He circumvents

between the neo-conservative urgency to declare capitalism's triumph and the attempt to dehistoricize and deny human subjectivity and displace the human into a linguistic vortex, an aporia in which no human subjectivity is possible.
15

Said mentions the formalistic culture reigning in the literary faculty at his time as a Harvard graduate student in literature in his memoir. See Said, Out of Place, 289.
16

Said, Fiction, 4.

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psychoanalytical terms such as mythic or unconscious17 to describe and explain Conrads strange and eccentric tales which tap into the inner aspects of human psychology. Said does not deny the validity of psychological interpretation which generally treats Conrads stories as fabricated by the unconscious, fantasy, and the supernatural. However, he is more interested in the dialectical and antagonistic relationship between Conrad the writer and his environment. The premise that Conrads writings are a series of linguistic, structural and thematic choices actively and consciously made by Conrad himself in reaction to his historical context enables one to understand Conrads thought from his perspective and how his fictions are made through examining his writings and historical reality. Since the attribution of Conrads stories to unconscious desires or forces beyond himself is not entirely based on and justified by historical and materialist interpretation, therefore psychological criticism is beyond the scope of Saids historical or biographical critique of Conrads fictions. By examining Conrads personal letters and his shorter fiction together, Said treats Conrad the man and his work as an organic whole. Saids conflation of fiction and non-fiction in his study of Conrad not only unsettles the assumption that literary objects, lyrics, tragedies, or novels, exist in some sort of stable or at least consistently identifiable form,18 but also reveals the antagonistic relationship between reality (the life of the writer) and literature. Said shows that formal elements in Conrads fictionsyntax, metaphor, adjective, narrative structure, characterization, etchave so much to do with Conrads life and experience of history. It may be agued that Saids continuing fascination with and attachment to Conrad and his works are perhaps more personal, existential and intellectual than academic. He feels an immense affinity to Conrad, because Conrads life resonates with his own and Conrad is a unique and complex novelist and thinker. Conrads rootless, exilic, and fragmented life, which is marked by a series of dislocations, geographical, cultural, linguistic, and spiritual, provides
17 18

Said, Fiction, ix. Said, HDC, 40-41.

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him with a peculiar and unsystematized vision on the world. Conrads difficulty with and uncertainty about himself, his identity, profession and language are reflected in his difficult, idiosyncratic, and paradoxical literary form and content. As a Polish writer, he is an outsider to British culture, the British empire he serves and the English language he speaks and writes.19 At the very beginning of Fiction, Said identifies the problem of writing in an acquired language in Conrad[Conrad] was a self-conscious foreigner writing of obscure experiences in an alien language, and he was only too aware of this.20 As Said says: language that a man speaks makes the man and not man the language. 21 In her study of Vicos humanism, Sandra Rudnick Luft underlines the constitutive nature of language in the making of humanity and society. According to Luft, human subjectivity and existence are always inseparable from the concrete linguistic and social practices of humans in-the-world.22 Thinking and writing are primarily linguistic activity. Therefore, when the linguistic medium of thinking, language, is reflected upon, nothing can and should be taken for granted. Language, too, has become an issue, as was its relationship to reality: its power to make or break facts, to invent whole regions of the world, to essentialize races, continents, cultures;23 the binary distinction between the objects represented and the language used for that representation becomes questionable. For Conrad, there is no mindindependent reality to be represented by language; reality itself is constituted by language. The realization that truth is artifactual human creation enables Conrad to see that truth has not only epistemological value but also moral, political, and military value; an idea is never simply an idea, and the imperialism of ideas easily converts itself into the imperialism of

Although Conrad was one of the most accomplished English writers of the 20th century, his spoken English was never what could be termed standard. This was a consequence of his learning the English language relatively late in life.
20 21 22

19

Said, Fiction, 4. Said, Vico: Autodidact and Humanist, 348. Sandra Rudnick Luft, Vicos Uncanny Humanism, 14.

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nations. 24 It is this consciousness of the intimate link between power and knowledge that Conrad expresses in a passage in Heart of Darkness, a passage which Said uses as an epigraph in his later work Culture and Imperialism (1993):
The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking away of it from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental preference but an idea; an unselfish 25 belief in the ideasomething you can sacrifice to.

Said sees in this passage examples of both Conrads profundity and limitation. Conrad here ironizes and critiques the colonial project as a process of economic and military exploitation and at the same time exposes the role knowledge plays in this exercise of power. It is an idea, easily understood as a reference to the so-called civilizing mission of colonialism that animates and justifies this project. While critiquing a system of domination that enforces terrible material and psychic suffering on natives and colonialists alike, vividly captured in the tormented figure of Kurtz, Conrad, like Marlow a potential authorial surrogate in the narrative, cannot see any alternative to what Said calls the cruel tautology26 of the West. For Conrad, colonialism is an overmastering system of domination. Conrad, however critically distant from British imperialism and colonialism, is a man of his time and is unable to see an independent Africa or Africans defining their own subjectivity.27

23 24 25 26 27

Said, Exile, 483. Said, Fiction, 140. Epigraph of Saids CI extracted from Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness. Said, CI, xviii.

One must also recount that Conrads critique of the civilizing mission of colonialism is at best ambiguous. There is a conscious attempt on the part of Conrad to portray Belgian imperialism as cruder and crueler than its British counterpart. The British version seems to be redeemed to some extent by its civilizing mission. The framing of the narrative also suggests this, as Marlow begins his tale aboard the Nellie on the river Thames, the lights of London in the distance evoke a civilisational space and the darkness that surrounds the people aboard the ship resonates with another darker space: that of Africa.

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Conrads particular perspective on imperial conquests seems to imply that the will to truth is the will to power, subjectivity or identity. Truth is impossible without the exertion of the will to subjectivity. Unwilling to succumb to the violence of the will to identity over difference, Conrad chooses to consider the facts of his life as an historian, according to Huizinga, considers his subject, as if the actual facts are not yet determined. 28 This explains why the structures of experience of Conrad and his fictional characters are arrested by the modernist either/or dilemma.29 Conrads postrealist fictional characters, Marlow and Falk exemplify such dilemma as they are faced with the terrible dilemma of either allowing themselves to vanish into native obscurity or, equally oppressive, undertaking to save themselves by the compromising deceit of egoism: nothingness on one side or shameful pride on the other either one loses ones sense of identity and thereby seems to vanish into the chaotic, undifferentiated, and anonymous flux of passing time, or one asserts oneself so strongly as to become a hard and monstrous egoist. 30 Conrads self-awareness epitomizes the modernist consciousness which calls into question traditional beliefs in every aspect of human existence, be it existential, ontological, or epistemological. Said says: Conrads especially anxious interest in the history and dynamics of political existence is remarkable. Yet he was never simply content with the psychological problems of his own existence. Always the restless seeker after normative vision, Conrad enlisted every sphere of experience in the task he had designated for himself. 31 It is this self-consciousness and skepticism in Conrad that have drawn Said in the first instance to a critical examination of Conrad, the man and his ideas. This Conradian and Saidian awareness of the absence of ontological stability in subjectivity and identity underlines the dialectic of knowledge and
28 29 30 31

Said, Fiction, 11. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 12-3. Ibid., 15.

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power, human consciousness and human existence, and human beings and their work. One can see Saids later idea of the exilic critic already taking shape in his analysis of Conrad as a literary and intellectual figure: the critic should disclose the operations of these dialectical transactions by remaining skeptical and resistant to the certainty of truth, subjectivity, and identity, and the idea of seamless totality and reality which is the teleology of imperialism. Saids literary criticism of Conrads fiction affirms the humanistic value of literary texts, which is the efficacy of individual consciousness to remain in an unresolved dialectical relationship with [social, political, historical, and economic forces] 32 and to intervene and control reality like Conrad did with his fiction in which the chaos of his existence is transmuted into a highly patterned art.33 The worldlinessthe cultural and historical thickness and densityof Conrads fiction cannot be exhausted by one single interpretation underpinned by one particular theoretical stance. In order to understand and construct all possible worldly and historical conditions that motivate and enable the writing of fiction, literary interpretation of Conrads novels has to be synthetic, as Auerbach says: everything we can find out about his life serves to interpret the work. 34 Therefore, the worldliness of Conrads novels is exemplified through endless interpretations and rereading from an ever-enlarging historical perspective to encompass the culture, politics, ideology, and aesthetics of Conrads time. Saids transition from a textual and existential analysis of Conrads life and the either/or posture35 in Conrads work in Fiction to his political and discursive criticism of European imperialism and la mission civilisatrice in his Culture and Imperialism (1993) demonstrates an enlargement of his interpretive historical perspective.

32 33 34 35

Said, HDC, 64. Said, Fiction, 196. Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public, 37. Said, Fiction, 17.

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The nexus of literature, theory and politics Said who has been seen as a literary theorist or postcolonial theorist does not believe in theory by itself, despite the fact that during the 1970s he wrote extensively on literary criticism in relation to theories from different academic fields ranging from philosophy, psychology to cultural studies in his second book Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975) and various essays. 36 In Beginnings, Said is concerned with elucidating the function and goal of criticism and how criticism can become a worldly, historical and political enterprise that bears upon forms of human and social action. The distinction between the notion of origin as having an authority and determining power over what comes after it and the concept of beginning as an enabling act of will to displace and challenge what comes before it (tradition, convention, culture, and literary forms), which parallels Vicos distinction between sacred and secular histories, situates criticism in a relationship of adjacency and complementarity which emphasizes the lateral and the dispersed rather than the linear and the sequential. 37 Said, by defining criticism as an on-going process of beginning and beginning-again, attempts to overthrow its perceived and often accepted belated secondariness in relation to the literary text by arguing that literary meaning is not determined or fixed by an origin (whether it is the sovereignty of the author, the text itself or language). [M]eaning is imposed rather than found.38 The point of doing criticism is not to look for

36

Said wrote several essays on Foucault and other theorists specifically during the 1970s and 1980s. They are: Notes on the Characterization of a Literary Text, MLN, Vol. 85, No. 6, Comparative Literature (December 1970): 765-790; Linguistics and the Archeology of Mind, International Philosophical Quarterly 11, no. 1 (March 1971):104134; Molestation and Authority in Narrative Fiction, in Aspects of Narrative: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. J. Hillis Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), 47-68; Michel Foucault as an Intellectual Imagination, boundary 2 1, no. 1 (autumn 1972): 1-36; An Ethics of Language, review of The Archaeology of Knowledge and Discourse on Language by Michel Foucault, Diacritics 4, no. 2 (1974): 28-37; Conrad and Nietzsche (1976) in Exile; Michel Foucault, 1927-1984, Raritan 4, no. 2 (fall 1984):1-11; and Foucault and the Imagination of Power, in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. Davld Couzens Hoy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 149-155.
37 38

Said, B, 357. Hayden White, Criticism as Cultural Politics, Diacritics 6, no. 3 (autumn 1976): 8.

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what is given and presented there in the text but to invent new meaning in it.39 Criticism must be able to see the text not as a finished object with a fixed originary meaning but as a historical process which has material existence and consequences for the world and the meaning of which is continually redefined by the present historical conditions. Criticism, which is a human act in history, will always have to take into account the texts and its own situatedness or worldliness and will need to reinvent and reconfigure its scope, premise, and focus by paying full attention to the occurrence of cultural and social phenomena. Therefore, although Said in Beginnings acknowledges the radical and critical spirit of structuralist, post-structuralist, and deconstructionist theories and the innovations in literary criticism advanced by them, he soon becomes discontented with theory and theoretical criticism, because they have been transformed into an apolitical, institutionalized, compartmentalized and highly specialized study of theory as a subject in itself in the process of academic and institutional neutering.40 Said sees in this tendency towards a totalizing abstraction and generalization the danger of replacing close philological reading of heterogeneous realities in the text with a mechanical application of theories. In his The World, the Text, the Critic (1983), Said goes as far as saying that it is the critics job to provide resistances to theory, to open it up toward historical reality, toward society, toward human needs and interests, to point up those concrete instances drawn from everyday reality that lie outside or just beyond the interpretive area necessarily designated in advance and thereafter circumscribed by every theory.41 After Beginnings, Said wrote Orientalism (1978). According to Said, Orientalism is the first text of his entire critical corpus that combines the political and the intellectual and scholarly.42 This critical turn in Said from
39 40

Said, Vico on the Discipline of Bodies and Texts, in Exile, 87-88.

Said says to his interviewer Te-hsing Shan, I have a great impatience with the theoretical writing in the 80s and 90s, that is to say, theoretical writing which has no particular object. See Said, An Interview with Edward Said, 132-3.
41 42

Said, WTC, 242. Said, An Interview with Edward Said, 124.

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literary and theoretical studies to a more political and cultural criticism is attributable to the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli war in 1967, which prompts Said to confront the question of self-definition as an Arab, an American citizen, and an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University. The paradox of his cultural, ethnic and national identities and his being-in-theworld becomes insurmountable; he lives and works in a country which provides him with the most ideal and necessary kind of intellectual freedom and yet threatens his Arab identity and culture by way of its almost unconditional support for Israeli nationalism. Saids understanding of and reflection on his own biculturality and his sense of intellectual and moral obligation to the human rights and self-determination of the people who are threatened and oppressed by cultural extinction and dispossession are transmuted into an intellectual and critical project whose aim it is to understand and improve the conditions for intercultural relations. In the introduction to Orientalism, Said mentions that there is a personal dimension to his beginning a critical examination of Orientalism: In many ways my study of Orientalism has been an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals. 43 The disjointed relationship between his own history as a Palestinian and the Western representation of the Orient prompts him to reflect on the relationship between representation and reality and the epistemological, historical and cultural processes through which representations of the Orient and its culture are arrived at. Within the cultural configuration of the West, Said identifies Orientalism as a predominant Western way of perceiving and representing the Orient which pervades all kinds of cultural and political activities. Orientalism is therefore an ensemble of these activities that manifest materially and ideologically in this particular perspective on the Orient. The episteme of Western culture, an interlocking grid of thought, representation, and politics, makes it impossible for one to think and speak about literature, theory and politics in isolation from each
43

See Said, O, 25.

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other. The distinction between pure and political knowledge thus appears to be ideologically motivated and serving specific political interests. One would not go very far in advancing mutual understanding and communication by taking Orientalism as an anti-Westernist critique of the Wests cultural, intellectual, political subjugation of the Orient. By demonstrating that culture, nation, geography, identity, the notions of the Occident and Orient are historically constituted, made and remade by human beings rather than natural and ontologically stable, Said is demystifying all the religious and hegemonic effects of culture and imperialism that solicit unquestioned veneration towards the self and hostility towards the other. The existential necessity of the national will to power and identity manifest in the discriminatory and exclusive nature of culture should not supersede another more fundamental necessity of the dialectic of the self and the other. Said says: the Orient is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as the Occident itself is not just there either. [] [A]s much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West. The two geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect each other.44 For Said, therefore, the West and the East help to define each other: the development and maintenance of every culture require the existence of another, different and competing alter ego.45 The interdependence of cultures forbids one to only talk about ones own culture without acknowledging the other: The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture.46 By studying and analyzing Orientalist representations cross-nationally and cross-disciplinarily, Said challenges the institutionalized and specialized forms of theoretical criticism that compartmentalize literature into different nations, genres, periods, styles and fail to account for how Orientalist representations

44 45 46

Ibid., 4-5. Ibid., 331. Ibid., 2.

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in their myriad forms are interconnected by a common style of thought.47 Orientalism is an actual and material example of how literature is a human activity inseparable from society and politics and how literature like every other human action can have material consequences of great significance to humanity. There is a world inside and outside the text: the Orientalist writing reveals the way the Orientalist understands his or her world in which he or she writes and at the same time influences the world in which his or her work is read and interpreted. Like language, the text mediates between the mind (consciousness) and the world (existence). 48 The view of language and literature as mediator allows Said to transcend the epistemological distinction between rationalism and empiricism, mind and body, subjectivity and objectivity, the signifier and the signified, and thereby the opposition between realist and structuralist theories of literature. 49 By worlding, i.e. pushing Orientalist texts back to their historical contexts of inception, Said goes beyond the kind of literary criticism that is parochially concerned with textual details and shows how the materiality of the text, i.e. its writing circumstance, publication, circulation, reproduction, and deployment, constitutes its meaning. Textuality cannot be analyzed and theorized without reference to historical and social experience. However, Orientalism also draws criticisms which accuse Said of being theoretically and methodologically inconsistent and ambivalent in this particular text. How then is Orientalism an example of Saids actual practice of humanistic and secular criticism? Said sees Orientalism as a vast system of knowledge about the Orient that operates in writing separated by time, space, authorship and discipline and exerts authority over a very different range of

47 48

Ibid.

Vico says, speech stands as it were midway between mind and body. See Vico, The New Science, 1045.
49

The realist believes that the text is a representation of the world and that an objective reality is accessible through reading the text while the structuralist holds that the so-called reality is totally constructed by the text. Both of these positions fail to account for the worldliness of the text.

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writers. In Orientalism, he adopts/adapts 50 Michel Foucaults notion of discourse as the very material consequences of a body of systematized textual knowledge. Michael Dutton and Peter Williams 51 criticize Said for his failure to align with Foucaults antihumanist position in his belief in the determining imprint of individual writers 52 instead of the anonymity of literary and knowledge production which is discursively determined and produced. James Clifford identifies Saids self-contradictory methodology in his use of Western tradition of literary criticism to criticize its humanistic disciplines. 53 It is perhaps this theoretical inconsistency of Orientalism which leads Samir Amin to see Orientalism as being untheoretical: Said has not gone far enough to the extent that he is satisfied with denouncing Eurocentric prejudice without proposing a theoretical explanation of Orientalism.54 Saids critique of Orientalism is not theoretical. Said does not believe in totalizing and deterministic theory which claims to explain and assimilate everything. He says, Orientalism is theoretically inconsistent, and I designed it that way: I didnt want Foucaults method, or anybodys method, to override what I was trying to put forward.55 Said is less concerned with employing Foucaults theory of discursive domination to make a circular argument about the ubiquity and irresistibility of power of discourse than with finding alternatives to the Orientalist mode of knowledge production based on unexamined and uncritical use and dissemination of Orientalist discourse. As
I use the dual terms adopt/adapt specifically because, as I would argue later, Said is not interested in proposing discourse as a totalizing scheme that evacuates human will or agency. To put it colloquially, he is aware of the dangers of discursive determinism.
51 50

See Michael Dutton and Peter Williams, Translating Theories: Edward Said on Orientalism, Imperialism and Alterity, Southern Review 26, no. 3 (1993): 314-57.
52 53

Said, O, 23.

See James Clifford. Review of Orientalism. History and Theory 19, no. 2 (February 1980): 204-23. Cliffords criticism is representative of various similar criticisms of Saids poststructuralist-cum-humanist position.
54

Samir Amin quoted in George Snedeker, The Politics of Critical Theory: Language/Discourse/Society (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2004), 45.
55

Said, PPC, 80.

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Tim Brennan observes, Orientalism is not a mere extension of Foucaults conception of a discourse into the area of cultural constructions of the exotic.56 Vico, Erich Auerbach, Antonio Gramsci and Raymond Williams are all important intellectual and theoretical sources of Saids Orientalism. For example, Said is intellectually close to Raymond Williams, and he affirms in Orientalism Williamss view: however dominant a social system may be, the very meaning of its domination involves a limitation or selection of the activities it covers, so that by definition it cannot exhaust all social experience, which therefore always potentially contains space for alternative acts and alternative intentions which are not yet articulated as a social institution or even power.57 His constant shift of intellectual interests and concerns testifies to this possibility of alternatives. Social and historical process and experience must be understood and interpreted not within a rigid theoretical framework but an ever-evolving theoretical structure. In the end, for Said the purpose of analyzing Orientalism is to identify a domain for struggle and resistance. 58 Since the discursive system is constructed, maintained in actual historical circumstances by the material practice of political and imperial domination, it can be known, analyzed, criticized and resisted individually and collectively. Instead of reading solely for the discursive structure in the text, the literary critic must also identify how resistances have been and can be carried out at various levels in various interpretations. Saids counter-hegemonic and counter-discursive critical project predicates upon an untheorized notion of critical consciousness and subjectivity that is ceaselessly anti-reifying, anti-systematizing with a keen awareness of ones own worldly affiliation with culture, politics and
56

Tim Brennan, Places of Mind, Occupied Lands: Edward Said and Philology, in Edward Said: A Critical Reader, ed. Michael Sprinker (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992), 77. See Said and Williamss discussion in Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters, 252. Williams is a potent source of intellectual influence to Said who states that one of the purposes of writing Orientalism is to advance the process of what Raymond Williams has called the unlearning of the inherent dominative mode. Said, O, 28.
58 57

Snedeker, The Politics of Critical Theory, 48.

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institutions. The complicity between Orientalism, imperialism and colonialism reflects the Orientalists failure to examine their own place in the world. Saids criticism of Orientalism also exemplifies the possibility of mining the critical resources and historicist methods of literary criticism to critique the practice of the humanistic disciplines. Saids humanism sees Orientalism as a kind of willed human work59 which is produced historically for specific cultural and political purposes. As Viswanathan observes that Orientalism produces a whole field of study in the form of comparative religion, literary studies, and anthropology, so that its productive valueits establishment of academic disciplinesis really an ironic outcome of negative perceptions of the nonWestern world.60 Literary and cultural studies should make use of historicist philological skills in reading and interpreting literary and cultural texts in a non-nationalistic spirit and from a genuine historical perspective without hierarchizing different cultures and literatures. In demonstrating the notion of the Orient as an ideological and textual construct by Orientalist discourse which corresponds to no ontological reality, Said says that he has no interest in, much less capacity for showing what the true Orient and Islam really are.61 This stance troubles critics like Dennis Porter who fears that Orientalism in one form or another is not only what we have but all we can ever have. 62 All humanistic knowledge is subjective in the sense that one can only interpret history and culture from ones own perspective in ones own historical circumstance. No interpreter can assume the role of a passive observer outside history as if the object of observation is not changed nor brought about by that very act of observing. The question of true or false, or subjective or objective appears to be less important than the question of how representation of the Orient is made and invented, for what purposes and ends, whether it is to rearrange human desires
59 60 61 62

Said, O, 15. Gauri Viswanathan, Introduction, in PPC, xiv-xv. Said, O, 331.

Dennis Porter, Orientalism and its Problems, The Politics of Theory, eds. Francis Barker et al. (Colchester: University of Essex, 1993), 180.

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for domination or liberation. The politics of Orientalism is to dehistoricize the representation of the Orient in such a way that the Orient appears to be objective and ontologically stable. This cannot be done without some form of violence imposed on the Orient which is to be assimilated and suppressed by the larger discourse of Orientalism. Representation therefore should not be the privilege of the Orientalist vested with institutional authority but also that of the Oriental, the subaltern, and the colonized. The urgency of finding ones own voice against a dominant and repressive discourse and as a form of cultural and political resistance is taken up as a major theme in Saids Culture and Imperialism. In Culture and Imperialism, Said has further demonstrated the interrelatedness and interdependency between different cultures, and also between politics (empire) and culture (as a way of life). Returning to English, French and other European canonical literary texts, Said demonstrates that it is not what and who one reads that matters, but rather how a text is written and how one reads it and for what purposes that are actually important.63 The point of doing literary criticism is to relate it to other areas and concerns, without being narrowly confined by ones own national, institutional or academic contexts. Reading English novels does not make one Eurocentricist, elitist, imperialist, or racist, nor would doing Third World literature make one a liberalist or pluralist. This secular, worldly and nonnationalistic work of literary criticism is responsive and counteractive to the neoconservative nationalistic efforts in defending a homogenous and triumphalist American identity through reclaiming and reviving traditional and canonical humanistic studies, as exhibited in the works of the Straussians like Allen Bloom, Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington. 64 In Culture and Imperialism, Said has
63 64

Said, The Politics of Knowledge, in Exile, 385.

William Bennett, the chairman of the National Endowement for the Humanities and later Secretary of Education under the Reagan Administration, urges the American academy to restore the cultural inheritance of traditional humanistic curriculum: [W]hat we have on many campuses is an unclaimed legacy, a course of studies in which the humanities have been siphoned off, diluted, or so adulterated that students graduate knowing little of their heritage Great works, important bodies of knowledge and

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broadened the scope of his critical attention to include European literature and postcolonial literature in order to open a two-way dialogue between the West and the East and show the intertwining of their histories. This is in part a response to the criticism that there is a lack of alternative modes of understanding and representing other cultures and a theory of resistance in Orientalism, as Said admits in the introduction to Culture and Imperialism that he did not focus on native resistance against empire and decolonization movements in Orientalism.65 From Orientalism to Culture and Imperialism, we do not see any overarching theoretical framework in conceptualizing the ontology of imperialism and colonialism, i.e., the ontological separation of humankind into different geographies, races, and cultures. Like those geographical thinkers such as Gramsci and Williamsbefore him, Said thinks of history, culture, society and discourse as human activities rooted in discontinuous geography. Geographythe movement, reconfiguration, occupation, assimilation,

differentiation of territoriesgoes hand-in-hand with the imperialist and orientalist discourse which is not so much a transhuman system that is beyond human control, as a humanly willed and therefore a humanly

contested/contestable system of domination. The tremendous mobility of world populations in the 19th to the 20th centuries prevails today (partly as a legacy of imperialism and the economic and socio-geography it created) and
powerful methods of inquiry constitute the core of the humanities and sustain the intellectual, moral and political traditions of our [American] civilization. If we neglect, as we have been neglecting, this core and rationale of the humanities, if we permit the fragmentation of the humanities to continue, then we will jeopardize everything we care for. This emphasis on what one reads rather than on how one reads is unsecular and dogmatic according to Said. See William Bennett, To Reclaim a Legacy: Report on Humanities in Education, Chronicle of Higher Education (November 28, 1984), 16. See also the reactionary works towards multiculturalism, antihumanism and postmodernism by Allen Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Soul of Todays Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987) and Samuel Huntington, Who Are We?: The Challenges to Americas National identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004).
65

Said, CI, xi-xxviii. He is also self-critical of the flaws of O in an interview (1991): I think one of the great flaws of O is the sense that it may have communicated that there is no alternative to that, which is a sort of hands-off sort of thing. Thats not what I would imply. Said, PPC, 116.

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resists any ahistorical and ungeographical accounts or linear and progressive historical narratives that would settle the intercultural tension, ironies and contradictions within this phase of history. In Orientalism, Said criticizes orientalism and colonialism through demonstrating how geographical governance is achieved through cultural and discursive indoctrination; after decolonization and territorial handover when postcolonial and poststructuralist theories seize the attention of the academic scene, Said resists the detachment of both theoretical discourse of postcolonial society and the discourse in postcolonial society from geographical realities by pushing back postcolonial culture, history and discourse to the material geography from which they stem; he thus demonstrates the coextensiveness of territorial boundaries and discursive boundaries, and that politics has to do principally with occupying and leaving territory.
66

Said, very self-consciously in Culture and

Imperialism, abandons jargonistic and abstract language and a coherent linear narrative structure in order to describe and represent as faithfully as possible the physical and geographical actualities and discontinuities that shape our life and consciousness. Empire, which preserves and enhances itself through the conquest of foreign land and resources, has become a way of life and given rise to a culture that is enabled by and in turn supports it. The geographical consciousness of the West as the metropolitan center and the non-West as peripheral locality defines the cultural and historical consciousness that has shaped and grounded European literary, historical, ethnographic, scientific writing: There is first the authority of the European observertraveler, merchant, scholar, historian, novelist. Then there is the hierarchy of spaces by which the metropolitan centre and, gradually, the metropolitan economy are seen as dependent upon an overseas system of territorial control, economic exploitation, and a sociocultural vision; without these stability and prosperity at home would not be possible.67 According to Said, literary criticism has often overlooked this
66 67

Paul Bov, Continuing the Conversation, Critical Inquiry 31, 2 (winter 2005): 401. Said, CI, 69.

