Nafssiya, or Edward Said's Affective Phenomenology of Racism 3031517695, 9783031517693

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Nafssiya, or Edward Said‘s Affective Phenomenology of Racism Norman Saadi Nikro

Nafssiya, or Edward Said’s Affective Phenomenology of Racism

Norman Saadi Nikro

Nafssiya, or Edward Said’s Affective Phenomenology of Racism

Norman Saadi Nikro Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient Berlin, Germany

ISBN 978-3-031-51768-6    ISBN 978-3-031-51769-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51769-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

This book is dedicated to the memory of Maria Markus, my former doctoral supervisor at the University of New South Wales who encouraged my juxtapositions of Said and Marxist critical theory. It is also dedicated to the memory of my parents, Ahmed and Nazek.

Acknowledgements

Research for this book was undertaken with a fellowship at the Leibniz-­ Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin. Thanks are due not only to the Directorate—Ulrike Freitag, Sonja Hegasy, and Kai Kresse—who encouraged my research, but to the general staff—Svenja Becherer (publications), Silke Nagel (office), Thomas Ripper (librarian), and Michael Schutz (technics)—who maintain the running of the institute and thus provide support for research. I thank also Heike Liebau and my colleagues in the research group Representations of the Past. My research involved a number of interviews—with Fawwaz Traboulsi and Syrine Hout in Beirut, Hanan Ashrawi in Ramallah, Hamid Dabashi in New York, and the late William Spanos in Binghamton. I want to thank them for giving their time and for tolerating my sometimes longwinded questions. Special thanks are due to Smaran Dayal, now an assistant professor of literature, for having transcribed the interviews, and otherwise making suggestive observations. I express thanks to my editor at Palgrave, Robin James, and the two anonymous readers of my manuscript. Both reviews helped me to better focus my argument.

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Contents

1 Introduction:  The Strange Disjunction  1 That “Strange Disjunction”   1 A “Phenomenology of the Colony”   6 Nafssiya  12 Giving an Account of Oneself  15 Gramscian Insights, Palestinian (Af)Filiations  20 Getting Personal  22 References  25 2 I nventorying the Self: Nafssiya, Elaboration, Recursive Humanism 29 Inventories of Self  29 Inventories of Nafssiya  34 Gramsci’s and Said’s Elaboration  39 Recursive Humanism  43 References  49 3 Archival  Repositories, Embodied Repertoires, Marxism 51 Programmatic Overtures  51 Between Archive and Repertoire  55 Said’s Embodied Repertoire  63 Said and Marxism  71 Travelling Theory  82 References  87 ix

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Contents

4 Beginnings:  Said’s Interventionist Scholarship 91 Phenomenological Livelihood of Literature and Cultural Criticism  91 Beginnings as Transitive Constellations  95 The Essay as Beginning Intention 103 Exile 111 Said’s Critique of “Linguicity” 116 Being in the World: Between Beginnings and Orientalism 130 Bridging Beginnings and Orientalism 133 References 137 5 Giving  an Account of Himself143 Prelude 143 Critique 147 Tracking the “Subject-of” 151 References 160 6 Towards  a Phenomenology of Racism163 The Arab Portrayed 163 Said and Merleau-Ponty 168 Phenomenological Closures 174 A Phenomenology of Race 181 In Conclusion 188 References 192 Index195

About the Author

Norman Saadi Nikro  is a research fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. He has Australian and Lebanese backgrounds. He completed his studies in 1998 at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, with a doctoral thesis on the social life of art and cultural production by migrants in Australia with non-English-­speaking backgrounds. He served as an Australian Volunteer Abroad in the West Bank of Palestine/Israel from June 1998 to September 1999, after which he moved to Beirut with a Mellon Post-Doc Research Award at the American University of Beirut. He was Assistant Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Notre Dame University in Lebanon from 2001 until 2007 when he moved to Berlin with his family. He gained his Habilitation degree at Potsdam University in 2013, where he has taught as a Privatdozent. His publications include The Fragmenting Force of Memory: Self, Literary Style, and Civil War in Lebanon (Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2012); Milieus of ReMemory: Relationalities of Violence, Trauma, and Voice (Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2019); The Social Life of Memory: Violence, Trauma, and Testimony in Lebanon and Morocco (co-edited, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); and Insidious Trauma in Eastern African Literatures and Cultures (co-edited, Routledge, 2024).

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Strange Disjunction

I was an uncomfortably anomalous student all through my early years: a Palestinian going to school in Egypt, with an English first name, an American passport, and no certain identity at all. To make matters worse, Arabic, my native language, and English, my school language, were inextricably mixed: I have never known which was my first language, and have felt fully at home in neither, although I dream in both. Every time I speak an English sentence, I find myself echoing it in Arabic, and vice versa. —Edward Said (2001a, 557)

That “Strange Disjunction” I begin my introduction by drawing on and illustrating two passages from Said’s oeuvre that pretty well capture the thematic impulses of my study of his ‘personal dimension,’ his relationship to his life and work. The first of which comes from a public interview in 1996, where he talks about what he refers to as the “colonial education” he received in his childhood (Said in Viswanathan 2005, 263), an observation he has made on other occasions. Growing up in “two British colonies,” he says—meaning Jerusalem in Palestine, his place of birth in 1935, and Cairo in Egypt—he “really had to learn more about England than Arab history.” He had to learn, he continues, about “King Canute and King Alfred and Shakespeare and the Enclosure Act and all kinds of facts that were completely nonsensical to © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 N. S. Nikro, Nafssiya, or Edward Said’s Affective Phenomenology of Racism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51769-3_1

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somebody from my background” (Said in Viswanathan 2005, 263). Consequently, he realized that, to quote his words again, he could “never be part” of the language, culture, and history he was being taught. A Palestinian with acquired American citizenship, Said is here referring to the primary and secondary schools he went to in Cairo—the Gezira Preparatory School and the Cairo School for American Children. As he records in his memoir Out of Place, he attended the latter without “the slightest feeling of being American” (Said 2000a, 80). Apparently, most of the teachers at these schools were English and taught a strictly English-­ centred curriculum. Said describes the preparatory school as his “first extended contact with colonial authority” (2000a, 42). As he says in the interview I mentioned above, he could not identify with the history and culture he was pedagogically subjected to and consequently came to embody a sense of alienation. However, at the same time, this seems to have provided him with a constructive capacity to critically reflect on the social and cultural aspects of his learning. The “strange disjunction,” as he calls it (2005, 264), provided him with “a kind of perspective,” meaning a “realization that you could absorb it and yet remain alienated from it.” The other passage I have in mind is a conglomerate of a number of comments he gave at different occasions on the Egyptian singer Umm Kalthoum. His remarks were not always very flattering, such as when in a short essay on the dancer Tahia Carioca he penned in 1990 he claims that, alongside belly-dancers, “you couldn’t really enjoy looking at the portly and severe Um Kalthoum” (Said 2001b, 347, emphasis in the original). The comment is rather short sighted in a male-centred fashion. He could well have remarked on other aspects of the Egyptian diva’s career, such as the challenges she faced and cleverly negotiated in her move from village life and rural performances to the music hall scenes of Cairo.1 In his memoir, Said recalls going to one of her concerts with his parents when, at the age of twelve, he was beginning to visit the Cairo opera. His recollection is rather doleful, referring to an “excruciating evening” that he had to sit through until after midnight. He found Umm Kalthoum’s performance long and boring, “horrendously monotonous in its interminable unison melancholy and desperate mournfulness,” 1  For an excellent biography of Umm Kalthoum, discussing performance in terms of social material practices, see Danielson (1997). By drawing on the work of Raymond Williams and Michel Foucault, her approach to musical production and performance is quite similar to Said’s.

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unflatteringly describing her singing as “unending moans and wailing of someone enduring a long bout of colic” (Said 2000a, 99). He contrasts the “jangling monophony” of her orchestra to the opera André Chenier, whose “dramatic animation” and plot kept him pleasingly “absorbed.” Said made these reflections in around the mid-1990s, when he was working on his memoir. Obviously, he was trying to capture how he felt at the time of his adolescence. This is evident when we consider that some five or six years earlier, in his Wellek Library Lectures he gave in 1989, his comments on Umm Kalthoum carry very different insights. Keeping in mind how capacities to view and listen to musical performances are socially shaped and culturally acquired, he is more positive about her style. His experience of Umm Kalthoum enabled him, he says, to appreciate “Western” classical music (1992a, 97). In fact, addressing the same performance he writes about in his memoir, Said is much more affirmative of what he describes as an “aesthetic whose hallmark was exfoliating variation, in which repetition, a sort of meditative fixation on one or two small patterns, and an almost total lack of developmental (in the Beethovenian sense) tension were the key elements” (1992a, 97–98). He favourably recalls the non-teleological structure of Umm Kalthoum’s performance, for which the driving force “was not to get to the end of a carefully constructed logical structure—working through it—but to luxuriate in all sorts of byways, to linger over details and changes in texts, to digress and then digress from the digression” (Said 1992a, 98). Said’s contrasting recollections of Umm Kalthoum are not a matter of, on the one hand, childish limitations and, on the other, more mature views of an adult. The contrast rather concerns how he developed an awareness that his cultural tastes and scholarly prowess were to a great extent shaped by his colonial education and that he (and this is my point) could cultivate a reflective, enabling, responsive relationship to his embodiment of that experience. Said’s reflections on the colonial education he was subjected to have been canvassed in the secondary literature, much of which I reference in the following chapters. However, I want to situate his reflections towards the affective phenomenology of colonial racism I develop in this study. To return to the Wellek talk I have been quoting, Said says: “And because, in my preponderantly Western education (both musical and academic) I seemed to be dedicated to an ethic of productivity and of overcoming obstacles, the kind of art practiced by Umm Kalthoum receded in importance for me” (1992a, 98). Indeed, as he revisits his recollections of

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Umm Kalthoum, he both learns to unlearn how his colonial education shaped his tastes and appreciates how the digressive rhythms of her style can be applied in critical valuations of Western classical music. His example is the more harmonic pulse beats, the “antinarrative aesthetic” (Said 1992a, 100), of Olivier Messiaen’s compositions. In a fine essay on Said’s practical and intellectual relationship to music, Rokus de Groot makes a similar observation: “Eventually, the contact with Arabic music also enabled Said to detect alternatives within the canon of Austro-German music” (2007, 227, emphasis in the original). In another essay, de Groot makes this point even stronger: In Said’s personal history, Western and Arabic music became intertwined traditions, allowing him to detect new ways of listening to both Arabic and Western classical music. Said’s depiction of Middle Eastern music, such as Umm Kulthum’s, as nondevelopmental, used to bear the Orientalist mark of rejection. However, to Said, this characteristic later provided a starting point for protesting the dominant tendencies in Western classical music and offered the envisaging of musical and cultural alternatives. (de Groot 2010, 216)

As is well known, Said was an accomplished amateur pianist, which provided him with a practical awareness of how music recitals take place through a momentum that includes the social viability of musical production and performance. His Musical Elaborations begins and ends with references to “Western and non-Western” music, challenging this binary designation itself. The “nonlinear” and “nondevelopmental” observations he makes on almost the last page of the book are complemented by his critical comments on Theodor Adorno (who of course remained a significant intellectual touchstone for Said) at the beginning of the book. Describing Adorno as a “creature of the Hegelian tradition,” in respect of the assumption of an “inescapable historical teleology that incorporates everything in its relentless forward path,” he continues: “my non-Western background has not allowed me to assume many of the values and teleologies he takes for granted” (1992a, xiv).2 By “non-Western,” he does not mean a distinct approach free from the influence of Euro-North-American cultural production and intellectual application, but rather a critical awareness of the power of such influence. 2  In his study of Said, McCarthy (2010, 41–42) similarly notes this tension with Adorno and further discusses Said’s materialist approach to musical performance.

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Ultimately, for Said, the same terms he used to positively assess Umm Kalthoum’s singing—“imitation, repetition, or ornamentation”—can be applied to the virtuoso performances of the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. The performances of both can be observed through “contrapuntal” (counterpoint),3 or else “heterophonic” (multiple, simultaneous variations of the same progression), alternatives to “a disciplined organization of musical time” (Said 1992a, 102). Considering again the “strange disjunction” he speaks about in the interview I began with above, as well as the contrapuntal rhythms he finds in Umm Kalthoum and Gould, one can say that Said never quite exhausted not so much the enduring influence of his colonial education, but the eventuating significance of his developing relationship to his colonial education. He strove to transform the relational pulse beats of this influence into thematic concerns he could visit again and again, towards clarifying for himself his motivations, towards applying himself to his scholarly endeavours. This is to say that, rather than satisfy himself with a clear distinction between his Western and Arab backgrounds, he developed a productive, critical sense of the limiting and enabling contours of their entwinement. Working through the varying threads of their entanglement, particularly in respect of his embodiment of the circumstantial resonance of their pulse beats, he learned to cultivate a “kind of perspective.” Through the “strange disjunction” Said learned to own, he fashioned a critical approach that was just as transformative as it was redemptive, just as digressive as it was progressive, just as personal as it was historically informed. As a Palestinian, as an American, as an Arab, as a largely Euro-North-American educated scholar, what was crucial for Said’s “strange disjunction” was not what one is, or what one knows, but what one does. In this study, I endeavour to trace the phenomenological force, the nafssiya, of Said’s personal dimension, towards an affective, materialist phenomenology of racism. In the following sections of this introduction I discuss some of the relevant secondary literature on Said, so as to better define how, in my own approach, I understand the significance of phenomenology, nafssiya, autobiography, and racism in his work.  Joseph Massad (2010, 30–32) has provided a more expansive sense of the relevance of Said’s notions of “counterpoint” and “contrapuntal,” towards appreciating the intertwined strands of his life, his Palestinian background, and his scholarly prowess. The term “contrapuntal” came to play a significant role in Said’s book Culture and Imperialism (1994), a study, incidentally, he had already announced fifteen years earlier in the introduction to Orientalism: “There is still a general essay to be written on imperialism and culture” (2003, 24). 3

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A “Phenomenology of the Colony” The phrase “the personal dimension” is Said’s own, which he employs as a subtitle in the introduction to what is undoubtedly his most famous and influential book, Orientalism, first published in 1978. In that section (which I discuss at length in the next chapter) he reflects on how his sense of self, his life experience, informs his motivations to have worked on and produced the book. His reflections suggest a phenomenological refrain that, while not a theme in Orientalism, nevertheless not only informs that book, as I argue, but his capacity for critical, or what can be referred to as interventionist, scholarship. While much of the secondary literature on Said tends to relegate his work before Orientalism to either a phenomenology of mind or else an engagement with poststructuralist theory, I intend in this study to demonstrate that phenomenology, in the sense of the affective livelihoods of people and things, informed his work more generally. In doing so, I work towards outlining a phenomenology of affect emerging from experiences and studies of racism. Discussions of phenomenology in Said’s work are mostly restricted to his first book Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (2008), which was first published in 1966, based on his doctoral dissertation. The book’s title captures Said’s primary theme, which concerns the relationship between Conrad’s personal letters and his fiction. Borrowing in the main from Jean Paul Sartre’s work on emotions, Said explores how Conrad’s fiction parallel’s the existential musings portrayed in his letters. As others have pointed out (most notably, McCarthy 2010, 14–29; Vandeviver 2019, 116–145), the work of the Belgian literary critic Georges Poulet was another important influence on Said’s approach to Conrad. Poulet and the so-called Geneva School looked towards the implications of a writer’s self-awareness in his or her creative work, rather than concern themselves with the historical underpinnings or the linguistic style of the text itself. Although Poulet is not mentioned in Joseph Conrad, a phenomenological influence is obvious when in the introductory chapter, “The Claims of Individuality,” Said places emphasis on “comprehension” as a motivating factor for both critic and writer alike. Against a “general theory of the unconscious,” Said writes, “comprehension is a phenomenon of consciousness, and it is in the openness of the conscious mind that critic and writer meet to engage in the act of knowing and being aware of an experience” (2008, 7).

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Significant studies of phenomenology in Said’s work are Hussein (2004), McCarthy (2010) and, more recently, Vandeviver (2019). These critics, especially the latter two, have noted phenomenological implications in not only Said’s book on Conrad but also his subsequent oeuvre. McCarthy writes (2010, 19) that phenomenology “lingers,” as he says, in much of Said’s “later work,” especially his Beginnings (1985, first published in 1975) and The World, the Text, and the Critic (1991, first published in 1983). As he points out, the notion of “intention” plays a key role in the first of these books—intention in the sense that consciousness is directed at a specific objective and hence plays a constitutive role—while the theme of “critical consciousness” informs the latter collection of essays. For his part, Vandeviver points towards the “continued existential-­ phenomenological undertone” (2019, 199) of Beginnings. He is critical of Hussein for underestimating these undertones (Vandeviver 2019, 195). However, while in his references to Beginnings Hussein questions the relevance of “either existentialism or will philosophy” (2004, 66), he acknowledges that “Said’s primary philosophical/theoretical underpinnings in both books4 (and indeed throughout his career) have remained fundamentally phenomenological” (2004, 98). Interestingly, in Beginnings and The World there are no references to phenomenology, other than brief passing mentions of Merleau-Ponty. Likewise, Orientalism is bereft of any discussion of phenomenology. Consequently, it would be understandable to accept that phenomenology played no role in Said’s work after his book on Conrad. However, in this study I take a different tack, and while to some extent agreeing with the relevant observations respectively held by the three critics I have shortly referred to, I intend to emphasize an affective phenomenology of race. As I argue, in his work after Joseph Conrad, especially in Orientalism, the implicit phenomenological underpinnings of Said’s work are embedded in an experience and study of colonial racism, rather than deriving from European scholarship. In other words, although in Chap. 6 I discuss the influence of the work of Merleau-Ponty on Said’s early intellectual development, I am not interested in situating Said’s work as an expression of phenomenology. I am rather concerned with developing a mode of reading Said in terms of a phenomenology that arises in the colony itself. In this respect, the following observation by Mbembe is apt: “Through literature, music, religions, and cultural artifacts, Blacks have therefore 4

 Hussein means both Beginnings and Joseph Conrad.

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developed a phenomenology of the colony that in various ways resembles what is referred to in psychoanalysis as ‘the experience of the mirror’  ” (2017, 104). Those versed in the ‘mirror stage’ and the Imaginary will no doubt have an idea of the conceptual tenor of Mbembe’s allusion to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. However, his insight is relevant for my purposes because it captures a key notion informing my approach to Said’s personal dimension. This concerns what Du Bois in 1903 called “double consciousness,” or “the veil” (2007, 2); what Ngũgı ̃ wa Thiong’o in the early 1980s described as “being made to stand outside [oneself] to look at [oneself]” (2005, 17); what Fanon in 1952 referred to as a “historical-racial-schema” (2008, 91); what Césaire in 1955 straightforwardly called an “inferiority complex” (2000, 43); what Audre Lorde in 1977 referred to as “the endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves” (2020, 13); what Mbembe, glossing Fanon, calls an “accomplice of castration” (2019, 5); what Ella Shohat, also discussing Fanon’s phenomenology of racism, at the turn of the current century refers to as “the relation between blackness and white racism” (Shohat, 2006, 258); and, to be sure, Said’s “strange disjunction.” I am arguing that Said’s personal dimension implicates his experience of racism, and that this experience informs his application of interventionist scholarship. In the third chapter of his memoir Said relates a particular incident that pretty well parallels that moment in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks when he is constrained to have to digest the bitter realization of how white people look at him, which induces him to reconsider how he looks at himself (Fanon 2008, 93). Said refers to his own incident as a “colonial encounter” (2000a, 44). He recounts the occasion when, still a child in Cairo, he comes across the secretary of the Gezira sporting club, an Englishman and father of a fellow student at Said’s school. Thinking that Said was trespassing, Pilley (the secretary) challenges him. As Said tries to explain that he and his family are members of the club, he is cut off: “Don’t answer back, boy. Just get out, and do it quickly. Arabs aren’t allowed here, and you’re an Arab.” Said’s reflects: “If I hadn’t thought of myself as an Arab before, I now directly grasped the significance of the designation as truly disabling” (2000a, 44). He informs his father of the incident, although to no avail, as his father is reluctant to question Pilley. To be sure, his father’s reluctance to confront Pilley is analogous to his reluctance to question the colonial situation the  Said  family inhabited. However, the recollection is a good example of Said’s “strange

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disjunction” I mentioned above. As I am arguing, it provides a sense of how, for Said, the ambiguous incorporation of racist attributes is a significant theme for his inventory of self. While none of the decolonial writers I referred to above are mentioned in Orientalism, through his personal dimension Said charts a similar critically reflexive terrain. His idiosyncratic sense of phenomenological perception, I want to point out, is distinguished by two further sets of coordinates which, together with his critique of the culture of colonial racism, transpire as a constellation. The first of these concerns his discarding of ‘mind’ as a category of interpretative inquiry and (secondly) how his notion of “worldliness” extends beyond human subjectivity to artefacts, especially texts—to the subjective livelihood of artefacts and texts themselves. While Hussein, McCarthy, and Vandeviver make not dissimilar observations concerning Said’s application of phenomenology, they fail to appreciate how his apprehension with phenomenology may well concern his dissatisfaction with the concentration on ‘mind’5 and the evasion of racism in European philosophical thought. This dissatisfaction, along with his innate avoidance of theoretical schools of thought, may well explain the absence of any significant discussion of phenomenology in his work after his book on Conrad. Indeed, the quite bold, much quoted assertion he makes in the introduction to Joseph Conrad—“In philosophical terms, this study attempts a phenomenological exploration of Conrad’s consciousness, so that the kind of mind he had, both in its distinction and energy, will become apparent” (2008, 7–8)—just wouldn’t make any sense in his subsequent work. For Said, phenomenology makes no practical sense when steeped in the contours of ontic assertions. Writing about Bourdieu’s critique of “scholastic thought,” Ghassan Hage makes a similar observation, concerning “a mode of thinking that detaches racism from its practical/usage context and conceives it as an academic exercise aimed at some kind of pure knowledge, a desire to classify for classification’s sake” (Hage 2017, 6) As I argue in this book, then, it is worthwhile to trace how a phenomenology of affect emerging from experiences and studies of racism, colonial and otherwise, informs Said’s oeuvre. At the same time, we must pay attention to the very materiality and situatedness, the affective 5  This dissatisfaction with the category of mind, or “mentality,” extends to his critique of essentialist uses of these terms by orientalist writers (see, for example, Said 2003, 105–106, 277, and 309).

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“worldliness,” by which a text, an artefact, circulates through both institutional and informal corridors of power, authority, and influence. As Said says in his essay “The World, the Text, and the Critic,” while drawing on an Islamic school of grammarians of the ninth-century, the Zahirites, a text can be regarded “as significant form, in which—and I put this as carefully as I can—worldliness, circumstantiality, the text’s status as an event having sensuous particularity as well as historical contingency, are considered as being incorporated in the text, an infrangible part of its capacity for conveying and producing meaning” (1991, 39, my emphasis). While this passage has been referenced in the secondary literature, the affective sense energizing his materialist notion of worldliness has been underestimated.6 As I often employ the terms material and imaginary resources, I want to briefly clarify how I understand their significance and how I employ them to signify certain conceptual associations and perceptual orientations. A material resource can be a camera, a desk, a library, or else a university education. An imaginative resource defines more the contours of subjective orientations to a camera, a desk, a library, or a university education. For example, I grew up in a household that did not include a desk and reading lamp (nor books, for that matter) as part of the furniture. In fact a desk and reading lamp wouldn’t have made much sense to my habitus, wouldn’t have been significant for my sense of material wellbeing and imaginative sense of self, circumstance, and purpose. Similarly, actually going to a university, as well as a capacity to imagine the value of undertaking university studies, played no role in the atmosphere of my home, friendships, and social orientations generally. Like most of the kids on my street in Sydney, and at the school I attended, my practical and imaginative expectations were limited to leaving school at around the age of 14 or 15 with a school certificate and doing an apprenticeship in one trade or another, very likely undertaking the same work as one’s father. Material and imaginative resources are, then, best understood as capacities, as molecular forces that circulate through social and cultural modalities of exchange, in respect of how one learns to accommodate circumstance and defer to others moving in and through one’s orbits. While capacities have more often than not been thought to be either structural or agential, to my mind they are better understood as actual and potential. Constituted 6  For a discussion of Said’s notion of the worldliness of a text from a postcolonial studies perspective, emphasizing a text’s materiality, see Ashcroft and Ahluwalia (2009, 1–26).

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in and through differential, deferential distributions of power, labour, and desire, capacities are, on the one hand, about the ability to get things done. On the other hand, they circulate and are embodied mostly as unarticulated assumptions concerning what one can potentially do in certain circumstances. In other words, a subject orientates a sense of self not only by getting things done, but by embodying a perceptual, imaginative sense of how one can potentially engage their worlds and how one can meaningfully access resources as capacities for livelihood. In short, as material and imaginary resources, capacities are best understood as relational conduits, channels, and passages, rather than in terms of entities and substances. Subjectivity, whether of a person or an artefact, is never given according to one attribute or another, but takes place in and through deferential modalities of address and response, which need not be verbal, and indeed often transpire as a nod of the head, a wink of the eye, or indeed an averted gaze. From the perspective of an affective phenomenology arising from colonialism and/or racism, it is not so much the whole—again, whether of a person, an artefact, or indeed a conceptual proposition—that holds together and defines parts. It is rather the relational comportment, the conduits, the gaps and fissures, through which parts gather force and orient themselves. Such comportment is also a “gathering,” as Sara Ahmed writes when discussing how subjectivity is formed by learning and unlearning to inhabit lesbian and heteronormative sexuality, concerning how “bodies and things” are “gathered in specific ways” (2006, 101). Towards outlining a phenomenology of race (which informs Chap. 6, “Towards a Phenomenology of Race”) and affect in Said’s oeuvre, I draw on a number of recent essays directly addressing the theme. I also draw on longer classical and contemporary studies of racism, such as the work of the writers I mentioned above—Fanon, Du Bois, Mbembe,—as well as Dabashi (2011), Gayatri Spivak (1999), and Lewis Gordon (2015). I develop this through a discussion of Judith Butler’s work, and by drawing on Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology. While the insights of Butler help to provide an affective notion of subjectivity, Ahmed directly questions the propensity of phenomenological disquisitions to elide themes of power and subjugation. In the process, I hope to contribute to an analytics of embodiment that critically questions the “paperless philosophy” (Ahmed 2006, 34) of European-centred phenomenology.

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Nafssiya In the following two chapters I discuss Said’s Orientalism, a book that has of course attracted much attention. However, in doing so, I take issue with the general consensus that Said’s methodology in that book is limited to a form of discourse analysis, or ‘colonial discourse analysis,’ as it is called. The secondary literature on the work of Said provides much engagement with his notions “critical consciousness” and “secular criticism,” as well as “humanistic scholarship.” However, this engagement tends to categorize such terms against the rubric of an encompassing notion of ‘discourse.’ For my purposes, this particular framework of assessing his oeuvre through an opposition between humanist commitment and discourse analysis transpires as a debilitating binary between agency and structure. Consequently, it tends to underestimate how, with his personal dimension, Said develops a phenomenological practice of situating affective inventories as relational components of critical application. To be sure, as I noted above, Said doesn’t address phenomenology in Orientalism. However, traces of phenomenology are plainly evident in his interest in embodiment; in the relationships between cultural repertoires, authors, and texts; and in bodies and artefacts as depositories of social modalities and cultural inventories. One can extend this to something like a phenomenology of the text, or of textuality, which Said tends to view not so much in terms of a book, or a film, with a definitive beginning and ending. He rather thinks of texts as worldly resources, as circulating modalities of social learning and cultural depositories, as capacities subjectively acquired and objectively deployed. His “analysis of the Orientalist text” (Said 2003, 21) is therefore an analysis of historical processes and social contexts in which texts, authors, readers, and viewers are embedded—circumstances in and through which identifications and representations circulate and are adapted, phenomenologically embodied, and referenced as specific hermeneutic schemes of association and disassociation, of belonging and not belonging. As Said was acutely aware, the act of reading (as well as viewing and listening) is never a passive undertaking, but actively contributes to the production, the animated vibrancy, of a text’s interactive relationships to its varying conditions of livelihood. Reading, whether for enjoyment or as an engaged momentum of critical response, is always, for Said, occasional. I emphasize the word, as it played a significant role in Said’s oeuvre, along with the otherwise equally prosaic term circumstance. The secondary

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literature has hardly anything to say about these two terms that together inform the very temperament, the epistemological and ontological fervour, of Said’s always developing relationship to his work. Reading, or else critical engagement, is always occasional, fitful, having a capacity to intervene, to reanimate the contours of a graphic mode of expression, and potentially bring about an irregular divergence to convention. While occasional, reading and critical response are anchored in circumstance, in respect of varying relationships between historical processes and personal dispositions. Through the particular circumstance of his strange disjunction Said carved out a capacity for critique “beyond,” to borrow from Hamid Dabashi, “the explicit or implicit presence of a European interlocutor looking over our shoulder as we write” (2015, 2). Dabashi’s pronouns “our” and “we” do not so much refer to a group of intellectuals untainted by European-North American-centred repertoires of knowledge production and related modalities of embodying such tastes. They rather inscribe, with Gramscian insight, constellations of personal disposition and historical processes by which such influences are foregrounded and picked apart, questioning their universalizing pretensions, their methodological presuppositions, as well as their subjectifying implications. Hence Said’s efforts to draw on a “hermeneutics of alterity”—to again borrow from Dabashi (2011, 85)—such as his references to ninth-century Zahirites studies of grammar while developing his notion of the worldliness of texts, or his reconsideration of his views of the music and song of Umm Kalthoum. My interest is in how Said learned to both breathe and apply a hermeneutics of alterity, how he learned to accommodate the varied hues and stammers by which subjectivity takes place in and through a matrix of intersectional forces—what in Chap. 5 I refer to as “becoming a subject of.” In this study, I approach the matrix by which Said maintained a relational sense of the connections between his life experience and his scholarly work through the Arabic term nafssiya. An extension of the root nafs (breath), nafssiya refers mostly to a sense of self. While one of the term’s connotations relates to psyche—as, for example, when reference is made to tabib al-nafs, a psychologist—it suggests a more fleshy, physical, or embodied sense of self than the closely related ruah (spirit).7 In a book on the structure of Islamic conduct and behaviour, nafssiya is translated as 7  For a discussion of the differences between nafssiya and ruah, see Dalhat (2015, especially 435–436).

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“disposition” (Hizb al-Tahrir 2012). A person’s shakhsiyya, character or personality, the introduction claims, is distinguished by aqliyya, mentality, “the tool used for understanding things,” and nafssiya—“behavioural disposition … the method for satisfying man’s instincts and organic needs” (2012, 4). From an Islamic point of view, these aspects of character, mind, and body are in balance when they are attuned to decorous conduct. For my purposes, nafssiya can be phenomenologically employed in terms of an embodied sense of self. The Arabic root nafs forms the basis of a number of words and connotations, implying a constellation of subjectivity. Besides breath, these include ego, inclination, self, tendency, aspiration, temperament, desire, body, and disposition. In my northern Lebanese vernacular one can say “nafssiyan I am not happy,” or “nafssiyan I don’t have much interest in the topic,” or again, “nafsi is not at ease.” The term can be contrasted to assabiyya, which the fourteenth-century social philosopher Ibn Khaldun employed to refer to characteristics of group affiliation (1989). Very often translated as group solidarity, assabiyya refers to shared sentiments, orientations, and feelings as motilities of social exchange, underpinning a social ethos. I have used the term “affiliation” intentionally, so as to capture Ibn Khaldun’s worldly emphasis on affect and emotions as forms of social glue, different from heredity and ties of blood, as in filiation.8 Interestingly, in the vernacular, Ibn Khaldun’s emphasis on social bonding has been somewhat diluted, as the term assabiyya tends to connote personal disposition. While it carries the connotation of being highly strung, it extends into a notion of having prejudiced views of others and their customs, or else a rather narrow view of the world. However, while assabiyya and nafssiya can be contrasted through their respective emphases on social and personal characteristics, the terms are similar when we note their down-to-earth or worldly sense of life and livelihood. While the word nafssiya, I want to suggest, might well refer to the subjective, rather than objectively social, conditions of life, it has the capacity to capture the affective phenomenological strains of Said’s personal dimension I am tracing in his work. In its connotations of temperament and aspiration, nafssiya can be employed to note a constitutive process of personal disposition

8  Said himself employed concepts of affiliation and filiation in his elaboration of his terms “secular criticism” and “critical consciousness.” See his introductory essay “Secular Criticism” (Said 1991).

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animated through relational circuits of social repertoires and cultural reservoirs. As I employ the term, then, nafssiya implies capacities for breath— breathing-in cultural tastes, strewn through modalities of social decorum, conventions by which people learn to become subjects of their worlds. However, the term can also mean breathing-out, rendering cultural tastes, social decorum, and conventions available for critical review. Nafssiya implies a relational exchange of temperament, in respect of circumstances in which a subject strives to maintain a cohesive sense of self in relation to others, as well as in relation to the force of social expectation. By emphasizing capacities, I want to foreground knowhow as circulations of subjective orientations to self and circumstance. With its propensity to employ personal and possessive pronouns as abstract categories of reference, the very grammar of classical phenomenology tends to elide questions of power and desire as capacities for social exchange. I address this problematic in my chapter on a phenomenology of race. In the next section I discuss nafssiya in relation to autobiography.

Giving an Account of Oneself9 This study began with my interest in the autobiographical tenor of Said’s work, the “personal dimension” he inaugurates in the introduction to his Orientalism. I was intrigued by his references to his background and life experience. I think it is fair to say that not many scholars have written so much about themselves as has Said. He seems to have been keen to talk about himself, his background, his life experiences, often in the introductions and prefaces to his books, though also in essays and interviews. I began with trying to understand his motivations, in respect of his scholarly preoccupations. I soon realized that a conventional, objectivist approach that would treat his life experience as the mere background to his work would fail to capture the reflective momentum of Said’s critical application. Certainly, his filiative Palestinian-Arab background and affiliative sense of being Palestinian, in relation to his “colonial education,” influenced the direction of his scholarly endeavours. However, just as Said himself often evoked his background as a constellation of forces, concerning his capacity for critical application, my study shifted to a more relational mode of address. I then began to cultivate a phenomenological 9

 To borrow Judith Butler’s compelling term (2005), which I discuss at length in Chap. 5.

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approach steeped in relational notions of embodiment, perception, livelihood, in the affective contours of racism. When we recall Said’s book on Conrad, we can appreciate his early interest in autobiography. This interest eventually led, quite a few years later, to his Out of Place: A Memoir, written in the circumstance of his terminal illness, and published in 1998, only four to five years before his death in 2003. I am using the term ‘autobiography’ loosely, in line with recent scholarship that has developed an attentiveness to how autobiography is embedded in social and cultural circumstances by which a literary mode of public self-representation is valued, gains an audience. Indeed, Said’s memoir, as well as his personal dimension, provides a refreshing view of how autobiographical writing—understood here as capacities to graphically foreground, articulate, animate, recursively situate, self-­ awareness—is caught up in differential relationships of power and circulations of knowledge. Such relationships and circulations involve emotional and political sensibilities, in respect of imaginary attachments shaping capacities for self-regard. As I outlined in the last section, the imaginary is best understood as a resource, differentially distributed and accessed, variably assumed as modalities of attachment and social exchange with others, according to practices of inhabiting social and, in Said’s case, intellectual milieus. Accordingly, autobiography—which has always played a role in constituting the value of transposing the personal into a mode of public address and response—can be understood in terms of material and imaginary resources. At the same time, I have been emphasizing a relational, molecular sense of Said’s personal dimension so as to steer away from a substantialist notion that a person’s background determines or else validates their political sensibilities and cultural tastes. In doing so I want to distinguish my approach from a narrow sense of what is referred to as ‘identity politics.’ Said himself tended to be critical of what can also be called identitarian assumptions. In an essay he penned very soon after completing his memoir, he writes: “Nothing seems less interesting than the narcissistic self-­ study that today passes in many places for identity politics, or ethnic studies, or affirmations of roots, cultural pride, drum-beating nationalism, and so on” (2001a, 567, first published in 1998). While he recognizes how ethnicity, roots, nationalisms, and so on have a role to play in terms of solidarities formed to contest modes of subjugation, such collectivities and their related personal dispositions are not preformed, subject to primordial identifications. They rather come into being in the acts of

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addressing pressing needs and interests, and in relation to symbolic practices of attachment and exchange. For Said, identity is always plural, crisscrossed by varying modes of attachment. As he argued in his reflections on Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, one is always “both inside and outside his or her community” (Said 2004, 53). As Hamid Dabashi would say, identities are more fluid, emerging through interwoven webs of “ethos,” rather than “ethnos” (2012, 45). In a fine study of subjectivity in Said’s work, Prasad Pannian also notes the affiliative, or else formative, dimensions by which “subject positions” and groups come to cohere (2016, 7). In the last couple of decades postcolonial and gender critics in Britain and North America have been questioning a predominating notion of autobiography that assumes the figure of a sovereign subject commanding the terms of self-understanding. Moore-Gilbert, for example, has argued that “Auto/biography Studies has traditionally advanced a view of autobiographical personhood as monadic and autonomous” (2009, 17). In fact he includes Said in his study of life writing in the colony and postcolony, observing that: “Many of the principal factors which contribute to Said’s sense of being ‘out of place’ … derive more obviously and directly from the colonial milieu in which he grows up” (2009, 116). As he suggests, for Said and the other writers he discusses, “auto/biographical Selfhood can scarcely be conceived separately from socio-spatial concerns” (2009, 66). Another critic, Leigh Gilmore, writes about what she calls “the fantasy of autobiography,” which she describes in terms of “a monument to the idea of personhood, to the notion that one could leave behind a memorial to oneself … and that the memorial would perform the work of permanence that the person never can” (2001, 12–13). The more worldly and relational impulses registered by these critics complement the earlier work of, for example, Janet Varner Gunn, who with her notion of “the autobiographical situation,” argued that selfhood always takes place through “reciprocity,” by inhabiting a world in which a person’s capacity to articulate a sense of themselves has always to be relationally negotiated and exchanged (1982, 31). I also want to mention the political philosopher Adriana Cavarero, who adapts Hannah Arendt’s distinction between “what” and “who” to develop an ethical sense of autobiographical subjectivity as a practice of exchanging one’s story with others, whereby selfhood emerges as “a totally external and relational reality.” As she further explains: “Both

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the exhibitive, acting self and the narratable self are utterly given over to others” (2000, 63). Attention to the entanglement of self and circumstance in autobiographical writing and criticism is not only a recent development. In an edited volume, Dwight Reynolds has mined a tradition of life-writing in Arabic to demonstrate how autobiography was understood to constitute a cultural and social practice of interpretation. In his introduction Reynolds discusses a late fifteenth-century autobiography by Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti and adapts the term tarjama li-nafsihi, “an interpretation of self.” He writes: “Al-Suyuti’s emphasis on passing on knowledge of his ‘circumstances,’ ‘conditions,’ or ‘states,’ words commonly used by medieval Muslim scholars to describe the contents of autobiographies, reflects a widespread conceptualisation of life as a sequence of changing conditions or states rather than a static, unchanging whole or a simple linear progression through time” (2001, 4). Rather than set out his life story chronologically, assuming a stable sense of self moving through the incidents and events of that chronology, al-Suyuti, Reynolds observes, gives an account of how he formed an identity, in relation to his experiences, his activities. What I find fascinating in Reynolds account of a tradition of life writing in Arabic are the terms tarjama and nafsihi. The former can mean both ‘interpretation’ and ‘translation,’ depending on the context and mode of address, while the latter, as I have discussed, relates to a sense of self. However, the point is that one works towards making sense of oneself in relation to the circumstances by which one learned to inhabit and exchange capacities for livelihood, undertaking varying tasks and projects deemed worthwhile. Complimenting this more expansive practice of life writing is an awareness of a tradition—or “genre” (Reynolds 2001, 36–42)—of autobiography in Arabic. Hence, autobiographical practices are crisscrossed by intellectual debates over the hermeneutic significance of self entwined with social circumstance. While Said was not well versed in the Arabic tradition of life writing, his memoir Out of Place provides a not dissimilar relational sense of his life. This relational dynamic informs his episodic style of composition, which to some extent parallels his sense of self. The publication of Out of Place brought in its wake much critical interest in Said’s life experience, especially after his death in 2003. Beyond the contours of his memoir, his abiding interest in the enabling entwinement of his life trajectory and critical practice marks many of the interviews he gave over the years, some of which have been collected in the volume Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward Said (Viswanathan

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2005). This interest also marks the growing corpus of his writings on Palestine and Israel, which for over a decade until his death he contributed in the main to the Egyptian weekly Al-Ahram, and in Arabic to the London-based paper Al-Hayat. Otherwise, in the spirit of his memoir, Said published articles such as “Between Worlds” (2001a) and “Invention, Memory, and Place” (Said 2000b). Notable commentaries on Said’s life from which I have benefited are Deane (2001), the obituary by Hamid Dabashi (2003), and from a visual perspective concentrating on photographs, Slyomovics (2009). In this vein I can also mention the compelling feature-length documentary film, Out of Place: Memories of Edward Said (Satô 2006), which presents a number of interviews with his friends and family, as well as colleagues, filmed in the cities and towns he had lived in—Jerusalem, Cairo, Dour El Choueir and Beirut in Lebanon, and New York. To these can be added the recent biography by Brennan (2021), which in its breadth of research has become something of a touchstone, and auto/biographies by Eddé (2019), his daughter Najla Said (2013), and the late William Spanos (2009). While drawing on this auto/biographical material in the subsequent chapters of my study, I devote more space to a discussion of Judith Butler’s notion of “giving an account of oneself,” which I adapt as a title for Chap. 5. In their discussion of critique in respect of what they call, after Foucault, “regimes of truth,” Butler provides a formidable discussion of how a “desire for recognition” implicates the affective ontological status, the subjectivity, of the I that employs critique. As Butler explains: “any relation to the regime of truth will at the same time be a relation to myself” (2005, 22). Hence, in relation to critical inquiry, or interventionist scholarship, giving an account of oneself entails a sense of the social conditions and cultural reservoirs by which one develops a sense of self: “Thus if I question the regime of truth, I question, too, the regime through which being, and my own ontological status, is allocated” (Butler 2005, 23). Obviously, Butler’s insights have some bearing on how I am approaching Said’s personal dimension, his nafssiya. Interestingly, as is well known, both Butler and Said have been influenced by the work of Foucault. However, I am not so much interested in exploring the influence of Foucault on Said—a theme that of course has received much commentary. I rather set out to demonstrate how Butler’s discussion of Foucault’s notion of critique and a hermeneutics of self—to their interrelation— amounts to a phenomenology of affect, which can be extended to Said’s work. As I argue in Chap. 5, while the thematic impulses of critique and a

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hermeneutics of self are anchored in certain historical events and circumstances, this anchoring proves to be resistant to an analytics grounded in a static notion of context as causal or structural background. In other words, Said’s giving an account of himself, I strive to demonstrate, transpires through his efforts to breathe life into texts, events, and subjective motivations. In doing so, he renders the very terms by which they are addressed reflective and responsive modes of critique, of critical inquiry. In a significant respect, the contours of such responsiveness implicate an embodied, embedded, phenomenology of affect that has tended to be underestimated in the secondary literature on Said’s work.

Gramscian Insights, Palestinian (Af)Filiations Related to my approach to Said’s giving an account of himself is his discussion of Gramsci in his personal dimension section of his introduction to Orientalism (2003: 25). This helps me to draw attention to the ways in which the intersections of personal disposition and historical processes were highly significant for Said’s account of himself. As I am generally arguing in this study, despite the prodigious amount of studies devoted to Said’s work, the critical and creative purchase of his personal dimension can be further addressed. Books and edited volumes on Said hardly discuss this aspect of his work, especially his earlier scholarly efforts before the publication of Orientalism, earlier studies whose neglect is only sporadically rectified.10 Moreover, relationships between Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (first published in 1966), the book he published ten years later, Beginnings: Intention and Method (first published in 1975), Orientalism, The Question of Palestine (1992b, first published in 1979), and The World, the Text, and the Critic (1991, first published in 1983), remain gravely underestimated. These earlier studies tend to be written off as innocuous ventures into, respectively, literary studies and poststructuralist theory, even though they, especially Beginnings, had made a considerable impact on the academic scene of literary studies in, mainly, North America. As I will discuss in Chap. 4 on Beginnings, the essay form was central to Said’s work, which like that of Walter Benjamin and John Berger employed juxtapositions and constellations by which the practice of writing 10  Besides the aforementioned Vandeviver (2019), Hussein (2004), and McCarthy (2010), see also the intellectual auto/biography by his former student Veeser (2010).

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transpired as a recursive mode of elaboration. Indeed, the comments Said makes about the digressive, contrapuntal rhythms he finds in Umm Kalthoum and Glenn Gould, which I referred to above, could just as well be found in the rhythms of his own essays. In my earlier readings of Said’s work I failed to make the connections between his pre- and post-Orientalism writings. I realized this as I reread the introduction to Orientalism at the same time as I reread Beginnings, which I had first become interested in some twenty-five years previously. The book consists of a number of essays he penned in the wake of the famous conference at John Hopkins University in 1966, dubbed the “structuralist controversy.” In my chapter on Beginnings I will argue that, despite being very different books, this earlier volume can be understood as a forerunner to the critical fervour informing the arguments he carved out in Orientalism. On another, related plane of reference, both Beginnings and Orientalism are informed by Said’s filiative and affiliative sense of his Palestinianness/ Arabness in the wake of the short war between Israel and Arab armies in June 1967. Significant at this juncture of Said’s personal dimension is his friendship with the Palestinian-American historian, public intellectual, and activist Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, whose worldly approach to scholarship greatly influenced Said’s early, critical sense of his relationship to his own academic practice.11 This influence—which Brennan describes as “tutor[ing] the French-identified Said in third-world political insurgency” (2021, 63)—gave rise to the essay “The Arab Portrayed” that Said wrote for Abu-Lughod’s edited volume (1970)12 on the 1967 war. Initiating his interest in stereotypical representations of Arabs in the United States, this essay became the kernel of Orientalism.13 At the same time, it produces a script for his personal dimension, a scene that Said will play out, recursively elaborate, quite often in his subsequent work. “The Arab Portrayed” encapsulates the Gramscian insight of entwinement between historical processes and personal circumstance. In fact his essay, although directed towards a very different thematic, maintains his keen insight into the circumstantial constellation of personal and historical impulses informing his book on Conrad. In that study, as he canvasses the 11  Said recounts this relationship in his obituary for Abu-Lughod (2001c). For an account of their friendship, see Lila Abu-Lughod (2005). 12  Parts of Said’s essay would later be included verbatim in Orientalism (2003, 285–286). 13  Said himself points this out (2001c, 17).

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interconnections between Conrad’s personal letters and literary production, Said picks up on what he refers to as the Polish émigré’s “defiance,” his challenge to “the cruel joke played on him by history when it offered him only a stunted, incomplete legacy of national identity, dissipated in an obscure and chaotic world” (2008, 38). Astonishingly, this same observation can be applied to Said’s Palestinian experience of an “incomplete legacy of national identity.” It also relates to Hamid Dabashi’s sense of a Gramscian/Saidian inventory of engaged intellectuals and the critical value of “defiance.”14

Getting Personal To conclude this introductory chapter I want to consider why, at least in English, the phrase “getting personal,” or “to take something personally,” mostly carries a negative connotation. In moments of argument, for example, one party may slur the other’s character rather than focus on the issue at hand. Depending on the occasion and circumstance, this could mean either an ad hominem remark (criticizing the person rather than the issue) or else transferring one’s insecurities onto others. In response, the aggrieved party may say: ‘why do you have to get so personal?’ Or ‘why make it personal?’ On such tense occasions, what happens is that the issue at hand is converted into an ontological assumption—one is judged, or indeed judges oneself, not by what one has done, or does, but by an assumption of what one is. A good example is the difference between, say, calling someone immoral, or idiotic—‘you are immoral,’ ‘you are an idiot’—and saying that what one did is immoral, or what one does is idiotic—you are acting immoral, you are being idiotic. The ontological tends to fix the subject to an entity, an ontic category, while the phenomenological provides a relational understanding of how people act according to circumstance. This relational approach to subjectivity provides an attentiveness to how people are shaped by their orientations to others, by what they do with capacities; how they negotiate, embody, inhabit, and otherwise work through relations of power and desire folded into capacities for livelihood. To my mind, the inclination to refer to oneself, to others, or indeed to material things and conceptual associations, in ontological terms of reference, plays a role in the tendency of academic researchers to avoid the  Interview with the author, conducted in New York on April 21, 2016.

