Edward W. Said (1935-2003).

"To keep his mind alive is to keep Edward alive." Mariam Said, widow of the late Edward W. Said, June 2004

EDWARD W. SAID DIED QUIETLY in his sleep in the early hours of the morning of 25 September 2003. He died of complications from chronic lymphocytic leukemia, a deadly disease that he had struggled with since 1991. Said's death attracted widespread attention from all over the world. The Secretary-General of the United Nations issued a statement on the occasion, as did the crown of the Hashemite monarchy as well as other ministers of culture in Lebanon and elsewhere. That Said was the object of this collective expression of mourning explains the enormous and even universal loss represented by Said's death, as it also says something about the sustained force and widespread influence of his thought and writings.

In the literature seminars I took with him at Columbia University, I recall the sense of urgency, immediacy, and the flawless fluidity with which he would discuss the writings of Joseph Conrad, the music of Beethoven, or the way he would recount his personal impressions of C. L. R. James in the twilight of his life. No one less perspicacious than Edward Said could make such a convincing and eloquent argument for the theoretical connections between postcolonial historiography, classical music, and anti-imperialist politics that speaks not simply to his exceptional gifts as a comparative critic and an intellectual, but also to the development and reinvention of the scope of this new humanism, which late in his life he aimed explicitly to define.

What I came to learn about Edward, as his student, his research assistant, and friend, was that both his life and his work were part of a willful human and humane endeavor. "Everyday seems like the first day of school," he would say. Indeed, his unrelenting commitment to the world and to knowledge can be best understood in the terms of an embattled contradiction between his own particular human exertions--his repeated and physical defiance of his medical prognosis, his challenges to authority and the ideas which help to sustain it--and the processes by which universal principles such as freedom, justice, and truth were placed in the service of their antithesis. His writings and even his presence always seemed to express and even embody a kind of will. It was not simply that Said was extraordinarily talented at exposing the hypocrisies that are an inherent part of the prevailing way in which the world is mostly understood. Through his writing and lectures Said had the ability to make the most complex worldly and historical processes so simple and graspable, without ever reducing their sophistication or producing new orthodoxies that could somehow explain and comprehend everything. What was most inspiring about him is that he made us all feel like intellectuals, rooted in the hard and material world of literature, politics and culture.

His demystifying and explanatory powers were gifted, at times entrancing, and inspiring. His style of writing, argumentation, and even insult (of which he was also a master) was to draw a series of tightly and increasingly critical circles around his object; yet insofar as his strategy was one of elaboration, it persistently denied objectifying itself as a method that could be repeated and rehearsed, like some sort of chorus, over and over again. Yet history and experience were not beyond comparison for Said, and throughout his life he was a great friend of the South African anti-apartheid movement.

Though he saw significant differences between the Palestinian movement for national self-determination and the struggle against apartheid, he viewed the latter as an exemplary one. For Edward, the international moral outrage against the white supremacist government--founded on a policy of demographic separation, emergency decrees, white supremacist death squads, and the daily degradation of South African blacks--held a deep relevance for him. Most of all, the anti-apartheid movement's great achievement was the fact that it made its cause an international one. He viewed the struggle as an enormous human effort that had effectively undermined apartheid's international support by forcing nearly everyone to acknowledge our common humanity.

Yet for Edward, there were distinct differences between the experience of black South Africans and Palestinians. Unlike the white settlers of South Africa, a great many of the Jewish settlers were the survivors and relatives of one the most horrific crimes of the twentieth century. Their sheer presence shrouded the circumstances in Palestine with a complexity that Edward would once ingeniously and ironically summarize by declaring that the Palestinian people were "the victims of the victims."

The power of his message could be measured by the level of outrage of his critics. His Columbia University office was ransacked and he was subject to a seemingly endless litany of lies about his character. He was the subject of numerous efforts defamation. (1) He was branded as the "Professor of Terror," in spite of his repeated and eloquent efforts to argue that there was no moral foundation to the killing of Israeli civilians. Among the cheapest attempts was an essay in Commentary magazine in 1999. (2) Throughout its meticulously constructed narrative, filled with countless omissions and fabrications, Commentary, a small neo-conservative magazine, assailed Said's life as Palestinian by pretending to show that he was not really Palestinian, nor ever lived in Palestine, nor that his family was evicted from Palestine in 1947.

What was even more troubling, however, was that Commentary's essay was not merely a defamatory attack on Edward both as an intellectual and as an exile, but part of the much larger, concerted and consolidating cultural and political project through which Israeli and many American Jews attempted to undermine the existential and ontological category of the Palestinian as a human subject of occupation, dispossession and expulsion. From Golda Meir's statement that there "is no such thing as a Palestinian" to Joan Peter's hoax of a book, From Time Immemorial, Israeli national mythology (and the consensus which binds it together as a totalized military culture and society) has been the prevailing idea that all Palestinians, collectively, represent a terrorist threat and do not really exist as human subjects.