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hidden spectacle of imperial struggle over territory that forms a constant but unacknowledged background in much of western (especially British) canonical literature from the 19th century onwards. To interpret the literary and cultural history of Western literature and culture in all its complexities of affiliation with other cultural and territorial histories, Said introduces a contrapuntal or counterpoint reading68 that places the Western imperial history of domination alongside the history of resistant movements of the colonized, thereby dehierarchizing the hierarchical thinking of culture and race. Saids contrapuntal reading erases the ontological and national distinction between self and other as separate histories and connects past and present, insideness and outsideness, presence and absence, power and resistance so that multiple histories, identities, literatures can be seen as cohabitating on a larger historical field, i.e. the whole of secular human history.69 For Said, not only theory but history, literary and cultural, travels and interacts with other cultures and traditions. Saids critical strategy is to understand under what historical and material circumstances things have come into existence; it allows us to look at history, culture, literature critically, genealogically, and historically instead of objectifying and transfixing them as pieces of unchanging reality for purposes of strengthening national and cultural identity, eliciting cultural veneration, and achieving intellectual, cultural, or moral hegemony. Various national, cultural, and literary histories, seen contrapuntally, would call into question the validity of the habitual Eurocentric attitude that sees other cultural and literary histories as what Chakrabarty calls variations on a master narrative that could be called history of Europe. 70 This contrapuntal reading is comparative which
68

Said uses this musical term to mean things that cant be reduced to homophony. That cant be reduced to a kind of simple reconciliation. [] And so multiple identity, the polyphony of many voices playing off against each other, without, as I say, the need to reconcile them More than one culture, more than one awareness, both in its negative and its positive modes. See Said, PPC, 99.
69 70

Said, CI, 61.

Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 27.

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according to Mufti would allow us to come to understand that societies on either side of the imperial divide now live deeply imbricated lives that cannot be understood without reference to each other. 71 Saids analysis of native resistance which takes place in many different forms is focused on the emergence of a new literary phenomenon that aims to resist as well as to enter the dominant imperial discourse by writing back to the empire. The rewriting of Western canonical novels such as Conrads Heart of Darkness by Ngugi wa Thiongo in The River Between and Tayeb Salihs Season of Migration to the North from the perspective of the colonized not only destabilizes Conrads Eurocentric and essentializing vision but also reveals how history, when traveling across temporal and spatial boundaries, can be reinterpreted and rewritten and how history is an agonistic process still being made, rather than finished and settled once and for all.72 Such a perspective displaces the notion of History as a master narrative that encodes a Eurocentric worldview and opens up the notion of histories that allow for the remaking and reinventing of the world by formerly oppressed peoples. The native struggle and resistance, which is primarily political, is transformed in a literary movement that makes it impossible to comprehend the literary in isolation from the political and the cultural. Yet like Gramsci, 73 Said is very critical of the total collapse of the literary into the political. Criticism which falls prey to the danger of the politics of blame is unable to distinguish between good writing and politically correct attitudes, as if a fifth-rate pamphlet and a great novel have more or less the same significance.74 Such attitudes are a consequence of the native resistance and the rise of chauvinism and xenophobia. Said is very
71

Aamir R. Mufti, Global Comparativism, in Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation, eds. Homi Bhabha and W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 115.
72 73

Said, HDC, 25.

For a discussion of Gramscis idea of aesthetic criticism, see Joseph A. Buttigieg, The Exemplary Worldliness of Antonio Gramscis Literary Criticism, boundary 2 11, no. 1-2 (fall 1982): 21-39.
74

Said, The Politics of Knowledge, 384.

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critical of Chinua Achebes criticism of Conrad as a racist who dehumanizes the whole African population and his reduction of aesthetics to politics. 75 Although all great works of art are involved with politics in various ways, they always remain irreducibly art. Aesthetic value and pleasure should not be compromised by political and cultural considerations. 76 As Said has shown, the work of great writers like Conrad always resists reductive attempts to be subsumed under the rubric of politics. In his rereading of Conrads novella Heart of Darkness in the context of imperial conquest, Said not only demonstrates how imperial ideology, ambition, fantasy, danger saturate Conrads work but also identifies an aesthetic realm that remains impenetrable by politics. Conrad, amongst many other modernist colonial writers, does not write with the same sanguine and reductive vision but a worldly pessimism and a heightened sense of self-and-national-consciousness. His novels, Said says, communicate both the inevitability and brutality of the British colonial project, rather than the pleasure of imperialism as implicated in, for instance, Rudyard Kiplings Kim. The positional in-betweeness of Conrads attitude towards the experience of empire exemplifies the modernist paradox: the extreme critical awareness of the danger of the complicity between instrumentalist thinking and imperialism does not translate into a sympathetic understanding of the victims of imperialism and a fully realized alternative to imperialism.77 Said discerns two ironic visions in Heart of Darknessone as conventional imperialistic and the other self-consciously anti-imperialist

75 76

Said, CI, 165-6.

Where African writers such as Chinua Achebe dismissed Conrad as a racist, suggesting that, whatever his gifts as a writer, his political attitudes must make him despicable to any African, Said saw such reasoning as amounting to spiritual, intellectual and aesthetic amputation. Contrary to the assumption sometimes made about him, he did not consider that the hidden political agendas and attitudes of cultural supremacy that he regarded as informing the canons of western culture from Dante to Flaubert necessarily diminished their artistic integrity or cultural power. Malise Ruthven, Edward Said: Controversial Literary Critic and Bold Advocate of the Palestinian Cause in America, in GuardianUnlimited.com, created on September 26, 2003, clipped on September 29, 2007, <http://guardian.co.uk/israel/Story1049931,00.html>.
77

Said, CI, 25.

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that can only be realized in Conrads circular narrative forms which draw attention to themselves as artificial constructions.78 Saids intention in reading these works of literature by Conrad, Kipling, Austen and others in the context of imperialism is not to blame their authors for their Eurocentrism and complicity with imperial ideology, but to see them in their context as accurately as possible because they are extraordinary writers and thinkers whose work has enabled other, alternative work and readings based on developments of which they could not have been aware.79 As such, they are very much products of their time and thus of dominant modes of thinking that characterized their work, but they also stand in a hesitant and at times uneasy relationship to these dominant modes of thinking. Saids interest in these writers rests primarily in their self-consciousness, and it is this self-critical consciousness that attracts later postcolonial writers to utilize these texts as sites for writing back. One can also see in Saids engagement with these texts something of Raymond Williamss conception of structures of feeling. For Williams, structures of feeling are emergent ideological/social forms that are yet to achieve a cohesive or definable form, and as such they cannot be named as a specific ideology or classconsciousness. They express themselves tentatively in various literary and art forms and point towards an emergent structure. 80 In Conrads writings, for example, that textual unease about colonial domination foreshadows an emerging critique and the ultimate dismantling of colonial authority. The same attitude should apply to our reading of Said whose writing is written at specific junctures in history for particular constituencies. One is bound to find dissonances, inconsistencies, contradictions, or ironies in Saids critical work, because it is a worldly-situated critical praxis that is responsive and sensitive to the change of historical and social circumstances rather than

78 79 80

Ibid, 29. Said, Freud, 24.

For a critical discussion of structures of feeling, see Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 128-135.

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an abstract theoretical exercise whose authority rests on internal coherence and historical consistency.

Political activism: The specific and local fight for universal justice The concerns of a literary critic are often thought to be different from those of a political activist, but they are not in Saids critical praxis. His worlding and politicization of history, literature, and art, which unlock the system of correspondences between knowledge and politics, fully exemplify his humanism. Saids criticism studies the ensemble of human activities and interactions of existential circumstances which make human existence and human work possible. Criticism therefore requires a critical consciousness that is pre-compartmentalized in order to be able to see what is included and excluded by ones institutional, professional and national horizons. For Said, humanistic and secular criticism must also be politically committed to the quest for non-coercive human knowledge and freedom, otherwise that critical detachment can easily slide into political non-interference. Saids criticism occupies a unique place in literary and cultural criticism because it stems from his personal experience as a Palestinian exile and his organic relationship to an oppressed and homeless people.81 He has relied on the critical resources and skills of literary criticism and discourse analysis to deconstruct the dogmatic and institutionalized ideas in order to advance intellectual and political freedom, and his experience of homelessness and dispossession in turn enables him to be wary of the damages and ravages inflicted on the colonized and marginalized by the dominant discourse of imperialism and nationalism from which he remains at critical distance. With reference to Mimesis as an attempt to rescue sense and meanings from the fragments of modernity with which, from his Turkish exile, Auerbach saw the downfall of Europe, and Germanys in particular, Said says: the scholar must reconstruct the history of his own time as part of a personal commitment to his field.82
81 82

Bov, Intellectuals in Power, xiii. Said, HDC, 115-6.

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For the Palestinian whose existence has been systematically encroached by the Israeli-Zionist confiscation of land and possession and whose history has been wiped out by Israeli triumphant history, Saids works on Palestine, Islam, Middle Eastern politics provide a counter-narrative to master narratives. His oppositional criticism and his reconstruction of Palestinian history and identity function much in the same way as the postcolonial rewriting of Western novels as the voyage into the heart of Western consciousness. The Question of Palestine (1979) and Covering Islam (1981) are polemical and political works, which continue with and extend the arguments put forward in Orientalism from the domain of literary representation of the Orient to contemporary historical and media representations of Palestine and Islam. The gap between the language of representation and the historical experience of people in the Middle East is huge. However, because historical representation has become an existential necessity for the Palestinians deprived of political representation and self-determination, Said continues to write about the Palestinian experience and narrate the history of dispossession and resistance without denying in Snedekers words historical reality in the name of methodological rigor. 83 Saids book After the Last Sky (1986) portrays the diversity of Palestinian people and life in the form of a photographic essay to remind the Western world that they are a people with a history. It is not Saids purpose to glorify the Palestinian culture and people and exclude the Israels; he wishes to bring the two into mutual acknowledgment of each others existence. According to Said, the life of the Palestinians and that of Israelis have intersected in such a way that any attempt to separate them into two states on one land would not end in peace. In his fight for the national and political self-determination of the Palestinians as the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless,84 Said has demonstrated that literature begins not only in the

83 84

Snedeker, The Politics of Critical Theory, 41. Said, RI, 84.

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individual particular85 but also in the fight for universal justice. [I]f you wish to uphold basic human justice you must do so for everyone, not just selectively for the people that your side, your culture, your nation designates as okay.86 Saids moral universalism in this context is unmistakable. 87 However, his execution of such idealism is different from the kind of imperialist rationale and tactics masked by Western humanisms self-avowed ideal of a universal humanity as manifested in the pursuit of, for example, linguistic and political universalism by Western scholars 88 of which he is self-consciously wary. While these scholars attempt to unify an array of linguistic identity into one linguistic identity, Said, a multilingual and multicultural individual living both Arabic and English as his mother tongue and native culture, finds it not only difficult but almost impossible to rationalize his bilingual and bicultural identity and consciousness into a harmonious unity. In the beginning of Out of Place, Said reflects on the problem of language, More interesting for me as author was the sense I had of trying always to translate experiences that I had not only in a remote environment but also in a different language. Everyone lives life in a given language; everyones experiences therefore are had, absorbed, and recalled in that language. The basic split in my life was the one between Arabic, my native language, and English, the language of my education and subsequent expression as a scholar and teacher, and so trying to
85 86

Said, HDC, 80. Said, RI, 93.

As I would discuss Saids moral universalism in further detail in Chapters Four and Five, Saids fight for universal justice is a situated and political resistance against universal injustices in society. Linguistic differences amongst cultures have been interpreted by Western linguists and scholars as communicative barriers of cross-cultural understandings. The search for the originary language and construction and implementation of a world language in hope to eliminate cross-cultural misunderstandings and conflicts have been historically in the West an idealistic academic and political enterprise. For a detailed and critical discussion of the politics and political affiliations and appropriation of an emergent and fastdisappearing world languageI. A. Richardss Basic Englishone of the examples of a linguistic universalism pursued by Western scholars, see Q. S. Tong, The Bathos of a Universalism: I. A. Richards and His Basic English, in Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulation, ed. Lydia H. Liu (Durham and London: Duke UP, 1999), 331-54.
88

87

98

produce a narrative of one in the language of the otherto say nothing of the numerous ways in which the languages were mixed up for me and crossed over from one realm to the otherhas been a complicated task.89 In the end of his memoir, he surrenders to the irreconcilability of his split linguistic and cultural identity. I will return to this theme of irreconcilability in the last section on Saids aesthetic criticism of this chapter. If universalism of humanity is not grounded in a universal tongue, what is it grounded in? Said has demonstrated through his personal cultural experiences and critical practice that there are so many dissonances even in the consciousness and identity of an individual situated within a particular cultural and historical setting, not to say the complex realities about culture and nation. His vision of a universalism is predicated upon a dereified perspective of reality and identity which demonstrates the dialectic of the universal general and the individual particular disconnected by the undialectical thinking of binary opposition. In counteracting Huntingtons clash-of-civilizations thesis, Said says: The goal of interpretation is to learn how to connect things with each otherdifferent
90

cultures,

different

peoples,

different

historical

periods, that is, to connect cultures by the humanistic spirit of interpretation and sympathetic understanding rather than through an enforced globalized language. There is for sure a linguistic dimension to achieving cross-cultural understanding, but what is more important to Said is the moral and intellectual dimension to that understanding. Language does shape ones consciousness, cultural, national, and historical. However, individual consciousness is no mere product of language; it is at once general and particular. One must also take account of the motive behind the will to understand different cultures; whether it is for political and cultural domination and coercion or mutual understanding and coexistence. To Said, it is most morally valuable and intellectually productive for one to be generous and scrupulous enough in spirit and intellect in the process of interpretation to surrender ones
89 90

Said, Out of Place, xi-xii. Said, The Uses of Culture, in End, 143.

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subjectivity to assume fully another not only for oneself but also the other. The unique human capacity for sympathetic interpersonal transition or even transgression from one individual experience to another is itself an exemplification of the universal human quality in transcendence of tongues and cultures. Universalism achieved through globalization requires utmost intellectual skepticism and biculturalism that defines Saids intellectual vision, as Chatterjee says: It is the very biculturalism of intellectuals in postcolonial countriesa necessary biculturalism which they have to work hard to acquirewhich enables them to see through the sham and hypocrisy of todays myth of global cooperation.91 It is therefore an intellectual challenge to comparative literary studies whose avowed universalism is nevertheless based upon a hierarchical system of languages and literatures. After The Palestinian Question and Covering Islam, which are written for a Western readership, Saids political writing on Middle Eastern politics and the relational dynamics between the Middle East and the West disperses into essays and reviews published very often bilingually in Arabic and English in periodicals and newspapers in both the Arab and Western worlds. These essays are later collected in four volumes: The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination 1969-1994 (1994), Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process (1995), The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (2000), and From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map: Essays (2004). They are Saids commentaries on and critiques of particular historical events, political figures or organizations, and they are written in a highly accessible non-academic language and aimed at a much more general public and wider non-Western constituency. The essayistic and journalistic form and structure exemplify local and specific intellectual and political struggle and resistance against general authoritative discourses, representations and narratives, and overarching institutional system and protocol. The very form of the essay as the ideal form of criticism for Said,
91

Partha Chatterjee, Their own words? An essay for Edward Said, in Edward Said: A Critical Reader, 216.

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like Adorno before him and Said is itself resistant to the totalitarian view of reality, truth and power: Adorno says, The essay remains what it always was, the critical form par excellence [] If the essay is accused of lacking a standpoint and of tending toward relativism because it recognized no standpoint lying outside of itself, then the accusation implicitly contains the conception of truth as something ready-made, a hierarchy of concepts.92 The absence of standpoint is a secular attitude which according to Said warns us to beware of transforming the complexities of a many-stranded history into one large figure, or of elevating particular moments or monuments into universals. No social system, no historical vision, no theoretical totalization, no matter how powerful, can exhaust all the alternatives or practices that exist within its domain. There is always the possibility to transgress.93 Political resistance against power should be based upon metacritical and metatheoretical reflections on the public role of the critical intellectual, as Said exemplifies in The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), Representations of the Intellectual (1994) and Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004). Although these books exhibit an impressive intellectual breadth covering a wide range of literary figures and critical methodologies, Said in his actual politically oppositional practice mainly writes about the question of Palestine and the Middle East because he himself is a Palestinian and an organic part of that dispossessed and stateless community. It is only from the particular point of view of an exile-Palestinian that Said can produce historically particular and marginalized knowledge of Palestinian national history and politics as opposed to the representations of Palestine by Zionist and Western imperialistic writers. Saids essays on Palestine, the Palestinians and the Middle East serve as historical documentation of everyday life of the Palestinians superseded and overshadowed by the authoritative cultural

92

Theodor. W. Adorno, The Essay as Form, New German Critique 32, (spring-summer 1984): 166.
93

Said, Music, 55.

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discourse and representation of the Middle East by Western mass media. Said exemplifies Foucaults idea of the specific intellectual as opposed to the universal intellectual in engaging local struggles: With the passing of the universal intellectual, the rhapsodist of the eternal, the specific intellectuals arise defined by expertise in their own fields and engaged, like the proletariat, in local struggles against power and oppression within specific sectors, at the precise points where their own conditions of life or work situate them.94 Said thus emphasizes a universalism of humanity not actualized through a common discourse but a common existential and intellectual responsibility and tie to ones own cultural and historical community.

Aesthetic subjectivity and resistance: Saids late style Saids description of Beethovens late style composition has self-referentially foreshadowed his own late style: Beethovens late music constitute[s] an event in the history of modern culture: a moment when the artist who is fully in command of his medium nevertheless abandons communication with the established social order of which he is a part and achieves a contradictory, alienated relationship with it. 95 Although Said has been interested in the category of aesthetics and as an accomplished classical pianist himself writing regular music criticism for The Nation and public lectures such as the Wellek Library Lectures, 96 it is not by mere coincidence that he occupies himself largely with the aesthetic in the late phase of his intellectual trajectory. Upon the request of the interviewer to periodize and categorize his intellectual career, he charts his own intellectual topography thus: I think the periodization is that first there has been an interest in existential problems of literary production. Then theres [the] theoretical period, Beginnings, where the whole question of project was formulated. And third, theres a political period which

94 95

Bov, Intellectuals in Power, 235; emphasis added.

Said, Adorno as Lateness Itself, in Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World, ed. Malcolm Bull (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 268.
96

This series of lectures is later published as the book Music.

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includes Orientalism, Covering Islam, The Question of Palestine, and continues for several years. And in the last period, the one I am in right now, I am going back toward the aesthetic more. Im writing memoirs, and Im also writing a book on what I call the late stylethat is to say, the style of artists in the final phase of their career. Plus, I am now doing more work on music. I have written a book on opera which Cambridge will publish. So its the return to the aesthetic.97 An obituary of Said says, In his final years, Said's health grew ever more fragile, and, though passionately concerned with the unfolding Palestinian disaster in the wake of 9/11 and the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, he took a conscious decision to withdraw from political controversy and channel his energies into music.98 His final return to the realm of the aesthetic is manifestly a self-conscious act. However, I would further argue that Saids late aesthetic criticism is no less a philosophically and politically conscious and oppositional act than his political writings. The aesthetic is not a place of retreat and political withdrawal for Said who never sees aesthetics as a separate social and cultural domain from politics. In the following, through demonstrating how Saids aesthetic writing arises from the historical conditions of the last phase of Saids life and by showing the intellectual and political significance and implication of Saids late style, I hope to provide a more nuanced understanding of the politics of Saids move to aesthetics and of the aesthetics of his political criticism. In 1991, at the age of 55, Said was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). When he began to undergo chemotherapeutic treatment in March 1994, he realized that his life approached its last phase which admitted no possibility of return to his old life; In May 1994, [Said] began work on [Out of Place].99 The aestheticization of his irrecoverable past and dwindling present as a memoir in face of a life-threatening disease and

97 98

Said and Te-hsing Shan, An Interview with Edward Said, 124-5.

Ruthven, Edward Said: Controversial Literary Critic and Bold Advocate of the Palestinian Cause in America, unpaginated.
99

Said, Out of Place, 216.

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encroaching death signifies not an unwilling withdrawal from intellectual and political discourse but an exigency to comprehend and make sense of the incomprehensibility of the two greatest forces of human lifelife and death. He says: This record of a life and ongoing course of a disease (for which I have known from the beginning no cure exists) are one and the same, it could be said, the same but deliberately different.100 A medical cure requires full knowledge of the disease; Saids memoir is an existential and humanistic search for meanings of a life for which he has also known from the outset no full understanding exists. The memoir is again a self-inventory like Orientalism of the whole life of an individual not only as an Arab intellectual in America: how Said has become in history who he is. The very act of Said writing his memoir exemplifies the fundamental problematic, paradox and irreconcilability of human existence that defines the late style of Beethoven, Adorno, Said and many others: how can one bridge the distance between ones past and ones present, writing and historicizing as narrator and living as character, thinking as outsider and being thought as an insider, controlling as a master and being controlled as a slave, and ultimately speaking truth to power and being constituted by power? And what is the nature of that distance temporal, geographical, cultural, ideological, imperial, metaphorical, formal, or fictional? Although Said in the preface to his memoir has stated that the purpose of his memoir is to answer the need to bridge the sheer distance in time and place between [his] life today and [his] life then,101 his final words communicate a sense of disillusionment with and emancipation from that idea of a distance and the need to bridge the past and the present to form a synthesis in the Hegelian sense:
I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this to the idea of a solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much significance. These currents, like the themes of ones life, flow along during the waking hours, and at their best, they require no reconciling, no harmonizing. They are off and may be out of place, but at least they are always in motion, in time, in place, in the form of all kinds of strange combinations moving about,
100 101

Ibid. Ibid., xii.

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not necessarily forward, sometimes against each other, contrapuntally yet without one central theme. A form of freedom, Id like to think, even if I am far from being totally convinced that it is. That skepticism too is one of the themes I particularly want to hold on to. With so many dissonances in my life I have 102 learned actually to prefer being not quite right and out of place.

The late-style writing of his memoir is concomitantly a return to the aesthetic and the subjective. Circumventing his long-term academic and critical concerns for the politics of history-writing, and the ontological and epistemological question of subjectivity in the memoir, Said delivers, as Paul Bov observes, as he always does in his later writings, a very strong authorial voice that clearly incarnates qualities of mind and humanity that stand as an example of how interesting, how profound, how generous, and how lovingly contentious a fully human being can be. 103 Said takes full authorial responsibility for his subjective perspective and memories in his memoir: Much as I have no wish to hurt anyones feelings my first obligation has not been to be nice but to be true to my perhaps peculiar memories, experiences, and feelings. I, and only I, am responsible for what I recall and see, not individuals in the past who could not have known what effect they might have on me.104 [T]o write, to be, an alternative through exile and subjectivity, albeit exile and subjectivity addressed to philosophical issues. 105 In this memoir Said is highly self-conscious of the subject I. Such selfconsciousness is not ordinary but unprecedented; the excruciating illness and impending mortality caused in Said an acute and painful awareness of the present with the self as his sole concern. This is why lateness is being at the end, fully conscious, full of memory, and also very (even preternaturally) aware of the present. Adorno, like Beethoven, becomes therefore a figure of lateness itself, an untimely, scandalous, even catastrophic commentator on the

102 103 104 105

Ibid., 295; emphasis added. Paul Bov, Continuing the Conversation, 405; emphasis added. Said, Out of Place, xii-xiii.

Said, Timeliness and Lateness, in Late Style, 15. This is a revised version of the previously published essay Adorno as Lateness Itself.

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present.106 Without the feeling of being an agent, ones self disintegrates, and it can no longer hold itself together. But the feeling of physical pain and degeneration ironically makes one more aware of ones self. This is the pain I am feeling; it is me who feels the pain so debilitating. Rousseau says, I feel, therefore I amthe capacity of feeling pain, be it physical or psychological, also seems to form the basis of subjectivity in addition to the existential need to be an agent. The corporeality rather than intellectuality of being supports and welcomes the idea of the human subject and also determines ones selfconsciousness. Both lateness and exile pertain to the disjunction and discontinuity of the organic continuity between the past and the present in both temporal and geographical senses. From the abyss between the past and the presentthe suspension of timeoriginates the subjective-aesthetic experience and expression which resists rationalizing, theorizing and historicizing. The irreconcilable gap between old work and late-style work thus permits no secular and genealogical criticism. Said rhetorically questions: But what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution but as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction?107 And on Adornos resort to the aesthetic, he says, Fixated on the new musics absolute rejection of the commercial sphere, Adornos words cut out the social ground from underneath art. For in fighting ornament, illusion, reconciliation, communication, humanism and success, art becomes untenable. 108 Saids late style itself exemplifies every aspect of lateness: radical anachronism, anomaly, discontinuity, unpredictability, irreconcilability, contradiction, nondefinition and resistance. The reference to such notions as preternaturalness, unearthly serenity, the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor in his elaboration of late style and the aesthetic109

106 107 108 109

Ibid., 14. Said, Timeliness and Lateness, 7. Said, Adorno as Lateness Itself, 276; emphasis added.

Preternaturalness is a paraphrase of the word preternaturally which appears in Timeliness and Lateness, 14; unearthly serenity is mentioned in the book cover of

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seems to contradict his secular criticism, which circumscribes itself within the domain of the genealogically traceable and epistemically accessible and outside the domain of the supernatural and unworldly. Although these notions have religious connotations, Saids allusion to these words should not contradict his secular criticism for he uses them to convey a quality of anachronism and untimeliness rather than a sense of supernaturalness. Late style is in, but oddly apart from the present.110 This profound statement on aesthetic late style and the temporal dimension of humanity alone strikes one as a powerful revelation on the many paradoxes and contradictions inherent in human existence in all its aspects. Struggling with the transience and finitude of life and existence, late-style work by the artists is beyond time and theory simply because these artists realize that above what they love and strive for, namely art and power, there is still something of a higher order eternity. Certainly, we are inside power and history, but power, culture and history are in turn inside the framework of time. Death has not required us to keep a day free.111 Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?112 The indifference of time and death to all of us all has always been the most detrimental blow to our subjectivities. That sense of meaninglessness and powerlessness is lucidly captured in Ecclesiastes, the only book in the Holy Bible in which man, the I, speaks about the understanding of and frustration with life from his point of view. The binary distinction between birth and death, good and evil, intelligence and stupidity, wisdom and ignorance, labor and rest, love and hatred, happiness and grief with a valorization of the former at the expense of the latter eventually negate each other and amount to nothing and meaninglessness because all these differences are subsumed and unregistered by the greatest distinction of all: Life and Death. There is a time
Late Style; and Said refers to art as the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor in Said, HDC, 63.
110 111 112

Said, Timeliness and Lateness, 24; emphasis original. Samuel Beckett, Proust (London: Calder, 1965), 17; emphasis added.

Quoted from the book of Matthew 6:27 in Holy Bible, New International Version (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2001); emphasis added.

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for everything, but everything faces the same ending. Time is indifferent to the binary distinctions from which men derive meaning, value and purpose of life. By the effort of man alone, life cannot be made meaningful. Life itself is meaningless. Man wants to be god bestowing meanings, imposing value judgment upon everything in life, but man, being ephemeral, finite, vulnerable, historical, turns out to be no god elevated from the repetitiveness and physical and biological necessities of life and death. It is the impending and indifferent death which prompts Said to inventory his past and reflect upon his life in his memoir, thereby to resist the indifference and meaninglessness of death. The inevitability of lateness testifies to the inevitable desire for eternity. The only way to achieve this is to suspend time itself, either by creating a disruption or straining the existing tension between the past and the present. Caught in the ever-disappearing present, artists have to transgress and contradict their subjectivities in the past and present in hope to project a late/different subjectivity beyond the present onto the distant future; to people there are not many tomorrows to be had, they have to create tomorrow: Explorations of the making of the self can go until the very end; the selfs unmaking is another affair, and late style comes close to that.113 In both the Taoist and Nietzschean senses, fetishism of the self is the finitude of art. Said says, For Adorno, lateness is the idea of surviving beyond what is acceptable and normal; in addition, lateness includes the idea that one cannot really go beyond lateness at all.114 In commenting on Saids interpretation of Adornos view of lateness, Michael Wood states: This is precisely what keeps us in time even when we seem to be out of time, and lateness has its playful as well as its tragic aspects. 115 Timothy Brennan also rightly observes: In fact, throughout [his] career [Said] embodied this very dilemma: Is it possible to be

113

Michael Wood, Introduction, Late Style, xvii. Said, Late Style, 13; emphasis original. Wood, Introduction, Late Style, xiv.

