Notes on Edward Said's view of Michel Foucault.

This article explores Said's views of the contemporary French milieu, focusing on an important writer, equally open to wide-ranging interests, Michel Foucault. It analyzes the relationship among some recurring themes in Edward Said (culture, literature, reality, imagination, critical conscience, and intellectual praxis), in their explicit or implicit relation to Foucauldian thought. Foucault's relevance to the Saidian project is assessed with an explanation of how and why Said admired as well as criticized him.

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Bird, my sea-bird, rising from the depth of darkness, God's blessings upon you for the good news you bring. For I know now Something happened ... the horizon parted, and the house greeted the light of day.

Fadwa Tuqan (1)

The Context: Texts, Discourse, and the World

Texts are in the world. That is a recurring, far from trivial theme in Edward Said. For the statement is not a truism. It lies at the core of a secular outlook. There are different ways of being, and of being in the world. To some people, being and being-in-the-world are indistinguishable, so long as one conceives of the world in a sufficiently broad sense. However, one can set apart symbols from what is not symbolic. To a large extent, culture is a matter of symbols. Through symbols and signs we can invent, and imagine, especially through language. What humans imagine may have no counterpart in the already existing, but when that is the case we still put something in the world: at least our imagining itself, be it transient or fixed in a relatively permanent medium. We can imagine in order to make: to create objects, artifacts, physical or otherwise, works of art, for instance, but also institutions (parliaments, universities, etc.). (2) Texts, in general, have connections to the physical environment, to society, to culture. Literary texts certainly do. This connectedness really matters for literary studies; it does not deny the autonomy of literature, however.

We can speak (or write) diversely. Let us go back to one of the ancients, Apuleius, in his booklet on logic, known as Peri Hermeneias. In it, he recounts various species of discourse (oratio), according to the purposes they serve (we might as well speak of speech acts):

   ut imperandi, vel mandandi, narrandi, succensendi,
   optandi, vovendi, irascendi, odiendi, invidendi, favendi,
   miserandi, admirandi, contemnendi, obiurgandi,
   poenitendi, deplorandi, tum voluptatem afferendi, turn
   metum incutiendi.... Est una inter has ad propositum
   potissima, quae pronuntiabilis appellatur, absolutam
   sententiam comprehendens, sola ex omnibus veritati
   aut falsitati obnoxia. (3)

The question of referring is significant for truth or falsehood, and so is representation, one of the sign's functions according to Karl Buhler, in his Organonmodell:

   [Das sprachliche Zeichen] ist Symbol kraft seiner
   Zuordnung zu Gegenstanden und Sachverhalten,
   Symptom (Anzeichen, Indicium) kraft seiner
   Abhangigkeit vom Sender, dessen Innerlichkeit es ausdruckt,
   und Signal kraft seines Appells an den Horer,
   dessen ausseres oder inneres Verhalten es steuert wie
   andere Verkehrszeichen. (4)

As expected, he recognizes among the three the dominance of representation (Darstellung: the representative or presentative function of language). (5) It is the nature of the relationship between representation and states of affairs which makes the difference in telling the truth (or failing to do so), as when speaking truth to power, (6) where the speaker expresses his/herself and appeals to his/her interlocutor in a generally asymmetrical way.

Why, if the existence of entities referred to in literary texts is not supposed to be relevant for the reader--at least in modern times (7)--do critics sometimes, or frequently, search for real experiences in those texts? Traditionally, it has been thought that literary texts, no matter how fictitious they are, carry (some) truth in them. Quite often, Said uses a particular art form--mostly the novel--as a witness to reality (in addition to its other values), specifically regarding the colonial-imperialist venture. The world enters into the critic's activity through the pragmatic dimensions of literary texts (therefore including their connotations), not necessarily because of their referents, which can be wholly imagined and purposely so. Among the pragmatic dimensions are, naturally, situation, context, emitter, receptor, and culture.

The overall sense of what a text (and its producer) purports to do is decisive in judging that text. In this respect, one of the relevant factors to have in mind is the crossing of borders between disciplines and genres, something discussed by many writers and critics nowadays. Both characteristics are usually described (wrongly) as having been initiated by post-modernism. The example of J. L. Borges could be illuminating. The phenomenon of mixing genres is many-sided and has different functions and effects. Once again, one should look at the writer's intention. As illustrations, we could cite the essays which formally merge disciplines, incorporating rhetorical techniques from the short story, or we might bring up the works of fiction, incorporating the mode of the essay or the scholarly study--or Dos Passos's technique of the newsreel collage. Certainly, there are many literary essays by Borges where fiction is absent from the composition itself (e.g., on Nathaniel Hawthorne or the Nordic Eddas, just to mention a couple). It is not implausible that some readers (not exclusively novel ones, certainly), faced with the huge number of names brought forward by the Argentinian "fictioner," can get confused once in a while. On the one hand, there could be fictitious narratives mistaken for real ("Pierre Menard," say); on the other hand, once the readers have had the experience of hybrid fictions--recognized as such--in the form of learned essays, there could be critical essays taken for fictions (viz. Borges on Marcel Schwob or Evaristo Carriego). This has something to do with the different, somewhat non-canonical, formation of present readers, writers, and critics alike in respect to previous generations, as Said comments in Beginnings. But no doubt, that is not the whole picture.

Sometimes it is not easy to discern what sort of text one is dealing with. One can even devise ambiguous texts (riddles, in a sense), as a sort of entertainment, so that the listeners or readers must guess whether what is being told really happened or has been made up. To that end, traditional marks of the fabulous can be used to disguise real events, like the formula Kan ma kan fi qadim az-zaman (there was, there wasn't, in ancient times)--or you can go on inventing, weaving around real people, so to speak. Needless to say, such exercises do not abolish the boundary between truth and falsehood.

The critic can choose all sorts of texts as his/her field of attention, no matter how complex or straightforward, no matter how particular or general. Consequently, critics sometimes choose to limit themselves to the study of literary works traditionally fashioned, or of more or less hybrid modern forms, and, in their activity, produce formal articles or books, or avail themselves of the essay, or even allow themselves to mix several sorts of genre.

The Humanist Drive

Edward W. Said's work is multidimensional, as almost everybody knows, spanning literary and musical criticism (or, more broadly the cultural realm), criticism of culture and its standards or norms, and political activity, chiefly--but not exclusively--advocating the Palestinian cause.

In this multiplicity of interests, he is one among a number of contemporary intellectuals and past writers. The pluarlism of Said's interests is not at all a new phenomenon. One can say that for centuries this has been a usual occurrence. Maybe the difference in recent time lies in the stress put on the reflection around texts and non-texts, and language versus non-language, including the relationship within sets of terms. But the tone and the general outlook of Said belong to some recognizable currents in the contemporary critical scene. One of the pluralistic currents looming large in West European thought during the last few decades has been led by some outstanding authors active in France. In such a trend, too, a wide range of subjects is treated, both from the world of fiction and from the non-fictional domain. It is pertinent to recall that criticism is expected to tell the truth about what it comments on, even when it deals with fiction (from a second-degree viewpoint, in this case), and even though the tools it marshalls are often insufficent to convince everybody. Critics are not expected to make up their essays through and through, nor to put forward arbitrary interpretations of a text, nor to leave in the dark part of the evidence.

