The Legacy of Edward W. Said

2. Heidegger, Foucault, and the "Empire of the Gaze": Thinking and Territorialization of Knowledge

2. Heidegger, Foucault, and the “Empire of the Gaze” Thinking the Territorialization of Knowledge We still think the Greek polis and the “political” in a totally unGreek fashion. We think the “political” as Romans, i.e., imperially. The essence of the Greek polis will never be grasped within the horizon of the political as understood in the Roman way. —Martin Heidegger, Parmenides The Roman reference that accompanied [the Napoleonic regime and “the form of state that was to survive it”] certainly bears with it this double index: citizens and legionaries. —Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish As I observed in the previous chapter, the difficult question of the relationship between Edward Said, above all, his critique of Orientalism, and the poststructuralists, particularly Michel Foucault, depends on which of the several Foucaults one invokes. Following a certain antipoststructuralist emphasis in Said’s work after Orientalism, recent “secular” and often postcolonial critics, especially in the wake of Said’s death, have, despite the evidence of his inaugural book, tacitly chosen the Foucault of Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things) and The Archaeology of Knowledge as the one who best explains Said’s (antagonistic) relationship to poststructuralist theory. This is the structuralist/archaeologist Foucault, who, in his brilliant account of the rise of discourse during the Enlightenment and his identification of this turn into modernity as a mutation from the European past, massively overemphasized the undeviating systematicity, the sheer textuality, and the totalizing structural reach of this regulative representational discourse at the expense of its authorship, its worldliness and more generally the humanity of man, and human agency. It is my contention, however, that the Foucault who is most pertinent to an understanding of the achievement of Said’s Heidegger, Foucault, and the Gaze 27 Orientalism is the Foucault of Surveiller et punir, which, as I have noted, was published only three years before Orientalism. This is Foucault the genealogist , the Foucault influenced not simply by his reading of Nietzsche as such but—and this is what I intend to contribute to the debate over Said’s relation to Foucault—the Nietzsche he discovered only after reading Heidegger, presumably Being and Time. Because this nexus and its enabling impact on Discipline and Punish is not well known, it will be necessary to undertake a detour into the relationship between Heidegger, particularly his “destruction ” of the Western “ontotheological” tradition (metaphysical inquiry), and Foucault’s genealogy of the disciplinary society to identify this Foucault and to demonstrate his pertinence to Said’s monumental analysis of the discourse of Occidental Orientalism. * * * Victor Farias’s careless identification of Heidegger’s thought with Nazism in Heidegger et le nazisme (1987) was enthusiastically endorsed by European and American humanist scholars who adhered to the very philosophical tradition that Heidegger’s discourse sought in part to interrogate. Moreover, its scandalization of this relationship compelled many of those philosophically and politically radical poststructuralist thinkers on the Left whose thought Heidegger’s had catalyzed to distance themselves from his work or to admit that its overdetermination of die Seinsfrage (the question of being) rendered it indifferent to history and politics or, as in the case of Jürgen Habermas, even complicit with political totalitarianism. As a consequence of this multiply situated initiative to delegitimize Heidegger’s ontological approach to the question of modernity, Heidegger and Heideggerianism, which had been foundational in the discourse and practice of emancipation at least since the end of World War II, were more or less marginalized by the Left in favor of more historical and sociopolitical perspectives, more specifically, by a number of discourses—New Historicism, cultural studies, feminism, neo-Marxism, and postcolonialism—that to differing degrees had derived their problematic from a certain (disciplinary) reading of Michel Foucault. To risk an oversimplification for the sake of focalizing the question this chapter addresses, it might be said that, increasingly since the putative revelations of Farias’s book, Heidegger and Foucault came to be represented by the Anglo-American Left as incommensurably opposed to each other, indeed, as a binary opposition that privileged the latter over the former. This disciplinary division, however, has obscured the relationship between Foucault’s and Said’s works or, more precisely, obscured the identity of the particular Foucault who influenced Said’s elaboration of his genealogy of Orientalism. 28 the legacy of edward w. said This binarist representation does not simply distort the relationship between Heidegger’s thought and...