114
115

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inside and outside at the same time? 116 Since time encompasses and transcends power, culture and history, the intellectual enquiry into the question of how one can be simultaneously inside and outside time would illuminate the same dilemma pertaining to the domain of power, culture and history. It is perhaps because of the pressure of time due to his impending death that Said had lately preferred the theory of time (timeliness and untimeliness of late style) to his earlier predilection for theory of power, culture and history as time encompasses all these categories like power and history. How subjectivity can be out of time and find the aesthetic, especially music, as its best channel of expression are difficult questions. But by virtue of the adaptive and developmental capacity of critical thinking, subjectivity itself extends beyond the present towards the future. We are both finite and infinite: finite because our thoughts are historically and politically conditioned, and infinite because our thinking can ever reflect upon its own thinking and therefore turn thinking into an object of thinking. When self-reflective thinking examines itself, it turns its observed subjective activity into something that is its oppositeobjective activity. We can never know the ultimate self/subjectivity since once thinking is being thought, it becomes mere thought; to understand it further requires a higher order of subjective thinking, ad infinitum. Under self-examination, subjectivity therefore remains paradoxically elusive, inaccessible, and resistant to total understanding. The history of human thought, be it Marxist or historicist-humanist, is a history of self-knowing or self-critiquing activity which, through knowing how the bourgeois subject or man is formed under various economic, socio-historical, and political conditions, turns subjective thinking into objective thought, knowledge, rule and theory. The ever-expanding objective account of how our thinking is historically and discursively determined thought testifies to the very existence of subjectivity or subjective thinking since the existence of objectivity is predicated upon subjectivity, as Adorno says: if the object
116

Timothy Brennan, Resolution, Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation, eds. Homi Bhabha and W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 49.

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lacked the moment of subjectivity, its own objectivity would become nonsensical.117 Seen in this light, knowledge, theory and definition remain as the objective forms that shape the life of man to be overthrown unceasingly by self-critical thinking. 118 Infinite thinking produces infinite interpretation while interpretation or criticism can never exhaust thinking as it is infinite and indefinite. A work of art as the emanation of thinking cannot be fully understood by definitive interpretation or reading: essayists, like pianists, concern themselves with givens: those works of art always worth another critical and reflective reading. Above all, neither pianist nor essayist can offer final readings, however definitive their performances may be. 119 [S]elfknowledge as constituted by self-criticism is nevertheless an objectification of and produced by the thinking self, and therefore, as Akeel Bilgrami says: what matters to Said is the truly unique human capacity, the capacity to be self-critical.120 Because of this subjective capacity to be self-critical, human beings can establish a critical distance with themselves. This distance, which is intellectual at first, will transform into a temporal distance between the past and the present and also a formal one between the aesthetic and the political. The antagonistic relationship amongst the aesthetic and political is a result of their battle for domination and control; one may argue that the answer to the question of whether the political encompasses the aesthetic or vice versa seems to rest on the ground of preference rather than epistemic evidence. The quest for knowledge objectifies and alienates the world and humanity, while
117

Theodor W. Adorno, Subject and Object, The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, eds. Andrew Arato & Eike Gebhardt (N.Y.: Continuum, 1987), 509. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt in the reader also mention that according to Adorno, the elimination of subjectivity in favor of objectivity does not necessitate reliable knowledge: An epistemological category, subjectivity is not an undesirable addition to the objective qualities of reality, best eliminated if we want reliable knowledge. There can be no knowledge without a perspective from which it is gained. The fact that this perspective may be (and usually is) collective makes it no less subjective. The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, 497.
118 119

Georg Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness, 186.

Said, Remembrances of Things Played: Presence and Memory in the Pianists Art, in Exile, 229.
120

Akeel Bilgrami, Foreword, in HDC, xi; emphasis original.

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the quest for art subjectivizes and personalizes, as Nietzsche says: [c]ompared with music all communication by words is shameless; words dilute and brutalize; words depersonalize; words make the uncommon common.
121

Words in this context refer to the categorization,

systematization, reification and subsequently limitation of the world. The imposition of signs, data, schema and paradigms onto the world makes the world finite and exhaustible by categories of knowledge. This is why Said in following Adorno aligns with Nietzsche and Georg Lukcs in advocating a return to the aesthetic from the scientific and theoretical. Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) has criticized the limits and epistemic presuppositions of science and argued for mans tragic dependency on art,122 for art comes as a remedy when science reaches and becomes aware of its limits. Nietzsche quotes Schopenhauers argument for music as the immediate embodiment of subjectivity: music is distinguished from all the other arts by the fact that it is not a copy of the phenomenon [since it is pure form without content], or, more accurately, the adequate objectivity of the will, but is the direct copy of the will itself, and therefore represents the metaphysical of everything physical in the world, and the thing-in-itself of every phenomenon.123 Said also adds a valuable piece of observation to his discussion of Lukcss formulation of class consciousness: we should note that several years before History and Class Consciousness Lukcs had argued that only in the realm of the aesthetic could the limitations of pure theory and of pure ethics be overcome; by the former he meant a scientific theory whose very objectivity symbolized its own reification, its thralldom to objects, by a latter a Kantian subjectivity out of touch with everything except its own selfhood. Only the Aesthetic rendered

121

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 327.
122

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Anchor Books, 1956), 96.
123

Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Idea, I quoted by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, 99.

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the meaning of experience as lived experienceder Sinn des Erlebnissesin an autonomous form: subject and object are thereby made one.124 Lateness is a kind of self-imposed exile from what is generally acceptable, coming after it, and surviving beyond it.125 Critical consciousness in the form of art born out of culture, history and power nevertheless has the freedom to choose between being inside and outside, protagonistic and antagonistic, at home and in exile, and in time or out of time. Hence, Said therefore agrees with Adorno that there is a fundamental irreconcilability between the aesthetic and the nonaesthetic that we must sustain as a necessary condition of our work as humanists. Art is not simply there: it exists intensely in a state of unreconciled opposition to the depredations [and reification] of daily life, the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.126 The unbridgeable distance, be it formal, temporal, spatial, between the aesthetic and the political is consciously created and sustained by the subjective consciousness. In fact, the very nature of the aesthetics is antagonistic to the political from which, according to Said, however, art paradoxically derives. 127 Ruthven also observes: In a brilliant essay on Die Meistersinger that grapples with Wagners anti-semitism, Said approves Pierre Boulezs aesthetic view on Wagners music: Wagners music, by its very existence, refuses to bear the ideological message that it is intended to convey.128 Said emphasizes on the paradoxical relationship between art and politics rather than their connections and differences. For Said, the fact that art is political does not mean that it is reducible to politics but resistant to politics. Late style not only expresses Saids view on aesthetics but also power and politics. While Said speaks vehemently about speaking truth to power and resistance against power, he also takes a
124 125 126 127 128

Said, WTC, 233. Said, Late Style, 16; emphasis added. Said, HDC, 63. Ibid.

Ruthven, Edward Said: Controversial Literary Critic and Bold Advocate of the Palestinian Cause in America, unpaginated.

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forgiving and sympathetic view of power as his intellectual predilection for exile demonstrates that power is productive and enabling. It is neither possible nor necessary for human beings to live in a political and historical vacuum in which there is no power, coercion, institution; we are constituted by power relations. The fact is intellectual freedom does not come after nor prior to resistance against power; it exists only in the form of resistance which exists only because there is power. The antithetical relationship between resistance and power does not negate the fact that power and resistance necessitate each other in actual existence; it differs from the mutually exclusive relation between truth and falsehood, and between right and wrong. Foucault says, resistance is a part of this strategic relationship of which power consists. Resistance really always relies upon the situation against which it struggles.129 Therefore, resistance, in the form of the aesthetic or the political, exists only in a relation to power. Resistance and power are an action-andreaction pair in the language of physical mechanics. Power can only be exerted upon freedom while freedom can only be experienced through and in power. All the apparently contradictory statements Said makes about himself, his critical practice and late style begin to make sense. The answer to the question of the nature of that distance that Said always refers to is relational or dialectical which encompasses different modalities, namely temporal, geographical, cultural, ideological, imperial, metaphorical, and formal. To establish a distance and relationship requires two or more points, positions, subjectivities which correspond to and react towards each other. Said, therefore, prefers to be a non-humanist humanist130 rather than a humanist without internal self-contradiction. For a humanists situatedness in the humanistic discipline and discourse would only provide a reference point from which the humanist begins and engages with his or her critical inquiry. But to develop from that critical beginning, the humanist requires another point of

129

Michel Foucault, Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity, in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 168.
130

Said, HDC, 77.

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self-situating which is critical of and antagonistic towards that beginning point of reference. We cannot speak of nonhumanism or antihumanism without being situated in the context of humanism. There is the resistance of power and the power of resistance; the same applies to the nonhumanism of Saids humanism and humanism of his nonhumanism, the morality of Nietzsches immorality and immorality of his morality, the non-subjectivity of subjectivity and the subjectivity of non-subjectivity, the politics of aesthetics and the aesthetics of politics, the beginning of ending and the ending of beginning, and the historicality of geographical consciousness and the geographicality of historical consciousness. The musical motif counterpoint concisely exemplifies Saids critical position. The entire corpus of Saids critical work can be viewed as a life-long symphony in which multiple selves, histories, cultures and theories understand and interact with each other, all happening in the intellectual dialectic of past and present. Each dialectical crossover between two coordinates will generate exponentially new points which will in turn engage in criss-crossing power relations with all coordinates coexisting together from beginning till end. Paradoxes are parallel to each other as are parallels paradoxical. This is why Said says that the human mind is so indefinite and subjectivity always irreducible to transhuman cultural, discursive, and institutional formation. With greater power comes greater resistance: exile produced by power becomes paradoxically the state of maximum self-consciousness, freedom and resistance. Said was first an exile by force and latter an exile by will. His powerful oppositional criticism is enabled by his exile. Literature, art and criticism for Said are an interplay between the new and the customary without which (ex nihilo nihil fit) a beginning cannot really take place:131 Historically you cannot find an instance of great art in the Western tradition which hasnt been involved in politics.132 As Gauri Viswanathan says, Far from rejecting these works as despicable products of modern Orientalism, Said
131 132

Said, B, xvii. Said, PPC, 414.

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is clearly fascinated by them, and he believes their aesthetic value is not compromised but rather defined by the political interests that determine their writing in the first place.133 In the end, what is the politics behind Saids conception of intellectual resistance within the aesthetic and musical? And why did he remain at a critical distance from Foucault although they both believe that resistance is only possible through changing power relations? The very aesthetic form of his resistance would exemplify the dialectical connection between the aesthetic and the political without actually arguing in the abstract how the two domains are radically related. Aesthetics is not to be subsumed interpretively within the theoretical and critical discourse of power; certain subjectively chosen formal elements refuse to be interpreted within one set of critical paradigms and parameters. Said suggests that various domains are connected and their hidden relations have to be revealed; however, precisely because they are different and not reducible to each other, the asymmetrical power relation between these domains can always be reversed. The aesthetic in this way can resist the political. With his subjectivity threatened by the indiscriminate totalitarian system of death, Said addresses solely himself, the private and particular, and he resorts to the formal integrity of the memoir for rescuing his fragmented subjectivity. 134 For it is perhaps his very own selfhood being oppressed, rather than the Palestinian or the Orient. The memoir thus provides an aesthetic, literary and formal nonsubmission and

133 134

Viswanathan, Introduction, in PPC, xvi.

Saids memoir is made up of eleven essays not chronologically ordered which demonstrates his geographical consciousness rather historical consciousness. The past and the present coexist contrapuntally with each other without being reduced to each other. The memoir is yet a unity and a formal and literary synthesis of Saids history. The memoir is a dialectic of the part and the whole. What is interesting and significant here is the formal difference between Saids autobiographical treatment of himself as history and his historical and political essays on the history of Palestinians. I would contend that both Saids memoir and episodic essays on Palestine are a form of resistance which is historically specific and politically oppositional. In the case of memoir, Said employs literary techniques and forms to resist against the disintegrating and alienating cultural forces which prevent him from understanding and inventorying himself throughout his life or similarly, in the case of the history of Palestine and Palestinians, he writes episodically and fragmentarily against the unified, systematic and overarching mainstream historical narratives of Palestine and Palestinians in the West.

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resistance to the weight of silence and absence, like the late music of Beethoven exiled from the materiality of the audial and musical.

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CHAPTER FOUR

The Resistance of Politics and the Politics of Resistance: Said as a Public Intellectual

[W]hat is critical consciousness at bottom if not an unstoppable predilection for alternatives? Edward Said1

[T]o speak is to do somethingsomething other than to express what one thinks, to translate what one knows. Michel Foucault2

(I)

Foucault and Said: The intellectual debate over the intellectual

In his essay Traveling Theory (1983), after making a critical distinction between theory and the critical consciousness, Said criticizes Foucault and his followers for turning theory that could be potentially insurrectionary into a self-enclosed discourse that is not readily penetrable by the open scrutiny of the critical consciousness. His specific criticism of Foucault embodies his more general criticism of the substitution of genuine critical and intellectual reception and reflection by theoretical and methodological paradigms and protocols in critical and theoretical practice. Said refers directly to the intellectual exchange between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault that transpired on Dutch television in 1971. 3 The telling contrast between
1 2

Said, Traveling Theory, in WTC, 247.

Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 209.
3

The exchange is collected in Reflexive Water: The Basic Concerns of Mankind, ed. Fons Elders (London: Souvenir Press, 1974).

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Chomskys liberal humanist position and Foucaults radical and skeptical stance on humanism and humanistic values on topics such as human nature and the role and responsibility of the intellectual makes this debate become something of enduring interest to academics and critics. Said takes a position to affirm Chomsky as a politically engaged and responsible intellectual and criticizes Foucaults position as politically ineffective and intellectually passive. Paul Bov later in his Intellectuals in Power: A Genealogy of Critical Humanism (1986) is critical of Said for overlooking the fact that intellectuals cannot be outside the regime of truth and for investing too much significance in the figure of the intellectual and thus thereby reproducing and preserving the authoritative structure of the humanistic tradition himself.4 William Hart on the contrary criticizes Bovs Foucauldian antihumanistic misinterpretation of Nietzsches humanism and sees Foucault and Bov as less politically progressive intellectuals than Chomsky and Said.5 The battle between Saidian humanism and Foucauldian antihumanism can go on and on but the implications behind the multifold arguments and theoretical justifications generated in this debate go beyond the simple opposition between the two camps. It should be noted at the outset that the difference between them is not simply that Said is defending a humanistic position in alliance with Chomskys liberal humanism while Foucault is antihumanistic as he denies the existence of human subjectivity and dismisses the prophesying role of the intellectual as being anti-democratic and perpetuating the authoritative structure of humanism against which the oppositional intellectual rebels. There is no clear-cut distinction between humanism and antihumanism. As Harold Weiss observes with reference to Paul Bov, it is impossible to attack humanism and the privileged subject without at the same time repeating the privilege of the intellectual subject,
4

Paul Bov, Intellectuals at War: Foucault and the analytic of power, in Intellectuals in Power, 233-4. Nevertheless, the intellectual genealogy of Bovs later works shows that he is still a strong defender of Saids humanism. See Bovs In the Wake of Theory.
5

See William D. Hart, The Responsibility of the Secular Critic, Edward Said and the Religious Effect of Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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since even genealogy itself gains its authority from the very humanism and asceticism it attacks.6 After all, Foucault, Chomsky and Said converge on the view that the intellectual should provide resistance and opposition to oppression. However, it is also impossible to talk about intellectual and political resistance to oppressive power structures without rescuing the intellectuals subjectivity from the theory of subjectivity that merely considers how the subject is constituted within the systems of discourse, capital and institutions. Therefore, this debate on intellectual responsibility and agency may be resolved not by taking sides with Chomsky-Said humanism or Foucault-Bov antihumanism or by defending either of them, but by grounding intellectual and political resistance to power and domination in a theory of the subject that demonstrates that subjects are both constituted and constitutive.7 In the following, I will examine the philosophical and political orientations of Saids and Foucaults intellectual projects, particularly their views on the relation between power and knowledge or truth and the social responsibility of the intellectual. Through this comparative analysis, I will demonstrate that the difference between Saids and Foucaults understanding of the power/knowledge complex is not an intellectual or epistemic but rather a historical and political one. Although Chomsky strongly believes in a universal human nature while Foucault sees that the human subject is historically, discursively, and institutionally constituted, they both participate in the human desire, quest and struggle for freedom and they are both profoundly concerned with the political and moral questions of what a free human being is and how human freedom, political and intellectual, can be enlarged. Chomsky claims that the intellectuals job is to try to create the vision of a future just society; that is to create a humanistic social theory that is based, if possible, on some firm

6 7

Harold Weiss, The Genealogy of Justice and the Justice of Genealogy, 88.

Ben Xu, Situational Tensions of Critic-Intellectuals: Thinking through Literary Politics with Edward W. Said and Frank Lentricchia (New York: P. Lang, c1992), 52.

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and humane concept of the human essence or human nature.8 Foucault views this quest for better human nature and postulation of a better society as too utopian and idealistic because it is precisely this assertion of reason, truth, and justice as the ideals and telos of intellectual pursuit rather than as functions of the power/knowledge complex that is the problem. However, Foucaults theoretical position is more complicated than an antihumanist one. He is not simply asserting that because power is everywhere, there is no truth, freedom and subjectivity. In the secular world, there is no mere existence nor essence, every essence/existence is firmly situated and thoroughly enmeshed in the worldly network of institutions, power, and politics. Therefore, it is not a matter of whether something is there because nothing is simply there: there is no there there.9 Foucault is a theorist of the subject who concerns the history of how human beings are made subjects. Chomskys and Foucaults different epistemic positions imply also their diverse political and strategic stances as political conditions and intentions are implicated in their understanding of human nature. Nevertheless, the antihumanist belief in the constituted human nature and the humanist belief in the constitutive nature of the subject alike demonstrate that the desire and search for freedom and subjectivity is as real and inevitable as the socio-historical forces which make them and is also the motif and motivation behind cultural and political processes and movements. It is impossible for criticism of humanism to circumvent the discourse of humanism and disavow humanistic ideals not only because criticism of humanism also valorizes the humanistic pursuit of subjectivity, but also
8

Noam Chomsky, Human Nature: Justice versus Power, in Reflexive Water: The Basic Concerns of Mankind, ed. Fons Elders (London: Souvenir Press, 1974), 172. There is no there there appears in Gertrude Stein's book Everybody's Autobiography, on the occasion when Stein wished to visit her childhood home in Oakland, California. Upon arrival, she found out that the house was not there anymore. Stein expresses the historical transitoriness and temporal hiatus of everything material, intellectual and metaphysical between past and present. The movement of time changes the intellectual and geographical landscape of the there, therefore, there is there in space but it is no longer there in time. Gertrude Stein, Everybodys Autobiography (London: Virago, 1985).
9

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because such criticism derives its authority and raison dtre from the discourse of humanism. Even though Foucault tries hard not to repeat the authorial authority by avoiding attributing representative and prophetic prerogative to the intellectual, he cannot escape the inevitability of self-referentiality and self-valorization. Bov prefers Foucault to Nietzsche and Said because Foucault does not replicate as much of the authoritative structure of humanism: Foucault does not adopt Nietzsches conception of the heroic intellectual or ground intellectual and critical practice in the critical consciousness in an attempt to legitimate critical practice, as Said does.10 However, based on what grounds of value judgment and evaluation does Bov take Foucaults less direct and perhaps less paradoxical derivation of the subjective and authorial intellectual for legitimation and authority as something positive? In this chapter, instead of evaluating and interpreting Foucault in light of Saids critique of him or Bovs defense of him, I would look at Foucaults relation to humanism in hope to gain a better understanding of Foucaults theory of the human subject, and ultimately to ground intellectual and political resistance and opposition against power in an understanding of the human being that makes resistance possible. Despite the disagreement between humanism and antihumanism, they must share some common moral values in order to allow any argument and debate to take place. Even the genealogy of good and evil cannot escape applying such moral judgment and evaluation upon itself: the moral of its intention and motivation; similarly, the antihumanist critique of humanism as an ideology and discourse cannot exempt itself from also being an equally ideologically charged discourse. Antihumanism like humanism views subjectivity and the desire for a free human being as an existential necessity and inevitability. The raison dtre of criticism itself within the structure of human science is the belief that things should be and could be different from what is dictated by the status quo. If there is a law or force determining the conduct and action of human beings in the way the movement of physical
10

Paul Bov, Intellectuals in Power, 35-6.

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bodies on the earth is conditioned by gravitational force, criticism of that human conduct and action debunks and delegitimizes itself as well as reducing itself to mere observation. Humanistic and moral criticism is predicated upon the fact that human beings have the freedom to think, deliberate, choose and act alternatively. Freedom is what defines human beings and differentiates them from other things in the world. The most severe critics of the humanist subject are very often motivated by the strongest desire for human subjectivity. Foucault is one of them. Contrary to the common view of Foucault as an antihumanist in denial of human subjectivity and freedom, Foucaults understanding of the human subject is not a simplistic one and not even absolutely an antihumanistic one. Foucaults theory or genealogy of the modern subject does not deny the existence of free and critical consciousness that can perform self-reflection, self-inventory, and self-criticism. We must critically reevaluate the culturally and historically conditioned assumptions concerning the relationship amongst power, individual and intellectual freedom, and subjectivity in order not to misread Foucault and tease out the possibilities and ways of intellectual and political resistance in Foucaults theoretical work. [I]f there are relations of power throughout every social field it is because there is freedom everywhere,11 says Foucault. According to Foucault, power and freedom do not have independent existence12 and therefore should not be reified. They exist only in human relations and interpretations. All the discourses on power and freedom make sense only because they are understood in human terms. It is an existential necessity for humans to understand and see themselves as subjects rather than objects, as the source of their own action. Power is relationships of power because power entails acting, and acting in turn
11

Michel Foucault, The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom: an interview with Michel Foucault on January 20, 1984, in The Final Foucault, 12.
12

Foucault says, something called Power, with or without a capital letter, which is assumed to exist universally in a concentrated or diffused form, does not exist. Power exists only when it is put into action, even if, of course, it is integrated into a disparate field of possibilities brought to bear upon permanent structures. See Foucault, The Subject and Power, Critical Inquiry 8 (summer 1982): 788.

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involves acting upon or to someone or something. Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free.13 According to Foucault, therefore, the only situation in which there is no power is torture because it is not a relation of power in which both the subjects are free. No one is absolutely free or unfree; anything that does not possess freedom is just a thing, an object, not a human being. A relation of power is a relation of power because it is reversible. There is no power relation between a subject and object because it is not a reversible relation, and therefore it is not a relation. The absence of power in torture underlines another important aspect of power which is the fact that it is the feeling of power rather than power per se that matters. Power is absent in torture because there is no power relation in this situation; in torture there is only a relation between a subject and an object (I-It relation) rather the power relation between two subjects (I-Thou relation). In this case, the feeling of power is radically suppressed or even annihilated because ones significance, superior position requires the acknowledgment of the other with a will that is free to the extent that such acknowledgment is the outcome of conscious deliberation and comprehension rather than an enforced conformism and choiceless or unconscious servitude.14 The indelible presence of power concomitantly validates the existence of the subject because even ones subjectivity requires the freedom of will and deliberation of another subject. Even the relation between master and slave, however asymmetrical their power relation is, cannot be synthesized and reduced, in the Hegelian sense, to a single subjectivity (the master self) since the masters experience of power is dependent upon the reaction and resistance of the slave. Only within the relationships of power amongst subjects do we become what we are and understand our own self and others. There can be no subject without power and freedom. Freedom is what makes the exercise of power possible. We cannot imagine a human world without power just as we cannot imagine a
13 14

Ibid., 790.

For more details on the philosophy of pain and torture, see Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

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human world without freedom. Power and freedom necessitate each other in relationships of power; as Foucault says: the more that people are free in respect to each other, the greater the temptation on both sides to determine the conduct of others. The more open the game, the more attractive and fascinating it is [because there is a greater sense of power].15 In Chapter Two, I describe poststructuralism as antihumanistic because it is prone to explaining the historical formations of the secular world such as institutions in transhuman or nonhuman terms. If humanism tends to reify the human subject, antihumanism hypostatizes power, structure and system. Therefore, Foucaults discussion of the microphysics of power is not antihumanistic because he discusses power and freedom in terms of relations of power which are understood in human terms. Foucault is antagonistic towards the objectification of power as simply a system of domination: as Weiss argues, he valorizes the free circulation of power relations, keeping them fluid, reversible, unstable, while he castigates their coagulation.16 The fluidity and mobility of power relations are the key criteria for the reversal of strategic relations of people which are rigidified and stabilized through institutionalization. When power is understood as relations of power in which there is reversibility of power and resistance, we can no longer see power as something that garners absolute control and domination over everything and therefore allows no possibility for freedom and social change. Foucault is concerned with the issue of the individual both objectified and utilized (constituted) by discursive and institutional power-structures, all the while accompanied by a normative call to struggle against those forms.17 However, according to Weiss, Foucaults position is paradoxical: The basic problem for Foucault is to reconcile his notion of subjectivity or individuality as constituted by power (as the condition of possibility of ), with the notion of an individual opposing power (as oppression); how we can be in and of power,
15 16 17

Foucault, The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom, 20. Weiss, The Genealogy of Justice and the Justice of Genealogy, 93. Ibid., 79.

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and still work against it.18 But resistance and reversal of power relations inhere in relations of power; as Foucault himself states, in the relations of power, there is necessarily the possibility of resistance, for if there were no possibility of resistanceof violent resistance, of escape, of ruse, of strategies that reverse the situationthere would be no relations of power.19 Therefore, intellectual and political resistance is not something marginal or external to but central to Foucaults metaphysics and analytics of power and genealogy of the modern subject. It should also be noted that not only is the equation of power with absolute good ideological, the association of power with transcendental evil is also full of cultural and ideological presuppositions. All human relationships are inscribed in relationships of power; every individual is situated in a power relation with others. However, based upon the conviction that power is evil, power relations are seen as something bad in themselves and as entrapments from which one must escape. Contrarily, power relations are the only medium through which one can resist power and reverse the power relations: We are always in this kind of situation [of power struggle]. It means that we always have possibilities, there are always possibilities of changing the situation. We cannot jump outside the situation, and there is no point where you are free from all power relations. But you can always change it.20 For Foucault, Power is not evil: To exercise power over another, in a sort of open strategic game, where things could be reversed, that is not evil. That is part of love, passion, of sexual pleasure.21 As I have attempted to show in Chapter Three, Said holds the same view on power as Foucault does, specifically with regard to Orientalism as a discourse of power. The disagreement between Chomsky and Foucault on the legitimacy of appealing to the universal structure of human nature and ideal of justice as a justification and basis for political struggle and social change originates from
18 19 20

Ibid., 78. Foucault, The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom, 12.

Michel Foucault, Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity, in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 167.
21

Foucault, The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom, 18.

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their different conceptions of power relations. Genealogically speaking, the Subjectthe bedrock, the first principle of humanismaccording to Stroziers understanding of Foucault, emerges out of the discourse of knowledge and power, and therefore there is no position outside discourse or power-knowledge.22 Consequentially, the ethic of and care for the subject, values and ideals such as justice, truth, the intellectual as the privileged subject are invented as instruments of the will to and struggle for power. They are not some transcendental ideals and telos outside the relations of power. Unlike Foucault who sees the coextensiveness of resistance and domination in power relations,23 Said in Traveling Theory aligns with Chomskys refusal to view resistance as a political struggle within power relations and assert resistances independence from power: If power oppresses and controls and manipulates, then everything that resists it is not morally equal to power, is not neutrally and simply a weapon against that power. Resistance cannot equally be an adversarial alternative to power and a dependent function of it, except in some metaphysical, ultimately trivial sense. Even if the distinction is hard to draw, there is a distinction to be madeas, for example, Chomsky does when he says that he would give his support to an oppressed proletariat if as a class it made justice the goal of its struggle.24 Saids defense of Chomsky affirms the exigency of goal-oriented and ideal-committed political action and resistance. However, it still does not provide us with the necessary epistemological justification for his humanistically committed gesture which is

epistemologically challenged by Foucaults understanding of the will to power as the metaphysics of humanism. The combat in which Said and Foucault are locked is also the combat between truth and power. Said believes in the possibility of non-coercive
22

Robert M. Strozier, Foucault, Subjectivity, and Identity: Historical Constructions of Subject and Self (Detriot: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 57.
23

Foucault says, The [power] struggle is everywhere at every moment, we move from rebellion to domination, from domination to rebellion, it is all this perpetual agitation that I would like to try to bring out. In Kentyoku to chi (Pouvoir et savoir), Dits et crits, vol. 3, 404.
24

Said, WTC, 246.