Said is multidimensional, albeit not disparate. I think his vision of humanism plays an integrating role, without becoming a full-fledged theoretical framework, nor claiming to do so. Humanism in what sense?--one may wonder. In a plurality of senses, some traditional; some less so. It is close to philology, as practiced by Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus, for example, but not yet fully secular, or as practiced in the twentieth century by Curtius, Spitzer, or Auerbach. In all of these humanists the search is for knowledge of man as a creative (and sometimes conflictive) being, and not merely as a creature reducible to the physical world, a creature that can be apprehended completely through the natural sciences. (8) "Worldly humanism v. the Empire-builders" is the subtitle of an article written by Edward Said on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Orientalism, published a little before his death; it is a sort of recapitulation and vision for the future. (9) On some points, his positive valuation of humanism in the article is in sharp contrast, one might say, to Foucault and a few of the structuralists (the less tradition-minded, probably), who, more often than not, show some disdain for humanistic values. In particular, there is the critique by Foucault concerning the Enlightenment, a movement whose indebtedness to West European Renaissance is undeniable. (10) I have the impression that Sartre's "L'existentialisme est un humanisme" is more congenial to the way Said sees the tasks of modern humanism. Said does not defend, in the aforementioned article (nor elsewhere), every kind of humanism, especially not the nation-centered variety, or those varieties subservient to one's own culture. (11) He specifically insisted on condemning ethnocentrism in his notion of humanism. (12)

Said's stance is somewhat similar to Noam Chomsky's, who has not attempted to put forward a unified theory encompassing both language, on the one hand, and politics and public matters, on the other, but whose views in both realms are consistent, mutually compatible. It is possible to make some connection between Chomsky's activity as a linguist and his political views; in each the responsibility of the human individual is particularly relevant, even decisive. Concerning both these fields, in Chomsky's conception, there is a rejection of behaviorism, and the affirmation of the subject's autonomy in normal circumstances, even though individuals and groups can be manipulated and deceived. (13) For both Said and Chomsky, the notion of expertise is largely out of place in public matters, because, barring secrecy, every citizen has the capacity to be in command of all the facts relevant to almost any public issue. But, of course, one should keep in mind the workings of the power system that not infrequently makes sure that ordinary citizens do not have access to the process of taking important public decisions, as Chomsky and Said have so often proposed.

This does not mean that specialists should not exist. Said points out:

   No one can know everything about the world we live in,
   and so the division of intellectual labor will have to continue
   foreseeably. The academy requires that division,
   knowledge itself demands it, society in the West is
   organized around it. But most knowledge about human
   society is, I think, finally accessible to common sense--that
   is, the sense that grows out of the common human
   experience--and is, indeed must be, subject to some
   sort of critical assessment. These two things, common
   sense and critical assessment, are in the final analysis
   social and generally intellectual attributes available to
   and cultivatable by everyone, not the privilege of a special
   class, nor the possession of a handful of certified
   "experts." Yet special training is necessary if one is to
   learn Arabic or Chinese, or if one is to understand the
   meaning of economic, historical, and demographic
   trends. And the academy is the place for making that
   training available: of this I have no doubt at all. The
   trouble comes when training produces guilds who, losing
   touch with the realities of community, good sense,
   and intellectual responsibility, either promote the guild
   at all costs or put it too willingly and uncritically at the
   service of power. (14)

From Said's perspective, such critical ability or independent assessment is altogether essential in the case of the intellectual, whether toward cultural creation or society as a whole. In this connection, the figure of Michel Foucault and his milieu represented an important point of reference and contrast for Said.

The French Intellectual Scene and Said

Maybe fifty years from now it will seem striking that during the later decades of the twentieth century so much weight was given in literary studies to authors like Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida, or the Telqueliens, etc. This has not been a phenomenon limited to France and the United States, naturally. Some of the attraction these intellectuals have exerted abroad relates to the need felt to renew a field perceived as stagnant, and mostly preoccupied with aesthetic and formal matters. Many saw in such authors, and in contemporary French thought generally, a salutary freedom and a will to engage in the issues of the hour. The ubiquitous Richard Rorty has this to tell us:

   It was not a dialectical necessity, but rather an historical
   accident, that post-Nietzschean European philosophy
   entered the universities of the English-speaking world
   through literature departments rather than philosophy
   departments. The main reason those departments served
   as ports of entry for the books of Derrida and Foucault
   was that everybody in them had become, by 1970, bored
   stiff with New Criticism, with Marxist criticism, and
   with Freudian criticism. Graduate students who read
   Frederick Crews's The Pooh Perplex were determined
   never to write anything remotely reminiscent of the
   books that Crews had parodied. New gurus were desperately
   needed. (15)

Of course the story was not so simple.

Beginnings includes a whole chapter, "Abecedarium Culturae," devoted to the figures of the French intellectual scene (but mainly about Foucault and structuralism and their overlap). In the Introduction to Reflections on Exile, there is a personal and telling note:

   Fred Dupee [to whose memory the book is dedicated], a
   real subversive ... in the intellectual as well as political
   sense, ... a deracinated, adventurous, and hospitable
   native-born American, ... [has] encouraged my interest
   in the new styles of French theorizing, in experimental
   fiction and poetry, and above all, in the art of the essay as
   a way of exploring what was new and original in our time
   regardless of professional hobbles. (16)

Not everyone, naturally, is convinced by those writers' outlook, singly or collectively. Some would extend their criticism to the environment surrounding them. George Steiner begins his review of The Order of Things with these words:

   French intellectual life is a scenario. It has its stars and
   histrionic polemics, its claque and fiascoes. It is susceptible,
   to a degree remarkable in a society so obviously
   literate and ironic, to sudden gusts of lunatic
   fashion. A Sartre dominates, to be followed by Levi-Strauss;
   the new master is soon fusilladed by self-proclaimed
   "Maoist-structuralists." The almost impenetrable
   soliloquies on semantics and psychoanalysis of
   Jacques Lacan pack their full houses. Now the mandarin
   of the hour is Michel Foucault. His arresting features
   look out of the pages of glossy magazines; he has
   recently been appointed to the College de France,
   which is both the most prestigious of official learned
   establishments and, traditionally, a setting for fashionable
   charisma. (17)

This review caused a rough exchange between author and reviewer. Equally surprised by the French intellectual scene, but offering a somewhat different appraisal, was Perry Anderson. (18) According to Said, Foucault and his peers

   emerged out of a strange revolutionary concatenation
   of Parisian aesthetic and political currents, which for
   about thirty years produced such a concentration of
   brilliant work as we are not likely to see for generations....
   Yet all of these Parisian intellectuals were
   deeply rooted in the political actualities of French
   life[:] ... World War II, response to European communism,
   the Vietnamese and Algerian colonial wars, and
   May 1968. (19)

On the politically oppositional character of a conspicuous part of French twentieth-century intellectuals, it might be pertinent to gauge the risks at stake in connection with the different times and situations. For instance, during the Algerian war of Independence, Sartre's apartment was bombed by elements from the right. (20) Those active in 1968 and alter incurred risks, no doubt, that their more conformist peers did not. However, they rarely suffered the way oppositionists in Third World countries, or fighters for independence and against dictatorship, did, and continue to do. (21)

All those French intellectuals had been trained in the study of classical Western thinkers. Perhaps Piaget's remarks about philosophical studies in France are appropriate here. The Geneva psychologist considers excessive the attention devoted in French philosophy departments to texts, whereas, in his opinion, scarce attention is paid to the world of experience, and no regard whatsoever is shown for ways of testing findings and theories. The criticism seems to be addressed in the first place to the normaliens (some of whom, among many others, were J.-P. Sartre, S. de Beauvoir, M. Foucault, P. Bourdieu and J. Derrida). (22)

It is worthwhile to consider Georges Mounin's Clefs pour la linguistique, an introductory book which appeared in France when structuralism was in its heyday, after it had already spilled from linguistics over to the humanities at large, including the social sciences, and, especially, anthropology and sociology. (23) Philosophers from certain currents linked to Marxism, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology were also attracted to the new method. Mounin welcomes some of the contributions, including those of Levi-Strauss, but warns the reader to be wary of the defective understanding they exhibit when it comes to linguistic notions, the basis on which they build their projections. (24)

Said celebrates in Foucault and other French intellectuals the overlapping (and even fusion) of disciplines. (25) This positive valuation of the crossing of borders is shared by many writers and critics nowadays. The problem with some of the border-crossers is that they tend to get adrift in fantasy, no matter how much they claim that they are not presenting imagined entities, but realities.