Yet Edward always saw reconciliation in the form of its antithesis or opposite. Humanity was capable of remarkable achievements, among the most significant the fact that despite Israel's ongoing policy of mass arrests, torture, political assassinations, endless curfews, detentions, housing demolitions; despite its contravention of countless U.N. resolutions, as well as the charter of the Geneva Convention, in spite of what amounts to the collective punishment of an entire people and their way of life--Palestinians have, over and over again, proven their ability to survive amid the gloomiest and most terrible of odds.

For Edward post-apartheid South Africa loosely provided a model of coexistence, interdependence, and reconciliation. What was crucial for him was that Israel accept its responsibility for the effects of 1948; that the Israelis' War of Independence was also Palestinians' War of Dispossession. How critically to account for the process that precluded the reconciliation between two seemingly irreconcilable histories, in other words, how to put an end to this parallel and paradox, was, in my opinion, the overriding theme throughout Edward's work of twenty-three books.

Works like Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, and Covering Islam focused on the politics of cultural representation. They provided a critical account of not only how the West portrays and supposedly attempts to understand the Other, but also in so doing, controls, manipulates and even produces the Other, which is, as a result, diminished, dangerous, and denigrated. Thus, in conventional discourse, are Palestinians terrorists and only terrorists, thus are Arabs, in the modern American mainstream's imagination, merely the objects of discourse and can scarcely, as human subjects, speak for themselves.

Indeed, no other book of Said's enjoyed the attention of Orientalism. (3) Since its publication in the United States in 1978, it has been translated into over twenty-four languages. It has been the subject of numerous conferences and the occasion of impassioned debates. Perhaps more than any work of late twentieth century cultural criticism, it has transformed the study of literature and culture. Yet for all of its success, Orientalism initially had difficulty finding a major publisher. Some publishing houses did not consider the book ground-breaking; still others were unwilling to back a book whose politics were at odds with the mainstream's view of Palestinians, Arabs, and Israel. Of the few publishers that expressed an early interest in it, the University of California Press offered Said a paltry $200 advance for the book. Eventually, however, Pantheon, renowned for publishing the works of intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, sent Orientalism to press in late 1977.

Orientalism's impact surprised both its publishers and even Said himself. For the topic of Orientalism--Europe's representations of the East--was not entirely new; other scholars had addressed the subject before. In 1953, for example, Raymond Schwab wrote Le Renaissance orientale (a fastidiously detailed study of Europe's nineteenth century experience of the Orient); a decade later, Anwar Abdel Malek wrote an influential article "Orientalism in Crisis" (a Marxist interpretation of Europe's representation of the "East"). In 1969, V.G. Kiernan wrote The Lords of the Human Kind (a history of European colonization). (4)

But Orientalism differed markedly from its predecessors. It brought together the philosophies of Michel Foucault, Raymond Williams and Antonio Gramsci to challenge the authority of Western knowledge of--and power over--the Orient. It examined an array of nineteenth century French and British novelists, poets, politicians, philologists, historians, travelers, and imperial administrators: the voyages and travel narratives of nineteenth century French authors such as Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Nerval, and Flaubert; the Indian journalism of Karl Marx; the writings of the first modern Orientalist Sylvestre de Sacy and of the French nineteenth century philologist Ernest Renan; the adventure tales of Richard Burton and T.E Lawrence; the speeches of Alfred Balfour; and the cables of British colonial governors in Egypt like Lord Cromer.

Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, Said viewed this ensemble of writing on the Orient as a discourse. Together the writings of Renan, Flaubert, T.E. Lawrence and others composed a discipline by which European culture managed and produced the "Orient." Their writings expressed "a will ... not only to understand what [was] non-European, but also to control and manipulate what was manifestly different." (5) For Said (as well as Foucault) a discourse was the means through which power exercised, constructed and objectified the human subject of knowledge.

Yet if Foucault offered Said a means of describing the relationship between knowledge and power over the Orient, Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony provided a way of explaining how the influence of certain ideas about the "Orient" prevailed over others. The extensive influence of a particular idea, Gramsci argued, operated not through the brute application of force in nontotalitarian societies, but by consent--a tacit, unwritten agreement often passed off as conventional wisdom or common sense. Hegemony, Said explained, was how Orientalism could remain an indefatigable cultural and political force in the Western media's representations of Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims.

Yet Gramsci's writings suggested more to Said than the idea of hegemony; Gramsci offered him a way of conceptualizing his own predicament. The best and most effective critiques, wrote Gramsci, begin when writers understand themselves as the products of the historical process, a process which leaves its traces without necessarily leaving an inventory of them. (6) Orientalism was thus Said's own account, his own inventory, of "the infinite traces" that decades of dispossession and exile had placed upon him and other "Oriental" subjects.

