Edward Said, Humanism, and Secular Criticism Author(s): Yumna Siddiqi Source: Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, No.

25, Edward Said and Critical Decolonization / ,)5002( pp. 65-88 Published by: Department of English and Comparative Literature, American University in Cairo and American University in Cairo Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4047452 Accessed: 22/12/2009 06:52
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Edward Said, Humanism, and Secular Criticism Yumna Siddiqi

It is difficult to overstate Edward Said's influence on cultural and social thoughtin the last twenty-five years. Said's work, especially Orientalism,radicallytransformed intellectuallandscapeof the the humanities and the social sciences.1 For his students from the postcolonial world such as myself, it gave us a new lens throughwhich to understandour own cultures and our relationshipto the West. For scholarsin the Westernacademy,it pointedto the complicity between supposedlydisinterestedscholarlypursuitsand the edifice of Western imperialism.For its many lay readers,it articulatedin an accessible way the inter-connectionsbetween political power and knowledge. In Orientalism, Said drew on the theoretical work of scholars such as Foucaultand Gramsci,to interpretliterarytexts in the light of imperial geopolitics, single-handedlybreaking the ground for the field of postcolonial literarystudies. Committedto criticism as an oppositional practice, Said became increasingly wary, at the same time, of the solipsism and opacity of the "nouvellecritique."In 1995, he taughta graduateseminar at Columbia University entitled "LastWorks, Late Style" that exemplified this shift from what we would now call "postcolonial criticism" to humanistic interpretation. When he died, Said was working on a manuscripton this topic, a brief preview of which appearedposthumouslyin article form in the August 2004 edition of the LondonReview of Books.2In his presidentialaddressto the MLA, entitled "Humanismand Heroism," Said delivered a paeon to the laborsof the pen, again in a pointedlyhumanisticregister.3Justbefore his death, he completed a book entitled Humanismand Democratic Criticism,in which he assessed the natureof, and need for, humanistic studies in the presentmoment.In the following pages, I first briefly sketchhis politicizing influence on literaryand culturalanalysis.I then attemptto make sense of his late engagementwith humanisticscholarship,the imprintof which had always markedhis work, and his attitude to humanismmore broadly. Alif25 (2005) 65

to and From Orientalism Culture Imperialism

In Orientalism, Said arguedthatWesternculturalrepresentations of the Orient contributeddirectly to legitimatingEuropeanrule over Far imperialterritories. from being an abstract body of ideas, such repwere a means of exercisingculturalleadershipor hegemoresentations ny. Orientalistwriters,from differentperiods and places, employed a relatively set repertoireof tropes that "put the Westernerin a whole with the Orientwithoutever losing him series of possible relationships of the relativeupperhand."4 These Orientalist structures referenceand Said noticed that attitudewere, what is more, largely self-referential; writers would frequentlyecho each other. In fact, Orientalistwriters often had very little first-handexperienceof people and places in the East. According to Said, the discourse of Orientalism-that is, the of aboutthe Orient-took on the repeateduse andcirculation statements status of "truths" declaimed with authorityby Europeans.Orientalists producedthis knowledgeaboutthe Orientbecausethey enjoyedthe unilateralpower of representation. This Orientalistproductionof knowland edge was not merely a conceptualexercise;it had far-reaching profoundmaterialeffects becauseit becamethe basis for imperialpolicy. Said's examination the operation Orientalism, a discourse, of of as directlyled to the emergenceof a whole field of colonialdiscourseanalysis in literarystudies.5Following Said's example,a numberof literary scholarsfocused on the workingsof colonial discoursein texts of the nineteenth century,the periodof greatest imperial expansionandthe consolidationof European power.6Scholarsalso turned theirattention the to relationship betweenimperialism literature otherperiods.7 and in Edward Said's influencequickly extendedto otherfields in the humanitiesand social sciences-film studies, art history, music studies, area studies, and anthropology, the like; some of the otheressays in this volume map thatinfluence.Broadlyspeaking,whatthese studiesshareis an interestin how the processesof imperialism occurred beyondthe level of economic laws and politicaldecisions, and-by predisposition, by the authorityof recognizableculturalformations,but continuing consolidation withineducation, literature, and the visual and musical arts-were manifestedat anothervery significantlevel, that of the nationalculture, which we have tendedto sanitizeas a realmof unchanging intellectual monuments, free of worldlyaffiliations.8
66 Alif 25 (2005)