I would like to highlight in Said the passion for knowledge and the distrust of postmodernism's champions (Lyotard, for one), and of the textual formalism of the deconstructionists (Derrida and disciples), whose viewpoints some consider facile alibis advanced by those writers in order not to commit themselves. This can be compounded by "traveling theory" in the sense used by Said. (26) He points out the metamorphosis of theoretical positions when they move from one context to another:

   By the time "theory" advanced intellectually into
   departments of English, French, and German in the
   United States, the notion of "text" had been transformed
   into something almost metaphysically isolated from
   experience. The sway of semiology, deconstruction, and
   even the archaeological descriptions of Foucault, as
   they have commonly been received, reduced and in
   many cases eliminated the messier precincts of "life"
   and historical experience. (27)

Michel Foucault in Said's Orientalism

More than once, and early on, Edward Said acknowledged his debt to Michel Foucault, (28) in whom he saw a source of inspiration and a powerful innovator, "a great and original mind." (29) Elsewhere, he observed: "Quite apart from its real historical discoveries, Foucault's archaeological research has a profoundly imaginative side to it." (30) On the positive side of the balance sheet:

   His major positive contribution was that he researched
   and revealed "technologies" of knowledge and self that
   beset society, made it governable, controllable, normal,
   even as these technologies developed their own uncontrollable
   drives, without limit or true rationale. His great
   critical contribution was to dissolve the anthropological
   models of identity and subjecthood underlying research
   in the humanistic and social sciences. (31)

They met at least on one occasion. In addition, Said saw Foucault "lecture once at the College de France in the early spring of 1978, when he addressed a very large and quite motley crowd drawn from the beau monde all the way through the academic ranks down to the clochards (or tramps) who had wandered in for shelter." (32) 1 am not aware that Foucault ever referred to Said, either in his writing or interviews. It is true that Foucault, in his research and in the published interviews, rarely mentions his peers and contemporary intellectuals. Exceptions are the reviews he now and then wrote. On the other hand, there are abundant references the other way around. Running the risk of overgeneralizing, I would say that earlier references to Foucault by Said are more enthusiastic.

As a matter of fact, in the Saidian outlook, there is a substantive presence of Foucault's conceptions. Perhaps it is in Orientalism where it is most operative, although it is in Beginnings and The World, the Text, and the Critic where a more detailed treatment is found, the former being limited to work previous to 1975, when the book was published, and the latter reaching up to near the end of Foucault's life. In addition, as late as in Culture and Imperialism one can see that Foucault's views are very much present. In Orientalism, the most widely known text among Said's writings, several Foucauldian concepts are invoked: archaeology, genealogy, archive and, foremost, discourse. (33) All of these concepts are related to power in one form or another, or, more properly, to limits of action. Undoubtedly, the presence of these concepts is one of the aspects that singles out Said's outlook on Orientalism and its practices, as opposed to studies carried by previous authors. Anouar Abdel-Malek, Maxime Rodinson, and many others come to mind, as well as scholars of pre-Orientalism (so to speak), like Richard William Southern and Norman Daniel. (34) An important characteristic of Said's contribution, in this regard, is the synthesis that is achieved in Orientalism, where images, prejudices, scholarly enterprise, and the role of imperialism are examined from a unified perspective, which seeks to do justice to the connections among them. But one should not ignore the author's own points of view and perceptions.

Said goes so far as affirming that without the concept of discourse, Orientalism could not have been written:

   I have found it useful here to employ Michel Foucault's
   notion of a discourse, as described by him in The
   Archaeology of Knowledge and in Discipline and Punish,
   to identify Orientalism. My contention is that without
   examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly
   understand the enormously systematic discipline by which
   European culture was able to manage--and even produce--the
   Orient politically, sociologically, militarily,
   ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the
   post-Enlightenment period. Moreover, so authoritative a
   position did Orientalism have that I believe no one writing,
   thinking, or acting on the Orient could do so without
   taking account of the limitations on thought and action
   imposed by Orientalism. In brief, because of Orientalism
   the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or
   action. This is not to say that Orientalism unilaterally
   determines what can be said about the Orient, but that it is
   the whole network of interests inevitably brought to bear
   on (and therefore always involved in) any occasion when
   that peculiar entity "the Orient" is in question. (35)

In my opinion, the notion of discourse advanced by Foucault is important in giving the text its physiognomy, as it were. However, the investigation, in general, would not have lost very much if a different approach had been chosen. Evidently, the conceptual framework used in the book is much richer, bringing in some insights from an enlightened (and broadly understood) sociology of knowledge (a discipline mistrusted by Foucault, as Said himself notes (36)), i.e., from a perspective originating in scholars and social activists critical of capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism--a perspective originating in many of the same authors which were so important in Said's work at large (such as Gramsci). It is even possible that shorn of the Foucauldian scaffolding, the book would have convinced some of its critics more readily, who are not overenthusiastic about what they (erroneously) see as over-deterministic constraints. Conceivably, some would even claim that in Orientalism Said's debt to Foucault is something which subtracts solidity from the book.

In intellectual studies, and in social thought generally, the notion has been widespread that individuals act and live within limits, set by an epoch or by the particular community to which they belong. (37) Durkheim deems la contrainte something essential to the social, to le fait social. (38) In cultural matters, it is more usual to speak of dominant ideas, or of norms or standards which leave some leeway for the creativity of the subjects. Alfred North Whitehead, who ranges widely in his cultural (and spiritual) interests, remarks that it is possible to configure an intellectual climate retrospectively, but, in contrast to Foucault and some structuralists, he does not claim that those living in a certain epoch are unable to take ready cognizance of the prevailing ideas. (39) Wellek and Warren, too, speak of dominant views in an epoch. (40) Instead of rules, one could speak of norms or standards. It is relevant to recall here a couple of further concepts advanced by Chomsky for the study of language: rule-governed creativity and rule-changing creativity.