Among the traces deposited by the years of dispossession was Said's experience of the June 1967 Arab-Israel War. As both Said and his friend Ibrahim Abu-Lughod recounted in the BBC's documentary film, In Search of Palestine (1998), (7) the Arab defeat in 1967 had magnified his subjective sense of the Palestinians' objective national loss. Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem, and all Said would hear over the radio waves in Manhattan was a discussion of how were "we" doing? Whether or not "we" were winning. In his early essay "The Arab Portrayed" (1968), written in the aftermath of the war at the behest of his friend Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Said penned what later became the central theme of Orientalism:

   If the Arab occupies space enough for attention it is a negative
   value. He is seen as a disrupter of Israel's the West's
   existence, or ... as a surmountable obstacle to Israel's creation
   in 1948. Palestine was imagined as an empty desert waiting to
   burst into bloom, its inhabitants inconsequential nomads
   possessing no stable claim to the land and therefore no cultural
   permanence. (8)

Orientalism was thus "a history of personal loss and national disintegration," as he later wrote. (9) Its aim was to "liberate intellectuals from the shackles of systems of thought like Orientalism." (10)

The apprentices of modern day Orientalism responded fiercely. Leon Wieseltier wrote that Orientalism issued "little more than abject canards of Arab propaganda." (11) In a belated riposte published in The New York Review of Books, Bernard Lewis accused Said of "poisoning" the field of "Oriental" studies. Calling Said "reckless," "arbitrary," "insouciant," and "outrageous," Lewis recounted how Said, along with other Arab, Muslim, and Marxist critics, had "polluted" the word "Orientalism." Said, Lewis argued, had attempted to denigrate the work of well-intentioned, disinterested Orientalists; he had politicized an innocent scholarship. (12)

Yet the shrill protests from Said's critics revealed less about Said's work than about their own false and constructed assumptions. Veiled in language of "scholarship" and "objectivity," their indignation was, as one reviewer put it, "an indication of the Orientalist attitudes that Said himself had described." (13) Lewis merely "delivered ahistorical and willful political assertions in the form of scholarly argument, a practice thoroughly in keeping with the least creditable aspects of old-fashioned colonialist Orientalism," Said responded. (14)

International publishers soon took notice. Within two years of its publication and a year after its debut in England (1979), numerous translations began to appear. In 1980, Editions du Seuil published the French edition with an introduction by the French-Bulgarian literary critic Tzvetan Todorov. In the same year, Kamal Abu Deeb, the Syrian poet and critic, published an innovative translation in Arabic. Translations in German, Turkish and Farsi soon followed. The Spanish and Catalan editions were published in 1991. There were translations in Japanese and Swedish in 1993, as well as others in Serbo-Croatian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Korean, Greek, and most recently Vietnamese.

In addition to the numerous essays, many, though certainly not all of them, arising out of debates and discussions of Orientalism, (15) a collection of books and monographs devoted to his vast and fertilely productively oeuvre have emerged over the past five years. (16) Yet in spite of all these notable attempts to define and identify an over-arching methodology that can be traced throughout Said's several dozen books, with perhaps only one extraordinary exception, (17) few critics have successfully or at the very least convincingly identified an overall method that endures from his earliest work, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, to his later works such as Culture and Imperialism and Reflections on Exile. (18) That such an Olympian thinker, who is credited with the invention of fields like Postcolonial Studies, and who made a decidedly transforming contribution to the reinvention of humanism in general, has elaborated such a contested and seemingly elusive overall method testifies neither to the difficulty of his work, nor to the fact that his critics seem to know only about half as much as he did.

Why this is the case has as much to do with what appears in his works as an informal method as it does with his method's relationship to the fields of Cultural and Postcolonial Studies as a whole--all fields which, it should be stated, are rooted in different traditions and conventions of literary and cultural interpretation that cannot so easily come to grasp the theoretical underpinnings of Said's work. Indeed, Said's intellectual development can be traced, though not grossly reduced to his affiliations with a wide range of figures, intellectuals, and critics including the philologists Erich Auerbach and Giambattista Vico, as well as the work of cultural critics such as Georg Lukacs, Raymond Williams, Theodor Adorno, and to a lesser extent the eccentric modernist literary critic R. P. Blackmur, a professor of Said's at Princeton in the mid-1950s. (19)

What has made these affinities difficult to discern and elaborate together in the form of an identifiable method of critical activity is that throughout Said's writings as well as his interviews, (20) he never explicitly defined a sustained method for himself, in spite of the substantial scholarly attention paid to the introduction of Orientalism, where the theoretical contributions of Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Antonio Gramsci play a prevalent, but by no means a defining role for Said's work as a whole. (21) Partly a consequence of the enormous attention paid to the presence of this triumvirate of theorists and their often oblique relevance to Said's many other works, critics have often settled mostly for descriptions of Said's general critical attitude that has served to conceal the real critical foundations of his model, if it can even be called such a thing. Indeed, Said's work is often described as presenting a heightened, powerfully motivated restlessness that is executed in a variety of worldly ways, making often provocative connections between, for example, Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and the novel's dependence on plantation slave labor in the Antilles. (22) All of this is similarly the case with his discussion of the seemingly paradoxical representation of musical silence in the scores and performances of Ludwig von Beethoven, the operas of Wagner, the performances of Glenn Gould on the one hand, and the role of silence in the works of postcolonial critics such as Ranajit Guha on the other. (23)