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personal in their work. Most high school and undergraduate students are taught to exclude reference to themselves if they are to provide an objective orientation to their research. This is achieved through a pedagogy of grammar, such that one shouldn’t use the pronoun ‘I,’ shouldn’t reference oneself, as in the phrase ‘it seems to me.’ Indeed, there should be nothing apparent about one’s findings, as observations and conclusions should not be based on perception, on how someone or something is looked at and looks back, is regarded, but rather in terms of what someone or something is, regardless of who is doing the looking. Grammatically, an objective analysis of the issue at hand assumes a descriptive mode of address, one that de-scribes its subject matter, rules out the possibility that subject matter coheres according to how it is scribed, dependent on a graphic mode of address. In other words, one shouldn’t get personal, shouldn’t include references to oneself, to one’s background, to one’s motivations, if an objective relationship to subject matter is to be achieved and maintained. I have previously canvassed this theme in terms of how discussions of methodology in studies of trauma underestimate the phenomenological contours by which a researcher relates to subjects of research, to ‘sources,’ and the contexts, the ‘fields of research,’ in which such encounters take place (Nikro 2018). The field of research need not be restricted to places where, for example, anthropologists conduct their work, but can include libraries, where historians, literary scholars, and philosophers retrieve the textual materials they work with. From the point of view of a phenomenology of affect, it seems to me that there are two aspects worth putting in relief. For the first, we can quite simply ask how sources become ‘sources,’ appropriated from the field of research and stored as retrievable resources? The materials a researcher encounters and returns with from the field are not stable, substantive entities. Once a film, a novel, even a newspaper article, for example, is transformed into a source, it is dislocated from the circuits in which it has been produced and encountered, henceforth placed into an alternative circuit of exchange—in this case, an academic milieu. A film shown in a local cinema house and reviewed in the local newspaper is not quite the same film, the same entity, once it becomes a source for research. In the process, its orientation to its livelihood—its motility, its capacity to circulate as a valued, significant site of address—comes to be transfigured into alternative terms of reference, circulating through avenues of scholarly exchange, such as conferences and journals. The film, to be sure, coheres

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in respect of the process of its production. However it also coheres according to how it takes shape in certain circumstances and the occasions in which it is viewed and addressed. In other words, its capacity to be valued, its ability to meaningfully inhabit its hermeneutic livelihood, is dependent on how it circulates through relational constellations of interest, power, desire, signification, as well as material and imaginary resources more generally. This awareness of the relational constellations, the conduits, by which an artefact becomes a source can be complemented by the second aspect I have in mind, which concerns the way in which researchers develop relationships to their subjects of research. Most of us have learned various strategies and grammars by which we slyly remove ourselves from the scene of research. In doing so, we reassure ourselves and others that our presence, interests, and motivations do not influence how an interlocutor, or else a film or novel, responds to the terms of reference guiding our deliberations. I evoke an example by borrowing from the work of anthropologists in Australia critically discussing the motivations and actions of the work of their peers. In an essay on colonial photography in Australia, John Bradley and his co-writers (2014) trace the itinerary of a group of photographs originally made towards the end of the nineteenth century by other anthropologists. The photographs were taken to record the indigenous Yanyuwa people in Australia, whom the earlier anthropologists regarded through an evolutionary scheme as somehow doomed to extinction. Some of the photographs lay for years in the Melbourne Museum, as exhibits of Aboriginal Australians. Bradley and his colleagues helped to rescue the photographs from the airless confines of their glass cabinets and passed them on to the few remaining descendants of the Yanyuwa people. While the photographs bore witness to the ancestors, they played a role in the capacity of the descendants to maintain images and narratives of their ancestors, their history, and indeed a recursive sense of themselves as a community. Interestingly, from first being instances of what the colonial anthropologists regarded as a dying race of people, the very same photographs came to bear witness to this racist assumption itself; and further, besides taking shape as sources for research, they became resources by which people rehabilitate capacities to narrate their history. In other words, as I discussed above in terms of a material phenomenology, the capacity of the photographs to be meaningful was dependent on the circumstances and

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occasions, the very manner, the pedagogical grammar, by which they were addressed—valued, stored, retrieved, exhibited, (re)sourced. At the same time, alongside their eventual significance for the Yanyuwa descendants striving to maintain their heritage, the photographs bear the imprints of the motivations of the anthropologists themselves. The point, to be sure, is that the practical value of capacities is not dependent on their ontological properties but rather transpires according to their relational orientations. Both sources and resources, we can say, are never quite owned, are not always ready-to-hand. Neither are they only present-at-­ hand once their practical use value fails. They rather circulate as material and imaginary resources, differentially accessed and deployed. These two aspects of a material phenomenology of affect—constellation characteristics of a source and the capacities of researchers to have responsive relationships to their subjects of research—have some bearing in the work of Said. They play a role in how he approached his personal dimension as a resource by which he could situate himself in relation to his scholarly preoccupations. They outline his methodological approach to texts as circulatory sites for the production of value and imaginary attachment, as resources for particular assumptions of self-understanding. In the process, they transpire as capacities for an exchange of self with others, mostly through deferential relationships of power and authority. I explore these contours of Said’s personal dimension in the next two chapters, concentrated on his book Orientalism.

References Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim, ed. 1970. The Arab-Israeli Confrontation of June 1967: An Arab Perspective. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2005. About Politics, Palestine, and Friendship: A Letter to Edward from Egypt. Critical Inquiry 31 (2): 381–388. Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press. Ashcroft, Bill, and Pal Ahluwalia. 2009. Edward Said. London: Routledge. Bradley, John, et  al. 2014. ‘Why Can’t They Put Their Names?’: Colonial Photography, Repatriation and Social Memory. History and Anthropology 25 (1): 47–71. Brennan, Timothy. 2021. Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Butler, Judith. 2005. Giving an Account of Oneself. New  York: Fordham University Press.

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Cavarero, Adriana. 2000. Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. Translated by Paul A. Kottman. London: Routledge. Césaire, Aimé. 2000. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press. Dabashi, Hamid. 2003. The Moment of Myth. Counterpunch, October 2, https://www.counterpunch.org/2003/10/02/the-­m oment-­o f-­m yth/. Accessed June 2013. ———. 2011. Brown Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press. ———. 2012. The Arab Spring. The End of Postcolonialism. London: Zed Books. ———. 2015. Can Non-Europeans Think. London: Zed Books. Dalhat, Yusuf. 2015. The Concept of Al-Ruh (Soul) in Islam. International Journal of Education and Research 3 (8): 431–440. Danielson, Virginia. 1997. The Voice of Egypt: Umm Kulthūm, Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Deane, Seamus. 2001. Under Eastern and Western Eyes. Boundary 2 28 (1): 1–18. Du Bois, W.E.B. 2007. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Cosimo. Eddé, Dominique. 2019. Edward Said: His Thoughts as a Novel. Translated by Trista Selous and Ros Schwartz. London: Verso. Fanon, Frantz. 2008. Black Skins, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press. Gilmore, Leigh. 2001. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma, and Testimony. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gordon, Lewis R. 2015. What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought. New York: Fordham University Press. de Groot, Rokus. 2007. Perspectives of Polyphony in Edward Said’s Writings. In Edward Said Critical Decolonization, ed. Ferial J. Ghazoul, 219–240. Cairo: American University of Cairo Press. ———. 2010. Edward Said and Polyphony. In Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation, ed. Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom, 204–226. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hage, Ghassan. 2017. Is Racism an Environmental Threat? Cambridge: Polity Press. Hizb al-Tahrir. 2012. The Essential Elements of Islamic Disposition (Nafsiyyah). Beirut: Dar Ul Ummah. Hussein, Abdirahman A. 2004. Edward Said: Criticism and Society. London: Verso. Ibn Khaldun. 1989. The Muqaddimah. Translated by Franz Rosenthal. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lorde, Audre. 2020. The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action. In The Selected Works of Audre Lorde, ed. Roxane Gay. New York: W.W. Norton. Massad, Joseph. 2010. Affiliating with Edward Said. In Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation, ed. Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom, 23–49. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Mbembe, Achille. 2017. Critique of Black Reason. Translated by Laurent Dubois. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2019. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham: Duke University Press. McCarthy, Conor. 2010. The Cambridge Introduction to Edward Said. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moore-Gilbert, Bart. 2009. Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics and Self-­ Representation. London: Routledge. Nikro, Norman Saadi. 2018. Researching Trauma: Some Methodological Considerations for the Humanities. Middle East Topics and Argument 11: 17–29. Pannian, Prasad. 2016. Edward Said and the Question of Subjectivity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Reynolds, Dwight F. 2001. Introduction. In Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press. Said, Edward W. 1985. Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1991. The World, the Text, and the Critic. London: Vintage. ———. 1992a. Musical Elaborations. London: Vintage Books. ———. 1992b. The Question of Palestine. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 2000a. Out of Place: A Memoir. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 2000b. Invention, Memory, and Place. Critical Inquiry 26 (2): 175–192. ———. 2001a. Between Worlds. In Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays, ed. Edward W. Said, 554–568. London: Granta Books. ———. 2001b. Homage to a Belly-Dancer. In Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays, ed. Edward W.  Said, 346–355. London: Granta Books. ———. 2001c. My Guru: Elegy for Ibrahim Abu-Lughod. London Review of Books. December 13. ———. 2003. Orientalism. London: Penguin. ———. 2004. Freud and the Non-European. London: Verso. ———. 2005. Language, History, and the production of Knowledge. In Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward Said, ed. Gauri Viswanathan, 262–279. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2008. Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography. New  York: Columbia University Press. Said, Najla. 2013. Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-­ American Family. New York: Riverhead Books. Satô, Makoto. 2006. Out of Place: Memories of Edward Said. Film: 2h 18m. Shohat, Ella. 2006. Post-Fanon and the Colonial. In Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices, 250–289. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Slyomovics, Susan. 2009. Edward Said’s Nazareth. Framework: Journal of Cinema and Media 1&2: 9–45. Spanos, William V. 2009. The Legacy of Edward W. Said. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a history of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Thiong’o, Ngũgı ̃wa. 2005. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. James Crey/Heinemann. Vandeviver, Nicolas. 2019. Edward Said and the Authority of Literary Criticism. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Varner Gunn, Janet. 1982. Autobiography: Towards a Poetics of Experience. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press. Veeser, H.  Aram. 2010. Edward Said: The Charisma of Criticism. New  York: Routledge. Viswanathan, Gauri, ed. 2005. Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward Said. London: Bloomsbury.

CHAPTER 2

Inventorying the Self: Nafssiya, Elaboration, Recursive Humanism

Inventories of Self In the “The personal dimension” section of his introduction to Orientalism (2003, 25–28) Said moves into an autobiographical mode of address. “Much of the personal investment in this study,” he writes, “derives from my awareness of being an ‘Oriental’ as a child growing up in two British colonies. All of my education, in those colonies (Palestine and Egypt) and in the United States, has been Western, and yet that deep early awareness has persisted” (2003, 25). This comment on his education and life experience evokes a reflective element to his intellectual motivations, in the process giving an account of how he views his critical practice in terms of his biography. In the midst of a complex argument tackling history, the politics of culture, and the production of knowledge, Said quotes what for many readers might well seem like an obscure passage from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks: “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” (Gramsci quoted by Said 2003, 25).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 N. S. Nikro, Nafssiya, or Edward Said’s Affective Phenomenology of Racism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51769-3_2

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Said points out that his English copy of The Prison Notebooks1 omits Gramsci’s concluding clause: “therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory” (Gramsci quoted by Said 2003, 25). Comparing the Notebooks to the original Italian, Said is impressed by the way in which Gramsci draws into productive proximity history, geography, knowledge, personal circumstance, self-awareness, and critique. What seems to have profoundly inspired Said by Gramsci’s notions of “the historical process to date” and an “infinity of traces” is the claim that critique necessitates an inventory of oneself. Such an inventory is shaped, comes to cohere, as a reflective mode of “knowing thyself.” At the same time, capacities to know oneself implicate related modalities of what I like to call hermeneutic livelihood. Such modalities include cross-sections of historical processes, personal disposition, graphic expression, and circumstance. Through these intersections, subjectivity transpires as both  a depository and application  of accumulated experiences, influences, cultural learning, almost always directed through relations of authority and deference, encompassing emotional and affective sensibilities. For Said, Gramsci’s notion of “compiling an inventory” of oneself involves an enterprise of questioning how such depositories animate one’s orientation to circumstance, to history, to others, and indeed, to oneself. Considering his critical interest in the material, affective, and reflective threads of self, the Gramscian understanding of subjectivity as a “depository” and, potentially, an “inventory” lends itself to a phenomenological appreciation of how one embodies certain orientations to the world around them. While the almost four hundred pages of what became a major publication of the second half of the twentieth century, Orientalism, hardly provide much by way of autobiographical commentary, Said’s personal dimension in the introduction inaugurates what would become a staple of his critical repertoire. In quite a few of his subsequent books, especially in his prefaces and introductions, as well as essays and interviews, he takes the time to reflect on himself, consider his motivations, which he sets in relation to the conditions (institutional, historical, existential) in which he produces his work. His 1  Said is referring to the famous edited translation of selections from Gramsci’s notebooks, in fact to the first English edition of 1971. A member of the Italian communist party, Gramsci was imprisoned by the Mussolini regime in 1926, until his death in 1937. While in prison he produced almost 3000 pages of handwritten notes, on social, cultural, philosophical, and political themes. For Said’s reference, see Gramsci (2003, 324). For a recent study that discusses the significant influence of Gramsci on Said, especially concerning a social ontology of historical materialism, see Hussein (2015).

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self-reflections are always drawn through a relational prism, a dynamic sense of himself in relation to others, to institutions, and to circumstance. His interest in his life experiences culminated, to be sure, in his memoir Out of Place (2000), while from the beginning of his intellectual career he put a lot of effort into studying the auto/biographical dimensions, the historicity, of authors and literary texts.2 Conor McCarthy has provided an important source for acknowledging this self-reflective aspect of Said’s work. Discussing his interest in Giambattista Vico, McCarthy points out that the Italian “locates himself explicitly in his work, in a move that Said would repeat at the start of all his major books” (2010, 26). Hence, where Said writes about Vico’s New Science, such as in the concluding chapter of Beginnings—“Vico in His Work and This”—he refers also to Vico’s Autobiography. In this study I set out to track Said’s abiding interest in the enabling entwinement of his life experience and intellectual practice. As I mentioned in my introductory chapter, I am concerned not merely with the relationship between his life experience and work, but how he himself explored this relationship as significant for his critical practice. There are a couple of points to be made here. The first one concerns the connection between biographical inventory and critical practice. While there are of course many biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs whose subjects are academics and intellectuals, they tend to speak about life experience, their extra-intellectual interests, circumstances, and pursuits, as the background of their achievements. Said’s practice of foregrounding his life experience is more recursive,3 whereby he has a sense that his life experience does not merely constitute his background but has an inter-­generative bearing on his capacity to be critically engaged. The second point I want to give some relief has to do with simply asking why, indeed, Said was often compelled to foreground his life experience. By way of contrast, we can consider two famous scholars who (among notable others) influenced Said’s intellectual development in the late 1960s and 1970s—Michel Foucault and, less so, Jacques Derrida. Neither of these illustrious, prolific scholars found it necessary in their major works of the 1960s and 1970s to foreground their backgrounds, 2  Not only concerning his study of Conrad, but also other intellectual figures, such as Theodor Adorno and Merleau-Ponty. 3  The term ‘recursive’ refers mostly to the repetitive application of a particular guideline or rule. In this study I employ the term to refer to Said’s reflective sense of himself as always in a recurrent process of discovery.

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their biographies.4 Would it, for example, have been completely irrelevant had Foucault brought up his sexuality in the first volume of his The History of Sexuality (1990)? Or what if Derrida mentioned his Arab-Jewish Algerian background in, for example, his Writing and Difference? Concerning Derrida, a modicum of self-reflection may well have induced him to qualify what he refers to as “our civilization” in the very first line of the first essay of this famous volume (1978, 3). While I may well be flippant in making these observations, I wonder if it is fair to ask if these formidable scholars thought that any reference to themselves, their personal and social circumstances, their motivations, might have qualified the objective merits of their arguments. To be sure, when we consider the remarkable way in which they went about critically questioning and dismantling the intellectual traditions they came to own as theirs, it would be exceedingly disingenuous to say that they were comfortable in such traditions. I am rather thinking about how Said’s sense of owning an intellectual tradition as his was fraught with questions of alterity, in respect of the production of colonial epistemologies and related cultural reservoirs, and, just as significantly, his personal experience of colonialism and racism. Thinking about this contrast with Said, I looked up the ‘readers’ that have been issued on their work—those collections of a famous scholar’s influential essays, which often include excerpted sections from their major books. What first struck me about The Edward Said Reader (2001), The Foucault Reader (1984), and A Derrida Reader (1991) was how the Said volume includes his first name in the title, while the other two do not. However, the contrast is more glaring when we read the respective introductions to these readers. While in their introduction Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin delve into a biographical account of Said, writing about his life and family, his Palestinian background, his travels and education, Paul Rabinow in his introduction to Foucault doesn’t mention any biographical details. The last section of his introduction is even titled “The Location of the Author,” although we quickly learn that this announces a theoretical discussion of “the author” as an anonymous function of discourse. Rabinow asks, rhetorically: “How, then, to situate Foucault?” Keeping in mind Foucault’s famous essay “What Is an Author”5 he 4  Derrida, of course, would later write about himself. See, for example, his autobiographical essay (1998). 5  This famous essay is included in Rabinow’s volume.

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responds: “From whence does his authority flow—if not from Reason and Justice, if not from Science, if not from courtly Art” (1984, 24). The capitalization of Science, Art, Reason, and Justice is telling, or rather not telling—the question of how to situate Foucault is strictly epistemological, not biographical or else historical. With the Derrida Reader it is much the same, though in keeping with his playful approach the introduction is written as a dialogue with an imaginary, putative reader, effectively deconstructing the convention of readers (understood as both verbal and nominal—the act of reading and books as readers). Towards the end of her introduction Kamuf makes the otherwise valid point that, to maintain a sense of “between the blinds” by which reading contributes to the significance of a text, the reader should not forget that Derrida’s essays have “already passed through the filter of another language” (1991, xlii). So that, since Derrida’s writing has already been qualified through translation into an English language, the putative reader can “open the shutters and the blinders” and “let your language play in the slanting rays” (1991, xlii). And yet, in this vein, I wonder if we can ask about the slanting rays by which Derrida changed his first given name Jackie to Jacques? Is it possible that he was just as uncomfortable with his forename as Said was with his, Edward? In what contexts, circumstances, or from what experiences, does one become uncomfortable with their name? My intention with this contrast is not to trivialize the important, influential impact of the respective works of Foucault and Derrida. I am rather wondering why, unlike Said, they were not induced to reflect on how their personal circumstances, their developing sense of themselves, perhaps their experience of sexism, xenophobia, or racism,6 related to their scholarly work. Not that I think that a scholar’s work is somehow determined by their life experiences or that academic output makes sense only in relation to one’s situation, one’s disposition, one’s preferences, one’s motivations. But surely we can, to some extent, consider how Foucault’s sexuality is in some ways entwined with his intellectual pursuits, perhaps also 6  A most recent addition of biographical works on Foucault is Simeon Wade’s Foucault in California (2019). What I find noteworthy in this sensitive account is, as Heather Dundas mentions in her Foreword, Wade’s own experience of discrimination in academia, due to his homosexuality. On this theme, see the work of another of Foucault’s biographers, Didier Eribon, whose own autobiography, Returning to Reims (2013), provides a sense of how the hallowed halls of academia require one to keep not only their sexuality in the closet but also their class background.

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enabling his intellectual temperament. Just as we can also consider how Derrida’s Arab-Mizrahi background has something to do with the vigour by which he went about dismantling the tradition of Western epistemology. These are complicated questions, for which at present I am poorly disposed to adequately discuss and otherwise would lead me well beyond my preoccupation with Said. However, the point I am trying to make is that Said was compelled to foreground his biography because of his personal experience of xenophobic discrimination and racism. This, I feel, is a significant theme that has tended to be missed by the secondary literature on Said, which mainly tunes into his sense of being “out of place,” straddling two cultures, Arab and American, Oriental and Western. As I have indicated, a central theme of my study of Said’s personal dimension revolves around how he came to situate an inventory of self, his endeavour to “know thyself,” as a condition of his capacity to engage intellectual practice and, more dramatically, critique. A key tangent of this personal dimension is that it was not merely his, and did not directly reflect his self-awareness. So that, although I am grammatically constrained to employ a possessive logic, I want to emphasize how the personal dimension Said strove to narrate and own as his remained implacably inchoate, emergent, irredeemably entangled with historical processes, with circumstance—a word he often uses, almost always with a certain relish, passion, and fascination. In this chapter I explore further how the historical and textual entanglement of Said’s personal dimension can be traced through my concept of nafssiya. I then consider the influence of the work of Antonio Gramsci on Said’s Orientalism. In the secondary literature, this influence tends to concentrate on the spatial, geographical dimensions of Said’s arguments. By contrast, I will rather be preoccupied with a notion of “elaboration” that Said develops from his reading of Gramsci. In the last section I discuss what can be called Said’s recursive humanism.

Inventories of Nafssiya Said was Palestinian, both by birth and by affiliation. His sense of being Palestinian was entwined with his awareness of circumstantial relationships between history, his background, and his developing capacity for critical inquiry (as I am generally arguing in this study). This awareness amounted to a recursive momentum informing his approach in his The Question of

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Palestine (1992b), first published in 1979, pretty much on the heels of Orientalism. In a key passage of his famous second chapter, “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims,” Said writes in an autobiographical mode of address. He refers to a constellation of historical forces, personal inventory, cultural repertoire—all encompassed by his interventionist reading of a predominating Western historical archive otherwise. While “ideas,” he writes, “have power,” referring specifically to the idea of Zionism for Jews, the power of ideas always takes place as a historical process, “is mixed in with historical circumstances” (1992b, 56). Ideas involve certain capacities for human subjectivity, certain capacities by which people learn and unlearn how to become subjects of their worlds. What, Said asks, does Zionism mean for an Arab and, more specifically, for a Palestinian? The question, he appreciates, is manifold, mainly because there is not only one experience of Zionism common to all Arabs. However, for Palestinians, Zionism bears an acute experience of exile and dispossession, especially in the wake of the Nakba,7 when with the creation of Israel in 1948 over 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their indigenous homelands. Said acknowledges how Zionism arose as a response to a Western history of anti-Semitism, genocide, and related aspirations for Jewish national cohesion. This history, he points out, is part and parcel of what he refers to as his “Western education,” his “intellectual formation.” He continues: “In what I have read, in what I write about, even in what I do politically, I am profoundly influenced by mainstream western attitudes toward the history of the Jews, anti-Semitism, the destruction of European Jewry” (1992b, 60). As a consequence of his Western education, he can appreciate the “intertwined terror and the exultation out of which Zionism has been nourished.” And yet as a Palestinian, as someone who has been displaced from his homeland8 by the Zionist settler drive for a national home for Jews, he is well aware of how the Western archive amounts to a delimitation of adversarial points of view, alternative narratives of history, such as concerning the Nakba. 7  On the Nakba, see Ahmad H.  Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod (2007). I was particularly moved by Lila Abu-Lughod’s chapter, “Return to Half-Ruins: Memory, Postmemory, and Living History in Palestine.” Abu-Lughod focuses in part on her father’s, Ibrahim, move to Ramallah, to teach at the University of Birzeit. His family hails from Jaffa. I had the good fortune to do a day trip with him to Jaffa in 1999, while I was serving a two-year stint in Ramallah as an Australian Volunteer Abroad. 8  Said’s family lost their home in Jerusalem in 1948.

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Said traces this conflicting inventory through the pages of George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda. First published in serial form in 1876, the novel articulates a sympathetic view of Zionist yearning for a national homeland. Said explores a peculiar ambiguity of Eliot’s narrative, an ambiguity nurtured by a nineteenth-century European repertoire of defining a positive, enlightened West against a negative, regressive East. While Eliot alludes to the racism directed towards Jews in Europe, she is sympathetic to Jews as long as they embody attributes of Western culture. Eliot, Said observes, is quite capable of seeing that Zionism can easily be accommodated to several varieties of Western (as opposed to Eastern) thought, principal among them the idea that the East is degraded, that it needs reconstruction according to enlightened Western notions about politics, that any reconstructed portion of the East can with small reservations become as “English as England” to its new inhabitants. (1992b, 64)

As he goes on to argue, while providing a complex, morally charged depiction of conflicting motivations of European subjects, Eliot fails to extend this multidimensional prism in her references to the East and its inhabitants. For my purposes, there are two aspects of Said’s discussion of Daniel Deronda that are significant for my study of his developing relationship to his work, his personal dimension, his nafssiya. One of these aspects concerns his general interest in how literature, as well as other graphic practices, plays an important role in maintaining influential “classificatory grids” (Said 1992b, 71)—what I’d like to refer to as certain cultural reservoirs or hermeneutic repertoires—by which people gather capacities to become subjects of their worlds and inhabit their worlds meaningfully. The second aspect concerns Said’s efforts to unlearn how he himself had come to embody the hermeneutic impulses of such grids. I will better canvas this second aspect in the next chapter. For the moment I want to refer to my use of the term nafssiya to capture the entwinement of these two aspects of Said’s critical efforts. As I outlined in my introduction, a primary feature of Said’s work was his interest in the circumstances, historical processes, and cultural reservoirs, in and through which authorship takes place as modalities of address and response. Hence, his concern with the worldliness of a text can be regarded as something like an extension of an author’s baggage, of an author’s inventory. This interest in the subjectifying implications of

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cultural repertoires informs his opening essay of The World, the Text, and the Critic, titled “Secular Criticism.” In this essay Said presents a critique of contemporary literary criticism that, at the time of publication (early 1980s), must have sounded odd to practitioners in the field. Taking both “Left” and “Right” literary theory to task (1991, 4), Said is at pains to wrest texts and textuality from tendencies to abstract their force from worldly circumstance. His sense of the physicality, or material processes, by which texts and human subjects exercise capacities to inhabit, address, and be responsive to their worlds can be contrasted to a deconstructive momentum of cultural criticism that tended to dismiss the contexts in which varying forms of cultural production take place. I emphasize the prefix con to draw attention to its adversarial significance. Context—or to again mention Said’s preferred term, circumstance—does not form a static background to cultural production. Context is livelier, more animated, always in the process of responding to the momentum of events. Rather than employ a deconstructive type of criticism that tends to exclude considerations of author biography and historical circumstance in the production of value and significance, Said is interested in how texts breathe in relation to their worldly situation. “Texts,” he insists, “are worldly, to some degree they are events, and, even when they appear to deny it, they are nevertheless a part of the social world, human life, and of course the historical moments in which they are located and interpreted” (1991, 4). Although this passage of Said’s argument has drawn much commentary, I want in fact to further labour the point, as I feel that the animating dynamic of nafssiya informing Said’s argument remains somewhat underestimated. What, for example, does he mean by texts constituting “events,” “part of the social world,” as he says? His notion of “secular criticism,” of course, does not define a certain areligious or aspiritual stance. He is rather interested, on the one hand, in the way in which texts circulate as phenomenological capacities for livelihood and, on the other, as momentums for the potential of critique, for “critical consciousness.” It is precisely momentums of nafssiya that distinguish Said’s approach from deconstructive applications of criticism. He is quite clear about this, especially in the long essay “Criticism Between Culture and System,” where, in a discussion of Foucault, he provides a lengthy reflection on Derrida’s work. Highly appreciative of the instigator of deconstruction, Said is nevertheless unimpressed with his failure to account for the circumstances in which a text is actually read, becomes an event in someone’s life, influences the capacities of subjects to inhabit their worlds, as well as

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account for those instances in which a reader strives to disinhabit, render problematic, conventions and normalized conditions of livelihood. As Said writes with emphasis: “the search within a text for the conditions of textuality will falter at that very point where the text’s historical presentation to the reader is put into question and made an issue for the critic” (1991, 212). I am all too swiftly mentioning aspects of Said’s work that are mostly viewed through a specialized interest in his contribution to literary criticism. However, I do so for the moment not so much to outline the epistemological implications of his methodology but to demonstrate the phenomenological tenor of nafssiya I am developing in respect of Said’s personal dimension. At one point in his discussion, he asks about Derrida’s failure to reflect on his own circumstances, his “programmatic hesitation toward his historical situation” (1991, 210). How, we can ask, does Derrida gain a capacity to stand outside “Western” metaphysics in his deconstructive critique of “Western” thought? Certainly, Derrida includes the adversarial momentum of his deconstructive interventions as part of a Western tradition of metaphysics. But how has the process of signifying this tradition as “Western” involved signifying other traditions as non-­ Western? How has it employed exclusions and delimitations to define both itself and that which it signifies according to the prefix ‘non’? Moreover, what if we were to ask about Derrida’s personal disposition, about his motivations, about his own itinerary, as I suggested above? While a text, similar to a human subject, constitutes interwoven, relational traces of influence, authority, conventions, and animated responsiveness, its capacity to be valued as a momentum of eventuating significance has always to take place in a circumstance. What sort of modalities of exchange lead a text, or a human subject, to defer to one source of authority or another, if they are to maintain capacities to inhabit their milieus meaningfully? Or must we restrict this very question to the molecular circulations of signs revolving around only themselves, like stars slyly blinking to each other in the night sky? Nafssiyan, we can say—to follow the momentum of Said’s recursive application of critique—both text and subject “inhabit a much contested cultural space, in which what has counted in the continuity and transmission of knowledge has been the signifier, as an event that has left lasting traces upon the human subject” (Said 1991, 225, my emphasis). Said’s personal dimension, of course, is all about turning the signifier on its head, so as to unpack the “lasting traces” imprinted on the flesh of human

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subjectivity. Hence, for Said, the term différance would not so much suggest an irrecoverable, though generative, vacancy of signification. It would rather point to intersections of historical processes and personal circumstances by which subjects have had to defer to the authority of predominating cultural repertoires if they are to inhabit their worlds meaningfully. Hence, it may well be just as productive to speak about deference, rather than différance. My conceptual employment of nafssiya is meant to encapsulate this intersection of the personal and historical. This intersection lies at the heart of Gramsci’s influence on Said in respect of the notion of elaboration.

Gramsci’s and Said’s Elaboration It is not difficult to appreciate how and why particular pages of Gramsci’s notebooks (2003)9 made such an impression on Said, especially concerning his efforts in Orientalism to account for the hermeneutic livelihood, or the social force, by which texts, language, and subjects comport themselves as reservoirs of knowledge, as circulating cultural repertoires. However, in respect of such historical processes, Gramsci stresses the relevance of critical reflection, whereby a person develops capacities to inquire into what he calls “common sense,” or “folklore,” striving towards “good sense” (Gramsci 2003, 325–326). Part of this good sense is to practise philosophy as a more down-to-earth interrogation of self and circumstance. “Philosophy,” Gramsci writes with his characteristic straightforwardness, “cannot be separated from the history of philosophy,” just as “culture,” he continues, cannot be separated “from the history of culture” (2003, 324, my emphasis). He understands history as a social process of activated knowledge, renewing and rendering relevant critical applications of thought. He argues for an organic notion of philosophy that, however it may be “coherent on a scientific plane,” maintains contact with its material circumstances: “Only by this contact does a philosophy become ‘historical,’ purify itself of intellectualistic elements of an individual character and become ‘life’” (2003, 330). In other words, while critical reflection is attuned to circumstances of livelihood, it requires some coherence in its pursuit of “one’s own intuitions of life and world” (Gramsci 2003, 327). Gramsci uses the word “systematic,” though emphasizes that this should not be understood in a 9  See the first section, “The Study of Philosophy,” of the third and last part of the book, “The Philosophy of Praxis,” 323–377.

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“pedantic” or “academic sense.” It is not difficult here to think of Said’s notion of “the secular” as, in part, an alternative to what he regarded as the propensity of academic schools of thought to lose touch with the social circumstances and historical processes by which they maintain relevance. However, Gramsci uses another term to describe this entwinement of critique, knowledge, intuition, and world, a term that came to influence Said. He calls it an “elaboration,” a process that takes account both of collective efforts in the history of philosophy—in other words, how philosophy takes place, respires (nafssiyan) we can say, as a historical force—and of digressive initiatives making “good sense” out of “common sense.” In one of the few places that Said clarifies the notion of elaboration, he notes how Gramsci employs the term to direct attention to the materiality of culture: “Gramsci’s insight is to have recognized that subordination, fracturing, diffusing, reproducing, as much as producing, creating, forcing, guiding, are all necessary aspects of elaboration” (Said 1991, 171). Elsewhere, in the introduction to his slim volume Musical Elaborations, he links the notion of elaboration to a consideration of music “as taking place … in a social and cultural setting” (Said 1992a, xii). For Said, it is important to examine what he calls the “performative” aspects of this taking place, the specific “concert occasion” (1992a, 11) in which a musical recital involves a complex web of cultural and social repertoires. Such as the decorum and etiquette involved in attending a concert performance, the conventional setting, musical pedagogy, and the transmission of tradition, not to mention the way in which a recital may replenish or veer away from conventions of performance. This is to say that Said is interested in the performance occasion, rather than musical tradition. The taking place of performance involves customary practices that, while no doubt embodying specific repertoires, play a constitutive role in the reproduction of such repertoires. Hence, for Said, elaboration involves an analysis of social and cultural circumstances in which performance both sustains customary practices and “transgresses,” he writes, their historical force. As the term suggests, such an analysis transpires as an elaborate, in the sense of detailed, consideration. Devoting the first essay—“Performance as an Extreme Occasion”—to the eccentric Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, Said writes about his “unusual enterprise”: which was at once to make the performance more—because packed, bustling, overflowing—of an occasion, and more extreme, more odd, more

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unlike the lived reality of human kind, and still more unlike other concerts. By its radical force Gould’s career in fine has supplied us with a largely but not completely new concept of what performance is all about, which like most things in musical elaboration—because it is still ideologically and commercially linked to the past and to present society—is neither a total disruption nor a total transformation of customary practice. (1992a, 34)

Like the terms “circumstance,” “secular,” and “worldliness,” the word “occasion” has a significant role in Said’s own repertoire of critical inquiry. He tends to employ it to focus on a particular event, though not in respect of how it takes place through time, but rather in time, in a particular place. This helps him to elaborate on the cross-sectional webs of interactions involved in the production of an event, rather than limit himself to an explanation guided by temporally broader, usually teleological, terms of reference. As a critical awareness of the phenomenological contours by which a performance takes place, the concept elaboration maintains Said’s understanding of performance as both a cultural activity and a social practice. His sectional, rather than teleological, emphasis on “performance as an extreme occasion” provides an awareness of detail, of relationships between background and foreground, of audience and the stage. In such terms, elaboration can thus be complimented by a recursive momentum that always takes place, in place, on certain occasions whose singularity is marked by a divergence, however slight, from the script. This notion of performance as recursive elaboration can be extended to Said’s own performance of Musical Elaborations, as either the occasion of his lectures or the repetitive refrain of their written, readerly form of graphic expression. Said’s personal dimension comes to perform a feedback loop, as he foregrounds the phenomenological contours of his nafssiya, his own self as a depository of cultural repertoires and related intellectual orientations. How does he take stock of such depositories, of his subjectivity as a site, a circumstance, of predominating modes of framing that which comes to fit the frame? As I mentioned in my introduction, in Musical Elaborations Said is keen to foreground what he refers to as his “non-western background.” To be sure, this description of himself is concentrated in a negative grammatical register (“non”), whereby “western” maintains its centric force. In this vein he mentions one of his intellectual mentors, Theodor Adorno, although qualifies his influence. Said refers to Adorno as a “creature of the

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Hegelian tradition,” meaning that his insights are conditioned by a view of history always on its way towards some sort of incorporative understanding. As much as Adorno provided a radical departure from an idealist philosophy predicated on Panglossian rationalizations of historical processes, his insights betray a “dialectical temporal model” (Said 1992a, xv) that, as far as Said is concerned, remains Eurocentric. However, Said’s notion of “elaboration” does not only encompass a cross-sectional inquiry of performance in terms of reproductive modalities of social and cultural practices, implicating “approved masterpieces and venerated authorities” (Said 1992a, 60). It also suggests an attentiveness to the way in which, as I have noted, a performance may digress, veer away from authoritative expectations. Towards this divergence or digression from the script, the critic takes note of the “impurities and hybrids that actually make up all cultures” (Said 1992a, 53). Thus, whenever Said mentions “social context,” he has in mind a much more dynamic, layered, and relational conception. Said’s constellation-like approach (which I discuss in Chap. 4) to cultural and social critique is suggested by some of his observations in the second essay of Musical Elaborations, “On the Transgressive Elements of Music”—observations that have epistemological and methodological implications. Here, he evokes a notion of “secular transgression,” which “chiefly involves moving from one domain to another, the testing and challenging of limits, the mixing and intermingling of heterogeneities, cutting across expectations, providing unforeseen pleasures, discoveries, experiences” (Said 1992a, 55). While elaboration, then, marks this cross-sectional methodology, for Said it also inscribes an awareness of how selfhood (understood as modal capacities to become a subject of one’s world) embodies certain reservoirs of knowing and being. At the same time, drawing up an inventory of oneself involves transgressive, potential lines of escape. For just as he did in the personal section of his introduction to Orientalism, at the outset of his lectures on music Said puts into perspective his complex relationship to a “western tradition,” thereby foregrounding, elaborating, the Eurocentric force of that tradition, as well as situating a recursive departure from that tradition. Indeed, while his second essay is about transgressive aspects of musical performance, it enfolds recursive impulses by which Said learns to situate himself in relation to a “western tradition.” This (un)learning of self would not be possible if “tradition” signifies a neat linear progression. So that, against a “historical teleology that incorporates everything in its relentless forward path,” Said outlines a more layered, cross-sectional

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mode of analysis, whereby “what is impressive about musical practice in all its variety is that it takes place in many different places, for different purposes, for different constituencies and practitioners, and of course at many different times” (1992a, xv). Elaborate applications of critical inquiry, then, involve a dynamic cross-­ sectional analysis of social and cultural reservoirs, as well as a reflective awareness of how selfhood is implicated in repertoires of learning. Towards an unlearning of the interpolative force—or what Gramsci refers to as the “hegemonic force” (2003, 333)—of such repertoires and reservoirs, elaboration is conditioned by a recursive application of critical reflection on circumstance. In his discussion of a “philosophy of praxis,” Gramsci is at pains to note how criticism departs from, though remains embedded in, “common sense” and that this constructive paradox includes a critique of any philosophy that has lost touch with the material basis, the social circumstances, of its relevance, its productive value. As Gramsci spells out his refreshingly non-teleological model of praxis: First of all, therefore, it must be a criticism of “common sense,” basing itself initially, however, on common sense in order to demonstrate that “everyone” is a philosopher and that it is not a question of introducing from scratch a scientific form of thought into everyone’s individual life, but of renovation and making “critical” an already existing activity. (2003, 330–331)

The circumstance in which one learns to become a subject of the worlds they inhabit “imposes” on the philosopher, Gramsci says, “a continual process of self-criticism” (2003, 350).

Recursive Humanism Orientalism is considered by many to have greatly contributed to the emergence of postcolonial studies, and is often described as an exercise of discourse analysis, or to quote an early, influential critique of the book, “colonial discourse analysis” (Ahmad 1992, 186). I want partly to situate my notion of nafssiya against the more influential, and to my mind debilitating, notion of “discourse analysis” that has often been employed in critiques of Said’s work. All too often Said’s attentiveness to the “worldliness” of scholarship and textuality is written off. While, to some extent, this way of understanding Said’s book derives from his preoccupation with textuality, it unfortunately has the effect of discounting his more material

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approach to culture and the production of knowledge. In fact, it is interesting to read Said’s introduction to his book Orientalism as a tussle between a ‘textual’ and material approach to culture and the circulation of knowledge if indeed we can appreciate how the textual and material are more interwoven than diametrically opposed. As I will demonstrate in my chapter on his earlier book Beginnings, this tussle did not only materialize in Orientalism, but energizes his critical views of the study and teaching of literature in North America long before the publication of his most famous book. This tussle informs his reconstructive approach to humanism, which itself has attracted criticism, beginning with a famous early review of Orientalism by the cultural anthropologist James Clifford. First published in 1980, and later as a chapter in his collection The Predicament of Culture, in his essay Clifford identifies what he calls an “ambivalence,” or “confusion” (2002, 260) at the heart of Said’s book. He suggests that the confusion resides in Said’s Foucault-inspired conception of discourse vacillating between a notion of the Orient as empirically real and as a construct, between “ideological distortion” (Clifford 2002, 260) and a self-­referential panoply of signs. However, although he recognizes that “Orientalist inauthenticity is not answered by any authenticity,” Clifford claims that Said sometimes “denies the existence of any ‘real Orient’” (2002, 260). Referring to the anti-humanist influence of Foucault (Clifford 2002, 264), Clifford notes the seeming paradox of borrowing heavily from a preeminent scholar bearing a rejection of the human subject as the source of knowledge, all the while identifying oneself as a humanist. Said had boldly identified himself as such in his introduction: “My own formal and professional designation is that of a ‘humanist,’ a title which indicates the humanities as my field” (Said 2003, 9). I will return to the second part of this quote in a moment but first want to outline how, in his review, Clifford fails to hear the recursive, reconstructive rhythms of Said’s designation of himself as a humanist. Clifford writes: “Said’s humanist perspectives do not harmonize with his use of methods derived from Foucault, who is of course a radical critic of humanism” (2002, 264). However, Foucault’s approach is valuable for Said not only because his radical archaeology helps him to define the way in which knowledge amounts to a cultural reservoir, or repertoire, circulating through certain reproductive modalities of constitution. It is also valuable in terms of its limitations, helping Said to not only appreciate how cultural reservoirs are refashioned,

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redeployed, even resisted, but also the colonial and imperial dimensions that Foucault failed to take stock of. In other words, Foucault’s work is valuable to the extent that Said’s approach does not “harmonize” with the archaeologist’s keen insights. For my purposes, this disharmony can be regarded through the difference between discursive and recursive methodologies. Where the notion of discourse outlines dispersed, though regimented, modalities by which human subjectivity takes shape and form (the formation of the subject, Foucault would have said), the notion of recourse, as the prefix re suggests, encompasses capacities to review how, to evoke Nietzsche’s compelling phrase, one has become what one is. In other words, recourse is similar to Gramsci’s notion of maintaining an inventory of oneself, as I discussed above. I want to be clear on this point, so as to avoid the slotting in of my argument into the well-worn and rather debilitating binary opposition of agency and structure: it is not simply a question of recognizing agency against a structuralist approach that tends to regard the human subject as an effect of social processes or else a nodal point of semiotic chains of signification. Rather, recourse discloses a relational, rather than substantialist, awareness of embodiment. To evoke an example close to Said’s preoccupations as a literary critic, we can say that a literary text does not constitute an embodiment of an author’s self-awareness but rather the circumstantial relationship between authors and the cultural reservoirs by which they make common sense—as well as, potentially, transgressive non-sense—of their worlds. This relationship has many layers, constitutes varying tangents, mediated by competing, often hegemonic processes by which notions of space and time are coordinated. From the perspective of a phenomenology of affect, mediums come to be embodied as sources of livelihood, practical knowledge of how to inhabit one’s world meaningfully. We can thus speak of medialities, whereby the medium does not only shape the message, but whose varying textures constitute modalities of inhabiting livelihood, as well as transgressive efforts to disinhabit conventional modalities of knowhow. A recursive approach takes note of medialities as circulations of material and imaginary resources, as well as capacities of people to access and apply such resources, in the process modifying (as the prefix suggests) the value and significance of resources, sometimes dramatically, mostly quietly. To return to Clifford, his otherwise constructive, favourable review fails to acknowledge the dissonance between Foucault’s anti-humanism and

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Said’s self-declared, reconstructive adherence to humanist critique. To refer back to the sentence I quoted from Orientalism above, where he identifies himself as a “humanist,” with his own qualifying inverted commas, Said continues: “and therefore the unlikely eventuality that there might be anything political about what I do in that field” (2003, 9). The point, to be sure, is that the humanities are indeed embedded in relational circuits of power and knowledge. This is not to equate the study of literature with the work of policymakers, Said says. The politics of literature he has in mind has more to do with material culture, historical processes, sensibilities, and affects. “No one,” he goes on to argue in a Gramscian vein, “has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar from the circumstances of life, from the fact of his involvement (conscious or unconscious) with a class, a set of beliefs, a social position” (2003, 10). Both Foucault and Said, then, approach humanism in terms of relational circuits of power and knowledge, though depart from one another in their respective approaches to capacities of the human subject. In the first chapter of his posthumously published book on humanism (2004), Said refers to Clifford’s review, agreeably citing the latter’s observation that in Orientalism he strives to hang on to a mode of humanist critique that Foucault, among others (Said mentions Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes), found uncongenial. However, Said has a more favourable view of the “methodological ambivalences” (Said 2004, 9)10 that Clifford faults in the book. So that, while he disagrees with what he refers to as “structuralist antihumanism” (Said 2004, 10), he otherwise shares the (post)structuralist critique of the ‘sovereign subject.’ This last term refers to a Cartesian intellectual tradition that places the human subject as an unadorned, neutral source of the production of knowledge. For Said, then, the methodological ambivalences he is charged with sustain a reconstructive critical approach by which, he writes, “it is possible to be critical of humanism in the name of humanism” (2004, 10). In his White Mythologies, first published in 1990, Robert Young discusses Said’s ambivalent evocation of humanism in Orientalism. He draws attention to the colonial references informing critiques of humanism, mainly in the work of French scholars in the 1960s and 1970s. A significant point he makes concerns the way in which Roland Barthes, for example, connected his critique of the sovereign subject and related universal values to “Western colonialism and racism” (Young 1993, 5). Young notes  Said quotes this term from Clifford’s review.

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the “perceptive review of Orientalism” by Clifford and quite reasonably draws attention to the somewhat essentializing terms of reference Said employs, such as “human experience,” “human history,” and “human community” (Young 1993, 131). As he goes on to write: “the idea of the human which Said opposes to the Western representation of the Orient is itself derived from the Western humanist tradition” (Young 1993, 131). While this observation is of course valid, it tends itself to reproduce binary terms of reference. Young’s question—“how does any form of knowledge—including Orientalism—escape the terms of Orientalism’s critique?” (132)—assumes that Said had imagined himself to be situated outside of a predominating Western episteme and related ontological condition. He fails to register Said’s sense of the “strange disjunction,” his personal dimension, his sense of being both an “insider” and an “outsider” (Said 2004, 76).11 I have proposed to call this sense of ambivalence, this variable, relational sense of being both inside and outside (the degree to which is always occasional, depending on the circumstances), recursive, to suggest a taking stock, reflecting on the social and cultural implications, the performative vigour, of one’s attachments and identifications. We can dip further into Said’s book on humanism to demonstrate the recursive impulses of his approach. In the opening essay, “Humanism’s Sphere,” he provides what, from a traditional point of view that associates humanism with major scholars, with the supposedly universal implications of their work, seems rather heretic. He sets the scene for his arguments by noting the varying contexts by which humanism is understood and practised. These contexts amount to a manifold range of forces, including not only the work of scholars, but also university curricula, as well as political processes, such as the war on terrorism and the bombing of Yugoslavia, at the time he is writing in the late 1990s, early 2000s. For Said, humanism cannot be simply regarded as the refined work of scholars whose research and teaching are embedded in the humanities, or else in terms of humanitarian concerns with the wellbeing of human populations. Rather, he is more interested in humanism, as he writes, “as a useable praxis for intellectuals and academics who want to know what they are doing, what they are committed to as scholars, and who want also to connect these principles to the world in which they live as citizens” (Said 2004, 6).

 For a discussion of Said’s enabling sense of humanism, see Spanos (2017, 19–20).

