Edward Said and Marxism: Anxieties of Influence
To his admirers, Edward Said has—especially since his death—come to be seen as the ideal type of critical intellectual, and Orientalism an ur-text for multiple enquiries and intellectual or even personal transmutations. For Timothy Brennan, Orientalism
turned out to be not only a book for knowing but a manual for doing. It was not just a book to emulate, but a book whose content addressed how to be the sort of intellectual Said himself became in the writing of it. This is why it cannot be exhausted. We pour ourselves into it, and therefore get ourselves back, but transformed.
(2001, 99)
we have been able to read it every day, transparently, in the dramas and dreams of our history, in its disputes and conflicts, in the defeats and victories of the workers' movement which is our only hope and our destiny.
(Althusser and Balibar 1970, 13)
Yet even if Said's work stimulates in some devotees an enthusiasm comparable to that felt for Marx's by some followers, the actual relationship has been notably problematic.1 It is striking that, although many of Said's admirers would call themselves Marxists, a great deal of the most probingly critical (not to mention the most sweepingly hostile) commentary on Said's work has also come from Marxists.
Said discussed his own attitude to Marxism at various times, but ordinarily in ways that were brief, allusive, ambivalent—and when he was more forthcoming, it was largely when directly challenged on the issue by interviewers, rather than in his own written texts. In one [End Page 50] such interview he said that "Marxism, in so far as it is an orthodofly, an ontology, even an epistemology, strikes me as extraordinarily insufficient . . . but I've never indulged in anti-Marxism either" (Said 1992b, 259). He linked this insufficiency to the political irrelevance of academic Marxism in the United States and the dogmatism and pro-Sovietism of political Marxism in the Arab world (259–61). "That leaves," he went on, "nevertheless, a great deal there to be interested in" (261). Many of the theorists and activists for whom Said expressed greatest admiration, from C. L. R. James to Theodor Adorno, Raymond Williams to Amilcar Cabral, occupied some place in the very broad church of non-Soviet Marxism; and he intermittently engaged—in largely though never unmixedly positive terms—with the work of major Marxist theorists of aesthetics from Lukács (e.g., Said 1976b, 1995b, and the strikingly laudatory invocation of Lukács in 2000c, xviii) to Fredric Jameson (e.g., Said 1982). He once said, sounding almost defensive, that he had always "tried my best to deal with it [Marxist thought] in a very vigorous way" (1992b, 261).
Yet the most important, or at least most evident, relevant intellectual relationships were not with Marxism as a body or tradition either of thought or of political action (or a cluster of them) but with a number of individual thinkers who are conventionally designated as Marxist: Adorno and Gramsci, Lukács and Fanon, Williams and, more broadly and diffusely, Marxist historians writing on imperialism. One may well wonder whether these very disparate figures—who, furthermore, tended to figure in or exert an apparent influence on often quite different parts and periods of Said's work—actually have enough in common for the "Marxist" label to have much analytical usefulness in relation to them all.
It may also be noted that only certain kinds of Marxism and of Marxist feature at all substantively in relation to Said's work. Said closely engaged with a specifically Western Marxism—both in Perry Anderson's (1976) sense of a western European intellectual tradition focused mostly on philosophical and aesthetic questions, and in the later configuration of a mainly Anglophone academic milieu. In a very different fashion and later in his...