No one as perspicacious as Edward Said, in other words, could make such a convincing and eloquent argument for the theoretical connections between postcolonial historiography, classical music, and anti-imperialist politics that speaks not simply to his exceptional gifts as a comparative critic and an intellectual, as it does to the development and reinvention of what could loosely be called a contesting and politically minatory secular humanism. Said's critical humanism legitimizes the work of colonized and indigenous subjects and at the same time forcefully promotes the contributions of postcolonial critics such as the rigorously historical and politically driven postcolonial and intellectual historiographies of Ranajit Guha and Michel Foucault on the one hand, and the aesthetically ambitious works of Beethoven, Wagner, and Schonberg, on the other.

All of this was rooted in Said's personal and tragic experiences of exile from Palestine in December 1947, (24) and his acutely political knowledge of the domesticating forces of academic fields, disciplines, and institutions, which tend to appropriate, and, in the end, evacuate theoretical activity of its ongoing political relevance, thus solidifying them into fixed and rigid gestures that are repeated in the form of an often numbing and complacent professionalism whose sole aim is, as he argued in a spectacular exchange with Stanley Fish, to reproduce existing forms of social and academic relations in the academy and in society at large. (25) Tirelessly thwarting the reification of the major critical categories and insights of his work--the idea of contrapuntal criticism (that he discusses in Culture and Imperialism), (26) the critical concept of affiliations and the practice of secular criticism (he elaborates this in The World, The Text, and the Critic) (27)--Said's work refuses to identify a method other than in relative general terms of an ongoing and worldly process and activity of critical consciousness, (28) which undermines the immobilizing limitations around which almost all methodologies revolve. His work thereby avoids hardening into the lapidary forms of static orthodoxies, theoretical dogmas, and provincial forms of professionalism, and thus poses a great difficulty if not an outright aporia for those who endeavor to synthesize his massive oeuvre into an identifiable method or model.

Yet another reason why Said's method has remained so elusive is related at least circumstantially to the scholarly efforts to identify a set of interpretative procedures that has, as Timothy Brennan has observed, overemphasized the Foucaultian dimensions of Orientalism to such an extent that the defining contributions of Giambattista Vico, Erich Auerbach, Georg Lukacs, Raymond Williams, and Theodor Adorno have been overshadowed by the presence of Michel Foucault in the first part of Orientalism. This is not simply because of the explicit emphasis that Said places on several of Foucault's critical categories that he draws upon from Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge (the idea of exteriority, for example), (29) but has as much to do with the fashion of French Theory and Poststructuralism and the serious reception of Foucault's work in the early 1980s. (30) Indeed, the dominant thrust of Orientalism was to establish the conditions for a form of non-dominative and non-coercive knowledge and power in Western culture's representation of the Islamic East.

Nevertheless, Foucault's importance for Said's Orientalism only partly accounts for his method there and elsewhere, in books like Beginnings: Intention and Method, where, in the early 1970s, Said was among one of the first critics to introduce Foucault's work to an English-speaking audience in "Abecedarium Culturae," the abc's of culture. (31) To read Said's oeuvre in Foucaultian terms certainly helps to grasp what has been his awareness of the inextricable relationship between the will to power and the will to knowledge; yet what all of this overlooks is not just the role of Antonio Gramsci, whose idea of hegemony and consent explains how certain ideas about the so-called Orient prevail over others in democratic societies, but glazes over the tacit, though fundamental role of Raymond Williams' The Country and the City. (32)

Indeed, what the attention lavished on Said's relation to Foucault concealed was Said's active relationship to the Romantic tradition of British Marxism in general and the writings of Raymond Williams' The Country and the City in particular. Unlike Foucault, Williams provided Said not with a kind of method, but a theoretical problem posed by the literary and poetic forms of the country-house poems of the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century novels of Jane Austen, the rural accounts of the countryside by Cobbett, and the urbanization of rural lands represented in Dickens, Hardy, Orwell, and others. Indeed, the drive of Williams' work is to emphasize the physical absence of subordinate classes, rural workers, peasants, guest laborers and immigrant workers from Britain's innumerable colonies, whose seemingly invisibility and relationship to the city and countryside result in what both Said and Williams consider to be the emergence of a contested social relationship over the geographical, territorial and property divisions that are part of the development of novels and other aesthetic forms from Virgil's Georgics onwards. (33)

