The Legacy of Edward W. Said

5. Edward Said's Humanism and American Exceptionalism after 9/11/01: An Interrogation

5. Edward Said’s Humanism and American Exceptionalism after 9/11/01 An Interrogation In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci says, “The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces without leaving an inventory.” The only available English translation inexplicably leaves Gramsci’s comment at that, whereas in fact Gramsci’s Italian text concludes by adding, “therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory.” —Edward Said, Orientalism The historical sense gives rise to three uses that oppose and correspond to the Platonic modalities of history. The first is parodic, directed against reality, and opposes the theme of history as reminiscence or recognition; the second is dissociative, directed against identity, and opposes history given as continuity or representative of a tradition; the third is sacrificial, directed against truth, and opposes history as knowledge. They imply a use of history that severs its connection to memory, its metaphysical and anthropological model, and constructs a counter-memory—a transformation of history into a totally different form of time. —Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” Edward Said’s posthumously published Humanism and Democratic Criticism is a deeply problematic book. Whatever his intention (was it to underscore his legacy in the face of his imminent death or simply another “raid on the inarticulate / With shabby equipment always deteriorating / In the general mess of imprecision of feeling”?),1 it will be and indeed seems already to have been understood by his legion of followers as a last will and testament to his lifelong commitment to the democratizing dynamics of humanist inquiry.2 152 the legacy of edward w. said This understanding rests on an interpretation that astonishingly relegates to oblivion the half-century of history following the catastrophe of World War I, which bore persuasive witness to the disclosure of Western humanism’s complicity with the depredations of the rule of Man: the self-identical subject, technology, patriarchy, nationalism, racism, and imperialism. This disclosure, moreover, has been articulated, in however exaggerated a form, by Western poststructuralist thinkers from Martin Heidegger; through Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Jean-François Lyotard, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and certain French feminists; to Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and Gayatri Spivak, among many others.3 This is not to say that this tacit burial of poststructuralist theory should be attributed to Said’s posthumously published “defense” of humanism and humanist studies. It is instead to suggest that whatever his reasons, Said’s refusal to encounter this resonant history, or rather his apparent cavalier indifference to it, has produced two unfortunate results. (1) It has obfuscated the meaning of the very term Said wanted to redeem and thus inadvertently rendered his last book the object of contestation between those traditional liberal humanist who have always accommodated difference to the anthropologos and those posthumanists who, by deconstructing the humanist tradition, have been attempting to develop a different understanding of humanity (and the studia humanitatis), one that acknowledges its historical contingency—its freedom from both external and internalized transcendentals—or, in Said’s terms, its radical “secularity.” (2) In an equally important and related way, Said’s dismissal of the history of the poststructuralist critique of humanism has also blurred the symptomatic directives for the critique of American-style democracy , the very critique his recuperated humanism is intended to undertake, precipitated by what he reiteratively characterizes as the epochal “changed political atmosphere” that “has overtaken the United States and, to varying degrees, the rest of the world” following “the events of September 11, 2001,”4 by which I take him to mean the George W. Bush administration’s unleashing of the “war on terror”—which was always latent in the exceptionality ethos of American democracy. This, according to a certain reading of the poststructuralist movement at large, is the polyvalent global violence that brings to its end (in both senses of the word) the otherwise incorporative or accommodational logical economy of Enlightenment or humanist modernity and thus calls for a radical revision not simply of what the humanist tradition has taken to be human but also of the idea of humanism as a mode of inquiry into being in all its manifestations. * * * Said’s Humanism and Exceptionalism 153 In the first of Humanism and Democratic Criticism’s five chapters, Said...