A New "Copernican" Revolution: Said's Critique of Metaphysics and Theology

The view that Edward Said is primarily a "Third World" critic of orientalism, imperialism, and Zionism has gained wide currency in the academic community and beyond. This appropriation of his writings, which has helped launch the increasingly important field of postcolonial studies, is perhaps not particularly surprising. After all, Said over the years wrote a great deal about these related areas of knowledge and socio-political combat. Some of the most compelling insights in his oeuvre concern modern Euro-American imperialism—its genesis, evolution, consolidation, reversal, and recrudescence; its doctrinal audacity and epic scope; its trails of scent and lines of descent; its enormous capacity for self-fortification, self-idealization, and (in the case of contemporary America) self-occultation. Orientalism, his most famous book (it has been translated into thirty-six languages worldwide), is an encyclopedic, meticulously diagnostic dissection and indictment of orientalist discourse;¹ presumptively disinterested but—in Said's view—profoundly motivated, this hybrid field of knowledge about the Orient (especially the Arab-Islamic Near East), though having medieval wellsprings, has over the last two and a half centuries matured into a formidable, theoretically armored discipline closely entwined with imperial dogma and practice.

Said also magisterially documented the scandals of Zionism, from the moment it piggybacked itself on European imperialism in the nineteenth century, to its political and ideological triumph in the mid-twentieth century, to its desperate twilight in the early twenty-first. All but stripped of its multilayered ideological disguise, this colonial venture is nowadays sustained by means of almost unlimited American aid (both moral and material) and the use of the most defamatory anti-Muslim, anti-Arab representations to come out of the orientalist tradition. Finally, Said was for decades a symbol of diasporic Palestine in the West, a precarious position he occupied with dignity and fortitude until his death in September 2003. He also belongs in the ranks of a small but (hopefully) growing minority of secular intellectuals who have tried to find ways of transforming the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis into a meaningful debate, ways of advancing beyond mutual demonizations and recriminations and, instead, envisioning the possibility of reconciliation between these two victimized communities on the basis of equality. Given the sense of urgency—even crisis—that permeates his reflections on these problems (in, for example, Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, Covering Islam, Culture and Imperialism, and The Politics of Dispossession² ), it is no wonder that the reception of his writings by multiple audiences has been largely determined by interest in (or debates about) decolonization, the North–South divide, theories of race construction, the dialectic between cultural capital and imperial power, and so forth.

And yet it should be clear by now that Said's intellectual legacy extends far beyond these related areas. Over the years he crafted a brand of rigorous eclecticism that enabled him to cut a wide swath across a large number of disciplines, both methodologically and substantively. In fact, I would go so far as to argue that his critical practice has potentially revolutionary implications for the humanities and social sciences. A careful, comprehensive examination of his work—especially such texts as Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, Beginnings: Intention and Method, The World, the Text, and the Critic, and Humanism and Democratic Criticism³ —shows that Said is a radical humanist bent on enhancing, amplifying, and extending the best that secularism has made available to an increasingly globalized world, while also exposing modernity's scandalous secrets, its unacknowledged or deliberately suppressed barbarism. Combining sociopolitical and intellectual history, philosophical reflection, and ideology critique—all of them left-handed, suspicious, often scathingly polemical—his "technique of trouble" is above all intended to initiate new intellectual habits about what it is that advanced, academic, secular criticism can—and ought to—do: the range of issues it should engage; the kinds of questions it should raise; its relationship to other knowledge systems, to social reality, to its own past and future; its ultimate raison d'être as a form of consciousness that necessarily—by definition, as it were...