Yet as Williams himself observed, certain kinds of methodological breakthroughs can just as easily become methodological traps. (34) Orientalism and Said's other works like Culture and Imperialism are thus not simply concerned with activating the cultural politics of these lapses and silences and thereby undermining the historical and cultural forces of the interdependent and dominating relationship between knowledge and power. Making these silences resonate is not merely a question of access to the institutions of public and social authority that help to enable it, but also involves what Said calls a critical consciousness and worldly knowledge of the historical contingencies of material and textual evidence and the authority upon which they depend. For example, in a polemic with the Israeli New Historian Benny Morris, whose The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem was based on countless reports, documents, memoranda, intelligence cables, and cabinet meetings through which Morris adduced the process of the dispossession of Palestinians in 1947 and 1948, (35) Said has argued that Morris's method was limited precisely by the scope of evidence that was available to Morris in the Israel State Archive. (36) While Morris uncovered a great deal that empirically challenged the mythology of Israel's emergence as a state founded at little expense to the lived and daily experience of Palestinians, why, Said asks, should Morris restrict his account to the purely textual and official evidence that he "uncovered" in the corridors of state power? Why not also read the record and the texture of the land, the traces of which reveal another history that was not included in Morris' study? (37) All of this is to say that forms of silence are deeply and profoundly part of the reproduction of existing social and political relations and the systems of thought that sustain these relations and ways of knowing, thereby enabling the political, military, and economic forces of empires to dominate minorities, colonized peoples, and indigenous subjects alike and in distinctive ways.

Of all the methods that Said employs to transcend this mostly political and cultural structure of domination and coercion, no two interpretative strategies have been of more importance to his work than the work of Erich Auerbach and Giambattista Vico. (38) Indeed, critics such as Bruce Robbins, Timothy Brennan and Aamir Mufti have also observed the importance for Said of both Vico and Auerbach before. (39) A scholar of incredible classical and philological training and part of a loosely defined group of German critics, including Ernest Robert Curtius (1886-1956), Leo Spitzer (1887-1960), Karl Vossler (1872-1949), (40) Auerbach's work has been mostly taken as recapitulating a general thematics and the cultural vicissitudes of exile for Said. (41) For Auerbach, however, philology entails a certain historical perspective as well as the firm belief that every culture and period are part of a series of cultural and material conditions that are not dissociable from the different stylistic registers of literary realism. (42) While literary works are all part of different historical periods and cultural traditions that derive from circumstances pertaining to an artist's immediate conditions, experiences, and grim or not-so-grim realities and conditions of existence, they are also related in often inextricable ways to other historical social and literary forms that are culturally available to them as well. The work of Dante, Cervantes, Flaubert, Joyce, or Naguib Mahfouz, for example, should not be evaluated by abstract categories of beauty that are invoked in ways that often transcend and even overlook the conditions pertaining to the stylistic registers of their artistic endeavors, but rather should be situated by the critic as part of a set of overlapping cultural relations between, for example, Dante and the Islamic philosopher Averroes. What precludes Auerbach from lapsing into a relativist historicism, however, is that for Auerbach the study of these social conditions is' not merely an issue for literary historiography, but involves instead a thorough and rigorous account of the interrelated and interdependent textual developments and exchanges between cultures, which are by no means hermetically constituted, monolithic, static, or homogeneous, but rather ongoing and therefore of continued political and cultural relevance. (43) This is, in fact, partly the reason why Said expressed a late interest in the scholarship of Maria Rosa Menocal, whose Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric and The Ornament of the World have examined the fruitful and overlapping features and connections between the Islamic Renaissance in al-Andalus in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and the Italian and Northern European Renaissance, which, it should be stressed, was entirely dependent on the archives of Islam and textual practices and interpretive strategies of studia abadiya for Europe's putative "discovery" of the philosophical writings of Aristotle and others. (44)

What this actually entails for Said in practice is not only a dialectically reflexive relationship to his own earlier work, which anyone who has managed to keep up with the extraordinary and ever-developing mass of his contributions will see at work an active process of constant revision and rethinking of his earlier claims--from "Traveling Theory" to "Traveling Theory Reconsidered," from Orientalism to "Orientalism Reconsidered," and so on (45)--but also an intellectual dexterity that constantly works through the internal tensions, irreconcilabilities, and discontinuities of the literary subjects he examines. All of these kinds of problems, Said argues, critics must raise not so much with the intention of providing an overarching solution or resolution to them, but by raising even more questions that are to be addressed, interrogated critically, skeptically, not according to some model or method, but as part of a willful human and humane endeavor, whose commitment can be expressed in terms of an embattled contradiction between his own particular human exertions struggling against the universalizing tendencies to negate those human ideals, against which the particular manages, almost by a sheer force of will, to stand and contest. "Thinking is not the intellectual reproduction of what already exists anyway," Adorno (whose criticism Said admired and liked to quote) writes. "Its insatiable aspect, its aversion to being quickly and easily satisfied, refuses the foolish wisdom of resignation. The utopian moment in thinking is the stronger the less it ... objectifies itself into utopia and hence sabotages its realization." (46)