In connection with such constraints, Said holds that:

   [Anyone wishing] to intervene in a field of rational activity
   [is aware] that his field--whether history, sociology,
   linguistics, literature, philosophy, the sciences--is disposed,
   or laid out and ordered, not by calendars but
   according to structures ordered internally by rules, sets,
   impersonal groupings. (41)

He adds:

   This is not entirely a qualitative observation, since it is
   quite possible to argue that the proliferation of information
   (and what is still more remarkable, a proliferation of
   the hardware for disseminating and preserving this information)
   has hopelessly diminished the role apparently
   played by the individual. The analysis of the knowledge
   revolution and of the scientific revolution by Michel
   Foucault and Thomas Kuhn, respectively, assigns greater
   importance in transmitting and recording information to
   impersonal orders, the episteme and the paradigm. (42)

Particularly, as regards culture, Said enhances its potential for productivity, in spite of the constraints:

   [T]o believe that politics in the form of imperialism bears
   upon the production of literature, scholarship, social theory,
   and history writing is by no means equivalent to saying
   that culture is therefore a demeaned or denigrated
   thing. Quite the contrary: my whole point is to say that we
   can better understand the persistence and the durability of
   saturated hegemonic systems like culture when we realize
   that their internal constraints upon writers and
   thinkers were productive, not unilaterally inhibiting. It is
   this idea that Gramsci, certainly, and Foucault and
   Raymond Williams in their very different ways have been
   trying to illustrate. (43)

A few lines earlier Edward Said had stated that Orientalism makes one realize "that political imperialism governs an entire field of study, imagination, and scholarly institutions--in such a way as to make its avoidance an intellectual and historical impossibility," (44) an avoidance which I understand in the sense of starting from scratch, paying no heed to the parameters set by such a field.

On the ways discourses are created, Said specifies an instance, while speaking of what he calls the textual attitude ("to apply what one learns out of a book literally"):

   A text purporting to contain knowledge about something
   actual [and arising out of certain circumstances just
   described a few lines above] is not easily dismissed.
   Expertise is attributed to it. The authority of academics,
   institutions, and governments can accrue to it, surrounding
   it with still greater prestige than its practical successes
   warrant. More important, such texts can create not
   only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to
   describe. In time such knowledge and reality produce a
   tradition, or what Michel Foucault calls a discourse,
   whose material presence or weight, not the originality of
   a given author, is really responsible for the texts produced
   out of it. This kind of text is produced out of those preexisting
   units of information deposited by Flaubert in the
   catalogue of idles recues. (45)

What about the author, then? Up to a point, the texts an author has already written can serve as a relative constraint, something susceptible to leave room for innovation. In the domain of literary creation, there seems to be a dialectic between the given and subjectivity:

      For the writer the eternally present moment arrives
   when his text can speak as a discursive formation "bringing
   out ... subjectivity" in language, his subjectivity....
   To use Foucault's terminology, the text volume is a sort of
   historical a priori fact permitting the formulation of new
   statements. It is a rule-bound order that does not, however,
   deny the writer the power to innovate. The writer's
   role, paradoxically, is to use the subtle constraints of his
   discourse (the text's volume) to expand their reach, to
   make his discourse capable of repeating its present and its
   rules in new ways: thus the dialectic of repetition and
   innovation seems to announce the writer's presence to the
   reader, to the text, to the institutions (professional, economic,
   social, political) that sustain it. Nevertheless--and
   this cannot be overemphasized--the writer is not at liberty
   to make statements, or merely to add to the text at will:
   statements are rare, and they are difficult, so strong is the
   text's anterior constraint upon him. (46)

That "statements are rare" is an exaggeration, I think, even allowing for the non-canonical way Foucault understands them. Besides, authors create through multiple kinds of utterances, too, not only by means of statements.

Much later, in a comprehensive assessment, the essential view is maintained, with some important additions:

   Foucault propounded fascinating, highly original views
   about such matters as the history of systems of thought,
   delinquency, discipline and confinement, introducing into
   the vocabulary of history, philosophy and literary criticism
   such concepts as discourse, statement, episteme, genealogy
   and archaeology, each of them bristling with complexity
   and contradiction such as few of his imitators and disciples
   have ever mastered or completely understood. (47)

Nevertheless, he did not accept wholesale Foucault's thought and research, both of which were not static, as is well known, but were transformed and enriched along the years, (48) not always consistently. So, besides remarking on the controversiality of Foucault's writings, (49) Said asserts both that "one thing is never in doubt: he was a prodigious researcher, a man driven by what he once called 'relentless erudition'" and that "[t]here are many problems and questions that come to mind as one reads Foucault." More particularly, concerning discursive formations, Said writes: "[U]nlike Michel Foucault, to whose work I am greatly indebted, I do believe in the determining imprint of individual writers upon the otherwise collective anonymous body of texts constituting a discursive formation like Orientalism." (50)

Concerning rules, the fact that they exist does not mean that for people to follow them amounts to becoming automata, a point of which Edward Said is very much aware, as is shown, for instance, in "Foucault and the Imagination of Power." In fact, even though community and language predispose people to follow the official ways of viewing things, the chapter entitled "Holding Nations and Traditions at Bay," in Representations of the Intellectual, is an example of how the oppressed can contest the cultural and political status quo. (51)

From a more general perspective, Said seems to have usually had towards Foucault the same complex stance, at once admirative and critical, that is often perceptible when Said deals with outstanding intellectuals, women and men, and is especially elaborate when he puts forward his opinions about those who have been decisive in his formation as a critic. It is a feature, I think, whose source lies in the very substance of the role the intellectual should play, according to Said. This view is displayed in a number of writings, such as Representations of the Intellectual, particularly, and is apparent also in the review articles he wrote on literature, culture, politics, and music. In a number of these articles, the text begins on a positive note, and sooner or later brings out an exposition of shortcomings, within an overall setting of enthusiastic approval, as is the case with Eric Hobsbawm. (52) A prominent case of the unsimplifying manner in which Said tended to regard other intellectuals is that of Sartre. (53) Charles Malik, for his part, is an example of a complex personality that Said got to know well. (54) In Malik's case, once again, we see Said's recognition of both a person's achievements and his or her shortcomings. We can follow dynamically the transformations of the individual, the way he responds to circumstances, so that a basic--in this case adverse--outlook is unfolded when it had not previously been obvious. (55)

As for Michel Foucault, Said presents nuanced shades of his contributions and image. For instance, although Michel Foucault was not inert in politics, and generally can be regarded as left-leaning, he did not act consistently in favor of the liberation of groups and individuals. Furthermore, Foucault showed a brilliance in expression that often conceals a lack of rigor. In my opinion, this is transparent in L'Archeologie du savoir, among his major methodologically conscious works, and in a few of the lesser ones as well. In connection with the compilation under the title Power, Said remarks: "In order to make shorthand generalizations about major social and epistemological shifts in several European countries, Foucault resorts to maddening, unsupported assertions that may be interesting rhetorically but cannot pass muster either as history or as philosophy." (56) He also writes:

   Too often, grand statements about society as a whole or
   at its extremes are presented without evidence or proof
   (Foucault seems to have had an addiction for the beginnings
   of centuries, as if history ran in hundred-year
   periods, of which the first part was usually where the
   important events occurred). (57)

Said points out Foucault's Eurocentrism repeatedly ("his Eurocentrism was almost total" (58)), and his lack of adequate attention to material conditions and interests which are relevant to historical change. (59) Said states:

   Without exceptions I know of, the paradigms for [the
   development of dominant discourses and disciplinary traditions]
   have been drawn from what are considered
   exclusively Western sources. Foucault's work is one
   instance and so, in another domain, is Raymond
   Williams's. In the main I am in considerable sympathy
   with the genealogical discoveries of these two formidable
   scholars, and greatly indebted to them. Yet for both the
   imperial experience is quite irrelevant, a theoretical oversight
   that is the norm in Western cultural and scientific
   disciplines except in occasional studies of the history of
   anthropology--like Johannes Fabian's Time and the
   Other and Talal Asad's Anthropology and the Colonial
   Encounter--or the development of sociology, such as
   Brian [Bryan] Turner's Marx and the End of Orientalism.
   Part of the impulse behind what I tried to do in my book
   Orientalism was to show the dependence of what
   appeared to be detached and apolitical cultural disciplines
   upon a quite sordid history of imperialist ideology and
   colonial practice. (60)

In Covering Islam, the final chapter is entitled "Knowledge and Power." The French thinker is mentioned only once in the chapter, but his ideas are unequivocally present in the discussion. Yet the approach seems not to conform to Foucault's position on the subject, ambiguous at best on the matter of truth. Said, on the contrary, defends clearly the possibility of attaining knowledge, in spite of the ineluctability of interpretive mediation in human matters, and of the fact that humans are immersed in space, time, and culture, etc., so that the interpreter is in a multiple situation of which s/he must be conscious in order not to fall victim to its givens. (61) I have the impression that it is rather the Establishment (either canonical or orthodox) intellectuals who, according to Said, would fit better in Foucault's picture of epistemes and archives. Intellectuals of that sort produce what officially passes for knowledge, whereas "people who quite consciously consider themselves to be writing in opposition to the prevailing orthodoxy" bring forth antithetical knowledge.