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knowledge and the intellectuals responsibility of speaking truth to power that is different from the kind of truth produced and instrumentalized by power and is exemplified in his genealogical study of Orientalism. In contrast, Foucaults radical skepticism of the self-evident value of truth seems to be saying that truth is more dangerous than power and it is truth itself that is the ultimate intellectual question. For Foucault, Bov says, it is the linkage of the very power of truth (including that produced by oppositional intellectuals) with the network of oppression and resistance that forms the hegemony of the present that must be struggled against.25 Thus the intellectual resistance to power is not to speak truth to power but as Foucault states: to constitute a new politics of truth.26 However, one cannot help asking what should a new politics of truth be, and in what direction is our resistance moving and for what purposes? We have also seen that Foucault understands the importance of altering power relations. But the same questions remainhow can power relations be changed so as to achieve desired changes in the social and political economy and towards what ends? Foucault sees that the idea of the leading intellectual as the visionary of a better society based upon certain conceptions of human nature is antidemocratic and a threat to peoples struggles because the vision of the leading intellectual is itself a product of the regime of power/knowledge and thereby a perpetuator of the authority and legitimacy of that regime. I am sympathetic to Foucaults skeptical attitude towards the sovereignty and legitimacy of the intellectual as the visionary and conscience of humanity, because, as Hannah Arendt says: it is highly unlikely that we, who can know, determine, and define the natural essences of all things surrounding us, which we are not, should ever be able to do the same for ourselvesthis would be like jumping over our own shadows.27 To be Nietzschean or Foucauldian
25 26

Bov, Intellectuals in Power, 234.

Michel Foucault, Truth and Power, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. and trans. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 133.
27

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, intro. Margeret Canovan (Chicago: The

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about this: intellectuals and the masses are not in a relation of the creator and the created but only in one of the dominator/subject and the

dominated/subjected. How can the intellectuals as humans themselves be situated outside the regime of truth and be able to imagine and formulate a human nature and normalcy of human behavior and conduct? The intellectuals do not hold the privilege of, for instance, the creator of a machine who has specific and exclusive knowledge of the optimal conditions for the optimal operation of the machine because he made it. There is a uniquely human desire to differentiate human beings from other things and to search for higher ideals and values that could provide meanings for human life. But at the same time, we realize that human beings can know only what they themselves make; meanings and values are made, and they are therefore secular rather than sacred. Anything or any truth that is transcendentalized is considered to be unsecular or theological and therefore having more to do with ahistorical impulses than with critical consciousness. The dilemma is that no worldly authority should be authorized as it is made by human beings and therefore ideological, relative, and refutable; similarly and ironically, the same applies to otherworldly authority as it is not made by humans and cannot really be known. I think Said would agree with Foucaults questioning of the intellectuals status and identity as he himself has done in his critique of the authority and legitimacy of the Orientalists because such skeptical scrutiny is a self-conscious and self-critical refusal to appeal to the quasi-theological authority presiding over the humanistic enterprise of Orientalism. Foucaults idea of the specific intellectual engaged in local political struggle against power with specific expertise in his or her own field is to counteract the universal intellectual who proclaims to be the master of truth and justice.28 However, if there is, as Chomsky says: always some conception of human nature, implicit or explicitly, underlying a doctrine of social order or social

University of Chicago Press, 1998), 10.

28

Foucault, Truth and Power, 126.

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change, 29 to what kind of authority does the justification for some conception of human nature appeal? It is now time to turn to Saids humanism and humanistic criticism for an answer. Said identifies his criticism with secular criticism as opposed to religious criticism. His Orientalism and The World, the Text, and the Critic, which examine the historical formation of the institution of literary criticism, are attempts to secularize human institutions by historical and genealogical hermeneutics. The basic thesis underlying Saids criticism in Orientalism is that the Orient (the world), Orientalism (the text), and the Orientalist (the critic) are situated within the material reality of culture, politics, desire, and interests. These three entities are secular and worldly in the sense that they are humanly and historically made, institutionalized and authorized. According to Said, the institutionalization and naturalization of Orientalist studies as an authoritative source of knowledge of the Orient has lent an air of ontological stability to the Western idea of the Orient. Therefore, the idea of the Orient and the whole institution of Orientalism have become unsecular, religiously inclined, and serving as an agent of closure, shutting off human investigation, criticism, and effort in deference to the authority of the more-than-human, the supernatural, the other-worldly. He continues: Like culture, religion therefore furnishes us with systems of authority and with canons of order whose regular effect is either to compel subservience or to gain adherents.30 That is to say the appeal to other-worldly authority is to make power relations irreversible and resistance futile and impossible. Saids humanism is inscribed in his belief that despite being situated within the relations of power amongst cultures, paradigms, and systems, the ability of critical consciousness to critique, secularize and historicize its own worldly situation and constitution is the foundation of intellectual resistance against power: On the one hand, the individual mind registers and is very much aware of the collective whole,
29

Noam Chomsky, On language: Chomsky's Classic Works, Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language in One Volume (New York: New Press, 1998), 70.
30

Said, WTC, 290.

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context, or situation in which it finds itself. On the other hand, precisely because of this awarenessa worldly self-situating, a sensitive response to the dominant culturethat the individual consciousness is not naturally and easily a mere child of the culture, but a historical and social actor in it.31 Said seems to be saying that humans are cultural and historical beings, but they are not merely that because of the critical consciousness which is transcultural and transhistorical. Such interpretation would lead to criticism similar to that of Foucaults conception of intellectual resistance, i.e. how we can be inside and outside of cultures and to that of Saids critique of orientalism; as Robert Young questions: how Said separates himself from the coercive structures of knowledge that he is describing.32 However, if the binary thinking which polarizes power and resistance finds Foucaults or Saids idea of resistance paradoxical, Foucault and Said in turn see such binary opposition between power and resistance misleading and limiting. The reversible nature of the power relation between the powerful and the powerless for Foucault is the dialectical interaction between the critical consciousness and power for Said. Power functions through historically emergent and constituted institutions, authorities and discourses which in turn determine the socio-historical formation of the human subject. The historical and material existence of human beings entails their situatedness within the network of power relations. As I said in Chapter Three, it is impossible and unnecessary for humans to live outside history and power in order to be truly free. Freedom is enabled, felt, experienced, lived and understood through intellectual and political resistance against power, not resistance independent or outside of power relations which would be unworldly and ahistorical. The resistance of critical consciousness against power is simultaneously dependent on, responsive and resistant to the historical conditions under which power functions. It is the dialectic relation between resistance and power which
31 32

Ibid., 15.

Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing, History, and the West (London: Routledge, 1990), 127. For a similar critique of Said, see John McGowan, Postmodernism and Its Critics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 165-67.

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makes the power relation between resistance and power reversible. In addition, the conception of history as progress towards an ideal human nature is faulty to Foucault and Said. Said is critical of the idea of origin; he thinks that culture and language do not originate from an origin passively but are actively created by the secular process of beginning and beginning again. On the one hand, it is ahistorical to conceive history as a progressive process towards an ultimate human nature, since human nature is historical and history a continual struggle against power. On the other hand, it is also ahistorical to see history as filiative, i.e. as enabled by an origin from which everything descends and derives its legitimacy. Since for Said the relation between two subjectivities and cultures is dialectical without the overcoming or overshadowing of one by the other, the nature of the relation between different subjectivities for Said is affiliative rather than filiative. Said, the secular critic, stands in an irreconcilable and dialectical power relation to everything. The dialectics and two-way dialogue between different cultures and histories demonstrated in Orientalism, Culture and Imperialism and Saids other writings is implicated in the dialectic of different individual critical consciousnesses. As I have mentioned in my discussion of secular criticism in Chapter Two, it is only in history, due to the ahistorical, undialectical and synthetic impulses of imperialism, that some cultures are subsumed under others in terms of identity and history, but not in the intellectual geographical consciousness. Said emphasizes time and again that cultures are historically and differently made and remade by people individually and collectively without ontological stability because of the capacity of critical consciousness to reflect upon its thinking and worldly location. Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism are written based upon the premise that it is possible to achieve intercultural communication and mutual understanding because the human capacity for self-understanding is only possible if the self is situated within relations to others. Orientalism is written in Western critical and theoretical language and for a Western audience but it is at the same time for Said himself, as a self-inventory of an Oriental, the

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cultural other. As an Arab brought up in a Western colonial culture, Said himself demonstrates that cultures are not mutually exclusive; and without sustaining an dialectical yet unreconciled relation between the Western Said and the Arab Said, he would not be able to write Orientalism: I have tried to maintain a critical consciousness, as well as employing those instruments of historical, humanistic, and cultural research of which my education has made me the fortunate beneficiary. 33 That critical consciousness exists in the dialectical relation between two or more locales. Accordingly, cultures are dependent upon each other for the continuous historical process of deeper self-understanding which will in turn lead to change and improvement in cultures and society. A critical and moral distinction must be made between the will to self-understanding and the will to conquest and assimilate the other. The latter is in turn predicated upon the belief in the ontological hierarchy of cultural identities. Without the Arab Said resisting being co-opted by the Western Said (imperialism and colonialization), Saids work would be orientalist; with the Western Said defeated by the triumph of Arab Said (decolonization and nationalism), his work would be nationalist and xenophobic. Saids Orientalism is a rejection rather than an assertion of cultural and moral relativism (East is East and West is West). His critical consciousness is the foundation of humanism, and it connects different domains and periods: humanism is sustained by a sense of community with other interpreters and other societies and periods: strictly speaking, therefore, there is no such thing as an isolated humanist. [ ] This is to say that every domain is linked to every other one, and that nothing that goes on in our world has ever been isolated and pure of any outside influence.34 The Goethian concept of Weltliteratur 35 the study of all the
33 34 35

Said, O, 26. Ibid., xxiii; emphasis added.

In the essay Philology and Weltliteratur, Auerbach discusses the Goethian understanding of Weltliteratur as one of the purposes of philology, a historicist discipline, which studies all kinds of literature in the world as a whole in transcendence of genres, institutions and cultures. Said, one of the translators of Auerbachs essay, often refers to Weltliteratur as exemplar of his holistic and historicist humanism. See Said, HDC, 95-6.

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literatures of the world as a symphonic whole that could be apprehended theoretically as having preserved the individuality of each other without losing sight of the whole36 is possible for Said because the critical consciousness is at once particular and general. The entire human race can be comprehended as a meaningful whole through understanding individual histories dialectically and collectively as a whole. In other words, both the totalizing view of humanity as united by a transcendentalized and transcultural human nature and the Epicurean atomist view of human beings as mere free-floating atomic entities existing in a random, orderless, and meaningless world, as an arbitrary discursive and interpretive formation, are reductive. Saids humanism conceives individual human beings as self-orbiting wheels self-conscious of innumerable criss-crossing dialectical relations between individual particular orbits and between each individual orbit and the general movement of the giant wheel of the historical epoch: the orbits of individual wheels will contribute to changes in more general movement which will in turn bring changes to particular orbits. Based upon the belief in the individual critical consciousness, Said says: We are not scribblers or humble scribes but minds whose actions become a part of the collective human history being made all around us.37 It is therefore important to see culture and art as belonging not to some free-floating ether or to some rigidly governed domain or iron determinism, but to some large intellectual endeavorsystems and currents of thoughtconnected in complex ways to doing things, to accomplishing certain things, to force, to social class and economic production, to diffusing ideas, values, and world pictures. 38 The aim of Saids emphasis upon fostering and practicing humanistic and philological hermeneutics to understand other cultures, periods, writers and to transit from one realm, one area of human experience to another39 is twofold: to achieve cultural and
36 37 38 39

Said, O, xxiv. Said, HDC, 68. Said, WTC, 170. Said, HDC, 80.

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social coexistence and to search for the higher truth concerning humanity as a whole across cultures and historical epochs. This unchanging and absolute truth according to Vico never resides in history: Only in the entirety of history is there truth, and only by the understanding of its whole course may one obtain it.40 The moral and epistemological dimensions of humanism are coextensive with each other. For Said, once higher truth is comprehended through connecting cultures and histories by the critical consciousness, this new understanding in turn will modify the critical consciousness itself. The critical consciousness forever confronts its own findings and truths at a distance. The cause (the producing of truth by the critical consciousness) and effect (truth produced) are dialectical, and higher truth concerning humanity too is subject to historical changes. Because of the dialectic of cause and effect, and the past and the present, the movement of the history of civilization, according to both Vico and Said, is spiral rather than circular or uni-directionally progressive. The truth about human beings is that they become what they make and they make to become other than what they have become. Human progress cannot be equated with scientific progress which is the moving towards a better understanding of and more precise definition of the essence of the natural world. In the human world, a new understanding will create new historical conditions, which will, therefore, require new historical understanding and consciousness. The human self-referential quest for human nature would be like the paradoxical act of jumping over our own shadows due to the circularity of the cause and effect of this truth of humanity (the goal of humanistic understanding is to obtain this truth of humanity and in turn the unity of humanity is the reason why humanistic understanding is possible). Said has followed Vicos historicism in asserting that humanity is historical as human beings are always inside history, and yet at the same time humanity is not merely constituted by history because the critical consciousness can reflect on, respond to and make history. The epistemic
40

Auerbach, Vicos Contribution to Literary Criticism, 37; emphasis added.

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perspective is always historical and subjective, therefore, human knowledge or self-knowledge is inevitably undermined by the indefinite nature of the human mind which makes humanistic knowledge radically incomplete, insufficient, provisional, disputable, and arguable. 41 There is always something beyond mere emotional expression, intellectual articulation, theoretical and historical formulation about the human mind and subjectivity. Human subjectivity, which is both a tragic flaw42 and constitutive element of humanistic knowledge and criticism, has to be recognized and in some way reckoned with since there is no use in trying to make a neutral, mathematical science out of it. 43 Subjectivity in the form of critical consciousness is within secular history yet not reducible to it because of its capacity for self-reflection. Subjective thinking itself resists to being fully understood by historical or genealogical hermeneutics. Because of the subjective indefinite nature of the human mind, humanism must confront the indefinite, incomprehensible and irrational production of human subjectivity. If as Said asserts relations of irreconcilability and antagonism between cultures must be maintained by our critical consciousness, not only would the conflict between truth and power but also that between idealism (the religious, theological) and historicism (the human, secular) be insurmountable. To return to the question of Chomskys and Saids conception of human nature, Chomskys statement that [t]here is always some conception of human nature, implicit or explicitly, underlying a doctrine of social order or social change is correct for Said only if that conception of human nature is situated within a dialectical relation with social change. If there is a human nature for Said, it would be the historical, dialectical and geographical critical consciousness which emphasizes on the non-subjectivity of subjectivity and the nonessential nature of human nature. The problem with Chomskys idealism is his thinking of the relation
41 42 43

Said, HDC, 12. Ibid. Ibid.

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between truth and power within the framework of binary opposition. The idea of truth as truth outside power and discourse or as mere instrument of power inside power is undialectical and will mislead people to question the authority and legitimacy of truth outside power. For Said, there is no outside otherworldly and transcendental authority to be relied upon in the speaking of truth to power, because the appeal to that kind of authority of truth is the closure of critical consciousness. Like Foucault, Said is very much aware of the danger of truth being instrumentalized by power. The authority to which Saids secular criticism appeals would be: the worldly authority of critically conscious resistance to every kind of authority including its own. Even ones own subjectivity is to be resisted, as far as Said and Foucault are concerned. Because of the dialectical and reversible nature of intersubjective power relations, to be is simultaneously becoming and not becoming oneself. There is the non-subjectivity of subjectivity and the subjectivity of non-subjectivity in both Said and Foucault: what is critical consciousness at bottom if not an unstoppable predilection for alternatives? one knows.45 Antihumanism cannot totally reject humanism; For Said, having faith, will, love, and goal, which are humanisms ideals inscribed within its subjectivist discourse, is necessary to intellectual practice and resistance: It isnt at all a matter of being optimistic, but rather of continuing to have faith in the ongoing and literally unending process of emancipation and enlightenment that frames and gives direction to the intellectual vocation.46 Even the antihumanistic attack on humanism requires a goal and target of criticism, however, as Ben Xu observes, In todays criticism and theory, the notion of historical progress or human nature, even as a tentative measure for the ethical value of opposition, becomes the surest indication of theoretical naivety and
44 45 46

44

and to speak is to do

somethingsomething other than to express what one thinks, to translate what

Said, Traveling Theory, 247. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 209. Said, O, xv.

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has been abandoned without a second thought. Deprived of any possible context of evaluation, the radicality or oppositionalness of ideas begins to be seen as a value by itself and not determined by the possible social changes it is likely to promote. And as a consequence, the political goal of being radical or oppositional becomes ambivalent or even self-contradictory.47 Xu has just described the difficulty of intellectual resistance in todays postmodern society: we no longer know what we are opposing and for what purposes. Foucault avoids the question of whether human nature exists; he historicizes human nature and the idea of justice which according to him serves as the apparatus of power and mask of injustice. It is against Foucaults rejection of humanistic ideals and purposes as mere functions of power that Said charges Foucault of failing to take seriously his own ideas about resistances to power.48 But if we look at Foucaults intellectual biography humanistically and genealogically, intellectual and political resistance and opposition are the prevailing motif inherent in his theoretical discourse. Many would acknowledge Foucault for his honesty in his substitutive sign for the metaphysical will to power.49 The view of Foucault as a radical antihumanist intellectual would be coextensive with the criticism of Said as self-contradictory, dishonest and elitist, for while employing Foucaults theory of discourse in his Orientalism, Said still identifies his criticism as humanistic and continuously avows and practices humanism. With reference to Saids valorization of the traditional role of the intellectual in speaking truth to power and imagining alternatives to the regime of truth at the expense of being critical of this regime as the ultimate cause of hegemony and oppression, Bov says: Nietzsche and Foucault more generally tell us that it is the linkage of the very power of truth (including that produced by oppositional intellectuals) with the network of
47 48 49

genealogical

deconstruction of the modern subject and disclosure of humanism as merely a

Ben Xu, Situational Tensions of Critic-Intellectuals, 81. Said, WTC, 246. Bov, In the Wake of Theory, 132.

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oppression and resistance that forms the hegemony of the present that must be struggled against. Not to struggle against this regime and its affiliations is inevitably to reproduce and extend it and the misery it causes. To imagine alternatives within it without at the same time struggling against itby, for example, calling into question the seemingly highest ideals we have and desireis not critical at all. Critique is practiced only when the appropriation of truth itself is at stake, not simply morals or attitudes.50 But in accordance with Foucaults and Saids conception of the power relation between resistance and power as reversible and dialectical, there would be no position outside the regime of the knowledge/power complex; as long as individual consciousness stands in an antithetical relation to this regime, a new politics of truth51 will emerge and in turn be counteracted by a new critical consciousness produced in relation to the new politics of truth. In criticizing Foucaults antihumanism, William Harts distinction between Said and Chomsky as political radicals and Bov and Foucault as epistemological radicals52 repeats the binary opposition between epistemology and politics, which does not lead to a more proper understanding of the relationship between Foucault and Said. Foucault and Said hold more or less the same epistemological views on subjectivity, knowledge and power, but they hold different political positions and execute different political actions. Said employs politics to critique epistemological theory, while Foucault relies on epistemological ground to attack politics. The dialectical relation between epistemology and politics in this case is coextensive with that between Foucault and Said. The politics behind Traveling Theory and other essays in which Said historicizes and politicizes Foucaults theory of power in spite of his actual agreement with Foucaults understanding of resistance is that Said concerns the political effectiveness of his criticism in specific historical situations rather than the epistemological correctness of Foucaults theory in abstraction. On the other
50 51 52

Bov, Intellectuals in Power, 234. Foucault, Truth and Power, 133. Hart, The Responsibility of the Secular Critic, 131.

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hand, the politics behind Orientalism in which he adopts Foucault despite his actual resistance against Foucaults determinism is that without subjecting the aesthetic and literariness of orientalist literature per se but only the discipline of orientalist studies to the analytics of knowledge/power, Said preserves an aesthetic domain for the resistance against not only the knowledge/power regime but also the totalizing explanatory power and determinism of the theory of power. When we are able to see the parallel of the antihumanism of Saids humanism and the humanism of Foucaults antihumanism, we can historicize Bovs value judgment and preference for Foucaults less paradoxical and indirect repetition of humanism and contextualize Saids contradictory and direct legitimation of humanism by grounding his criticism in the critical consciousness and moral role of the intellectual. Bov was writing at a time when humanisms will to power and its regime of knowledge/power ought to be unmasked in order to expose the injustices and antihumanism of humanism. Said has been writing to respond to the historical conflicts between humanism and antihumanism; his humanism addresses the historical and intellectual situation in which the historical commitment, revolutionary spirit and political effectiveness of the theory of knowledge/power have been neutered by academic and ahistorical application, dissemination and institutionalization. Foucaults theory of power has been reproduced in the academy but the revolutionary impulse and historical engagement of Foucaults work cannot be reproduced. Saids humanism must be read in the context of Foucaults theory of power and resistance but it would be equally reductive to read Said as mere Foucauldian or anti-Foucauldian. Saids purpose is to contextualize and historicize Foucaults theory, whether by directly employing or politicizing it, under particular historical circumstances in order to maximize the political effectiveness of both Foucaults theory and his own criticism. In actual resistance against power, epistemology without political and historical consideration is powerless, while political activism without epistemic understanding and grounding is dangerous. According to Said, the

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nonsubjectivity of the intellectual who doesnt know exactly where he is heading nor what he will think tomorrow,53 should not stop the public intellectual from making firm and unambiguous political and institutional decisions and executing immediate action on an everyday basis. Saids humanism is to counteract the degradation of the theory of power to an epistemic justification for political withdrawal and intellectual indifference. It should be noted once again that the deconstruction of the modern subject as a bourgeois myth does not and should not nullify and delegitimize the desire for subjectivity as an existential necessity. The bourgeois myth registers this desire and is an ideological and material manifestation of this desire, albeit it has in the end become a repressive regime. The poststructuralist critique of the bourgeois subject is only possible if it is underpinned by a better understanding of what freedom really is or should be like. Those who do not allow for the possibility of human agency and subjectivity are being hypocritical and apocalyptic. On the other hand, absolute freedom in absence of power is illusory and impossible. Humanism is only meaningful in the context of oppressive power. Freedom achieved without resistance to power is not valuable; therefore, according to Said, every human production, however ideologically situated and co-opted, is valuable for its resistance against its environmental determinants. The two labels Humanism and Antihumanism have acquired various ideological and cultural connotations through multiplying ramifications and applications, and they have become for some not only intellectual, critical, theoretical but also professional positions which they take without being organically related to the historical and political circumstances that have given rise to the needs for them to take their positions, as Said says: Look at the result of all the massive infusion that American literary, and I suppose, cultural studies in general, have received through theory in the last thirty years: structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, semiotics, Marxism,

feminism, all of it. Effectively theyre all weightless they all represent
53

Foucault, Power and Sex, 161.

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academic choices and a lot of them are not related to the circumstances that originally gave rise to them.54 The question of how ideological meanings of these paradigms of thinking and writing can be critically examined requires urgent attention, and analysis of their historical or genealogical formations would be a useful way to prevent these schools of thought becoming mere positions following academic neutering, institutionalization,

professionalization, intellectual compartmentalization, and reification. When genealogically examined, humanism and antihumanism are merely

antagonistic and contradictory, they exist within the same context of power relations. The relationship between humanism and antihumanism is not one of exclusion. Therefore, one cannot make value judgment and decide which one of these schools of thought is better or more right. My purpose here is to propose an alternative and hopefully more dialectically productive way of reading Said and Foucault on the issue of intellectual and political resistance that circumvents the binary opposition between humanism and antihumanism. Despite Saids own disagreement with Foucaults political position and the totalizing tendency of his theory of power, Foucaults theory of power and dialectics of power and resistance (freedom) are essential to the understanding of Saids notion of humanistic resistance. Moreover, it would be more theoretically plausible and applicable instead of critically challenging to mount a critique of Saids humanistic position within the theoretical framework of Foucaults analysis of the regime or discourse of power-knowledge, which topples the foundation of humanism. Said historicizes and politicizes Foucault, because he is indebted to him: Saids historical and humanistic criticism is an act of showing his indebtedness to intellectual figures of great importance to him including Foucault. It is important to note that there is no historical, cultural, discursive transcendence for both Foucault and Said. The association of transcendence with criticism has led many critics to find Saids Orientalism repeating the objective and
54

Said, PPC, 113.

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neutral authoritative structure of orientalism itself: as Said claims, people always create reality through already in-place discourses, then how is anyone, Said included, able to get outside those discourses in order to offer a critique of them? [] The fabrication of less inflammatory, more positive images of the Arab that Said recommends implies an ability to transcend prevailing ways of perceiving the world, but Said never explains how exactly such transcendence is possible.55 If there is anything we should go beyond, it would be the intellectual trap of the undialectical, polarizing and exclusivist binary opposition between humanism and antihumanism.

(II)

Vico and Said: atavism and historicism

Throughout his career, Said makes no distinction between truth and power in order to identify his criticism with truth; instead he makes a distinction between the secular and humanistic and the religious and supernatural and defines his critical practice as combating the sacred with the secular. Saids humanism is founded on this distinction which is in turn genealogically based upon the Vichian notion that human or historical knowledge is possible because we can only know what we make, and we cannot know the natural or theological because it is made by God.56 Said time and again reminds us that history is continuously made and remade individually and collectively by men and women, not by supernatural or transhuman forces: human history as made by human action and understood accordingly is the very ground of the humanities. 57 However, insofar as Saids humanism appeals to human

Michael P. Spikes, Edward W. Said: Political Critique, Understanding Contemporary American Literary Theory (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press: 2003), 109; emphasis added. The idea of critiquing outside of or in transcendence of discourse is a linguistic and conceptual misinterpretation underpinned and rigidified by binary thinking. The epistemic principle of Vicos New Science is that knowledge and creation are the same thing. According to Vico, humans can have more certain historical knowledge of history than scientific knowledge of nature because they make history: For there can be no more certain history than that which is recounted by its creator. Vico, The New Science, 349.
57 56

55

Said, HDC, 10.

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subjectivity, he also appeals to the indefinite, uncertain, contradictory, paradoxical, indefinable, the almost mystical, as his late-style writings exemplify. There is something about the human mind that escapes total comprehension, which constitutes the tragic flaw of humanistic knowledge. According to Said, such a tragic flaw of human knowledge can only be remedied and mitigated by the disciplines of philological learning and philosophical understanding but can never be superseded. 58 Saids recognition of these qualities of subjectivity paradoxically admits the irrationality, preternature of human imaginative and material production into the domain of secular and rational humanistic understanding and knowledge: Like Vico, Said wants to see all these myths and images as human productions, therefore accessible to rational understanding, because they are man-made in the first place. But to inhabit a regime of these images is precisely to be beset by the irrational, by the mysterious forces of the alienated productions of the human imagination.59 The supernatural, which is outside the epistemological domain circumscribed by Vico and Said, nevertheless, exists coextensively with the human historical world, and the same applies to the natural world also. If according to Vico, human beings can acquire full and perfect knowledge of the human world but never the natural and supernatural world because they do not make them, then there is always something incomplete and imperfect about historical knowledge or self-knowledge because we cannot answer epistemic and existential questions that fall outside the epistemically accessible domain, such as questions that Stephen Hawking reiterates: Why are we here? Where do we come from? How did the universe begin? Why is the universe the way it is? How will it end? 60 Human knowledge and language are historical, thus historicist scholars provide

58 59 60

Ibid., 12. W. J. T. Mitchell, Secular Divination: Edward Saids Humanism, 470.

Steven Hawking, quote from Steven Hawkings Universe, in PBS.org, clipped on January 21, 2007, <http://www.pbs.org/wnet/hawking/html/home.html>.