What all of this has to do with the difficulty of identifying or even locating a method lies partly in the demystifying, explanatory powers of Said who, in Orientalism and elsewhere, draws a series of tightly critical circles around the discursive object of the so-called Orient; yet insofar as his strategy is one of elaboration, it persistently denies objectifying itself as a method that can be repeated and rehearsed, like some sort of chorus, over and over again. Much of Said's intellectual exertions, in other words, are deeply shaped by his affiliation with Vico. As Said has argued in Beginnings, "Vico's obsession with details ... confirmed, even if it obscured, the human historical presence, just as his obsession also obscured [his--Vico's] method. When Vico argued for a New Science, his tendency," Said continues to say, "was to turn away from schematic methods ...; instead he advocated a wideness of scope, broad comparisons, the love of detail linked to large universal principles. The power of Vico's rhetoric always takes one away from method to knowledge as pathos, to [knowledge as] invention, to [knowledge as] imagination."

In this way, Said's vast ouevre is a work of an astonishing will and human achievement that continues and will continue, as long as we read and re-read him, to remain of so much importance precisely because such works cannot be repeated, precisely because they have constituted not a method, but a general critical attitude and critical consciousness that enables us to imagine, in the form of Orientalism's antithesis, that someday we shall be free from the coercive and dominative forms of knowledge and power that have been exercised at an extraordinary cost to the experience and lived realities of human beings.

ENDNOTES

(1.) Justus Weiner, "My Beautiful Old House and other Fabrications by Edward Said," Commentary (September 1999). Also see, "The False Prophet of Palestine," The Wall Street Journal, 26 August 1999, to which Edward had responded, but the Journal's editors refused to print. "Weiner is a propagandist who like many others before him have tried to depict the dispossession of Palestinians as ideological fiction: this has been a steady theme of Zionist 'information' since the 1930s. He never gives actual sources, but uses innuendos and unsubstantiated assertion. He neither attributes any of the sources he allegedly talked to, nor does he cite from the 'voluminous' documents he supposedly consulted, nor does he indicate what exactly they said, when, and in answer to what question," Edward wrote. (Edward W. Said, unpublished letter to the editor, The Wall Street Journal, "Defamation Revisionist Style," 28 August 1999).

(2.) The allegations enjoyed a great deal of attention since they were first published in Commentary in September 1999. In The Daily News, for example, Sidney Zion asserted that "Said invented a life as a victim of Israeli aggression" (Daily News, 24 August 1999). In The Jerusalem Post, Daniel Pipes charged that Said practiced "dissimulation" and that his Palestinian identity was nothing more than a "good career move" (The Jerusalem Post, 6 September 1999). The British and American media--including newspapers such as The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal--also found it newsworthy to report upon allegations leveled by a small conservative Jewish monthly, Commentary, against him, without ever offering Said a gentleman's opportunity to reply.

Yet in spite of all energy lavished on Said's early life in Jerusalem, few if any cared to observe or even question the intentions of Commentary's author, whose writings over the past two decades were part of a strenuous effort not only morally to justify Israel's military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem, but also to provide the legal foundations for the continued demolition of Palestinian homes, the destruction of Palestinian orchards, and the deportation of Palestinian refugees from land that has been occupied in contravention of countless United Nations resolutions from 1948 onwards.

Written by an American Jew, Justus Weiner, whose research was funded by the convicted junk-bond trader, Michael Milken, the article, entitled "My Beautiful Old House," was part of Weiner's concerted efforts to deny the historical and political foundations of the Palestinian historical experience of dispossession and diaspora. In essay after essay, Weiner stressed that the Israeli government embodied a "commitment to human rights and justice," which he saw as consistent with Israeli military policy on the ground. He argued, for example, that the deportation of Palestinians from the Occupied Territories as well as the disgraceful demolitions of Palestinian homes "reduce the number of fatalities and serious injuries suffered by rioters." In a 1995 article, he justified the deportation of Palestinians from the Occupied Territories to Lebanon because Israel had provided the refugees with nothing more than "warm blankets, food and money" (Columbia Human Rights Law Review, Vol. xxvi, No. 2, Winter 1995). In 1996, he claimed that the Rabin's massive expulsion of Palestinians from the towns on Lydda and Ramle in the 1948 war was justified and that Jewish settlers had a legal title to Hebron because, after all, "Abraham purchased the cave at Machpela from a Hittite for 400 pieces of silver" (Boston College International and Comparative Law Review, Vol. xx, No. 1, Winter 1997).