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While embedded in certain historical processes, humanistic scholarship has to be understood as an activity, as a “doing,” whose first principle requires the scholar to note her inventory, situate her cultural baggage as an intersectional constellation of forces, both enabling and delimiting. Sticking to his own scholarly preoccupations with the teaching of literature, he is critical of Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind of 1987, whose “didactic humanism” (Said 2004, 17) argues for the maintenance of a largely Eurocentric canon of books for humanities curricula. While Bloom no doubt champions critical scholarly application, he tends to equate the expansion of literary and philosophical curricula to include non-European texts as negatively relativist. Bloom’s work serves Said to better develop his sense of humanism as a critical practice that both learns and departs from the formidable reservoir of, mostly, Western scholarship. This way of situating humanism brings us back to the recursive dimension of Said’s work—a dimension that, as I have suggested, informs his scholarly endeavours since the late 1960s, when he was working on a number of essays that eventually constituted his book Beginnings. In his reconstructive critique of humanism, Said argues that scholars tend to underestimate how cultures of learning are only possible through exercises of “radical antiauthoritarian dissent” (2004, 28). As he says, scholars of the humanities have “forgotten that many of the figures in today’s canon were yesterday’s insurgents” (2004, 28). Reading the canon against the grain of academic domestication, Said’s main point is that pedagogy involves myriad applications of learning and unlearning, critical reflection on the force of cultural reservoirs. He canvasses some etymological associations with the term canon and settles on its contrapuntal form in music—“employing numerous voices in usually strict imitation of each other, a form, in other words, expressing motion, playfulness, discovery, and, in the rhetorical sense, invention” (2004, 25). Thus, through contrapuntal constellations of voice, melody, and harmony, as well as instances of disharmony, a canon both preserves the past and renders it available for change, for revision, for what he refers to as “reanimation.” “Canonical humanities,” Said goes on to write, “will always remain open to changing combinations of sense and signification.” I quote further from this passage, as it captures the recursive impulses of Said’s relationship to his work I have been striving to put in relief: every reading and interpretation of a canonical work reanimates it in the present, furnishes an occasion for rereading, allows the modern and the new

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to be situated together in a broad historical field whose usefulness is that it shows us history as an agonistic process still being made, rather than finished and settled once and for all. (Ibid., 25, my emphasis)

With his recursive approach to cultures of pedagogy and learning, Said distinguishes his humanist concerns from what he has called “the harmless rhetoric of self-delighting humanism” (1991, 225). He understands texts as fields of force, encompassing varying practices and relational orientations whose applications involve, nafssiyan, a temporal and spatial “reanimation.” At the same time, he appreciates subjectivity as a depository of historical processes and related capacities to animate the force of history and culture. The term animation suggests a sense of liveliness, breathing life into cultural phenomena, noting their residual qualities, situating a text in circumstance. However, this notion of recursive reanimation extends to an appreciation of how a sense of self is entwined with the very grammar, the hermeneutic repertoire, by which a text gains its social material force. I discuss the personal dimensions of this entwinement in the next chapter.

References Ahmad, Aijaz. 1992. Orientalism and After: Ambivalence and Metropolitan Location in the Work of Edward Said. In In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso. Bayoumi, Moustafa, and Andrew Rubin, eds. 2001. The Edward Said Reader. London: Granta Books. Bloom, Allan. 1987. The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. New York: Simon and Schuster. Clifford, James. 2002. On Orientalism. In The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-­ Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1998. A Silkworm of One’s Own. In Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Eribon, Didier. 2013. Returning to Reims. Translated by Michael Lucy. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e). Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books.

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Gramsci, Antonio. 2003. Selections From the Prison Notebooks. Translated by Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence and Wisehart. Hussein, Cherine. 2015. The Re-Emergence of the Single State Solution in Palestine/ Israel. New York: Routledge. Kamuf, Peggy, ed. 1991. A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. New  York: Columbia University Press. McCarthy, Conor. 2010. The Cambridge Introduction to Edward Said. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rabinow, Paul, ed. 1984. The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books. Sa’di, Ahmad H., and Lila Abu-Lughod, ed. 2007. Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory. New York: Columbia University Press. Said, Edward W. 1991. The World, the Text, and the Critic. London: Vintage. ———. 1992a. Musical Elaborations. London: Vintage Books. ———. 1992b. The Question of Palestine. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 2000. Out of Place: A Memoir. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 2003. Orientalism. London: Penguin. ———. 2004. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New  York: Columbia University Press. Spanos, William V. 2017. Toward a Non-Humanist Humanism: Theory After 9/11. Albany: Suny Press. Wade, Simeon. 2019. Foucault in California: [A True Story—Wherein the Great French Philosopher Drops Acid in the Valley of Death]. Berkeley: Heyday. Young, Robert. 1993. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 3

Archival Repositories, Embodied Repertoires, Marxism

Programmatic Overtures Translated into over 30 languages, it is difficult to overstate the impact Orientalism has had on academic research. Contributing to the emergence of postcolonial studies, the book has influenced studies in literature, art, geography, and exploration, in respect of histories of colonial exploitation. With his book Said achieved an interventionist act par excellence, demonstrating how scholarship can indeed be critically involved without necessarily being ideologically driven. We could also observe how the book constitutes a prime example of how Said liked to identify himself as an “amateur,” as he dived headlong into a field of research whose methodological conventions and professional protocols were new to him. Kuhn’s notion of “normal science” is rather apt when thinking of Said’s divergence from such protocols: “Men whose research is based on shared paradigms are committed to the same rules and standards for scientific practice. That commitment and the apparent consensus it produces are prerequisites for normal science, i.e., for the genesis and continuation of a particular research tradition” (Kuhn 1970, 11). Said shared neither the commitment nor the consensus of orientalist research applications. Otherwise, the critical fervour of Orientalism was not really a departure from Said’s earlier work. While constituting a very different thematic to the earlier volume Beginnings, Orientalism bears the fruition of the former text’s methodological contours of critical application. This interventionist © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 N. S. Nikro, Nafssiya, or Edward Said’s Affective Phenomenology of Racism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51769-3_3

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methodology is articulated almost programmatically. I explore Said’s elaboration of this methodology in Beginnings in the next chapter. However, I want to briefly outline this programmatic framework as an introduction to my present preoccupation with the phenomenological contours of archival repositories, embodied repertoires, and Marxism informing Orientalism. I do so in part to demonstrate how the two volumes have much more in common than the secondary literature on Said’s oeuvre assumes. In Beginnings: Intention and Method Said spells out his programmatic overture in the chapter “A Meditation on Beginnings,” directly proceeding a subsection titled “The Individual Versus the System.” Against a notion of research as a field of “genetic concepts,” “founding fathers,” “continuous temporal narratives,” and “impersonal rules,” Said asks: “what power is left to the individual freely to act, to intervene, to motivate, when he wishes to effect a rational beginning for a course or project?” (1985, 62). The problem for Said is to provide some rationale for a beginning, understood as an intervention, while steering clear from a Cartesian assumption of the individual as a sovereign subject—what Said calls the “authoritative subject”—free from circumstance, free to transcend itself as an embodiment of cultural repositories. For Said, this problematic requires three specific attitudes and related applications. The first of these involves attentiveness to the circumstances in which “past systems of thought” are revitalized in the present, while the second undertakes a practice of knowledge production, whereby the contours of knowledge are not approached as “fixed and immutable, but as performing an enabling function, serving as a threshold to further discoveries and knowledge” (Said 1985, 62). The third “innovation,” as Said calls them, involves “methodological initiatives of a kind that restore to the individual researcher the capacity for redefining, regaining, and rethinking his position, and thus which give his position rational, active, even revolutionary status” (1985, 62). I have emphasized what, for my purposes, can be regarded as the keywords of Said’s programmatic statement. To restore is to reequip the scholar with capacities to undertake initiatives, redirecting applications of thought into pathways branching off the main course. The researcher may well transpire as a storehouse of distinctive traits and embodied scholarly repertoires. However, through reflection on the contours of her relationships to her subjects of research, the researcher can render such repertoires available for critical elaboration. I discussed this last term in the previous chapter,

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concerning Gramsci’s influence on Said, in respect of the notion of intersectional confluences of historical processes and personal dispositions. From a phenomenological perspective, capacities, I have been arguing, are never subject centred, but relational. They circulate differentially as material and imaginary resources, according to modalities of power, labour, and desire—the very glue by which subjects keep themselves intact and manage to stick together, or else exercise efforts to loosen the glue and distance themselves from conventions of social livelihood. Involving both epistemological and ontological contours, the gathering, production, and distribution of knowledge encompass phenomenological tangents of being in the world, of exchanging a sense of purpose with others in whose midst one moves. Being in the midst of others has, to be sure, become increasingly mediated by technological devices that are, prosthetic-­ like, just as immersive as they are communicative. By this I mean that, from a phenomenological perspective, a mobile phone, for example, does not only provide the means to store and exchange information, but influences how human subjectivity embodies capacities to coordinate orientations to time, duration, space, and place. However, my point is that, considering how capacities constitute interwoven circulations of material and imaginary resources, with my phenomenological preoccupations I find it more interesting to speak of the nexus between history, self-awareness, and knowledge in terms of know-how, of learning how to know. Knowhow, it is important to note, always takes place in relation to circumstance, by which one both embodies and employs capacities of how to know. Said’s circumstantial notion of knowledge as knowhow in the introduction to Orientalism has an unmistakable piquancy in his understanding of humanist scholarship, especially concerning what he phrases as “the relationship between knowledge and politics.” As he goes on to explain the site-specific taking place of this relationship, he writes: “My argument is that each humanistic investigation must formulate the nature of that connection in the specific context of the study, the subject matter, and its historical circumstances” (2003, 15). As I alluded to above, Said liked to refer to himself as an “amateur,” rather than an “expert,” or “professional.”1 Stumbling into a field of scholarship whose predominating frameworks of reference encompassed 1  The “fully committed amateur,” Said writes with emphasis in the introduction to his Musical Elaborations (1992a, xvii). Or as he describes the intellectual in his Reith Lectures: “outsider, ‘amateur,’ and disturber of the status quo” (1994a, x). The fourth Reith lecture is indeed titled “Professionals and Amateurs.”

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certain intellectual repositories and paradigmatic repertoires that he did not share, Said transformed those same repositories into an enabling function. He thus carved out a threshold, chiefly by reflecting on how he himself, as a colonial subject, bore the effects, the inventory, of orientalist cultures. In his introduction to Orientalism, references to his life and work are imbued with epistemological and political undertones. In the subsection titled “The distinction between pure and political knowledge,” for example, Said alludes to his “contemporary reality,” critically questioning the way in which his “formal and professional designation” of humanist suggests that research is uncontaminated by politics (2003, 9). To be sure, he is referring to political culture and political sensibility, those “structures of feeling” (to borrow the well-known phrase from Raymond Williams) embodied as textures of life, as capacities to inhabit one’s world, formally institutionalized and otherwise exchanged as conventional modicums of social and personal livelihood. Although designating himself a “humanist” (with the inverted commas that evoke a sense of so-called) and describing his work as humanist scholarship, he problematizes the assumption that scholarly activity has no political implications. As he says: “the determining impingement on most knowledge produced in the contemporary West (and here I speak mainly about the United States) is that it be nonpolitical, that is, scholarly, academic, impartial, above partisan or small-minded doctrinal belief” (2003, 10). Far from wanting to “rub culture’s nose in the mud” (2003, 13), he nevertheless insists on recognizing the imprint of the political on the culture of scholarly activity. He draws attention to the way in which scholarship, particularly Orientalist scholarship preoccupied with rendering the Orient a suitable subject matter for intellectual inquiry, amounts to “a distribution of geopolitical awareness” (Said’s emphasis), informed by an epistemological inventory in which “the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident.” “No one,” Said writes, “has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar from the circumstances of life, from the fact of his involvement (conscious or unconscious) with a class, a set of beliefs, a social position, or from the mere activity of being a member of society” (2003, 10). While his thoughts here may well be influenced by Gramsci’s notions of “traditional” and “organic” intellectuals, Said is interested in the productive relationship between Orientalist scholarship, literature, and travel writing, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the structures of feeling or embodied cultural reservoirs of life and livelihood. As he will argue in his later

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Culture and Imperialism (1994b), specifically through his concept “contrapuntal,” while a novel, or, for example, an essay in the field of romantic criticism, hardly constitutes a political intervention, its style and social/ historical conditions of production implicate textures of “political circumstance” (Said 1994b, 10). The culture of scholarship that mostly interests Said is “the literary-cultural establishment” (Said 1994b, 13) that refrains from considering its political circumstances, particularly concerning the culture of imperialism. In this chapter I trace Said’s interest in political sensibilities embodied in literature, scholarship, and culture, through the notions of archival repositories and repertoires. My aim is to demonstrate Said’s phenomenological interest in the lives of particular authors and the influential proportions of their work. Like the texts they produce, authors can also be described as mobile sites of cultural learning and dissemination, circulating through institutional processes of production and distribution, as well as avenues of public decorum and related modalities of social exchange. In another section I discuss Said’s awareness of his own subjectivity as a site for the production of imperial culture, in respect of his boyhood fascination with the character Tarzan. In a later section I track Said’s relationship to Marxism, noting Marxist critiques of his work. I discuss the positive influence of Raymond Williams on Orientalism, an influence that tends to be underestimated in the secondary literature. In the final section of this chapter I discuss Said’s notion of “traveling theory.”

Between Archive and Repertoire While Said does not employ the term “archive” in his Orientalism, with his Foucault-inspired emphasis on “statements,” “citations,” and “quotations,” he had something like a storehouse of retrievable and recyclable references in mind. In the introduction, he describes Orientalism as a “discursive formation,” a “system for citing works and authors” (2003, 23). However, despite borrowing heavily from Foucault’s notion of discourse as a self-regulating system of terms of reference, whose recycling amount to a self-fulfilling cultural reservoir, Said nevertheless takes a different tack, flagged by his deliberate “Yet unlike Michel Foucault” (2003, 23). He departs from Foucault with his interest in the relationship between author and authority, his belief “in the determining imprint of individual writers” (Said 2003, 23).

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So that while textual formations and circulations of recyclable references constitute the various strands of Orientalism, Said insists that this does not amount to anonymous schemes of signification. Authors, he claims, accrue a certain “distributive currency” (2003, 23) by which the value of their work has some dependence on them being recognized as authoritative figures of scholarly or creative writing. His interest in the lives of significant, influential authors is not merely decorative but has a formative role in his overall argument. In fact, this critical move on Said’s part provides another tangent to my theme of his personal dimension, bearing imprints of his affective phenomenology of colonialism and racism. We can extend the notion of “the personal dimension” to consider the embodied repertoires an author carries with them, repertoires that transpire as hermeneutic dispositions. A good example of this tangent is Said’s discussion of the nineteenth-­ century French writer, traveller, and social democrat Alphonse de Lamartine. He focuses his discussion on Lamartine’s travelogue to Lebanon and Syria, his “imperialist” Voyage en Orient (Said 2003, 179). Said is not only interested in how the travelogue characterizes stereotypical notions of the Orient but how Lamartine himself embodies certain repertoires and imaginary associations influencing his perceptions and existential experiences of the Middle East. So that, besides implicating an analogical grammar of literary associations, the textual contours of Voyage en Orient incorporate an embodied grammar Lamartine had imbibed from his reading of other Orientalist texts. This awareness of how certain grammars are incorporated, embodied, points to the phenomenological contours of Said’s understanding of “discourse,” of the “discursive formation” of Orientalism, which he describes as a practice of “citing works and authors” (2003, 23). Lamartine affectively embodies certain references and citations. Said writes that when he first undertook his journey to what he regarded as the Orient in 1833, Lamartine was “a bundle of predispositions, sympathies, biases,” inducing him to become an “incorrigible maker of an imaginary Orient” (2003, 177). In other words, Lamartine’s descriptive accounts of the cities and landscapes of Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine depend more on

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an established European cultural and literary reservoir of descriptive currencies and imaginary associations.2 Perhaps it is more fitting to speak about the textural, rather than textual, proportions of the travelogues Said interrogates. The term textural alludes to a sense of interwoven threads, arrangements, contortions, constellations of embodied grammars. Textural constellations of the textual and personal, the literary and biographical, inform the second part of Orientalism, tellingly titled “Orientalist Structures and Restructures” (my emphasis). Besides Lamartine, Said discusses the lives and writings of other nineteenth-century British and European travellers, such as Edward Lane, Richard Burton, and Francois de Chateaubriand. The legitimacy of their insights, he argues, derives not so much from their empirical claims to be describing the physical proportions of what they encounter, but rather from what he phrases as “the restorative citation of antecedent authority” (2003, 176). “Pilgrimage,” he writes in reference to what he calls the “narrative consciousness” of nineteenth-century travellers, is a “form of copying” (2003, 177). His point is that Lane’s, Burton’s, and Chateaubriand’s (2015) respective observations are shaped by their reading of other studies and literary accounts of a putative Orient, from which they emerge as depositories of idioms and analogies, all the while restructuring and reconstituting the stereotypical value of such analogical grammars. For European Orientalist writers, Lane’s observations of the “manners and customs” of Egyptians, for example, could just as well be borrowed and applied to other Arabs, such as Lebanese, Syrians, and Palestinians. For Said, the nineteenth-century travelogues he discusses constitute something like a reservoir of stock associations: In the system of knowledge about the Orient, the Orient is less a place than a topos, a set of references, a congeries of characteristics, that seems to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of a text, or a citation from someone’s work on the Orient, or some bit of previous imagining, or an amalgam of all these. (2003, 177)

2  Said’s discussion gave rise to a significant corpus of critical studies addressing the writings of European adventurers, pilgrims, explorers, all taking advantage of the corridors of European colonialism to travel and record their observations, domesticating variegated landscapes into European-centred analogical grammars. See, for example, Louise Pratt (1992), and Carter (1988). Said references both books in his later Culture and Imperialism.

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Knowledge of the Orient is “textual” to the extent that descriptions depend more on a grammatical nexus of references and annotated citations than what in the process amounts to de-scriptive accounts of empirical observation. In other words, the ‘archaeological’ (to evoke the influence of Foucault on Said’s argument) terrain of textual cross-­ references constitutes certain hermeneutic reservoirs that work as interpretive schemes, patterns, or else ciphers by which knowledge of the Orient gains authority and institutional legitimacy—in the academy, in museums, in works of literature, in publishing houses, in the media. Said, to be sure, had a profound, admiring respect for the work of the authors he studied, though he demonstrates how their publications constitute interwoven threads of assumed cultural domination, personal disposition, and political sensibility. These interwoven threads inform the work of Richard Burton, most famously his account of his pilgrimage to Mecca in the mid-nineteenth century. Burton’s alienation from Europe and identification with Arab/ Islamic culture did not prevent him from embodying a hermeneutic repertoire of European authority. Said points out that, from a European perspective, Burton was almost peerless in his knowledge of Arabic languages and cultures. This knowledge wasn’t gained merely through reading, but rather through direct experience of living in the midst of Arabs. Burton’s Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1964, first published in 1855), this is to say, is not as bookish as other Orientalist writings. His observations, Said acknowledges, “are the result of knowledge acquired about the Orient by living there, actually seeing it firsthand, truly trying to see Oriental life from the viewpoint of a person immersed in it” (2003, 196). However, as Said argues, Burton’s existential experience of the Orient, his striving to understand and portray Arabic/Islamic ways of life, does not prevent him from assuming a European right to conquer Arab countries: Thus, when Burton tells us in the Pilgrimage that “Egypt is a treasure to be won,” that it “is the most tempting prize which the East holds out to the ambition of Europe, not excepted even the Golden Horn,” we must recognize how the voice of the highly idiosyncratic master of Oriental knowledge informs, feeds into the voice of European ambition for rule over the Orient. (Said 2003, 196)

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Said’s central point concerns the intricate web of cross-references, the “distributive currency” (2003, 23), by which knowledge enfolds power— the Foucauldian thesis that knowledge-of implicates constitutive relations, circuits, channels, institutional reservoirs of power and authority. However, as I mentioned above, “unlike Foucault,” Said’s phenomenological interest in how cultural assumptions are affectively embodied compels him to maintain an interest in the lives, the desires, the personal dispositions, the nafssiya, of the authors he discusses. So that, besides demonstrating the embeddedness of texts in historical processes and social and cultural contexts, Said strives to map out a methodological undertaking that would include a phenomenological awareness of the “imprint,” the biographical dispositions, of the authors he studies. In his introduction, up until his subsection “The personal dimension,” he had been pointing out the main threads of his book, providing conceptual and thematic signposts, adapting Foucault’s notion of “discourse” to outline the non-correspondence theory of truth girding his study as a whole. As a broad, variegated field of scholarship and cultural production, Orientalism manufactures the validity of its truth claims through a sly slippage between descriptive, imaginative, and conceptual terms of reference. While presupposing an empirical validity—whereby what is said de-­ scriptively about the Orient is assumed to seamlessly match what the Orient is really like—European novels, travelogues, art, scholarly and intellectual publications thematizing the Orient reproduce a stock set of categories, observations, imaginative allusions, and emotional schemes of attachment. The archaeological sedimentation and recycling of these categorical terms of reference—“regularities proper to discourse,” to reference Foucault (1972, 200)—serves to generate the force of their validity. Hence Said’s opening remark about a journalist visiting Beirut in the 1970s–1980s and observing that the city no longer measures up to “Nerval’s Orient,” or else “Chateaubriand’s Orient”—two French writers and erstwhile travellers of the early to mid-nineteenth century. For the journalist, a European’s impression of the Orient is more valid than a local’s impression or form of representation: “the main thing for the European visitor was a European representation of the Orient and its contemporary fate, both of which had a privileged communal significance for the journalist and his French readers” (2003, 1). Moreover, the journalist assumes that the Orient is in many respects homogeneous. Thus, as Said observes (2003, 23), journalists, novelists, and travel writers use Edward

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Lane’s mid-nineteenth-century Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (2020) to describe other Arab countries. Said’s point, then, is not that there are no real places in what is geographically inscribed as the Orient, places with their multifaceted social interactions, traditions of life, cultural and intellectual production, and manifold forms of historical narration. His focus, rather, as I alluded to above, is how Orientalism constitutes something like a cultural and intellectual archive of descriptive, imaginative, and material resources, cultural repertoires—or, to again point to the influence of the work of Foucault on Said, “statements”3—that are both embodied and employed as terms of reference, regardless of empirical verifiability. “[T]he phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here,” Said explains, “deals principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient […] despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a ‘real’ Orient” (2003, 5). I am going over familiar terrain in the critical reception of Said’s Orientalism. However, I do so in order to argue that through the contours of the “serious study” he embarked on, Said maintained a phenomenological awareness of historical processes and institutional sites in and through which human subjects and texts bear embodied hermeneutic repertoires. Said’s efforts to give his notion of the personal dimension some methodological purchase involve an intricate awareness of the interconnections between culture and politics. He focuses on the failure of humanism to methodologically account for the political implications of scholarship, arguing that while “humanist scholars” (2003, 13) often refer to contextual constraints of a text’s attributes, there is “a reluctance to allow that political, institutional, and ideological constraints act in the same manner on the individual author” (2003, 13). When we recall his discussion of his “personal dimension” a few pages later, it would not be 3  This is not the place to launch into a discussion of the material and performative attributes Foucault attached to the productive nexus of power and knowledge he called “discourse” or “discursive practices.” However, here, in passing, is a telling quotation from his Archaeology (1972, 107): “We will call statement the modality of existence proper to that group of signs: a modality that allows it to be something more than a series of traces, something more than a succession of marks on a subject, something more than a mere object made by a human being; a modality that allows it to be in relation with a domain of objects, to prescribe a definite position to any possible subject, to be situated among other verbal performances, and to be endowed with a repeatable materiality” (my emphasis).

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mere conjecture to point out that he had his own biography in mind, his own experience of constraints, the colonial education he learnt to own as his, be responsive to. The methodological contours of Orientalism bring about a shift from a critique of ideology to a phenomenological dimension by which constraints are embodied, as something like a subjective archival repository that is more mobile than fixed. In my promotion of the term “archive” I am performing a retrospective, perhaps also anachronistic reading of Orientalism. Admittedly, as I mentioned above, Said himself rarely uses the word in his famous book. Where he does employ the term, it always carries a rather static sense of stored texts and documents. This more classic sense of the archive is obvious, as when, in reference to his study of Orientalism, he mentions the logistical “problem of cutting down a very fat archive to manageable dimensions,” tracking what he calls “an intellectual order within that group of texts” (2003, 16). Neither does he employ the term in the two para-texts added to the book since it was first published—the Afterword of 1995 and the Preface of 2003. The latter was first given as a concluding address to a conference at Columbia University in April 2003 (six months before his death), honouring the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of the book. Although authored a quarter of a century after the first edition of Orientalism in 1978, in his belated Preface Said still felt the need to refer to his materialist, “worldly,” notion of textuality. “Texts,” he writes, “have to be read as texts that were produced and live on in the historical realm in all sorts of what I have called worldly ways” (2003, xxii). Indeed, the “worldliness” of texts and, more generally, of forms of cultural production is a constant theme running through his work since Orientalism and the essays that constitute The World, The Text, and the Critic. The second essay of this latter publication carries the book’s title. As in Orientalism, it outlines a notion of texts as “being in the world” (1991, 35). In fact, the essay encapsulates a significant phenomenological resonance of Said’s oeuvre that has mostly escaped the massive secondary literature addressing his methodology. This resonance is concentrated in his emphasis on being, the circumstantial beingness, or worldliness, of texts. As I am more generally arguing in my study of Said’s personal dimension, this affective, perceptual phenomenological resonance is embedded in the nexus of his intellectual pursuits and life experience. It also has some bearing on what we can term

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transfigurations between “archives” and related “repertoires” (Taylor 2003). In her study The Archive and the Repertoire, Diane Taylor develops a compelling notion of archives in respect of a specific concept of “performance.” Her argument involves a critique of understanding practices of knowledge production and circulation largely through written language and accompanying notions of textuality and discursivity. For Taylor, the term “performative” had come to subsume subjectivity into modalities of recognizable normative practices. Writing at the turn of the current century, discussing theatre, art, dance, and memory activism in Latin America, she is critical of an investment in discursive performativity whose categorical observations underestimate how knowledge mostly circulates as embodied practices. She is also critical of ethnological studies that carry embedded hierarchical assumptions of differences between literate/discursive and embodied/expressive cultural practices. This critique hinges on her accompanying notion of what she calls “scenarios,” as she explains when discussing methodology: By shifting the focus from written to embodied culture, from the discursive to the performative, we need to shift our methodologies. Instead of focusing on patterns of cultural expression in terms of texts and narratives, we might think about them as scenarios that do not reduce gestures and embodied practices to narrative description. (2003, 16)

Taylor’s relational notion of archive and repertoire is all the more compelling because of the site-specific applications of her research. Focusing, in one chapter, on photography and protest activities around the disappeared in Argentina, she develops a phenomenal sense of photographs in terms of the taking place of events and activities—which she calls “the DNA of performance.” She writes that in a context of “[t]estimonial transfers and performance protest [.. . t]he repertoire stores and enacts ‘embodied’ memory—the traumatic or cathartic ‘shudder,’ gestures, orality movement, dance, song—in short, all those acts usually thought of as ‘live,’ ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge” (2003, 155). According to her concept of a performative repertoire, archives do not so much constitute dusty storehouses of documents or images seldom exposed to light and air, available only for the academy, museum, or government official. Nor can their significance be confined to a purely referential mode of representation or imagistic mode of identification. As a collection of

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“nonreproducible knowledge,” as she says, an archive constitutes a proactive site in which documents, images, and artefacts resonate as repertoires, as evocative practices of address and response. This more dynamic approach to archives as mobile sites for the production of knowledge as practical exercises of application is suggested by Derrida’s notion of an “unhoused” archive, an “anarchive” (Derrida 1998, 79), or what could be called an “anarchic archive” (Nikro 2019). It is similar to what the interventionist Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme call a “living archive,” an “archival multitude,” related to “archival activism” (2014, 356). Developments in data processing and digital technologies have ushered in new possibilities for archives to transpire as activities of distribution and circulation, new possibilities for “insurgent citizenry,” they write (2014, 357). Understanding archival practices as performative events, and not simply documented recordings of events, Abou-Rahme and Abbas maintain the practical relevance of archives as material and imaginary resources. Commenting on Arab revolutionary activities of 2011, they speak about the necessity to “imagine a different political horizon, a different way of being political” (2014, 357). To return to Taylor’s emphasis on the physicality of performance, I find it interesting to consider not merely the “archival” allusions in Said’s discussion, but also how storehouses of knowledge have always to be performed, have always to transpire as material practices. While Said casually uses terms such as “systems” and “structures” when writing about the authoritative capacities of Orientalist writers and textual productions in terms of recycled, stereotypical references, his discussion serves to give flesh to what we can call, following Taylor, an archive becoming repertoire. I’d like to suggest, then, that the term “repertoire” is more appropriate than “system” or “structure.” This emphasis on the performative, rather than strictly discursive, has value not only in respect to Said’s approach to culture as a performative practice, but also in respect to how he takes stock of his own inventory and his sense of embodying a cultural reservoir.

Said’s Embodied Repertoire As I have been pointing out, the relational prism by which Said construes his inventory in Orientalism encompasses interwoven modalities of self, circumstance, history, colonialism, racism, and imperial culture. His references to himself as an Oriental, with and without quotation marks, are steeped in an ambivalence that is not so much uncertain or contradictory

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but rather proactively engaging the manifold threads of his inventory. As much as he is compelled in certain circumstances to assume and exchange a sense of himself as an Oriental or ‘an Oriental,’ an Arab or ‘an Arab,’ an American or ‘an American,’ he is well aware that his intellectual capacities are conditioned by an experience of xenophobic, racist colonial culture and scholarship. And while an inventory of European colonial culture may well provide means for a centring of self, it involves modicums of an othering of self. Between a centring and othering of self lie manifold threads of memory and history that are interactively bound to Said’s capacity for critical inquiry. Said’s personal dimension appears late in his introduction, on the last three pages, and could be read as some sort of conclusion to his prefatory remarks. An important point to note is Said’s emphasis on how material and imaginary resources are both embodied and actively employed. As I have been suggesting, Said’s materialist approach to culture suggests a more expansive notion of embodied archival repositories, terms of knowhow that take on flesh as they circulate through, to mention a couple of examples, the writing, promotion, and reading of literature, or else the production, promotion, and viewing of a film. A good example of an archive becoming repertoire is when children (I think of my own childhood) dress up as Cowboys and Indians, physically playing out, performing, what they have seen in film. The costume is worn directly on the skin, while appropriate sounds, gestures, and modes of expression (mimicking the swish of a sword, a gunshot, or else the ricochet of a bullet hitting a rock4) supply the scene with an acoustic resonance. Along with the costumes and sounds are compacted specific notions of an Indian, or a Cowboy, as well as caricatured images of their life-­ worlds. According to the predominating cultural reservoir of my childhood generation, the Cowboy is depicted as White and affording certain moral or immoral attributes, while the Indian is all too often anonymously characterized as lacking any moral outlook altogether. On a few occasions Said has reflected on his childhood fascination with Tarzan and Robinson Crusoe—two stories and variously fashioned adventure narratives that have constituted significant reservoirs for European Orientalist culture. Produced as novels, theatre plays, drawings, toys, board and video games, audiobooks, comics, as well as film and television 4  I recall the standard scene in Western films of a ‘wagon train’ encircled around itself to fend off the Indians, who always emit a chorus of screams as they attack—the screams signifying connotations of savagery.

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serials, both stories stage patriarchal and racialist desires to venture out of an imagined European self and civilization into what is often called ‘the unknown,’5 experiencing oneself as a site for a rehabilitation of culture and moral standing.6 Where Crusoe achieves this by domesticating the savage Other and the natural environment in which he is stranded, in the process reaffirming a capacity for moral judgement and command over nature, Tarzan is brought out of the wilderness by being seduced by the feminine Other. When we consider Ibn Tufayl’s twelfth-century Hay Ibn Yaqzan (2009) and the Mesopotamian story of Gilgamesh (especially the seduction of the wild man Enkidu) (2003),7 Crusoe and Tarzan appear in some ways as rehearsals of a much broader polytheistic-monotheistic cultural and spiritual repertoire. By the time Said in his Cairo childhood was visiting the local Zamalek cinema house on Saturday afternoons, cinematic versions of Tarzan, Aladdin, Sinbad, and Ali Baba reproductions were in their prime. In his memoir Out of Place he writes about the “plush cinema seats,” as he “luxuriated in the sanctioned freedom to see and not be seen” (2000, 34).8 The character Tarzan became a particular model of attachment: “Later I developed an irrecusable attachment to Johnny Weissmuller’s whole Tarzan world, especially to the uxorial and, in Tarzan and His Mate at least, virginally sensual Jane cavorting in their cosy tree house” (Said 2000, 34). Although ostensibly inscribing a character who somehow lives beyond social etiquette, mannerisms, morality, and indeed, speech, Tarzan’s tree house world comes to reproduce a stock set of semiotic references, whereby desire is channelled through a heterosexually framed reservoir of chaste sexuality and nuclear family. For Said, the “clever Wemmicklike comforts” of the tree house “seemed like a pure, uncomplicated distillation of our life as a family alone in Egypt” (2000, 34). These remarks are significant not only in terms of Said’s efforts to reflect on his inventory but also in respect of who he thought constitutes his audience, the potential readers he assumed to share his cultural reservoir. “Wemmicklike” refers to the character John Wemmick in Charles Dicken’s mid-nineteenth-century novel Great Expectations (1996). Away 5  A stock trope that Joseph Conrad never tired of reproducing. Beyond a Europeancentred lens (however historically varied and differentiated this lens may be), ‘the unknown’ is of course known and inhabited otherwise. 6  I have a longer discussion of this colonial desire for regeneration (Nikro 2006). 7  The Gilgamesh story was discovered on stone tablets in the mid-nineteenth century. 8  By “sanctioned freedom” he is referring to respite from the dictates of his tasking parents.

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from his professional work, tamed by his fiancé Miss Skiffins, Wemmick embodies intimate characteristics of family and thus for Said provides a suitable character analogy to Tarzan’s relationship to Jane. Yet the analogical observation betrays the cultural reservoir Said himself embodied. While the example no doubt serves to refer to the composure of the domestic scene, it betrays a particular cultural association of such domesticity, silently shared by Said and his assumed readers. Otherwise, through his elaboration of his boyhood fascinations, Said is of course critical of the cultural and racialist implications of Tarzan and the reproductive repertoires of Hollywood. One such repertoire is the phonetic resonance of language itself. As Said observes: “It was very odd, but it did not occur to me that the cinematic Aladdin, Ali Baba, and Sinbad … all had American accents, spoke no Arabic, and ate mysterious foods—perhaps ‘sweetmeats,’ or was it more like stew, rice, lamb cutlets?—that I could never make out” (2000, 34). Indeed, for those like myself who experienced their childhoods in English-speaking countries (Australia) with the rise of television in the 1970s, it was quite usual to tune into a weekend movie matinee on the television and watch films such as Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion (1950). In this particular film, the wrestler Abdullah the Assassin, despite hailing from a “tribe” in Algeria, speaks in American English, as do other characters presented in the film as Arabs. Strangely, in such films the foreign Arab characters appear both recognizable and unrecognizable—recognizable as stock figures pretending to be Arab, while unrecognizable as Arab characterizations speaking in American accents. The eventuating significance of appearances, to be sure, always has some dependence on who is looking and from where they are looking. Nevertheless, between “Wemmicklike” assumptions and “sweetmeat” conjectures, Said’s childhood attraction to the Tarzan films was concentrated on those in which the famous Olympic swimmer, Johnny Weissmuller, played the main role. In a reflective essay penned in the late 1980s, titled “Jungle Calling,” Said recalls his childhood fascination and investment in a particular modality of masculinity. He writes: “In one of the rare ecstatic moments of my early adolescence—I must have been about ten—I recall saying to an older male relative that once in the trees or on his escarpment Weissmuller-Tarzan could hold off twenty or thirty, or maybe even fifty, men on the ground” (2001a, 328). It is a telling reflection, considering my overall preoccupation in this study with what I am calling Said’s personal dimension. The essay, indeed, is quite critical, beginning with a comparison between the eloquent speech of the Tarzan

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character in the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Hollywood’s almost mute Weissmuller-Tarzan. Said wonders why, among commentators, the “Burroughs’s fantasy” of a “cultivated” (2001a, 328) Tarzan had attracted more critical attention than the linguistically inept cinematic version. However, Said’s Tarzan—the Weissmuller-Tarzan he embodied as part of his imaginary adolescent world and later in life critically addresses— takes on “noble” proportions once he is compared to a diverse repertoire. “The stream of comic-book, television, and other movie Tarzans, from Lex Barker and Gordon Scott to Ron Ely and Jack Mahoney, end up being trite variations on a noble theme” (Said 2001a, 328). In his essay, he goes on to observe the influence of Robinson Crusoe and the jungle boy character of Rudyard Kipling’s late nineteenth-century collection of stories The Jungle Book. Where Tarzan in Africa is reared by apes, Kipling’s Mowgli is looked after by a pack of wolves, hence his nickname “man-cub.” Concerning the Tarzan novels of Burroughs (28 of them, Said notes), he observes that where the heroes tend to be tall and white, the “villains are unfailingly … East European Jews, Arabs, blacks” (2001a, 329). He mentions how Weissmuller-Tarzan’s only non-English word is “umgawa” and discusses briefly its various connotations in the films, at times employed as “a shout directed at the recalcitrant blacks who people the series, either as threatening savages or as cowering and incompetently subservient porters, servants, coolies” (2001a, 332). While taking stock of the racist aspects of Tarzan films and novels, some of his discussion demonstrates his interest in how a non-White audience digest this cultural reservoir. He shortly references Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks,9 concerning a comparison of how people in Martinique view the Tarzan films differently from people from Martinique living in France. While the former, Said notes, “tended to side with Tarzan against the blacks; the same people seeing the film in France feel their black identity much more acutely and are consequently upset by the sight of a white abusing a lot of natives” (2001a, 333–34). His reflections here verge on a broader appreciation of the naturalizing implications of racist references, which are all too often concealed in a language of universalizing pretensions. As he goes on to observe: “Tarzan appears as the racial enemy in one setting, whereas in another he is interpreted as a hero who fights to preserve a natural order against those who disturb it” (2001a, 334). 9  Said (2001a, 333) mistakenly writes “Skins,” with “1952” the only bibliographical reference.

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Said’s essay, however, is strangely elegiac, as though he were striving to capture, Proust-like, a certain experience of his childhood, steeped in the “sanctioned freedom” he enjoyed at the cinema. For Said, Weissmuller-­ Tarzan, who he much prefers to Burroughs’s “aristocratic ape-man” (Said 2001a, 330), represents a solitary figure, a “forlorn survivor,” an “orphan without upward mobility,” a “hero diverted from worldly success and with no hope of rehabilitation, in permanent exile” (2001a, 336). Indeed, along with the associations of exile and the notion that Tarzan does not fit in anywhere, is out of place, it would not be too far-fetched to suggest that Said poured much of himself into his essay—the “jungle” of his essay’s title resonating as his childhood desire to elude social mores and stultifying expectations of decorous conduct. The uncharacteristically short and sharp last sentence of his essay—“Time for a Weissmuller revival” (2001a, 336)—alludes to his sense of “permanent exile,” a term which represents his notion of exile as a position from which to maintain a critical relationship to convention. Said’s essay on the Weissmuller-Tarzan character and his childhood fascination with the cinematic figure comes up in an interview in 2001, shortly after the publication of his collected essays, Reflections on Exile. When asked about the inclusion and “surprising juxtaposition” of the essay to the others in the volume, he answers that it represents his “interest in the manufacture of exoticism” (Smith 2004, 233). He refers to “Wiseman” (sic) as “a great hero” of his childhood. The perceptive interviewer, Joan Smith, suggests that the “myth” (she follows Said’s use of the term) of Tarzan “reflects the distance of your life. You were a Palestinian-­ born boy living in Egypt, with American citizenship, going to English schools and watching American films about Africa” (2004, 233). As Smith changes the subject, mentioning how the central essay on exile provides the large volume with thematic direction, in response Said refers again to his Tarzan identification. Despite the racism of the films, he says, what “gripped” his “imagination” was the apparent characterization of Tarzan having no family background, completely “unaccounted for” (2004, 233). Smith’s perceptive observations and questions have some merit when we consider how in his Out of Place Said presents his childhood domestic scene as constraining and debilitating. The memoir ostensibly covers his childhood in Jerusalem and Cairo, and his adolescence in Cairo, Lebanon, and North America, up to his academic appointment at Columbia University in 1963, when he was 28 years of age. While he discusses the schools in Cairo and the United States that shaped his emotional and

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intellectual temperament, he provides a somewhat bemused portrait of his emotional relationship to his parents, devoting lengthy recollections to the regimes they apparently forced upon him. Not only was he constrained to experience his childhood and adolescence through an acute distrust of his budding sexuality, but was constantly chastised for his posture and physical attributes. Said writes: “As I look back on my sense of my body from age eight on, I can see it locked in a demanding set of repeated corrections, all of them ordered by my parents, most of them having the effect of turning me against myself” (2000, 62). Said’s references to his parents’ injunctions are somewhat staggering. While his poor eyesight could not be deemed a personal failing, it seemed to his parents that, at twelve years of age, his pubic hair was abnormal. Constantly cautioned for his slumping shoulders and large chest, he writes that he “seemed caught between the hump and the barrel” (2000, 65), made to wear an upper body brace of sorts, a “harness,” into his early twenties. According to his recollections, much of his body became a site of disapproval for his parents. This included his flat feet, for which he was made to wear “metal arches” in his shoes; his “odd habit of shuddering” briefly when urinating, for which he was taken to a specialist; his queasy stomach, which he describes as “the source of numerous ills and pains all my life” (2000, 62–63). Apparently, as Said recalls, the family doctor was rather sceptical about his mother’s habit of wrapping his midsection up with a small blanket. Amidst the catalogue of his parents’ correctional administration, it seems only natural that he developed a habit of chewing his fingernails, which his parents painted with a foul tasting coating as a deterrent. Another incident he recalls is his father confronting him with his pyjama pants he’d left on the bathroom floor. Apparently, unsoiled pyjama pants signified the absence of wet dreams, which amounted to the severe crime of masturbation. Said describes his parents’ reforms as “campaigns,” which served to make him “deeply self-conscious and ashamed” (2000, 63). His father complimented these campaigns with physical beatings (2000, 65). These occurred through a calculated use of a “riding crop,” or else as slaps administered through fits of anger. As Said recollects his father’s violence: “I much preferred the studied care he took with my canings—using a riding crop—to the frightening, angry, and impulsive violence of his slaps and swinging blows to my face” (2000, 65). In his memoir Said pretty much presents himself as a victim. There is hardly any reference to himself as an achiever. This is of course surprising, not only in light of his scholarly

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output, but also in successfully negotiating the education system in North America, especially his one-year, pre-college stint at the Mount Hermon boarding school in Massachusetts (2000, 225). My purpose of briefly mentioning Said’s recollections of his childhood is to suggest that his parents’ correctional ministrations amounted to a regime through which he developed a reflective relationship to his body. While his childhood fascination with Tarzan may well have transpired as an imaginative sense of escape from the domestic scene of family life, the figure of Tarzan developed into a source for his reflections on the power of cultural repertoires. Otherwise, considering his preference for and critical preoccupation with mostly canonical or else highbrow cultural production, especially concerning literature and music, the essay “Jungle Calling” is an example of a type of postmodern cultural criticism that Said tended to frown upon. However, my purpose in discussing the essay has to do with my notion of the affective implications of his personal dimension. He understood his capacity to undertake critical inquiry as an entwinement with his own life experience, as well as the circumstances in which he went about connecting his life experience to the racist implications of colonial and imperialist culture. So that, while in his memoir, in the jungle calling essay, as well as in the interview with Smith I have shortly referenced, Said recalls his childhood fancies, he situates this recall in the present as a condition of his capacity to undertake critical inquiry. As he learned to evoke his inventory as a condition of his capacity for scholarship, he came to give more emphasis to the relationship between his life experience and his critical practice. In his essay “Between Worlds” Said writes: “Having allowed myself gradually to assume the professional voice of an American academic as a way of submerging my difficult and unassimilable past, I began to think and write contrapuntally, using the disparate halves of my experience, as an Arab and as an American, to work with and against each other” (2001b, 562). Said, to be sure, could just as well have described himself as an Arab(-)American, with or without a hyphen. But the significant point is that he found it helpful to maintain and explore the tension between them, a tension that served to disqualify them as neat, discrete cultural identities that could simply be opposed to one another.

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Said and Marxism There is a big difference between the critic who saw Marx only in terms of his comments on India and Algeria, lumping him together with the rest of the Orientalists, and the same critic who in his “late style” acknowledges the influence Marxism and Marxist authors had on him, such as Gramsci, Lukács, Raymond Williams, and others. (Traboulsi 2008, 36)

One of the guiding threads of my study of Said’s personal dimension, his nafssiya, concerns his sense of the material implications of texts, subjects, and modes of representation. This thread is woven out of many influences, amongst which the work of Marxists has a significant role. Said, to be sure, steered clear of adapting Marxism as an explanatory model of historical processes or else subjective dispositions. However, he draws much from Marxism as a tradition of critical scholarship and practice. Said’s relationship to Marxism was ambiguous, if we appreciate this term in a positive sense to indicate diverse strands of application. This ambiguity is expressed in an interview where he discusses Marxism through varying momentums and practices—as a tradition of critical thought, political movements, communism, anti-colonial liberation movements, Palestinian resistance, and not least, concerning the ideological expediencies of anti-­ Marxist and anti-communist arguments. So while he says in the interview that it is “difficult” for him to “identify with Marxism” (Wicke and Sprinker 1993, 261), he is well aware of the historical significance of its diverse theoretical and practical effectiveness. In a couple of places in his introduction to Orientalism (2003, 13, 25) he alludes to what he regards as an inadequate Marxist model of base and superstructure,10 though doesn’t provide further elaboration. At the same time, he explains that his “analyses employ close textual readings whose goal is to reveal the dialectic between individual text or writer and the complex collective formation to which his work is a contribution” (2003, 23–24). His employment, here, of the term “dialectic,” in relation to “collective formations,” provides a hint of his indebtedness to Marxist emphases on the social material implications of culture. While he tended not to use the notion of ‘class antagonism’ as a generative aspect of historical processes, he nevertheless maintains a sense of the “material effectiveness” of the production of literature and textuality (Said 2003, 23). 10  For a concise, influential discussion of the base/superstructure model in the work of Marx and Marxism, see Williams (1977a, 75–82).

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Wherever he mentions “the text,” he alludes to the “social circumstances” (2003, 21), “historical circumstances” (2003, 15), or else “saturating hegemonic systems like culture” (2003, 14) in which writers and readers are embedded. An anti-systems thinker, Said was wary of historicist models explaining how culture and intellectual preoccupations are conditioned, if not determined, by modes of social and economic production. However, his interest in relationships between cultural production, history, and political sensibility was cultivated through his reading of the work of Marxists, such as Georgy Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Theodor Adorno, and Raymond Williams. It is thus puzzling that Said has been criticized by latter-day Marxists for his apparent ‘culturalist’—meaning non-material—leanings. Marxist critiques very often situate Said within the field of postcolonial studies. An example comes from Neil Lazarus. Discussing what he refers to as “the post-colonialist disavowal of Marx and Marxism,” he associates Said’s work with a “dematerialized understanding of ‘the West’—and of modernity, its socio-historical ground—as being in a fundamental or primary sense a sort of cultural disposition” (2004, 45). For my purposes, in demonstrating the phenomenological contours by which Said understood the “material effectiveness” by which cultures inscribe modalities of embodiment, I want, in this next to last section, to outline, and challenge, the terms by which Marxists have dismissed Said’s work, especially Orientalism, as being ‘culturalist.’ While Marxist critics of Said have been canvassed in the secondary literature, in what follows I begin my discussion with a Marxist critic who tends to be neglected by European and North American based scholars. The strained relationship Marxists have had with Said’s work pretty well begins with Sadik al-‘Azm’s review essay on Orientalism that was first published in the journal Khamsin in 1981. Al-‘Azm had initially, in 1980, submitted his review essay to the journal Arab Studies Quarterly, which Said himself had co-established in 1979 with Ibrahim Abu-Lughod. The submission brought about a tense exchange of letters between Said and al-‘Azm in November/December 1980. Although they were friends, and their epistles were courteously addressed and signed off, the exchange was rather bitter and not only over intellectual disagreements but including personal innuendo. In his review essay Al-‘Azm was particularly incensed by Said’s categorization of Marx as an Orientalist, which he describes as not merely wrong but as a “travesty” (al-‘Azm 1981, 14). He had in mind Said’s description

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of Marx’s model of socio-economic change in colonial India as “pure Romantic Orientalism” (Said 2003, 154). For his part, Said was taken aback by al-Azm’s claim that, by maintaining the binary model of West and East, he reproduces the essentializing categories he is otherwise taking to task. Certainly, as others later also observed, al-‘Azm makes the valid observation that Said’s somewhat unilineal model of Orientalism—beginning with the ancient Greeks, coursing through the Renaissance, and on to Europe and North America in the twentieth century—is somewhat anachronistic. However, the rather strange balancing act al-‘Azm performs when trying to give conceptual legitimacy to Marx’s famous ‘grave-digging’ rationale (that the capitalist class, while developing the means of production, will bring about its own historical dissolution, chiefly by creating a mass of un- and underemployed class of disenfranchised subjects) is not so convincing. Just as it was aimed at the exploits of England in India, Marx’s critique, al-‘Azm argues, was aimed at Europe itself: There is nothing specific to either Asia or the Orient in Marx’s broad theoretical interpretations of the past, present, and future. On this score his sources are thoroughly “European” in reference and owe nothing to Orientalist learning. One only needs to recall those vivid passages in the Communist Manifesto where Marx portrays the modern European bourgeoisie in the double role of destroyer and creator: destroyer of the old inherited Europe, maker of its liberal present and usher of its proletarian future. Like the European capitalist class, British rule in India was its own grave-digger. There is nothing particularly “Orientalist” about this explanation. (1981, 15).