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diachronic studies of knowledge; however, how would it be possible to provide an ultimate account of the origin or raison dtre or meaning of knowledge and language self-referentially within the system of knowledge and language without considering the raison dtre of the intellectual capacity for acquiring and producing knowledge and language or the desire for knowledge, freedom and power? These unresolved questions all go back to the first question of metaphysics: Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?61 Instead of saying that there is always the ahistorical dimension inside and outside human history that we humans just cannot validate epistemically, it seems that the ahistorical and the historical dimensions of humanity exist only within a dialectical relationship with each other as the ahistorical human desire for power, freedom, justice and eternity would not exist if it were not situated within the historical and temporal world of encumbrances and ephemerality. However, as I would show in Chapter Five, universalism is to a certain extent irrelevant to historicist humanism even though a universalist conception of human nature has often been a popular intellectual pursuit. Having discussed the intellectual dynamics and relationship between Said and his intellectual predecessor Foucault in the previous section, I would, in the following, situate Said in the intellectual genealogy of Vicos humanism in order to understand and analyze not only the intellectual relationship between Said and Vico but more importantly the intellectual, historical and political meaning of Saids grounding of his humanism in Vicos historicist humanism in the postmodern context of Saids criticism. As I have attempted to show in Chapters Two and Three, Saids literary criticism exemplifies and substantiates the materiality of language and historical situatedness of literature. Such historical and material critique of human production is based
61

See Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 19. Nihilism, which believes in the meaninglessness of being, is a self-deception and is never one of the answers to this question. One can impose value judgment upon what are already there in existence and compare which is better or worse, however, such judgment cannot be made upon existence and non-existence; according to the nihilists, human existence is no different from or is even better than non-existence but how would non-existence make no difference or be better to them if they had never come into existence?

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upon Vicos material and dialectical view of human language and knowledge. Knowledge of human beings (self-knowledge) and of the natural world are both pursued by humans themselves; human beings who are both the manipulators and dependents of nature are also part of nature and must study nature and discover natural laws in order to survive in and develop from it. There are scientific principles and laws inherent in the physical world and our own corporeal body. The human body, according to Vico, is mans most immediate reality and first piece of knowledge, from which the tree of human knowledge evolves. According to Aristotle, we derive knowledge from the information filtered by the senses. 62 As Said in his essay Vico on the Discipline of Bodies and Texts observes, [a]lthough Vicos style is a very learned and bookish one, what it frequently describes is quite physical.63 The body which furnishes Vico with all sorts of imagery, metaphors and analogies in understanding human history and institution is Vicos first source of knowledge. Language is the mediator between the body and the mind, as Vico says: speech stands as it were midway between mind and body.64 Vicos materialist perspective on human language has demonstrated the dialectical relationship between the natural and historical dimension of humanity. According to Vico, the origin of language is anthropomorphic and human knowledge anthropocentric. The following excerpt from New Science expresses Vicos view on the relationship amongst the natural (body), the historical (knowledge production), and language:
Noteworthy too is the fact that in all languages most expressions for inanimate objects employ metaphors derived from the human body and its parts, or from human senses and emotions. Thus, we say head for top or beginning; front or brow, and shoulders or back, for before and behind [] And countless other examples can be cited in any language. All this follows from Axiom I: In his ignorance, man makes himself the measure of the universe. And in the examples cited, man has reduced the entire world to his own body. Now, rational metaphysics teach us that man becomes
62

Vico quotes Aristotle in The New Science, Nihil est in intellectu quin prius fuerit in sensu. (Nothing goes to the intellect without passing through the senses), 363.
63 64

Said, Exile, 83. See Vico, The New Science, 1045.

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all things through understanding, homo intelligendo fit omnia. But with perhaps greater truth, this imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding, homo non intelligendo fit omnia. For when man understands, he extends his mind to comprehend things; but when he does not understand, he makes them out of himself and, by transforming himself, 65 becomes them.

Vico tries to reconstruct the lost dialectical links amongst human knowledge, language, and physical and material origins of human production. This is contrary to the structuralist and poststructuralist views on language and methodology of linguistic studies which attempt to sever the dialectical relationship between human intellect and physical nature and deconstruct the ontological stability, independent existence of nature, and the referential and representative function of language in the web of discursivity and textuality. Poststructuralist linguistics has turned language as a dwelling-house of being in the Heideggerian sense into a prison-house. The Vichian and poststructuralist views on language may both seem to imply that words, texts, and discourses are made by humans and are historical. However, their theoretical directions and emphases are contrastive. On one hand, as Said observes, The anthropomorphization of knowledge, against which Nietzsche was later to rebel, is Vicos project, even if civilization progresses (if that is the word) from the body to impersonal institutions.66 On the other hand, the poststructuralist methodology alienates human production and institutions from critical agency and subsumes literary and discursive production to the determinism of epistemic and discursive rules that cover every instance of authorial flair, thus reducing the originality of any writer he reads to a deliberate accident occurring within the latent, ordered possibilities of all language.67 From a historical point of view and in accordance with Vicos tripartite structure of the history of human civilization which emerges from the primitive and poetic mind (age of gods), the moderately reasonable (age of heroes), to the obsessively intellectual (age of man), the
65 66 67

Ibid., 405. Said, Vico on the Discipline of Bodies and Texts, 85. Said, B, 294.

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poststructuralists theory and method are not antihumanistic. Rather such theory and method manifest the distinctive theoretical-historical perspective from which poststructuralism accounts for how human beings have come to be what they are and act as they do. Despite Frederic Jamesons criticism of Structuralism for its lack of historical consciousness, poststructuralist theorization of the human reality, according to Jameson, has its deeper justification, which must be sought elsewhere, outside the claims and counterclaims for scientific validity or technological progress. It lies in the concrete character of the social life of the so-called advanced countries today, which offer spectacle of a world from which nature as such has been eliminated, a world saturated with messages and information, whose intricate commodity network may be seen as the very prototype of a system of signs.68 Devoid of ontological stability, human material and corporeal reality no longer serves as an epistemic and scientific basis for knowledge, as Foucault observes: We believe, in any event, that the body obeys the exclusive laws of physiology and that it escapes the influence of history, but this too is false. The body is moulded by a great many distinct regimes; it is broken down by the rhythms of work, rest, and holidays; it is poisoned by food or values, through eating habits or moral laws; it constructs resistances. [] Nothing in mannot even his bodyis sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men. 69 Suppose the poststructuralist diagnosis is accurate and valid, and, as W. J. T. Mitchell says: Suppose Vicos deeper lesson was that human beings finally cannot sustain a knowledge/power relation to their own creations but find themselves caught up as victims in the terrible systems (social, economic, and political) that they have wrought,
68

70

our own consciousness and

Frederic Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), viii-ix; emphasis added.
69

Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 87-8.
70

See Mitchell, Secular Divination: Edward Saids Humanism, 470.

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self-knowledge are constituted by the historically emergent regime of power/knowledge, and our very belief in and understanding of universal human nature, truth, justice is responsible for the repression of human agency and freedom. Foucault thinks that the intellectuals job is not to distinguish the true from the untrue but to replace the regimes of truth with a new politics of truth.71 If the idea of man, as Foucault wagers, would be erased like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea once the arrangements of human knowledge crumble,
72

then what would allow the idea of man to be drawn

and human knowledge rebuilt on rocks rather than sand? Tinged with nihilism and with disavowal of higher ideals for the role of the privileged intellectual, Foucaults theory is not to lay down rules or to prescribe formulas for resistance, but to conceive resistance as a creative process; to create and recreate, to change the situation, 73 in order to allow for the work of freedom, i.e. self-creation rather than self-discovery. The heyday of modern civilization becomes the beginning of a new barbarism and skepticism. Both Vico and Foucault are the intellectual predecessors of Said who is highly conscious of the historical contexts and political subtexts of Vicos and Foucaults critical work. Vico aims to establish the philosophical and common law of humanity that is concomitant and coherent with his faith in Christianity; Foucault writes to deconstruct and resist institutional, authoritative, discursive and transhuman regimes of truth and various cultural and ideological practices. Said himself also writes within a particular historical context to a targeted public constituency for specific purposes. Saids connection with Vico and Foucault in this context would be meaningful only if the connection is understood within the historical context of his intellectual and political reference to Vico and Foucault in his humanistic criticism and practice. As
71 72

Foucault, Truth and Power, 133.

Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 387. B. Gallagher and A. Wilson in an interview with Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: New Press, 1997), 168.
73

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discussed and demonstrated in the previous section and Chapter Three, the difference between Said and Foucault is political and strategic rather than intellectual and epistemic; after the use of Foucaults discursive framework in Orientalism, Said makes a conscious effort to distance himself from Foucault in his later critical work. It is important to understand the political and strategic value of this effort made by Said whose purpose is not to disagree with or refute Foucaults theory of knowledge/power but to address at the historical moment his worldliness or situatedness with regard to the historically emergent in US society and the US academy. Said diagnoses in his late lectures on humanism74 that the major intellectual and political question we are faced with today is not how to deconstruct and resist the hegemony of power and injustice but how to rescue and create meanings of human and cultural life after deconstruction. It is therefore significant, and not incidental I think, for Said to retrieve and use Vico in the postmodern U.S. context in his manifesto of humanism in Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004), which crystallizes his early interest in Vico.75 Vicos study of the history of humankind in New Science is to discover and reinvent meanings for humanity. For Vico, because there are observable and distinctive laws in human history, nothing that happens in history is accidental. As Collingwood says: A truly historical view of human history sees everything in that history as having its own raison dtre and coming into existence in order to serve the needs of the men whose minds have corporately created it.76 Vicos atavistic effort in inhabiting the poetic and imaginative mind of primitive men from whence latter civilizations evolve and his etymological method of retro-signification,77 which drives
74

HDC is a posthumously published work of Said which consists of a series of lecture on humanism in the U.S. context. As a postgraduate student at Harvard, Said is already profoundly interested in Vico and in his early academic career, he published a number of essays on Vico: Vico: Autodidact and Humanist (1967), Conclusion: Vico in His Work and in This (1975) in B, Vico on the Discipline of Bodies and Texts (1976) in Exile, etc.
76 77 75

Collingwood, The Idea of History, 77. This term is used in Pierre Guiraud, Etymologie et Ethymologia (Motivation et

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meanings of signs back to physical bodies from which they are generated,78 demonstrate that the raison dtre of cultural and linguistic formations is not exhausted by the will to power but grounded in physical reality. In a state of abject intellectual poverty, limited in vision and knowledge yet highly motivated by instincts and bodily needs, powerful in imagination, senses and instinct, the first men in the earliest stage of human civilization cannot act otherwise but in the way they did upon the encounter with natural phenomena and in accordance with their bestial impulses. It is an existential necessity and inevitability for the first men to conjure up the idea of Jove, a divine being, after the sight and sound of the thunderstorm, as Vicos narrative tells us, and from that very idea of Jove to the myth of Jove, moral sentiments, disciplines, and finally political structures and human institutions (marriage, family, society) begin to evolve. Mythical imagination and sign production is the beginning of political institution and social order: the concept of concrete realism in primitive language and myth are extremely suggestive of modern tendencies [which are alluded not] to certain parties or countries, but to trends of thought and feeling spread all over our world.79 This dialectic of word and political and institutional materiality exemplifies Saids humanistic notion that every domain is linked to every other one80 and that the relation between words and the natural and corporeal reality is not arbitrarily made. What is significant about Vicos historicist humanism is that language as the third medium is able to bridge the gap between the natural and the secular/historical and thus to participate in the dialectics between the physical and the historical; for Vico, therefore, language is the epistemic hiatus between humanism and natural science. Historicist hermeneutics thus circumvents both the New Historicists and New Critics interpretive approaches, which as Kiernan Ryan says: contrive to make material history vanish: the one by

Rtromotivation), Potique II (1972): 407.

78 79 80

See also Said, Vico on the Discipline of Bodies and Texts, 85. Auerbach, Vico and Aesthetic Historism, 117. Said, O, xxiii.

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severing the work from the world, the other by reducing the real to the written.81 Saids intellectual affinity and final return to Vico, who along with Foucault also inspires him into beginning his book on Beginnings in the first place, 82 I would argue, are justifiable, because Vicos atavistic effort in showing the dialectics amongst the natural, the historical and language allows for a greater possibility of resistance to and reversal of power relations. Saids own intellectual trajectory validates what he says at the beginning of his career: history is not progressive or teleological; criticism as beginning is basically an activity which ultimately implies return and repetition rather than simple linear accomplishment, and beginning and beginning-again are historical whereas origins are divine.83 After wrestling with poststructuralist theories in the early phases of his intellectual career, Said in the end puts forward his theory of humanism, which is based upon the Vichian historicist humanism. In his critique of poststructuralist theory-based tendencies and politically withdrawn sentiments, Said has found that there is something incomplete and unsatisfying about the idea of man as a historical invention. Though Foucaults notion of discourse and its historical contingency have been such a cogent theoretical underpinning to his deontologizing of the Orient, Said needs to think of humanism as providing a way forward. If, according to Vico, human beings can only know what they make, the natural world is another dead end for humanism in addition to the supernatural. Nonetheless, Vico admits that the body is the first source of
81

See Kiernan Ryan, Introduction, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism: A Reader, ed. Kiernan Ryan (London: Arnold, 1996), xiv.
82

After conceiving structuralism as beginning a new critical project in Chapter Five Abecedarium Culturae: Absence, Writing, Statement, Discourse, Archeology, Structuralism in B, Said criticizes it for its deterministic and almost totalitarian view of language as a system which allows for no possibility of authorial intention and invention. In Chapter Six Conclusion: Vico in His Work and in This, Said converges the insights from Vico and Foucault to substantiate his criticism of Structuralism and humanist belief in the possibility of creating for oneself a critical beginning that is discontinuous from and affiliatively not filiatively related to tradition and convention of language, discourse and culture: Writing is the act of taking hold of language (prendre la parole) in order to do something, not merely in order to repeat an idea verbatim. Said, B, 378.
83

Ibid., xvii.

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human knowledge, and he relates the human to the natural, hence, the historical with the ahistorical. Critical consciousness rationalizes and intellectualizes but refuses to be treated the same way by humanism. Said believes that when the body (the natural, material, irrational, incredible) disappears on the horizon of theory, theory itself loses its worldly anchor, becomes unworldly and leads to an aporia or dilemma in which humanity can be everything and simultaneously nothing. The theory of power, for instance, tends to overshadow the power of resistance. Foucaults theory can be a theoretical and epistemological ground for powerful political resistance against authority in power and oppression. The theory of discourse has been employed, for instance, by the feminist movements to overthrow patriarchal authoritative structure and ideology. Radical feminism goes so far as to say that heterosexuality is an ideology perpetuating mens power over women, an inculcated political desire and inclination, instead of a natural and biological disposition. Into what forms of human existence do these radical feminists attempt to transform society? How would they be justified to speak for and defend their own interests, rights, and identities when the theoretical bases they employ to deconstruct society, sexuality, gender reduce every single human conduct and action as politically and ideologically determined? How would their choice of homosexuality be exempted from being an ideology and be legitimized? Once again, Saids reinvocation of Vicos humanism should not be seen as a refutation of Foucaults deconstruction of the idea of man, but should be sympathetically, historically and politically understood as Saids approach to our moral dilemmas in the practice of literary criticism. The purpose of Saids employment of Vico is to remind us that there was, has been and still is a concrete material world in which one must anchor ones thinking and work. The belief that everything is ideological should self-critically reflect upon itself since the belief in ideology is also inevitably ideological. If according to Foucault, anything that can and should be known is determined by the regimes of truth and the distinction of truth and falsity is far less important than the

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conditions of the regimes of truth that allow such distinction to be made, Saids criticism of the dehistoricized and apolitical use of Foucaults theory by Foucaults followers in Traveling Theory implies that theory is also part of history and ideology which cannot totalize reality. Said makes a crucial distinction between theory and critical consciousness. Critical consciousness must not be framed by theory; it historicizes and politicizes the origin, peregrination and application of theory. Through self-reflection, it

contextualizes and situates theory in history and evaluates its political efficacy in its worldly reception, transformation and institutionalization. Like Foucault who leaves no theoretical groundings and prescription for intellectual and political resistance, Said refuses to theorize critical consciousness in order to open up an intellectual domain which is uncircumscribed by the interpretive reach of theory. His most concrete description of that domain is perhaps in this description of humanism: Humanism is the means, perhaps the consciousness we have for providing that kind of finally antinomian or oppositional analysis between the space of words and their various origins and deployments in physical and social place, from text to actualized site of either appropriation or resistance, to transmission, to reading and interpretation, from private to public, from silence to explication and utterance, and back again, as we encounter our own silence and mortalityall of it occurring in the world, on the ground of daily life and history and hopes, and the search for knowledge and justice, and then perhaps also for liberation.84 Said is aware of the vulnerability of a theory of critical consciousness that could become an academicized and institutionalized act of conformist consciousness and thereby become a mere function of power. Theory born out of a critical consciousness can in turn frame and disable that consciousness without maintaining the tension or distance between the two. Similar to his rearticulation of Vico, Said is politically and strategically more sympathetic with Chomsky than with Foucault on the issue of upholding universal justice and speaking truth to power as the intellectuals
84

Said, HDC, 83.

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responsibilities and duties. He and Chomsky have coauthored a book aimed at critiquing the U.S.s acts of aggression against humanity in the Middle East.
85

As a linguist, Chomsky has developed his theory of innatism concerning human mental/linguistic abilities. The meta- or trans-historic universal structure of the human mind is the basis for linguistic acquisition and justification for universal humanistic values such as morality, justice, truth, and equality. He grounds his belief in universal human nature in the natural and ahistorical of which Foucault is skeptical. The epistemological presuppositions of their different fields of study which enable Chomsky and Foucaults findings, their positions and beliefs, are too fundamental and important to be simply embraced or dismissed. Moreover, objectives and methodologies of natural science and the humanities are interpenetrable and dialectical, and the separation between the two disciplines is ideological. Adorno says: although art and science have separated from each other in history, their opposition is not to be hypostatized. The disgust for anachronistic eclecticism does not sanctify a culture organized according to departmental specialization. In all of their necessity these divisions simply attest institutionally to the renunciation of the whole truth.86 Foucault thinks that one should study science historically, and he has studied history scientifically. Science studies and explicates both nature and humans as machinesto discover and develop natural and scientific laws and principles. Foucaults writing of the history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects87 corresponds to the scientific study of human being by treating humans as subjects subjected to the microphysics of power as opposed to the microphysics of physics, chemistry and biology. His theory of power is the underlying mechanics which determines and constitutes human
85

Noam Chomsky and Edward Said, Acts of Aggression: Policing Rogue States (New York: Seven Stories, 1999).
86 87

Adorno, The Essay as Form, 156.

See Foucault, The Subject and Power, in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, eds. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 203.

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self- consciousness and its epiphenomena. Both Foucault and Said believe that human beings are capable of self-creation and achieving intellectual freedom in the process of reacting to and resisting external constraints. The difference between Foucault and Said concerning the question of humanity and the role of the intellectual is that Said is more willing to invest value and hope in human capacity to make society a better place, while Foucault cautiously leaves open the question of human nature and insists on the importance of historicizing it. Perhaps, Foucault and Said are both justified in taking their positions. Foucault is critical of the human: its historical contingency, discursive and political determinacy, and therefore he refuses to be didactic and prescriptive intellectually and politically. For him, to prescribe is to limit rather than to free critical thinking. Said is historically situated in the time span between modernism and postmodernism and like Foucault is skeptical of worldly authority. Saids humanism is a reaction towards the deconstruction of man rather than a simple return to traditional humanistic values for authority. In the postmodern world devoid of faith and hope in humanity, Said believes that as humans situated in the political turbulences of international and intercultural misunderstandings, conflicts, and wars, it is politically urgent and effective to have faith in our critical and intellectual agency. One might be intellectually and politically sympathetic with either Foucault or Said and subsequently either criticize Foucault for his radical skepticism in humanity or reject Said for his faith in humanity, but it is possible for one to identify with both of them if one attempts to understand their differences historically. It is as a resistance against the transhuman and transindividual systems of language and power that Saids humanism emphasizes the individual and the particular. The historical participates in the transhuman system as much as the latter conditions the former. If everything in the historical world is created by humans and therefore accessible to human understanding, and if everything is contained within the domain of theory and operates in accordance with the rules and laws within the mechanisms of language, discourse, and episteme,

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our critical consciousness cannot be just constituted linguistically or discursively. Breaking down human life into smaller analyzable and separable parts influenced by biological, psychological, environmental, and cultural forces does allow us to understand ourselves better, but that self-knowledge cannot supersede and substitute life itself. The tension between the individual and historical particular and universalism of humanity and humanistic ideals and values is dialectical and relational: individual parts can be said to make up a whole greater than a mere sum of its parts, which, according to Timothy Brennans interpretation of Said, leads away from a monadic consciousness to a relational group consciousness, which is not simply Hegelian but philological. 88 To put it simply, individual differences and the unity of individual differences are related yet irreducible to each other.89 For instance, the secular critic or writer stands in a dialectical relation to each single word and subjects it to critical examination and distinction. Each of the consciously chosen words is to challenge the writers worldview in totality, which however paradoxically is what enables the choice of words by the writer himself or herself. Similarly, the idea that the whole of humanity is made up of different individuals should not make the particular historical differences amongst individuals less important. Such generic categories as race, gender, and class tend to eliminate individual uniqueness and difference. Therefore, for Said, the more overarching the system is the more attentive we should be to the individual particular, to invent, discover, and appreciate its singularity in order to resist and circumvent totalizing identitarian terms and categories. Saids humanism is not individualism at the expense of multiculturalism nor universalism motivated by and resulting in totalitarianism. Like Adorno, Said sees the relation between individual part and whole not as hierarchical or
88 89

Timothy Brennan, Resolution, Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation, 54.

However, if scientifically or mathematically or logically represented, this becomes the Sorites paradox: a heap of sand is certainly made up of multiple grains of sand, however, one can never attain a heap of sand nor a non-heap by either repetitively adding or removing a single grain of sand.

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dynastic but dialectical: Adornos Minima Moralia is, for Said, a cascading series of discontinuous fragments, all of them in some way assaulting suspicious wholes, fictitious unities presided over by Hegel, whose grand synthesis has derisive contempt for the individual. The conception of a totality through all its antagonisms compels him [Hegel] to assign to individualism, however much he may designate it a driving moment in the process, an inferior status in the construction of the whole.90 It is necessary to demonstrate how various domains are inter-connected and reveal their hidden relations because they are all parts of humanity. Nevertheless, certain formal elements refuse to be interpreted within one set of critical parameters, and precisely because they are different, irreducible to each other, aesthetics and politics stand in a relation of power with each other in such a way that one can use aesthetics to resist politics and thereby reverse the asymmetrical power relation between them.

The above is Saids theory about both the individual and humanity as a whole. But in the end, Saids humanism and his firm belief in critical consciousness as foundation to morality, freedom, and justice is not based on any theory, paradigm, or episteme but on his love for human life, humanity and the humanities. Humanists and scientists might have set off to search for knowledge about themselves and the world out of love, interest, desire but have tragically and self-defeatingly found that humans are nothing more than machines programmed by various autonomous systems and functions. Said affirms humanism for the same simple reason as Tzvetan Todorov, who says:
90

Said, Late Style, 15. Such a view circumvents the opposition between universalism of humanity and cultural relativism detected by critics as self-contradiction of Saids humanism; Michael Spikes says, McGowan argues that there is a conflict between Saids implicit appeal to universal, transcendent notions of the good and his explicit assertion that all values are culturally relative, socially and historically conditioned. Said assumes that he can definitively, authoritatively say what is right and wrong about the views a text presents, yet he also maintains that concepts of rightness and wrongness vary in different societies and historical periods. Spikes, Edward W. Said: Political Critique, 112; see also John McGowan, Postmodernism and Its Critics, 165-67.

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By choosing to study thought in itself, I am already committing myself to the humanist family, since thought would not deserve to be examined separately if it were not free but only the mechanical product of a cultural community, a social class, a historical moment, or the biological necessities of the species.91 Scientists and poststructuralists may have successfully explained the operational mechanism of the natural and human world, but disregarded the tragic, discontent, powerless, and meaningless sentiments we have if we see and treat ourselves in the same way as they do. When scientific, medical, or technological discoveries demonstrate that various human intellectual and physical capacities are replaceable by machineries, as Walter Benjamin has observed with regard to the disappearance of art and the aura of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, whatever human qualities or capacities resist to being replaced would provide us with insights into the values of being human and a humanist. The ultimate betrayal of the intellectuals is not the co-optation by power, institution, profession, reputation, or nation, but the disingenuousness of their love for the real subject of their studies: individual life and humanity. For Said (as for R. P. Blackmur), criticism is an act of love.92 It is also an act of courage, faith, optimism of the will in addition to the pessimism of the intellect.93 No one would want to fight an unwinnable war. One can align with humanists or poststructuralists, but after all, it is a matter of belief and faith that determines the theoretical groundings on which to say which position is right or wrong. Both Said and Foucault see the dialectical and coextensive relation between power and intellectual resistance whose importance and exigency they both affirm. What is certain is that Foucault and
91 92

Tzvetan Todorov, Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism, 7.

See R. P. Blackmur, The Critics Job of Work, Language as Gesture: Essays in Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952).
93

A slogan charged with revolutionary spirit by Antonio Gramsci to which Said refers in his Institute For Palestine Studies Papers: Rationally, Palestinians know that the odds are against themtheir own confidence in the justice and truth of their cause, on the other hand, tells a happier story: Gramscis pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will. Said, PA, 29; see also Said, Pen.

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Said chose, in face of what they both knew, what they believed is good for human beings and disseminated their beliefs. Such choice is an act of a free will. After the intellectual distinction between truth and falsehood, one still has to make a number of political and moral choices between hope and despair, faith and skepticism, love and hatred. And this hope for more freedom for Said will bring actual freedom; hope and freedom are circular: The fundamental paradox of education is that you must serve and submit to authoritythe authority of tradition, of learning itself, of the scholars and scientists who went before you and in a sense made you possibleand at the same time you must somehow remain critical, even defiant. And what makes you defiant, what makes it possible for you to build a bridge across the abyss [of immutability and impossibility to go beyond the authority of tradition] that so many people are defeated by, is hope and a belief in a great idea, the ideal of justice, the idea of emancipation, the idea of enlightenment, which of course is where the bridge leads you.94 Said chooses to be different from Foucault rhetorically, philologically and disciplinarily for his humanistic belief in the political effectiveness of criticism and in the dialectic of philology and politics. His scrupulous and critical attention to the worldly agency and efficacy of words registers his attitude, passion, and hope for the enlargement of human freedom. Different words lead to different ramifications, attitudes and actions. There is still a political difference, however minor, between fighting against more oppression and fighting for more freedom. Having dismantled and rejected all sorts of worldly authority, if it were not for the faith in the value of critical consciousness, there would be no other sound justification of the authority and value of Saids humanistic criticism. Said is antagonistic to and rebellious against the very authority of his own discipline which has entrapped Lacan, Althusser and Derrida, who, he says: have became prisoners of their own language, [and] what they were really doing was producing more work in fidelity to what theyd done before. They
94

Said, Citizenship, Resistance, and Democracy, in Rewriting Politics: Cultural Politics in Postmodernity, ed. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 32.

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were maintaining the integrity of their work and, above all, maintaining a kind of loyalty to their readers, who expected more of the same.95 In face of postmodernism, humanism has become a lost cause, but Said, who sees himself as the only true follower of Adorno, 96 has found comfort and meta-theoretical justification for his belief in his fight for Palestinian self-determination and existence: In contrast, the uncompromisingly critical thinker, who neither superscribes his conscience nor permits himself to be terrorized into action, is in truth the one who does not give up. Furthermore, thinking is not the spiritual reproduction of that which exists. As long as thinking is not interrupted, it has a firm grasp upon possibility. Its insatiable quality, the resistance against petty satiety, rejects the foolish wisdom of resignation.97 With both Adorno and Saids distaste for worldly authority, the pursuit of humanism as a lost cause sounds paradoxically religious.

95 96 97

Said, PPC, 167. Ibid., 458. Adorno, quoted in Saids On Lost Causes, in Exile, 553.

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CHAPTER FIVE

The Moral of Genealogy: Reading Said between Presence and Absence, Historicism and Universalism

The morality of thought lies in a procedure that is neither entrenched nor detached, neither blind nor empty, neither atomistic nor consequential.Theodor Adorno1 The humanities, properly considered, have their own inescapable human logicto rephrase from Ernst Cassiererand it is their job to perform on themselves a continued Geistesgeschichte that eschews both intellectual positivism, the conceit of the philologists, and universal systematizing, the conceit of the philosophers. It is a difficult task, but two hundred years ago Vico did it. Edward Said2

In an essay on the personal exchanges and mutual past he shared with Edward Said at the American Puritanical school Mount Hermon,3 William Spanos has foregrounded the semantic, humanistic, intellectual, philosophical and paradoxically religious richness of absence, silence or nothing, which resides in all creative critical writing. Echoing what Said says in his memoir: The fact that I was never at home or at least at Mount Hermon, out of place in nearly every way, gave me the incentive to find my territory, not socially but intellectually,4 Spanos identifies the intellectual absence in Mount Hermon, which is described by Said as racially discriminatory, morally hypocritical,

1 2 3

Theodor Adorno, Mimima Moralia, 74. Said, Vico: Autodidact and Humanist, 351-2.