Said, Foucault, and Resistance

Said perceives a change of heart in various radical French intellectuals, among them Foucault and the postmodernists, during the 1970s and 1980s. In Foucault's case. disenchantment sets in--not coincidentally--with the Iranian revolution and its excesses. But Said is cautious not to leave out other motivations for the change, both personal and theoretically-guided. Basically, in Foucault the shift is twofold: a growing conviction of the ineluctability of constituted power in Western societies, and a willingness to utter simplifying political pronouncements. The two aspects are linked. It was "sad to think of him as yet another 'progressive' who had succumbed to the blandishments of often hackneyed pronouncements against the Gulag and on behalf of Soviet and Cuban dissidents, given that he had in the past so distanced himself from any such easy political formulas." (62) For Lyotard and Foucault seem to feel as if "[t]here is nothing to look forward to: we are stuck within our circle." (63)

Said concludes: "In short, Foucault's imagination of power is largely with rather than against it.... [H]is interest in domination was critical but not finally as contestatory or as oppositional as on the surface it seems to be." But alternative visions of power, "stimulated and enlivened" by his work, do exist: a) "classical ideas about ruling classes and dominant interests" (as the studies by C. Wright Mills witness), b) counter-discursive testimonials by confined and elided groups, and c) "the vulnerability of the present organization of culture." (64)

In spite of trying to avoid "the practice of saving Foucault from himself", according to Said some paradoxes emerge. The first of these is between Foucault's analysis of power (which reveals its injustice) and theorization (which shows it as unbound). Further would be his recognition that discourse is "that for which struggles are conducted" and, on the other hand, his not being willing to accept that the discourse of liberation can succeed. In the end, a sort of "antithetical engagement" is discovered in the way Foucault imagines power, manifest in what explicitly or implicitly his work does not deal with, and expressed most enthrallingly in the discord between "Foucault's archaeologies and social change itself". (65)

In this respect, an overall comparison between Fanon and Foucault, who were contemporaries (although practically Fanon had already passed away when Foucault began his career), is quite unfavorable to the latter: "Foucault's work moves further and further away from serious consideration of social wholes, focusing instead upon the individual as dissolved in an ineluctably advancing 'microphysics of power' that it is hopeless to resist." He seems to justify an equally irresistible colonialism; he avoids using against authoritarianism the heterodox intellectual heritage he shares with Fanon. (66)

The Question of Palestine

In "Sartre and the Arabs: A Footnote," (67) Said tells of his encounter with the French existentialist, in connection with a seminar "on peace in the Middle East," although soon "it became clear to [Said] that Israel's enhancement (what today is called 'normalisation') was the real subject of the meeting, and neither the Palestinians nor the Arabs." The seminar was sponsored by Les temps modernes; it took place in Foucault's home. Said was prompted to publish the encounter, he tells us, by "two fascinating if dispiriting reviews [in Al-Ahram] about his visit to Egypt in early 1967" [in the company of Simone de Beauvoir and Claude Lanzmann], during the days of Gamal Abd al-Nasir as President. Said writes:

   Foucault was there, but he very quickly made it clear to me
   that he had nothing to say about the seminar's subject, and
   would be leaving directly for his daily bout of research at
   the Bibliotheque Nationale. I was pleased that my book
   Beginnings was readily visible on one of his bookshelves,
   all of which were brimming with a neatly arranged mass of
   books, papers, journals. Although we chatted together amiably,
   it wasn't until much later (in fact almost a decade
   after his death in 1984) that I got some idea why Foucault
   had been so unwilling to say anything to me about Middle
   Eastern politics.... [I]n the late 80s, I was told by Gilles
   Deleuze that he and Foucault, once the closest of friends,
   had clashed finally because of their differences over
   Palestine, Foucault expressing support for Israel, Deleuze
   for the Palestinians. No wonder, then, he hadn't wanted to
   discuss the Middle East with me or anyone else there! (68)

It has been commonly known that a large part of the left has shown a weakness for Israel in their conceptions of the Palestinian-Zionist conflict. (69) Paradoxically, such weakness has been shared by Third World parties and intellectuals. (70) It is interesting, but not surprising, that dependency theory (or what remains of it) could be applicable to the world of ideas as well.

Edward Said was able to situate the Palestinian predicament in a larger setting, from a point of view oriented to mankind at large, in agreement with his overall outlook. In fact, the question of Palestine does not exclude paying attention to oppression anywhere and everywhere. Far from his homeland, Said had first-hand experience of living in the midst of imperialism, like such libertarians as Jose Marti. New York, the (eccentric) heart of the USA, is one of the bulwarks of Zionism, but also the home of a counter-culture of immigrants and exiles. (71) Within the US macro-environment, Edward Said experienced the micro-climate of its universities, that extraordinary hybrid of liberalism and respect for ideas, on the one hand, and compliance to the power Establishment, on the other.

It is worth noting, I think, that Foucault is virtually absent (not quite, though) from such remarkable works as The Question of Palestine, The Politics of Dispossession, Peace and its Discontents, and Blaming the Victims, books devoted mostly to the contemporary Palestinian experience. The same can be said of most of the articles that appeared in newspapers and magazines during the last two decades of Said's lifetime. There may be several explanations of the fact. To begin with, we could bring up the growing distance from Foucault's death, rather marginal as a reason, for the tendency was observable when Foucault was still alive. Other, more or less, plausible reasons, combined or taken singly, are: the difference in what sort of public was intended and (partially) the dissonance produced by citing positively a person who is hostile to the Palestinian cause. But one should not dismiss the possibility that, in general, the Foucauldian outlook could simply be dispensed with in exposing the dispossession of the Palestinian people. Naturally, a deeper examination of those texts (an archaeological enterprise of sorts) may reveal an underlying presence of concepts and interpretations originating in Michel Foucault.

Notes

(1) Fadwa Tuqan, "The Seagull and the Negation of the Negation," The Palestinain Wedding, trans. A. M. Elmessiri (Washington, DC.: Three Continents P, Inc., 1982), 223.

(2) Cf. the concept of Verum ipsum factum (Rodolfo Mondolfo, Verum factum: Desde antes de Vico hasta Marx [Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 1971]). Without stretching matters too much, it is possible to perceive some analogies between Vico's notion of verum factum and what Karl Popper has called World Three.