Al-‘Azm claims that, when considering “productive capacities, social organisation, historical ascendency, military might and scientific and technological development,” it is an indisputable fact that “19th century Europe was superior to Asia and much of the rest of the world.” And while Orientalism “did its best to eternalise this mutable fact … Marx, like anyone else, knew of the superiority of modern Europe over the Orient” (1981, 15). Looking through his essay again, it is puzzling that he does not refer to colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As I said above, I am presently canvassing Marxist critiques of Said so as to give further shape to the phenomenological contours of his methodology in Orientalism. Towards this, it is necessary to outline the dualistic

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categories by which Marxists tend to dismiss Said as culturalist. Although he doesn’t use the term “discourse analysis,” al-‘Azm articulates a basic Marxist dissatisfaction with giving theoretical speculation a primary role in historical change and development. Marx himself, of course, in turning Hegel on his head, as it were, had made the critique of abstract philosophy central to his work. This is captured in his famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, where he states that philosophers have been content to interpret the world, but the task is to change the world (Marx and Engels 2004, 121–124). Hence al-‘Azm’s repeated scare quotation of Said’s use of the term “mind.” Armed with this dualistic model of socio-economic modalities of production and corresponding cultural and intellectual practices, al-‘Azm makes a distinction between “Institutional Orientalism” and “Cultural-­ Academic Orientalism” (1981, 5). From his Marxist perspective, he argues that Said makes the mistake of claiming the latter mode as the driving force of Western domination of the Orient: “Thus, for [Said] European and later on American political interest in the Orient was really created by the sort of Western cultural tradition known as Orientalism” (1981, 7). For al-‘Azm, Said’s apparent culturalist approach underestimates the machinations of political power: “Therefore Edward Said sees the ‘Suez Canal idea’ much more as ‘the logical conclusion of Orientalist thought and effort’ than as the result of Franco-British imperial interests and rivalries (although he does not ignore the latter)” (1981, 8). It is Said’s apparent view of history as systems of representations that al-‘Azm finds problematic: “With Said one stands at times on the verge of regression into belief in the magical efficacy of words” (1981, 14). A very similar critique is expressed by Aijaz Ahmad in his famous sixty-­ plus-­page monograph-style essay “Orientalism and After: Ambivalence and Metropolitan Location in the Work of Edward Said,” first published in 1992. Like al-‘Azm, Ahmad’s “fundamental disagreement” with Said “on issues both of theory and of history” (Ahmad 1992, 159) derives from a Marxist dissatisfaction with what is regarded as Said’s lack of attention to capitalist expansion as a driving force of imperialism and class as a related, generative category of historical antagonism. For Ahmad, these categories, it should be said, are complemented by other thematics. In an earlier essay of his book, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory,’ ” he takes to task a fellow Marxist, Frederic Jameson, for underestimating feminist and “Black Literature” (Ahmad 1992, 122) in conceptions of first and third world literatures. He

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is unhappy with Jameson’s rather static assumption of these latter categories, as though first and third worlds encompass discrete, culturally bounded entities. As he says in the conclusion of his essay: “Jameson’s is not a First World text; mine is not a Third World text. We are not each other’s civilisational Others” (1992, 122). From the outset of his book, then, Ahmad questions any neat assumption of civilizational/cultural geographical entities and extends this in his critique of Orientalism. However, in the second half of his expansive discussion of Said’s Orientalism, Ahmad focuses on what he calls, capitalized and in inverted commas, “Colonial Discourse Analysis” (1992, 186). Equating Orientalism with culturalist exercises of critique that underestimate the relevance of social material practices, he makes an issue of what he regards as Said’s epistemologically confused notion of (mis)representation (Wicke and Sprinker 1993, 193). In this fashion, Ahmad strives to demonstrate the limits of a Foucault-inspired non-correspondence theory of truth that assumes that history takes place in discourse, regulated by recycled epistemological reservoirs and cultural repertoires standardized by mediums of representation. He admonishes “the idea that imperialism is mainly a cultural phenomenon to be opposed by an alternative discourse.” As he goes on to say by way of example, evoking the domestication of Amílcar Cabral to metropolitan debates: “What is important about Cabral, evidently, is his discursive position, not that he launched and led the armed struggle” (1992, 204, Ahmad’s emphasis). Different to other Marxists, Ahmad does not approach Said as somehow representative of postcolonial studies.11 Due to his ingrained dissatisfaction with academia’s propensity to domesticate, or else unworld, intellectual inquiry, Said mostly used the term postcolonial as a historical reference (six or seven times in Culture and Imperialism) and otherwise distanced himself from the field: “I would rather not myself talk about it because I do not think I belong to that,” he rather abruptly responds in an interview in 1997 when asked about postcolonial studies (Said 2002, 2). Ahmad, on the whole, seemed to sense Said’s dissatisfaction with schools of thought that developed into academic disciplines, into disciplinary practices of packaging knowledge (as well as subjects of knowledge, we can add). However, his critique of Said is limited by associating the methodology of Orientalism with an all-too deconstructivist notion of discourse  See, for example, the argument by San Juan Jr (1998).

11

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analysis. He underestimates not only Said’s cogent critique of what in the early 1980s he called “textuality” but also the specific North American intellectual and historical circumstances in which Said articulated his dissatisfaction with academic literary and cultural studies.12 Ahmad associates Said with what he refers to as a “new kind of intellectual” who, despite being part of a broad “Left,” fails to connect theory to “social democracy,” or else to the “labour movement.” He relates this neglect to: an anti-bourgeois stance in the name of manifestly reactionary anti-­ humanisms enunciated in the Nietzschean tradition and propagated now under the signature of anti-empiricism, anti-historicism, structuralism and post-structuralism, specifically Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Derrida, Glucksmann Kristeva [sic], and so on. (1992, 192)

He doesn’t discuss the specific circumstances and reception of the work of the “reactionary” intellectuals he names. In this same spirit he underestimates what Timothy Brennan (2000) and William Spanos (2009) have, respectively, understood as Said’s critical engagement with American academic culture of the 1980s—with, in Brennan’s words, “the emergence of an oppressive theoretical Americana” (2000, 562). As Brennan also says in a footnote, pointing out the myopic interpretation of Said as anti-­ materialist: “By contrast, he was militating against the conceptual and epistemological conservatism of poststructuralism at a time when few understood its implications” (2000, 561). A particular weakness of Ahmad’s argument derives from his failure to have read Said’s earlier Beginnings. This would have provided him with a more nuanced understanding of the reception of the work of Nietzsche, as well as insight into Said’s critique of structuralism, concerning his dissatisfaction with the literary studies academy in the United States. Otherwise, while he notes Said’s departure from Foucault, like so many other commentators who restrict the theoretical influence on Orientalism to Foucault, Ahmad completely neglects the influence of Raymond Williams on the book. “Even one or two pages by Williams,” Said writes in the introduction, “on ‘the uses of Empire’ in The Long Revolution tell us more about nineteenth-century cultural richness than many volumes of hermetic textual analyses” (2003, 14). At the time, in the second half of the 12  On this theme, see especially Said’s essay “Reflections on American ‘Left’ Criticism” (1991, 158–177).

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1970s, Williams’s work—quite distant from a critique of the orientalist intellectual culture Said was predominantly concerned with—was for Said so important that he even ends his introduction with a further reference to the work of the Welsh Marxist cultural critic, theorist, and novelist. In his sixty-plus-page essay on Said, Ahmad mentions Williams only once and very briefly. Against the “reactionary anti-humanisms,” he writes, “the rectitude of people like Raymond Williams now seems so bracing” (1992, 192–3). However, he could have noted that in October 1989 Said was invited to give the inaugural Raymond Williams Memorial Lecture in London, which was published the year after (Said 1990). The lecture provides a hint of how, back in the 1970s as he was working on Orientalism, Said had read Williams’s The Country and the City (1977b, first published in 1973) as a “cultural materialist” (Williams 1977a, 75–82) critique of the colonization and possession of land. Approvingly, Said claims that the book “gets much of its force from its direct and unflinching look at the land itself, the struggles to possess it, to speak on its behalf, to build or colonise on it and in its name, to dispossess, ruin, maim and distort the lives of many, all in the cause of land” (1990, 82). In his great book Williams had placed emphasis on what he called “enamelling” (1977b). By this he meant aestheticized patterns of neo-­ pastoral vision that fail to register social material conditions of life. According to Said: “Property, as Williams demonstrates with extraordinary skill, authorises schemes, establishes discourses, founds ideologies, many of them leading back to the earth, ‘England’s green and pleasant land’ for some, ‘the heart of an immense darkness’ for others” (Said 1990, 82). The last quip here alludes to his developing thoughts on how the words Joseph Conrad employs in his novels transpire as modes of enamelling, as aesthetic formulations that translate landscapes into established cultural reservoirs. While many cultural critics refer to Williams’s notion “structures of feeling,” they tend to miss the phenomenological pulse beats of the term. In his Marxism and Literature Williams devotes a whole section of a chapter to this phrase. He makes a distinction between “practical consciousness” and “official consciousness” (1977a, 130). While the distinction carries traces of Gramsci’s critique of abstract philosophy, the latter term suggests a critique of ontic modes of formulation: mistaking, as Williams says, “terms of analysis as terms of substance” (1977a, 129). In other words, a conceptual schema is read literally, de-scriptively, rather than as a heuristic, methodological orientation implicating certain distributions of

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material and imaginary resources. To mention a couple of examples, Rousseau’s “state of nature” or Freud’s “the unconscious” are thought to be actual entitities, even though they do not correspond to empirical verification. As a consequence of this ontic fervour, Williams suggests, “forming and formative processes” are converted into “fixed” and “formed wholes,” while “living presence is always, by definition, receding” (1977a, 128). “For practical consciousness,” he goes on to say, “is what is actually being lived, and not only what is thought is being lived” (1977a, 130–31). With his qualification “not only,” the important point to gather from Williams’s discussion is his avoidance of a Cartesian dualism between the real and representation. We can understand his notion of a “structure of feeling” as a precursor to more recent studies of the social life of affects and sensibilities. Preoccupied with “meanings and values as they are actually lived and felt,” Williams writes: “not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity” (1977a, 132). He understands consciousness not as a propensity for abstract understanding of self and world, but rather as a perceptual, inchoate awareness of self and world, a self-awareness whose contours are always circumstanced, worldly, enmeshed in processes of hermeneutic livelihood. Accordingly, Williams emphasizes how forms of social life, as well as forms of social analysis, encompass “specifiable material practices.” As modalities of social practices, cultural forms have a certain nafssiya, a certain livelihood as hermeneutic capacities to perceptively inhabit the world. As a literary and cultural theorist, Williams strives to demonstrate how art involves modalities of social production and exchange. “The materiality of works of art,” he writes in a section titled “From Medium to Social Practice”: is then the irreplaceable materialization of kinds of experience, including experience of the production of objects, which, from our deepest sociality, go beyond not only the production of commodities but also our ordinary experience of objects. (1977a, 162)

With his emphasis on “perception” and “experience,” with “Bourgeois literature” as “an immense and varied practical consciousness” (1977a, 211), it is not too difficult to appreciate how Williams’s cultural materialism influenced Said’s phenomenological approach in Orientalism, despite this phenomenology remaining largely understated.

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In the very last section of Marxism and Literature, “Creative Practice,” Williams’s observations sound like a mix of Gramsci and the later Foucault. He writes about ideology and theory as practices by which one works towards better understanding the conditions of one’s assumptions and presuppositions, rather than as abstract categories of reference. Being creative is all about engaging oneself in “active production,” the consequences of which cannot be planned in advance. Hence, “not casting off an ideology, or learning phrases about it, but confronting a hegemony in the fibres of the self and in the hard practical substance of effective and continuing relationships” (Williams 1977a, 212, my emphasis). No doubt, Said found in Williams a confirmation of Gramsci’s notion of “inventory,” if we keep in mind the Italian’s keen observation of entwinements between historical processes and subjective dispositions. As I have suggested, Marxist critiques of Said tend to underestimate the influence of the work of Williams. To some extent, an exception is Benita Parry, who in 2012 gave the Annual Edward Said Memorial Lecture at the University of Warwick. In an earlier essay, she makes an important observation on the concept and thematic category of “worlding” that Said picks up from the work of Williams: Said acknowledges that it is from Williams that he derived his usage of culture as a social practice, as the negotiated processes within which subjectivities, cognition, and consciousness are made and remade under determinate historical and political conditions; and it is this construction that makes possible Said’s usage of discourse as always implying a “worlding” of textuality. (Parry 1997, 7–8)

In her well-received book Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (2004), Parry always references Said favourably while directing a more critical mode of address to the deconstructivist momentums in the work of Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak. Over the last decades she has provided a radical critique of the tendency of postcolonial studies to abstract knowledge from historical contexts of anti-colonial struggle and resistance. Her important efforts to reinvigorate the referential, and not merely semiotic, significance of terms such as resistance, neo-colonialism, liberation—as well as her emphasis on anti-colonial agency—have in the main been directed through a critique of postcolonial theory concentrated in applications of discourse analysis.

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Much of her argument is aimed to debunk what she calls “the exegetics of representation” (2004, 12) and “privileging the means of representation as the sole progenitor of meaning” (2004, 55). The work of Bhabha and Spivak, Parry writes in her second chapter, “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse,” “will be discussed to suggest the productive capacity and limitations of their different deconstructive practices, and to propose that the protocols of their dissimilar methods act to constrain the development of a radical anti-colonial critique in which resistance is privileged” (2004, 19). However, considering her critical focus on discourse and representational analysis, I wonder why Parry didn’t include a discussion on Said’s Orientalism. After all, one of the main criticisms of his book was its disregard of resistant practices and related intellectual articulations by the colonized.13 To my mind, Parry could well have tempered and nuanced her argument by including a critical discussion of Said’s own style of an “exegetics of representation.” By teasing out his departure from Foucault, and noting his interest in how writers and intellectuals produced stereotypical modes of representation in specific historical contexts, Parry could have further appreciated the intellectual circumstances in which Said developed his notion of worldliness. However, in her essay I referenced above, where she observes the influence of Williams on Said, like Aijaz Ahmad and Neil Lazarus she equates Said’s work with postcolonial discourse analysis and postcolonial studies. For whatever reason, she makes no reference to Said’s formidable skirmishes with literary studies in the United States, which could have led her to appreciate the social material implications of his critique of poststructuralism and deconstruction. In her essay, Parry spends more time on “drawing attention to Said’s immense influence on the development of both colonial discourse analysis and its close younger relative, postcolonial theory” (Parry 1997, 8). Another problem with Parry’s approach to Said is her complete neglect of his work on the historiography, political culture, and existential circumstances of Palestinians and Palestine/Israel, and his formidable contribution to Palestinian liberation. This neglect informs her later essay “Edward Said and Third World Marxism” (2013). What first attracted me to this essay was the title, suggesting an approach to Said’s work in relation to 13  For example, there is no mention of Fanon in the almost 400 pages of the book, which is surprising when we consider how important Fanon later becomes for Said, especially in his Travelling Theory essays. I discuss this in the next section.

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Marxisms emerging in contexts of decolonial, anti-colonial/imperial, and third world struggles. This, I thought, would provide an alternative to the more common path of relating Said to, mostly, European Marxists. However, Parry completely disregards Said’s work in relation to Palestine. In her introductory remarks she writes: “In this commentary I will consider the radical Third-World Marxist tradition and its intersections with nationalism, with a view to indicating that Said did not attend to its specificity and depth” (2013, 105). The last clause is astonishing—what could be more of a third world entanglement of nationalism, anti-occupational strife, violence in the service of liberation, radical theory, and Marxism than the contemporary struggle of Palestinians? From the late 1970s Said was an active member of the Palestinian National Council, serving as an independent member. Attending meetings in mostly Tunis, where the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and other Palestinian groups settled after the Israeli onslaught in Lebanon in 1982,14 Said rubbed shoulders with Marxist groups, such as George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He eventually resigned from the Council in the wake of the Oslo Accords.15 But my point is that Said was influenced not only by Marxism as a variegated body of social and cultural criticism but also in terms of a political movement, however factional that movement may have been in the context of the Palestinian National Council. Otherwise, none of Said’s books on Palestinian themes are difficult to access. All of them have remained in print since their first editions, extending into further editions. The earlier volumes, such as After the Last Sky (1999, first published in 1986) and The Question of Palestine (1992b, first published in 1979), include belated prefaces by Said to subsequent editions. It is unfortunate that Parry disregards these publications. In the same vein, while her bibliography includes references to quite a few prominent Marxists, I have to say that it is rather disconcerting that none of these readings inspired her to look more closely at the Palestinian struggle and Said’s active participation in this struggle against Israeli occupation. 14  See al-Hout for a personal account of the PLO (2011). Like Said, al-Hout was critical of PLO decisions, especially concerning the Oslo Accords of 1993. 15  Said famously termed the Accords that Yasser Arafat signed with Israel on the lawns of the White House in the United States in September 1993 a “Palestinian Versailles.” Considering the ongoing colonization of the Palestinian West Bank since then, his critique has turned out to be prescient. See his essay “The Morning After” (1996, first published in 1993).

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I think it is fair to say that both Ahmad and Parry—despite the almost twenty-five years separating their respective critiques of Said—share a similar focus on what they regard as the abstraction of theory (what they both address as “discourse analysis”) from social material practices, particularly in respect of what they regard as a failure to maintain Marxist categories of analysis. And while both critics are firm devotees of the work of Raymond Williams, as indeed was Edward Said, their preferred example by which to discuss the latter’s apparent shortcomings is the more revolutionary work of figures such as Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral. Interestingly, both critics underestimate the Marxist implications of Said’s essays on the theme of “travelling theory,” especially concerning the influence of the work of Fanon. They fail to adequately note how Said’s notion of “critical consciousness” was designed to demonstrate the limits of theory, the limits to a form of discourse analysis that underestimates the affective phenomenology of racism informing Said’s oeuvre.

Travelling Theory As I mentioned above, there is no reference to Fanon in Orientalism, which is in some way surprising, when we consider how important Fanon later became for Said, from the early 1980s. In the 1970s he had some acquaintance with Fanon’s work, which is briefly referred to in Beginnings, although somewhat ambivalently as a critical “doctrine of imperialism” (1985, 373). Similarly, Fanon is mentioned only once in the collection of essays that constitute The World, the Text, and the Critic (1991, 49), with a long quotation from The Wretched of the Earth. Curiously, this reference to Fanon is not in Said’s travelling theory chapter of the same volume but rather in the second, eponymously titled essay. As I shall go on to discuss, in his later “Travelling Theory Reconsidered” (2001c), first appearing in 1994, just over ten years after the first travelling essay, Said situates Fanon’s work as an example of a productive and radically generative relationship of theory to the circumstances in which it transpires as a responsive mode of critical address. A key notion in Said’s first travelling theory essay is responsiveness, along with what he refers to as “resistance.” Making further claim to his central notion of “critical consciousness” in terms of a “resistance to theory,” he writes:

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The critical consciousness is awareness of the differences between situations, awareness too of the fact that no system of theory exhausts the situation out of which it emerges or to which it is transported. And, above all, critical consciousness is awareness of the resistances to theory, reactions to it elicited by those concrete experiences or interpretations with which it is in conflict. Indeed I would go as far as saying that it is the critic’s job to provide resistances to theory, to open it up toward historical reality, toward society, toward human needs and interests, to point up those concrete instances drawn from everyday reality that lie outside or just beyond the interpretive area necessarily designated in advance and thereafter circumscribed by every theory. (1991, 242)

By focusing on the limitations of theory, Said is concerned with mapping out a dynamic relationship between a theory deriving from another time and place (including how time and place inform the perceptual value of theory) and the terms by which it can be employed not only to explain and analyse different circumstances but radically respond to and initiate critical practices.16 As always, Said is interested in what enables critical scholarship—an enabling that emerges from limitations. At the time, around 1980, Said was engaging particular debates over textuality, temporality, and related epistemological issues in North America, responding to what he calls “American ‘Left’ Literary Criticism,”—the title of another essay in his The World, the Text, and the Critic volume. This essay was first given as a presentation at a conference convened by William Spanos in 1974. In an interview I undertook with Spanos,17 he spoke about this conference as a “response” to the more celebrated conference of 1966 in which Derrida participated and introduced deconstruction to academia in North America.18 Spanos refers to Said’s talk as “an evental moment in precisely the sense that he put deconstruction in its place, as something no longer viable, because it was not worldly.” He goes on to say that Said’s talk constituted “a turning point in American literary studies.” What I find compelling about Spanos’s reflections is not merely that Said’s early critique of deconstruction is completely missed by 16  For an insightful discussion of how “Said’s ideas have travelled through many worlds,” particularly in relation to Hebrew in Israel, see Shohat (2006, 359). 17  Interview conducted at Spanos’s home in Binghamton, New York State, on April 23, 2016. The following quotations from Spanos are from the same interview. 18  Titled “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” the conference was held at the John Hopkins University in 1966. I will say more about this conference in the next chapter.

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Ahmad and Parry, but that it is an example of Said practising what he is preaching—resisting a theory from elsewhere that is not worldly and responsive enough to engage the “actual material of history” (Said 1991, 167). To my mind, Timothy Brennan’s observations on Said’s unschooled methodology better capture the pulse beats of his dissatisfaction with the universalizing tendencies of theory. As Brennan perceptively explains: “The textual politics of such a position is found in his opposition to a politics of culture that tries to make things happen at the level of the semiotic” (2000, 578). While in his travelling theory essays Said refers to and discusses figures such as Lukács, Raymond Williams, Lucien Goldmann, and Foucault, he is primarily concerned with the ways by which theory involves historical and geographical inventories of embodiment and disembodiment, traversing and situated in varying locations and their practices of cultural and intellectual production. His sense of the entwinement of theory, time, and place was articulated through his discussion of Marxist philosophers and social theorists, particularly those addressing intersections of power, intellectual articulations, and material culture. The Marxist influences on his work tend to share geographical and spatial terms of reference, such as found in the work of Williams, Gramsci, Michel Foucault, and Fanon. In “Traveling Theory” Said recognizes how, in moving across geographies and temporalities, theory becomes an “enabling condition of intellectual activity.” And yet he qualifies this and says, to continue the quote, that: one should go on to specify the kinds of movement that are possible, in order to ask whether by virtue of having moved from one place and time to another an idea or a theory gains or loses in strength, and whether a theory in one historical period and national culture becomes altogether different for another period or situation. (1991, 226)

We should be careful to note how for Said it is not only a question of a methodological adaptation from one time and place to another, but how in the movement, appropriation, and application of theory, particular embedded epistemological and ontological inventories are also transported. Influenced by Marxist notions of the value of intellectual inquiry as social praxis, a primary concern for Said was how a theory can be adapted to respond to varying historical circumstances. He argues that

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once a theory travels to other places it tends to become somewhat diluted of its critical force, becoming a mere “interpretive device” or methodological frame of reference. He focuses on Lucien Goldmann’s adaptation of Lukács History and Class Consciousness to the study of cultural and social history in France. He claims that through this transportation, the radical force of Lukács’s intellectual praxis is somewhat muted, subdued, and domesticated. The travel “from Budapest to Paris,” Said writes, brings about a “conversion of insurrectionary, radically adversarial consciousness into an accommodating consciousness of correspondence and homology” (1991, 236). Said claims that the application of a theory from elsewhere, another time and place, has to take into account and respond to emerging intellectual, cultural, and social practices. Making a more relational than relativist argument, any application of theory has to include some reflection on the temporal, spatial, and epistemological inventories it embodies. It is thus not a question of a different context that serves to qualify the relevance of a theory travelling from elsewhere (this is a relativist assumption) but rather the exigencies of local practices of cultural production and intellectual engagement, in relation to the capacity of theory to proactively, creatively respond. This is what Said means by his notion of a “resistance to theory.” While categories and concepts from elsewhere are valuable to name and identify, give critical direction to, social symptoms that otherwise remain difficult to thematically address, at the same time such categories from elsewhere can be too static and heavy handed. We could say that the very tension between conceptual categories and modalities of hermeneutic livelihood is what, for Said, phenomenologically energizes both the actuality and potentiality of a travelling theory. It is this relational prism of temporal/spatial configurations that Said comes to better address in the later travelling theory essay, where the work of Fanon is enlisted to demonstrate how a travelling theory can become what he now refers to as “transgressive theory” (2001, 439). This later essay, to be sure, is marked by Said’s growing interest in irredeemable dissonance and “unresolved contradictions,” what he eventually came to call “late style” (Said 2007, 7). “What now seems to me incomplete and inadequate in such an account of Lukács’s theory and its subsequent travels,” Said writes about his first travelling theory essay, “is that I stressed the reconciliatory and resolvable aspects of his diagnosis” (2001c, 438). As he will come to do in his posthumously published Late Style (2007), in the second of his travelling theory essay Said pits Adorno against Lukács, so as

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to demonstrate that while the work of the former has carried over the influence of the latter, it has also to be understood as a critical response and departure. However, beyond the more European-based problematic of Adorno’s critique of Lukács, it is through his consideration of Fanon’s adaptation of Lukács that the historical and geographical circumstances of colonialism come to further Said’s reflections on the non-reconcilable tension informing the potential of a travelling theory to become a transgressive theory. Focusing on Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (2001, first published in 1961), the productivity of this non-reconcilable tension has two coordinates: the more glaring polarization of France and its colony Algeria, and the influence of Lukács’s book on Fanon’s Marxism and residual Hegelianism. Said’s point, then, is that the travelling theory has to be read in terms of its relational application, its capacity to practically respond to a diverse historical momentum and geographical location. In respect of the exigencies of this application, the reconcilable temporal imprint of Lukács’s theory (“reconciliation under duress,” to repeat Adorno’s famous phrase) comes to be rendered productively irreconcilable. It is, then, the spatial, proactive, decolonial tenor of Fanon’s preoccupations that serve to contextualize, modify, and render applicable Lukács’s more temporally oriented “philosophical antinomies”: “The issue for Lukács was the primacy of consciousness in history; for Fanon it is the primacy of geography in history, and then the primacy of history over consciousness and subjectivity” (Said 2001c, 446). The awkwardness of this last clause hints towards a certain blockage if we were to better note how Lukács understood history as both that which comes to be endured and that which comes to be proactively engaged, in the process forging an emerging sense of temporality in terms of a social material practice, embedded in the formation of class and accompanying modes of historical self-awareness. The relational exigency of a materialist conception of theory and praxis had for Lukács what he calls a certain historical “uniqueness.” In his argument against “theoretical contemplation,” he writes: “Theory and praxis in fact refer to the same objects, for every object exists as an immediate inseparable complex of form and content. However, the diversity of subjective attitudes orientates praxis towards what is qualitatively unique” (1971, 126). Arguably, Said could have better attended to the relational pulse beats of Lukács’s insights into class consciousness as historical contingency.

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However we may discuss Said’s fascination with Lukács, we can note the debt his notion of a transformation of a “traveling theory” into a “transgressive theory” owes to Marxist applications of theory as social praxis. And when we consider how central Fanon became for Said’s second travelling theory, we can also appreciate the decolonial tenor of his argument. As I have been suggesting, for Said theory has always to be situated in and “respond to” (not reflect, which is often assumed in more relativist references to context) its particular circumstances of application. As he had already written in the earlier essay: I am arguing … that we distinguish theory from critical consciousness by saying that the latter is a sort of spatial sense, a sort of measuring faculty for locating or situating theory, and this means that theory has to be grasped in the place and the time out of which it emerges as a part of that time, working in and for it, responding to it. (1991, 241–2, my emphasis)

Said’s compelling travelling theory argument is itself situated in and responsive to a North American academic and intellectual momentum of the late 1970s and early 1980s, whereby for literary and cultural studies the various poststructuralisms had come to be influential. An important component of his interest in travelling theory as modalities of praxis concerns his interest in scholarship as interventionist. In the next chapter on his earlier publication Beginnings, I trace the phenomenological contours by which he, nafssiyan, developed his interventionist practice of scholarship.

References Ahmad, Aijaz. 1992. Orientalism and After: Ambivalence and Metropolitan Location in the Work of Edward Said. In In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 159–220. London: Verso. Al-‘Azm, Sadik. 1981. Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse. Khamsin: Journal of Revolutionary Socialists of the Middle East 8: 5–26. Al-Hout, Shafiq. 2011. My Life in the PLO: The Inside Story of the Palestinian Struggle. Translated by Hader al-Hout and Laila Othman. New  York: Pluto Press. Basel, Abbas, and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. 2014. Ruanne in Conversation with Tom Holpert, ‘The Archival Multitude’. Journal of Visual Culture 12 (3): 345–363. Brennan, Timothy. 2000. The Illusion of a Future: Orientalism as Traveling Theory. Critical Inquiry 26 (3): 558–583.

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Burton, Richard. 1964. Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina. New York: Dover Publications. Carter, Paul. 1988. The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History. New York: Alfred Knopf. Chateaubriand, Francois de. 2015. Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem. Translated by A.S. Kline. London: Poetry in Translation. Derrida, Jacques. 1998. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dickens, Charles. 1996. Great Expectations. London: Penguin. Fanon, Frantz. 2001. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. London: Penguin. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books. Kuhn, Thomas. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lane, Edward. 2020. An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians: Written in Egypt During the Years 1833–1835. London: Hanse Books. Lazarus, Neil. 2004. The Fetish of ‘the West’ in Postcolonial Theory. In Marxism, Modernity, and Postcolonial Studies, ed. Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus, 43–64. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Louise Pratt, Mary. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Lukács, George. 1971. History and Class Consciousness. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. London: Merlin Press. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 2004. The German Ideology. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Nikro, Norman Saadi. 2006. David Malouf: Exploring Imperial Textuality. Postcolonial Text 2 (2): 6. David Malouf: Exploring Imperial Textuality | Nikro | Postcolonial Text. https://www.postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/ view/371/811 ———. 2019. AnArchic Archive: Phenomenal Photographs and Multiple Exposures. Tohu, January 13. https://tohumagazine.com/article/anarchic-­ archive-­phenomenal-­photographs-­and-­multiple-­exposures. Parry, Benita. 1997. The Postcolonial: Conceptual Category or Chimera? The Yearbook of English Studies 27: 3–21. ———. 2004. Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique. New York: Routledge. ———. 2013. Edward Said and Third World Marxism. College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies 40 (4): 105–126. Said, Edward W. 1985. Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1990. Narrative, Geography and Interpretation. New Left Review I (180): 81–97. ———. 1991. The World, the Text, and the Critic. London: Vintage.

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———. 1992a. Musical Elaborations. London: Vintage Books. ———. 1992b. The Question of Palestine. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1994a. Representations of the Intellectual. London: Vintage. ———. 1994b. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1996. The Morning After: October 1993. In Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process, ed. Edward W. Said, 5–18. New York: Vintage. ———. 2000. Out of Place: A Memoir. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 2001a. Jungle Calling. In Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays, ed. Edward W. Said, 327–336. London: Granta Books. ———. 2001b. Between Worlds. In Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays, ed. Edward W. Said, 554–568. London: Granta Books. ———. 2001c. Travelling Theory Reconsidered. In Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays, ed. Edward W.  Said, 436–452. London: Granta Books. ———. 2002. In Conversation with Neeladri Bhattacharya, Suvir Kaul, and Ania Loomba. In David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson, ed. Relocating Postcolonialism, 1–14. London: Blackwell. ———. 2003. Orientalism. London: Penguin. ———. 2007. On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. New York: Vintage. Said, Edward W., and Jean Mohr. 1999. After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives. New York: Columbia University Press. San Juan, Epifanio, Jr. 1998. The Limits of Postcolonial Criticism: The Discourse of Edward Said. Solidarity: Against the Current, November/December, 77. https://www.solidarity-­us.org/node/1781. Accessed November 2014. Shohat, Ella. 2006. The ‘Postcolonial’ in Translation. In Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices, 359–384. Durham: Duke University Press. Smith, Joan. 2004. Cultures Aren’t Watertight. In Interviews with Edward Said, ed. Amritjit Singh and Bruce G. Johnson, 230–243. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Spanos, William V. 2009. The Legacy of Edward W.  Said. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press. The Epic of Gilgamesh. 2003. Translated by Andrew George. London: Penguin. Traboulsi, Fawwaz. 2008. Orientalizing the Orientals: The Other Message of Edward Said. In Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward Said, ed. Müge Gürsoy Sökmen and Bașak Ertür, 33–43. New York: Verso. Tufayl, Ibn. 2009. Hayy Ibn Yaqzān: A Philosophical Tale. Translated by Lenn Evan Goodman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Wicke, Jennifer, and Michael Sprinker. 1993. Interview with Edward Said. In Edward Said: A Critical Reader, ed. Michael Sprinker, 221–264. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers. Williams, Raymond. 1977a. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1977b. The Country and the City. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 4

Beginnings: Said’s Interventionist Scholarship

The process of learning is the process of constantly beginning again. —John Berger, A Painter of Our Time (2010, 48)

Phenomenological Livelihood of Literature and Cultural Criticism In respect of the affective phenomenological contours of Said’s work, concerning my interest in how he developed a keen awareness of the relational scope of his biography and critical practice, it is worthwhile to outline the main arguments of Beginnings (1985), as well as the book’s circumstantial temperament, its and its author’s nafssiya. As I hope to demonstrate in this chapter, despite being broadly eclipsed in fame and influence by Orientalism, as well as addressing what appears to be a very different set of themes, the latter book couldn’t have been researched and produced by Said without him having first written Beginnings. Not that there is a causal link between the two. However, Beginnings provided him with the intellectual wherewithal to undertake his work on Orientalism as a beginning. Winning the inaugural Lionel Trilling Book Award, Beginnings: Intention and Method was published in 1975, his second book coming ten years after his first, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (Said 2008). It was well reviewed immediately upon its publication, with the quarterly journal Diacritics devoting a special issue to it in the autumn of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 N. S. Nikro, Nafssiya, or Edward Said’s Affective Phenomenology of Racism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51769-3_4

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1976. Prominent North American literary scholars of the day addressed Said’s arguments, grappling with his peculiar approach to literary texts, cultural sensibility, and accompanying critical applications as material practices emerging at the faultlines of social history, authorial intervention, language, and form. Eccentric and non-formulaic, Beginnings straddles existential literary criticism, formalist applications of what had been established in the American academy as New Criticism,1 as well as influences from prominent French writers. Consequently, the book reads rather like clusters of deliberations addressing various writers and schools of thought. Essayistic in its somewhat formless composition, Said brings into proximity a number of intellectual and scholarly traditions, including modernist English poetry and criticism, German and Italian philology with a materialist bent, Marxism, psychoanalysis, French structuralism, and poststructuralism, not to mention literary and cultural criticism in North America, where of course he was based. At the same time, having been written from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, the essays that Said eventually fashioned into the book carry the impulses, the nafssiya, of his exploration of Arabic language and culture, as well as his developing sense of his Palestinian background. The vast secondary literature addressing Said’s work tends to underestimate how Beginnings shaped his relationship to his subsequent work. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that where the Naksa of 1967 (the six-day war with Israel and subsequent occupation of Palestine beyond Israel’s 1948 borders) and his involvement with Abu-Lughod’s edited volume The Arab-Israeli Confrontation of June 1967 (1970) influenced Said’s sense of being Palestinian, in Beginnings he developed a related sense of being a critical intellectual. One could almost say much the same about his earlier book on Conrad, with whom he shared a not-­ so-­dissimilar fate of exile. Two of Said’s former students, Veeser and Brennan, have provided discussions of Beginnings that go some way towards appreciating the personal and intellectual horizons motivating Said’s work on the book. Veeser perceptively adapts an image of Michelangelo’s sculpture The Captives from the work of the literary critic Richard Poirier (who Said greatly admired) to emphasize Said’s idea of a beginning that can never be 1  For a recent, valuable contribution towards appreciating relationships between New Criticism and Said, see Nicolas Vandeviver (2019).

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definitive, can never break free from circumstance. In fact, Veeser’s reading of Said’s work through a lens of Menippean satire lends itself to my notion of nafssiya. According to Veeser: “Poirier conceives of a brave if vulnerable subject who keeps some volition and autonomy although trapped within, who manages to fight for room to breathe, and who achieves an identity apart from that of the malevolent machine that encases him” (2010, 50–51). Brennan’s discussion of Beginnings is more expansive, taking into account not only the intellectual threads informing Said’s work on the book, but also the political and social circumstances, such as his friendship with Shafiq al-Hout, a co-founder of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (Brennan 2021, 132).2 So that, although much of Beginnings concerns his engagement with French structuralism and poststructuralism, Brennan reminds us of Said’s renewed commitment to developing his Arab connections and learning. In 1970–1971, for example, he was on Sabbatical in Beirut, where he took regular instruction in Arabic grammar and intellectual history. However, I wonder if both Joseph Conrad and Beginnings have been neglected because they don’t readily live up to the more radical image of Said that the secondary literature tends to embrace, concentrated more on his Orientalism (2003), The Question of Palestine (1992), and Covering Islam (1997)—three books he regarded as a trilogy. To be sure, there is much secondary literature that is quite unsympathetic to Said and his work, and not only from significant figures of Orientalist scholarship, such as Bernard Lewis, but also from Marxists (as I discussed in the last chapter), postcolonial scholars, as well as polemics that have deemed him to be a professor of terror. However, both appreciative and antipathetic commentaries tend to underestimate the specificity of Said’s intellectual background, situated in the academy of North America. For my present purposes, it is important to discuss Beginnings in terms of Said’s interest in the production of literature (writing, publication, reading, review, commentary) as modalities of inhabiting worldly circumstances, involving circulations of power, authority, and influence. Another critic acknowledging the importance of Beginnings, William Spanos, observed this worldly dimension of the book, concerning how Said “situates his inquiry at the site of ontology—the question of Being” (Spanos 2009, 11). Indeed, while energized by a critical response to North 2

 See al-Hout’s memoir (2011) on his experience in the Palestinian movement.

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American literary theory, especially what Said regarded as its overly specialized and unworldly intellectual ethos, the book’s temperament envelopes his sense of culture and subjectivity not merely as contours of the production and circulation of social and cultural knowledge, but more significantly in phenomenological terms of livelihood. In this phenomenological scheme, Said appreciates how literary texts and authors are always becoming subjects of their worlds, in respect of their capacities to be socially and culturally viable. Although Prasad Pannian in his recent book on Said doesn’t write about Beginnings, he rightly emphasizes Said’s sense of subjectivity in terms of being, rather than merely knowing. As he says, “investigation into the questions of subject formation and of subjectivity in his various writings is more ontological than epistemological” (Pannian 2016, 7). As I discussed in the previous chapter, I would only extend this ontological register to the subjectivity of literary texts themselves—how they circulate and how they accrue capacities to inhabit and affect their environments. As I have been suggesting, this sense of the phenomenological livelihood of subjectivity can be extended to Said’s approach to literary texts and literary criticism. For Said, form—the production of varying modalities of historical reference and cultural expression—does not merely simulate a worldly circumstance or cultural phenomena but circulates as a range of material and imaginary resources. To be clear, by modalities I mean, for example, that a two-hour film that tells a story stretching over two decades influences subjective capacities to both employ and embody narrative as a mode of stabilizing a sense of temporal movement. Such capacities circulate differentially as resources by which people learn to become subjects of their worlds and inhabit their worlds meaningfully. This recognition of the materiality and physicality of form is central to Said’s argument in Orientalism. As I argued in the previous chapter, the notion that Said employs a sort of colonial discourse analysis tends to undermine recognition of his phenomenological approach to the production and circulation of cultural form. In this chapter, devoted in the main to Beginnings, I begin by first discussing his constellation-like approach to the production of textuality and culture. The second section is devoted to Said’s essayistic style. In the third section I consider Said’s critique of what he calls “linguicity.” In the last two sections I discuss certain continuities in Said’s work between Orientalism and Beginnings, and the remarkable interview he gave to Diacritics for their special issue on Beginnings. This interview is noteworthy in terms of how it bridges his scholarly,

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interventionist approach between these two books, as well as how it reflects Said’s understanding of the latter work in terms of resistance. A perceived sense of his failure to address the theme of resistance in Orientalism has been a primary criticism of the book. As I will strive to demonstrate, the interview challenges this particular criticism.

Beginnings as Transitive Constellations Where, for his work on Orientalism, Said found Gramsci’s gritty approach to subjectivity as an inventory of congealed forces congenial, in Beginnings he was in the main inspired by the writings of the seventeenth-eighteenth-­ century philosopher Giambattista Vico, especially his The New Science (1999), though also his Autobiography (1975). So great was this influence that he devoted the concluding chapter, “Vico in His Work and in This,” to the Italian philosopher. The core of this influence is Vico’s notion of “gentile history,” or what Said prefers to call “secular history” (1985, 11), which he adapts towards his approach to texts and criticism. Said argues that the livelihood of texts and the writing of criticism is not to be found in their mimetic dimensions of representation or else how they measure up to an ideal analytic. He is rather interested in reading texts in respect of their circumstances of production and how they become hermeneutic vehicles for the distribution and circulation of cultural value and significance. Addressing a theme that becomes more or less central in Orientalism, Said is interested in how a text’s very livelihood implicates certain cultural reservoirs, as well as how writers can initiate creative modes of departure from such reservoirs. Such creative departures, while influenced by established modes of signification, nevertheless involve a willed effort, an “intention,” towards responding to circumstance and related repertoires of articulation, contributing to emerging practices of “the production of meaning” (Said 1985, 12). In other words, while Said is interested in the formal properties of a text, he applies a more transitive (Hussein 2007, 100) approach to literary and cultural production, in respect of established hermeneutic inventories by which a text productively circulates. According to Abdirahman Hussein, “transitive beginnings” are “sensitive to historical circumstance,” whereas “intransitive beginnings” are “aloof, self-subsistent.” The former is “responsive to discontinuity, repetition, dispersal, transformation; that is to say, it is affiliative; the other resists change, encouraging continuity, exclusivity, centripetality. It is filiative through and through,” serving

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“ideological currency” (Hussein 2007, 100).3 While I wouldn’t want to draw a hard and fast distinction between transitive and intransitive aspects of literature and literary criticism, the contrast is useful to appreciate Said’s basic understanding of what a text does in terms of circumstance rather than how a text is structured as a hermetically sealed play of forces. For my purposes, what is significant about Said’s approach in Beginnings is how this transitive dimension amounts to a phenomenological appreciation of writing and textuality, of both literature and literary criticism. Vandeviver recognizes this aspect of Said’s earlier work, pointing out that: “Speaking as a phenomenological critic, Said approaches the literary work as a phenomenon, as an object of perception that comes to us as a whole and therefore has to be comprehended and studied in full, as a particular consciousness” (2019, 100). Said, to be sure, maintained a focus on intention, suggested by his central notions of “critical consciousness” and “secular consciousness,” two terms he regularly employed in his writing in the wake of Beginnings and Orientalism. At the same time, considering his phenomenological appreciation of texts as productive modalities of hermeneutic embodiment and circulation, I would add that works of literary and cultural production encompass subjective intimations of association and thus are not only objects of perception. As I have pointed out earlier in my study, for Said a literary text, or else a film, circulates as an accumulating process of hermeneutic livelihood, according to how social practices of viewing and reading, and more specialist applications of commentary and review, contribute to a text’s attributes, the capacities of texts to work as subjective intimations, as folds of value, of cultural relevance. Interestingly, in his endnote to his first mention of Vico in the opening pages of his book, Said (1985, 383, note 11) references the work of Gilles Deleuze. While, for Said, the twentieth-century French philosopher shares the eighteenth-century Italian’s “anti-Platonic” critique of idealism— Plato’s tripartite (the good, the true, and the beautiful) notion of philosophical knowledge based on the capacity of philosophers to “grasp the eternal and immutable” (Plato 1987, 216)—this pairing encapsulates a configuration informing Said’s work as a whole. This combination has to do with his interest in humanism, such as Vico’s more grounded, 3  While Said makes passing reference to the notions of filiation and affiliation in Beginnings (xiii), concerning the emergence of modernist culture, he outlines their conceptual significance in the introductory essay to his collection The World, the Text, and the Critic. London: Vintage (1991, 16–24).

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“secular” approach to history and human endeavour, and what some critics view as the anti-humanist impulses of the work of poststructuralists— such as Deleuze, though, of course, especially Foucault.4 In Beginnings, Said adapts a configuration of Vico, whom he calls the “first philosopher of beginnings” (1985, 350), and Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida, towards his critique of the structuralist wave of influence in literary criticism in North America in the 1960s. These philosophers, Said claims, provide a radical departure from “professional consensus” and practice writing as “an act of discovery rather than out of respectful obedience to established ‘truth’ ” (1985, 378). However, for Said, a “Vichian” practice of scholarship undertakes critique as a creative response to circumstance, initiating detours and worldly applications of historical knowledge. The first, introductory chapter of the book, titled “Beginning Ideas,” sets out the path Said embarks on in his study of beginnings and provides a critical reflection on his motivations: “why such a study proposed itself to its author, why it is pursued in this way in particular, and how a rationale for such a study is arrived at” (1985, 5). So that, while writing about the value of beginnings for literary and cultural criticism, his discussion itself embodies an actual practice of beginning, outlining the productive role of intention and the practical aspects of methodology. Said’s passionate approach to criticism was far from an abstract exercise of intellectual detachment, as though he was working ‘on’ a particular text, rendering its energy identical to the terms of its analytical dissection. His “method,” Dominique Eddé shrewdly observes in her memoir of her relationship to Said, “always involved him as a physical person.” As she goes on to say, “Every time he discusses a novel, a work of criticism, an opera or a historical event, Said puts himself into the discussion” (Eddé 2019, 9). In other words, the notion of beginning can be regarded as an enabling function. In providing an account of the circumstances and motivations for the book Beginnings, Said speaks about how criticism, while inspired by a particular idea and involving an intentional effort to develop an idea, comes to evoke emergent, unanticipated  digressions, relationships, and associations. Such “relationships with other works” effectively involve “continuity or antagonism or some mixture of both” (Said 1985, 3). He thus understands criticism as an open-ended practice of exploring 4  As I discussed in Chap. 2, critics have tended to point out this apparent contradiction— humanist and anti-humanist impulses—in respect of Said’s Orientalism. From an approach of American pragmatism, see Hart (2000, especially 72–76).

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relationships evoked by the practice of criticism itself, even though it relies on the established works of other critics and related modalities of writing. According to Said, his “ambition” amounts to something like an intellectual adventure, an undertaking that “becomes intelligible only in the book’s unfolding and not through first advancing some ideal type which it then seeks to fulfill” (1985, 4). The term “beginning” itself is best appreciated as a recursive process, rather than a precise starting point launching a linear movement. Thus, Said distinguishes a beginning from “origin,” which carries a more fixed connotation (1985, 6). Said’s sense of a beginning as a process of application, as a critical intervention in scholarly work, is uncannily anticipated by Walter Benjamin’s eccentric notion of “origin,” articulated in his The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Benjamin writes: “That which is original is never revealed in the naked and manifest existence of the factual; its rhythm is apparent only to a dual insight” (Benjamin 1992, 45).5 I will continue the quote in a moment but want to draw attention to the undeniable phenomenological fervour of Benjamin’s writing. That which comes to be regarded as “original” involves not so much a fixed notion of its emergence but rather a rhythmic process of its eventual significance, an emergence that is “apparent,” which is to say involving a background from which a particular mode of perception gains thematic shape and consequence. Benjamin goes on to explain what he means by “a dual insight:” “On the one hand it needs to be recognised as a process of restoration and reestablishment, but, on the other hand, and precisely because of this, as something imperfect and incomplete” (1992, 45). In other words, that which is regarded as original takes shape as an inchoate orientation to circumstance, emerging from “the historical world” (Benjamin 1992, 45) as both an embodiment of the cultural reservoirs of that world and a working through such reservoirs. For Said, emerging relationships borne out by the practice of critical application—while foregrounding the historical and intellectual circumstances in which the work of criticism is deemed a valuable exercise—transpire as “a field or constellation” (Said 1985, 15) rather than a linear progression. Said’s essayistic style carries a similar nafssiya of transitive impulses to the notion of “constellations” outlined by Benjamin in his book on seventeenth-century German tragic drama (Trauerspiel, or mourning plays) I referenced above. In his introduction, his 5  Written as a habilitation thesis (but which was ultimately withdrawn), the book was first published in 1928, over ten years after Benjamin had composed it.

