The Legacy of Edward W. Said

Notes

Notes Chapter 1: Edward W. Said and the Poststructuralists 1. For example, though not strictly speaking a neoconservative, the reviewer of Said’s posthumously published On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain (New York: Pantheon, 2006), Edward Rothstein, marginalizes Said’s focus on the open-endedness of the late style by focusing his review on Said’s commentary on Jean Genet’s solidarity with the Palestinian cause in 1970, thus implicating Said with terrorism: “‘I defend the Palestinians whole heartedly and automatically,’ Genet writes, ‘They are in the right because I love them.’ He recalls the brotherly kisses he bestowed on a fellow guerrilla in Jordan in 1970: ‘The one they embraced would be leaving that night, cross the Jordan River to plant bombs in Palestine and often would not return.’ “But wouldn’t a ‘late style’ have some sense of irony about this romanticization of violence? Or some notion about precisely what these light, sparkling, open figures were intending? Wouldn’t it require being more attuned to the precise character of the contradictions so warmly embraced? Doesn’t late style require some scrupulous self-reflection, some sense of how earlier perceptions might themselves require revisiting and revising? Wouldn’t something similar have helped Said’s own late style?” (New York Times Book Review, July 16, 2006, p. 19). 2. Statement of Stanley Kurtz before the Subcommittee on Select Education, Committee on Education and the Workforce, U.S. House of Representatives, http://edworkforce. house.gov/hearings/108/sd/titlevi61903/kurtz.htm. 3. I am referring to several of those who were privy to the lectures that became Humanism and Democratic Criticism and spoke to this matter in the special issue of boundary 2 (31, no. 2 [Summer 2004]) edited by Aamir Mufti and entitled Secular Criticism and to several of those who contributed to the volume edited by Homi Bhabha and W. T. J. Mitchell and entitled Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), which commemorated Said’s death. 4. Timothy Brennan, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 98. Later in that book (101), Brennan identifies 234 Notes to Pages 3–9 poststructuralist theory’s “splic[ing] together” of the “racial and political” other, “as though they were the same thing”—a splicing that, he claims, “was simply unacceptable to Said”— with “the Heideggerian turn.” Brennan’s book was published after Said’s Humanism and Democratic Criticism. 5. Paul A. Bové, “Continuing the Conversation,” in Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation , 41. 6. Said, On Late Style, 7. 7. For a brilliant critique of Said’s contradictory distinction between a “bad,” ontologically “essentialist” humanism and a “good,” “essential” humanism, see R. Radhakrishnan’s essay “Edward Said’s Literary Humanism” (Cultural Critique 67 [Fall 2007]: 24–25): “Does Said really believe that he can hold on to the good vibes and connotations of the mere adjective ‘essential,’ while at the same time cast himself as an uncompromising antagonist of ‘essentialism’ as a philosophical-theoretical-epistemological position? . . . Humanism and Democratic Criticism teems with passages where Said celebrates the self-reflexive, de-stabilizing, and protean play of language in literary and aesthetic works, but in all these references he is thinking of literary language that to him is organic to experience, not the ‘language’ of theory that to him is occlusive of worldliness and experience. It would appear then this non-essentialist play of literary language and aesthetic elaboration is essential. Not an ontological thinker and not a philosopher, Said chooses not to do battle with essentialism per se, but with identitarian historical modes of living and being that are underwritten by essentialism, in particular, nationalism. “Why then does Said, who believes in, or would like to believe in, the epistemological assailability of humanism, not take poststructuralism to heart (poststructuralism whose very life breath is the ‘death of essentialism’); or for that matter, Heidegger’s ‘Letter on Humanism’ which Said rightly identifies as ‘a thoroughgoing examination of its [humanism ’s] metaphysical relationship to a prior Being,’ but only to say, as a consequence, that ‘what really concerns me is humanism as a useable praxis for intellectuals and academics?’ Would not the epistemological deconstruction of humanism be perfectly compatible with Said’s critical text?” 8. Aamir R. Mufti, “Secular Criticism: A Reintroduction for Perilous Times,” in Secular Criticism, a special issue of boundary 2 (31, no. 2 [Summer 2004]: 1–2). In this piece Mufti focuses on the legacy...