William V. Spanos, Edward Saids Mount Hermon and Mine: A Forwarding Remembrance, boundary 2 28, no. 3 (fall 2001): 157-189.
4

Said, Out of Place, 231.

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and intellectually Eurocentric and conservative,5 as the site of genesis of the intellectual trajectory of Saids critical practice. Saids humanistic and secular criticism is a critical response to this intellectual absence in American education; Spanos depicts Said as the Palestinian/American oppositional intellectual who, through the sheer force of his humane intelligence and awesome historical sense, was leading both a resistant American academy and the even more resistant American media into recognition of the not-sopromising land of American-style globalism.6 As a response to the presence and absence of Saids memoir, Spanos, who was teaching English literature at the same time Said was studying at Mount Hermon, transforms the absence of his intellectual presence in Saids biographical account of Mount Hermon his anti-Mount-Hermon-ethos talk at Mount Hermon Convocation inspired by Kierkegaardian existentialisminto an historical and intellectual presence for himself.7 What is so significant about Saids and Spanoss personal accounts of Mount Hermon is that they demonstrate how the idea of absence plays such an important role in Saids and Spanoss intellectual formation and reflection. Intellectual and historical absence has been an important motif in both Saids and Spanoss criticism. Said says: Ive always been interested in what gets left out and the tension between what is represented and what isnt represented: 8 his whole corpus of work lends a voice to what is suppressed
5 6 7

For Saids detailed personal remembrance of Mount Hermon, see Out of Place, 225-249. Spanos, Edward Saids Mount Hermon and Mine, 161.

Spanos says, I need to put this absence [of Spanoss critical and theoretical engagement with the movement of Kierkegaardian existentialism] in terms of a fundamental and, to me, telling difference between Edwards experience at Mount Hermon and mine. For Edward, it was essentially the lack of any redeeming momentum at Mount Hermon that precipitated the redemptive intellectual identity that was to determine his future work. For me, I now realize, thanks to Edwards memoirs, it was the presence of such a momentum, however, peripheral and inadequately practiced by its proponents, that not only redeemed my two otherwise benighted years at Mount Hermon but inaugurated the transformation of my sense of calling, indeed, of my relationship to being, and that eventually coalesced to shape the identity that has determined my intellectual labor ever since. This was the Christianspecifically Kierkegaardianexistentialist thought [] It is this marginalI am tempted to say spectralmomentum that Edward says nothing about in his remembrance of Mount Hermon. Edward Saids Mount Hermon and Mine, 180-1.
8

Said, Late Style, xix.

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by Western humanism, imperialism and Zionism; Spanoss poststructuralist criticism of Western humanism provides a theoretical account of the haunting emergence and deconstructive presence of the spectral other or non-being historically, territorially, culturally and politically repressed by the truth discourse of the West.9 Said and Spanos have demonstrated that it is the job of the intellectual to fill in the historical absence and to maintain a tension or dialectic of presence and absence, being and non-being, certainty and uncertainty, and center and periphery in order to prevent oneself from being totalized and tautologically or circularly validated by a particular discourse. In the previous three chapters, I have attempted to establish that to be humanistic is to be historical and critical. Saids humanism is predicated upon the belief in the ability of critical consciousness to attain self-knowledge, freedom and justice. Historical and critical consciousness is the foundation of justice and cultural coexistence. Akeel Bilgrami contends that Saids humanism has two poles or dimensions: epistemic (the human search for selfknowledge and what sets the humans apart and capacity for self-criticism) and moral (the concern for whatever that is human).10 Bilgrami argues that the two poles of humanism are linked because the Other is the source and resource for a better, more critical understanding of the Self.11 I would further argue that these two poles of humanism are interrelated because the critical and epistemic dimension of humanism is at bottom a moral one. By mapping Saids humanism within the tradition of critical humanism or negation and reading Saids humanistic criticism as a moral critique and the problem of Western humanism and epistemology as fundamentally moral rather than epistemic, I would delve into the absence of Saids critical humanism, i.e. the
9

Spanoss use of the word specter or non-being in the Heideggarian sense summarizes and represents whatever that is unfamiliar, unrepresented, suppressed, annihilated and absent in writing, history and discourse. See William Spanos, The End of Education: Towards Posthumanism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, c1993) and Humanism and the Studia Humanitatis after 9/11/04: Rethinking the Anthropologos.
10 11

Akeel Bilgrami, Foreword, in Saids HDC, x. Ibid., xii.

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epistemic basis, nature and intellectual and political implication of the moral of his secular humanism. The discussion of the moral foundation of Saids humanism provides an opening for me to establish a deeper connection between Saids humanism as critical negation and as Vichian historicism. Based on the premise that the critical and the moral consciousness are a oneness, I would demonstrate how the critical consciousness, according to Said, circumvents the dichotomy between history and philosophy, historicality and universalism, and presence and absence, thereby constituting the foundation of his humanism.

Conceit and Humility: humanism as will to power and humanism as will to coexistence In his early writing on Vicos historicist humanism, Said has already identified conceit as the cause of humanisms preponderance to positivism and universalism:
We need physics, logic, law, history, and literature, and so we invent them. The second potentiality is for the mind to see itself everywhere in these studies. Thus the mind recognizes itself eternally in the history and the course of these studies Yet the mind realizes that its inescapable condition is that it is human. This is why Vico, and many later humanists in his spirits, shrug their shoulders at progress. What passes for progress, let us say in the natural or social sciences, is either increased certainty, or a state in which the mind, scorning its poetic origins, becomes an increasingly abstract instrument: it has merely passed from poetic barbarism to a barbarism of reflection. The humanities, properly considered, have their own inescapable human logicto rephrase from Ernst Cassiererand it is their job to perform on themselves a continued Geistesgeschichte that eschews both intellectual positivism, the conceit of the philologists, and universal systematizing, the conceit of the philosophers. It is a 12 difficult task, but two hundred years ago Vico did it.

Conceit is a moral rather than intellectual or epistemic condition and problem. 13 The inescapable condition or human logic pertains to the

12 13

Said, Vico: Autodidact and Humanist, 351-2.

According to Vico, the desire to go beyond or make oneself appear to be outside of the ideal eternal history of mankind is a kind of conceit; claiming to be the most ancient civilization is the conceit of nations whilst asserting what they know is as old as the world is the conceit of scholars. See Vico, The New Science, 122-127. The imperialist

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historicality of the human mind and humanity as a whole. At each stage of the development of mankind, what the peoples believe to be true (although this is only the outcome of their erroneous and limited knowledge), and what therefore serves as a basis for their actions, institutions and expressions is subject to historical change, 14 therefore as far as the observable laws of history refer to the reality of the mind, they are not certain, as far as they are certain, they do not refer to the reality of the mind.15 Certainty is a moral conceit; resistance against certainty and acknowledgment of the inescapable human logic or tragic flaw16 of human subjectivity are different forms of what Mitchell calls ethical gesturea kind of deferral of authority, a public confession of uncertainty.17 Saids and Spanoss interest in the absence in Western humanistic discourse and their transformation of this absence into the cultural and discursive presence of the marginalized and dispossessed imply the critique of conceit, which is the motif pervading the negative critique and deconstruction of Western humanism. Saids genealogical critique of Orientalism, literary criticism and humanism is situated within the history of critical humanism presided over by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Auerbach, and Foucault.18 My purpose here is not to recount the genealogy of Saids critical humanism but to contextualize his humanistic criticism within the larger setting of the critique of Western humanism as merely a substitutive sign for the metaphysical will

attempt to conquer, assimilate, understand, systematize, ontologize, reify and objectify the cultural other is therefore a form of power and conceit.
14 15

Auerbach, Vicos Contribution to Literary Criticism, 37.

This is a paraphrase of Albert Einsteins statement: [A]s far as mathematical propositions refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain they do not refer to reality. Albert Einstein, Geometry and Experience, the 1921 lecture to the Prussian Academy of Sciences, Ideas and Opinions, ed. Carl Seelig (New York: Wings Books, 1954), 233.
16 17 18

Said, HDC, 12. Mitchell, Secular Divination: Edward Saids Humanism, 469; emphasis added.

Paul Bov has given a detailed and critical account of the genealogy of the tradition of critical humanism in Intellectuals in Power: A Genealogy of Critical Humanism.

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to power,19 and to read the moral of genealogy or the critical genealogists like Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault and Said by identifying the critique of the will to power as fundamentally the critique of conceit. All Saids critical works, from Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966) to Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004), are a persistent critique of the ahistorical and antihistorical impulses of literary criticism and various forms of imperialism. These impulses are manifestations of the will to power which attempts to attain absolute authority or dehumanize targeted cultural or racial subjects by suppressing the historicality of humanity. The Orientalist studies the history of the Orient without self-critically and selfconsciously examining his or her own discipline which is historically situated in the material grid of politics, culture and capitalism; the literary critic applies a theory without understanding genealogically the historical emergence, geographical and cultural peregrination, and political efficacy of the theory and understands literature, art and culture as domains of human activity elevated from politics and the history of imperialism. Western imperialism and its cultural and literary manifestations are based upon the ahistorical and undialectical binary logic which distinguishes between and dichotomizes the center and the periphery and the self and the other. As I have mentioned in Chapter Two, these kinds of antihistorical mentality are a form of conceit in the Vichian sense. Because of conceit, human knowledge is anthropological, self-referential and self-centered: Another property of the human mind is that, when people can form an idea of distant and unfamiliar things, they judge them by what is present and familiar.20 In other words, the human mind does violence and injustice to the unfamiliar through interpreting the unfamiliar based on what is familiar to the mind. Despite the fact that all human knowledge exists to serve the human and the creation of knowledge is inseparable from the application of knowledge, according to humanists like Vico and Said there is still a moral distinction to be made between two kinds
19 20

Bov, In the Wake of Theory, 132. Vico, The New Science, 122.

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of motivation behind the epistemic genesis or two epistemic perspectives: the will to power over others or the will to master and the will to coexistence amongst others or the will to serve. The former attempts to know the whole truth about the whole world and to unify the whole of humanity by imposing absolute standards and values upon others, whilst the latter attempts to comprehend the whole humanity by overthrowing and modifying ones own view of reality. Because of conceit, human beings see themselves as master of knowledge of the whole of humanity without realizing they are parts of the whole. As Western humanism or epistemology culminates in moral problems like racial inequality and injustice, imperialist antihumanistic and

antihistorical colonization and repression, and Orientalisms complicity with imperial power, there is also a moral cause of these problems at the inception of humanism. Within the tradition of critical humanism, Saids critical genealogy of Orientalism and the discipline of literary criticism is genealogically linked to Foucaults and Nietzsches criticism of power and truth. Nietzsches philosophy is a critique of humanism as the will to power, subjectivity or knowledge. In his first book The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche has already contended that the humanistic and scientific endeavor to search for truth is self-centered, i.e. for the sake of the self instead of truth itself,21 not for the purposes of knowledge, but for the practical, egotistical ends of individuals and nations.
22

Nietzsche makes a distinction between the

optimism of science and the tragic pessimism of art. Every science has its limits, and it is out of conceit that science can retain its optimism in its search for truth and in the reliability of science itself. I would quote Nietzsche at

21

Nietzsche says, Moreover, once it has been proved beyond question that the Antipodes can never be reached by such a direct method, what person in his right mind would want to go on diggingunless it were for the accidental benefit of striking some precious metal or hitting upon a law of nature? For this reason, Lessing, most honest of theoretical men, dared to say that the search for truth was more important to him than truth itself and thereby revealed the innermost secret of inquiry, to the surprise and annoyance of his fellows. The Birth of Tragedy, 92-3.
22

Ibid., 94.

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length here in order to show the philosophical implications of the scientific zest and quest for knowledge:
As against this practical pessimism [because of the politics of knowledge], Socrates represents the archetype of the theoretical optimist, who, strong in the belief that nature can be fathomed, considers knowledge to be the true panacea and error to be radical evil. [] Whoever has tasted the delight of a Socratic perception, experienced how it moves to encompass the whole world of phenomena in ever widening circles, knows no sharper incentive to life than his desire to complete the conquest, to weave the net absolutely tight. To such a person the Platonic Socrates appears as the teacher of an entirely new form of Greek serenity and affirmation. This positive attitude toward existence must release itself in actions for the most part pedagogic, exercised upon noble youths, to the end of producing genius. But science, spurred on by its energetic notions, approaches irresistibly those outer limits where the optimism implicit in logic must collapse. For the periphery of science has an infinite number of points. Every noble and gifted man has, before reaching the mid-point of his career, come up against some point of the periphery that defied his understanding, quite apart from the fact that we have no way of knowing how the area of the circle is ever to be fully charted. When the inquirer, having pushed to the circumference, realizes how logic in that place curls about itself and bites its own tail, he is struck with a new kind of perception: a tragic perception, which requires, to 23 make it tolerable, the remedy of art.

Science motivated by the will to power over and knowledge of the whole world attempts to account for the world of phenomena within the scope or circle of scientific and theoretical framework and paradigm. The widening scope of scientific inquiry and knowledge is made possible and plausible by the principle of inclusion which is not possible without the principle of exclusion. What is most dangerous of all is that the scientific scope or paradigm is underpinned by presuppositions and delimitations which make scientific inquiry a circular process, i.e. a scientific result or effect is predetermined and dictated in the first place by scientific assumptions and exclusions which in turn are validated by the result. For instance, the positivistic and materialist view of human consciousness accounts for the cause and effect of consciousness materialistically excluding the metaphysical dimension of consciousness and thus reducing it to mere material existence and denying the possibility of freedom which exists insofar as the
23

Ibid, 94-5.

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metaphysical realm of consciousness exists. Nietzsches critique of the optimism of science is also a critique of the conceit of human beings. From this perspective, art for Nietzsche does justice to what is excluded and deemed as uncertain by science. When science meets its own limits, art comes to the rescue to set us free from scientific paradigm and convention. Unlike science, art does not aim at attaining certainty, the pessimism of art in the form of tragedy is anti-reifying and anti-objectifying. Tragedy, for Nietzsche, according to Habib, is not rational but based on myth, on a deeper wisdom ineffable in words and concepts but expressed in the structure of tragedy and its images.24 In the Parmenides lectures, Heidegger discloses the complicity between Western humanism and Western imperialism since the Romans reductive adoption of Greek philosophy following the conquest of Greekspeaking countries by the Romans. The genealogy of humanism from Greek to Roman shows how the politics and interests of the Roman Empire reform Greek humanistic studies and the humanist epistemic perspective.25 Nietzsche preceding Heidegger has already identified two extreme truth-seeking perspectives of the Greek and the Romans. 26 Spanos says, Heidegger (following Nietzsche) is pointing to the Romanss reduction of the Greek understanding of truth as aletheia (unconcealment) to veritas (the adequation of mind and thing, i.e. correctness).27 The epistemic gaze of the Romans is at
24

M. A. R. Habib, A History of Literary Criticism: From Plato to the Present (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2005), 514.
25

Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 41-2. William Spanos also draws upon Heideggers and Foucaults genealogies of modern humanism in tracing the development and ramification of humanism to a Roman origin. He argues, the humanist paideiaits celebration of culture against anarchyis implicated in the imperial political project. See Spanos, The End of Education: Towards Posthumanism, xviii. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977), 146.
26 27

Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, 28-73.

Spanos, Humanism and the Studia Humanitatis after 9/11/04: Rethinking the Anthropologos, unpaginated. Heidegger discusses aletheia as unconcealment and veritas as correctness in An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 102, and also Basic Writings from Being and Time

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once imperial and transcendental: Imperium means command The imperium is the command in the sense of the disposing order. To commanding, as the essential foundation of sovereignty, belongs being above. That is only possible through constant surmounting in relation to others, who are thus the inferiors.28 The distinction between seeing truth as unconcealment and seeing it as correctness is a moral rather than an intellectual or epistemic one: the former unanthropocentric perspective aims to understand or unconceal reality by deconstructing what the human mind has constructed to comprehend and represent reality, while the latter anthropocentric and egoistic disciplines and corrects the mind according to the truth constructed and perpetuated by power. Western imperialism and humanism are coextensive with each other because the same moral imperial attitude pervades in both: imperialism in the form of regime of domination and governance and humanism in the form of regime of truth and discipline are made possible by the will to power over difference at the expense of the other, the non-being or nothingness of being in Heideggers terms. The conceit of Western humanism results in imperialism, and imperialism materializes humanism by creating an imperially and capitalistically administered world in which humanism finds its dwelling place and strongest political vanguard. Because this imperialist metaphysical thinking also determines and governs how history is written, it culminates in an ahistorical and antihistorical worldview of humanity. History is written from a metaphysical or logocentric perspective that looks back retrospectively from the end (in both senses of the word)from after or above the temporal process, i.e. from an essentially imperialist point of view which , as Spanos observes, exclude[s] or repress[es] or forcibly accommodate[s] the differences that would disrupt the identity of that which is being produced,

(1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964), ed. and intro. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 125, 127. Further reference to the transition from aletheia as unconcealment to veritas as correctness can be found in the article Platons Lehre der Wahrheit in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 9, Wegmarken, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976), 203-238.
28

Heidegger, Parmenides, 41-2.

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interpreted, or explained (taught).29 Identity, for Said, is non-contradiction, or rather contradiction resolved,30 which is the new thesis of the Hegelian progressive dialectic of world history in which contradictions are resolved. Having established the connection between the epistemic and the moral basis of the will to knowledge and the will to coexistence, I would contend that the two poles of Saids humanism, i.e. the epistemic quest for self-knowledge and moral search for coexistence, are interconnected. There is a line between what one knows and what one does not know, between presence and absence, and between self and other, and ones moral attitude towards ones knowledge and oneself determines not only the shifting of this line but also the entire perspective of reality. The attitude of seeing oneself as the servant of truth is identical with seeing oneself as servant of others while the master-of-truth perspective entails the understanding of oneself as master of others. The epistemic and moral perspective of Western humanism is underpinned by the moral imperial will to exclude rather than include, to totalize rather than multiply and diversify reality. For Said, humanism or humanistic education is to nurture the unique self-critical ability and foster a critical culture. As Said says, what is critical consciousness at bottom if not an unstoppable predilection for alternatives?31 I would thus say the critical attitudeto include rather than to exclude, to reflect upon and look at life not in terms of the will to power, presence and Truth made visible by the humanistic-imperialist horizon but in terms of what is made invisible outside the horizon: will to coexistence, absence, nothingness, the unfamiliar, and the otheris at bottom a moral attitude. For both Foucault and Said, in order to be critical and moral, one does not only have to sustain a symmetrical power relation with alternative thinking and other subjectivities but also maintain a relation of power with ones own subjectivity: In the case of Foucaults own relation to himself, of his self29 30 31

Spanos, The End of Education, 20. Said, History, Literature, and Geography, 463. Said, Traveling Theory, 247.

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perception as intellectual in particular, the problematization is similar. The effort to make oneself permanently able to remove oneself from oneself has, as its corollary, a concomitant effort to involve others. Consequently, this effort to modify your own thinking and that of others seems to be the intellectuals raison dtre. 32 Foucault says that we write and critique in order to be other than what we are, 33 in order not to disseminate and perpetrate what we already know to influence and overcome others. The intellectual requires constant self-critical redefinition of what is the socially responsible mode of intellectual behavior.34 Said in following Adornos selfexiled moralityIt is part of morality not to be at home in ones home35 echoes Foucaults anti-subjectivity criticism. They both affirm that it is only by surrendering your own dwelling housesubjectivitythat you can have free life, as Bov says: It is only that negative [critique] that makes possible the defense of life.36 Said does not want exile but he chooses to be in exile: it is part of morality to counteract and contradict ones own desire and intention. The anti-subjectivity critical spirit of Foucault and Said implies Todorovs conception of active humanism as opposed to passive humanism which mainly concerns the justification and protection of individual freedom and rights rather than social or communal relation and coexistence, [a]ctive humanism is based on the finality of the you, on the acceptance of the particular human being (other than self) as the ultimate goal of our actions. Here, even the term morality is no longer adequate, or it must be given a broader meaning, since humanists favor not moral injunctions but the value of human attachment, friendship, and love. In turn, such a morality intervenes in politics: the affairs of the country are no longer conducted in the same
Karlis Racevskis, Michel Foucault, Rameaus Nephew, and the Question of Identity, in The Final Foucault, 30.
33 32

Foucault in an interview with Charles Ruas, Archologie dune passion, Magazine littraire 221 (July-August, 1985), 104.
34 35 36

Bov, Intellectuals in Power, 223. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 39. Bov, In the Wake of Theory, 88.

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manner if we decide to take it into account.37 The act of consideration and involvement of other subjectivities is moral not because it is dictated by moral laws or injunctions but it is based on love for others. One has to put Saids homelessness at home and Foucaults removal of oneself from oneself in the context of their intellectual activities in order to unlock the correspondences amongst morality, love, subjectivity and freedom. Said says, The purpose of the intellectuals activity is to advance human freedom and knowledge,38 and Foucault states, my roleis to show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed.39 Bov believes that Said would be nothing if not committed to the power of resistance and optimism that human struggles for freedom can be achieved.40 The view of humanisms search for self-knowledge and coexistence as a united quest for freedom would further substantiate my contention that humanisms will to knowledge or truth and coexistence is fundamentally a moral will. Based on Todorovs active humanism, Saids homelessness at home and Foucaults removal of oneself from oneself are moral acts of love for the sake of others; Said and Foucault seem to imply that freedom is exile and selfremoval achieved through resisting the power of ones own subjectivity while home, or that subjectivity is nonfreedom and imprisonment as a result of submitting to the power of ones own subjectivity. Heidegger also sees exile or being not-at-home as the primordial existential condition of humanity. 41
37 38 39

Tzvetan Todorov, Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism, 32; emphasis original. Said, RI, 17.

Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, eds. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, Patrick H. Hutton (London: Tavistock Pubns., 1988), 10.
40 41

Bov, Continuing the Conversation, 404.

Heidegger says, In anxiety one feels uncanny. Here the peculiar indefiniteness of that which Dasein find itself alongside in anxiety, comes proximally to expression: the nothing and nowhere. But here uncanniness also means not-being-at-home This character of Being-in was then brought to view more concretely through the everyday publicness of the they, which brings tranquilized self-assuranceBeing-at-home, with all its obviousnessinto the average everyday of Dasein. On the other hand, as Dasein

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Spanos in discussing Heideggers view of humanity affirms the moral responsibility of human beings: care (Sorge) is the fundamental existential structure of human beings being. It is this primordial condition that renders human being, not the master or overlord, but the care-taker of being.42 When we understand the goal of humanism as morality is the other and that such a morality intervenes in politics, we can identify love and power as the two great forces in human society and politics and juxtapose them to understand how freedom is made possible. Love, like power, exists only in human relations; the former is self-sacrificial while the latter is to sacrifice others in terms of freedom. According to Foucault and Said, ones own subjectivity is a form of power to be resisted by being homeless at home (secular criticism), transiting from ones subjectivity to other subjectivities, interpreting the text through a two-way dialogue instead of one-way interrogation (humanistic and philological criticism)43 and removing oneself from oneself (the raison dtre of criticism), therefore to hold on to the self is to serve and submit to power while to remove from oneself and involve others is itself an act of freedom resulting in more freedom. Freedom is a choice informed not by power and subjectivity but self-sacrificial love for the sake of others. The most fundamental power relation between power and resistance against power (freedom) exists not between two subjects but within the individual himself or herself: freedom is nonsubjectivity and inclusion of others (absence, nothing, non-being or specter). The difference in motivations (love and power) distinguishes between Saids and Zionists criticism of the former PLO leader Yasir Arafat even though they might use the same

falls, anxiety brings it back from its absorption in the [familiarized] world. Everyday familiarity collapses. Dasein has been individualized, but individualized as Being-in-theworld. Being-in enters into the existential mode of the not-at-home. Nothing else is meant by our talk about uncanniness. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (London: SCM Press, 1962), 233.
42 43

Spanos, Humanism and the Studia Humanitatis after 9/11/04, unpaginated. Said, HDC, 92.

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language. 44 Criticism, which is the search for alternatives by removing oneself from oneself, is therefore an act of love instead of an act of the will to power. In short, when we see Said individually and genealogically within the critical humanistic tradition, Said is against all forms of conceit (imperialist, antihumanistic and antihistorical). One would not have true knowledge and understanding of humanity and the world as well as individual and communal freedom if one does not humble oneself in relation to the other (culture and individual). The unity between critical knowledge and morality of Saids humanism mirrors the unity of wisdom and piety in Vicos New Science. Vico in concluding his magnum opus The New Science says: In sum, all the observations contained in this work lead to one conclusion. My New Science is indissolubly linked to the study of piety; and unless one is pious, one cannot be truly wise.45 The concept of piety is to be historically contextualized and understood in the context of secular humanism. In an explication of Vicos understanding of the connection between piety and wisdom, Joseph P. Vincenzo says: The answer to this question is already implied in our examination of the sense in which Vicos science is a science of piety. Piety, we saw, is the archaic human response to that which is other than man. If there is to be poetic wisdom, there must be piety. But when Vico says further, that from this it must be concluded that he who is not pious, cannot be truly wise, he is saying something more. He is saying to the reader that if one is to gain that noetic vision of the whole which is rendered visible by this science, one must have no share in the conceits which are the cause of all the errors and distortions of this whole. One must rid oneself of the conceit of scholars (boria
44

For instance, when Said says, [Arafat] is of course a genius at manipulating selfinterest and the power of his security forces, he criticizes for the interests and freedom of the Palestinians at large not for the sake of deprecating Arafat. Said, End, 22.
45

Vico, The New Science, 1112; emphasis added. I believe that by this statement Vico is saying that those people who think they know actually do not know the whole truth and those who know that they do not know would be able to know the whole. There is a dialectic and circularity of conceit and ignorance and of humility and wisdom. Piety in religious context would mean the fear of and respect for a supernatural being while in the secular context the humbling of oneself in relation to the other and respect for the other.

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delle dotti) which impertinently extends familiar modern categories and modes of thinking into unfamiliar ancient times and places; and, the conceit of the nations (boria delle nazioni), whereby one nation sets itself up above and beyond the ideal eternal history. This insight leads not only to an understanding of the New Science as a science of how philosophical piety functions to render the whole intelligible it also leads to a recognition of how impiety or conceit distorts and fragments the vision of the whole.46 Piety is a moral attitude which subordinates oneself in relation to the other. Moral humility is required in the humanistic and epistemic search for knowledge to constantly reexamine the premises, the certain and the established beliefs and presuppositions of our time. In his paper on the Vichian unity of piety and wisdom, Vincenzo says: The loss of poetic wisdom is due to mans conceit which necessarily forgets all exteriority or otherness. Such conceit thus imprisons man to the confines of his own subjectivity, prohibiting any ingress into what is common to all47: the loss of piety necessitates intellectual and moral failures on the part of the human in the search for knowledge of humanity and communal coexistence. No human beings can, by virtue of merely focusing on and caring for ones own subjectivity, bring about communal coexistence, as the understanding or vision of the totality of humanity is impeded. The concern for ones freedom (i.e. subjectivity) will not bring freedom in the real and practical sense; it is only the concern for the freedom of others that could truly bring intellectual and moral freedom to humanity at large. The moral and intellectual cause and effect of conceit are circular. Saids secular humanism is founded upon Vicos historicist humanism as established and exemplified in The New Science. Said himself did not go as far as to acknowledge the connection amongst wisdom, morality and
46

A paper entitled Vicos New Science: The Unity of Piety and Wisdom presented by Joseph P. Vincenzo at the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy in Boston, Massachusetts from August 10-15, 1998. The paper is taken from the homepage of Paideia Project On-Line, clipped on December 15, 2007, <http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Hist/HistVinc.htm>.
47

Vincenzo, Vicos New Science: The Unity of Piety and Wisdom, unpaginated.