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“Epistemo-­Critical Prologue” (Erkenntniskritische Vorrede, in the original), what Benjamin refers to as “fragments of thought” (1992, 29) entail a range of relational proximities whose eventuating value and significance arise through accompanying molecular shifts. The part gains intelligible livelihood through a process of attraction and reaction. To illustrate this he draws an analogy to a mosaic. Made up of fragments or else particles, a mosaic foregrounds the process by which it comports an image. Mosaics are usually made from small pieces of stone, glass, or tile, although they can be also made with other materials (leaves, acorns, paper cut-outs, etc). They are constituted through patterns, marked through contrasting colours, shapes, and textures. A compelling aspect of mosaics is that there is no effort to hide, render invisible, the cracks and fissures by which the pieces are placed in proximity. In mosaics, both the image and the pieces are visible—the latter are not dissolved by the former. Thus the image wears its material constitution on its sleeve, as it were. It cannot be limited to an expression of an idea, but rather as a gritty exercise of fashioning the contours of an image. Fragments and the processes by which they are brought together exercise what Benjamin calls a “momentum”—the “irregular rhythm” by which pieces of a mosaic, or of thought, traverse the form of their ideal associations. “The value of fragments of thought,” he writes, “is all the greater the less direct their relationship to the underlying idea” (1992, 29). Concepts themselves carry a phenomenal momentum, come to cohere as they take shape in relation to one critical application or another, transpiring as momentums of “materialist enlightenment” (Buck-Morss 1979, 93). As Deleuze and Guattari have argued, concepts implicate a “heterogenesis”: which is to say, “zones, thresholds, or becomings … a concept is a heterogenesis … an ordering of components by zones of neighborhood” (1994, 20). In this vein I can point to the writings of the late John Berger, another critic who, like Said and Benjamin, tended to regard formal properties of a text or work of art as worldly, in respect of modalities of production and circulation. While the livelihood, the value and significance, of a text or work of art is entwined with institutional modes of power and authority, they involve responsive expressions of creative application. Like Said and Benjamin, Berger (who of course was very much influenced by Benjamin) emphasizes a relational dynamic. In G., his Booker Prize-winning novel of 1972, he expresses a sensitivity not to things, ideas, or else people in themselves but to the “relations which I perceive in things” (Berger 2012, 137,

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my emphasis). His sensitivity transpires as a shift from packaging events as causally connected instances of temporal succession (“consequentiality in time”), to intersections of place (“extensively in space”). The “complex synchronic pattern” he prefers is captured by the famous, much quoted line of the novel: “Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one” (2012, 133). In the novel, this declaration is not merely announced as an ideal but is given flesh. An example of this is the many stories and varying versions of what happened to the character Chavez, as he attempted to be the first person to fly over the Swiss Alps. The more witnesses there were, it seems, the more there were accounts of what happened, circulating through rumour and gossip, and in the press.6 For Berger, the one implicates a multiple, a constellation of parts whose relational resonance does not amount to a seamless whole, answerable to a governing figure. “But I am not the sum of my parts,” the character Camille says (2012, 202), in her efforts to imagine her sense of self otherwise, not answerable to a romantic logic of patriarchal possession. Berger’s ploy of transforming an image of an apparent seamless whole into component parts serves to bring about a collage-like, or perhaps montage-like effect, foregrounding action, movement, materiality, process, the molecular circulations and interactions of an environment—not unlike Deleuze’s sectional notion of what he called “movement-image,” in respect of variations of parts leading to modifications of the whole (Deleuze 2013, 7–11). Influenced by the Cubists’ relational emphasis on combinations, discontinuity, discomposure, and process, Berger took to task what he referred to as “the habit of looking at every object or body as though it were complete in itself, its completeness making it separate” (Berger 2018b, 132). What I am referring to as transitive constellations, then, appreciates how parts and fragments gain livelihood through their shifting relationships to other parts and fragments. Rather than conforming to an overarching whole, a whole that is all too often conceived in static terms of reference, the eventuating value and significance of parts take shape as multi-layered and multidirectional instances of orientation. This layered, cluster-like conception of cultural form and textuality, I argue, informs Beginnings. It can be tracked, for example, where Said devotes a long passage to a discussion of Freud (1985, 159–182), focusing mainly on The Interpretation of Dreams. Here, he is fascinated by the way in which Freud treats dreams as 6  Berger borrowed the character and events from life: Jorge Chávez, a Parisian of Peruvian descent, had tried to fly over the Alps in 1910.

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something like a hermeneutic encounter. In this encounter, both the telling of a dream and its learned analysis amount to a “palimpsest,” to “clusters,” Said writes, or layers of “verbal fragments” (1985, 165). In his consideration of Freud, we can sense the development of Said’s relational approach, whereby the part—the “statement”—does not gain its interpretive value by measuring up to the more general significance of the whole, but rather in respect of its circulatory relation to other parts. “Interpretation,” Said asserts with a Foucauldian turn of phrase, “is a field of understanding in which statements are dispersed but whose positions can be determined with regard only to certain (but not all) other statements” (1985, 169). Transitive constellations, especially their relational vigour, qualify any understanding of Said’s notion of a “beginning intention” as possessive or commanding, as though things only become meaningful to the extent they objectively reflect the specific terms of reference by which they are addressed. Said worked with a much more modest appreciation of intention taking shape in and through the process of writing. “An intention,” he points out, “is a notion that includes everything that later develops out of it, no matter how eccentric the development or inconsistent the result” (1985, 12). To be sure, this is a more refined way of depicting the activity of writing, especially in the humanities. Those of us involved in such activity well know that the practice of writing never takes place as a seamless expression of ideas but transpires as a process of constantly trying to make sense of emerging thoughts resonating beyond any neat configuration of one’s terms of reference. The notion “resonates” is significant here, suggesting a threshold by which the livelihood of one’s thoughts involves a restless effort to catch up with the shape and contours of a beginning intention, always conditioned by circumstance, by interactions with others, whether a person, or a book, or a film, etc. In his reflections on musical performance and composition, Daniel Barenboim—who with Said established the West-Eastern Divan orchestra in 1999—expresses this relational sense of beginning when he writes about sound. “Sound is not independent,” he writes: it does not exist by itself, but has a permanent, constant and unavoidable relation to silence. In this context the first note is not the beginning, but comes out of the silence that precedes it. If sound stands in relation to silence, what kind of relationship is it? (2009, 7)

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In other words, a beginning is implacably dependent on a background that never quite lends itself to, answers, a mode of address. That which takes place in the foreground, that which takes shape as a beginning, has always to remain in relation to, has always to provoke, the circumstances of its emergence. Said’s extensive interest in music, in terms of both his accomplished ability with the piano and his prodigious writings on musical performance, influenced what we can call his non-subject-centred phenomenological temperament. In his critique of phenomenology, Jean-Luc Nancy captures a sense of the subject as a feedback loop, whereby self-awareness takes place in relation to an echo resounding beyond one’s intention. For Nancy, selfhood is not defined as a knowing subject, the human subject as the measure of objective knowledge, but rather resounds much like what he calls a “diapason,” a tuning fork, a swelling sonority. Presence to oneself, he writes, involves an “encounter,” what Said himself would call an “occasion.” To quote Nancy, the phenomenal subject transpires as a “rebound,” as “a place-of-its-own self, a place as relation to self, as the taking-place of self, a vibrant place as the diapason of a subject or, better, as a diapason-subject” (2007, 16, emphasis in the original). Nancy’s critique of phenomenology here lends itself to Said’s swelling, sonorous notion of intention, understood as having to entertain emergent themes and insights, accommodations implicating human subjectivity itself as a process of learning, of exchange and renewal. “It is a question, then,” Nancy goes on to write, “of going back from the phenomenological subject, an intentional line of sight, to a resonant subject, an intensive spacing of a rebound that does not end in any return to self without immediately relaunching, as an echo, a call to that same self” (2007, 21). Said’s sense of intention, we could thus say, is open-ended, transpiring as an “appetite” (Said 1985, 12) for scholarly application, intellectual intervention, in respect of the “body of work” (my emphasis), its circumstantial livelihood: “With regard to a given work or body of work, a beginning intention is really nothing more than the created inclusiveness within which the work develops” (Said 1985, 12). In the next section, I want to explore the resonance of a “beginning intention” and “created inclusiveness” in terms of Said’s essayistic style of writing.

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The Essay as Beginning Intention While the essay is often adapted to articulate a critical fervour, within academia it is regarded as overly subjective. Here in Germany, I’ve come to learn, the essay tends to be frowned upon as impressionistic, lacking the more objective form of what is often referred to as the “article,” implying the convention of peer review. This is perhaps because the essay involves creative flourishes that render the written text more patchwork and meandering, circulating around a particular theme rather than tackling it head­on. It tends to lack the structure of a logical argument, with a clear introduction outlining primary and secondary themes, and a conclusion that summarizes the discussion and refines the main argument. The essay seems to begin and end abruptly, expressing an explorative style that may well read like a series of digressions for those expecting a more logical progression. Certainly, Said’s own style of writing encompasses an explorative momentum, articulated through what seem like meandering digressions that at times appear as unlikely juxtapositions. Arguably, he became more conscious of this digressive and juxtapositional style when in the early 1990s he began to cultivate a notion of “late style,” culminating in his posthumously published book on the theme (2007). Said picks up the term from Adorno’s writing on music, a fragment titled “Spätstil Beethoven,” and otherwise discusses his eccentric autobiographical text Minima Moralia (Adorno 1996). The aphoristic style and fragmentary form of Adorno’s book—composed as a haphazard series of short reflections on music and literature, dedicated to his Frankfurt School colleague Max Horkheimer—incorporates dissonance and digression to avoid any sort of conciliatory conclusion. As Said (2007) makes clear in his chapter on Jean Genet, late style exercises a tension that cannot be relieved by a theoretical gesture of reconciliation but explored through a juxtapositional, discontinuous momentum.7 A good example of discontinuity, juxtaposition, and digression in Said’s style of writing is his late (late, in both senses of the term) essay “On Lost Causes,” first published in 1997. Here, he weaves in and out of what for an inattentive reader might seem like a disconnected series of literary, cultural, social, and political references. In his discussion Said 7  Adapting the French term dérapage (slipping, sliding) to describe Said’s style of writing, Veeser (2010, 45–47) makes much of Said’s antipathy to conclusions.

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moves from Antonio Gramsci to Alfred Tennyson’s epic poem Ulysses, from Gamel Abdel Nasser to Gustave Flaubert’s Education Sentimentale, from George Lukács’s Theory of the Novel and Don Quixote to Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and then from Walter Benjamin to Yasser Arafat, winding up with Adorno immediately following a discussion of the PLO and Palestinian resistance. However, his essay achieves not so much a difficult balancing act but rather demonstrates the dissonant style that came to inform his late work more self-consciously. A primary theme of “On Lost Causes,” to be sure, concerns hope, which Said fashions in terms of the value of maintaining a record of a lost cause as counterpoint—a contrast of gains and losses. While he deploys an array of literary and philosophical references, his main subject is the unenviable Palestinian political predicament in the wake of the Oslo Accords of 1993 when Yasser Arafat presented himself on the lawns of the White House in the United States of America to sign a peace plan with Israel. Critical of the Palestinian leadership for agreeing to the Accords, Said laments not so much a lost cause for Palestinian resistance but rather how no mention was made of a Palestinian history of “loss and sacrifice.” As he writes: Arafat also now represented the cancellation of a heritage of loss and sacrifice: his White House speeches, for instance, were profuse with gratitude for Israeli and American recognition, and never once mentioned the land his people had permanently lost, the years of suffering under occupation and in the wilderness, the immense burdens assumed on behalf of the PLO by people who had thought of what they were doing as legitimate support for a just cause. (2001f, 551)8

Said’s essay reads more like a lament than a critical exposition, although pulsing through its melancholic rhythm he encourages hope as both a constructive recovery of the past and an effort to anticipate a future not defined by deference to doctrinaire political accommodations. For my present purposes, as I said above, “On Lost Causes” demonstrates Said’s essayistic style of writing, more specifically, the phenomenological temperament of this style, its nafssiya. While he never wrote at length on the form of the essay, he did make many casual remarks on the  The acronym PLO stands for Palestinian Liberation Organisation.

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theme. These occasional references suggest an opposition between the “essayistic” and “doctrinal,” the “performative” and “systematic” (Said 2001b, 170), or else the fragmentary and holistic. By “performative,” or else “critical performance”—terms he evokes in his essay on one of his early intellectual mentors, the autodidactic literary critic R. P. Blackmur (Said 2001e, 247, 267)9—he means that critical writing is not exhausted by its descriptive endeavours but is itself a force to be reckoned with. In contrast to detached observations, the essay resonates as an exercise of tracking the significance of themes arising through the practice of writing, always taking place in specific circumstances, institutional empowerment, and personal situation. In his introduction to his Reflections on Exile collection of essays, he writes about another early mentor, the Marxist literary critic Fred Dupee, as having “encouraged” his approach to “the essay as a way of exploring what was new and original in our time regardless of professional hobbles” (Said 2001, xiii).10 There have been only a few writings that directly address what is often referred to as “the form” of the essay, a description that sits somewhat uneasily with the mostly non-formulaic exercise of essay writing. One famous contribution came from the young, pre-Marxist Georg Lukács, in his introduction to his early volume Soul and Form, (1974)11 a slim collection of literary essays he had previously published in various journals, in the first decade of the twentieth century. His introduction is titled “On the Nature and Form of the Essay: A Letter to Leo Popper.” There, he steers a course between what he refers to as “scientific exactitude” and “impressionistic freshness” (1974, 17). The practice of essay writing, he suggests, bears witness to the transitory, perhaps transformative, nature of self and other, subject and object. In this fashion Lukács inaugurated a reflective notion of critique that lies between “science” and “art,” between the systematic ordering of knowledge and “literary imagination” (Lukács 1974, 2). Between “soul” and “form” the essay, for Lukács, is composed as a restless engagement with limitations, with that which either circumscribes the indeterminacy of life or else makes no effort to explore the possibility of giving form to such indeterminacy. In the wake of the modern, 9   For Blackmur’s influence on Said, see Brennan (2021, 64–70); and Vandeviver (2019, 88–99). 10  The volume as a whole is dedicated to Dupee. 11  The book was first published in Hungarian in 1910.

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post-­ Renaissance differentiation of science from art, the essay seems incongruous, an excess escaping the systematic logic of scientific exactitude and the sublime effects of aesthetic form. Where science inscribes causality into relations between objects and between events, and art lifts restlessness into solemn destiny, the essayist’s striving to address life and livelihood acknowledges, critically foregrounds, limitations. Hence, “The essay can calmly and proudly set it fragmentariness against the petty completeness of scientific exactitude or impressionistic freshness” (Lukács 1974, 17). Indeed, Lukács makes a virtue out of what he calls the “provisional” and “occasional” characteristic of the essay. He expresses this with a metaphoric allusion to travelling on a road whose end does not amount to a “presumptuous tautology.” Rather, “the longing for value and form, for measure and order and purpose” (1974, 17) cannot be fulfilled once and for all but remains provisional. Thus, conclusions are attuned to a certain arbitrariness, not because they are subject to a wilful point of view but because they are caught up in a rhythmic movement that exceeds conceptual closure. Although he was a keen reader of Lukács, I don’t think that Said was acquainted with his earlier writings. He tends to reference the Hungarian’s more famous Theory of the Novel (1971a), especially the modernist notions of irony and his famous post-epic concept of “transcendental homelessness,” as well as, to be sure, his great work History and Class Consciousness (1971b). And while, in respect of the earlier Soul and Form, Said would have been uncomfortable with Lukács’s failure to evoke the social conditions or cultural conventions (in other words, power and authority) towards which the essay aims its critical force, he would have otherwise found congenial how, for Lukács, essay writing arises from circumstances of life, energized by the effort to connect critique to, as he says, “life as lived” (Lukács 1974, 13). In this sense, while he commends Plato as “the greatest essayist who ever lived,” Lukács lays more emphasis on the way in which Socrates “lived” the problematics he addressed. In other words, we can say, Said shared this passion by which theoretical issues arise from an effort to fashion experiences of life (such as a “colonial education,” we can say) into themes that can be addressed and discussed. What we could call the early Lukács’s non-Platonic Platonism involves a critical effort to treat ideas not as other worldly standards by which to pronounce sensory impressions of life as inauthentic but rather as modalities of multiple reference. Lukács’s passing allusions to Schopenhauer (a figure whose notion of “will” influenced Said’s book on Conrad) suggest

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his interest in situating truth not according to an objective analytic but, interestingly, in respect of desire and will. This suggests a non-­ correspondence notion of the force of truth not so unlike the epistemic, affective phenomenological contours of Orientalism.12 This is not to deny the value of verification towards stabilizing knowledge of the world. It is rather to note how knowledge transpires according to modalities of life, embodied orientations of self and circumstance. Hence, as the young Lukács insists, with emphasis, “Form is reality in the writings of critics; it is the voice with which they address their questions to life” (1974, 8). While this “reality” bears a “mystical moment of union” between soul and form, between the force of life and the force of comprehension, like “voice” it resonates beyond analytical terms of reference. This is because, for the essayist, “destiny” emerges as the “possibility of reshaping” life experience, “creating it anew” (Lukács 1974, 8)—activating a beginning, we could say. Lukács’s allusion to voice is in itself suggestive of the phenomenological temperament embedded in his discussion, in the sense that the resonant, and otherwise wavering tonality of voice bears a sense of trepidation (one of the essays in his collection is indeed on Kierkegaard), of unanticipated scenarios, of anticipation as itself a scene. In this way voice can be regarded as a call, whose performative significance emerges in relation to a potential response. I borrow this notion of “call” (with all its Althusserian overtones) from the Lacanian critic Mladen Dolar. Distinguishing between “command” (the symbolic) and aesthetic pleasure (the imaginary), he suggests a “third level” of voice as a “blind spot” (Dolar 2006, 4). Directed towards eliciting a response, a call cannot predetermine how the response will be articulated. At the same time, the significance of the call, the way in which a call takes shape and orientation, emerges in and through a response. A performative notion of voice places emphasis on how it resonates as a practical application of self in relation to others whose bearing has consequence for livelihood. In respect of the essay, this means that writing involves a transitive momentum, opens up the possibility of a dialogue. The ethical import of the essay, we can additionally say, concerns not so much its adherence to specific rules of articulation, conduct, and observance but rather how it works to situate responsibility as a process 12  As Lukács writes, “It is simply not true that there exists an objective, external criterion of life and truth” (1974, 11).

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engaging capacities to be responsive. While, as I mentioned above, Said would have been uncomfortable with the young Lukács’s failure to situate his deliberations with reference to social history, he would have agreed with the way in which for Lukács the essay involves a creative momentum—a beginning intention, we can say. Further, Said would have also found attractive the Hungarian’s allusions to what he terms “life,” “life-­ problems,” “life-mood,” “the force of life,” “transition,” and “human temperament.” Scholarly endeavour, in other words, is embedded in a life-world, is irredeemably worldly, is motivated by a scholar’s experience of the world, and an accompanying, responsive effort to render aspects of the world thematic exchanges of address and response. This inter-­ generative link between life and critique informs Said’s collection of essays in his The World, the Text, and the Critic. As he says: “Each essay in this book affirms the connection between texts and the existential actualities of human life, politics, societies, and events” (1991, 5). For both Lukács and Said critique in the essay is occasional. While the topics and issues an essayist deals with are broadened out to appreciate their contextual implications, they are never placed within an analytical scheme overriding their particularity. Thus, essays tend to be composed in a style of writing committed more to the new and fragmentary. Being occasional, the essay explores subject matter that could only be termed obscure by those forms of inquiry articulating a systematic mode of address. A sense of occasion, we can say, informs the essay’s own movement of critical inquiry. For it implicates a style of writing that is acutely aware of the transitory nature of both itself and its subject matter. It explores a mobile site where both its own language and the livelihood of subject matter develop through a form of interaction not unlike a conversation, where the eventuating significance of what is said or written reverberates long after what is actually articulated. Its writing is more like an exploration of a dialogue that resists any finality. The essay never begins from scratch but always intervenes in a dialogue already begun; it never ends but leaves off through a transitory exit. Attuned to livelihood—to the implications of being confronted with a comical, stereotypical image of self—the self-reflective, critical momentum of Said’s style of essay writing may well have emerged from that primordial, racist scene in which the young scholar “Ed Said” is faced with a Princeton reunion class in 1967. As he describes the scene in his “The Arab Portrayed” (1970), the members of the class were dressed in what was meant to mimic Arab robes and headgear, celebrating the Israeli defeat

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of the Arabs in the six-day war of June of the same year. I purposely use the name “Ed,” as this is how Said often found himself being addressed when he moved to the United States (Said 2000, 236)—a name that he wasn’t sure about how to embody in terms of his background, a name that he was never comfortable with. But my point here is that the essay that eventually emerges from the Princeton reunion incident, “The Arab Portrayed,” resonates as a response, a beginning, to his experience of racism in the schools and universities he attended in the United States and reverberates into a momentum concentrated in the writing, publication, and review of Orientalism. As I am presently arguing, Beginnings is part and parcel of this momentum. Its fervour is articulated through the explorative impulses of a form of writing, the essay, attuned to an affective phenomenology of racism. A significant aspect of this phenomenology, concerning the livelihood of textuality, is suggested by Said’s interest in language, a central theme in Beginnings (as I will discuss in the next sections). But this preoccupation, I want to point out, takes place not merely as a theme, but also as a practice, Said’s very own style of writing. Woven into his essayistic style is an awareness that language can only approximate, and never exhaust, the significance of what is said. As Merleau-Ponty has it, significations are never merely “discovered.” Rather, “touching on [ ] significations already present in us,” the writer “makes them yield strange sounds” (1973, 13). These unanticipated, less than ready-to-hand (to use a famous phenomenological term), potentially signifiable sounds resonate through transitory passages in which sense and sensibility, imaginary identifications, and symbolic attachments can never be exhaustively known but further explored as aspects of livelihood. “Nothing,” writes Adorno, specifically addressing the form of the essay, “can be interpreted out of something that is not interpreted into it at the same time” (1991, 4–5). For Adorno, essay writing implicates a verbal terrain in which signification is always “incomplete, contradictory, and fragmentary” (Adorno 1977, 126). An essayistic form of philosophy, for Adorno, its very “actuality,” incorporates “intention” as an emergence of significance, not a preformed outline. I have suggested that the essay incorporates what Said calls “a beginning intention,” though an intention having to entertain the unintentional, those unanticipated insights and themes emerging from emerging scenarios and the practice of writing itself. The word “intention,” to be sure, is pretty well central to Beginnings, announced in the subtitle of the book. It is, of course, an organizing term for phenomenology, according

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to the famous stricture that consciousness is always a consciousness-ofsomething, suggesting a constructive, rather than passive, attribute of knowledge production. This assumes that the signifiable contours of an object reflect the terms of reference directed towards it, directly answers the “call” through a constructive, responsive prism. And yet phenomenology strives to situate consciousness-of-something within the parameters of ontology, considering how knowledge transpires as an experience of being in the world. In this sense, knowledge is more akin to know-how, a practical exercise of gathering and employing capacities to get things done. Know-how is not merely an instrumentalization of knowledge but rather encompasses capacities to inhabit livelihood, inhabit one’s world meaningfully. As I discussed in my introduction, the gathering of capacities implicates differential and deferential circulations of resources, involving power, influence, and authority, mostly located within institutions (the family, the workplace, schools, etc), according to their hierarchies and the conventions they promote. Like human subjects, texts incorporate conventions underpinning relations of power and authority. Also like human subjects, they circulate through worldly circumstances, interact with their environments, work as cultural reservoirs, differentially embody and deferentially deploy certain material and imaginary resources. Said wants to account for the sentient dimensions of both the human subject and textuality, of both soul and form, to recall Lukács. Both the human subject and texts embody modalities of perception, a “labyrinth of incarnations” that Said attributes to Merleau-Ponty’s interest in the body as a relational site of perception. For Said, the French “philosopher of ambiguity” “demonstrates that we use our body to know the world; space and time are not abstractions but almost-entities that we haunt and inhabit” (Said 2001a, 8). Or, as Merleau-­ Ponty himself writes, in his efforts to rescue the conceptual value of intention and perception from Kant’s a priori, his obsessive trust in “general types,” and Descartes’s doubt, his obsessive distrust of the senses: “there is a significance of the percept which has no equivalent in the universe of the understanding, a perceptual domain which is not yet the objective world, a perceptual being which is not yet determinate being” (2002, 54). To be sure, for Said the rhythms of this “not yet,” the inchoate force of what Merleau-Ponty calls “almost-entities,” are not exhausted by conventions and institutional decorum. They involve critical reflection and application, as well as solidarity—modes of praxis striving to foreground imperious restrictions and activate lines of escape. Part of this praxis, I have

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been arguing, is to inquire into one’s cultural inventory, defamiliarize oneself from one’s embodied inventories, dabble in a hermeneutics of alterity,  in the process linking up with broader practices and narratives of resistance. For Said, the essay constituted an appropriate practice of writing by which to defamiliarize his sense of self from preconceived attributes, especially concerning his largely Western education, however enabling that education otherwise proved to be. At the same time, he sought to familiarize himself with his sense of being Palestinian, with the historical condition of Palestinians more generally. This writing practice includes taking note of interruptive, digressive lines of thought, rather than settling in the comforts of analytical conventions and established hermeneutic protocols. Said alludes to this recalcitrance in another of his dispersed allusions to the essay, where he draws an analogy to a performance of a piano recital. Neither, he suggests, can offer any finality, exhaust the possibilities for further interpretive performances, further applications of review. In an essay on Glenn Gould, he likens the essay to a “literary form” which, “like the recital, is occasional, re-creative, and personal” (2001d, 229).

Exile Before going on to discuss Said’s early and remarkably prescient critique of structuralism, I want to explore the possibility of relating the open-­ ended, self-reflective, digressive, and recursive style of the essay to his notion of exile. The theme of exile had much bearing on how he regarded his relationship to his scholarly work (teaching, writing, reading, and lecturing) through a lens of political and cultural displacement. For Said, exile encompassed both a political circumstance of physical displacement from the place one regards as home, as well as the loss of a narrative, or range of narratives, by which one maintains an imaginary sense of home, maintains memories of home. However, before getting carried away with a notion of exile as an ideal type of reference, as universally applicable, we need to recognize both Said’s existential location in the heart of Empire, in the United States, as well as his historically fraught Palestinian background. These two circumstances are fatefully linked—Said’s experience of colonization, the loss of Palestine as a homeland, and his journey into the heart of imperial power underpin his sense of being in exile, of being an exile. Many of Said’s intellectual mentors were exiles, such as Joseph Conrad, Theodor Adorno, Georg Lukács, Nobel prize nominee Faiz Ahmad Faiz,

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Eqbal Ahmad, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Erich Auerbach, and Mahmoud Darwish.13 Like Said, in one way or another they all share a difficult relationship to political culture and the fate of nationalism. And like Said, they spent much of their time at a desk, labouring through the task of writing. Interestingly, none of them was a systematic thinker, preferring to compose their works in shorter forms, such as essays, aphorisms, poetry, and short story. Temperamentally, they tend to approach subject matter as a developing terrain of literary and critical application, by which the practice of writing involves a restless effort to trace the emerging contours of a mode of address. The restlessness woven into their work derives not so much from a failure to bring about some form of conceptual closure, but from their fragmenting experience of the world, their experience of history as a scene of loss and potential renewal. In his famous 1984 essay on exile—the one he later chose, only a few years before his passing away, as the title of his collection of essays, “Reflections on Exile”—Said describes exile as an experience of fracture, a breach, a disruption of social, cultural, and political continuity. The term he uses is “rift,” an “unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home” (2001c, 173). However, as the term “rift” suggests, exile for Said is not merely about loss but also concerns an opening, or a beginning, an opportunity for a transformative mode of self-awareness and creative application. Hence, from the beginning of his essay, Said wants to distinguish his notion of exile from a romantic lens steeped in a nafssiya of loss, a melancholic temperament finding solace through a withdrawal of self from the world. Related to this is his critique of a tendency to render exile a literary trope of aesthetic identification, which, he writes, “is to banalize its mutilations” (2001c, 174). So that, while recognizing the significant experience of exile in the work of poets and critical thinkers, Said strives to note the sheer volume and desperation of displacement in the twentieth century: “exile,” he writes, is irredeemably secular and unbearably historical; [ ] it is produced by human beings for other human beings; and [ ] like death but without death’s ultimate mercy, it has torn millions of people from the nourishment of tradition, family, and geography. (2001c, 174) 13  Said’s book Culture and Imperialism is dedicated to Eqbal Ahmad, while Orientalism carries a dedication to Abu-Lughod and his partner Janet Lippman Abu-Lughod.

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Said takes account of the displacement of populations, of refugees and émigrés, especially the Palestinians, though also Armenians. He mentions Paris as a place not only of “cosmopolitan exiles” (2001c, 176), but also of disenfranchised migrants and refugees, “undocumented,” he says, “without a tellable history.” He mentions Beirut, which until 1982 was a lively location for Palestinian writers, intellectuals, and activists, as well as, to be sure, many Palestinian refugees who, still now, live in the camps of the capital, not to mention those of north and south Lebanon. He recalls one night in Beirut at a restaurant with his friends Eqbal Ahmad and Faiz Ahmad Faiz, when the latter spontaneously recited poetry, which had to be translated for Said’s benefit. He mentions the plight of a fellow Palestinian, Rashid Hussein, a translator who lived in the United States, working in the office of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation at the United Nations in New York. Said recounts another friend, an Armenian, whose parents were exiled from Eastern Turkey after their families were massacred. Hence, for Said, exile was not an abstract notion in the service of a theory of displacement, but both an existential, physical experience and creative awareness by which such experiences are rendered palpable, narrated, and shared, potentially underpinning possibilities for solidarity. In other words, exile encompasses both loss and the potential of a “beginning intention” to recuperate loss and embark on articulating a creative response. To quote a much referenced passage from Said’s essay on exile (with all its Adornian overtones): “The exile knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional. Borders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory, can also become prisons, and are often defended beyond reason or necessity. Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience” (2001c, 185).14 In terms of a “beginning intention,” exile comes to be articulated as a modality of self-awareness emerging through reflection on assumptions and attachments, “working through” them, Said writes with emphasis, “not by rejecting them” (2001c, 185).

14  For the secondary literature discussing Said’s notion of exile, see Pannian (2016, 68–77). For an interesting development of the notion in terms of “exilic criticism,” in respect of Said’s influence on literary scholarship in America, see Mackenthun (2014).

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This sense of “working through” involves more of a Verwindung, than an Überwindung,15 a reflective undergoing, rather than an abstract form of self-centred overcoming. Boundaries and borders are not overcome, transcended once and for all, but remain porous, open ended. Corridors and passages themselves don’t merely constitute anonymous crossings in between one border and another, one place and another. They rather transpire as creative sites of transition, similar to the explorative momentum of a beginning intention in the writing of essays, whose “boundaries are not only blurred but caught in a sort of perpetual mobility: no fixed sender, no unified subject or themes, and finally, no definite addressee” (Bensmaïa 1987, 89–90). In the closing pages of his essay on exile, Said evokes his notion of “contrapuntal,” a concept that he developed throughout the 1980s, which later played an important role in his Culture and Imperialism (1994a) of the early 1990s. Here, in his essay on exile, the concept provides a way in which to appreciate what he calls a “nomadic” and “decentered” experience of place, of being out of place. Contrapuntally, being out of place should not be understood as a movement between the familiar and strange, between the habitual and unfamiliar. For the exile, one’s sense of home comes itself to be estranged by an experience of the new environment. This experience brings about a heightened awareness of the conventionality of language, culture, and form—an awareness that then extends to the old. Said calls this a “plurality of vision” and continues: “For an exile, habits of life, expression, or activity in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment. Thus both the new and the old environments are vivid, actual, occurring together contrapuntally” (2001c, 186). A beginning intention, the essay itself as a practical application of a beginning intention, can be regarded through Said’s contrapuntal lens of exile, through the recursive counterpoint of what he calls “contrapuntal juxtapositions” (2001c, 186). I mentioned John Berger above and want to conclude this section by evoking another one of his essays on the production of art, “The Basis of All Painting and Sculpture Is Drawing” (2018a).16 Discussing his practice 15  An important concept for Friedrich Nietzsche, concerning his idea of “overcoming,” his critique of the “afterworldsmen,” the propensity of the “despisers of the body” to worship ideal associations (Nietzsche 1969, 58–63 and 136–139). For a discussion on the difference between Überwindung and Verwindung see Vattimo (1988, 52). 16  The essay was first published in 1960.

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of drawing, Berger muses over the white page coming to be transformed into a three-dimensional environment as his lines and smudges provide volume, animating the flat surface into varying contours and rhythms, figurative movements drawn not merely in their actuality, but in their taut potentiality. As he says, “A line, an area of tone, is important not really because it records what you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see” (2018a, 27). Although he refers to drawing, rather than writing, Berger’s dynamic notion of the force of a graphic exercise of expression lends itself to appreciating Said’s notion of a beginning intention, particularly in respect of the juxtapositional style of his essays. Berger focuses his reflections on a human figure he sets out to draw. He writes about his inability to decide whether the reposed figure that begins to take shape in his drawing is caught in an act of getting up from the floor or else is happy to be held down. The interesting point, to be sure, concerns his efforts to somehow suggest—through line, smudge, and shade— the figure’s capacity for movement, what he refers to as its “energy,” the “energy of the pose” (2018a, 28). His reflections could well pass as a description of a sculpture by Rodin who, while working, much preferred that his models move around his studio, rather than remain fixed in one pose or another. Similarly seeking the directional force or propulsion of the figure’s repose, the “tension of his body,” Berger continues: “My first lines had to express that; had to make him stand like a skittle, but at the same time had to imply that, unlike a skittle, he was capable of movement, capable of readjusting his balance if the floor tilted, capable for a few seconds of leaping up into the air against the vertical force of gravity” (2018a, 29). In other words, for Berger, his work on the drawing has value as a beginning intention, has value to the extent that he depicts not so much the figure in isolation from its surroundings, according to the use of outline to contain its form, but rather in respect of a relational matrix by which the figure maintains a capacity to respond to its circumstance, respond to unanticipated scenarios, to eventualities.

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Said’s Critique of “Linguicity” An integral impulse of Said’s nafssiya in Beginnings concerns how, with his reading of Vico, he developed an interventionist practice of scholarship that henceforth would inform his subsequent work.17 As I mentioned above, much of the secondary literature on Said tends to confine the interventionist impulses of his work to Orientalism. This underestimation has the adverse effect of writing off Beginnings as a purely theoretical exercise of teasing out the implications of poststructuralism for the study of literature, Said’s primary field of study. This oversight fails to take seriously how in the wake of the 1967 Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands beyond the 1948 boundaries, which is to say in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Said was grappling with the methodological contours of interventionist scholarship. A primary aspect of his grappling had to do with developing a dynamic application of the interconnections between text and context. One can sense his dissatisfaction with what he regarded as the unworldly study of literature and culture in his essays around the early 1970s. In a review essay on Geoffrey Hartman’s Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958–1970, for example, he begins by observing that contemporary literary criticism tends to discount context as lying “outside” the resonant verbal performance of a text. “Verbal functions more or less ‘inside’ language,” he writes, “play the roles previously assigned to history, society, and the general culture, for these three have generally been thought of as being ‘outside’ points of reference” (1971a, 934). For Said, Hartman’s efforts to move “beyond formalism”—beyond, this is to say, the strictly formal, constructivist contours of textuality and literary language—failed to adequately provide a dynamic, relational view of history and context, of literature embedded in and circulating through history and circumstance: “At bottom Hartman doesn’t seem willing to move his criticism from the level of a specific text, through the disruptive social element, then finally into historical complexity” (Said 1971a, 942). Hartman’s “critical shortcomings,” Said asserts, betray his propensity to remain “inside the poetic world” (Said’s emphasis), an inclination that amounts to an unworldly practice of literary criticism, an uncircumstanced, unworldly application of criticism that, methodologically, fails to go “beyond formalism.”

17  In a late, posthumously published essay, “Living in Arabic” (2004), Said again mentions how Vico was “such an important figure” for him.

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While pointing out what he felt to be the limits of Hartman’s book, Said himself doesn’t quite articulate an alternative. Clearly, he was interested in how literature—as well as its studied appreciation, literary criticism—circulates in and through historical contexts, circumstances replete with certain modes of authority, production, distribution, access, reception, and response. However, he doesn’t provide alternative terms of reference, or else alternative methodological applications. One feels that Said, in 1970, is stumbling around,18 working on the writing of a number of essays that will eventually constitute the publication of Beginnings,19 which will provide methodological contours for his interventionist notion of critique. His positive reference to Foucault’s L’Ordre du discourse,20 which he describes as providing “an adequate regard for the difficulties of history and literature together” (1971a, 942), is made casually, as a passing comment. However, in what reads like the burgeoning seed of the creative matrix informing Beginnings, on the last page of his review of Hartman he references Vico, in the original Italian. He points out that while Hartman’s interpretation of fiction remains too text centred, on the other hand, his discussion of poetry is more lively, “making new texts” of the “poetic texts” he addresses as an interpretive practice of criticism. For Said, literary criticism should not be limited to an exercise of analytical dissection, to ideal types and accompanying generic classifications. It should rather be methodologically nomadic, responsive to creative departures—to literature, as well as the study of literature, as a context-­ bound range of inchoate scenarios. His work towards Beginnings can be contrasted to Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, first published in 1957. Frye’s “anatomy” was devised as a “systematic structure of knowledge” in the field of literary criticism, a field he thought was “badly in need of a coordinating principle, a central hypothesis which, like the theory of evolution in biology, will see the phenomena it deals with as parts of a whole” (Frye 1971, 16). Said briefly discusses Frye’s Anatomy in the 18  This uncertainty on Said’s part is reflected in his somewhat vague choice of words, such as “disruptive social element” and “historical complexity.” 19  In his later preface to the 1985, second edition of Beginnings, Said mentions that the material eventually collated into the book was written in the late 1960s and early 1970s. 20  This is the title of the lecture Foucault gave in Paris in December 1970, published in both French and English the year after. The English version was included as an appendix to Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972). That Said references Foucault in just about the same year in which his writings are published is an indication of how closely he was following his work.

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last pages of Beginnings and not altogether unfavourably. However, against the “decentering,” “nomadic,” “provisional” “methodological vitality” of knowledge production envisioned by “Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze” (Said 1985, 376, emphasis in the original), the “need in Frye’s theory for a center” amounts to a paradigmatic typology that Said found uncongenial, too systematic. Another publication of his at the time is a rather scathing review (Said 1972) of Ihab Hassan’s book (1982, first published in 1971) on the burgeoning field of “postmodernist literature.” Said begins with a discussion of how literary criticism rarely provides a reflective account of its motivations and only addresses Hassan’s book roughly halfway into his review. As in his earlier essay on Hartman, he references Foucault’s L’Ordre du discourse approvingly. Foucault’s “method,” he claims, includes “systems of exclusion and inclusion, notions of authorship, sayability, identity, repetition” (Said 1972, 5)—although he makes this observation with the same passing tenor that leaves a reader struggling to appreciate the significance of Foucault’s work for him. However, along with his discussions of Barthes, Northrop Frye, Lionel Trilling, and other notable critics, there is a central argument running through Said’s review, an argument that was simmering away as he was working on Beginnings. This is outlined by the title of his essay, “Eclecticism and Orthodoxy in Criticism,” terms that will be transfigured into “innovation” and “repetition” in his book. He gains these terms from R. P. Blackmur, whom he quotes for an epigraph to his review: “Our eclecticism is our only revenge upon our orthodoxy.” Said’s developing notion of a “beginning intention,” we can say, grows out of the tension between innovation and repetition, a tension informing his interventionist notion of scholarship as practical application, rather than abstract reflection. The “new vitality” he evokes, while demonstrating its indebtedness to an established repertoire of intellectual application—“a kind of guild consciousness of criticism, taught, handed­on, preserved”—would not be “uncircumstanced” (Said 1972, 2) or, in his later language, would not be unworldly. However, not having yet read, or perhaps not having yet digested, Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (first published in 1969  in its original French), the missing piece of the puzzle remained vacant. This missing piece concerns Foucault’s notion that the force of knowledge is located neither in mind nor in structure but involves certain modalities of production, collection, storage, circulation, and related practices of subject formation. Amounting to a cultural archive, such modalities thrive as

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circulations and exchanges of livelihood, capacities to inhabit life-worlds by embodying culture as hermeneutic repertoires. I will return to this rather quiet phenomenological dimension of Foucault’s work in the next chapter. For now, I want to hazard the suggestion that Said left out a discussion of phenomenology in Beginnings simply because he wasn’t sure what to do with it. Having read Foucault’s L’Ordre du discourse, it is not so difficult to appreciate how dissatisfied he became with his earlier application of phenomenology in his book on Conrad, which tends to emphasize a somewhat wilful sense of consciousness and mind (as I discussed in my introductory chapter). At the time Said, perhaps, had meant to distance himself from psychological studies of Conrad.21 However, once he discovers Foucault’s Archaeology, his emphasis on “mind” and “consciousness” will be reviewed, the former dropped altogether, the latter coming to inform conceptions of “critical consciousness” and “secular consciousness.” The other significant notion Said developed in his work of the early 1970s—a notion that was nourished by Foucault’s approach to power and knowledge as productive, rather than repressive—is his view that the history and culture of literary production is enabling and not merely confining. In fact, Said’s more materialist understanding of culture—which later finds sustenance in the work of Raymond Williams22—begins here to take shape. To return to his review of Hassan’s book: “No,” he emphatically writes, “Hassan’s reference is not the reality of the enabling culture, its history and literature—he has an almost schematic contempt for them— but rather is a wholly verbal ambience created out of disembodied phrases. These phrases are intended by Hassan to indicate the presence of a tradition” (Said 1972, 6). Hassan, Said submits, ignores the “culture of circumstance,” a “semantic density” that is reduced to a caricature once the critic lapses into rhetorical extravagances, underestimating the lingering, enabling force of literature as material culture. In other words, “innovation” transpires as a hollow exercise of critique when it imagines that it

21  An example is Bernard Meyer’s Joseph Conrad, a Psychoanalytic Biography (1970). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970. Meyer’s study, first published in 1967, produced more of a psychoanalytic caricature of an acutely inhibited Conrad wrestling with his demons. This led another biographer to describe Meyer’s Conrad as “fragmented and shredded almost beyond recognition.” See Leo Gurko (1979, viii). 22  There is no mention of Williams in Beginnings. I discussed the influence of Williams on Said, especially concerning Orientalism, in the previous chapter.

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starts with a tabula rasa, which inevitably assumes some sort of origin rather than a beginning. In this respect, it is rather peculiar that in his review of Beginnings, another prominent North American literary critic, Hillis Miller, would misread Said’s notion of the enabling force of culture. While Miller notes how Said distinguishes his notion of beginning from a sense of origin, he evokes a somewhat existentialist purism. According to Miller, where an author’s innovative creativity must be modestly played down, “A beginning … starts from scratch” (1976, 6). Otherwise, while Miller appreciated Said’s affirmative notion of literary and cultural criticism, he confines his review of Beginnings to an exercise of what amounts to an unworldly approach to literary texts. In fact, in his preface to the second edition of his book in 1985, Said begins by taking Miller to task, rejecting his label of “uncanny criticism” (1985, xi). It is worthwhile to briefly visit Said’s preface, as it encapsulates the important bridge or nexus between Beginnings and Orientalism I am here trying to put in relief. Concerning this nexus, I find it somewhat peculiar that in a short four-­ page belated preface, penned almost a decade after the publication of Beginnings, Said would even give so much space to Miller’s notion of “uncanny criticism.” I say this not because Miller’s work isn’t compelling. Rather, in the wake of Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, The World, the Text, and the Critic, and as he was working on what would be eventually published as Culture and Imperialism, Said’s interests had by the mid-­1980s moved on from his skirmishes with literary criticism in North America. However, one significant aspect of such skirmishes is that Said had developed an almost acute impatience with the academic study of literature and culture, which he often referred to as a “guild,” as he does in this preface. As far as Said is concerned, Miller’s argument that, for uncanny critics, the very failure of logic and rationality in literary language is where interpretive understanding begins to arise underestimates how in Beginnings he was trying to set out a proactive, even “rational” approach: For in isolating beginnings as a subject of study my whole attempt was precisely to set a beginning off as rational and enabling, and far from being principally interested in logical failures and, by extension, ahistorical absurdities, I was trying to describe the immense effort that goes into historical retrospection as it set out to describe things from the beginning, in history. (1985, xi–xii, Said’s emphasis)

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Said was exceedingly impatient with what he viewed as a new formalism in contemporary literary criticism, with “its isolation of literature and ‘literariness’ from ‘the world,’ and its quasi-religious quietism” (Said 1985, xii). As far as he was concerned, this “guild practice” could only fail to appreciate the “historically grounded study” of Beginnings—a groundedness, I would suggest, located in the phenomenological tenor of his interest in how language, literature, and culture are inhabited—institutionally, socially, politically, as well as transgressively. Without a doubt, it was important for Said to rescue his book from a view that regarded it as a purely theoretical or rhetorical exercise. To my mind, what I otherwise find remarkable about his belated preface is that he saw no discontinuity between Beginnings and his subsequent work. As I mentioned above, Said penned his preface after The World, the Text, and the Critic. It is in light of this work, as well as his developing understanding of the circumstances in which he maintained a reflective view of his relationship to his work, that he concludes his preface by pointing out that one of the primary arguments of Beginnings lies “in that constant re-­ experiencing of beginning and beginning-again whose force is neither to give rise to authority nor to promote orthodoxy but to stimulate self-­ conscious and situated activity, activity with aims non-coercive and communal” (1985, xiv). Considering how Said adamantly regards Beginnings as continuous with his materialist approach to literary criticism, it is rather peculiar that, as I mentioned above, the book has tended to be neglected in the secondary literature on Said. As I have also suggested, in Beginnings Said moves away from a phenomenology restricted to conscious intention, which, to again reference Nancy, “does not concentrate [the] ear on musical resonance but rather converts it ahead of time into the object of an intention that configures it” (2007, 20). Attuned more to a phenomenology of perception, for Said intention involves applications of sense and sensibility, grounded in the resonating force of material practices. Emerging through this resonance, sense and sensibility are implacably inchoate, implicating a “subversion of authorial sovereignty in favour of the critic’s revisionary practice” (Bhabha 2005, 374). In his obituary salutation to Said, Homi Bhabha (another incorrigible essayist) perceptively alludes to what he calls Said’s “phenomenology of the exile” in terms of a “philological commitment,” which he describes as “politically progressive and temporally recursive; historically contextual because it is aesthetically contrapuntal; secular and worldly, its

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feet on the ground, despite its engagement with the provisionality of the present” (2005, 374, emphasis in the original). With Beginnings, then, Said developed an interventionist approach to the study of literature and culture, grounded in a material phenomenology of language and knowledge. Towards this, he strives to set out the methodological contours rather than theoretical terms of reference, by which literary and cultural criticism is practised in and through the creative force of language. Just as Freud grew increasingly dissatisfied with the propensity of the secondary literature to view his “the unconscious” as a hermetically sealed enclosure of instinctual forces,23 in Beginnings Said endeavours to appreciate the “vulnerability” (1985, 205) of a text to its circumstantial reading, to the tenor of its contextual responsiveness, to the phenomenological contours by which it provokes an interpretive beginning rather than encapsulating an origin—mythical, iconic, symbolic, instinctual, or otherwise (1985, 213–214). My comparative allusion to Freud is not coincidental. In Beginnings, Said is fascinated by the anti-paternalism of Freud’s motivations, his bypassing of “paternal originality” (Said 1985, 173) with which to secure his scientific rationale. Along with Freud’s decentring of human subjectivity as the primary locus of authorial intention (Freud’s notion that unconscious drives are just as effective as conscious application), Said regards the assumption of an origin as a “repressive central authority” (1985, 174). Here he finds commonality with Nietzsche, whose “distinctions between origin and purpose” correspond to his “distinctions between author (origin) and beginning intention (purpose and interpretation)” (1985, 175, Said’s emphasis). His important point, to be sure, is that verbal articulation amounts to a relational process in which the terms by which interpretation is practised are themselves in the process undergoing interpretation (the so-called hermeneutic circle). Consequently, what comes into relief as interpretive understanding, while motivated by a beginning intention, never adds up to what was intended. This is because statements, or 23  Hence his distinction of “Trieb” from “Instinkt,” drive or force from instinct. Related to this distinction is Freud’s subsequent “structural model” (dynamic would be a better description) of overlapping, interwoven agencies of Id, Ego, and Superego (Freud 1986), introduced in part to avoid the nature-nurture binary by which his “topographical” view of the unconscious had come to be regarded. Otherwise, one can note how in his book on dreams (1983), Freud first strives to methodologically distinguish his approach from conventions of symbolic analysis, conventions which overlook the role of what he called “the dreamwork.” Similar to Said, Freud was interested in processes.

