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1. Edward W. Said and the Poststructuralists An Introduction In setting up a world and setting forth the earth, the work [of art] is an instigating of this strife. This does not happen so that the work should at the same time settle and put an end to the strife in an insipid agreement, but so the strife may remain a strife. Setting up a world and setting forth the earth, the work accomplishes this strife. The work-being of the work consists in the instigation of strife between world and earth. It is because the strife arrives at its high point in the simplicity of intimacy that the unity of the work comes about in the instigation of strife. The latter is the continually selfoverreaching gathering of the work’s agitation. The repose of the work that rests in itself thus has its essence in the intimacy of strife. —Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” Opposition is true friendship. —William Blake, “Proverbs of Hell” With the untimely death of Edward W. Said in 2003 various constituencies of the academic and public intellectual community, both in the United States and abroad, have begun to reassess the writings of this powerful contemporary oppositional intellectual, seeking to determine the nature of his legacy. On the right, the Straussian neoconservatives, who have exerted inordinate influence over the policies of the George W. Bush administration, have already inaugurated a campaign that goes beyond simply discrediting Said’s work as that of a subversive intent on slandering America’s benign global image and undermining its global authority.1 This initiative, for example, is epitomized by the crude testimony that the anthropologist Stanley Kurtz of the Hoover Institution gave before the House Subcommittee on Select Education (June 19, 2003). Kurtz claimed that Said’s groundbreaking and extraordinarily influential critique of the ideological bias of Western schol- 2 the legacy of edward w. said arly and media representations of the Orient, which he first presented in Orientalism, had become dogma in Middle East area studies funded by the federal government under Title VI of the Higher Education Act and, in thus encouraging this kind of “extremist” and “anti-American” scholarship, had contributed massively to the undermining of the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” if not, as his pedagogic rhetoric insinuates, to terrorism itself: The ruling intellectual paradigm in academic area studies (especially Middle Easternstudies)iscalled“post-colonialtheory.”Post-colonialtheorywasfounded by Columbia University 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 19th century intellectuals who propped up racist colonial empires. The core premise of postcolonial theory is that it is immoral for a scholar to put his knowledge of foreign languages and cultures at the service of American power. In his regular columns for the Egyptian weekly Al-Ahram, Said has made his views about America crystal clear. Said has condemned the United States, which he calls “a stupid bully,” as a nation with a “history of reducing whole peoples, countries, and even continents to ruin by nothing short of holocaust.” Said has actively urged his Egyptian readers to replace their naïve belief in America as the defender of liberty and democracy with his supposedly more accurate picture of America as an habitual perpetrator of genocide.2 On the left, a significant number of oppositional intellectuals, claiming to be his heirs and eager to proffer an image of Said’s oeuvre that would radically counter this vulgar neoconservative vilification, seem to have read his posthumously published last book, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, as his apologia pro vita sua, the culmination of the narrative history of his thought.3 To be specific, they seek, following his directives, to offer us a Said who, in marked opposition to the “antihumanism” of the great poststructuralist thinkers who were his contemporaries—Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, and not least, Michel Foucault— finally and overtly identified his more or less lifelong anti-imperialist project with the Western humanist legacy these poststructuralists were committed to delegitimizing. One of the most recent—and counterproductively uncompromising—versions of this binarist left-oriented claim comes from Timothy Brennan, a former student of Said, who writes: With some guardedness, it is in the essays of The World, the Text, and the Critic that he sets out to portray a mental landscape of imperial resurgence at the...

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