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philosophical and religious piety. His secular humanism is anti-dogmatic and anti-religious: This is a poignant irony, to be recalled for the benefit of people who maintain that criticism is art, and who forget that, the moment anything acquires the status of a cultural idol or a commodity, it ceases to be interesting. That at bottom is a critical attitude, just as doing criticism and maintaining a critical position are critical aspects of the intellectuals life. 48 As I have established that what Said implies by a critical attitude is at bottom a moral attitude, therefore, I would further maintain that insofar as Saids humanism is underpinned by a moral attitude, his humanism is a fight against the arbitrariness of humanistic and philological criticism, humanism and humanity. His humanism emphasizes the rationally understandable, and sympathetically

epistemically knowable,

genealogically traceable

transferable knowledge of humanity or human history as it is made by men and women according to the principle formulated by Vico in New Science.49 This is why Said is so antagonistic towards the epistemic indeterminacy, moral aporia and relativism and political indifference of deconstruction and poststructuralism in their understanding of humanity and human production and institution, and, according to Mitchell, he sees these kinds of thinking as the rise of skepticism and the resurgence of superstition.50 With the belief that everything in history has in Collingwoods words its own raison dtre and comes into existence in order to serve the needs of the men whose minds have corporately created it,51 Vicos humanism is thus a science which counteracts the arbitrariness, irrationality and randomness of human history. Saids humanism is grounded in Vicos New Science. Vico frequently reminds his readers in The New Science and his Autobiography that his study of the common law of all nations or the ideal eternal history of mankind is more importantly a study of Divine Providence revealed: a
48 49 50 51

Said, WTC, 30; emphasis original. Said, HDC, 11. Mitchell, Secular Divination: Edward Saids Humanism, 470. Collingwood, The Idea of History, 77.

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rational civil theology.52 According to Vico, human history is not an arbitrary temporal development of humanity but operates according to the moral laws and principles defined by divine providence. I do not see Saids anti-religious secular humanism contradictory to Vicos humanism or Said contradicting himself by predicating his secular humanism upon Vicos humanism, because Vicos faith in God and study of the entire course of human history are historicially situated in response to the intellectual, historical and political conditions of his time.53 And Saids adoption of Vicos historicist humanism is a historical and strategic act against the inhumanity of the postmodern and posthumanist political situations of his time. Therefore, although Said studies

52

Vico coins this phrase to represent his humanism: Since original sin caused people to fall from a state of perfect justice, human intentions and actions generally follow different and even contrary paths. If people were left to pursue their private interests, they would live in solitude like wild beasts. But by His providential care, God ordered and arranged human institutions so that this same self-interested led people, even through these different and contrary ways, to live with justice like human beings and to remain in society. In my New Science, I shall show that this social nature is the true civil nature of humankind, and that law exists in nature. This role of divine providence is the first of the principal topics studied in my New Science. Viewed in this aspect, my work becomes a rational civil theology of divine providence. The New Science, 2. Vico also mentions that the purpose of his study is to subordinate Platonic philosophy to Christian faith. The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, trans. Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin Ithaca (N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1944), 155. Vicos New Science is both a humanism of religion and a religion of humanism. The question of the degree and nature of the religiosity of Vico is beyond the critical focus of this thesis. From a historical perspective, to a certain extent Vicos religion is historically and politically determined. Concerning the universalist and ahistorical character of Vicos science, Wenfei Huang sees no contradiction between the evolutionary property of historicism and unchanging eternal character of Christianity in Vico but only misinterpretation viewed from the slanted perspective of historicism. He says: Absolute philosophical principles are implicated in the Vichian historical and evolutionary consciousness. Intellectuals after Vico heavily influenced by Romanticism and secular humanism strongly uphold the flag of Vicos anti-Enlightenment historicism and overlook the essence of the reverence for Christian faith of his science; overemphasize the historicality of Vicos science at the expense of its unchanging philosophical principles; overstress Vicos originality at the expense of the eclecticism of his science. According to Huangs observation, it might be argued that religion is an inherent part of Vicos science. However, that would be irrelevant to the study of historicist humanism; Vicos belief in religion and universalist principle can only be understood historically, sympathetically and strategically. See Wenfei Huang, Weike Xin ke xue zhi zhong gu xing (Taibei: Gua Li Taiwan da xue chu ban wei yuan hui, 2000), 122, 105; my translation.
53

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and writes about Vicos New Science in various essays, 54 he has not dealt with Vicos belief and faith in Gods Providence, which according to Vico himself makes his New Science or the scientific study of the laws and principles of human history possible, or the connection between the religious dimension of Vicos humanism and his secular and critical humanism.55 What Said concerns are the human capacity for self-knowledge and self-criticism and how we can apply this self-critical ability to understand literature, culture and politics and to fight against intellectual dogmas and hegemonies. According to Said, what is the secular and moral foundation of his humanism and how does his moralcritical consciousness operate in understanding and criticism such as philological hermeneutics and literary criticism?

The dialectical mediation between historicism and universalism The tension between the historical particular and the universal general has been an important motif in Saids secular criticism. So far I have been reading Saids critical-moral humanism as a form of resistance against the unsecular interpretation of history, which sees human history as an arbitrary and transhuman formation. One might argue that insofar as Saids humanism is a fight against the arbitrariness of humanistic and philological criticism, humanism and humanity, it is based upon certain unarbitrary hermeneutical and moral principles. From another perspective, his secular humanism is also critical of the idea of universalism and determinism. Said like Foucault did not
See Saids Vico: Autodidact and Humanist and Vico on the Discipline of Bodies and Texts. Clearly Said is mainly concerned with humanism as a historical discipline, he thus historically contextualizes his adaptation of Vicos humanism for specific purposes: For my purposes here, the core of humanism is the secular notion that the historical world is made by men and women, and not by God, and that it can be understood rationally according to the principle formulated by Vico in New Science, that we can really know only what we make or, to put it differently, we can know things according to the way they were made. His formula is known as the verum/factum equation, which is to say that as human beings in history we know what we make, or rather, to know is to know how a thing is made, to see it from the point of view of its human maker. Hence Vicos notion also of sapienza poetica, historical knowledge based on the human beings capacity to make knowledge, as opposed to absorbing it passively, reactively, and dully. Said, HDC, 11; emphasis added.
55 54

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deny or reject the existence of universal moral principles based upon a universal human nature; while Foucault circumvents the question of a fixed and unchanging human nature by a genealogical study of humanity, Said goes beyond the question of universalism or universal humanity by his discussion of critical consciousness. In The World, the Text and the Critic, Said discusses and exemplifies the oppositional and resistant agency of critical consciousness, which is the foundation of his humanism. By contextualizing critical consciousness historically within the Marxist-Lukascian conception of class consciousness, Said identifies critical consciousness as the site of emergence of class consciousness.56 According to Said, critical consciousness connects different cultures, histories and literatures and comprehends the world in terms of relation and historical process within a fragmented and commodified capitalistic society. The idea of unity and coherence pervades Saids humanistic and secular criticism: [Critical] [c]onsciousness goes beyond empirical givens and comprehends, without actually experiencing, history, totality, and society as a wholeprecisely those unities that reification had both concealed and denied. At bottom, class consciousness is thought thinking its way through fragmentation to unity.57 On the theory of coherence, Said says: the theoretical enterprise, an interpretive circle, is a demonstration of coherence: between part and whole, between world vision and texts in their smallest detail, between a determinate social reality and the writings of particularly gifted members of a group. In other words, theory is the researchers domain, the place in which disparate, apparently disconnected things are brought together in perfect correspondence: economic, political process, the individual writer, a series of texts.58 To do criticism is to connect the disconnected and to relate parts to the whole. This is why Said is very critical of intellectual specialization and
56 57 58

Said, WTC, 233. Ibid., 232-3. Ibid., 235.

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academic compartmentalization: The division of intellectual labor, which has meant increasing specialization, further erodes any direct apprehension one might have of a whole field of literature and literary study; conversely, the invasion of literary discourse by the outre jargons of semiotics, poststructuralism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis has distended the literary critical universe almost beyond recognition.59 The intrusion of critical theories such as semiotics, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis into the field of literary study has made the reading of literature a scientific experiment rather than a personal voyage into the literary text to establish not only a two-way communication between the reader and the writer across time and space but also the dialectical relationship between the individual writer or text and the whole humanity at that specific historical moment. The humanistic literary reading and study is predicated upon the understanding of literature as a product of the human mind which stems from a particular historical and social existence whilst critical theory produces ahistorical theoretical framework, method and technical jargon which lack the humanistic and historical perspective required for the reading of the historically specific literary text. Literary interpretation for Said is not arbitrary; the historical situatedness of any text determines ones interpretation. A literary text cannot be treated as a scientific object without historical specificity. Literature by virtue of being placed in the world has specific meanings and values that place restraints upon what can be done with them interpretively.60 Adorno also sees intellectual specialization as a rejection of whole truth: although art and science have separated from each other in history, their opposition is not to be hypostatized. The disgust for anachronistic eclecticism does not sanctify a culture organized according to departmental specialization. In all of their necessity these divisions simply attest institutionally to the renunciation of the whole truth. 61 As every domain is interrelated (nature, science, culture,
59 60 61

Ibid., 228. Ibid., 40. Adorno, The Essay as Form, 156.

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politics and literature), we would benefit from making a deeper relation between science and humanism. We cannot separate humanistic criticism and scientific development because the consequences and implications of both humanistic and scientific research, social, moral, political and cultural, are to be investigated and laid out in humanistic discourse. If humanism fails to respond to the social, psychological, ethical and ecological problems brought about by scientific innovations and failures, it requires constant selfexamination in order to tease out its own assumptions and premises which render certain domains of human activity invisible and negligible on the humanistic and institutional horizon. Said considers individual texts as a whole. Like Vico, he is interested in human collectivity, as he says his book Beginnings is a combination in intellectual work of a special, idiosyncratic problem and a very strong interest in human collectivity.62 The goal of Vicos scientific study of the evolution of human history is the unchanging philosophical principles inherent in history, as Mazlish says: it was Vico who first stressed the evolutionary aspect of humanity, and who treated each stage in that evolution as a whole, or cultural configuration. As a result, Vico was able to subvert the previous domination of thought by natural law, with its emphasis on a fixed, unchanging, and eternal common humanity, and to substitute for it the main outlines of historicism, even though Vico himself tended to think in terms of a generalized unity of mankind.63 Human beings will the human world into existence. The entire history of mankind is a creation, reflection, projection and materialization of the human mind itself: history is human will understood both temporally and absolutely.64 History is the temporal understanding of human will because the historicality of the mind determines the historicality of humanity or human history whilst the absolute understanding of human will entails that the human mind or will is a unity or a whole possessing an absolute character. The unity
62 63 64

Said, B, 357. Bruce Mazlish, The Riddle of History, 55. Said, B, 361.

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of human histories across epochs is an eternal Platonic state which must not be understood outside but inside human history.65 As Auerbach says, According to Vico, this natural course of history has been ordained by Divine Providence which, it is true, works exclusively within history, not from without. Still, it is Divine Providence; each of the stages of historical development is necessary, perfect in itself, and good; the whole of human history is a permanent Platonic state, in spite of continual change.66 Vicos New Science is both a humanism of religion and a religion of humanismideal eternal history and rational civic theologyachieved through establishing a dialectical relation between the individual particular (history or philology) and the universal general (science or philosophy). Human history is therefore Divine Providence expressed historically and temporally while Divine Providence is histories understood in entirety and unity: Only in the entirety of history is there truth, and only by the understanding of its whole course may one obtain it. Thus the truth for which philosophy is searching appears to be linked with philology, exploring the particular certa [the certain, or the established] as well as their continuity and connection.67 In Saids discussion of the philological criticism of Auerbach and Leo Spitzer, the two philological humanists allude to the notion of the whole truth or Divine Providence as internal logic or inner force of history and a literary work. Vicos and Auerbachs philosophical philology or philological philosophy 68 attempts to unlock the correspondences between the human
65

I have previously contended in Chapter Four that the idea of truth as truth outside power and discourse or truth as mere instrument of power inside power is undialectical since the power relation between resistance and power is reversible and dialectical. There is no outside position vis--vis power relation. Again, the idea of critiquing outside of or in transcendence of discourse is a linguistic and conceptual misinterpretation underpinned and rigidified by binary thinking.
66 67 68

Auerbach, Vicos Contribution to Literary Criticism, 33; emphasis added. Ibid., 37.

Auerbach summaries Vicos work in these two interchangeable phrases: This connection [between historical epochs], the whole course of human history, la commune natura delle nazioni, is the subject of Vicos work, which therefore, may be called as well a philosophical philology as a philological philosophydealing exclusively with mankind on this planet. See Auerbach, Vicos Contribution to Literary Criticism, 37.

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nature of every age and all human activities and expressions of that age concerned, and also to understand the whole truth of the entire historical development:
[W]hen, in other words, [people] come to develop a sense of historical dynamics, of the incomparability of historical phenomena and of their constant inner mobility; when they come to appreciate the vital unity of individual epochs, so that each epoch appears as a whole whose character is reflected in each of its manifestations; when, finally, they accept the conviction that the meaning of events cannot be grasped in abstract and general forms of cognition and that the material needed to understand it must not be sought exclusively in the upper strata of society and in major political events but also in art, economy, material and intellectual culture, in the depth of the workaday world and its men and women, because it is only there that one can grasp what is unique, what is animated by inner force, and what, in both a more concrete and a more profound sense, is universally valid: then it is to be expected that those insights will also be transferred to the present and that, in consequence, the present too will be seen as incomparable and unique, as animated by inner forces and in a constant state of development; in other words, as a piece of history whose everyday depths and total inner structure lay claim to our interest both in their origins and in the 69 direction taken by their development.

Auerbach uses inner forces instead of outer forces because these forces work only inside history and can only be understood historically. Leo Spitzer also refers the inner forces of history or literature or the whole truth of a work of art as the inward life-center, inward form, and life-giving center, the sun of the solar system. 70 The dialectic of the historical particular and the universal general is established through viewing and representing history and reality from the historicist perspective which according to Said is multiperspectival, dynamic, and holistic.71 These humanists have yet to give a definite account of what that inner force of history and literature is; nonetheless, the inner force or whole truth of human history manifests itself omnipresently in every domain of a
69

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask, intro. Edward Said (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 444; emphasis added. Leo Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History, in Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1948), 19; emphasis added.
71 70

Said, HDC, 111.

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writers life and the whole human society, therefore, the understanding of the inner force as the meaning-giving source or center of human history and production requires infinite stages of subjective interpretation which can never be definite and are always subjectively flawed. But all of them uniformly and unequivocally believe that the whole truth of humanity is comprehensible by the human mind because human history or humanity is made by humans themselves. Vico says, The civil world is certainly the creation of humankind. And consequently, the principles of the civil world can and must be discovered within the modifications of the human mind,72 therefore Auerbach says, the entire development of human history, as made by men, is potentially contained in the human mind.73 Said also states: There is no guarantee that the making of this connection [between details and life-giving center of a work of art] is correct, no scientific proof that it has worked. There is only the inner faith of the humanist in the power bestowed on the human mind of investigating the human mind.74 The philological details of Vico, Auerbach and Said exemplify their philosophical understanding of the relation between the human mind and human knowledge. Knowledge does not exist externally, but rather is potentially contained within the mind and can be understood through the modification of the mind. The mind, which experiences historical change in the course of modifying itself in the process of understanding and self-understanding, is historical; the unique capacity of the human mind for modification and development in the process of understanding and selfunderstanding, which expresses itself through continual changes in time, is ahistorical. Auerbach refers to this capacity of the mind as magnanimity: a state of mind capable of recreating in itself all varieties of human experience, of rediscovering them in its own modifications,75 and Said and Foucault call

72 73 74 75

Vico, The New Science, 331; emphasis original. Auerbach, Vico and Aesthetic Historism, 118; emphasis added. Said, HDC, 65. Auerbach, Vicos Contribution to Literary Criticism, 34-5.

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this the critical capacity of the mind to modify ones subjectivity through searching for alternatives and removing oneself from oneself. Saids interest in and concern for the relations amongst different domains and modalities of human life should not be confused with the idea of unity as an ahistorical universal character of humanity. Unity is anti-arbitrary and anti-atomist yet not necessarily universal. As I have suggested in my discussion of Saids historicist humanism in Chapter Two, unity is historical and epochal.76 Every human production within a certain historical period is interconnected with each other and is characterized by a particular perspective of reality of that historical period. Moreover, according to Said, the study of the universal general and the philological hermeneutics of a literary text are only possible because unity is individual. Although there are multiple dimensions or modalities concerning the human mind such as the intellectual, moral, psychological and sensual, each of the modalities is interrelated for the mind is itself a unity or a oneness: It is always the mind with which Vico is concerned. Its modalities are the objects of historical criticism which means that mans mind is to be read as a continuing book with a central mythos to it, like reading the Autobiography and the New Science as narratives, as courses and re-courses over a series of crises in intellection and self-consciousness. Yet the mind is unity, a oneness underlying the modalities, because it has made a mythos of itself. When it realizes that what passes for myth is only a concession to the historic sense which, as Nietzsche was to say many years later in The Use and Abuse of History, is a weakness that must be overcome, it neutralizes or renders its power impotent by perceiving the myth as a myth. When this is done the whole immanent structure leaps into view. Vico calls this ideal eternal history, or Gods providence revealed; the myth is a rational civil theology.77 The inner forces or inward form of a literary work that Auerbach and Spitzer talk about correspond to the unity of the mind. And the unity of the mind is achieved through the working of critical consciousness.
76 77

Bov, Intellectuals in Power, 137. Said, Vico: Autodidact and Humanist, 350-1; emphasis original.

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According to Vico, since the entire development of human history is the human mind understood historically, the entire development of human history, as made by men, is potentially contained in the human mind and may therefore, by a process of research and re-evocation, be understood by men, the re-evocation is not only analytic; it has to be synthetic, as an understanding of every historical stage as an integral whole, of its genius a genius pervading all human activities and expressions of the period concerned. 78 Thus, the mind must view a textual or cultural whole synthetically and holistically from as many perspectives as possible: cultural, geographical, political, literary and perhaps musical. However, the mind or critical consciousness would not attain a full understanding of itself if it merely examines and studies itself as history. The whole immanent structure of the mind becomes visible only when the mind forgets its own subjectivity, finitude and historicity. The statement that the mind is unity sheds light on the very connection between wisdom and morality. As Auerbach says, a mans work stems from his existence and consequently everything we can find out about his life serves to interpret the work, 79 who you are informs and determines how and what you read and write. Humanistic criticism is always subjective, as Said says: it is what one remembers of the past and how one remembers it [with what kinds of attitude, emotion and feeling] that determine how one sees the future.80 All modalities of the individual mind, intellectual, aesthetic, moral, psychological and sensual, are connected, and the mind is a totality which manifests itself throughout these modalities. Auerbachs magnanimous capacity, Saids critical attitude or attitude of alienation 81
78 79 80 81

Auerbach, Vico and Aesthetic Historism, 118. Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public, 37. Said, Exile, xxxv.

This phrase is taken from Bov who says, a critical attitude toward ones own culture requires more than critical detachment. It requires some substantial dissatisfaction with current values. It requires an attitude and experience of alienation, a subject Said discusses at some length in taking Auerbachs exile in Turkey as metaphorically paradigmatic of all oppositional critical work. Bov, In the Wake of Theory, 89.

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towards oneself and Foucaults counter-subjective spirit are not exclusively a cognitive capacity but fundamentally a moral capacity to forget the self, to love and include the other. Saids summary of his humanism as a stubborn conviction that must, that can only begin in the individual particular, without which there can be no real literature, no utterance worth making and cherishing, no human history and agency fit to protect and encourage 82 implies that humanism and humanistic knowledge are founded upon individual critical consciousness. No knowledge, principle, system or freedom is possible without the active participation of the critical consciousness. In other words, epistemology and morality are not to be understood in terms of epistemic and moral principles but in terms of the moral of individual thinking and critical consciousness. Therefore, like Foucaults genealogical criticism, without refuting the existence of epistemic and moral principle upon which his humanism is predicated, Said begins with individual critical consciousness whose active thinking, choosing and acting circumvents the dichotomy between historicism and universalism, philology and philosophy. Morality exists in thinking rather than transcendental moral principles: The morality of thought lies in a procedure that is neither entrenched nor detached, neither blind nor empty, neither atomistic nor consequential. 83 The moral of Saids humanism is a dialectical mediation between the historical particular and the universal general, relativism and determinism. The moral-critical consciousness is not a position or a doctrine; it is subjectivity achieved through suspending, choosing and repositing between binary opposites.

Autodidacticism: the individual basis of morality and knowledge Humility, the respect for and embrace of otherness, necessitates that the care for truth is coextensive and concomitant with the care for others. The moral attitude towards the other pervades the humanists quest for coexistence and
82 83

Said, HDC, 80. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 74.

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truth, and therefore the attitude of inclusion applies to both epistemology and human relation. Saids humanism adheres to the attitude of inclusion or inclusiveness rather than exclusion or marginalization. The very existence of the exilic critics love for truth and justice (care for others), as Bilgrami argues, forestalls:
the slide from an acknowledged loss of external Reason to a relativism about values [as it involves] seeing that appeal as an assertion of a value of caring about the truth (as one sees it and judges it) [an humanism-enlightenments pursuit] rather than showing an indifference to others who disagree with one, as the relativistic pluralists do when they say that they may have their own sort of moral truth on their side. Such a way of caring for truth, therefore, itself reflects a caring for others [prerequisite of coexistence], caring enough to want to convince them of the truth. That is the point of the talk of brotherhood as a value, a humanist value, which in this specific sense is missing in the relativist cast of pluralism. 84

The care for truth cannot be separate from the care for others and vice versa as they both originate from piety for otherness. Moreover, the interchange among different cultures is dialectically necessary to the increasingly rapid development and articulation of humanity. 85 I do agree with Bilgramis suggestion that inclusiveness and exclusiveness are a moral attitude which bears upon ones quest for truth and coexistence: When one is in a moral dispute with another, even if it is a bitter and vexed dispute, it is far better to have an attitude of inclusiveness toward ones foe that makes one strive to share the truth as one sees it with him, rather than to adopt an excluding attitude and say that he may have his own sort of truth or right on his side. The latter is what the relativist pluralist says.86 The loss of external Reason is valid and acknowledged, however, as I said, external Reason is not the foundation of humanism, humanistic understanding and morality. The

84

Akeel Bilgrami, Secularism and Relativism, boundary 2 31, no. 2 (summer 2004): 196. An excellent read for anyone who is puzzled by the impasse and indeterminacy of relativism defining the postmodern age and interested in looking for alternatives (humanism as suggested by Bilgrami).
85 86

Bov, Intellectuals in Power, 166. Bilgrami, Secularism and Relativism, 195.

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foundation of human understanding and coexistence is not external to the mind and humanity but works internally within the human mind. That is why Said underlines the autodidactism 87 of humanity as the entirety of human history is potentially contained within the human mind. The human mind is universal and yet individual: understanding of the whole only begins in the individual particular as individual consciousness is the only medium through which one can perceive and comprehend the whole. The autodidactic property of mankind is the basis for Saids ideal of participatory democracy which emphasizes democratic intellectual participation by individuals in the making of history, and democracy is never a matter of replacing one set of authorities and dogmas with another, nor of substituting one center for another. It was always a matter of opening and participating in a central strand of intellectual and cultural effort and of showing what had always been, though indiscernibly, part of it, like the work of women, or blacks and servantsbut which had been either denied or derogated.88 To appreciate individuality is also a form of justice. The recognition of individuality is a form of justice against injustice produced by the indifference of institution, system and power. Saids macro-democratic thinking begins at the micro-particular level which is not simply individual but philological (the individual particular parts of literature, rhetoric and discourse): even each word is to be examined contrapuntally with other words so that cultural and ideological connotations can be revealed and dehierarchized by putting these meanings in a more balanced power relation with each other. Said also assigns an equal status to both context (general) and text (particular). In the end, the
87

Said exemplifies this autodidactic property of humanity through Vico: Everything [Vico] learned, he learned for and by himself; he seems to have been convinced of his individuality and strength of mind from his earliest days, and most of the time his Autobiography is an account of this self-learning. Said, Conclusion: Vico in His Works and in This, in B, 358. See also Saids Vico: Autodidact and Humanist. In fact, Said himself is an autodidact who emphasizes writing as an autodidactic process of learning and self-learning. In a course on the foundations of Euro-American critical theory here in the University of Hong Kong, Paul Bov said that Said strictly maintained a habit of writing and wrote from 5 a.m. to 1 p.m. everyday. Bov also mentioned that as Saids colleague at Columbia University, Said often told him to write more, write more.
88

Said, The Politics of Knowledge, in Exile, 381.

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spirit of democracy lives in individuals. Democracy is universal openness to individual participation bestowed with equal recognition and political and institutional power. The system and institution of democracy therefore must be challenged and modified by the individual and historical consciousness. For Said, democracy rests on the individuals democratic thinking which is predicated upon a geographically-decentered consciousness to circumvent centralizing discourse, power, identity politics and subjectivity. From this perspective, democracy is not simply a political state or system established prior and external to its participants but it is an attitude towards others adopted and practiced by the participants themselves. If everything is political, then nothing is morally neutral. Critical consciousness and moral consciousness are a unity: how you think depends upon your moral attitude. The question of morality is also the question of humanity. Like his predecessors of critical humanism, Said is concerned with the genealogy of humanity. Saids critical work is influenced by both Foucaults and Vicos philosophy, and yet his humanism maintains a critical tension between Foucaults negative critique of humanism and Vicos scientific study of human history. On one hand, Foucaults genealogy of human morality demonstrates that morality is historical and that since the history of morality itself is not teleological, the moral distinction between good and bad is inapplicable to morality itself as a historical formation. Genealogy aims to undermine authority in power and any appeal to transcendental authority by showing how power operates in the materiality of language and discourse. It does not concern the truth and falsity of things; it teases out the power relations between the systems of subjection and the subjected subject and transcends the binary opposition between the true and the false: Although [Foucault] traced with great patience the discursive systems of sciences of life, language, and labor, his aim was not to unveil the truths they had discovered or the falsities they had propounded. Rather, once again, it was the effective operation of these disciplineshow and around what concepts they formed, how they were used, where they developedthat

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was Foucaults prey.89 Foucault has demonstrated that our consciousness and subjectivity including our conscience (the sense of justice) and emotion (the sense of happiness and self-esteem) are controlled, determined, and even brought into existence by the regimes of power and knowledge. Viewed from the perspective of the will to power as an existential necessity of humanity, Foucaults understanding of the formation of human civilization and history is instructive. On the other hand, Vico introduces an alternative genealogical perspective of understanding human history: primordial pietyfear of the mythic otheris the origin of the most rudimentary [political and moral] institutions of humanity and poetic wisdom, i.e. the earliest form of human wisdom from which human reason and morality develop. 90 Said also says, [human ideas] were once passionate imaginings stemming from [pious and fearful] responses to physical existence. 91 Human history seen in this light is not solely a human creation but directed and participated by exterior force the Divine Providence: The poetic word [e.g. the sign Jove] does not occur out of sheer human doing or making, but arises out of mans response to the particular manner in which divine providence makes it claim on man from time to time in human historicity. History is not created or produced by men, but occurs as a result of mans fantastic and archaic response to that which is exterior to man, to that which surpasses and ultimately uses mans desires to design the course and recourse of human historicity. 92 It is not a matter whether will to power/knowledge or morality comes first to exert control and determination over one or the other: according to Vico, it is piety as the primordial form of human moral regard for the other which unites the intellect,

89 90

Paul Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, 12.

Vincenzo, Vicos New Science: The Unity of Piety and Wisdom, unpaginated. According to Vico, when the primitive men in history saw and heard a thunderbolt, they out of pious fear of the unknown other created the sign Jovefathers of men and Godsto designate the sight and sound of a thunderbolt.
91 92

Said, Vico on the Discipline of Bodies and Texts, 87. Vincenzo, Vicos New Science: The Unity of Piety and Wisdom, unpaginated.

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emotion and sensuality of humanity and enables the formation of the early form of human wisdom for later historical development. History stems from human existential circumstances in which human beings respond and react to exterior forces. Saids genealogical and moral humanism circumvents the Foucauldian and the Vichian genealogical perspectives of the beginning and development of humanity and morality: the former views humanity and morality as functions of the will to power while the latter as functions of moral attitude of piety. As discussed before, morality is not a mere function of discourse of power but exists in ones critical consciousness. Morality should not be discussed, intellectualized and theorized as a concept but instead be realized through thinking between ideas, cultures and theories.