(3) The Peri hermeneias of Apuleius, trans. David Londey and Carmen Johanson (Leiden: Brill; NY: Kobenhavn-Koln, 1987), 82-83: "[There are various kinds of speech: for the purposes of,] for example, ordering, commanding, inflaming, wishing, vowing; expressing anger, hatred, envy, favor, pity, amazement, disdain, reproof, penitence, lamentation; as well as producing pleasure and inflicting fear ... the one of these which is the most important for my topic is that which is called statemental [pronuntiabilis]. It expresses a complete meaning and is the only one of them that is subject to truth or falsity." Obviously, this is an expansion of views contained in Aristotle's Peri hermeneias and Poetics. Although the second part of the passage seems to refer to sentences rather than to speeches, the broader interpretation does not do violence to the spirit of both excerpts. (Incidentally, in addition to specializing its meaning to a particular type of discourse, the word oratio--acquiring the sense 'prayer' in some languages, for instance in Spanish--means chiefly 'sentence.')

(4) Karl Buhler, Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache, 1934 (Jena/Stuttgart: Gustav Fischer Verlag, 1982), [section] 2.2. "[The language sign] is a symbol by virtue of its coordination to objects and states of affairs, a symptom (Anzeichen, indicium: index) by virtue of its dependence on the sender, whose inner states it expresses, and a signal by virtue of its appeal to the hearer, whose inner or outer behaviour it directs as do other communicative signs." Translation by Daniel Fraser Goodwin, Theory of Language: The Representational Function of Language (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1990), 35.

(5) Daniel Fraser Goodwin, Theory of Language, [section] 2.3, 37.

(6) Cf. Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual (London: Vintage, 1994), chapter V and Tom Paulin, "Writing to the Moment," The Guardian (September 24, 2004). The playwright Tom Paulin was Said's colleague in Columbia.

(7) Giambattista Vico's beautiful reconstruction on epic poetry states that the Ancients believed myths were true. See Edward Said, "Vico on the Discipline of Bodies and Texts," Reflections on Exile, 83-92.

(8) Ferial Ghazoul, "The Last Book" [a review of Humanism and Democratic Criticism], Al-Ahram Weekly (8-14 July, 2004).

(9) "I have called what I try to do 'humanism,' a word I continue to use stubbornly despite the scornful dismissal of the term by sophisticated post-modern critics. By humanism I mean first of all attempting to dissolve Blake's mind-forg'd manacles so as to be able to use one's mind historically and rationally for the purposes of reflective understanding. Moreover, humanism is sustained by a sense of community with other interpreters and other societies and periods: strictly speaking, therefore, there is no such thing as an isolated humanist." See Edward Said, "Orientalism 25 Years Later: Worldly Humanism v. the Empire-builders," Counterpunch (August 3, 2003), <http://www.counterpunch.org/>, n. pag. Said goes on pleading for a rational secular discourse taking advantage of interpretive skills provided by humanism, so as to make sense of a history made by man, in a collective endeavor of intertwined civilizations: "And lastly, most important, humanism is the only and I would go so far as saying the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history" ("Orientalism 25 Years Later," n. pag.).

(10) See, for Foucault's critique of the Enlightenment, Jurgen Habermas, "Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present," Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1986), 103-08, and Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, "What is Maturity," Foucault: A Critical Reader, 109-21.

(11) Said wrote: "It seems to me that unless we emphasize and maximize the spirit of cooperation and humanistic exchange--and here I speak not simply of uninformed delight or of amateurish enthusiam for the exotic, but rather of profound existential commitment and labor on behalf of the other--we are going to end up superficially and stridently banging the drum for 'our' culture in opposition to all others." See Edward Said, "The Clash of Definitions," Reflections on Exile, 584.

(12) Cf. Edward Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (NY: Pantheon Books, 1981), 153: "[U]ntil knowledge is understood in human and political terms as something to be won to the service of coexistence and community, not of particular races, nations, classes, or religions, the future augurs badly."

(13) See, for example, Noam Chomsky, Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use (NY: Praeger, 1986): and Language and Responsibility, Based on Conversations with Mitsou Ronat (Sussex: Harvester, 1979).

(14) Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 162.

(15) Richard Rorty, "Looking Back at 'Literary Theory,'" ACLA State of the Discipline Report, <http://www.stanford.edu/~saussy/acla/rorty-essay.pdf>: "De la grammatologie and Les roots et les choses were translated into English at exactly the right time" (2). "Reading their books gave people a sense that new horizons were opening" (2). Needless to say, neither Marx nor Freud were displaced by the "new gurus."

(16) Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, xiii-xiv.

(17) George Steiner, "The Mandarin of the Hour--Michel Foucault," The New York Times (February 28, 1971). We can place Steiner's comment side by side with Merquior's remark on the usual way to do philosophy in France (Foucault o el nihilismo de la catedra [Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1988]).

(18) "The arrival of the Fifth Republic coincided with the full flowering of the intellectual energies that set France apart for two generations after the war. Looking back, the range of works and ideas that achieved international influence is astonishing. It could be argued that nothing quite like it had been seen for a century. Traditionally, literature had always occupied the summit on the slopes of prestige within French culture. Just below it lay philosophy, surrounded with its own nimbus, the two adjacent from the days of Rousseau and Voltaire to those of Proust and Bergson. On lower levels were scattered the sciences humaines, history the most prominent, geography or ethnology not far away, economics further down. Under the Fifth Republic, this time-honoured hierarchy underwent significant changes. Sartre refused a Nobel Prize in 1964, but after him no French writer ever gained the same public authority, at home or abroad. The Nouveau Roman remained a more restricted phenomenon, of limited appeal within France itself, and less overseas. Letters in the classical sense lost their commanding position within the culture at large. What took their place was an exotic marriage of social and philosophical thought, at the altar of literature [my emphasis]. It was the products of this union that gave intellectual life in the decade of De Gaulle's reign its peculiar brilliance and intensity. It was in these years that Levi-Strauss became the world's most celebrated anthropologist; Braudel established himself as its most influential historian; Barthes became its most distinctive literary critic; Lacan started to acquire his reputation as the mage of psychoanalysis; Foucault to invent his archaeology of knowledge; Derrida to become the antinomian philosopher of the age; Bourdieu to develop the concepts that would make him its best-known sociologist. The concentrated explosion of ideas is astonishing. In just two years (1966-67) there appeared side by side: Du miel aux cendres, Les mots et les choses, Civilisation materielle et capitalisme, Systeme de la mode, Ecrits, Lire le capital and De la grammatologie, not to speak--from another latitude--of La societe du spectacle. Whatever the different bearings of these and other writings, it does not seem altogether surprising that a revolutionary fever gripped society itself the following year." See Perry Anderson, "Degringolade," London Review of Books 26.17 (September 2, 2004), <http://www.lrb.co.uk/>, n. pag.

(19) Edward Said, "Michel Foucault, 1927-1984," Reflections on Exile, 188.

(20) There are a couple of stories (or two versions of the same story) about Sartre and De Gaulle. In 1960, Les temps modernes published a letter (the Manifeste des 121) calling for Algerian independence. Some officials proposed Sartre's incarceration; De Gaulle rejected the suggestion with the words "On n'emprisonne pas Voltaire." or, alternatively, "Sartre, c'est la France." It was probably relevant that the state and its organs did not perceive a mortal danger in those activities: it may also be that the intellectuals involved were perceived by those holding power as members of the system and the middle class. I do not mean that French administrators (or European governments, generally) respect human life and freedoms at all costs. Three facts will suffice as illustrations, all relating to the Maghrib:

1) To begin with, the conduct of the war against Algerian freedom fighters and some Frenchmen who lent them active support. Henri Alleg, a Communist who was tortured in Algeria, wrote a report or memoir on the practice (La question; followed by La gangrene, by a collective of young Algerians who had suffered the same violation of their human rights). There is a contrast with what happened in the "Hexagon"; in the Maghrib, officials, policemen, and the military had a much freer hand, while the metropolitan Socialist government turned a blind eye. It is not far-fetched to bring to mind the role of some distinguished intellectuals: the specialist in Aztec studies, Jacques Soustelle, was one of the most ferocious.

