Introduction: Edward Said and After: Toward a New Humanism

Edward W. Said established an ambivalent relationship toward humanism throughout his life and work. While Said extolled humanism's power to connect progressive intellectual workers and create lines of solidarity between the discrepant experiences of women and men who were working against grave injustices in the world—regardless of national filiations—he also recognized humanism's potential destructiveness in contributing to the realization of totalizing discourses such as orientalism. As a consequence of this ambivalence, Said advocated a New Humanism that would affirm the highest aspirations of culture while also working against the pitfalls of identitarian thinking, which propels national and religious enthusiasm.¹

As W. J. T. Mitchell recently claimed in a special issue of Critical Inquiry (Winter 2005) devoted to the life and legacy of Said, "Humanism for Said was always a dialectical concept, generating oppositions it could neither absorb nor avoid. The very word used to cause in him mixed feelings of reverence and revulsion: an admiration for the great monuments of civilization that constitute the archive of humanism and a disgust at humanism's underside of suffering and oppression that, as Benjamin insisted, make them monuments to barbarism as well" (462). It is seemingly time to reflect on the conditions of possibility for a new and critical humanism, as Said's critical writings clearly gestured toward.

"Secular criticism" and "worldliness," two critical ideals that animated the life and work of Edward Said, seem to have been "lost," particularly in the contemporary academy's political climate where the corporatization of the university—along with the theoretical cocoons that have sprung up as a result—has reduced categories such as "human agency," "action," and the capacity of women and men to work "in the world" to the realm of the unattainable and naive.² As Said wrote in his essay "Humanism's Sphere," "humanism [is] something fundamentally discordant with advanced theory."³ Add to these troubling tendencies within intellectual criticism the rise of the cult of expertise and the strong academic inclination toward political quietism; Said found himself continually disturbed by both.

Throughout his career as a literary critic and political activist, including during his last days when he was suffering a terrible illness, Said again and again confirmed that secular criticism and worldliness were the very conditions of possibility for a New Humanism that would lead future public intellectuals toward formulating just resolutions to intransigent ethnic and religious conflicts within a world full of so many seemingly lost causes. The rise of the new orientalism and the growing specter of a new intellectual McCarthyism, to a degree, prove the general tenor of Said's theses as these were developed throughout his oeuvre.

Now, in this moment of grave political uncertainty inside and outside the university, how can Edward W. Said's extensive and path-breaking literary and political work—in addition to his inspirational life and example—be deployed to advance a critical humanism for the creation of noncoercive knowledge and to bring together discrepant experiences, which were central aspects of Said's work as a committed intellectual? How does one begin to assess Said's commitment to humanism, his affirmation of the power of human beings to shape the world through their will and efforts instead of through unfathomable forces caused by abstract, ahistorical, and decontextualized entities like "market forces" and "structural underpinnings," when so much within contemporary culture seeks to deny the power and efficacy of human action and individual effort? By challenging essentialized and given categories such as "culture," "the Arab mind," and "the clash of civilizations," Said sought to recuperate through careful analysis what others had left as immutable, uncontested, and forgotten.

This special issue of Cultural Critique seeks to examine and understand what Said's humanistic legacy provides the critical intellectual at this historical moment, when so much about the potential of the human remains diminished and uncertain, even belittled by those who have moved beyond the human. Said's frustration with what he viewed as the diminishment of the critical potential of literary theory, for example, arose because of what he viewed as...