For Weiner, Palestinians as human subjects existed outside of the juridical discourse of international human rights. In a 1997 law review article entitled "The Palestinian Refugee's 'Right to Return," he claimed that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights does not somehow apply to the social plight of Palestinians. Since Palestinians were not citizens of Israel in 1948, he argues, they have no right under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to "return to their country" (Boston College International and Comparative Law Review, Vol. xx, No. 1, Winter).

It was extraordinary how so many major news organizations sought without scrutiny to repeat the charges of Commentary's author, a transplanted American in Israel, who was by no means what one would call an objective journalist or an even-handed scholar. A former employee of the Israeli Ministry of Justice's Division of American Law and External Relations, he had been employed for years by the Israeli government, assiduously denying Israeli's responsibility for human rights violations. Indeed, throughout his work for the Israeli government, Weiner repeatedly defended Israel's abuse of the fundamental rights of human beings. In August 1989, for example, he asserted that Israel's killing of Yassir Abu Ghosh, a Palestinian boy from Ramallah, was justified even though Amnesty International had found that the adolescent was "shot dead by Israeli security forces as he walked with friends along a crowded main road towards the central square of Ramallah." He was hit in the head and the back by three or more bullets, said Amnesty, quoting an eyewitness report that the shots "were fired from a range of less than 10 meters." That same month, he argued incredibly that the toxic and noxious effects of tear gas on the human's respiratory system were based on "unfounded medical assumptions and erroneous medico-legal evaluations of injuries (The Jerusalem Post, 24 August 1989).

Weiner callously responded to the killing of the young Palestinian boy by sending journalists a two year-old article from the U.S. weekly paper The Boston Phoenix, claiming that too much attention was focused on Israeli human rights violations and not enough on abuses from other Arab countries. All of this--the repeated and seemingly endless circulation of an utterly mendacious article by an ex-Israeli official funded by a convicted felon Michael Milken--deeply troubled and frustrated Edward. "Why doesn't anyone go and investigate him and his house?" Edward joked.

(3.) Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

(4.) V.G. Kiernan, The Lords of the Human Kind: Black Man, Yellow Man, White Man in the Age of Empire (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969).

(5.) Said, Orientalism, 12.

(6.) Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks: Selections, Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, Trans. and Ed. (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p. 324.

(7.) "In Search of Palestine," narrative and written by Edward Said, London: British Broadcasting Company, May 1998.

(8.) Edward Said, "The Arab Portrayed," The Arab-Israeli Confrontation of June 1967: An Arab Perspective, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (Ed.), (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1970): 5.

(9.) "Afterword," Orientalism, p. 337.

(10.) "Afterword." Orientalism, p. 339.

(11.) Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic, 7 April 1979, p. 29.

(12.) Bernard Lewis, "The Question of Orientalism," The New York Review of Books, 24 June 1982, pp. 49-55.

(13.) Talal Asad, English Historical Review, Vol. 95 (376), p. 648.

(14.) Edward Said, "Orientalism: An Exchange," The New York Review of Books, 12 August 1982, 44. Cf. Said, "Afterword," Orientalism, pp. 341-345.

(15.) For the numerous discussions about Orientalism and the controversy surrounding it see, for example, Timothy Brennan, "The Illusion of a Future: Orientalism as Traveling Theory," Critical Inquiry 26 (Spring 2000), pp. 558-583; James Clifford, "On Orientalism," The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 255-276; Majorie Levinson, "The Discontents of Aijaz Ahmed," Public Culture 6 (Fall 1993), pp. 97-131; Moustafa Marrouchi, "Counternarrative, Recoveries, and Refusals," Boundary 2, Vol. 25, No. 2 (1998), pp. 205-257; Bruce Robbins, "The East as Career: The Logics of Professionalism," Edward Said: A Critical Reader, Michael Sprinker (Ed.), (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 48-73.

(16.) See, for example, Bill Ashcroft, Edward Said (London: Routledge, 2001); Valerie Kennedy, Edward Said and the Work of the Critic (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000); and William Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

(17.) Abdirahman A. Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society (New York: Verso, 2003).

(18.) Edward W. Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966); Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994).

(19.) See Edward W. Said, "The Horizon of R. P. Blackmur," Reflections on Exile (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000): 246-267.

(20.) See Edward W. Said, Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward Said, Gauri Viswanathan (Ed.), (New York: Pantheon, 2001).

(21.) Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

(22.) Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), pp. 80-97.

(23.) Edward W. Said, "From Silence and Sound and Back Again: Music, Literature, and History," Reflections on Exile (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). See Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); Ranajit Guha, "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency," Selected Subaltern Studies, Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak (Eds.), (New York: Oxford, 1988), pp. 45-86.

(24.) Edward W. Said, Out of Place (New York: Knopf, 1999).