In a variety of academic fields and disciplines, scholars have undertaken the work of elaborating in detail the complex relationships between the domain of cultureand the projectof imperialism. While in OrientalismSaid argues for the significance of colonial discourseand sketchesits contours,in Cultureand Imperialismhe also proffers rich and extended readings of writers such as Austen, Conrad,Kipling, Camus,and Gide, showing how significantthe experience of Empire was for writers of the Europeanliterarycanon. To examine this significance, Said formulatesa theory of what he calls reading": "contrapuntal As we look back at the culturalarchive,we begin to read it not univocally but contrapuntally,with a simultaneous awarenessboth of the metropolitanhistory that is narrated and of those otherhistories againstwhich (and together with which) the dominatingdiscourseacts. In the counterpointof Westernclassical music, various themes play off one another,with only a provisional privilege being one; yet in the resultingpolyphogiven to any particular ny there is concert and order,an organizedinterplaythat derives from the themes, not from a rigorousmelodic or formal principle outside the work. In the same way, I believe, we can read and interpretEnglish novels, for example, whose engagement (usually suppressedfor the most part) with the West Indies or India, say, is shaped and perhaps even determinedby the specific history of colonization,resistance,and finally native nationalism.9 Said draws on an analogy from music to explain the principleof conreading:an attentionto the suppressedtraces of colonization trapuntal and of responses to it in literarytexts. It is importantto note that, in elaboratinghis model for reading,Said refers to a type of composition thatis not drivenby any "rigorousmelodic or formalprincipleoutside the work"-or what one might call "theory."Said repeatedlyvoices a reservationsaboutthe dominanceof theoryin literaryinterpretation, point that I will come back to later. He also emphasizes that, in literary texts as in counterpoint,different themes coexist; the critic can reveal the full complexity of imperial culture by exploring the interthat experienceand the experienceof the "Other" play of metropolitan can be discerned in the interstices of texts of the colonial era. Said's Alif25 (2005) 67

notion of contrapuntal readingis similarto Bakhtin'sview of dialogic interpretation-both believe that it is the task of the critic to foreground the interactionof different voices.10 Said elaborates on his view of contrapuntal reading using a numberof examples, including that of Kipling's novel Kim: The pointis thatcontrapuntal readingmusttake accountof and bothprocesses,thatof imperialism thatof resistanceto it, which can be done by extendingourreadingof the texts to includewhat was once forciblyexcluded.... Kipling's India,in Kim,has a qualityof permanence inevitability and thatbelongs notjust to thatwonderfulnovel, but to British India,its history,administrators, apologistsand,no less and important, the Indiafought for by Indiannationalists to as theircountryto be won back. By giving an accountof this and in seriesof pressures counter-pressures Kipling' India, s we understand processof imperialism the itself as the great work of art engages them, and of later anti-imperialist resistance.In readinga text, one must open it out both to 11 what went into it andto whatits authorexcluded. According Said,Kimdrawson the rhetoric sportto castimperial to of rule in Indiaas partof the "Great Game,"itself a directreference the geopoto litical rivalryat the time betweenGreatBritainandRussia.Also, it portraysa visionof thepermanence nativeacceptance Britishrule,preand of cisely at a time when Indianswere mobilizingfor national independence. To extendSaid'scontrapuntal one reading, mightaddthatthe novel traces Kim's transformation from a boyish adventurer a cog in the wheel of to colonialinformation-gathering administration, a belatedacknowland in edgementof a shiftin Britain'simperialfocus fromconquestto administration.A fully contextual readingof Kim,with due attention elisions to andrevisions,revealsthe complexnegotiations betweenEnglishmen and Indiansof what"India" was, who was to ruleit, andhow. Said's Ambivalent Humanism In both Orientalismand Cultureand Imperialism,and at regular interValsthroughouthis scholarly career, Said critiques certain aspects of humanism,yet identifies himself as a humanist.As W. J. T. Mitchell puts it, 68 Alif25 (2005)