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“dream-thoughts,” enfold the force of what Freud called displacement and condensation—roughly, metaphoric transfer and metonymic associations. Or more straightforwardly, euphemisms and substitutes that are less confronting for the maintenance of ideal identifications and symbolic mandates in relation to which subjectivity takes shape. While drawing on quite a few of Freud’s writings, there are four significant assemblages Said develops out of his reading. One of these, as I mentioned above, is Freud’s departure from a central authority, his “ceding [of] authorial paternalism” (1985, 181), eschewing an originating idea, author, or event by which to anchor the validity of his deliberations. Three important, prismatic elements of this departure from paternal authority are, we can observe, the same three that Said later finds in his reading of Gramsci: critical intervention, self-reflection, and circumstance. As Said quotes Freud: “The amount of psychical energy by which it is possible to reduce critical activity and increase the intensity of self-observation varies considerably according to the subject on which one is trying to fix one’s attention” (1985, 173). Fascinated by Freud’s focus on how dreams take the place of what words fail to represent—an assemblage that Derrida, in a famous essay on Freud, called “a certain polycentrism of dream representation” (1978b, 217)—Said developed an awareness of how critique requires an inventory of the cultural/psychic traces by which one has learned to become a subject of one’s world—a learning having to always find some sort of balance between conformity and transgression, denial and affirmation. The second, related assemblage concerns Freud’s appreciation of verbal and nonverbal performance, of language and image (including sound) as articulate and gestic fields of composite threads, as compounded traces of subject formation. This connects to the constellation-like, relational vigour informing Freud’s approach to signification, regarding “dreams from the very first as being of a composite character, as being conglomerates of psychic formations” (Freud quoted by Said 1985, 173). Freud’s method, we could say, consists of trying to reverse the process by which a dream is composed (narrated by the patient), using a “‘decoding’ method” (Freud, quoted in Said 1985, 173) to discover its composite characteristics, working back through the dreamwork (most notably, condensation and displacement). Considering the importance Said gives to this particular passage from the Interpretation, it is worthwhile quoting further from it. Freud writes:

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Our first step in the employment of this procedure teaches us that what we must take as the object of our attention is not the dream as a whole but the separate portions of its content … If … I put the dream before [a patient] cut up into pieces, he will give me a series of associations to each piece, which might be described as the “background thoughts” of that particular part of the dream. (Freud, quoted in Said 1985, 173)24

Additionally, as Said observes, Freud’s own analytical discussion of dreams transpires as a conglomerate of verbal formations emerging from the interaction between dreamwork and interpretive applications. He emphasizes Freud’s predilection for “verbal fragments,” relational conglomerates of both actual and inchoately potential modalities of signification. “Freud’s text,” Said writes, “is constructed like a palimpsest” (1985, 165). I emphasize modalities to note how for Freud and for Said’s developing notion of beginnings, whatever is identified as the object of signification works also as a subjectifying mode of orientation to the value of signification. This last assemblage, or thematic, will have a profound influence on Said’s orientation to a phenomenological, rather than strictly epistemological, notion of cultural value, especially as he learns to link it to his adaptation of Gramsci’s “infinity of traces,” what I have been calling an embodied repertoire. This phenomenological approach evokes the fourth assemblage I’m trying to put in relief. It concerns how, due to social conventions by which people learn to become subjects of their worlds, learn to inhabit their worlds meaningfully, “verbal fragments,” or else nonverbal modes of exchange and orientation, become  congealed in repetitive patterns of behaviour. Such patterns amount to something like hermeneutic capacities for recognition and identification, capacities that are never quite stable. Said’s discussion of Freud is compelling because of the way in which he turns Freud’s psychoanalytic discussion of dreams back on itself, teasing out the import not merely of Freud’s methodology, but of the hermeneutic implications of his methodology for literary criticism. As I have been arguing, an important observation in this respect is that for Said, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams doesn’t offer a theory, but rather a methodology, 24  The ellipses and parenthetical adjustment are Said’s. Interesting how the grammatical adjustment makes it sound as though the patient was cut up into pieces. But this of course is the point that Said is getting at: decoding a text requires a complimentary exercise of decoding oneself. For Freud’s quite succinct discussion of the methodological value of what he calls “decoding,” see his Interpretation of Dreams (1983, 169–180).

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terms of reference for the practical application of scholarship, not an abstract, meta-discussion of theoretical categories. Hence the important role played by Freud’s discussions of case studies in his book on dreams. While in Beginnings: Intention and Method Said marshals an array of scholars and intellectual applications, his primary interest lies in a practical notion of methodology. So that while his discussion of Freud may seem incongruous—when, for example, set comparably alongside Vico—his focus on how, for Freud, a decoding method entails a concentration on shifting “conglomerations” (Freud’s term), rather than schematic wholes, suggests the more sentient notion of method Said is striving for. As I mentioned in my introductory remarks above, Vico’s work provided the main impetus for Beginnings. Rejecting Descartes’s stricture that empirical knowledge is ideally substantive, “ruled” through the implementation of precise methods,25 Vico, Said notes, argued that the value of knowledge implicated circumstance, tradition, imagination, and, more deliberatively, intervention—a creative, inventive departure from accumulative historical processes and conventions, all the while acknowledging how one remains embedded (remains of the self) in the currents of such processes and dispositional circumstances. Describing Vico as “the prototypical modern thinker,” Said writes that he maintained “an unstraying obligation to practical reality and sympathetic imagination in equally strong parts” (1985, 349). His passion for Vico’s somewhat fleshy conception of historical knowledge, language, and etymology is evident on almost every page and not only because the notion of creative intervention informed Said’s notion of a beginning intention. Commenting on Vico’s The New Science, he writes: “Man’s world begins among stones, rocks, frogs, and cicadas … This is quite another world from Plato’s realm of forms or from Descartes’s clear and distinct ideas” (1985, 348). What Said terms “obligation” and “sympathetic imagination” encapsulate this notion of an inventive, critical intervention, beginning as a departure into a “significant process” of thought, reflection on oneself, and historical processes; beginning as this process itself rather than tied to an origin, an event fixed in time and place. Such 25  As Descartes imperiously declares in his Discourse on Method (1968, 43) “as there is only one truth of each thing, whoever finds it knows as much about the thing as there is to be known, and that, for example, a child who has been taught arithmetic, having added up according to the rules, can be sure that he has found out, as far as the sum he was examining is concerned, all that the human mind is capable of finding out.”

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takes place, transpires, nafssiyan, in respect of “circumstance”: “the obligation not just passively to continue, but the obligation to begin by learning, first, that there is no schematic method that makes all things simple, then second, whatever with reference to one’s circumstances is necessary in order to begin, given one’s field of study” (1985, 349, my emphasis). As I have earlier in this study observed, the word “circumstance” became an idiosyncratic staple of Said’s intellectual repertoire, flavoured with a phenomenological tenor, employed here in his discussion of Vico in a similar fashion to his discussion of Gramsci’s allusion to an “infinity of traces.” Although Said does not refer to phenomenology, his sense of “circumstance” as both a disposition of livelihood and the basis by which one intervenes in how livelihood is rendered significant, encapsulates a phenomenological notion of human subjectivity. Hence his notion of a beginning intention as a creative method by which “to write is to ‘know’ what at the outset cannot be known except by inventing it, exactly, intentionally, autodidactically” (1985, 349). Said’s choice of words here is telling, especially the resonant force they carry for his self-understanding. An autodidact is mostly someone who is self-taught, somewhat wilful in their choices of study and intellectual pursuits, temperamentally averse to formality and doctrine. With Said, the word autodidact will be subsequently transformed into his notion of “the amateur,” as against the “professional” or “expert.”26 This particular paragraph I am quoting encapsulates the kernel of Said’s book. The paragraph comes on the heels of his critical discussion of structuralism, focused in the main on French writers, such as the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the semiotic work of the literary and cultural critic Roland Barthes, the Marxist Louis Althusser, as well as the Swiss linguist Ferdinand Saussure, among others. In contradistinction to the static, formalist implications of structuralist methods (not the interventionist aspects, scholarly and otherwise, of their work, but what Said regarded as the debilitating consequences of their methodological assumptions), Said champions a “Vichian sense” of scholarship as “action,” whereby “knowledge” is valued to the extent that it “animates” a process rather than inscribed as an “already-achieved result” (1985, 380–81). Interestingly, in these final pages of his book, where he becomes bolder in his critique of “specialization” and “ideological professionalism,” Said references a study of phenomenology by Pierre Thevenaz, classically titled What Is Phenomenology?  See the fourth of his Reith lectures of 1993, “Professionals and Amateurs” (1994b).

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(1962).27 Although he doesn’t thematize phenomenology in this particular instance, it wasn’t far from his thoughts. Said was particularly struck by Thevenaz’s argument for “fusing together the moral will and the grasping of evidence” (Thevenaz quoted by Said, 1985, 380). With his interest in methodology, rather than theory, as an interventionist practice critically employed towards redirecting relationships between scholarship, personal disposition, and history, Said could only be dissatisfied with the inevitable unworldly structuralist emphasis on language as an order or system of semiotic research. Saussure’s decoupling of a word or sign—more correctly, the capacity of a word or sign to signify— from a purely referential or else representational medium was itself a major innovation in the study of language. At the same time, the arbitrary nature of a sign’s capacity to signify, while promoting a relational, non-­ substantialist scheme of signification, implicated a rather passive assumption of subjectivity. As Saussure describes what he calls his “first principle,” arbitrariness: The word arbitrary also calls for comment. It must not be taken to imply that a signal depends on the free choice of the speaker. (We shall see later than [sic] the individual has no power to alter a sign in any respect once it has become established in a linguistic community.) The term implies simply that the signal is unmotivated: that is to say arbitrary in relation to its signification, with which it has no natural connexion in reality. (de Saussure 1992, 68–69, emphasis in the original)28

It is not my intention here to digress into what would be a derivative discussion of what Derrida famously, not without some exaggeration, described as “the structuralist invasion” (1978a, 3), and Said refers to as “an invasion by language” (1985, 329), or “linguacentricity” (1985,

27  It is the only reference to Thevenaz’s study in Said’s book, made so quickly, it seems, that he forgot to include the place and date of publication, as well as the publisher. The book includes essays on Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre, as well as Merleau-Ponty, whose work had yet, in the 1960s, to be translated into English. 28  Saussure’s book, Course in General Linguistics, was first published in French in 1915, two years after Saussure passed away. Amazingly, the text was prepared by collating and editing the lecture notes of Saussure’s students. In my understanding of Saussure, I have benefited from Jameson (1974).

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336).29 My purpose is rather to better trace the phenomenological implications of Said’s critique of structuralism, his materialist, in some ways embodied, understanding of language, narrative, and textuality as sites of circumstance and social-biographical motivation. Said’s affective phenomenology, his interest in the circumstances and motivational impulses by which difference and repetition (Said references Deleuze approvingly), tradition and innovation, come to be thematized, is embedded more between the lines of his writing, rather than addressed directly. An example is the way in which he describes the structuralist deployment of “découpage,” which literally means cutting, division, or an assemblage of compartmentalized segments. Reducing the sensible to the order of the intelligible, the field of livelihood to an abstract system of signification, structuralism brackets out the messy motivational impulses that Derrida referred to as “play” (1978c). But Said’s choice of words is telling, suggesting something like a lobotomy, by which structuralism excludes the capacities of subjects to maintain an enabling, interventionist sense of self and circumstance. “Facing an enormous amount of detail,” Said writes in his critique of “linguicity”: the critic’s mind becomes a confident David going straight for the vulnerable spot in Goliath’s forehead. The critic cuts out a patch in the detail as a way of constraining the vast body of which it is a part, and he then focuses exclusively on the patch. Emotionally he asserts his mind’s undoubted sway over what seems to be a totally resisting mass of detail; morally he demonstrates his right to control it because he has a victorious tool, proven in the encounter. (1985, 324)

For the structuralists, questions of emotional and moral (dis)composure gain analytical purchase not in terms of how a subject articulates their significance but as they are delimited to the “patch of detail” Said alludes to. And while Lévi-Strauss, for example, regarded structural anthropology

29  Said references Derrida’s critique of structuralism, especially the next to last essay of Writing and Difference, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” In a telling turn of phrase, commenting on Lévi-Strauss’s efforts to “transcend the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible by operating at the outset at the level of signs” (Lévi-Strauss quoted by Derrida), Derrida writes: “the necessity, force, and legitimacy of his act cannot make us forget that the concept of the sign cannot in itself surpass this opposition between the sensible and intelligible” (1978c, 281, my emphasis).

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as a critical departure from evolutionist, allochronic30 models assuming imperious hierarchical differences between “primitive” and “civilised” social formations, he worked with what can only be described as an all-­ too-­rarefied assumption of “unconscious structure” (Lévi-Strauss 1963, 21).31 Once the subject is lobotomized, it becomes amenable to a Cartesian assumption of the body as a detachable mechanism, a vacant site for which the variable perception of wax, for example, has no consequences for how a person comports themselves, as well as reflect on the significance of their experiences, their memory. Again, there is no point in rehearsing what by now has become a standard critique of structuralism. For my purposes, as I said above, I want to put into relief the phenomenological temperament of Said’s discussion, especially where the theme of ontology—the Being of a subject, a text, an object; or more phenomenologically, the perceptual prisms by which self, text, and object transpire as subjects of their worlds—becomes significant for his discussion. Hence, as he writes on the heels of his critique of Lévi-­ Strauss: “Thus the structuralist substitutes order, or the structure of thought, for a Being that in classical philosophy had informed and nurtured thought” (B, 327). Nafssiyan, Said’s own intellectual and temperamental taste could only be averse to an epistemic regime that discounted the frailty, the inchoateness, of human subjectivity. Nafssiyan, he proactively linked this frailty to “exile,” a theme that, as I discussed in the previous section, later became significant for his understanding of himself and capacities for critical inquiry: “The solitary, crystalline perdurability we feel and know in a poem, the condition of its exile from the communal sea of linguicity, cannot be named by structuralism” (B, 338).

30  The term belongs to Johannes Fabian’s (2002) critique of linear models of temporality that serve to deny “coeval” attributes of social and cultural differences. 31  As Lévi-Strauss writes: “If, as we believe to be the case, the unconscious activity of the mind consists in imposing forms upon content, and if these forms are fundamentally the same for all minds—ancient and modern, primitive and civilized (as the study of the symbolic function, expressed in language, so strikingly indicates)—it is necessary and sufficient to grasp the unconscious structure underlying each institution and each custom, in order to obtain a principle of interpretation valid for other institutions and other customs, provided of course that the analysis is carried far enough” (1963, 21). In this scheme, which LéviStrauss more or less reasserts 15 years later in the second volume of his structural anthropology, any reflection on the cultural inventory embodied by the researcher is viewed as “interfering prejudices and preferences” (1977). For Said, of course, inventorying one’s prejudices and preferences is enabling rather than “interfering.”

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Being in the World: Between Beginnings and Orientalism My polemical intention is to demonstrate how Orientalism is and was a way of being in the world. (Said 1976, 47)

Structuralism and the emerging shape of poststructuralism splashed onto the North American academic scene in October 1966 when the John Hopkins University held the conference The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, organized by the university’s Centre for Humanities. The organizers of the conference had invited a number of prominent contemporary scholars working in French, such as René Girard, the phenomenologist Georges Poulet, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, the Hegelian scholar Jean Hyppolite,32 the Marxist Lucien Goldmann, and Jacques Derrida—among others from Europe and North America.33 A volume of papers and accompanying discussions from the conference was published four years later, and then again two years after that, in 1972 (Macksey and Donato). Said, still a young scholar, had attended the conference, although played no active role. Nevertheless, on the second page of their introduction to the volume the editors credit his essay of 1971, “Abecedarium Culturae: Structuralism, Absence, Writing” (1971b) for making a noteworthy response, “providing a valuable panorama … noting … the terrible paradoxes unleashed by the various rules which attempt to contain ‘linguicity’ ” (Macksey and Donato 1972, x). Indeed, Said’s essay, which he later included as chapter 5 of Beginnings, circulated at the time as an influential commentary on the significance of the work of Derrida, Foucault, and others that tend to be labelled as poststructuralist, such as Deleuze. An example comes from Gayatri Spivak, who in her remembrance of Said recounts how the editor of the publishing press that had contracted her to translate Derrida’s Of Grammatology sent her a copy of Said’s essay (Spivak 2005, 519). Interestingly, while the conference was meant to explore the relevance of French theory, particularly structuralism, for the academic scene in North America, it worked more to announce the emerging contours of poststructuralism, particularly through Derrida’s participation, who at the 32  Judith Butler discusses the influence of Hyppolite in the second chapter of their Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. 33  For an extended discussion of the conference, see Vandeviver (2019, 109–116).

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time had yet to become famous. His contribution is mischievously titled “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” presenting what turned out to be a formidable critique of structuralism, concentrated mostly on the work of Lévi-Strauss, and at the same time demonstrating his deconstructive methodology. However, what is interesting about his contribution is how early on in his paper he took sharp aim at the work of another French scholar whose absence from the conference must have been noteworthy. In his critique of structuralism, both historicist (developmental stages, a “history, a period,” he writes) and synchronic, Derrida forthrightly says: “This is why one could perhaps say that the movement of any archaeology, like that of any eschatology, is an accomplice of this reduction of the structurality of structure and always attempts to conceive of structure from the basis of a full presence which is out of play” (1978c, 248). While, to be sure, Foucault had not yet, in 1966, written his Archaeology of Knowledge, he had earlier in the year published Les mots et les chose, which is subtitled Une archéologie des sciences humaines.34 Derrida, it seems, was dissatisfied with Foucault’s compartmentalization of history into periods; not so much stages along a developmental continuity, but portions of history nonetheless, what Foucault called “ages,” however discontinuous they may be, concentrated more in epistemic shifts in the production of knowledge. Four years later, in a belated Foreword to the English version of his book, Foucault felt compelled to defend his argument and methodological classifications: “In France, certain half-witted ‘commentators’ persist in labelling me a ‘structuralist.’ I have been unable to get it into their tiny minds that I have used none of the methods, concepts, or key terms that characterize structural analysis” (1970, xv). I mention such skirmishes between Derrida and Foucault because Said, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, developed his work in part through an ongoing engagement with both. In an endnote to his discussion of Freud in Beginnings he references his indebtedness to Derrida’s essay “Freud and the Scene of Writing” (Said 1985, endnote 95, 392), which he had read in the original French. Otherwise, he finds congenial Derrida’s focus on the productivity of language as a shifting terrain of signification implicating conventions of grammar rather than a logical system of floating signs. Hence Derrida’s general critique of how speech, the spoken word, is regarded as more authentic than the written word, a critique aimed at a  The book was first translated into English four years later (1970).

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philosophical tradition that opposed speech and writing—“the humbling of writing beneath a speech dreaming its plenitude,” Derrida says (1976, 71). This “humbling,” Derrida argues, infects the work of Lévi-Strauss, whose rigid distinction between language and writing, between “peoples using writing and peoples without,” involves “an ethnocentrism thinking itself as anti-ethnocentrism” (1976, 120, emphasis in the original). Well acquainted with his critique of “phonocentrism,” Derrida, Said observes, “pulled apart and terrorized the conceptual glue of structuralism” (1985, 343). Foucault, whose archaeology of power and knowledge bore much influence on Orientalism, is in Beginnings treated to a lengthy commentary (Said 1985, 283–315). While his work became more valuable for Said than that of Derrida, in Beginnings he comes across as an ambiguous figure, sometimes placed within the structuralism camp (1985, 284, 315, 324), at other times distinguished from those he regarded as structuralists (1985, 328, 338, 339). However, towards the end of the book, Foucault’s reflections on the “intellectual’s role” in “fighting against the forms of power” (Foucault quoted by Said, 1985, 378) become more significant, which Said quotes favourably, almost with the same breath in which he alludes to “scholarship in the Vichian sense” (1985, 379). Hence, in these last pages of Beginnings, Said evokes a more proactive sense of intellectual inquiry, suggesting an interventionist sense of scholarship. “For the scholar or researcher,” he writes, “a beginning develops when the conditions of his reality become equal to the generosity of his, of everyman’s, intellectual potential.” This potential is located in the way in which beginnings “for the critic restructure and animate knowledge, not as already-achieved result, but as ‘something to be done, as a task and as a search’ ” (1985, 380). Interestingly, Said’s reference here is neither to Foucault nor to Vico, but to Pierre Thevenaz’s book on phenomenology I mentioned above (1962), which he must have been reading at the time. It is a somewhat peculiar reference with which to end his book, as it can be read to suggest his failure to more directly address the relevance of phenomenology for his argument in Beginnings. Beginnings is not the only place where Said clarified for himself his approach through a comparative discussion of the work of Derrida and Foucault. He elaborates on this in his essay “Criticism Between Culture and System,” where he allies himself closer to the work of Foucault. Concerning their respective approaches, “Derrida’s,” he writes with emphasis, “moves us into the text, Foucault’s in and out” (Said 1991,

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183). For Said, the difference between Derrida and Foucault lies in how the latter manages to maintain a sense of context, with distributions of power and knowledge as material circuits of subject formation. As he remarks on Derrida’s deconstructive preoccupation with textuality: “any method like that will finally be unable to get hold of the local material density and power of ideas as historical actuality” (1985, 212). For my purposes, the extent to which Said’s views of the work of Derrida are debatable concerns me less than appreciating how his discussions of both writers helped him to further clarify his approach to, as he says, the “material density” and “historical actuality” of textuality—a density and actuality implicating how texts circulate as cultural depositories, a density and actuality informing both Beginnings and Orientalism.

Bridging Beginnings and Orientalism I have been arguing that Beginnings constitutes Said’s developing capacity for the interventionist application of his scholarship. The interview he gave to the issue of the journal Diacritics—which, as I mentioned above, included a number of review articles on his book—provides a remarkable document to chart not only his growing awareness of the value of a critical methodology but also how his work embodies impulses of resistance. In the interview, he begins by distancing himself from what the interviewer calls a “critical avant-garde.” He does so by focusing on the work of Harold Bloom, who Said claims “nowhere takes account of the debt poetry owes to culture and history” (1976, 34). Not that he is altogether dismissive of Bloom’s literary criticism. Indeed, he quite appreciates his work, especially his well received notion of an “anxiety of influence” (Bloom 1997).35 However, Said is troubled by the way in which Bloom underestimates the material density by which influences between one writer and another are mediated by historical circumstance, circulations of literature as material, and imaginative resources. Hence Said’s long reflections on Bloom in the interview, which on the face of it may well seem overly wrought, though indeed provide him with a developing sense of what he begins to call the “worldliness” (1976, 39) of the production of literature and culture. Referring to criticism as

35  Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

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“praxes,” he describes what he was trying to do in Beginnings in the following terms: I was examining the way in which one launches himself from contemplation to a sort of worldly action, although I didn’t then (and don’t now) pretend for a moment that reading and writing are in themselves other-worldly; of course they’re not, but the question is how they are in the world, and how can they be in the world—a terrifyingly complex question. Much of the answer to that is left very implicit in the book, although the last chapter (on Vico) takes it up overtly. (1976, 39)

As far as Said is concerned, Bloom places too much emphasis on the transmission of literary influence from one writer to another, failing to take into account the institutions (such as journals and magazines, universities, publishing houses) in which such influence is embedded and, to maintain Said’s Foucauldian lens, circulates as processes of subject formation and orientation. Here, in 1976, one can see the impact on Said of Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge, which he evokes to support his observations on Bloom—“cultural history” constituting more influence than the “work of heroic, radical figures” (Said 1976, 34). To be sure, as I argued in an earlier chapter, in the introduction to Orientalism Said takes issue with Foucault’s underestimation of the imprints of individual authors. However, by this he means more the intertextuality of their cultural learning rather than their heroic status. For Said, an author’s biography constituted a relevant resource for critical inquiry. A third of the way into the interview, Said makes a slight detour, foregrounding his own biography or at least how his background conditions him to maintain a sense of the significance of history, circumstance, and political culture. He refers to Conrad’s short story The Secret Sharer, alluding to his own “two quite separate lives” (1976, 35). By this he means, on the one hand, his position as an academic, teaching and researching literature, and on the other hand his Arab background and his “political involvement.” He doesn’t provide any details but speaks more about how separate these two selves had become and how, to some extent, the divide between them is conditioned by the propensity of academia to remain aloof from questions of politics and power. Said mentions how this divide has become a serious issue for him. From the way in which he articulates the problem, it is obvious how his personal circumstance, his growing interest in his Palestinian background, is intertwined with his developing

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capacity to establish continuities between culture and politics, between the study of literature and institutional power. Interestingly, we could say that Said’s methodological interest in the historical circumstances by which an author, a writer, a scholarly critic is compelled to carve out a beginning intention can be applied to himself. This is to say that with Beginnings, Said pretty well practices what he preaches. For Said, Bloom’s notion of antagonistic influence between writers is valuable because it demonstrates a dialectic of interconnectedness and potentially resistant discontinuity between writers. However, where Bloom’s somewhat romantic approach limits his insights to writers (mostly “strong poets,” as he calls them) and their work, Foucault gives emphasis to interconnections between subject and institutional, if not social, formations. Said writes about “unceasing and meaningful interaction between forces—classes, nations, power centers, regions, whatever—seeking to dominate and displace each other” (1976, 36). In his contrast of Bloom and Foucault, he mentions his interest in “colonialism and imperialism,” in terms of historical forces and his own background. He speaks about his efforts to bridge these forces to his scholarly endeavours, particularly his preoccupation with literature and culture. Here, we can already see the leaps that Said will fashion in respect of his application of Foucault, as the latter tended not to have much to say about imperialism and colonialism. My purpose in discussing the interview is, as I said above, aimed towards demonstrating the continuity of Said’s thoughts between Beginnings and Orientalism. This is evident in the way the first half of the interview concerns the earlier book, while in the second half Said speaks more about his work on the latter, the bulk of which he, in 1976–1977, had already finished writing. He speaks about the force and power of “Western knowledge” over Islam which, despite poorly understanding the cultures and social livelihoods of the Orient, nevertheless constituted productive reservoirs of reference. Much of what he says in the latter parts of the interview encapsulates his argument and methodology of Orientalism, especially his interest in “the partnership between a discursive and archival textuality and worldly power” (1976, 41). At the same time, his allusion to, as he says, “the very life of texts in the world, their materiality, their capacity for the production of misery or liberation” maintains a bridge between Beginnings and Orientalism. This phenomenology of the text—of the way in which a work of literature circulates as an influential depository of cultural reference and value, affecting the contours of self and other awareness—simmered in

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Beginnings. In Orientalism it becomes more pronounced. My suspicion is that, despite his interest in the work of Merleau-Ponty, and the influence of existentialism on his book on Conrad, in Beginnings Said wasn’t quite sure about how phenomenology—which remained all too subject centred—could be applied to the livelihood of texts. Certainly, the influence of Foucault played a role in Said’s turning away from phenomenology, even though, as I am arguing in this study, his interest in the worldliness, the livelihood, the nafssiya of texts, artefacts, and human subjectivity is attuned to a materialist phenomenology. In the latter part of the interview he speaks at length about Frantz Fanon and mentions in passing Aimé Cesaire, two important anti-colonial writers. Said alludes to the “early work of Fanon,” mentioning the original French edition of his The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon 2001, first published in 1961). However, neither Fanon nor Cesaire is referred to in Orientalism. In Beginnings there is one very brief and rather puzzling reference to Fanon—“Fanon’s doctrine of imperialism” (1985, 373)— which tends to suggest more about Said’s unacquaintance with his work, let alone the implications of his writings for a phenomenology of racism (I discuss this in Chap. 6). Nevertheless, in the interview Fanon helps him to develop a notion of “resistance to colonial oppression” (Said 1976, 43). As an example he cites Gamal Abdel Nasser’s propensity to “attack colonialism in the native Egyptian dialect”—by which he meant the colloquial Arabic—“turning on Britain and France on his own terms” (1976, 43). Clearly, Said thought of his work on Orientalism in terms of resistance: My own work at present is focussed on situating, placing, materializing the discourse of Orientalism: revealing its structures, characterizing it as a language whose institutional and disciplinary presence eliminated, dis-placed the Oriental as human and put in his place the Orient Orientalized as specimen. I feel myself to be clearing the library of such possessing languages as those of Orientalism, making it possible for myself as an Oriental, and for other Orientals, to speak, using whatever language we feel we need to use. (1976, 44)36

My intention here is not to cover Said’s argument in Orientalism but rather to demonstrate how, in the very passion of this intellectual exchange in the Diacritics interview I have been discussing, he understood his work 36  In the spirit of this resistance, Said says much the same in his 2003 preface to his Orientalism (2003, xvii).

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as a practice of resistance, “an Oriental writing back at the Orientalists … writing for compatriots and colleagues about matters of common concern,” to quote the last lines of the interview (Said 1976, 47). In Orientalism itself, he occasionally mentioned history as a process of resistance. For example, when discussing the work of Hamilton Gibb: “That the history of modern Islam might be more intelligible for its resistance, political and nonpolitical, to colonialism, never occurs to Gibb” (2003, 279). No wonder that he was later somewhat puzzled and taken aback by one of the main criticisms of the book, concerning his failure to note how people subjected to colonialism responded to and reacted against their oppression. To be sure, when we consider his efforts in his Culture and Imperialism to account for voices and histories of resistance to colonialism and imperial rule, this criticism was not altogether unproductive. However, considering his efforts to render his “inventory” an enabling function of critical response, it is fair to say that while providing a bridge between Beginnings and Orientalism, the Diacritical interview constitutes Said’s ongoing understanding of his scholarly work as critical intervention.

References Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim, ed. 1970. The Arab-Israeli Confrontation of June 1967: An Arab Perspective. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Adorno, Theodor. 1977. The Actuality of Philosophy. Telos 31: 120–133. ———. 1991. The Essay as Form. In Notes to Literature, Vol One, ed. Theodor Adorno. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1996. Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life. Translated by E. Jephcott. London: Verso. Barenboim, Daniel. 2009. Music Quickens Time. London: Verso. Benjamin, Walter. 1992. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne. London: Verso. Bensmaïa, Reda. 1987. The Barthes Effect: The Essay as Reflective Text. Trans by Pat Fedkiew. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Berger, John. 2010. A Painter of Our Time. London: Verso. ———. 2012. G. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2018a. The Basis of All Painting and Sculpture is Drawing. In Landscapes: John Berger on Art, ed. Tom Overton, 27–32. London: Verso. ———. 2018b. The Moment of Cubism. In Landscapes: John Berger on Art, ed. Tom Overton, 113–140. London: Verso. Bhabha, Homi. 2005. Adagio. Critical Inquiry 31 (2): 371–380.

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Bloom, Harold. 1997. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New  York: Oxford University Press. Brennan, Timothy. 2021. Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Buck-Morss, Susan. 1979. The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno. Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute. New York: The Free Press. Butler, Judith. 1999. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 2013. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1994. What is Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. London: Verso. Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. ———. 1978a. Force and Signification. In Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1978b. Freud and the Scene of Writing. In Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1978c. Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences. In Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. de Saussure, Ferdinand. 1992. Course in General Linguistics. Translated by Roy Harris. Illinois: Open Court. Descartes, René. 1968. Discourse on Method and the Meditations. Translated by F. E. Sutcliffe. London: Penguin Books. Dolar, Mladen. 2006. A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge: MIT Press. Eddé, Dominique. 2019. Edward Said: His Thoughts as a Novel. Translated by Trista Selous and Ros Schwartz. London: Verso. Fabian, Johannes. 2002. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Fanon, Frantz. 2001. The Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin. Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock Publications. ———. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge and ‘The Discourse on Language’. Translated by A.  M. Sheridan Smith and Rupert Swyer. New  York: Pantheon Books. Freud, Sigmund. 1983. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by James Strachey. London: Penguin. ———. 1986. “The Ego and the Id.” In Sigmund Freud (Ed.), The Essentials of Psychoanalysis. Translated by James Strachey. London: Penguin, 439-483. Frye, Northrop. 1971. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Gurko, Leo. 1979. Joseph Conrad: A Giant in Exile. New York: Collier Macmillan. Hart, William D. 2000. Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture. Cambridge University Press. Hassan, Ihab. 1982. The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. Al-Hout, Shafiq. 2011. My Life in the PLO: The Inside Story of the Palestinian Struggle. Translated by Hader al-Hout and Laila Othman. New  York: Pluto Press. Hussein, Abdirahman A. 2007. A New ‘Copernican’ Revolution: Said’s Critique of Metaphysics and Theology. Cultural Critique 67, Autumn: 88–106. Jameson, Fredric. 1974. The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Structural Anthropology Volume 1. Translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. London: Penguin. ———. 1977. Structural Anthropology Volume 2. Translated by Monique Layton. London: Penguin. Lukács, Georg. 1971a. The Theory of the Novel. Translated by Anna Bostock. London: Merlin Press. ———. 1971b. History and Class Consciousness. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. London: Merlin Press. ———. 1974. Soul and Form. Translated by Anna Bostock. London: Merlin Press. Mackenthun, Gesa. 2014. Overlapping Territories—‘Exilic’ Readings: Edward Said and the emergence of Critical Empire Analysis in American Literary Scholarship. In Edward Said’s Translocations: Essays in Secular Criticism, ed. Tobias Döring and Mark Stein, 144–168. New York: Routledge. Macksey, Richard, and Eugenio Donato. 1972. The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1973. The Prose of the World. Translated by John O’Neill. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2002. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge. Meyer, Bernard. 1970. Joseph Conrad, a Psychoanalytic Biography. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Miller, J. Hillis. 1976. Beginning with a Text. Diacritics 6 (3): 2–7. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007. Listening. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1969. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin Books. Pannian, Prasad. 2016. Edward Said and the Question of Subjectivity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Plato. 1987. The Republic. Translated by Desmond Lee. London: Penguin.

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Said, Edward W. 1970. The Arab Portrayed. In The Arab-Israeli Confrontation of June 1967: An Arab Perspective, ed. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, 1–9. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1971a. What is Beyond Formalism? Comparative Literature 86 (6): 933–945. ———. 1971b. Abecedarium Culturae: Structuralism, Absence, Writing. TriQuarterly 20: 33–71. ———. 1972. Eclecticism and Orthodoxy in Criticism. Diacritics 2 (1): 2–8. ———. 1976. Interview. Diacritics 6 (3): 30–47. ———. 1985. Beginnings: Intention and Method. New  York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1991. The World, the Text, and the Critic. London: Vintage. ———. 1992. The Question of Palestine. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1994a. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1994b. Representations of the Intellectual. London: Vintage. ———. 1997. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. New York: Vintage. ———. 2000. Out of Place: A Memoir. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 2001a. Labyrinth of Incarnations: The Essays of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays, 1–14. London: Granta Books. ———. 2001b. The Future of Criticism. In Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays, 165–172. London: Granta Books. ———. 2001c. Reflections on Exile. In Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays, ed. Edward W. Said, 173–186. London: Granta Books. ———. 2001d. Remembrance of Things Played: Presence and Memory in the Pianist’s Art. In Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays, ed. Edward W. Said, 216–229. London: Granta Books. ———. 2001e. The Horizon of R. P. Blackmur. In Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays, ed. Edward W.  Said, 246–267. London: Granta Books. ———. 2001f. On Lost Causes. In Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays, ed. Edward W. Said, 527–553. London: Granta Books. ———. 2003. Orientalism. London: Penguin. ———. 2004. Living in Arabic. Al-Ahram Weekly, February 12–18 https://mlfcham.com/v1/ecrivains-­arabes/edward-­said/living-­in-­arabic. Accessed June 2016. ———. 2007. On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. New York: Vintage. ———. 2008. Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography. New  York: Columbia University Press.

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Spanos, William V. 2009. The Legacy of Edward W. Said. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2005. Thinking about Edward Said: Pages from a Memoir. Critical Inquiry 31 (Winter): 519–525. Thevenaz, Pierre. 1962. What is Phenomenology? Chicago: Quadrangle Books. Vandeviver, Nicolas. 2019. Edward Said and the Authority of Literary Criticism. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Vattimo, Gianni. 1988. The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-­ Modern Culture. Translated by Jon R. Snyder. London: Polity Press. Veeser, H.  Aram. 2010. Edward Said: The Charisma of Criticism. New  York: Routledge. Vico, Giambattista. 1975. The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico. Translated by Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin. Cornell: Cornell University Press. ———. 1999. The New Science. Translated by David Marsh. London: Penguin Classics.

CHAPTER 5

Giving an Account of Himself

When the “I” seeks to give an account of itself, an account that must include the conditions of its own emergence, it must, as a matter of necessity, become a social theorist. —Judith Butler (2005, 8)

Prelude As I have been arguing in this study, while in Orientalism Said was primarily concerned with compiling a genealogical inventory of the Oriental Other taking shape in the culture and scholarship, as well as brute force, of European colonialism and, latterly, North American imperialism, he was at the same time foregrounding and working through how he himself embodied aspects of this same inventory. Moreover, far from being limited to one personal outlook or another, Said understood this inventory to be culturally and politically contagious, shared by others. Thus his warning, just before his “personal dimension” section, to “readers in the so-called Third World” (Said 2003, 25), when he articulates one of his motivations: “My hope is to illustrate the formidable structure of cultural domination and, specifically for formerly colonized peoples, the dangers and temptations of employing this structure upon themselves or upon others” (2003, 25, my emphasis). Indeed, it is not too far-fetched to say that Said’s efforts to make an inventory of himself, the “Oriental subject,” inform the animus of his © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 N. S. Nikro, Nafssiya, or Edward Said’s Affective Phenomenology of Racism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51769-3_5

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book. “In many ways,” he writes, “my study of Orientalism has been an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals” (2003, 25, my emphasis). In what came to be billed as “the last interview,” recorded shortly before his death in 2003 (a quarter of a century since the publication of Orientalism) Said refers to the “animus” of his book in similar terms. When asked by his interviewer, Charles Glass, if he wrote Orientalism as “an Occidental or an Oriental,” he responds: “I don’t really know … but the driving force of the book … the animus of the book, derives from the tremendous gap I felt between these accounts of the Orient, that were Western accounts, from the outside, and my own experience. I mean, there was no correspondence between them at all” (Dibb and Glass 2003). Said’s personal take on “correspondence,” here, suggests both the methodological and nafsiyyan aspects of his book when we recall his uncertain sense of being both an Oriental and what he refers to as a “Western scholar.” However, the significant point is that Said felt not merely torn or split between two cultures and traditions—between the Orient and Occident, or East and West. For this would presuppose, Huntington-like, a clash of civilizations between two distinct, mostly homogeneous geographical territories and cultural attributes. Rather, as I pointed out in my introductory chapter, he located this split of self and circumstance as a relational prism bearing existential and intellectual consequences and responsibilities. In other words, rather than constituting ontological and/or psychological attributes, this split has always to “take place” (Agamben 2013, 2), to happen, to be recognized as a circumstantial happening, by which subjectivity takes shape, comes to cohere—or, indeed, becomes incoherent, fails to cohere—as a relational prism of responsiveness. In the introduction to Orientalism, Said employs the term “critical consciousness” (two words included in his quote from Gramsci), which will come to bear manifold conceptual threads running through his work of the 1980s. Besides foregrounding an archival or else archaeological nexus of power and knowledge informing scholarship (inspired by Michel Foucault), and a notion of “culture” as material textures of life and livelihood (inspired by Raymond Williams), critical consciousness for Said evokes a reflective awareness of an affective embodiment of conventional values and predominating, accommodating modalities of identification. In other words, the value of critique, as I have been suggesting, involves an

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unravelling or else a “critical elaboration” (another term included in the quote from Gramsci) of how one has learned to become a subject of (I return to this notion below) their world. This learning, Said always felt, takes place by responding to circumstance, fashioning a self by elaborating an inventory of self, in and through the constant flow of a stuttering narrative aligning self-awareness, motivation, and circumstance. While Said often wrote or, in interviews, spoke in binary terms about his sense of self emerging between national, ethnic, and civilizational identities—oriental and occidental, Western and Arab, Palestinian and American—he just as often evoked transcultural assemblages as well as economic and historical processes when referring to himself. Late in his memoir, when recalling visiting his family in Lebanon in the “fateful year” (2000, 268) of 1967, he writes about his family’s “peculiarly fractured status as Palestinian-Arab-Christian-American shards disassembled by history, only partly held together by my father’s business successes” (2000, 268). Earlier, in the first pages of his memoir, he writes about his childhood desire to have a more homogeneous sense of self: “I have retained this unsettled sense of many identities—mostly in conflict with each other—all my life, together with an acute memory of the despairing feeling that I wish we could have been all-Arab, or all-European and American, or all-Orthodox Christian, or all-Muslim, or all-Egyptian, and so on” (2000, 5). Writing his memoir in the 1990s—as he was entering the seventh and, as it turned out, the last decade of his life—about his childhood efforts to negotiate his overlapping identities, Said found it useful to explore what he called “the non-Edward part of himself” (2000, 4). However, this way of referring to himself was not meant to fix what we can refer to as, perhaps not so equally, an Edward part of himself. Rather, Said was more interested in developing an awareness of how his sense of being out of place was more heterophonic, made up of varying strands and attachments, though sharing a particular inventory. Hence, when in the introduction to Orientalism he writes about the lack of correspondence between Western accounts of the Orient and his own childhood, about his adolescent and adult experience of Jerusalem and Cairo, he does not mean that the “non-Edward part of himself” conforms to a fixed category of identity. He rather means that the binary assumptions informing the orientalist gaze amount to a self-serving, self-referential analytic. As he had responded to the question whether he wrote Orientalism as an oriental or westerner, Said realized that his undecidability, his “strange disjunction,”

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not only provided him with a capacity for critical awareness, but could be deployed to challenge binary terms of reference. Said’s notion of “critical consciousness” emerged through his efforts to situate his inventory as a methodological basis for interventionist scholarship. In his own words, “I have tried to maintain a critical consciousness, as well as employing those instruments of historical, humanistic, and cultural research of which my education has made me the fortunate beneficiary. In none of that, however, have I ever lost hold of the cultural reality of, the personal involvement in having been constituted as, ‘an Oriental’ ” (2003, 26). In referring to himself as an “Oriental,” Said points not only to the way in which he has been Othered through European colonial culture and education, but how through processes of othering he has come to embody what Du Bois in the very early twentieth century called “double consciousness,” or else “the veil” (Du Bois 1996). Similar to Fanon’s notion of “black skin, white masks” (Fanon 2008), Du Bois meant that black subjects in the United States had introjected an inferiority complex and internalized a White gaze upon themselves. As the Haitian poet René Depestre said in a discussion in 1967 with Aimé Césaire: “relationships between consciousness and reality are extremely complex. That’s why it is equally necessary to decolonize our minds, our inner life, at the same time that we decolonize society” (2000, 94). It is the phenomenological contours of this introjection Said is getting at when he warns others not to “employ this structure upon themselves.” For to employ this structure on oneself would not only maintain a relationship of subjugation but also render subjugation a psychological attribute, underestimating the social, cultural, and political dimensions of power. I intend to return to this racial schema of orientation and discomposure in the next chapter, where I discuss the terms by which Said’s work can be read to contribute to phenomenological studies of racism. For the moment, it is significant that Said articulates a sense of critical consciousness steeped in ambivalence, in a genealogy of humanistic scholarship that is both enabling and limiting, at least in respect of his intellectual pursuits. His humanistic education, this is to say, is at the same time a “Western education” or else what amounted to a colonial education he received in the English schools of his youth in Cairo. In Chap. 2, I referred to Said’s humanism as recursive, meaning that by reflecting on his inventory he did not assume a position untainted by the cultural reservoirs he singled out for critical discussion. In these last two chapters of my study I further explore this aspect of Said’s personal dimension and strive to demonstrate

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his attentiveness to the racial basis, the White assumptions, embedded in the genealogy of humanism. What is remarkable about the passage I quoted above, concerning Said’s claim to apply a critical consciousness, is not only the ambivalent sense of “humanistic scholarship” he never tired of exploring in his work. Rather, what is significant is how Said refers to himself as “having been constituted.” This way of depicting himself suggests not so much a knowledge of himself but a recursive sense of having a relationship to his embodied self. In other words, his capacity to know himself has some dependence on how he learns to become himself, learns to exchange himself with others, learns to appreciate the worldly value of his work. For Said, this knowledge of self was not limited to his ego but provided contours for critical engagement. In this chapter I want to discuss the theme of critique more directly, mainly through Judith Butler’s notion of “giving an account of oneself,” in respect of her comments on the work of Foucault. Butler provides a suggestive phenomenological appreciation of Foucault, which somewhat goes against the grain of a more influential concern with the epistemological contours of his work. Her insights help me in turn to appreciate the phenomenological dimensions of Said’s work in relation to that of Foucault. At the same time, considering her ongoing interest in Fanon and the racial implications of subject formation, her work, unlike other metropolitan critical theorists, can be situated towards a phenomenological discussion of racism.

Critique The term critique mostly carries a sense of intervention, an analysis aimed at demonstrating untenable assumptions embedded in a theoretical argument in relation to a historical process, or else a historical circumstance. As an interventionist practice of scholarship, critique involves a related commitment towards uncovering social injustices, disrupting the ways in which inequalities are normalized as part and parcel of everyday life. Despite the perhaps overly wrought theoretical language in which critique is often articulated, it involves a practical exercise of bringing about transformative changes to social, cultural, and political processes and accompanying sensibilities. In doing so, it sets out terms of reference by which change can be engaged, can be imagined, and acted on, transpiring as a transformative modality of intervention. From a Marxist perspective, critique involves a dialectical alternation between theory and practice, a historically bound tension between

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reflection on social conventions and acting with others towards bringing about change. Thus, as Max Horkheimer and, later, Jürgen Habermas have pointed out in their respective discussions of “traditional theory” and “critical theory,” critique is directed towards social transformation rather than a contemplative vision of historical development. While both Frankfurt School writers may well have varying understandings of the historical role of “class consciousness,” they share the basic premise spelled out by Lukács—that critique is valid to the extent that it initiates an emergent awareness of historical circumstance (class consciousness), leading to a (class) struggle for social transformation. As Lukács has it, as “praxis” critique would not be “subordinated to the theory of contemplation” (1971, 126).1 In Chap. 2 I discussed the significance of the terms nafssiya and elaboration towards appreciating the personal dimension, the phenomenological resonance, informing Said’s application of critique. I want for the moment to track the phenomenological resonance of his approach to critique through Foucault’s discussion of the theme. In his somewhat prosaically titled essay “What Is Critique?” Foucault makes a compelling distinction between enlightenment and critique. The first of these terms comes from a famous essay by the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who published a newspaper article in 1784 titled “What Is Enlightenment” (Was ist Aufklärung, in the original German).2 The term came to reference a historical period, anchored in Europe, as in the “age of enlightenment.” However, in his article, Kant emphasized enlightenment as an activity, rather than a given historical condition. “Enlightenment,” he famously began, “is man’s release from his self-­ incurred tutelage” (Kant in Foucault 2007, 29). As he went on to write, with emphasis: “If we are asked, ‘Do we now live in an enlightened age?’ the answer is, ‘No,’ but we do live in an age of enlightenment.” Crucial to his argument is the distinction he makes between the “private” and “public use of reason,” evoking the example of a clergyman speaking as a preacher to his congregation and as a scholar addressing themes of public significance. Kant himself, we can add in passing, practises what he 1  The original German version of Horkheimer’s essay “Traditional and Critical Theory” was written and published in the late 1930s in the context of National Socialism and rising fascism in Germany. See his volume Critical Theory: Selected Essays (1982). For Habermas, see his early volume Theory and Practice, especially the introductory chapter “Some Difficulties in the Attempt to Link Theory and Practice” (1988). 2  Reprinted in Michel Foucault (2007, 29–37).

