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Reviewed by:
  • Edward W. Said and Jacques Derrida: Reconstellating Humanism and the Global Hybrid
  • Daniel T. O’Hara
Karavanta, Mina, and Nina Morgan, eds. Edward W. Said and Jacques Derrida: Reconstellating Humanism and the Global Hybrid. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. 350 pp.

Of the thirteen chapters and introduction in this fine new collection of critical essays, only the latter and three of the former, or roughly a third of the volume, address explicitly either Derrida or Derrida and Said together. That said, Derrida (or Derrida and Said together) pervades the book, virtually haunting it with the unquiet specters of the global hybridity Derrida at least addressed often (if not loudly) but Said largely presumed and did not address in any theoretical form with respect to his own position in the world and the academy. This is the major reason why, when I was asked by the press to confirm its sense of the book’s value by giving a blurb for it, I did so enthusiastically. [End Page 384]

For, in long review-essays published in boundary 2, more than twenty-five years ago, I had raised the question of Said’s failure to conceptualize coherently or systematically his own situation as something other than just what he appeared to take it to be, a radically contingent combination of personal intellectual achievement with fortuitouos social and professional circumstances. In fact, when I raised the issue of class—Said’s actual class origins as well as his class aspirations, in the second of these essays, which was originally commissioned by another “high-powered” theory journal of the time, its editors declined to print it, implying Said had vigorously objected. Whether that was true or not, until recently, especially since his death, this question has not been taken up in a serious, comprehensive, and nuanced manner. With this collection, that and many other critical questions concerning Said, and to a lesser extent, Derrida, are critically scrutinized with rigor and finesse.

Besides the excellent introduction by the editors (“Humanism, Hybridity, and Democratic Praxis”) and their equally excellent concluding chapter (“‘Another Insistence’: Humanism and the Aporias of Community”), the essays by William V. Spanos (“Edward Said’s Humanism and American Exceptionalism: An Interrogation after 9/11”), R. Radhakrishnan (“Edward Said’s Literary Humanism”), and Bruce Robbins (“Said and Secularism”) bring the question of class and its relationship, positively and negatively, to the idea of speaking truth to power and being taken seriously out fully into the open, in a definitively critical fashion. Given the limitations of the short review format, however, I must focus on only one of them and so will focus on the last of these essays. This is because Robbins gives intimate expression to the complexities of the personal and professional situation. Once Said’s student, and long thought to be one of his protégés, Robbins is now, after his dear mentor’s death, finally a professor at his institution, Columbia University. In other words, Said is now our once-young critic’s ghostly senior colleague. Even more significantly, Robbins knows all this and expresses it all just beautifully.

In line with his own earlier work, Robbins casts the question of class with respect to Said in terms of his and his mentor’s question of “secularism.” To be secular, as Robbins shows, is for Said to be an intellectual in permanent exile from the world; but as Robbins also shows, to maintain such purity of vantage point means Said must neglect or even disdain the professional and social dimensions that make that vantage point possible for him and not for others, even others in the same profession, as well as others in the historical and political circumstances out of which Said personally came.

In fact, so ascetically rigorous does Robbins find Said’s commitment to the intellectual life’s permanent exile, that he has to admit his teacher [End Page 385] here verges on religious criticism, Said’s bête noire and for which he espouses loudly and often what he christens “secular criticism.” This intellectual mode is the critical attitude per se, and Said claims, is best embodied in Vico’s famous Enlightenment motto, variously...

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