Humanism for Said was always a dialectical concept, generatingoppositions it could neither absorbnor avoid. The very word used to cause in him mixed feelings of for reverenceandrevulsion:an admiration the greatmonuments of civilization that constitute the archive of humanismand a disgust at humanism'sundersideof suffering and oppression that, as Benjamin insisted, made them monumentsto barbarism well.12 as Before elaboratingupon Said's deep and extended engagementwith humanism,for which he has been criticizedon a varietyof fronts,it is helpful to distinguishbetween differentmeaningsof humanism.Leela Gandhi, in her discussion of the relationship between postcolonial scholarshipand humanism,identifies two streams of humanismthat overlap in some ways, yet are historically and philosophically distinct.13 Sixteenth-centuryRenaissance humanism, associated with scholars such as Petrarch,Erasmus, Montaigne, More, and Bacon, denotesan emergentprogramof belletristiclearningthatspawnedwhat today we call "thehumanities." Enlightenment humanism,by contrast, refers to the loosely linked eighteenth-century Europeanphilosophical movement whose proponents-among them Voltaire, Diderot, d'Alembert,Turgot,Condorcet,Hume, Rousseau,and Kant-championed the power of humanreasonto triumph over superstition ignoand rance,and to betterthe lot of humankind. Said's relationship humanism,in the first sense, is equivocal. to On the one hand, as we have seen, he identifiesin the "greatworks of art,"that are at the center of humanisticscholarship,Orientaliststructures of representation that, more or less, explicitly denigrateEurope's "Others." the otherhand,he applauds value of these greatworks. On the While he mountsa critiqueof Orientalist patternsof representation, he by no means rejects the study of "dead white men," as more hostile detractors the Europeanliterarycanon might. Indeed,he seems little of interestedin the domains of popularcultureand everyday life, where imperialideology arguablyhas its fullest elaboration impact.As for and the second connotationof humanism,Said whole-heartedly subscribes to the core legacy of Enlightenment: belief thatthe rational,secular, the critical pursuit of knowledge can lead to human emancipationand progress.In this respect,Said differsfrom post-structuralist critics such as Lyotardand Demida,who have identifiedin the very structures of Enlightenment rationalitya logic of domination,and have fed into one
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streamof postcolonialcriticismthat exhibits an "inherited deconstructive bias against Enlightenmenthumanism."14 the same time, he At briefly gesturestowardsthe need for otherways of knowing the Other, and asks the questionof how to studyotherpeoples andculturesfrom a nonrepressive and nonmanipulative perspective.Here, he imagines the possibilityof a kind of knowledgethattraversesculturaldifferenceand serves the end of liberationwithoutbeing falsely universalist. In Orientalism, Said, for the most part,follows Foucault'slead in of dissectingthe operation Orientalist discourseandshowingits collusion in imperial domination.Said's own critical practice has a distinctly humanist flavor,withhis invocationof the universalvalueof greatworks and the genius of individualwritersand composers.James Clifford's trenchant, sympathetic yet teases out the contracritiqueof Orientalism dictory stance Said takes towardsFoucauldiandiscourse analysis. As Cliffordpoints out, Said draws on the theoreticalinsights of Foucault with respectto the relationship between power and knowledge,and the operation an archive,yet insists,in distinctlyun-poststructuralist of fashion, thatthe individualimprintof the authormatters: What is important theoretically is not that Foucault's authorcounts for very little but ratherthat a "discursive formation"-as opposed to ideas, citations, influences, references,conventions,and the like-is not producedby authorialsubjectsor even by a groupof authorsarranged as a "tradition."15 Said, unlike Foucault, is interested in the ways authors commonly participate in the production and perpetuation of an idea of "the Orient,"an idea that has a specific political implication: the validation of imperial rule. Said's commitmentto humanist scholarly analysis is evident, not only in the way he characterizes the so-called discourse of Orientalism,but also in the contrapuntal methodologyhe proposesfor reading.In using the musical metaphorof counterpoint, emphasizes he a compositional form that involves "the combinationof two or more independentmelodies into a single harmonic texture in which each retainsits linearcharacter.'"16 favors a mode of interpretation Said that is attunedto the interplayof differentvoices, in what is a harmonious whole. In this, he expresses a humanistvision of what texts are and how they should be read. This endorsementof humanismis also evi70 Alif25 (2005)