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preachers—in publishing a critical article in a local newspaper he straddles the private (in his teaching at the university) and public uses of reason. According to Foucault, Kant handed down a philosophical enterprise of questioning how certain applications of knowledge, certain epistemic regimes, constitute broader forms of legitimacy, especially concerning the investment of authority in institutions of governance. However, as Foucault points out, while it maintains anti-authoritarian impulses, the Kantian critical enterprise tends towards an all-too formal exercise of inquiry “into the legitimacy of historical modes of knowing” (2007, 59). For Foucault, critique involves not so much an analysis of the constitutive implications of the limits of knowledge but rather a critical awareness of the modalities by which people become subjects of their worlds and can potentially transgress the historical force, the embodied imprints, of such modalities. Thus, according to Foucault, “critique would essentially insure the desubjugation of the subject in the context of what we could call, in a word, the politics of truth” (2007, 47). In this vein, I want to foreground Foucault’s later emphasis on subjectivity as a constellation of forces refracted through instances in which self-­ awareness is problematized, becomes an exercise of reflection and, potentially, self-transformation. This emphasis comes from his lectures and writings of the late 1970s and early 1980s before his death in 1984. Arguably, this later preoccupation with a “care of the self,” as the third volume of his history of sexuality is titled, amounts to a phenomenological approach to subjectivity, concentrated in conditions of being human. This ethical, quasi-humanist turn in Foucault’s work involved a less fateful conception of the human subject, an interest not merely in “rules of conduct” and in subjectivity as nodal sites for reproductive economies of power and desire but the ways by which subjects go about “transforming themselves,” making “their life into an oeuvre” (Foucault 1990, 10). In his work of the early- to mid-1970s, Foucault concentrated on the intricate mechanisms by which power and knowledge are parcelled as circulatory modalities of subject formation. In doing so, he initiated an alternative approach to the study of power as more relational and productive than substantive, adversarial, and repressive. However, in doing so, he tended to elide generative differences between subjectivity and subjugation. Human subjectivity amounted to a rather fateful modality of constitution. In his Discipline and Punish, for example, he focuses on regulatory modalities of control, whereby people, what he calls “docile subjects,” become reproductive functions of institutions—in schools, in hospitals, in

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the workplace, and in prisons. In this context, he argues that disciplinary strategies organized through “carceral networks” of surveillance and observation encompass a “circular process” in which “the formation of knowledge and the increase of power regularly reinforce one another” (1979, 224). For Foucault, the otherwise vacuous appearance of space is the very medium by which architectural configurations are strategically planned to maximize efficiency. Space becomes “disciplinary” and “analytical,” coordinated in symmetrical grids designed for the harnessing of power through the productivity of subjects. Foucault calls this architecture “Panopticism,” an instrumental way of organizing space for the efficient control of bodies, such as working on a production line or else sitting in rows of desks in the classroom. The factory, the schoolroom, and the prison constitute sites not of repression, but of production, regulation, and normalization. However, as I said, his understanding of subjectivity tended to be rather fateful. As he describes the Panoptic tower of surveillance: “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection” (1979, 202–203). To my mind, a significant aspect of Foucault’s late work concerns his avoidance of fixing subjectivity to underlying attributes beyond practical exercises of exchanging a sense of self with others. And while this exchange is conditioned through circulations of material and imaginary resources, relayed through institutional avenues of power, knowledge, and desire, Foucault’s insights help to thematize subjectivity through a relational prism by which self-awareness remains inchoate and emergent. His later term for this relational prism of subjectivity is “hermeneutics of the self,” encompassing his concern with a “genealogy of the subject,” rather than a positivist preoccupation with a “philosophy of the subject” (Foucault 2007, 150). I will discuss further what Foucault means by a hermeneutics of self, but want to keep in mind Said’s notion of subjectivity as an inventory of oneself, a taking stock of how one has become what one is, tracking a sense of self in relation to historical processes and forces. In a significant respect, when expanded to include  a hermeneutics of alterity, this particular perspective of a hermeneutics of self has some bearing on my study of Said’s “personal dimension,” concerning his efforts to account for his inventory. As I have been arguing, his interest in giving an

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account of himself played a significant role in what he often referred to as “critical consciousness.” However, as I intend to demonstrate, Said’s personal dimension is by no means limited to European-centred epistemologies and cultures, to either a Hegelian assumption of selfhood transcending and, in a feedback loop, reconciling itself in and to history, or else a Kantian a priori of subjective capacities. His personal dimension implicates the force of colonial and imperial power exercised by a globalizing, predatory north. Rather, then, than define a sense of self according to a pre-discursive or preaffective ontological attachment, an inventory of oneself amounts to a taking stock of how one has come to embody specific dispositional traits— social, cultural, and political characteristics. These traits can be termed interwoven modalities of livelihood, specific manners of conduct, or else overlapping personas, by which one becomes an active subject of one’s world, one’s environment. By such modalities (human, class, gender, race, sex, age) one learns (and unlearns) to embody (and disembody) certain cultural sensibilities, political orientations, modes of personal comportment, employed as hermeneutic emplotments of self. As I indicated in my introductory chapter, we can think of such modalities as capacities by which to maintain a meaningful, though not quite deliberate, sense of self. However, for Said, such capacities had value to the extent that he managed to unlearn and disembody colonial sensibilities and orientations, unlearn and disembody a racial schema that was not merely imposed on him, but which he learned to incorporate as a hermeneutics of self. In the next section I trace the ethical contours of incorporation through an intersection of the work of Judith Butler and Foucault. Considering Butler’s abiding interest in subjectivity as a conglomerate of modal incorporations, we can refer to this intersection as a tracking of the subject-of. This notion provides a significant ethical dimension to the theme of critique, an ethical dimension that Butler promotes in their work.

Tracking the “Subject-of” In their Giving an Account of Oneself, whose chapters are based on lectures they gave at the University of Amsterdam in 2002, Butler outlines the ethical implications of critique. Although they do not address colonialism and racism, and pretty well stay in the orbit of European-centred scholarly production, Butler anchors their discussion of critique, ethics, and responsibility to their rejection of any pre-discursive, pre-social basis for human subjectivity. Moreover, as a practical exercise of orientation to

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oneself and to others, ethical responsibility involves an unravelling of self-­ constitution. While the question of ethics may well implicate how subjects learn to comport themselves in the midst of others, for Butler ethical commitment begins with a critical exercise of “giving an account of oneself,” a notion I want to connect to Said’s nafssiya, the phenomenological resonance of his inventory. Butler writes: “An ability to affirm what is contingent and incoherent in oneself may allow one to affirm others who may or may not ‘mirror’ one’s own constitution” (2005, 41). This is the opening sentence from their long second chapter, “Against Ethical Violence,” where they define ethics not only in respect of social dimensions of subject formation, but in relation to telling a story of oneself, involving “an acceptance of the limits of knowability in oneself and others” (Butler 2005, 63). So while it may well be a commendable exercise to track one’s inventory, the genealogical layers of one’s social repertoire and cultural sensibility, giving an account of oneself cannot be regarded as an exhaustive avenue of coming to know oneself. For Butler, ethics neither begins nor ends with the human subject, as there are no substantive preaffective or pre-discursive foundational attributes by which human subjectivity is inclined to incorporate ethical commitment. While no doubt shaped by existing modalities of decorum and convention, giving an account of oneself has always to take place as a scene of address, as an exchange with others. Giving an account of oneself thus remains unstable, as one cannot control how their personal story is received. What is important is that one finds themselves in a situation where they are compelled to give, to receive, to be responsive. Exchanges of oneself with others take place in certain contexts, certain circumstances encompassing capacities for subject formation. The limits of self-knowledge are marked by verbal and nonverbal forms of interaction accompanying and to some extent making possible the narration of a personal story. “The ‘I,’  ” Butler writes, “cannot give a final or adequate account of itself because it cannot return to the scene of address by which it is inaugurated and it cannot narrate all of the rhetorical dimensions of the structure of address in which the account itself takes place” (2005, 67). The word “structure” in this particular part of her argument seems to carry a similar sense to Said’s employment of the word I referred to above when he writes about the employment of the structure of cultural domination. In both cases, the word carries less an ontological condition than the repetitive refrains guiding subject formation in respect of social practices.

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For Butler, the potential of an ethical relationship to oneself and others lies not in social competence but in a commitment to expose oneself to the failure of self and other understanding. In an earlier essay they follow Foucault’s late work (adopting his title “What Is Critique”), providing a framework for thinking through the implications of a critical practice that emerges from what they refer to as “the tear in the fabric of our epistemological web” or else “the epistemological field in which one lives” (Butler 2001, 3). It is those instances when common sense, “our most sure ways of knowing” (Butler 2001, 3), suddenly doesn’t make sense that critique emerges through reflection on the assumptions that underpin common sense. Emphasizing critique as a doing, a relational, responsive “practice,” Butler writes in her characteristic style of dialogical exchange: “The point will not be to refer practice to a pregiven epistemological context, but to establish critique as the very practice that exposes the limits of that epistemological horizon itself, making the contours of the horizon appear, as it were, for the first time, we might say, in relation to its own limit” (2001, 5). It is worthwhile following Butler’s argument in this essay on Foucault’s “virtue,” as it betrays something like a tussle between discursive and phenomenological approaches to subjectivity. The drama of this tussle is played out between notions of “subject-formation” and “self-­ transformation.” The latter term carries Foucault’s late view of the human subject in terms of capacities to track how one has come to embody particular configurations of subjectivity and potentially “think otherwise” (Foucault 1992, 3) to prevailing equations of normativity. His late work can be described as a critical effort aimed at unpacking hermeneutic constellations of a “subject-of.” As he describes his project: “Thus, in order to understand how the modern individual could experience himself as a subject of ‘sexuality,’ it was essential first to determine how, for centuries, Western man had been brought to recognize himself as a subject of desire” (1992, 6, my emphasis). From Said’s point of view, we can interject, Foucault fails to consider how the recognition of oneself as a subject-of, especially for “Western man,” takes place through repertoires, depositories, of racial othering. To again evoke Said’s embodied sense of what he called a “strange disjunction,” he felt that the ethical compass of his relationship to his work benefited from tracking the grammars of colonial racism and imperial authority by which he came, to repeat Foucault’s words, “to recognize himself as a subject of desire.” From Said’s point of view, Foucault fails to elaborate on

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how his notion of “Western man” transpires as an unstable, colonial, racialized subject of desire. My present discussion of Butler and Foucault aims to demonstrate the phenomenological implications of their work. As I remarked above, for Foucault the potential to “think otherwise” marks something of a departure from his earlier, more fateful notion of subjectivity as a site of subjugating incorporations of power. Concentrating on his late work, Butler even hazards the observation that, in his preference for a history of how normativities (“moral codes”) have been “lived,” rather than a categorical history of such codes of conduct themselves, Foucault “begins to sound like a phenomenologist” (2001, 5). As Butler further develops the concept of “self-transformation,” two aspects of their discussion strike me as compelling, although somewhat incongruent. Firstly, their credible argument that the “desubjugation of the subject” has some bearing on political culture and political sensibility, in respect of the practical exercise of a “politics of truth” (Butler 2001, 8). These terms are of course Foucault’s, although Butler seems to thematize them more in terms of a social ontology than an epistemology of the production and circulation of knowledge. Indeed, while their essay, “What Is Critique,” begins within a register of epistemological concerns (“epistemological certainty,” “knowingness” and “thinking otherwise,” “epistemological web,” “epistemological field”), their disquisition develops in the direction of social and political ontology. Thus, “desubjugation of the subject” cannot be restricted to better knowing oneself or understanding one’s motivations in relation to circulations of knowhow, but rather to ask, in the words of Foucault that Butler quotes, “What, given the contemporary order of being, can I be?” The second aspect of Butler’s argument I am less sure about is their quiet assumption that “self-transformation”—while implicating interwoven threads of self-awareness and a willingness to “think otherwise,” or else, be otherwise—transpires as, it seems, an individualizing process. Butler, in at least this essay on Foucault, seems to suggest that the potential transformation of self takes place without taking the risk of situating one’s practice of critique amidst the often clammy interaction with others. To some extent they are aware of this aporia, or impasse, in Foucault’s late work. They are no doubt fascinated by the radical implications of his anti-­ foundationalist notion of critique, whereby he jettisons any reliance on a conceptual anchor somehow lying outside of history, genealogy, and social processes. Nevertheless, Butler is too swift in their gloss on his notion of

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an “arts of existence,” which they define “as having to do with a cultivated relation of the self to itself” (Butler 2001, 12). This comment evokes a rather conventional, nineteenth-century liberal sense of self-cultivation.3 Notwithstanding Butler’s emphasis on “reflexivity” by which, they write, “the subject is both crafted and crafting,” their discussion teeters at a fault line that risks vacating a sense of solidarity (of which they have otherwise consistently advocated), of being-in-common with others through differentially shared interests, needs, and desires. What is conceptually lacking, it seems to me, is a more concrete notion of “formative practices” that would provide a social dimension to Butler’s deliberations, a dimension of social formation, or else political solidarity, that would be equally (or unequally, for that matter) emergent and inchoate as their notion of subject formation through critical reflection. This is to say that, while Butler recognizes a phenomenological shift in Foucault’s late work, they restrict this shift to a psychological notion of the subject, a gesture that Foucault himself would have been uncomfortable with. This shift and limitation is suggested by their concluding paragraph, where Butler writes: “We have moved quietly from the discursive notion of the subject to a more psychologically resonant notion of ‘self,’ and it may be that for Foucault the latter term carries more agency than the former” (2001, 12, my emphasis). No doubt that, in employing the term “resonant,” Butler wants to avoid a restrictive notion of psychology that underestimates the social, environmental dimensions of one’s character. This is suggested by their term “epistemological field,” an ingrained, learnt range of capacities, a feel for what actions and signals work in particular circumstances. However, to what extent is the habitual beyond the range of accountability of giving an account of oneself? What happens when the habitual, the corresponding, comforting feel for circumstance, is rent by an inchoate sense of the contingency of competing, conflictual forces, such as not quite having an appropriate feel for being both “an Oriental” and “an Occidental”? To what extent does the habitual remain habitual? To my mind, in their essay “What Is Critique” that I have been discussing, Butler winds up in an aporia that they reassess in the later essays that constitute their book Giving an Account of Oneself—which I will return to shortly. In respect to this essay on “Foucault’s virtue,” I wonder why Butler didn’t take more seriously Foucault’s lectures on “the hermeneutics  A standard scenario of nineteenth-century English literature.

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of the self,” which make up part 2 of his The Politics of Truth publication. His discussions in these essays outline not so much the “formation” of the subject, but what he calls a “historicity of the subject” (2007, 151).4 The term “historicity” suggests a sense of how becoming a “subject of” involves capacities to test (rather than reflect) the fit or misfit between one’s motivations and circumstances and may well compliment Butler’s notion of selfhood as “resonant.” The key here, it seems to me, is Foucault’s distinction between a notion of the subject as a conglomerate of attributes—that could be potentially “discovered” as “the most obscure part of ourselves”—and “practices of self-examination” by which selfhood takes responsibility for the terms of its constitution. This more recursive sense of subjectivity would, to some extent, compliment Butler’s later notion of an expository self, selfhood as a circumstantial, testing site of exchange with others. Said, I don’t think, ever engaged with Foucault’s late work, perhaps because he was uncomfortable with the archaeologist’s failure to unpack the colonial implications of “Western man.” However, it is not so difficult to appreciate how the inchoate phenomenological aspects of Foucault’s late work, around the notion of a hermeneutics of self, compliment Said’s application of a Gramscian inventory. In his late lectures on the hermeneutics of self, Foucault makes a distinction between the ancient Greek injunction to “know oneself” and the Christian ethic of taking responsibility for the moral “constitution” of oneself, induced through the practice of confession. As he writes in his account of the emergence of a Christian ethic of confession: “the self doesn’t have to be discovered but to be constituted, to be constituted through the force of truth” (2007, 165). Truth, the truth of the self— what he calls the “gnomic self”—does not transpire through a foundational scheme of underlying attributes, but rather in more practical terms of exposing oneself, of situating oneself as a commitment to be responsive to others, to the communal terms of responsibility. For Foucault, this historical “transformation,” as he calls it, implicates the emergence, or “genealogy,” of the “modern subject,” bringing in its wake “what we would call the hermeneutics of the self” (Foucault 2007, 156). This hermeneutics of self hinges on what he regards as a Christian ethic of self-examination, whereby the “force of truth” transpires as an 4  Part 2 of his The Politics of Truth is titled “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self.”

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“ideal unity of will and truth” (Foucault 2007, 170). I have discussed the subjectifying implications of confession previously (Nikro 2012, see especially chapter 2), where I emphasized how confession not only brings about a social rehabilitation of self but performatively serves to reproduce a symbolic sense of a community ethos, to which the redeemed, rehabilitated self can be readmitted, can be subjected, can remain a subject of. Thus confession, while seemingly concerned with the individual, implicates a social dimension of subjective emergence and thus shouldn’t be restricted to a psychological notion of selfhood. Moreover, in keeping with Foucault’s argument of an expository self, let us note that, unlike the law, the formality of confession does not require factual verification. Truth does not lie in the realm of the evidential but rather in the taking of responsibility for one’s action, taking responsibility for atonement. As one notable critic observes, the subject—the subject of, we can say—emerges according to a “truth to the self” rather than through “the truth of fact” (Brooks 2001, 141). Butler’s recourse to a “psychologically resonant notion of self” reflects the aporia I mentioned above, concerning their failure to situate the ethical problematic of the phenomenological self within the context of a social ethos. Addressing this failure requires an approach that recognizes how knowing oneself is relationally woven in social practices of exchanging a sense of oneself with others. Butler avoids this failure in the opening essay of her Giving an Account of Oneself, suggested by the second sectional subtitle, “Scenes of Address.” Henceforth, influenced by the Arendtian philosopher Adriana Cavarero, especially her Relating Narratives (2000), Butler develops their social/political ontology of misapprehension not in respect of a psychology of self, but rather through the clammy risk of interaction with others, whereby selfhood takes place as a social modality of address and response. I briefly referred to Cavarero in my introductory chapter, mentioning that she adapts Hanna Arendt’s distinction between “what” and “who” (1998, see especially chapter V) so as to develop a non-foundationalist, relational ontology of political culture. In presenting oneself to others as a “who,” one does not take refuge in a broader category of identification, an ontic category that would define “what” one is. Rather, one exposes her ever fragile, ever inchoate “uniqueness” through the address of another, an address that anticipates a response. According to Cavarero’s reading of Arendt’s notion of “natality,” the political subject is not based on pre-discursive attributes but emerges through instances of exposure

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when the other’s reactions and responsiveness cannot be presupposed, cannot be guaranteed to reflect one’s sense of self, one’s efforts to project/protect an ideal-ego. Arendt and Cavarero understand speech and narrative as modalities of action, what the former referred to as praxis, the emergence of political subjectivity as a locus of address and response. This emergence implicates an affiliative practice of political community, implicating modifications to the terms by which such associations take place. For Butler’s purposes, this view of the human subject and community as inchoate and emergent—rather than founded on, say, a retroactive supposition of “the state of nature,” a la Rousseau, or else a-priori subjective capacities for reason and ethical conduct, a la Kant—offers a “relational politics, one in which the exposure and vulnerability of the other makes a primary ethical claim upon me” (2005, 31, my emphasis). Thus, giving an account of oneself takes place in those incidents when one is called upon to respond to the address of another, to exchange a sense of self with others. This, to be sure, doesn’t come about in a moral and normative vacuum but implicates an “ontological field,” in the context of which one has gone about gathering resources on their way to becoming a subject-of. Butler’s more relational approach here concentrates on the “emergence of an ‘I’ ” rather than their previous interest in the “formation of the subject.” In this relational approach, the “I” does not “stand apart from the social conditions of its emergence” or else “the prevailing matrix of ethical norms and conflicting moral frameworks” (Butler 2005, 7). The “I,” the subject-of, emerges as a configuration: When the “I” seeks to give an account of itself, it can start with itself, but it will find that this self is already implicated in a social temporality that exceeds its own capacities for narration; indeed, when the “I” seeks to give an account of itself, an account that must include the conditions of its own emergence, it must, as a matter of necessity, become a social theorist. (Butler 2005, 8)

This passage suggests that the telling of oneself implicates momentums of broader temporal reservoirs, larger narratives that,5 while exceeding a personal inventory, nevertheless are entwined with capacities to maintain a 5  For example, to identify oneself according to one nationality or another implicates broader narratives of the nation. At the same time, in giving an account of oneself to another, in respect of the scene of address, may well involve exploring the gaps between narratives of the nation and person stories.

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sense of self in and through practical exercises of exposing oneself to others. Through such momentums, personal experiences transpire as hermeneutic schemes by which subjectivity, in relation to its world, takes shape. For example, trying to make sense of an encounter in which she is singled out for a racist slur, or gesture, an African-American might appropriate the history of the slave trade and apartheid in North America to develop an elaborate (in Said’s sense of the term, as I discussed in an earlier chapter) sense of her experience. However, while the significance of such historical resources may well “exceed … capacities for narration,” as Butler says, they are not only appropriated and employed as articulate modalities of self and other understanding. They transpire as embodied orientations of self, as hermeneutic schemes by which subjects develop capacities to inhabit their world meaningfully. From a phenomenological point of view, a hermeneutics of self implicates “those pre-reflective dimensions of lived experience that predetermine the habitus of our experiencing, and interactions in a bodily manner” (Staudigl 2012, 29). Butler herself notes how selfhood emerges by “establishing a living relationship” (2005, 8) to normative schemes of orientation, though goes on to emphasize how this emergence occurs at a fault line of tenuous control over how one is received and hence is constrained to reflect on assumptions and presuppositions. Indeed, for Butler, such constraints themselves constitute modalities of being. For Butler, then, the “I” is not so much formed but “emerges.” From the perspective of critical reflection, this emergence is not circumscribed by a repertoire of norms guiding decorous conduct. In other words, it does not constitute recognition as a restrictive equilibrium of differential, deferential alterity but transpires as a failure of such equilibriums to remain opaque. This “post-Hegelian” (Butler’s term) approach to an ethics of self-constitution devolves upon a notion of subjectivity that takes place, a constitution that does not precede its taking place. As Badiou writes in his radical approach to the question of ethics, “To enter into the composition of a subject of truth can only be something that happens to you,” through an encounter by which selfhood is constrained to entertain the limits of its imaginary identifications and symbolic horizons (2002, 51, my emphasis). To what extent, Butler wonders, can an ethical notion of the human subject entertain a sense of selfhood resonating through an infinite number of occasions, of happenings? How can an ethics of the self be based on “our shared, invariable, and partial blindness about ourselves” (Butler 2005, 41), on the limits of self and other understanding, on the

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recognition of such limits? In turning the Hegelian maxim of recognition on its head, all the while maintaining its relational vigour, for Butler it is no longer a question of whether one recognizes or does not recognize oneself in and through the address of another. The problematic of establishing an ethical stance based on alterity encompasses a notion of selfopaqueness or rather instances of exchange where self-opaqueness plays a proactive role in capacities to exchange a sense of self with others: “In consequence, we might consider a certain post-Hegelian reading of the scene of recognition in which precisely my own opacity to myself occasions my capacity to confer a certain kind of recognition on others” (Butler 2005, 41). Based on misrecognition, on the productive failure of recognition to reconcile (aufheben, as Hegel would have said) asymmetrical difference, Butler emphasizes the crucial role of an inchoate alterity by which self and other are not expected to conform to categorical horizons of identification (Butler 2005, 42). In doing so, Butler provides an ethics of alterity that does not fail to appreciate the social circumstances, the historical forces, and cultural reservoirs, by which misapprehension between oneself and another takes place. Moreover, this taking place, Butler is keen to suggest, has the potential to transfigure, radically foreground and question, the livelihood of cultural reservoirs and social modalities of being. In other words, an ethics of alterity has the potential to take place as a material phenomenology of the emergence of subjectivity in and through processes of social exchange. Hence, for Butler, while subjectivity is only possible through modalities of becoming a subject-of, such modalities and related differential distributions of resources are never static but afford proactive momentums of social initiative, political creativity, emerging solidarities. For my purposes, I want to direct Butler’s “post-Hegelian” insights towards a discussion of a phenomenology of race, which I turn to in the next chapter, concerning what can be called the phenomenological closure of Butler’s otherwise important work on racism. I do so by first discussing Said’s early essay “The Arab Portrayed” and his early embrace of the work of Merleau-Ponty.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2013. The Coming Community. Translated by Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Arendt, Hanna. 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Badiou, Alain. 2002. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Translated by Peter Hallward. London: Verso. Brooks, Peter. 2001. Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Butler, Judith. 2001. What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue. Transversal Texts. https://transversal.at/transversal/0806/butler/en. Accessed April 9, 2014. ———. 2005. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press. Cavarero, Adriana. 2000. Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. Translated by Paul A. Kottman. London: Routledge. Depestre, René. 2000. An Interview with Aimé Césaire. Translated by Maro Riofrancos. In Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press. Dibb, Mike, and Charles Glass. 2003. Edward Said: The Last Interview. BBC Documentary. Edward Said: The Last Interview [2003]—YouTube https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxW0uJBWVIY. Du Bois, W.E.B. 1996. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Penguin Classics. Fanon, Frantz. 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press. Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin Books. ———. 1990. The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality Volume 3. Translated by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin. ———. 1992. The Use of Pleasure: History of Sexuality, Volume Two. Translated by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin. ———. 2007. The Politics of Truth. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Habermas, Jurgen. 1988. Theory and Practice. Translated by John Viertel. Cambridge: Polity Press. Horkheimer, Max. 1982. Traditional and Critical Theory. In Critical Theory: Selected Essays, ed. Max Horkheimer, translated by Matthew J. O’Connell and Others. New York: Continuum. Lukács, Georg. 1971. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. London: Merlin Press. Nikro, Norman Saadi. 2012. The Fragmenting Force of Memory: Self, Literary Style, and Civil War in Lebanon. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Said, Edward W. 2000. Out of Place: A Memoir. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 2003. Orientalism. London: Penguin. Staudigl, Michael. 2012. Racism: On the Phenomenology of Embodied Desocialization. Continental Philosophy Review 45: 23–39.

CHAPTER 6

Towards a Phenomenology of Racism

All of us, readers and writers, are bereft when criticism remains too polite or too fearful to notice a disrupting darkness before its eyes. —Toni Morrison (1993, 91)

The Arab Portrayed In one of his lectures Elias Khoury quipped that in 1967 Said decided to become a Palestinian (Khoury 2008, xiii). While the remark may well be a bit exaggerated, Khoury is referring to Said’s growing political awareness after the so called six-day war in June 1967, when various Arab armies were swiftly defeated by Israel, which subsequently seized what has since been referred to as the Occupied Territories of Palestine. Arguably, Said’s growing politicization was also due to his experience of racism in the United States in the wake of the six-day war. Significantly, the book Orientalism was precipitated by his existential experience of the way in which Arabness was represented in North America. He recounts this experience in his essay “The Arab Portrayed” (1970), which I mentioned briefly in my introductory chapter. It is worthwhile discussing it further, as it constitutes an early articulation of Said’s experience of racism in the United States. The essay opens with two examples of the representation, or portrayal, of “the Arab” in what he calls “the American mind” or else “the American consciousness.” The first of his examples is a reunion class at Princeton © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 N. S. Nikro, Nafssiya, or Edward Said’s Affective Phenomenology of Racism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51769-3_6

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that chose to dress up in the fashion of a stereotypical Arab: “robe, headgear, and sandals,” Said writes (1970, 1), though with the added insult, he observes, of the members of the reunion mockingly holding their arms above their heads to signal the “abject defeat” of the Arabs in the June war. Said’s acute personal sense of racist offence resonates in the passion of his prose: “Surprisingly, there was no serious complaint made about the really vile taste at work as there might have been if any other national or racial group had been similarly insulted” (1970, 1). His discussion of this reunion is repeated, almost verbatim, in Orientalism (2003, 285), although by the 1970s Said would drop expressions such as “the American mind.” The personal and epistemological connection between this essay of 1967 and Orientalism is presaged in his further comments on this extravagance at Princeton. Indeed, the following line could be regarded as the kernel of Orientalism: “The logic, not so much of events in the war,” Said writes, “but of events in the American consciousness of the Arab, permitted this tasteless demotion of a people into a stupid and offensive caricature” (1970, 1). In the later work, as I have suggested, “consciousness” and “mind” will be dropped and substituted with Foucault’s “discourse” and “episteme,” so as to trace the nexus between power and knowledge, in respect of the reproductive cultural reservoirs and hermeneutic livelihood of a stock range of references, representations, and accompanying modes of subjectivity. The second example he mentions in “The Arab Portrayed” concerns Arab characters in American movies, in the “average film in which an Arab appears” (Said 1970, 1). The figure of the Arab, Said argues, always appears to be “over-sexed” and “degenerate … often seen snarling at the captured American hero and a blonde girl, ‘My men are going to kill you, but—they like to amuse themselves beforehand.’ He leers suggestively as he speaks” (1970, 1). Said links such stereotypes to the way in which the American media, mostly championing Israel’s victory, often depicted Arabs as an anonymous, hysterical mob, whereas Israelis are depicted as “stalwart individuals, the light of simple heroism shining from their eyes” (1970, 2). Already in this essay, in 1967, he was establishing the methodological imprint of Orientalism, published ten years later, concerning the role of literature, or textuality, to reproduce and disseminate patterns, hermeneutic schemes, of racist associations: “The symbolism repeated the simple pattern of a Cooper novel—was not the June War the conflict

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between the white European bravely facing the amoral wilderness in the person of savage natives bent on destruction?” (1970, 2–3).1 Of course, Said could well have found a not-so-dissimilar “pattern” in the work of Conrad. That he didn’t says something about the effect the war of 1967 had on his developing understanding of himself. If, through his work on Conrad, he developed a more acute awareness of his own “incomplete legacy of national identity,”2 of the historical circumstances in which Palestine and his Palestinian heritage were in the process of being erased, in “The Arab Portrayed” he began to develop a critical methodology to address those circumstances and processes. While, at this time, he was thinking about how a study of stereotypical depictions of Arabs could be methodologically grounded, his approach remained steeped in notions, as I have said, of the “American mind,” “western consciousness,” or else what he refers to at one point as “the mind’s syntax” (1970, 4). As I have said, he subsequently dropped such terms,3 as well as the phenomenology of consciousness informing the Conrad book. However, my point is that “The Arab Portrayed” prefigures not only some of the significant themes informing his subsequent work but also his personal dimension in relation to his scholarly work. Making a similar observation to his warning in the introduction to Orientalism directed to “formerly colonized peoples” (2003, 25), in his short introductory paragraph he admonishes Arabs for accommodating, playing up to, stereotypical representations: “What is disheartening in both representations is how readily [the Arab] seems to accommodate the transformations and reductions into which he is continually being forced by vulgar pressures” (1970, 1). Considering his efforts to foreground and work through the affective influence of his colonial education, it is not difficult to appreciate how Said may well have had himself in mind when articulating these cautions. In the second to last chapter of his memoir, Said refers to 1967 as “that fateful year” (2000, 268). It was indeed an eventful year in which he was induced to reorient his self-understanding and his relationship to his work. “I was no longer the same person after 1967,” he writes. He observes a number of “dislocations,” though emphasizes “the dislocation that subsumed all other losses,” identified in part as “the unpolitical years of my  James Cooper was an American novelist of the nineteenth century.  As he had said of Conrad (Said 2008, 38). 3  In Orientalism, Said is quite critical of scholars using terms such as “the Arab mind” (2003, 308–309). 1 2

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education, [and] the assumption of disengaged teaching and scholarship at Columbia” (2000, 293). While he notes the effect of historical events on his self-understanding, he reflects on how such events affected his relationship to his scholarly work. Moreover, his historical and political reflections are always mixed with his references to his personal relationships—to his mother and father, mainly, though also to his first marriage and, as well, a significant romantic relationship. While his memoir of 1998 and his essay “The Arab Portrayed” are separated by thirty years, they express a similar intertwined dynamic informing much of his work—his life experience as a recursive component by which he develops capacities for interventionist scholarship. From the perspective, then, of how I have been striving to demonstrate the interwoven strands of his personal dimension, I feel it is fair to take issue with critiques of Orientalism that underestimate Said’s efforts to not only take stock of his inventory but to proactively situate this taking stock as a basis for cultural critique. The four main critiques of Orientalism are a historicist generalization of a repressive textual reservoir that stretches from the ancient Greeks to the twentieth century, a failure to note resistance to the application of such reservoirs, an all-too-rigid geographical distinction between East and West, and a reliance on a humanist tradition of cultural critique that sits awkwardly with his methodology. While these criticisms are relevant, they tend to direct attention away from the phenomenon of a third world critic voyaging into the heart of Empire, employing the Empire’s own humanist protocols against itself, and thus undermining its arrogant claims to cultural superiority. As I pointed out at the beginning of this study, this voyage-in of a “secret sharer,” to employ the title of one of Conrad’s short stories, is encapsulated by Said’s proactive notion of his “strange disjunction.” My mention of Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” is apt when we look into Said’s discussion of the story in his book on Conrad. The narrative entails a sort of doppelgänger tale, with the main character depicted through a double, a sailor named Leggatt, a fugitive, who is accidently responsible for the death of another sailor. Escaping his jailors by swimming in the water while in port, he is helped on board another boat by a rookie captain, who had been standing on deck alone, in the twilight of dusk. This captain somewhat abruptly chooses to hide Leggatt in his quarters, as they set out to sea. In his discussion of the story, Said observes: “While Leggatt is a real person, he is also an image according to which the young narrator can see himself in an extreme intellectual and moral perspective” (2008,

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127). What is noteworthy here is how Said connects the theme of an intellectual perspective to a moral commitment, as the young captain, the narrator of the story, attempts to appreciate the circumstances, rather than the act itself, by which Leggatt has become a fugitive. Said quotes from the story: “and all the time the dual working of my mind distracted me almost to the point of insanity. I was constantly watching myself, my secret self, as dependent on my actions as my own personality” (Conrad quoted by Said 2008, 129). Said’s analysis of this passage is interesting. He notes that the captain is put into a position of having to entertain the possibility of being an “imposture,” as he realizes that his moral values are more circumstantial than universally applicable. Said views this realization positively, in terms of Leggatt representing a modicum of rebelliousness. And while he attributes this critique of morality to Conrad’s uneasy understanding of himself as an exile, it seems to me that at the same time Said is playing out his own sense of duplicity—of trying to live up to a North American persona, “Ed,” that in the 1960s he increasingly found hollow. It would not be too far-fetched to observe that Said could better come to terms with his “other self,” as he refers to himself in his memoir (Said 2000, 284), when he came into contact with others who also moved across East and West, or else the global North and the global South. In this context, in the last pages of his memoir, he refers to a romantic relationship with someone who travelled between Europe, North America, Lebanon, and Cairo. “She had been so intimate a part of my life,” he writes: so necessary to my starved and repressed hidden self, that life without her, I had felt, was unimaginable. She seemed to speak directly to that underground part of my identity I had long held for myself, not the “Ed” or “Edward” I had been assigned, but the other self I was always aware of but was unable easily or immediately to reach. (2000, 284)

This “other self,” to be sure, this “hidden self,” he well appreciated, constituted various irreconcilable strands of his self as enabling. In this final chapter of my study of Said’s personal dimension, his nafssiya, I trace the phenomenological imprints of Said’s secret sharer, the “other self” and related hermeneutics of alterity he learned to own as his. My aim in doing so is to further demonstrate how Said approached his other self not so as to exhaustively account for himself as somehow torn between two cultures. Rather, as I have been doing in this study, to better

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clarify how his practice of an interventionist scholarship is bound up with refusing hard and fast distinctions between “West” and “East,” refusing what Dabashi has called “the binary banality” (2009, 146). The key is to appreciate that what is important for Said is not so much to locate and reveal this other self but undertaking a process, establishing a method, tracking an inventory, tracing a multitude of binaries, the “performance of their alterity,” as Dabashi says. Thus, this “other self” has to be regarded as an emerging subjectivity beyond, though entangled with, the binary equation of Self and Other. In what follows, I first discuss Said’s reading of Merleau-Ponty. After that I return to Judith Butler to suggest a closure, a limitation, that helps us better appreciate the contours of Said’s phenomenology of race and racism. I finish the chapter and book by discussing the work of writers who provide such a phenomenology, which I argue can be regarded as a basis by which to understand Said’s personal dimension.

Said and Merleau-Ponty In my introduction I mentioned briefly a number of critics who discuss phenomenology in the work of Said. One of those is Abdirahman A. Hussein, who claims that while Said does not mention the work of the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, his ideas inform Said’s book on Joseph Conrad.4 At the same time, he is cautious to distinguish Said’s approach from Husserl’s “transcendental phenomenology” (Hussein 2004, 30), which would not have been congenial to Said’s “need to uncover the agonistic (and not just assimilative) labors of an individual thinker’s self-fashioning, as well as to account for the socio-historical processes, forces, strategies, and institutions that both empower and constrain the intellectual” (Hussein 2004, 30). However, despite this perceptive caution, Hussein tends to restrict his discussion of phenomenology in Said’s work to a category of “mind,” which has the effect of limiting an understanding of subjectivity to a notion of self-consciousness, however alienated, or estranged, such consciousness may be. For example, in pointing out the critic’s capacity to appreciate the web of material interactions implicated in the production of literary texts, Hussein writes: “Said’s version of this interpretive approach is strongly tinged with phenomenology:

4  As Hussein is well aware, Husserl’s influence on Said came through the work of Sartre, who Said references in his Joseph Conrad.

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the mind is always a powerful motor in the world; it also acts as its own monitor and demystifier” (Hussein, 2004, 165, emphasis in the original). While, in his early work, as I discussed above, Said often employed the category of “mind” to explain a subject’s perception of the world, he subsequently dropped it altogether as a useful category. He came to appreciate how self-estrangement implicates material processes of distribution, circulation, and access. And while this development of his critical repertoire came about through his reading of Foucault, arguably it also had to do with his earlier reading and writing on Merleau-Ponty on the heels of his work on Conrad. Despite being aware of Said’s early interest in the work of Merleau-­ Ponty, Hussein hardly mentions him. And where he does, he conflates his work with the existentialism of Jean Paul Sartre. As he writes of Said: “And although he has elsewhere written appreciatively of Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, Sartre’s contemporary and one-time associate, existentialism as such has not been of great concern to Said” (Hussein 2004, 31). Hussein, it has to be said, is a very close and astute reader of Said, an example of which is his important observation that Sartre’s appeal for him lay in his dissatisfaction with Freudian readings of Conrad. However, I am wondering why he didn’t look further into Said’s interest in Merleau-Ponty. Said mentions the formative influence of Merleau-Ponty in the introduction to his collection of essays titled Reflections on Exile, where he writes that it was above all his work that helped him appreciate “mind as incarnated irremediably in things” (2001a, xxi). Alongside other writers he was drawn to early on, Said points out that their insights are steeped in a realization that they could not “escape to some promontory outside the troubling element of what I call worldliness” (2001a, xxi). What is interesting in these comments, written to introduce a collection of his essays in a volume published in 2000–2001, is that he retroactively refers to Merleau-Ponty as a major influence on his work, especially on his notion of “worldliness.” The only mention of Merleau-Ponty in the much earlier book, Joseph Conrad, is an epigraph singularly wedged between the preface and the first chapter. The epigraph focuses on language as an environment, or milieu, that, while preceding and hence conditioning capacities for subjectivity, remains malleable enough for intervention. In his fine, almost exhaustive study of Said’s relationship to North American and European literary criticism and philosophy, Vandeviver notes the singularity of this epigraph and

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discusses the influence of Merleau-Ponty on Said’s early work. However, in doing so, not unlike Hussein, he tends to put more emphasis on a wilful notion of agency. He writes: “The speaking subject is thus a conscious, intentional and free agent or subject of action that uses language as an instrument to bring about change in its environing world, add to its meaning, and shape discourse” (2019, 148). Considering that Said came to appreciate how culture and the language of literature materialize as certain reservoirs influencing the shape and orientation of subjectivity, I feel that Vandeviver underestimates the ambivalences of Said’s personal dimension, the “strange disjunction” girding his nafssiya. I would therefore regard the epigraph as an indication of Said’s early, stumbling efforts to delineate for himself the contours of his methodology rather than a concise definition of his critical application. Obviously, in writing his introduction to the Reflections on Exile collection, Said is performing a belated interpretation of his work, reading his notion of worldliness back into his earlier intellectual interests. Or perhaps he felt that he should have maintained his interest in the work of Merleau-­ Ponty. However, the point here is that Said felt that worldliness relates more to the materiality, or physicality, of culture and not to a knowing, or unknowing, self-possessed subject. This is obvious in the opening chapter of the Reflections volume, an early review essay on Merleau-Ponty that Said first published in 1967. Interestingly enough, Said labels his essay “Labyrinth of Incarnations” (2001b). As his discussion demonstrates, he was very much interested in embodiment, in a phenomenology of what he calls “immanence,” as an alternative to a reductive “theoretical rubric” that would merely explain the basis or structure of “lived reality.” According to Said, Merleau-Ponty’s work is embedded in a post-war philosophical transition from “inbred professionalism to humanistic amateurism” (2001b, 2). The terms “professionalism” and “amateurism,” as I have already noted, would later become an important binary pair for Said’s arguments against cloistered intellectualism and abstract theory. In the present essay, which was penned on the heels of his Conrad book, he makes passing reference to the increasing interest in language, in both analytical (Anglo) and speculative (French or continental) philosophy, as a departure from the behavioural orientations of the social sciences. “In a sense,” he writes, “philosophy has passed from the study of economic-­ behavioral-­ psychological man to the study of linguacentric man. Immanence—or the meaning embedded in human, lived reality—is now the central theme of French philosophy, and in the work of Maurice

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Merleau-Ponty it has received extraordinarily rich, passionate, and complex treatment” (Said 2001b, 3). Said later tempered his enthusiasm for the “study of linguistic man,” especially when it became evident that in some circles this was becoming sequestered and unworldly.5 In some parts of his “Incarnations” essay it seems as though he read his own disposition into the life of Merleau-Ponty. For example, he notes how he had an intense attachment to his mother, just as Said himself had to his own mother. Similarly, Merleau-Ponty, he writes, “claimed never to have recovered from an incomparable childhood” (2001b, 4). In the mid-­1960s, it seems, Said was exploring how his own intellectual development was enmeshed in his efforts to reflect on his life experiences, “the tenor of his life,” as he says about Merleau-Ponty (2001b, 4). Additionally, that his capacity for intellectual engagement was entwined with a reflective approach to his personal dispositions and historical circumstances, to his nafssiya, as I have been arguing. Through his readings of Merleau-Ponty and, later, Gramsci, Said came to realize how entwinements between personal disposition and historical processes afford multidirectional, intersectional forces. The Australian philosopher Rosalyn Diprose provides a concise discussion of this multiplicity in the work of Merleau-Ponty. In her book Corporeal Generosity she develops a close reading of Merleau-Ponty’s sense of the irremediable entwinement of self, other, and circumstance, what she calls (adapting an important notion of his phenomenology of perception) a “prereflective intertwining of bodily schemas.” In distinction to the existential philosophy of his friend and colleague Jean Paul Sartre, she argues, Merleau-­ Ponty did not assume a singular, foundational basis to define human subjectivity. Rather, the very entwinement of embodiment and reflection involves a multiplicity of forces, crisscrossing interactions: “I am not a singular body, because I am for-myself by being first of all with and for other lived bodies” (Diprose 2002, 89). In other words, alterity is not limited to a binary scheme of self and other, whether recognizable or not, but takes place (“with and for”) as relational intersections of crisscrossing trajectories. In this sense, Said’s characterization of himself on the final page of his memoir as “a cluster of flowing currents,” as opposed to “the 5  As I discussed in Chap. 4, Said’s dissatisfaction with language-centred forms of analysis became more forceful and better articulated in the 1970s. As he writes in his book Beginnings: “Being, in short, was swallowed up in the internal analysis of language. The structuralist vision of things takes this rationale almost for granted” (1985, 316).

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idea of a solid self” (Said 2000, 295), written almost at the end of his life, remains curiously in step to his early fascination with Merleau-Ponty. In the “Incarnations” essay, Said notes Merleau-Ponty’s interest in human subjectivity as a “natal attachment to the world” (2001b, 4). Seemingly obsessed with the notion that the body carries and performs ways of being in the world that elude logical applications of understanding, escape “the ascendency of mind over matter,” he favours Merleau-­ Ponty’s “attention to the body’s crucial role in our experience” (Said 2001b, 5). He quotes from the Phenomenology of Perception: “the world is not what I think, but what I live through. I am open to the world, I have no doubt that I am in communication with it, but I do not possess it; it is inexhaustible” (Merleau-Ponty quoted by Said 2001b, 5). This quotation provides an important, somewhat constitutive key to appreciating Said’s embrace and application of his notion “worldliness,” informing his ongoing critique of intellectual insulation from questions of power. Influenced by the cultural materialism of Raymond Williams, culture, for Said, encompasses material practices of social exchange, as well as political sensibilities involved in the production and study of literature, or else, for example, the formal circumstances and social milieus by which a musical performance is staged for an audience. I have been concentrating on Said’s early fascination with a phenomenology focused on the multidimensional, affective, perceptual circuits of embodiment. As I have suggested, in his personal and intellectual development, Said came to appreciate human subjectivity and cultural practices as sites of relational, orientational constellations, caught up in differential flows of power, labour, and the production, distribution, and acquisition of material and imaginary resources. This relational, molecular approach to human subjectivity, I want to emphasize, would not equate a notion of a purposeful self with a notion of conscious intention, as if human subjectivity is meaningful only to the extent that the sensible horizon of an other, an object, or non-human subject, mirrors the shape of a conscious intention. To a certain extent, the hermeneutic schemes, or else cultural repertoires, people and artefacts embody in the process of becoming subjects of their worlds go some way towards defining the significance of phenomena. However, this is only part of the story, as there are always nonsensical remainders or fits of discomposure that maintain their vigour through less than determinate modes of address. I have been adapting Hamid Dabashi’s suggestion of a hermeneutic worldliness, what he compellingly calls a

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“hermeneutics of alterity” (2011, 84–85), to approach the resonance of this discomposure—this stubborn resistance of people and things to the terms of their ontic categorization. Arguably, Said’s intertwined notion of “inventory” and “historical process” lends itself to a hermeneutics of alterity in which a subject “resonates” though varying, intersectional rebounds. In other words, he avoids situating himself, his argument, as somehow transcending his capacity to inhabit and critically engage his worlds. He provides a compelling notion of human and artefactual subjectivity steeped in specific constellations of race and racial phobias, of the power of culture and specific modalities of knowledge application to colonize people and their cultures of livelihood. He concerns himself with power and desire to reflect on his location, on his cultural bearing, rendering his “western education,” not to say his “colonial education,” a constituent aspect of his capacity to articulate critique. In other words, as I endeavoured to demonstrate in my opening chapter, Said did not satisfy himself with a passive sense of being caught between two cultures, occident and orient, but explored the potential to render his disposition a basis for scholarly intervention. Dabashi’s hermeneutics of alterity goes some way towards helping us appreciate Said’s dissatisfaction with the ontic proportions of theory. This dissatisfaction informs the second essay of the Reflections on Exile collection, “Sense and Sensibility,” published in the same year, 1967, as his “Incarnations” essay. He contrasts the work of Georges Poulet to the autodidact literary critic Richard Blackmur. Considering Said’s interest in Blackmur’s notion of “gesture” (Blackmur 1981),6 it would be reasonable to read Said’s title as a reference to these two figures—“sense” relating to Poulet and “sensibility” relating to Blackmur. According to Said: “Poulet’s method is to attribute measurable dimension to a writer’s style, which is the writer’s consciousness translated into the duration of language” (2001c, 18). However, he seems to take the side of sensibility, the side of Blackmur: “life’s irresolution in essays that mock realization and represent the stutters of our imperfections” (Said 2001c, 23). As I am suggesting, Said’s hermeneutics of alterity maintained a relational sense of the forces, the cultural reservoirs, by which subjects (whether human or artefactual) embody capacities to inhabit the world. This relational sense of worldliness is a key aspect of what Merleau-Ponty 6  See Blackmur’s essay “Language as Gesture,” in his collection of that title: Language as Gesture: Essays in Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981.