2) The complicity of the French government in the Mehdi Ben Barka affair.

3) The disastrous policy (abetted by other "Western" governments) of bloody confrontation with the winners of the 1991 Algerian elections.

(21) There are indications that during May 1968 (and the following months) things could have been different. If there had been an insurrection by the workers, perhaps the outcome would have been much worse in terms of violence.

(22) Jean Piaget, Sagesse et illusions de la philosophie (Paris: PUF, 1965).

(23) Georges Mounin, Clefs pour la linguistique (Paris: Seghers, 1968).

(24) A comprehensive, albeit not rigorous, study of structuralism is provided by Francois Dosse, Histoire du structuralisme (Paris: La Decouverte, 1991): part I, Le champ du signe (1991) and part II, Le chant du cygne (1992). (Notice the pun in the two titles.)

(25) Said, "Michel Foucault, 1927-1984," 188.

(26) In the sense used in "Traveling Theory," The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983), 226-47, and "Traveling Theory Reconsidered," Reflections on Exile, 436-52.

(27) Reflections on Exile, xviii.

(28) The following are some of his important works mentioned by Edward Said: Maladie mentale et psychologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962); Histoire de la folie a l'age classique. Folie et deraison (Paris: Gallimard, 1961); Naissance de la clinique. Une archeologie du regard medical (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963); Les mots et les choses. Une archeologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966); "La pensee du dehors," Critique 229 (1966): 523-46; "Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur," Bulletin de la societe francaise de philosophie 69 (1969): 73-104; L'archeologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969); L'ordre du discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971); Surveiller et punir (Paris: Gallimard, 1975); Histoire de la sexualite (3 volumes): vol. I: La volonte de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), vol. II: L'usage des plaisirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), and vol. III: Le souci de soi (Paris: Gallimard, 1984); and Dits et ecrits, 4 volumes, edites par D. Defertet F. Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994).

(29) Edward Said, "Deconstructing the System," a review of Power." Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984: Volume Three, The New York Times (December 17, 2000).

(30) Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (NY: Basic Books, 1975), 289.

(31) Said, "Michel Foucault, 1927-1984," 196. In this respect, it is relevant to recall the famous Nietzschean jeu d'esprit advanced by Foucault, "man is dead" ("l'homme est mort"), in Les mots et les choses. It is true that there had been an ongoing struggle against anthropocentrism and what its critics saw as the exaggerated role the social sciences and the humanities tended to assign to the subject, in order to question the notion of a Cartesian subject devoid of social dimensions: "[Foucault] shows how the subject is a construction laboriously put together over time, and one very liable to be a passing historical phenomenon replaced in the modern age by transhistorical impersonal forces, like the capital of Marx or the unconscious of Freud or the will of Nietzsche. Each of these explanatory forces can be shown to have a 'genealogy' whose 'archaeology' Foucault's histories provide" ("Deconstructing the System"). "The effect of Foucault's argument, as much probably as the effect of any general account of it that one gives, is that man as we know him is dissolved." (Beginnings, 286). Said's position is far more nuanced than that advanced by Foucault and some of the structuralists.

(32) Said, "Deconstructing the System."

(33) Edward Said, Orientalism (NY: Vintage Books, 1978). Besides the prominent place assigned to discourse and discursive formations, and allied concepts, Orientalism includes other Foucauldian themes as well: "A fourth element [alongside expansion, historical confrontation, and sympathy] preparing the way for modern Orientalist structures was the whole impulse to classify nature and man into types" (119); "In natural history, in anthropology, in cultural generalization, a type has a particular character which provided the observer with a designation and, as Foucault says, 'a controlled derivation.' These types and characters belonged to a system, a network of related generalizations" (119); "The difference between the history offered internally by Christianity and the history offered by philology ... is precisely what made modern philology possible, ... whose major successes include the final rejection of the divine origins of language.... What Foucault has called the discovery of language was therefore a secular event that displaced a religious conception of how God delivered language to man in Eden" (135); "All of Flaubert's immense learning is structured--as Michel Foucault has tellingly noted--like a theatrical, fantastic library, parading before the anchorite's [Saint Anthony's] gaze" (188 and n. 46, p. 339: "On the library and its importance for mid-nineteenth-century culture, see Foucault "La bibliotheque fantastique," which is the preface to Flaubert's La tentation de saint Antoine"). Said signals an omission, too in Orientalism, n. 44, p. 338: indicating that Renan is not at all mentioned in The Order of Things.

(34) See, for example, R. W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1962) and N. Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1960); The Arabs and Mediaeval Europe (London: Longmans, 1975); and Islam, Europe and Empire (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1966).

(35) Said Orientalism, 3. On an outstanding figure in the constitution of French Orientalism in the nineteenth century, Said writes: "Renan was a figure in his own right neither of total originality nor of absolute derivativeness.... [He] is a figure who must be grasped, in short, as a type of cultural and intellectual praxis, as a style for making Orientalist statements within what Michel Foucault would call the archive of his time" (130).

(36) "His 'archeologies' were purposely intended not to resemble studies in the sociology of knowledge" ("Michel Eoucault, 1927-1984," 190).

(37) So, Said states: "There has been great interest recently ... in the quasi-encyclopedic and esoteric organization of popular knowledge in medieval and Renaissance society. Here, too, regular and total formations of knowledge are seen as dominating the mentality of an era. Karl Polanyi describes in The Great Transformation the difference in political economy between what he calls the radical illusion within a marketview of society--'there is nothing in human society that is not derived from the volition of individuals'--and the opposing contention that 'power and economic value are a paradigm of social reality.'" Levi Strauss seeks to show "how mind's 'seemingly un-controlled inventiveness' nevertheless reveals that 'the human mind appears ... determined in all its spheres of activity.' This by virtue of 'the existence of laws operating at a deeper level' than that of surface behavior. The interplay between these 'deeper' laws and individual creativity, which according to Noam Chomsky, for example, combine and recombine 'given' elements, is the aspect of this debate most relevant to contemporary understanding, and more specifically to contemporary rationalism. One need only mention philosophies as wholly disparate as those of Freud, Chomsky, and Foucault to document the problem's compelling interest. Fundamentally we can generalize fairly by saying that the issue now seems to be focused on the position of differentiation in human reality: Do the significant or systematic differences that individuate the various activities and productions of mind really begin at the level of self, or are they located more basically (or transcendentally) at a general epistemic level, a transindividual level?" (Beginnings, 55-56).

(38) Emile Durkheim, Les regles de la methode sociologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981).

(39) Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World. Lowell Lectures, 1925 (NY: MacMillan, 1939).

(40) Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (Harmondsworth: Peregrin Books, 1963).

(41) Said, Beginnings, 50-51, referring to The Order of Things and Derrida's De la grammatologie.

(42) Said, Beginnings, 51, referring to Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and to Foucault's "Reponse a une question," Esprit. Cf. Merquior comparing the notions of episteme and paradigm.

(43) Said, Orientalism, 14.

(44) Said, Orientalism, 14.