dent in his account of the literaryachievementsof non-Western,anticolonial writers. One of the sharpercritiquesthat have been made of Orientalismis that Said neglects to acknowledge the culturalproduction of people who enduredEuropeanrule. In fact, Said suggested in Orientalismthat Europeanwriters were able to representthe Orient "with very little resistance on the Orient's part."17In Culture and Imperialism,Said complements his readings of Europeantexts with discussions of writerswho did in fact "writeback"to Empire:Fanon, Cesaire, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, C. L. R. James, George Antonious, and many others. He describes the literaryefforts of these writersas "the voyage in," which he characterizesas "an especially interestingvariety of hybridculturalwork."18 arguesthat: He The ideological and cultural war against imperialism occurs in the form of resistancein the colonies, and later, as resistance spills over into Europe and the United States, in the form of oppositionor dissent in the metropolis. The first phase of this dynamicproducesnationalist independence movements, the second, later, and more acute phase produces liberation struggles. The basic premise of this analysis is that although the imperial divide in fact separatesmetropolisfrom peripheries,and althougheach culturaldiscourseunfolds accordingto different agendas, rhetorics, and images, they are in fact connected, if not always in perfect correspondence.... The connectionis made on the culturallevel since, I have been saying, like all cultural practices the imperialist experienceis an intertwinedand overlappingone ... 19 Said emphasizes the dialogic relationshipbetween the cultural discourseof the colonized and that of the metropole.He observes that those who wrote from the vantage point of colonized subjectsneither reproducedmetropolitandiscourse uncritically nor were completely detached from it; rather,writers from the peripheryhad a complex, angularrelationshipto metropolitan culture.In describing"thevoyage Said thinksagain along humanistlines of an interactiveand mutuin," ally transformative culturalengagement.To illustratehis claim, Said discusses the work of two pairs of writers,C. L. R. James and George Antonious, and RanajitGuha and S. H. Alatas, the first pair writingin 1938, and the second well after decolonization. Said argues that the
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historical differences between these moments influence the work of the two sets of writers. C. L. R. James and Antonious take the European discourse of Enlightenment on its own terms. C. L. R. James, in The Black Jacobins, shows how the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L'Ouverture applied the principles that underpinnedthe French Revolution to French colonial territoriesto lead a liberation struggle. George Antonious, a Syrian who was closely connected to elite circles of the British colonial government,decried the failure of the Britishto keep faith with theirpromiseof freedomto Arabpeoples after their service to the Allies in the First World War. Said distinguishes these thinkersfrom a latergenerationof postcolonialscholars, such as Guha and Alatas, who provide detailed critiques of imperial discourse and practicein A Rule of Propertyfor Bengal and TheMyth of the Lazy Native, respectively. Edward Said himself ranks among these thinkersin thathe interprets texts and theorists,not metropolitan with the aim of telling an "Other"story, but of being a critical interlocutor of imperialculture. Said gives particularthought to those writers who made "the voyage in" and turnedtheir pens to anti-imperialist struggle:Gandhi, and Cabral, among others. He distinguishes thinkers Nehru, Fanon, who articulatedtheir anti-imperialism nationalistterms from those in who framedtheir agendain terms of liberation.Antianti-imperialists imperialistssuch as Nehru and Gandhiultimatelyfell back on a political form thatreproduced perpetuated and many of the depredations of colonialism: the postcolonial nation-state. Fanon, by contrast, also took a sharplyanti-imperialiststance, but mounted a thorough-going appraisalof the pitfalls of nationalism in his liberationistmanifesto The Wretchedof the Earth. Said notes: Fanon was the first major theoristof anti-imperialism to realize that orthodox nationalism followed along the same track hewn out by imperialism, which while it appeared to be conceding authority to the nationalist bourgeoisie was really extendingits hegemony. To tell a simple story therefore is to repeat, extend, and also to engendernew forms of imperialism.20 Said indicts nationalism for its simplifying narratives,and applauds Fanon for his vision of nationalliberationas a dynamic process without a clear teleology. Said also lauds Fanon for his critique of a 72 Alif25 (2005)

Eurocentricuniversalism,and his gestures towardsa new humanism, a point that I will returnto. Humanism and Secular Criticism If EdwardSaid's influence on literaryscholarshipwas to underscore-in a humanistvein-the political stakesinvolved, his own work shifted during the last years of his life to a more traditionalform of humanisticscholarship.Said had always arguedfor a secularcriticism thateschewedjargon and engaged with the world at large, and was not the domain of specialists. In The World,the Text, and the Critic, as early statementof his methodologicalprinciples,Said insisted: In its suspicionof totalizingconcepts,in its discontentwith reified objects,in its impatiencewith guilds, special interests, imperializedfiefdoms, and orthodoxhabits of mind, criticismis most itself and,if the paradoxcan be tolerated, most unlikeitself at the momentit startsturning into organized dogma.
. .