The genealogy of Saids humanism underlines an inner force or genius which animates his long-standing multifaceted and multifarious criticism. The unity of his works is unmistakable yet full of particular rhetorical flairs, historically specific details, and political passions. No matter how one contextualizes, historicizes and deconstructs his humanistic thoughts and praxis, there is something indelibly Saidian about Said himself. His literary criticism is organically linked to his existence and his passion and compassion towards his subjects of study which separates him from academics who write for the academic position they assume. If there is something so unarbitrary about the historical and intellectual formation of Saids humanistic criticism, his existence as a literary critic, humanist and public intellectual has its raison dtre that can only be sought in his history. His critical practice entails a dialectic of his historical existence and moral-critical consciousness. [T]he mind is unity, a oneness underlying the modalities, not only because it has made a mythos of itself93 but also because between self and other, presence and absence, home and exile, historicity and universality, optimism and
93

Said, Vico: Autodidact and Humanist, 350.

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pessimism, filiation and affiliation, politics and aesthetics and theory and praxis, it is Saids mind, a unity of piety, intellect, morality and emotion, which chooses, deliberates and re-posits itself.

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EPILOGUE

An Exiles Exile: The Question of Humanism

[H]umanism is not a way of consolidating and affirming what we have always known and felt, but rather a means of questioning, upsetting, and reformulating so much of what is presented to us as commodified, packaged, uncontroversial, and uncritically codified certainties.Edward Said1

Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary.Viktor E. Frankl2

Every intellectual inquiry begins with a series of questions. Arising from specific historical and political situations and crises, questions enable human knowledge by focusing critical attention on the search for answers, new possibilities and alternatives. Confined and conditioned by perspective, culture and intellectual formation, questions also delimit and determine the scope, orientation and results of the intellectual inquiry. Prior to changing and exerting effects upon the world, questions transform and educate us intellectually, morally and emotionally. Humanism is an existential and philosophical question concerning all humanity. For humanists and antihumanists alike, their questions are ultimately humanistic, in search for meanings of humanity. How one asks a question entails why one asks that

1 2

Said, HDC, 28; emphasis added.

Viktor E. Frankl, Mans Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), 154.

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question. It is therefore important for us humans to know the reason why we ask that question that we ask in the first place. The historical transition of Western humanism from modernism to postmodernism is a replacement of the Enlightenment question of why and how humans could be free as a modern bourgeois subject by the postmodern question of why and how humans are unfree as subjected and disciplined subjects. In the case of Edward Said, the questions he raises for himself as a critic, public intellectual and political activist philosophically reflect and historically remodify his understanding of humanism and humanity. From the beginning to the end of his career, even when he employed Foucaults theory of discourse in his critique of Orientalism, Said believed in the human capacity to make and change history and in the agency of self-understanding, selfcriticism and cross-cultural understanding. Underlying each phase of Saids intellectual and critical practiceliterature, theory, politics, and aestheticsis the question of how the studies of literature, theory, politics and aesthetics enable us to achieve a better understanding of ourselves and to search for possibilities of thinking, living and acting. As Hayden White argues, meaning is imposed rather than found,3 and relations are created rather than inherited.4 Criticism is a historical and ongoing process of the will to meaning. If, according to poststructuralist antihumanism, human beings are powerless and life meaningless in face of power, language, capital and ideology, human beings still have the freedom to question the status quo and the system or in the least be emotionally and intellectually discontented. It is important therefore to ask questions which can enact new forms of meaning, thinking and acting in relation to specific historical conditions. Historically and politically speaking, it is of great intellectual and political significance to understand humans in terms of subjects and knowledge as power, and thereby deconstruct the culturally, socially and institutionally imposed meanings of humanity. In the age of
3 4

Hayden White, Criticism as Cultural Politics, review of B, 8. Said, PPC, 457.

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posthumanism and epistemic, cultural and moral relativism, it becomes politically urgent and historically necessary to ask the set of questions which seek to create and construct new meanings of life. [W]hat is critical consciousness at bottom if not an unstoppable predilection for alternatives?5 Saids humanistic critical practice is a historical and intellectual search for an alternative to the established mode of thinking and articulation. This is, I think, why Said emphasizes the secular process of beginning and beginning again as the first step in the intentional production of meaning 6 in history and criticism. In concluding this study of Saids humanistic practice, I examine Saids self-determining and self-fashioning of the meaning of exile in relation to the will-to-meaning experience of the Jews in a Nazi death camp observed and analyzed by Viktor Frankl, an Austrian-Jewish psychiatrist. 7 Throughout this thesis, I have discussed the intellectual importance of exile to Saids humanistic and secular criticism. Exile is a state of displacement, nonsubjectivity, powerlessness and meaninglessness. It is the denial of ones identity, home, culture, existence, subjectivity and humanity. As a people of exile, the Jews were denied everything, existentially, intellectually and physically. Although Saids experience as a Palestinian exile in America could not be compared with that of the Jews during the Holocaust, Said and those Jewish prisoners who managed to survive the concentration camps both demonstrate that they can only survive and triumph intellectually in the absence of the right to be, for Said, a Palestinian and, for the Jews, a human being. As experiences of human suffering and crisis, exile and extermination are the intellectual and existential site of alternative meaning production and creation. Instead of concentrating on the question why suffering?, Said and
5 6 7

Said, Traveling Theory, in WTC, 247. Said, B, 5; emphasis original.

Viktor Frankl in his Mans Search for Meaning first recounts his personal experiences and observations of Jewish people in a Concentration Camp and identifies the will to meaning as an existential necessity as opposed to Alfred Adlers Nietzschean notion of the will to power.

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the Jewish intellectuals seek to answer the question how can I make suffering meaningful? Saids notions of secular criticism and the exilic critic provide a constructive and meaningful interpretation of exile as a critical attitude of magnanimity, sympathy and trans-subjective understanding. Saids

humanistic criticism derives its critical and moral agency from an exilic attitude in spite of the debilitating effect of exile on his subjectivity. Through changing their attitudes toward inevitable suffering, 8 the Jewish prisoners create meanings out of their suffering by harboring and maintaining unconditional faith in love, family, friendship, the future or God. Faith does not contradict reason and wisdom; it is part of thinking and the will to meaning. The originary act of man understanding himself presupposes that man is able to understand and what he attempts to know is worth knowing. Said believes that hope and freedom are circular: The fundamental paradox of education is that you must serve and submit to authoritythe authority of tradition, of learning itself, of the scholars and scientists who went before you and in a sense made you possibleand at the same time you must somehow remain critical, even defiant. And what makes you defiant, what makes it possible for you to build a bridge across the abyss [of immutability and impossibility to go beyond the authority of tradition] that so many people are defeated by, is hope and a belief in a great idea, the ideal of justice, the idea of emancipation, the idea of enlightenment, which of course is where the bridge leads you. 9 The often quoted slogans of Gramsci pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will entail that we have to be critical and skeptical not only of the status quo administered by the authority in power but also the fallibility and presumptiveness of our intellect and yet simultaneously be hopeful about the freedom of the will to choose differently and alternatively. No matter how totalitarian a system is, human beings have at least the freedom to react to it emotionally. The critical watershed of Saids intellectual
8 9

Viktor Frankl, Mans Search for Meaning, 133. Said, Citizenship, Resistance, and Democracy, 32.

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transformation from a scholar of English and comparative literature to a public intellectual and political activist is first initiated and motivated by an emotional response towards the political and cultural disfigurement of the Arab world.10 The struggle for Palestinian self-determination and social justice here and in America, says Said, could not be projected better than in that phrasecommanding knowledge combined with ardent faith.
11

The

overcoming of power, injustice, greed and aggression produces more knowledge of these things than merely analyzing and surrendering to them. I do not intend to argue for a hedonist view on theory but a unity of all modalities concerning human life (piety, wisdom, morality and feeling): if a theory does not affirm moral principles and bring hope and happiness to the world of human beings, it is incomplete and morally flawed. There is always a dialectic of hope or faith and better understanding and more freedom in Saids works, as Mitchell says: Vicos rational civil theology is the best name for Edward Saids religion of reading and writing, humanism and democratic criticism.12 Frankls existential analysis emphasizes the indelible freedom of choice, which is reflected in Saids view of the potentialities of critical consciousness in understanding, resisting and changing history and society. From the point of view of death, the distinction between the rich and the poor, the wise and the fool is meaningless; from the point of view of suffering, humans are helpless and powerless. But we decide and determine what questions to ask, how to think, feel and act, who we are and can become. As Viktor Frankl writes, Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary.13 The critical consciousness is the active will to meaning, which stands in an antagonistic relation to the randomness of the historical particular and the determinism of
10 11 12 13

Said, Dispossession, xiii. Said, PA, 30. W. J. T. Mitchell, Secular Divination: Edward Saids Humanism, 470. Viktor Frankl, Mans Search for Meaning, 154.

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the universal general. Humanistic criticism, according to Said, is to understand and critique in a worldly and integrative, as distinct from separating or partitioning, mode and, at the same time, to offer resistance to the great reductive and vulgarizing us-versus-them thought patterns of our time.14 And the critic is a traveler between cultures, localities, theories and positions: the traveler crosses over, traverses territory, and abandons fixed positions, all the time. To do this with dedication and love as well as a realistic sense of the terrain is a kind of academic freedom at its highest [] To join the academic world is therefore to enter a ceaseless quest for knowledge and freedom.15 Said says: Criticism exists only because critics practice it. It is neither an institution nor, strictly speaking, a discipline; 16 the critical consciousness is only realized and materialized in history and society through the critics choices and actions. This thesis is a study of Edward W. Saids humanism; it examines the epistemic and moral foundation of his humanism and contextualizes his critical practice as a project of resistance against forms of cultural, intellectual and political oppression. What has been kept in focus in this study is the intellectual importance and historical relevance of Saids humanism and critical practice to our contemporary cultural, academic and political conditions and current theoretical and critical preoccupations. Humanism grounded in the critical consciousness is at bottom a moral-critical attitude, which actively seeks and creates meanings in what we think and do; for it can only be realized and practiced by individuals, humanism resists to be transfixed and objectified as concept, theory or idea. Saids humanism and criticism will continue to generate new critical questions and theoretical ramifications in the future to come. New critical questions are needed to address and respond to another historical moment and a different cultural and geo-political context.
14 15 16

Said, HDC, 50. Said, Exile, 404. Ibid., 165.

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The critical questions raised and discussed in this thesis are both for understanding Said and myself. This Saidian project is meaningful to me as a student of English Literature in Hong Kong, because Saids humanistic practice of self-inventory and self-criticism enables me to reflect upon the specific genealogical and geo-political formation and the cultural, civil and political functions of the discipline of English Studies in Hong Kong from the colonial to the postcolonial era. The meaning of English education is and needs to be continuously redefined by both the past and the present. In theory, history and geography, there are a wide range of critical questions and concerns to follow this research project. It would be of theoretical and philosophical importance to extend the scope of the critical genealogy of Saids humanism to encompass not only Saids intellectual and humanistic masters from the past but also his contemporary Euro-American and Arab humanists and intellectuals. For example, R. P. Blackmur, a literary critic and poet at Princeton University from the 1940s to the 1960s, whose literary criticism and autodidactism have exerted a great influence on Said. Also, Richard Poiriers literary criticism, Theodor Adornos negative dialectics, Nietzsches will-to-power metaphysics, Raymond Williamss Marxist literary criticism and cultural materialism all contribute to Saids humanistic practice, and their influences on Said would need to be theorized and historicized. Moreover, the music and piano performance and interpretation of the Canadian pianist and composer, Glenn Gould, exemplify intellectual freedom and autonomy. Wood says: Said specifically identified this task as that of the intellectualin this perspective Glenn Gould, seeking to question and remake the relation of music to the social world of performance, is Saids model of the intellectual.
17

Gould embodies and manifests the individuality and

subjectivity of the intellectual in the unique aesthetic and musical domain uncircumscribed and untheorized by the system of power, convention and

17

Michael Wood, Introduction, in Late Style, xvii.

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protocol.18 Saids discussion of Gould provides a special angle from which one can understand the importance and function of music as an aesthetic category to Saids humanism. Apart from the theoretical and philosophical continuation of the project of Saids humanism, the question of humanism will also need to be reexamined, recontextualized, redefined and reevaluated in other historical and geo-political settings. In the context of China, for instance, since the liberalization of China toward the world, in attitude and in policy, Q. S. Tong and Douglas Kerr suggest, there has been an overwhelming amount of interest in the developments of the Western humanities, in particular in contemporary critical theory or critical knowledge more generally.19 Saids humanism and critical practice are historically situated in the U.S. to address the specific intellectual, academic and political issues and problems in the West; intellectuals and critics in China, who are experiencing the force and momentum of modernity and postmodernity at the same time, would need to reorient questions of humanity, morality, and intellectual and ethical responsibilities toward historical, cultural, moral, intellectual, national and geopolitical conditions in China. What does it mean to be an intellectual and academic in China in the midst of the intellectual and economic need to open the national gate to the West and the national will to power and identity? From

18

According to Said, Glenn Gould is an intellectual because every choice of his intellectual and musical articulation and production is subject to Goulds determination and discretion: from the musical instrument, location of production, choice of musical pieces, medium of expression; all these are consciously chosen to maximize and enhance the freedom of Goulds own intellectual expression and to produce music and musical understanding in the highest order. See Said, The Music Itself: Glenn Goulds Contrapuntal Vision, Vanity Fair 46, no. 3 (May 1983): 97-101, 127-128; Glenn Gould, the Virtuoso as Intellectual, Raritan 20, no. 1 (summer 2001): 1-16; and Presidential Address 1999: Humanism and Heroism, PMLA 115, no. 3 (May 2000): 285-290. See also Glenn Goulds own writing and interviews in Gould, Glenn, The Glenn Gould Reader, ed. Tim Page (New York: Knopf, 1984).
19

Q. S. Tong and Douglas Kerr, Introduction: Difference and Convergence in Globalization, in Critical Zone 1: A Forum of Chinese and Western Knowledge, eds. Q. S. Tong, Wang Shouren and Douglas Kerr (Hong Kong and Nanjing: HKU Press and Nanjing University Press, 2004), 2.

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the perspective of language as a form of cultural capital, how should national, academic and economic resources be reallocated and redistributed in the context of multilingualism and multiculturalism? There are so many uncertainties concerning the future development of China. As intellectuals and humanists, we could not and perhaps should not prescribe certain directions and goals or utilitarian values as policy-makers and state intellectuals do, but we can, by a historical and disciplinary self-reflection and most importantly self-criticism, diagnose and articulate emergent structures of feeling, morals of thoughts and subcultures. In face of new historical development, it is important to combine critical knowledge with critical imagination in hope to achieve a dialectic of tradition and modernity, knowledge and criticism, and theory and praxis. There are many critical possibilities and historical localities which are beyond the scope of this thesis, but show the intellectual and critical potientialities of this Saidian project. In Chapter One, The Last Jewish intellectual, the discussion provides a historical and theoretical overview of Said as a Palestinian intellectual and critic in America. Saids humanistic and secular criticism demonstrates a dialectic of historical circumstances and critical self-reflection and repositionings. His antagonism toward religious discourse and the

ontologizing of humanity, culture, knowledge and identity stems from his personal experience of biculturalism and bilingualism. For cultural amphibians like Said, the interplay and interpenetration of cultures, languages and identities are intellectually more productive than their separations. Saids reinvention of humanism is historically linked to the question of the human subject and the postmodern experience of the crisis of meaning. In fighting against intellectual powerlessness and political indifference, Saids humanism affirms human agency and the political effectiveness of literary, philological and cultural criticism. Vicos historicist humanism and science of history provides a philosophical basis on which Said ramifies and historicizes the function and meaning of humanism in the contemporary context of postmodernism and postcolonialism.

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Chapter Two, Humanism and Secular Criticism, contextualizes Saids humanism and secular criticism within the Vichian humanistic and philological tradition. Vicos historicism or historicist humanism is a theory or philosophy of human nature that recognizes the historical nature of humans and of all things human, i.e. the totality of the historical world as made by humans themselves. According to Vico, humans are not simply arethey are nothing other than their history. Human nature is human history: human history, as made by humans themselves, is essentially the development of the human mind. Said therefore understands the human in terms of human existential actualities: language, knowledge, criticism, theory, and politics as historical. From this historical perspective, Said judges culture and literature not just in terms of their cultural and national origins, but in close relation to their historical conditions. Since each historical period or stage is understood as a whole in which all human activities intertwine with and interpenetrate one another, Saids philological and secular criticism is cross-disciplinary and opposed to the compartmentalization of the human world into different cultures, geographies, and histories and to the specialization and

institutionalization of human knowledge. Chapter Three, Saids Critical Practice, is a combination of literary, formal and theoretical analysis of Saids major and representative critical work to show the dialectical connection between his historically situated critical work and his belief in humanism. This chapter proposes to examine four major critical categories as classified by Said himself: literature, theory, politics, and aesthetics collectively and genealogically. Through explicating Saids literary and cultural criticism in Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism in accordance with Saids formulation of humanism and literary criticism, the discussion demonstrates how Saids humanism circumvents the crude distinction between traditional Eurocentric humanism and poststructuralist antihumanism, and also politics and aesthetics. This chapter also underlines the importance of aesthetics to Saids humanistic criticism, especially in his late career. Saids critical practice shows how one can and should connect

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aesthetics with politics without reducing the former to the latter nor studying art outside its political context in the name of aesthetic appreciation. Saids return to aesthetics and literary writing is no less a political resistance against system and the weight of discourse than his literary and cultural criticism and political fight for Palestinian self-determination. Chapter Four, Said as a Public Intellectual, resituates Saids idea and praxis of the public intellectual within the famous Foucault-Chomsky intellectual debate on human nature and the role and responsibility of the intellectual vis--vis power. Saids critique of Foucault and defense of Chomsky in Traveling Theory has drawn much critical discussion which often situates Said in an oppositional relation to Michel Foucault. This chapter attempts to show the intellectual and epistemic connection between Saids humanism and Foucaults philosophy and that the difference between Said and Foucault is primarily historical, disciplinary, political and strategic. Contrary to the common view of Foucault as an antihumanist in denial of human subjectivity and freedom, Foucaults understanding of the human subject is not a simplistic one and not even absolutely an antihumanistic one. The most severe critics of the humanist subject are very often motivated by the strongest desire for human subjectivity and freedom. Foucault is one of them. According to Foucault, power and resistance are two sides of the same coin, which define and reinforce each other. Both Foucault and Said see freedom and resistance as inherent part of rather than external to the regime of knowledge/power. I have also discussed how Saids distancing of his humanism from Foucault and adoption of Vicos historicism is a historically specific, political and strategic response and reaction toward unworldly and historically detached critical theories and criticism such as the poststructuralist view of language and literature. Finally, Chapter Five, The Moral of Genealogy, first establishes that the tradition of negative critique of Western humanism from Nietzsche, Foucault to Said is also a moral critique of the conceit of the will to power, knowledge and identity as the metaphysics of Western humanism. The

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discussion demonstrates that the critical consciousness and the moral consciousness are a oneness. Based on this observation, this chapter then examines the epistemic and moral basis of Saids humanism. Yet there is no epistemic foundation for Saids humanism and moral criticism. Ironically, it is this absence of moral basis and principles that enables Saids self-determining of the meaning of humanism. Humanism and morality exist only in dialectical thinking and critical repositioning; they are again achieved through questioning subjectivity, ideology and power, determining meanings and choosing attitudes freely and actively. The value and meaning of humanism for Said lie in its being a means of questioning, upsetting, and reformulating so much of what is presented to us as commodified, packaged, uncontroversial, and uncritically codified certainties, rather than consolidating and affirming what we have always known and felt.20

To return to where I began in this concluding chapter, it is of great intellectual and existential importance to ask critical and constructive questions that are based on and confirm the conviction in the freedom of choice and determination of meaning. Although I have not been through the traumatic experience of exile and the existential exigency of the will to meaning in suffering like Said and Jewish intellectuals, every individual has to address the existential necessity of finding meanings and deal with the sense of meaninglessness and powerlessness in life in one way or another. Learning to ask the right question is perhaps more important than the search for an answer. The need to answer the question of humanity and humanism gives life a purpose. In face of situations and senses of meaninglessness and powerlessness, one may find comfort and encouragement in Frankls tragically optimistic statement of human freedom:
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They
20

Said, HDC, 28; emphasis added.

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may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedomsto choose ones attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose ones own 21 way.

21

Viktor Frankl, Mans Search for Meaning, 86.

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Bibliography

Edward W. Saids works All references to works by Edward W. Said are listed here chronologically.

____________ (1966). A Sociology of Mind. Review of The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the Penses of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine, by Lucien Goldmann. Partisan Review 33, no. 3 (summer 1966): 444-448. ____________ (1966). Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966. ____________ (1967). Vico: Autodidact and Humanist. Centennial Review 11, no. 3 (summer 1967): 336-352. ____________ and Maire Said (1969). Introduction to Philology and Weltliteratur, by Erich Auerbach. Centennial Review 13, no. 1 (winter 1969): 1-17. ____________ (1970). Notes on the Characterization of a Literary Text. MLN 85, no. 6, Comparative Literature (December, 1970): 765-790. ____________ (1971). Linguistics and the Archeology of Mind. International Philosophical Quarterly 11, no. 1 (March, 1971): 104-134. ____________ (1971). Molestation and Authority in Narrative Fiction. In Aspects of Narrative: Selected Papers from the English Institute. Edited by J. Hillis Miller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1971.

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____________ (1972). Eclecticism and Orthodoxy in Criticism. Diacritics 2, no. 1 (spring 1972): 2-8. ____________ (1972). Michel Foucault as an Intellectual Imagination. boundary 2 1, no. 1 (autumn 1972): 1-36. ____________ (1974). An Ethics of Language. Review of The Archaeology of Knowledge and Discourse on Language by Michel Foucault. Diacritics 4, no. 2 (1974): 28-37. ____________ (1975). Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Basic Books, 1975. ____________ (1978). Orientalism. 25th anniversary edition. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. ____________ and Eugenio Donato (1979). An Exchange on Deconstruction and History. The Problems of Reading in Contemporary American Criticism: A Symposium. boundary 2 8, no. 1 (autumn 1979): 65-74. ____________ (1979). The Palestine Question and the American Context. Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1979. ____________ (1979). The Question of Palestine. New York: Times Books, 1979. ____________ (1980). Literature and Society: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1978. Edited and with a preface by Edward W. Said. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. ____________ (1981). Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. New York: Pantheon, 2004. ____________ (1983). The Music Itself: Glenn Goulds Contrapuntal Vision. Vanity Fair 46, no. 3 (May, 1983): 97-101, 127-128. ____________ (1983). The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983. ____________ (1984). Michel Foucault, 1927-1984. Raritan 4, no. 2 (fall 1984): 1-11.

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____________ (1984). The Mind of Winter: Reflections on Life in Exile. Harper's Magazine 269 (September, 1984): 49-55. ____________ (1986). Foucault and the Imagination of Power. In Foucault: A Critical Reader. Edited by Davld Couzens Hoy. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. ____________ (1986). Michael Walzer's Exodus and Revolution: A Canaanite Reading. Grand Street 5, no. 2 (winter 1986): 86-106. ____________ (1986). After the Last Sky: Palestinian live. Text by Edward W. Said. Photographs by Jean Mohr. New York: Vintage, 1993. ____________ (1987). Kim: The Pleasures of Imperialism. Raritan 7, no. 2 (1987): 27-64. ____________ (1987). The Imperial Spectacle. Grand Street 6, no. 2 (winter 1987): 82-104. ____________ (1988). Identity, Negation and Violence. New Left Review 171 (September-October, 1988): 46-60. ____________ (1989). Andras Schiff at Carnegie Hall. The Nation, December 25, 1989, 802-804. ____________ (1989). Figures, Configurations, Transfigurations. Lecture given at the Conference of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, England, on August 25, 1989. Polygraph 4 (1990): 9-34. ____________ (1989). The Satanic Verses and Democratic Freedoms. The Black Scholar (March, 1989): 17-18. ____________ (1990). Narrative, Geography and Interpretation. New Left Review (March-April, 1990): 81-97. ____________ (1990). Untimely Meditation. The Nation, August 1, 2003, 38-42. ____________ (1991). Musical Elaborations. The Wellek Library Lectures at the University of California, Irvine. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

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____________ (1993). The Importance of Being Unfaithful to Wagner. Review of Wagner in Performance, edited by Barry Millington and Stewart Spencer, Wagner: Race and Revolution, by Paul Lawrence Rose, Wagner Handbook, edited by Ulrich Mller and Peter Wapnewski, and Richard Wagners Visit to Rossini and An Evening at Rossinis in BeauSjour, by Edmond Michotte. London Review of Books 15, no. 3, (July 1, 1993): 11-12. ____________ (1993). Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. ____________ (1994). Against the Orthodoxies. In For Rushdie: Essays by Arab and Muslim Writers in Denfense of Free Speech. Edited by Anouar Abdallah and others and translated by Kevin Anderson, Kenneth Whitehead. New York: G. Braziller, 1994 ____________ (1994). The Pen and the Sword: Conversations with David Barsamian. Monroe. ME.: Common Courage Press, 1994. ____________ (1994). The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969-1994. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994. ____________ (1994). The Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994. ____________ (1995). Adorno as Lateness Itself. In Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World. Edited by Malcolm Bull. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. ____________ (1995). Why Listen to Boulez? The Nation, November 6, 1995, 548-551. ____________ (1995). Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process. Preface by Christopher Hitchens. New York: Vintage, 1995. ____________ and Jon Whitman (1999). Edward Saids Presidency. Special Topic: Ethics and Literary Study. PMLA 114, no.1 (January, 1999): 106-107. ____________ (1999). Out of Place: A Memoir. New York: Knopf, 1999.

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____________ (2000). Glenn Gould, the Virtuoso as Intellectual. Raritan 20, no. 1 (summer 2001): 1-16. ____________ (2000). Globalizing Literary Study. Special Topic: Globalizing Literary Studies. PMLA 116, no. 1 (January, 2001): 64-68. ____________ (2000). Invention, Memory, and Place. Critical Inquiry 26, no. 2 (winter 2000): 175-192. ____________ (2000). Presidential Address 1999: Humanism and Heroism. PMLA 115, no. 3 (May, 2000): 285-290. ____________ (2000). Foreword to Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire: Interviews with David Barsamian, by Eqbal Ahmad and David Barsamian. In Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire: Interviews with David Barsamian. Cambridge, Mass. South End Press, 2000. ____________ (2000). Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. ____________ (2000). The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After. New York: Pantheon Books; London: Granta, 2000. ____________ (2001). Afterword: Reflections on Ireland and Postcolonialism. In Ireland and Postcolonial Theory. Edited by Clare Carroll and Patricia King. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. ____________ (2001). The Clash of Ignorance. The Nation, October 22, 2001, 11-13. ____________ (2001). Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said. Edited and introduced by Gauri Viswanathan. New York: Pantheon Books, 2001. ____________ (2002). In Conversation with Neeladri Bhattacharya, Suvir Kaul, and Ania Loomba. In Relocating Postcolonialism. Edited by David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002. ____________ (2002). Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society. New York: Pantheon Books, 2002.

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____________ (2003). A Monumental Hypocrisy. Counter Punch.org. Created on February 15, 2003. Clipped on August 14, 2008. <http://www.counterpunch.org/said02152003.html>. ____________ (2003). Citizenship, Resistance, and Democracy. In Rewriting Democracy: Cultural Politics in Postmodernity. Edited by Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. ____________ (2003). Whos In Charge? A Tiny, Unelected Group, Backed by Powerful Unrepresentative Interests. Counter Punch.org. Created on March 8, 2003. Clipped on August 12, 2008. <http://www.counter-punch.org/said03082003.html>. ____________ and David Barsamian (2003). Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W. Said. Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2003. ____________ (2004). Freud and the Non-European. London: Verso, 2004. ____________ (2004). From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map: Essays. New York: Pantheon Books, 2004. ____________ (2004). Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. ____________ (2004). Interviews with Edward W. Said. Edited by Amritjit Singh and Bruce G. Johnson. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004. ____________ (2004). On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. New York: Pantheon Books, 2006. ____________ (2008). Music at the Limits. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.

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