(25.) Edward W. Said, "Response to Stanley Fish," Critical Inquiry 10 (December 1983); also see Stanley Fish, "Profession Despise Thyself: Fear and Self-Loathing in Literary Studies," Critical Inquiry 10 (December 1983), pp. 349-364. Also see, Edward W. Said, "Traveling Theory," The Word, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 226-247.

(26.) For Said, contrapuntal criticism entails reading a text with an understanding of what is in effect the political economy of works of art insofar as contrapuntal reading (as an interpretative procedure) emphasizes that all artists and authors maintain not only a relationship to their immediate surrounding, but also to other geographical regions of the world, whose work should be read in order to make visible the overlapping experiences and interdependent histories and cultures of conflict" and exchange. See Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), pp. 66-67.

(27.) For Said, affiliation is very much connected to the process of legitimizing the European humanistic tradition. In "Secular Criticism," Said writes, "the affiliative order ... surreptitiously duplicates the closed and knit family structure that secures generational hierarchical relationships to one another." That is to say, affiliation designates the process of Eurocentrism insofar as it, by virtue of its function as a structure, reproduces and consolidates cultural relationships to works of European literature in such a way that "what is ours is good, and ... deserves incorporation and inclusion in our programs of humanistic study." See Edward W. Said, "Secular Criticism," The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 21.

(28.) Edward W. Said, "Secular Criticism," The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 24.

(29.) To compare Said's employment of the notion of exteriority with that of Foucault's, see Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 107-108, 118-125; and Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), pp. 20-21.

(30.) Edward W. Said, "Reflections on American Left Criticism," The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp: 158-177.

(31.) Edward W. Said, "Abecedarium Culturae," Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975): 279-243. An earlier version of this work was also published as "Abecedarium Culturae: Structuralism, Absence, Writing," TriQuarterly (Winter 1971).

(32.) Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

(33.) Edward W. Said, The World, The Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 23.

(34.) Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters (London: New Left Books, 1979), p. 252.

(35.) Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

(36.) Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, p. vi.

(37.) Edward W. Said, "Interview," The Edward Said Reader (Eds.), Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin (New York: Vintage, 2000), pp. 424-25. Also, see Carol Bardenstein, "Threads of Memory and Discourses of Rootedness: Of Trees, Oranges, and the Prickly Pear Cactus in Israel/Palestine," Edebiyat 8 (1998), pp. 1-36.

(38.) Said has written extensively on Vico. His works include: Edward W. Said, "Vico: Autodidact and Humanist," Centennial Review (Summer 1967); Edward W. Said, "Vico on the Discipline of Bodies and Texts," MLN (October 1976). See in particular, Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 345-382. His works on Auerbach include his translation of "Philology and Weltlitertur," Centennial Review (Winter 1969), "Secular Criticism," The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).

(39.) Bruce Robbins, Secular Vocations (New York: Verso, 1994). Aamir R. Mufti, "Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Discourse," Critical Inquiry 25 (Autumn 1998), pp. 95125, Timothy Brennan, "Places of Mind, Occupied Lands: Edward Said and Philology," Edward Said: A Critical Reader, Michael Sprinker (Ed.), (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992): 74-95; Timothy Brennan, "The Illusion of a Future: Orientalism as Traveling Theory," Critical Inquiry 26 (Spring 2000), pp. 558-583.

(40.) See Geoffrey Green, Literary Criticism and the Structures of History: Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1982); Michael Holquist, "The Last European: Erich Auerbach as Precursor in the History of Cultural Criticism," MLQ, Vol. 53, No. 3 (September 1993): 371-391; Seth Lerer (Ed.), Literary History and the Challenge of Philology (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1996).

(41.) Aamir R. Mufti, "Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Discourse," Critical Inquiry 25 (Autumn 1998): 95-125.

(42.) See Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and its Public in Late Antiquity and in the Middle Ages (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1965), pp. 5-24.

(43.) See Erich Auerbach, Literature Language and its Public, pp. xxi-xxii.

(44.) Maria Rosa Menocal, Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1994). Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (New York: Little Brown, 2002). Also see, Gil Anidjar, "Our Place in al-Andalus": Kabbalah, Philosophy, Literature in Arab Jewish Letters (Palo Alto, California: Stanford University Press, 2002). For Said's discussion of the importance of the Arab colleges, madrasas and the courts of al-Andalus for the later European Renaissance, see Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew N. Rubin (Eds.), "An Interview with Edward Said," The Edward Said Reader (New York: Vintage, 2000), p. 434.

(45.) Edward W. Said, "Traveling Theory," The World, the Text, and the Critic, pp. 226-248; Edward W. Said, "Traveling Theory Reconsidered," Reflections on Exile and other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 436-452; Edward W. Said, "Orientalism Reconsidered," Reflections on Exile and other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 198-215.

(46.) Theodor W. Adorno, "Resignation," Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, Trans. Henry Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 292-293.

Andrew N. Rubin is Assistant Professor of Literature, Department of English at Georgetown University.