. For in the main-and

here I shall be

explicit-criticism must think of itself as life-enhancing and constitutivelyopposedto every formof tyranny,domination,and abuse;its social goals are noncoerciveknowledge producedin the interestsof humanfreedom.21 ForSaid,criticism must,if it is to maintain commitment non-coercive its to knowledge and freedom, guard against its own consecration.Aamir Mufti's essay on the significanceof Auerbach Said's thoughttraces for whatpreciselySaidmeansby "secular" his criticism.22 in Muftiarguesthat Saidarticulates notionof secularism his froma minority position. Said, For secularcriticisminsists upon the possibility of emancipation even as it expresses profound skepticism about the transparencyof all such claims. Secular criticism does not imply the rejectionof universalismper se. It implies a scrupulous recognition that all claims of a universal nature are particular claims. Furthermore, and most importantly,it means rescuing the marginalizedperspective of the minority as one from which to rethink and remake universalist (ethical, political, cultural) claims, thus displacingits assignationas the site of the local.23 Alif25 (2005) 73

That is, for the secularcritic, the minoritybears a supplementary relationshipto universalistconstructs,showing them to be incompleteand destabilizing them in a mutually productive way. For Said, secular criticismis of the world and in the world;it also shows the world to be a place of productiveand mutuallydestabilizingoppositions and tensions. It is this understandingof humanist scholarship that Said advanced,ratherthan a celebrationof humanistvalues per se. Before I turnto the pieces on humanismandheroismandon late style, I want to map in a schematic way his shifting view of theory, and, specifically, of Foucault'swork. This view, I believe, is homologous to his attitudeto humanismand to humanisticscholarship.In his introductionto Orientalism,Edward Said acknowledges his debt to Michel Foucaultfor his notion of discourse, adding, My contention is that without examining Orientalismas a discourse one cannot possibly understandthe enormously systematic discipline by which Europeanculture was able to manage-and even produce-the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the postEnlightenmentperiod.24 At this point in his scholarly career, Said is primarilyinterestedin how-in the concretemediumof discourse-cultural forces acted in a systematicanddisciplinedway, not merelyto buttressimperialrule,but to "produce" very objectsof European the control.He valuesFoucault' s work for its detailed attentionto the generativerelationshipbetween power and knowledge,and his shrewdanalysisof the operationof discourse. In a commemorativeessay publishedon Foucault's death in 1984, Said commented on the hybrid and iconoclastic quality of Foucault's scholarship, "ironic, skeptical, savage in its radicalism, comic andamoralin its overturning orthodoxies, of idols, andmyths."25 In this piece, Said notes Foucault'spreoccupation with otherness:"For Foucault, othernessis both a force and a feeling in itself, something whose seemingly endless metamorphoses his work reflects and This scholarlyinterestin othernessis of courseone thatSaid shapes."26 shares.At the same time, Said criticizesFoucaultfor his failureto pay any attentionat all to Europe's Others:"His Eurocentrism was almost total, as if historyitself took place only among a groupof Germanand Frenchthinkers."27 notes thatFoucaultfails to avoid the pitfallsof Said
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a false universalism, making broad generalizationson the basis of Frenchevidence; and he criticizes Foucaulteven more trenchantly for his his lack of "interestin the relationships work had with feminist or postcolonial writers facing problems of exclusion, confinement and In domination."28 anotherbrief essay on Foucault,that appearedtwo years later, Said is even more pointed in his criticism, arguing that Foucault'sprison-houseview of power is politicallydisabling: I wouldn't go as far as saying that Foucault rationalized power, or that he legitimized its dominion and its ravages by declaring them inevitable, but I would say his interestin dominationwas critical but not finally as contestatory,or as oppositional as on the surface it seems to be. This translatesinto the paradoxthatFoucault's imagination of power was by his analysis of power to reveal its injustice and cruelty, but by his theorizationto let it go on more or less unchecked.29 According to Said, Foucault's vision of a pervasive, microcapillary power, and his failure to imagine-or lack of interest in imagining-any counter-force to the operation of power fosters a certain quiessence. Said contrasts this attitude with that of oppositional intellectuals, such as Fanon, Alatas, Ngugi, Rushdie, and others who "show, in Fanon's words, the violence done to psychically and politically repressed inferiors in the name of an advanced culture, and then afterwardsto begin the difficult, if not always tragically flawed, project of formulating the discourse of liberation."30 These intellectuals not only do the work of critiquing institutional structuresand discourses of oppression, they seek to overcome or subvertthis oppression. Said is even more explicit in his criticism of Foucault in Culture and Imperialism, where he compares Foucault unfavorablyto Fanon: Fanon representsthe interestsof a double consitutuency, native and Western, moving from confinementto liberation; ignoring the imperial context of his own theories, Foucaultseems actually to representan irresistablecolonizing movement that paradoxicallyfortifies the prestige of both the lonely individualscholar and the system that containshim.31
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Said's criticism is twofold: on the one hand, he faults Foucault for neglecting to follow throughupon the ramificationsof his analysis of power for postcolonial subjects;on the otherhand,he objects to the fact thatFoucault's analysisof power actuallyhas the effect of inhibiting the theorizing of resistance. In fact, it is difficult to see where resistancewould come from if power is dispersed,discursive,and capillary, as Foucault so powerfully argues. Famously, Foucault's own response to this commonplaceobjection was to maintainin an essay entitled "The Subject and Power" that where there is power, there is resistance.32 However, this gesture towards the omnipresence of resistanceis a long way away from, and possibly precludes,any concrete theory of liberation,as Said rightly objects. For Said, the aim of an analysis of power is not only to lay barethe perniciousimplications of imperialistknowledge practices,but to imagine or, at least, gesture to the possiblity of alternativediscourses and practices. Perhapsmore than Foucault,Said admiresthe work of Gramsci and Williams, both of whom attemptedto understandhow political dominationwas exercised, with a view to challengingand overcoming it. Most of all, it is in Fanon's writing that Said finds an explicit attemptto conceive of a relationshipthatis liberatoryin this sense, and that arises specifically out of the historicalexperienceof Empire:
... Fanon reads Western humanism by transporting the