(45) Said, Orientalism, 94.

(46) Said, Beginnings, 258, referring to The Archaeology of Knowledge. Cf. Orientalism, 23, on the notion of authority: "Wherein ... lies the authority of writing? Either authority is, as Foucault has been trying tirelessly to demonstrate, a property of discourse and not of writing (that is, writing conforms to the rule of discursive formation), or authority is an analytic concept and not an actual, available object. In either case authority is nomadic: it is never in the same place, it is never always at the center, nor is it a sort of ontological capacity for originating every instance of sense. What all this discussion of authority means is that we do not possess a manageable existential category for writing--whether that of an 'author,' a 'mind,' or a 'Zeitgeist'--strong enough on the basis of what happened or existed before the present writing or where it begins."

(47) Said, "Deconstructing the System."

(48) Usually three or four stages are distinguished.

(49) "Of Foucault's work it is, I think, true that it leaves no reader untouched or unchanged.... Even those readers in whom he has produced a distaste that goes as far as revulsion will also feel that his urgency of argument is so great as to have made a lasting impression, for better or for worse" ("Deconstructing the System").

(50) Said, Orientalism, 23.

(51) Edward Said, "Holding Nations and Traditions at Bay," Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (NY, Random House, 1994), 2545

(52) Edward Said, "Contra Mundum," Reflections on Exile, 474-83.

(53) "Except for Algeria, the justice of the Arab cause simply could not make much of an impression on [Sartre], and whether it was entirely because of Israel or because of a basic lack of sympathy for cultural and maybe religious reasons, I do not know. In this he was totally unlike his friend and idol Jean Genet, who celebrated his strange passion for Palestinians in extended sojourn with them and by writing the extraordinary "Quatre heures en Sabra et Chatila" and in Le captif amoureux." This judgement notwithstanding, Sartre's death produced in Said a profound feeling of loss. See Said, "Sartre and the Arabs: A Footnote," Al-Ahram Weekly (1824 May, 2000).

(54) Edward Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (NY: A. Knopf, 1999), 263 ft.

(55) Interestingly, in the numerous references to Chomsky in Said's essays I have not been able to spot a single place where there is a negative comment. On some issues Said sides with Chomsky rather than with Foucault, as in their views on power ("Traveling Theory," 244-46). Nevertheless, Chomsky figures less ostensibly than Foucault in Said's writings, a fact which probably has to do with the respective fields of professional activity. I think that this constant positive valuation of Chomsky by Said has something to do with the fidelity to principles and the quality of those principles. This is in sharp contrast to Said's opinion of Bernard Lewis, for instance, whom on one occasion he characterized as a "tireless mediocrity." See Edward Said, "When Will We Resist?," The Guardian (January 25, 2003).

(56) Cf. Said, "Michel Foucault, 1927-1984": "[I]n the last part of his career he had a tendency to venture comically general observations" (189).

(57) Said, "Deconstructing the System."

(58) Said, "Michel Foucault, 1927-1984," 196.

(59) Edward Said, "Criticism between Culture and System," The World, the Text, and the Critic, 222. Elsewhere, on the oppositions inside/outside in culture and 'ours'/'theirs': "[W]e must remember that for nineteenth-century Europe an imposing edifice of learning and culture was built, so to speak, in the face of actual outsiders (the colonies, the poor, the delinquent), whose role in the culture was to give definition to what they were constitutionally unsuited for" (Orientalism, 228). On exclusion and confinement, see Orientalism, n. 28, p. 344.

(60) Edward Said, "Discrepant Experiences," Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), 47. Cf. "Consolidated Vision," Culture and Imperialism, 132: "The imperial attitudes had scope and authority, but also, in a period of expansion abroad and social dislocation at home, great creative power. I refer here not only to the 'invention of tradition' generally, but also to the capacity to produce strangely autonomous intellectual and aesthetic images. Orientalist, Africanist, and Americanist discourses developed, weaving in and out of historical writing, painting, fiction, popular culture. Foucault's ideas about discourses are apt here; and, as Bernal has described it, a coherent classical philology developed during the nineteenth century that purged Attic Greece of its Semitic-African roots."

(61) Edward Said, Covering Islam, 149.

(62) Edward Said, "Michel Foucault, 1927-1984," 195.

(63) Edward Said, "Two Visions in Heart of Darkness," Culture and Imperialism, 26-27.

(64) Edward Said, "Foucault and the Imagination of Power," 242-43.

(65) Said, "Foucault and the Imagination of Power," 242-45.

(66) Edward Said, "Collaboration, Independence, and Liberation," Culture and Imperialism, 278.

(67) Said, "Sartre and the Arabs: A Footnote."

(68) Said, "Sartre and the Arabs: A Footnote."

(69) Joseph Massad, "The Legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre," Al-Ahram Weekly (30 January-5 February, 2003): "What is it about the nature of Zionism, its racism, and its colonial policies that continues to escape the understanding of many European intellectuals on the left? Why have the Palestinians received so little sympathy from prominent leftist intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault or only contingent sympathy from others like Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Etienne Balibar, and Slavoj Zizek? Edward Said wrote once about his encounters with Sartre and Foucault (who were anti-Palestinian) and with Gilles Deleuze (who was anti-Zionist) in this regard. The intellectual and political commitments inaugurated by a pro-Zionist Sartre and observed by Said, however, remain emblematic of many of the attitudes of leftist and liberal European intellectuals today." Massad adds: "When these European intellectuals worry about anti-Semitism harming the Israeli settler's colony, they are being blind to the ultimate achievement of Israel: the transformation of the Jew into the anti-Semite, and the Palestinian into the Jew. Unless their stance is one that opposes the racist basis of the Jewish State, their support for Palestinian resistance will always ring hollow. As the late Gilles Deleuze once put it, the cry of the Zionists to justify their racist violence has always been 'we are not a people like any other,' while the Palestinian cry of resistance has always been 'we are a people like all others.' European intellectuals must choose which cry to heed when addressing the question of Palestine."

(70) Cf. the article by Juan Abugattas, "'The Perception of the Palestinian Question in Latin America," Journal of Palestine Studies 11.3 (Spring 1982): 117-28: "The few [Latin American] intellectuals and politicians who, at the time [of the partition of Palestine], could have detected the deception [equating Zionism with the Jewish victims of Nazism] were finally confused by the support that the idea of partition received both from some progressive governments and from some of the main European intellectuals who served as their spiritual mentors. Concerning the Palestinian Question, as concerning many other questions of international politics not directly or obviously relating to their immediate realm, Latin American politicians have often tended to adopt, almost uncritically, the positions defended and advocated by the European and North American groups which they consider to be their natural counterparts. Even at the time of the Algerian War of Liberation, individuals who in many other respects professed views generally regarded as "progressive' showed themselves very reluctant to support the Algerians and to condemn the policies of the French government" (120).

(71) "[I]t would be disingenuous not to admit that the Palestinian experience seems retrospectively to have predisposed my own critical attention in favor of unaccommodated, essentially expatriate or diasporic forms of existence, those destined to remain at some distance from the solid resting-place that is embodied in repatriation. Therefore the essay form has seemed particularly congenial, as have such exemplary figures for me as Conrad, Vico, and Foucault. Thus, as a cause, as a geographic, local, original experience, Palestine for me provided affinities with, say, Conrad's radical exilic vision, or with the lonely exceptionalism of a Foucault and a Melville" (Reflections on Exile, xxxiv-xxxv). Of course, not everything is explained by personal experience.