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understood as a “phenomenology of perception” (the title of his major work). Perception, he claims, should not be understood as a streamlining of “the thickness of duration” (2002, 47). He argues that the multidirectional aspects of experience (what he calls “world”) should not be dissolved into the ether of categorical understanding (what he calls “universe”). Obviously influencing Said’s notion of “worldliness,” Merleau-Ponty writes: “we dissolve the perceptual world into a universe which is nothing but this very world cut off from its constitutive origins, and made manifest because they are forgotten” (2002, 47, emphasis in the original). Where ontic categories constitute a convenient forgetting that people and things maintain relational prisms of crisscrossing affects, worldliness renders the shape and contours of this forgetting approachable, precisely as “a historical process.” In a perhaps not-so-strange confluence, we could say that Gramsci and Merleau-Ponty become complimentary figures in the work of Said. Certainly, the author of Phenomenology of Perception maintained an awareness of history as a force field of perceptual bearings that can be “awakened,” rendered available for self-reflection: “Consciousness must be faced with its own unreflective life in things and awakened to its own history which it was forgetting” (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 36, my emphasis). He distinguishes “attention” from “intellectualism”—the latter concerned with “the structure of perception,” the former with “a combination of associative forces” (2002, 37, my emphasis). The key point is that perception involves “combinations” that cannot be exhaustively accounted for. Through his reading of Merleau-Ponty, I feel it is fair to say Said came to appreciate how his personal dimension involves multiple impulses and influences, a realization that became a source for his capacity for intellectual inquiry.

Phenomenological Closures In the previous chapter I traced the valuable contribution Butler has made to an ethics based on a social ontology. I suggested that this amounted to a phenomenology attuned to social interactions and historical processes, to the notion of a subject-of, rather than a pre-discursive, pre-affectual notion of what is often referred to as “the” subject—the subject defined by an ingrained aptitude for ethical and moral conduct. One of my purposes was to demonstrate the phenomenological tenor of Butler’s reception and application of Foucault. By indicating the phenomenological

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resonance of Butler’s work in relation to the later Foucault, my larger purpose to be sure is to put into relief the phenomenological tenor of Said’s personal dimension. As I suggested, I am keen to show how his efforts to make an inventory of self, his giving an account of himself, was valuable to the extent that he could relate his inventory to an interventionist practice of scholarship. I have engaged the term recursive to signify this retro(pro)active practice. In this section of this chapter, I draw attention to a closure that creeps into Butler’s work—concerning, specifically, their tendency to underestimate this recursive dimension when addressing phenomenology and racism. My aim is to put into relief the contours of Said’s phenomenological critique of racism. In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler more directly mentions phenomenology in the third essay, titled “Responsibility.” They ask if there can be “a history of reason in Foucault’s sense within phenomenology” (2005a, 115). The question implicates Butler’s wariness of limiting a notion of the emergence of subjectivity to circuits of discourse. In a conventional sense, discourse is understood to imply discussion, dialogue, debate, speech, and verbal exchange. However, more in keeping with Foucault’s preoccupations with what he called “regimes of truth,” discourse implies circulations of power and knowledge transpiring as productive, if subjugating, resources for the formation of subjectivity. Considering this radical, non-foundational notion of truth that undermines an understanding of the human subject as a sovereign source of knowledge and understanding, Butler describes how Foucault distanced himself from a phenomenology of consciousness invested in “a subject who endows meaning through its acts of consciousness” (2005a, 117). Butler’s remarks on phenomenology in Giving an Account of Oneself are, however, all too brief and infrequent. They make no mention to the work of Merleau-Ponty. This is peculiar when we consider that his phenomenology of bodily perception informs a much earlier essay of Butler on gender, published in 1988. There, Butler taps into the work of Simon de Beauvoir to point out that “the body is a historical situation” (Butler 1988, 521, emphasis in the original). In a foreshadowing of Gender Trouble (first published two years after this essay), Butler argues that gender attributes are consolidated through repetitive acts attuned to conventionally accepted modalities of exchange. As bodily schemas of historical processes, gender is not an expression of an underlying, “preexisting identity” but “created through sustained social performances” (Butler 1988, 528). Although Butler mistrusts a “phenomenological model” (Butler

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1988, 520) that would regard gender as a subjective attribute preceding and determining how one learns to inhabit their worlds, they nevertheless put into relief a phenomenology of body, perception, and action. As a “cultural sign” of gender, a subject learns to inhabit what transpires as its body and world by appropriating predominating equations of heterosexual normativity, performing them as a repertoire of repetitive actions. “The body,” Butler writes in an unconventional grammar, “becomes its gender through a series of acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time” (1988, 523). In this phenomenological approach, emphasis is placed on “how one acts one’s body,” always in relation to, if not altogether in tune to, prescriptive conventions. This engagement with a phenomenology of body and perception is wedged in between Butler’s first and second books—Subjects of Desire of 1987 (which was based on their doctoral dissertation) and the more famous Gender Trouble of 1990. In neither of these works does the work of Merleau-Ponty play much of a role. However, Butler’s very brief references to him seem at odds. In an endnote in Subjects of Desire, for the chapter on Jean Paul Sartre, she distances Merleau-Ponty’s interest in the perceptual body from the dualistic framework informing Sartre’s emphasis on conscious estrangement. “Perception,” Butler writes, “is not a mode of knowing the world which requires distance between the perceiving agent and the world it knows: for Merleau-Ponty, perception is already flesh, a sensuous act which apprehends an object in virtue of a common sensuousness” (Butler 1999, 248).7 By contrast, in the later, more influential Gender Trouble, also in an endnote, Butler pretty well contradicts their earlier, more favourable view: “Note the extent to which phenomenological theories such as Sartre’s, Merleau-Ponty’s, and Beauvoir’s tend to use the term embodiment. Drawn as it is from theological contexts, the term tends to figure ‘the’ body as a mode of incarnation and, hence, to preserve the external and dualistic relationship between a signifying immateriality and the materiality of the body itself” (2007, 209).

7  The reissued, paperback edition of the book includes a new preface, where Butler writes about studying Hegel as a Fulbright Scholar in Heidelberg in Germany. In the preface, Butler mentions writing her dissertation under the supervision of Maurice Natanson, a “phenomenologist,” who informed her that “French philosophy met its reasonable limit in the work of Sartre and selected writings of Merleau-Ponty” (vii). Elsewhere, Butler notes this prime difference between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. See their essay “Merleau-Ponty and the Touch of Malebranche” (2005b, 194).

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Butler’s scare quotes around the definite article reflects their rejection, as I have already mentioned, of any pre-discursive or preaffective basis— what they call “foundationalist fictions” (2007, 4)—by which bodies become depositories of signifying inscriptions. At the same time, as they came to more forcefully articulate in their subsequent book Bodies that Matter (first published in 1993), while a subject cannot escape the power of discursive inscriptions by which sex is rendered significant in/for itself and in/for others, this does not mean that the body is contained, delimited by discursive applications. As Butler says: “to claim that sexual differences are indissociable from discursive demarcations is not the same as claiming that discourse causes sexual difference” (2011, xi). What is interesting is Butler’s discussion of discourse and performativity. The latter term gives material emphasis to what Foucault called “discursive practices,” which for Butler’s purposes underscores his dismissal of a wilful notion of discourse. A “practice,” Butler suggests, should be distinguished from “act,” to avoid a notion of a subject of sex as wilful. As Butler outlines the second of the five problematics informing their book: “the understanding of performativity not as the act by which a subject brings into being what she/he names, but, rather, as that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains” (2011, xii, my emphasis). While Butler uses the word “phenomena” casually, without any allusion to phenomenology as a research application, their discussion of the materialization of sex by which bodies are shaped in and through corporal orientations lends itself to the notion of a “bodily schema” that Merleau-Ponty developed in his work (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 55, 163). Conceptualizing a body schema as an “open system” of varying, relational conduits, or “equivalences,” he writes: “It follows that it is not only an experience of my body, but an experience of my body-in-the-world, and that this is what gives a motor meaning to verbal orders” (2002, 163–64). In its varying, multiple orientations to its surroundings, a body’s shapes and flows are not limited to a symbolic logic, to “verbal orders.” His connection of motility to “verbal orders” could well be compared to Butler’s notion of “that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains,” which I have just quoted, if we keep in mind Butler’s proviso that, in the complex web of such production, a body’s shapes and orientations are not limited to such constraints. Above all, Butler wants to maintain an awareness of signification as material, corporal processes of orientations.

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The notion of a body or corporal schema is more pronounced in Butler’s references to Frantz Fanon’s employment of the term. Such as in their essay on the infamous police beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles on March 3, 1991 (Butler 2004).8 Butler adapts Fanon’s notion of a “historical-­racial-schema” (Fanon 2008, 91) to thematize the hermeneutic repertoire by which the jurors at the trial of the policemen found them innocent of any wrongdoing. As it turned out at the time of the incident, a bystander had made a video of the beating, which was used by the prosecution in the trial. However, rather than accepted as a description of what had actually occurred—four white policemen gratuitously beating an unarmed black person on the street—the video, Butler argues, was viewed through a racist scheme. Butler refers to this scheme as a “racially saturated field of visibility” (Butler 2004, 205). “Seeing,” they explain, is always a “reading,” whereby the sense and sensibility of that which is put into visual relief is shaped by hermeneutic schemes of association, bearing specific epistemic reservoirs. Counter-intuitively, the defence lawyers argued that, despite being outnumbered, raising his hands to protect himself from the batons pummelling him, King posed a physical threat to the four policemen. As Butler goes on to provocatively write: “According to this racist episteme, he is hit in exchange for the blows he never delivered, but which he is, by virtue of his blackness, always about to deliver” (2004, 210). In demonstrating the undeniable “racist organization and disposition of the visible,” Butler references the famous incident in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks when he is confronted with the third-person address of a child, who says to her mother: “Look! A Negro … I’m scared!” Fanon’s discussion of the scene provides an elaborate account of the force of the White gaze. However, what is interesting about Butler’s discussion is how they misread his notion of a historical-racial schema, despite quoting this particular passage at length. This was brought to my attention in an essay by Eyo Ewara, who points out that in their approach to Fanon, Butler tends to miss the emphasis he gives to introjection, to the ways in which the racialized, subjugated body internalizes a White gaze, which plays a role in self-constitution, in capacities to inhabit one’s livelihood. Indeed, looking over Butler’s essay again, there is no reference to the way in which Rodney King himself articulated his experience of his beating and subsequent experience of the law. His voice remains absent. 8

 See also her “Violence, NonViolence: Sartre on Fanon” (2008).

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For Ewara, Butler’s elision is symptomatic. Canvasing their discussions of Fanon across their work, he argues that Butler “engages in a systematic misreading … insofar as she misreads the historico-racial schema as a lens through which black people are read by whites instead of an account of how racialized peoples develop senses of themselves relative to white racist perceptions” (Ewara 2020, 266). Ewara makes a valid point. To quote him further: In imagining that racism only affects how the specifically non-white body is perceived and treated by others as part of the constitution of whiteness, and not attending to how that body constitutes and relates to itself, Butler shifts the focus of Fanon’s historico-racial schema from an account of black or racialized subjectivity into an account of white racist perception. (2020, 267, emphasis in the original)

To be sure, Butler’s application of Fanon’s insights maintains his critical interest in the body as a receptacle of racial subjugation. However, Butler tends to misread his emphasis on what he refers to as “the lived experience” of “the black man” (Fanon 2008, 90). As I observed above, in Butler’s Endangered/Endangering essay, Rodney King’s voice remains conspicuously absent. In fact he is limited to a third-person mode of address, which, unlike a second-person mode of address, works to diminish his capacity for responsiveness—for, indeed, his voice. However, my broader point, following Ewara, is that Butler could well have considered Fanon’s account of introjection. Accordingly—and this is the point of my present discussion—the phenomenological closure creeping into Butler’s essay can be contrasted to Said’s personal dimension—specifically, his Gramscian inspired interest in taking stock of how he embodied and responded to his “colonial education.” Or else, we can listen to the voice of Achille Mbembe, who, reading the same passage of Fanon, refers to a “miniaturized madness,” which he articulates thus: “A representative instance of the ‘white’ took my place and made my consciousness its object. Henceforth, this instance breathes in my place, thinks in my place, speaks in my place, monitors me, acts in my place” (2019, 133).9 The socio-psycho resonance of “place” here is similar to Said’s sense of being “out of place.”  “The difficulty,” Mbembe had earlier in the same study written in respect of Fanon, “involved not only one’s being assigned a race but one’s internalizing of the terms of this assignation, that is, one’s coming to the point of desiring and becoming the accomplice of castration” (2019, 5). 9

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To some extent, Butler corrects their misreading of Fanon in their more recent The Force of Nonviolence. In the chapter “The Ethics and Politics of Nonviolence,” they are careful to follow Fanon’s distinction between Merleau-Ponty’s “corporal schema” and his elaboration of a “historical-­ racial schema.” Where the former relates to perceptual fields in and through which one develops capacities to embody a sense of oneself in a perceptual relationship to environments, the latter points towards a subjective incorporation of the racial implications of such fields. “The black man,” Fanon writes, “has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man” (2008, 90). He is dissatisfied with what he refers to as “ontological explanation” (2008, 90) because it remains largely objectivist, underestimating how the eye (or I) of “the white man” has become the inner eye (or I) of “the black man” (2008, 90). So, for Fanon, “beneath” the body schema lies the “historical-racial schema” (Fanon 2008, 91). As I said, Butler better notes this in their later work, picking up on Fanon’s disjunctive first- and third-person notions of self-constitution: “On the one hand, a ‘third-person consciousness’ enters into a ‘first-person consciousness,’ so one’s very mode of perception is riven by another consciousness. Who is seeing when I am seeing, and when I see myself, am I seeing only through the eyes of another?” (Butler 2021, 113). To sum up before the next section, in their respective preoccupations, Butler and Said practise a phenomenology (albeit understated) emphasizing historical processes and specific modalities of embodiment, rather than categorical attributes amounting to a “transhistorical subject” (Butler 2005a, 115). Both draw heavily on the work of Foucault—Said, concerning how, in the introduction to Orientalism, he fashions an affective, material phenomenology by which discourse transpires as cultural and intellectual repertoires, in relation to perceptual momentums of self-­ orientation; and Butler, not so dissimilarly preoccupied with “historical sedimentations” by which one learns to become a subject of their world by appropriating “corporeal style” (Butler 1988, 524) and specific bodily postures. Inestimably influenced by Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge,10 both Said and Butler sought to provide avenues for a critical practice that would note how subjectivities are shaped by repetitive refrains of 10  No better evidenced than in their respective recourse to notions of layered sedimentations and repertoires, or what Foucault called “enunciative regularities.” As a critical practice, Foucault’s methodology constitutes a scholarly intervention, so as to “uncover the regularity of a discursive practice” (Foucault 1972, 144).

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normative, hermeneutic codes and corporal schemes while demonstrating potentialities for divergent lines of escape—Butler, in respect of gender, and Said, in respect of race and colonial/imperial practices of subjugation. In doing so, they engage compelling elaborations of power and desire. To my mind, we can situate Said’s reference to himself as “a cluster of flowing currents” within Butler’s scheme of misapprehension or misrecognition. We can do so in relation to his injunction in the “personal dimension” section of his introduction to Orientalism against the “dangers and temptations” of employing the “structures” of imperial recognition on oneself. As I have been noting, both scholars share a primary intellectual influence. Butler’s notions of the “reiterative power of discourse” and “regulatory norms” (Butler 2011, xii) derive from the same source as Said’s approach to orientalism as a “discursive formation,” as a “system for citing works and authors” (Said 2003, 23), as “figures of speech” and “narrative devices” that accrue “referential power” (2003, 20–21). While both scholars adapt the work of Foucault for their respective pursuits, they emphasize a not-so-dissimilar notion of the materiality of discursive practices by which subjects inhabit their worlds according to certain identifications and attachments. This material coordinate, I want to emphasize, constitutes a phenomenology of perception that situates the theme of power in relation to differential circuits of material and imaginary resources. It is precisely here, according to this nexus, or else matrix, by which people become subjects of their worlds, that tends to be elided by classical phenomenology.

A Phenomenology of Race While phenomenology is often recognized as a branch of philosophy and social theory in the global North, studies in the racial dynamics of perception and embodiment haven’t made much of an impression on the discipline. This is in part due to the somewhat neutral language, what Sara Ahmed calls a “paperless philosophy” (2006, 34), informing the field in its Euro-centred guise. This field tends to write out of the picture the material resources, historical processes, and relations of production underpinning capacities to develop and apply philosophical inquiry. In short, the field fails to consider how power, influence, and authority underpin and orient the very practice of philosophical inquiry. In her Queer Phenomenology, Ahmed provides important terms of reference by which to challenge this paperless philosophy. Writing about the norm of

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heterosexuality, for example, she asks about capacities to “inhabit” a certain “social form,” in respect of “the gathering of bodies and things in specific ways” (2006, 101, emphasis in the original). Extending this insight to the theme of racialization, she notes how capacities to inhabit livelihood are very often shaped by orientations to whiteness. Referring to Fanon, she writes: “Such forms of orientation are crucial to how bodies inhabit space, and to the racialization of bodily as well as social space” (2006, 111). Ahmed employs the term “orientation” to good effect. The concept suggests not only a molecular scheme of relational circuits of distribution and production, but of corresponding conventions by which bodies take shape as affective repositories. Orientations imply vectors by which “arrivals” take place, whereby human and artefactual subjects tow in their wake the conditions of their emergence. She provides a temporal emphasis to vectors of orientation and arrival: If phenomenologists were simply to “look at” the object that they face, then they would be erasing the “signs” of history. They would apprehend the object as simply there, as given in its sensuous certainty rather than as “having got here,” an arrival that is at once the way in which objects are binding and how they assume a social form. (2006, 41)

She draws on Marx to refute an idealist strain of phenomenology that forgets the labour and “conditions of arrival” by which an object accrues consistency as a subject of its world: “The temporality of ‘what comes before’ is erased in the experience of the object as ‘what is before’ in the spatial sense” (2006, 41). Ahmed, to be sure, explores the terms by which a materialist phenomenology can account for capacities by which objects, things, bodies, and subjects take shape through relational modalities of sexuality, desire, labour, and race. Her approach provides a materialist extension of Nancy’s critique of the possessive subject that phenomenology has always flirted with (Nancy 2007, 21). Her primary example, “tables,” takes place and shape in respect of what people do with them, a doing which, in turn, invests tables with capacities to affectively shape human and non-human circuits of orientation. A vase of flowers, to take another example, sitting on a table, implicates a varying contour once it is placed on a window ledge, as its capacity to orientate space—the way in which people develop capacities to inhabit space—on all sides comes to be thwarted once it is bordered by a pane of glass. In the first section of my introductory

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chapter, I emphasized how, for Said, doing is much more important than what one is or what one knows. In subsections of her study titled “Doing Things” and “Inhabiting Spaces” Ahmed discusses the taking shape and place of tables as a relational dynamic by which “objects and bodies ‘work together’ as spaces for action” (2006, 57). Her emphasis on movement and motility, on vectors of “arrival” and “orientation,” includes a reflective account of her own personal dimension. She provides what amounts to a Gramscian inventory of self, giving an account of her own “arrival,” taking stock of her background experiences and developing capacities to undertake alternative lines of action (2006, especially 151–156). Thus, the term “orientation” can be complemented by the terms “disorientation” and “reorientation.” Recognizing how the “arrival of black bodies at British universities was only possible given the history of black activism,” she articulates a corresponding reorientation, a “collective refusal to follow the line of whiteness” (2006, 156). Disorienting herself from this “line,” Ahmad strives to be responsive to the history of divergences that have made her own divergence possible. Thus, to be responsible is to put oneself in a position to be responsive, gathering oneself amidst others taking collective shape through the gathering of a “we.” How does subjectivity emerge when “not oriented around whiteness”? “We don’t know, as yet, what shape such a world might take, or what mixtures might be possible, when we no longer reproduce the lines we follow” (Ahmed 2006, 156). Ahmed’s significant point, of course, is that her capacity to act, to critically address the livelihood of racial discrimination, implicates a history of resistance, sensibilities steeped in an archive of material and imaginative resources, complemented by what she calls “phenomenal space” (2006, 112–120). This refers to the ways in which bodies learn to inhabit their environments according to both physical and imaginary orientations to place. Capacities to inhabit livelihood involve both intimate and broader demarcations of belonging, oriented in and through modalities of conduct by which such demarcations cohere. Her insights complement Fanon’s understanding of “phenomenal space” as more combative, more polarized, more in terms of racial and class demarcations. In his famous description of colonialism as a “Manichaean world” (2001, 31) he provides a phenomenological description of bodies in contexts of the racialization of social space. In fact he applies this to circumstances of both colonialism and decolonization.

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Considering this complementarity between Ahmed and Fanon, I want to note that there is a formidable genealogy of phenomenologies of race and racism that hasn’t garnered much attention in discussions of the field.11 This genealogy includes W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (2007) from the first decade of the twentieth century, Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (2008) from the mid-century, Spivak’s Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999) and Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2006) at the turn of the twenty-first century. More recently, it includes Hamid Dabashi’s Brown Skin, White Masks (2011), Lewis Gordon’s (2015) work on Fanon, and Achille Mbembe (2019), from whom in my introduction I borrowed the notion of a “phenomenology of the colony.” Interestingly, around one hundred years separate the publications of Du Bois’s and Dabashi’s books. While they were no doubt produced in different circumstances, involving varying momentums of colonial violence, imperial belligerence, racist grammars of othering, related practices of subjugation, as well as solidarities of resistance, both works revolve around what Du Bois called “double consciousness” (2007, 2) or what Dabashi refers to as “the colonized subjugated to their colonizers’ assumption of cultural superiority” (2011, 20). Du Bois famously defined the twentieth century in terms of a “color line.” In his The Souls of Black Folk he evokes (as I mentioned in my introductory chapter) a notion of “the Veil,” by which he meant a dividing line between White and Black American subjects—“the two worlds within and without the Veil” (2007, i). While the notion refers to White ignorance of African-American experience of American history, it extends to the way in which Black subjects internalized and struggled with the terms of their subjugation. Du Bois’s book, constituting fourteen essay-like chapters, as well as a “Forethought” and “Afterthought,” straddles different genres, such as sociological observation, historical insight, and political thought— flavoured with impressionistic accounts of his encounters while travelling through the American South, as well as reflections on his personal history. The essays, each of which is headed by a staff of musical notation from what Du Bois called “sorrow songs,” read like a collection of stories, told in a style of writing weaving together anecdotal observation, philosophical conjecture, sociological elaboration, and psychological insight. Through these interwoven threads Du Bois puts into relief his notion of a “double

11  In the last couple of decades this is changing. See, for example, Staudigl (2012); Alcoff (1999); Macey (1999); Laubscher et al. (2021).

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consciousness,” employed to describe the existential predicament of Black American subjects. “Born with a veil,” Black Americans tend to regard themselves from the asymmetrical, relational perspective of a subjugating White gaze, from the other side of the veil: the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-­ consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. (2007, 2)

The short Forethought ends on a personal note: “And, finally, need I add that I who speak here am bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil” (2007, i). One of his motivations, then, concerns his racialized experience of being Othered, which he relates right at the beginning of his book, in the opening page of his first essay, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings.” The scene takes place in his childhood, in “a wee wooden schoolhouse,” when the children play a game of exchanging visiting cards: “The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,—refused it peremptorily, with a glance” (2007, 1). The incident, especially the unbidden “glance,” induces an uncomfortable “revelation.” His childhood assumption of a non-racially marked subjective disposition is painfully torn asunder: “Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil” (2007, 1). Henceforth, as Du Bois experiences himself becoming a differential part of what he regarded as whole, he is induced not merely to refer to a “they,” but of having to look upon himself through “their” gaze. The unnamed whole with which he assumed to belong is cleaved in two directions: externally, the group of school children is split into Black and White, while internally Du Bois himself is split into a related dynamic. A double consciousness emerges as the racialized subject has to look upon themself “through the eyes of others,” through a White gaze. The scene Du Bois recounts is similar to the scene at a cafe on a Paris street I discussed above, when Frantz Fanon is confronted by a kid saying to his mother “Look, a Negro! Maman, a Negro!” Intervening with what amounts to

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the decorous privilege of White tolerance,12 the mother responds first to her son, “Ssh! You’ll make him angry”; and then to Fanon: “Don’t pay attention to him, monsieur, he doesn’t realize you’re just as civilized as we are” (Fanon 2008, 93). For Fanon, the “we” must have resonated well beyond its immediate sonorous pitch. Like Du Bois before him, and like Said after him, he is confronted with an existential threshold where his assumption of being part of the “we” is sundered by both a condescending White gaze and his reflections on the terms by which his presupposed neutrality, his incognito, his secret sharer, is abruptly called to account. And as with Du Bois, the racializing White gaze induces in him an emerging realization that his capacity to hold himself together, to not fall apart, is dependent on that same gaze, on his “endeavor to seek admittance to the white sanctuary from within” (Fanon 2008, 33–34). He needs an affirmative gaze to be looked at in a way that how he looks measures up to “white approval” (Fanon, 2008 34). As Mbembe asks: “By exhibiting us in this manner, do we look at ourselves as others look at us? And what do they see when they look at us? Do they see us as we see ourselves?” (2019, 175). How does one break away from the circular force of a “look” that is all at once both verbal (looking and being looked at) and nominal (my look, or his look, the way in which someone looks)? The answer, in part, involves a responsiveness that, beyond ontic formulas defining what one is, or what one knows, is concentrated in what one does  and says, as well as what one doesn’t do and say. To speak, then, of a phenomenological closure that underestimates the incorporation of a third-person voice as an inner voice of oneself is to raise awareness of the critical value of maintaining Fanon’s approach to a corporal schema embedded in relational circuits of racial subjugation. It is also to maintain awareness of schemes of interpellation, whereby the “native informer,” that “centrally interpellated voice from the margin” (Spivak 1999, 40), serves the imperial interests of the global North. In this respect, Fanon’s voice resonates through Dabashi’s discussion of what he calls a “deep colonial grammar” (2011, 13). In his Brown Skin, White Masks, he applies the term to those he calls “comprador intellectuals.” These are cultural and political commentators who have voyaged into the heart of empire, happy to offer insider knowledge of their home countries. According to Dabashi, the “native informant,” in contrast to the “native  For a discussion of “White tolerance,” see Hage (2000).

12

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informer,” is “trained in European and American universities in the deep colonial grammar of their discipline” and through field work “turn[s] the members of their own families and the fate of their own native countries into objects of anthropological curiosity” (2011, 13). However, he concentrates more on the “native informer,” who he describes as having “emigrated and serve the empire on its home front” (2011, 13). Like Spivak, Dabashi addresses the problem of the third world intellectual becoming a “native informer,” a “comprador” intellectual who, having internalized a paternal Western view of the world, trades in the knowledge of their native culture (Dabashi 2011, 12).13 Thus, for Dabashi, as for Said14 and Spivak, critique involves a taking stock of one’s own assumptions, of the cultural repertoire one has come to embody. Through this “Gramscian inventory of our whereabouts,” Dabashi writes in his obituary (2015, 45) for Said, a “band of rebels and mutineers”—all inspired by the voice of Said—maintain a critical awareness of how they may be co-opted into native informers. Dabashi relates the capacity to maintain critical self-awareness to place, what he calls “whereabouts,” meaning circumstances of power, influence, and authority by which co-­ option transpires as modicums of accommodation, of deference. Said’s efforts to inventory and disclose the “deep colonial grammar” he, in part, bears can be regarded as a complement to Spivak’s efforts to trace how this grammar “forecloses” an awareness of the racial and gender attributes borne by the “figure of the ‘native informant’” (Spivak 1999, 13, footnote 20). Through their respective itineraries into the heart of empire, Said and Spivak, as well as Dabashi, maintain a critical awareness of the interpellative forces they have had to contend with. Like Spivak and Dabashi, Said learned to situate his inventory within the recursive momentum of his capacity for interventionist scholarship. It is in such terms that we can appreciate how with his personal dimension he provides a critique of racism by way of a phenomenology attuned to affective, perceptual schemes of embodiment.

13  The historical etymology of the term “comprador” arises from colonial circumstances of the seventeenth century. Portuguese in origin, it refers to a local person enlisted by Europeans as an agent to purchase goods or else provide information on local customs. 14  See Said (1986) for a discussion of how, from a “secular perspective” (52), “the postcolonial intellectual” (51, 54) has a capacity to challenge the “Western meta-subject” of “modern Western imperialism” (59).

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In Conclusion I have mentioned Fanon’s dissatisfaction with ontology, his wariness of a philosophical propensity to rely on ontic categories by which to ground discussions of being. From his perspective, ontic categories remain insensitive to historical processes and varying alterities by which subjects accrue relational capacities to inhabit their worlds. One can also sense his dissatisfaction with a phenomenology that, while giving emphasis to the relational comportment of bodies, underestimates the engendering power, the colonial circuits, the racism, of such comportment. For Fanon, phenomenology doesn’t work as a neat application of either Husserl or Merleau-Ponty. When reading his Black Skin, White Masks, or his The Wretched of the Earth (2001), one has the impression that he picks at European philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, taking out bits and pieces to deal with practical problems or else fashioning them to articulate his decolonizing struggles. The very style of his writing—clipped, short and combative sentences, often resonating with an irony that serves to undercut moralistic pretensions—informs his dissatisfaction with philosophical conjecture. Through his characteristic, non-academic style, one can say that ideas, for Fanon, have value when their historical implications emerge through the practical exercise of thought. We can thus say that phenomenology has practical value when its material manifestation as an application of thought includes a sense of subjectivity as an inchoate emergence into livelihood, into breath. Nafssiyan, this breath respires through a prism refracting racial subjugation, modalities of interpellation, and critical exercises of responsiveness and solidarity. Lewis Gordon makes valuable observations about what he calls Fanon’s “creolized style of writing,” which he describes as an approach to “problems without presumptions of disciplinary, linguistic, or stylistic allegiance” (2015, 73). Gordon borrows the notion of a creolized style of writing from Jane Anna Gordon, who claims that, in a context in which “continuities are broken and people must work with what remains to proceed … for anything to remain meaningful it must be transformed as it is resituated again and again in each new generation and circumstance” (Jane Anna Gordon quoted in Gordon 2015, 73). While a neat, streamlined body of theory from elsewhere may well provide some insight into

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the breaking up of continuities, it will fail to appreciate15 how social disintegration reaches into the linguistic characteristics, the symbolic associations, and corporal vernaculars, by which continuities endure. Hence, Lewis Gordon insists, with emphasis, that “Fanon’s phenomenology is … Fanonian phenomenology” (2015, 73). And while he demonstrates the characteristic components of Fanonian phenomenology, his accompanying point concerns what he calls “the problem of subordinated theoretic identity” (2015, 5). By this he means two related problematics—explaining a thinker’s ideas according to their biographies, their life experience, all the while assuming that the shape  their ideas have been borrowed from the work of other thinkers. My generalizing, paperless phrasing (a “thinker’s,” “their”) tends to neutralize Gordon’s attentiveness to the racial circumstances, or else presuppositions, by which it is assumed that “white thinkers provide theory and black thinkers provide experience for which all seek explanatory force from the former” (Gordon 2015, 5, emphasis in the original). Thus, it would be reductive to describe Fanon as a Merleau-Pontian or Freudian scholar, just as it would be limiting to describe Said as a Foucauldian scholar. In fact, as I near the end of this study, I remind my readers that I have not approached Said through a prism of his life experience and the influence of Foucault, Gramsci, or Merleau-Ponty on his work. As I have been arguing, I have been interested in how Said situated his colonial education and related experience of racism as a component of his developing capacity to practise an interventionist style of scholarship. Considering how he sought to thematize his Gramscian inventory through a critical, self-reflective lens, all the while foregrounding the predatory characteristics of knowledge production in the Western academy, Said’s work lends itself to current discussions around practices of decolonizing research methodologies. Although I haven’t framed my approach to Said’s oeuvre with reference to contemporary debates concerning the “decolonization of theory,” it seems to me that his insights, especially his travelling theory essays, could be enlisted to critically address what to my mind transpires as a debilitating focus on theory itself. Elsewhere, I have discussed this problematic in a contribution to methodological considerations when researching trauma (Nikro 2018), where I suggested that, from a phenomenological approach, a decolonizing methodology would 15  Which, of course, is Said’s point in his travelling theory essays, which I discussed in Chap. 3.

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be concentrated in how researchers inhabit their fields of research, developing relationships to their subjects of research, as well as the artefacts they either produce or gather, what are often called “sources,” and are inevitably stored and circulated as “resources.” Said’s attention to repositories and archives would be important in this respect. To pursue this line of inquiry in respect of Said’s work, it would be an idea to further flesh out the significance of a material phenomenology and decolonizing methodology in respect of knowledge production across and between the global South, in tension to the influence of an often predatory, globalizing North. For Said, while capacities for critical engagement neither begin nor end with self-understanding, what Walter Mignolo has referred to as “epistemic disobedience” (Mignolo 2015, xxi) requires a hefty dose of reflection on the institutional circuits and historical processes by which one has been both enabled and restricted. In other words, epistemic configurations of knowledge enfold ontological dispositions of power, knowledge, and desire, and it is well worth teasing out the phenomenological contours of such dispositions. Ever resilient in his characterization of the uncanny alterity of epistemic configurations and ontological dispositions, Dabashi makes the observation that “since the Third World has imploded and gone in search of its own future beyond the European imagination” (2015, 29), Europe itself has to go beyond its imagination of itself. It would be fair to say that Said’s personal dimension, his “strange disjuncture,” constitutes an arduous effort to trace this uncanniness. To be sure, Said’s book Orientalism is itself steeped in the philosophy, social theory, and cultural canons of Europe. As I mentioned above, in this book he makes no mention of Fanon, or else the critical work of others addressing colonial violence and racism, such as Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, Amílcar Cabral, Leopold Senghor, wa Thiong’o (all of whom, like Said, are influenced by European thought), anti-colonial writers he discusses fifteen years later in Culture and Imperialism. In the latter volume, historical processes of “decolonization” and practices of resistance are given much attention. In the earlier book, Orientalism, one of the very few mentions of a critical response, if not resistance, to European writers is Said’s discussion of Abdullah Laroui’s critique of Gustave von Grunebaum’s reductive notions of Islam (2003, 296–299). As I have indicated in this study, Said’s lack of attention to anti-colonial resistance is, of course, one of the main critiques of Orientalism. However, for my purposes, such critiques, while in part valid, underestimate how the very writing of the book not only performs a radical attempt of intellectual resistance on the part of

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Said himself but gave rise to further critical work addressing imperious forms of knowledge production implicated in histories of colonial subjugation and racial violence. Considering his intellectual inventory, Said would not have baulked to identify himself as a “western scholar,” though is keen to problematize the historical processes and personal circumstances by which he became a “western scholar.” In other words, in his work he develops a critical view of his relationship to his cultural learning, his intellectual bearing. Said’s dis-position and dis-placement,16 as well as his efforts to include a discussion of his dispositions and displacements, suggest an existential experience of what Mignolo famously termed “border thinking” (despite his comments on what he regarded as Said’s rigid geography of the Orient and the Occident).17 In his efforts to give an account of himself, Said strove to articulate both the personal and historical configurations by which his displacements and dispositions constrained him in certain ways while enabling him in others ways. Through this confluence, through the “cluster of flowing currents” in and by which he learned to become himself, he elaborated self-understanding in phenomenological terms of differential circuits (currents) of authority, intellectual labour, power, and desire. In this study I have evoked the term nafssiya to capture these configurations. I have been arguing that, despite the all-too-swift categorization of Said’s work, especially Orientalism, as an epistemological exercise of discourse analysis, a phenomenological dimension of being in the world played an important role in his oeuvre. This dimension stretches from his early interest in the “fiction of autobiography” in Joseph Conrad, through the 1960s when he became more acutely aware of the history of his Arab 16  My awkward emphasis is meant to evoke the etymological sense of the Latin dis as a splitting of the self into two. For my purposes, this splitting (say, between Occident and Orient) cannot be overcome by an addition of the two but rather implicates a void—varying momentums, or inventories, of division. Interestingly, the Latin dis implicates an alterity marked by the negative, as in not being so and so; not being European, say, or being a nonEuropean—one’s ontological status defined in the negative, all the while giving value to the positive, to the “European.” 17  Mignolo (2012, 50). Distinguishing “interior borders” and “exterior borders” in respect of differential momentums of colonialism, Mignolo redirected world systems theory towards a recognition of the “diachronic contradictions” (50) by which European colonialism and modernity overlapped in different parts of the world. Thus, from Mignolo’s point of view, the Occident and the Orient remain unstable geographical sites and signifiers, shifting through overlapping borderlands.

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and Palestinian background, to his trilogy of the late 1970s (Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, and Covering Islam), up to his own memoir of the late 1990s, Out of Place, which was composed under the cloud of his terminal illness. This ontological dimension involved Said’s keen phenomenological awareness of how racist assumptions are incorporated, how such assumptions are introjected and played out as modicums of being in the world, of certain modalities of self-understanding and capacities to exchange a sense of self with others. Said’s sense of the worldliness, or else context-bound circumstances in which culture and learning come to be embodied as formations of character, implies a phenomenological awareness and critique of racism. In this respect, his warning of “formerly colonized people” employing the “structure” of “cultural domination” on “themselves or upon others” (Said 2003, 25) places him within a genealogy of decolonial writers who articulated an awareness of how racial assumptions become part and parcel of the formation of subjectivity. To be sure, as Said demonstrated in his work, such modes of subjugation involve resistant practices. The genealogy of phenomenological studies of racism constitutes a rich resource for emergent practices of critique steeped in a sense of nafssiya.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press. Alcoff, Linda Martin. 1999. Towards a Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment. Radical Philosophy 95 (May/June): 15–26. Blackmur, Richard. 1981. Language as Gesture: Essays in Poetry. New  York: Columbia University Press. Butler, Judith. 1988. Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. Theatre Journal 40 (4): 519–531. ———. 1999. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2004. Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia. In The Judith Butler Reader, ed. Sara Salih and Judith Butler, 204–211. New York: Blackwell. ———. 2005a. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press. ———. 2005b. Merleau-Ponty and the Touch of Malebranche. In The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, ed. Taylor Carmen and Mark Hansen, 181–205. Cambridge University Press.

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———. 2007. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. ———. 2008. Violence, NonViolence: Sartre on Fanon. In Race After Sartre: Antiracism, Africa Existentialism, Postcolonialism, ed. Jonathan Judekan, 211–232. Albany: Suny Press. ———. 2011. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. London: Routledge. ———. 2021. The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Politico Bind. London: Verso. Dabashi, Hamid. 2009. Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in Time of Terror. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. ———. 2011. Brown Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press. ———. 2015. The Moment of Myth: Edward Said, 1935–2003. In Hamid Dabashi Can Non-Europeans Think? London: Zed Books. Diprose, Rosalyn. 2002. Corporeal Generosity: On Giving With Nietzsche, Merleau-­ Ponty, and Levinas. Albany: State University of New York Press. Du Bois, W.E.B. 2007. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Cosimo. Ewara, Eyo. 2020. Fanon’s Body: Judith Butler’s Reading of the ‘Historico-Racial Schema’. Critical Philosophy of Race 8 (1–2): 265–291. Fanon, Frantz. 2001. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. London: Penguin. ———. 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books. Gordon, Lewis R. 2015. What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought. New York: Fordham University Press. Hage, Ghassan. 2000. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. New York: Routledge. Hussein, Abdirahman A. 2004. Edward Said: Criticism and Society. London: Verso. Khoury, Elias. 2008. The Intellectual and the Double Exile. In Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward Said, ed. Müge Gürsoy Sökmen and Bașak Ertür, xiii–xx. New York: Verso. Laubscher, Leswin, Derek Hook, and Miraj U.  Desai, eds. 2021. Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology. New York: Routledge. Macey, David. 1999. Fanon, Phenomenology, Race. Radical Philosophy 95 (May/ June): 8–14. Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham: Duke University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2002. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge. Mignolo, Walter. 2012. Local Histories, Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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———. 2015. Foreword. In Can Non-Europeans Think? ed. Hamid Dabashi. London: Zed Books. Morrison, Toni. 1993. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007. Listening. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press. Nikro, Norman Saadi. 2018. Researching Trauma: Some Methodological Considerations for the Humanities. Middle East Topics and Arguments 11: 17–29. Said, Edward W. 1970. The Arab Portrayed. In The Arab-Israeli Confrontation of June 1967: An Arab Perspective, ed. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, 1–9. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1985. Beginnings: Intention and Method. New  York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1986. Intellectuals in the Post-Colonial World. Salmagundi 70 (71): 44–64. ———. 2000. Out of Place: A Memoir. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 2001a. Introduction: Criticism and Exile. In Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays, ed. Edward W.  Said, xi–xxxv. London: Granta Books. ———. 2001b. Labyrinth of Incarnations: The Essays of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays, ed. Edward W. Said, 1–14. London: Granta Books. ———. 2001c. Sense and Sensibility. In Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays, ed. Edward W. Said, 15–23. London: Granta Books. ———. 2003. Orientalism. London: Penguin. ———. 2008. Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography. New  York: Columbia University Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. London: Harvard University Press. Staudigl, Michael. 2012. Racism: On the Phenomenology of Embodied Desocialization. Continental Philosophy Review 45: 23–39. Vandeviver, Nicolas. 2019. Edward Said and the Authority of Literary Criticism. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Index1

A Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion (1950), 66 Abou-Rahme, Ruanne, 63 Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim, 21 Actual, 10 Adorno, Theodor, 4, 41 Affiliative, 21 After the Last Sky (1999), 81 Agamben, Giorgio, 144 Ahmad, Aijaz, 74 Ahmad, Eqbal, 112 Ahmed, Sara, 11 Al-Ahram, 19 Al-Hayat, 19 al-Hout, Shafiq, 93 Allochronic, 129 Althusser, Louis, 126 Amateur, 53 Anarchic archive, 63 Anti-humanism, 45

Aqliyya, 14 Arabic, 19 Arab-Mizrahi, 34 The Arab Portrayed, 21, 163 Arafat, Yasser, 104 Archaeological, 58 The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), 118 Archive, 55–63 Arendt, Hanna, 157 Artefacts, 9 Assabiyya, 14 Autobiography, 5 Al-‘Azm, Sadik, 72 B Badiou, Alain, 159 Barthes, Roland, 126 Basel, Abbas, 63 Bayoumi, Moustafa, 32 Beginnings (1985), 7

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 N. S. Nikro, Nafssiya, or Edward Said’s Affective Phenomenology of Racism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51769-3

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196 

INDEX

Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975), 20, 91 Beirut, 19 Benjamin, Walter, 98 Berger, John, 99 Between Worlds, 19 Bhabha, Homi, 121 Black Skin, White Masks (2008), 8, 184 Blackmur, R. P., 105, 118, 173 Bloom, Allan, 48 Bradley, John, 24 Brennan, Timothy, 76 British colonies, 1 Brown Skin, White Masks (2011), 186 Burton, Richard, 57 Butler, Judith, 11, 19 C Cairo, 1 Capacities, 15 Cavarero, Adriana, 17, 157 Cesaire, Aimé, 136 Chateaubriand, Francois de, 57 Circumstance, 12 Clifford, James, 44 Colonial Discourse Analysis, 75 Colonial education, 1 Colonial racism, 3 Color line, 184 Constellations, 24 Contrapuntal, 5, 55 Corporal schema, 180 Counterpoint, 5 Covering Islam (1997), 93 Critical consciousness, 7, 12, 82 Cultural depositories, 12 Culturalist, 75 Cultural reservoirs, 36 Culture and Imperialism (1993, 1994b), 5n3, 55

D Dabashi, Hamid, 11, 19, 172 Daniel Deronda (1876), 36 Darwish, Mahmoud, 112 De Groot, Rokus, 4 Decolonial, 9 Deferential, 11 Deleuze, Gilles, 96 Depository, 30 Derrida, Jacques, 31 De-scribes, 23 Desubjugation, 154 Diacritics, 91 Differential, 11 Discursive formation, 55 Dolar, Mladen, 107 Double-consciousness, 185 Du Bois, W. E. B., 11 E Egypt, 1 Elaboration, 41 Embodied repertoires, 56 Enables, 83 Ethnos, 17 Ethos, 17 Ewara, Eyo, 178 F Faiz, Faiz Ahmad, 111 Fanon, Frantz, 8 Fanonian phenomenology, 189 Filiative, 21 Foucault, Michel, 31, 44, 84 Freud, Sigmund, 101 G Gilmore, Leigh, 17 Giving an account of oneself, 19

 INDEX 

Goldmann, Lucien, 84 Gordon, Lewis R., 11, 188 Gould, Glenn, 5, 40 Gramscian, 13, 21 H Hartman, Geoffrey, 116 Hassan, Ihab, 118 Hegelian, 4 Hermeneutic impulses, 36 Hermeneutic repertoires, 36 Hermeneutics of alterity, 13 Heterophonic, 5, 145 Historical-racial schema, 180 Horkheimer, Max, 103 Humanistic scholarship, 12 Hussein, Abdirahman A., 7, 95 I Ibn Khaldun, 14 Identitarian, 16 Imaginary resources, 10 Imperialism, 55 Infinity of traces, 30 Intellectuals, 54 Interpretation of Dreams (1983), 124n24 Interventionist methodology, 51–52 Invention, Memory, and Place (2000b), 19 Inventory, 30 Islamic, 14 Israeli, 81 J Jerusalem, 1, 19 The Jungle Book, 67 Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (2008), 6

197

K Kalthoum, Umm, 2 Kant, Immanuel, 148 L Lamartine, Alphonse de, 56 Lane, Edward, 57 Laroui, Abdullah, 190 Late Style (2007), 85 Lebanon, 19 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 126 Lewis, Bernard, 93 Livelihood, 12 Lukács, Georg, 71, 111 M Marxism, 71 Massad, Joseph, 5n3 Material resource, 10 Materialist phenomenology of racism, 5 Mbembe, Achille, 7, 179 McCarthy, Conor, 6, 31 Memoir, 2 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 7 Methodological, 61 Mignolo, Walter, 190 Miller, J. Hillis, 120 Mind, 9 Molecular, 16 Moore-Gilbert, Bart, 17 Mosaic, 99 Musical Elaborations (1992a), 4, 40 N Nafs, 13 Nakba, 35 Naksa, 92 Nasser, Gamel Abdel, 104 The New Science (1999), 31

198 

INDEX

O Occasional, 12 On Lost Causes, 104 Organic, 54 Oriental, 29 Orientalism (1978), 6 Out of Place: A Memoir (1998), 2, 16 P Palestine, 1 Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), 81 Palestinians, 5, 15, 57 Pannian, Prasad, 94 Parry, Benita, 79 Performative, 40 Personal, 22 Personal dimension, 1, 15, 29, 56 Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1964), 58 Phenomenological contours of his nafssiya, 41 Phenomenology, 3 Phenomenology of affect, 20 Phenomenology of Perception (1945), 172 Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, 81 Postcolony, 17 Potential, 10 Poulet, Georges, 6 Prison Notebooks (1947), 29 Professional, 53 Q Queer Phenomenology (2006), 11 The Question of Palestine (1992b), 20

R Recursive, 31 Reflections on Exile (2000), 68 Relational, 16 Repertoire, 55–63 Resistance, 82 Resistance to theory, 82 Response, 83 Responsiveness, 82 Reynolds, Dwight, 18 Ruah, 13 S Said, Najla, 19 Saussure, Ferdinand, 126 The Secret Sharer, 166 Secular, 40 Secular criticism, 12 Shakhsiyya, 14 Shohat, Ella, 8 Slyomovics, Susan, 19 Soul and Form (1974), 105 The Souls of Black Folk (2007), 184 Spanos, William, 19, 76 Spivak, Gayatri, 11, 79 Strange disjunction, 2, 5, 8 Structuralist, 45, 126 Structuralist controversy, 21 al-Suyuti, Jalal al-Din, 18 T Tabib al-nafs, 13 Tarjama li-nafsihi, 18 Tarzan, 67 Taylor, Diane, 62 Texts, 9 Thevenaz, Pierre, 126 Thiong’o, Ngũgı ̃wa, 8 Third World, 190 Traboulsi, Fawwaz, 71

 INDEX 

Traditional, 54 Transitive constellations, 95–102 Travelling theory, 82 V Vandeviver, Nicolas, 6 Varner Gunn, Janet, 17 Veeser, H. Aram, 92 “The Veil”, 184 Vichian, 97 Vico, Giambattista, 31 W Weissmuller, Johnny, 66 Western, 4

Williams, Raymond, 71, 76 Worlding, 79 Worldliness, 10, 41 The World, the Text, and the Critic (1991), 7, 20 The Wretched of the Earth (1961), 82 Y Yanyuwa people, 24 Young, Robert, 46 Z Zahirites, 10, 13 Zionism, 35

199