large hectoringbolus of "theGreco-Latinpedestal"bodily to the colonial wasteland,where "thisartificialsentinel is turnedinto dust."It cannotsurvivejuxtapositionwith its
quotidian debasement by European settlers.... National

consciousness,he says, "mustnow be enrichedand deepened by a very rapidtransformation a consciousness into of social and political needs, in other words, into [real] humanism.". . How odd the word "humanism" . soundsin this context, where it is free from the narcissisticindividualism,divisiveness, andcolonialistegoism of the imperialism thatjustified the white man's rule.33 Accordingto Said, Fanon points to the hollowness of humanist principleswhen they are transposed an imperialcontext.At the same to time, Fanon sees the possibilityof a real humanismemergingfrom the struggle for liberation.In an essay on Fanon's imagining of a "new humanism," RobertBernasconi arguesthatFanondid not merelycritique
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the old humanismfor the Eurocentric assumptionthatEuropean values were universally valid; nor did he simply point to the failure of to Europeans adhereto those values when dealingwith nativepeople.34 nationalism would grow Rather,he proposedthatout of anti-imperialist a truly liberatory consciousness,a new kind of humanism.Bernasconi arguesthatin Fanon'sview, it is the violenceof the colonizedthatwould dialecticallyproducethis new humanism.EdwardSaid makes a similar case: "ForFanon violence, as I said earlier,is the synthesisthat overIn of comes the reification whitemanas subject,Black manas object."35 EdwardSaid's readingof Fanon,one can see his interestpreciselyin the possibilityof a humanism emergingthatis trulyuniversal: Liberationis consciousness of self, "not the closing of a door to communication"but a never-endingprocess of "discovery and encouragement" leading to true national self-liberationandto universalism... in the obscurityand difficulty of Fanon's prose, there are enough poetic and visionary suggestionsto make the case for liberationas a process and not as a goal containedautomaticallyby the newly independentnations. ThroughoutThe Wretchedof the Earth ... Fanonwants somehow to bind the European as well as the native together in a new non-adversarial communityof awarenessand anti-imperialism.36 Said's own interestin a new humanism bridgesdifference is libthat and this of eratory speaksthrough discussion Fanon.As AnthonyAllessandrini has argued, Said shareswithFanona criticalstancetowards humanism, as well as a belief thatit can be refashioned trulyliberatory for ends.37 Humanism in Said's Late Work Humanism,then, is a positive term that runs throughEdward Said's career. However, as I have suggested, it takes on a greater importance,and also a different significance, in his late work. On the face of it, the kind of humanismthat Said advocates in his last years looks very much like traditionalhumanism.Given that Said had himself pointed to the shortcomingsof a Eurocentrichumanism,it would seem oddly regressive for him to embracean unreconstructed humanism himself. Certainly,critics who believe that he did precisely this might argue that, late in life, Said returnedto the strongly humanist
