Saidian Humanism

Of crucial importance to Edward Said throughout his extraordinary career as an exemplary literary comparatist was the problem of humanism. In taking up the issue of Saidian humanism, I want to consider what it is; why it was such a fixture of Said's intellectual trajectory; and how humanist interpretation was complicated by the critique of Orientalism. As is well known, the German philologist Erich Auerbach remains a consistent reference point in Said's oeuvre, as a figure of secular criticism in exile, a defender of literary worldliness in an era of cultural standardization, and an explicator of Dante who drew Christian ontology into concert with the representation of earthly realism. Drawing on Said's preface to a new edition of Auerbach's seminal Mimesis (reproduced in this volume), I want to examine the question of why Said held on so tenaciously to humanist precepts and exegetical practices. In Orientalism, humanism and empire are revealed in mutual compact, but there are other humanisms that survive the compromise with imperialism: emancipatory humanism, the ethics of coexistence, figural paradigms of ontogenesis in world-historical forms of culture, and the ideal of translatio as portal to a universal or sacred language. Such a language may be seen as comparable, if not equal, to a linguistic monotheism whose very sound-values—as in the case of classical or Koranic Arabic—are thought to be tangible evidence of paradise.¹ Said's reading of divine language in the preface to Mimesis intimates—though not in any explicit way—that humanism provides a crucial way of dealing with the "God problem," allowing him to negotiate his way around the categorical imperatives of Christian and Islamic tradition. And this, of course, has significant bearing on definitions of secular criticism indebted to Said's work.

Said was always an accomplished literary critic in a humanist vein, interested in "great writers" even, as he noted in a 1993 interview cited by Jonathan Arac, when those writers are Orientalists and/or imperialists.² Humanism was integral to his vision of cultural coexistence without coercion as well as to his ascription of Goethean Weltliteratur, which harks back to his translation in 1969 of Auerbach's "Philology and Weltliteratur" essay. The back cover of Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth to Power, an anthology of essays edited by Paul Bové, highlights the inseparability of humanism and politics in Said's work: "Perhaps more than any other person in the United States," we read, "Said has changed how the U.S. media and American intellectuals must think about and represent Palestinians, Islam and the Middle East. Most important, this change arises not as a result of political action but out of a potent humanism."³

Said's fidelity to humanism's synthetic approach to diverse cultures (on the order of Goethe's "common world-council"), to philological credos of translatio studii, and to literature's ability to settle value on the human person allowed his work to remain congenial to the humanities mainstream, even when his political and theoretical engagements aroused antagonism on the part of conservative critics. His adherence to emancipatory humanism was profoundly in step with that of Frantz Fanon insofar as it embraced values of individual freedom, universal human rights, anti-imperialism, release from economic dependency, and self-determination for disenfranchised peoples. Most recently, I think, Saidian humanism, defined with the Orientalist critique at its crux, pointed to urgent issues in the field of language politics. Saidian humanism in this guise would examine the linguistic and geopolitical objectives of what Amitav Ghosh has referred to as the new "Anglophone empire," a term emphasizing the role of English-language commonality in cementing allegiances among countries that make up the "coalition of the willing" (America, Britain, and Australia).⁴

In Said's watershed book Orientalism, humanism is rarely directly indicted, but as the ballast of philological Euro-nationalism, and as the purveyor of Orientalist tropes and archetypes, its complicity with Orientalism becomes evident. Said's reading of Dante'...