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roots of his own intellectual formation at Princeton and at Harvard, roots thatin his focus on Europeancanonicaltexts he had never entirely repudiated.Or, and this is born out by his own statements, one might conjecturethat Said was disenchantedwith the extremeopaqueness and solipsism of contemporaryliterarycriticism in general and postcolonial studies in particular,and reassertedthe value of sholarship that was secularin the sense of being worldly in its concerns and widely accessible in its idiom. While these explanations are in part persuasive, I want to suggest that Said turns to humanism so keenly because he believes it provides a critical edge against the alienating effects of modernizationand modernity,broadlyspeaking. In his MLA presidentialaddress,Said imputes a heroic quality to the activity of humanistscholarship.He speaks to "thegradualloss over the past few decades,but also the prospectsfor recovery,of a critical model for humanismwith a heroic ideal at its core."38For Said, the handwritten text serves as an expression of this heroic ideal. Said is speakingquite literally:He emphasizesthat the fruitsof the pen are the solid materialproductof intellectuallabor. He distinguisheswriting done laboriouslyby hand from the productsof the wordprocessor, which enables one to save, modify, adapt, and incorporatehuge numbers of words seemingly without labouror sweat.... The result is a standardization tone that has more or less done of away with the quirkiness and carefully nurturedgestation of handwrittenwriting that one associates symbolically as well as actually, not only with Freud, but with great literary figures contemporarywith him such as Proust, Mann, Woolf, Pound, Joyce, and most of the other modernistgiants.39 Here, as in much of his criticism, Said expresses high praise for the "giants"of the English literarycanon, but what is interestingis thathe sees these writers as part of a literaryconfraternitythat is at risk of dying out because of the mechanizingand leveling tendenciesof modern technology. Said appearsto embrace a non-Marxist,even patrician, materialism,literallyseeing in the ontology of laborthe possibility of a transcendence of the homogenizing and depersonalizing effects of modern conveniences. Said also characterizesthe writer with pen in hand as a figure for the humanistenterprise.He sees the
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quagmire of contemporaryliterary scholarship, with its "vast disagreements,""ill-formed"inter-disciplinary and "new arrangements, jargons"as possibly traceableto the loss of an enabling image of an individual humanbeing pressing on with her or his work, pen in hand, manuscriptor book on the table, rescuing some sense for the page from out of the confusion and disorganizationthat surround in everyday life.40 us In a consummately modernist vein, he views the wielder of the pen as a bulwark against the tide of non-sense and un-reason. The role of the humanist scholar is, in these conditions, to engage in rational critique: Humanismis disclosure;it is agency;it is immersingoneself in the element of history;it is recoveringwhat Vico calls the topics of mind from the turbulentactualitiesof human life, "the uncontrollablemystery on the bestial floor," and then submitting them painstakingly to the
rational process of judgment and criticism.... For what

is crucial to humanisticthought, even in the very act of sympatheticallytrying to understand past, is that it is the a gesture of resistanceand critique.41 Said attributes humanisma dynamic,secular,andcriticalqualitythat, to he fears, is being erodedin the sphereof learning,and in the world at large.He extols the humanistscholaras a historicallyattunedcriticwho is not so much interestedin preservinga Europeantradition,as Said's invocationof "great" Europeanscholarsmight suggest on a superficial reading,but is, rather,committedto the pursuitof humanfreedomin a trulyexpansivesense thatis basedon an "[expanded] understanding ... of humanhistory to include all those Othersconstructedas dehumanized, demonizedopponentsby imperialknowledgeanda will to rule."42 In singling out the figure of Freud as representative here, Said is following a logic thatMuftitracesso well in relationto Auerbach: figthe ure of the exiled GermanJew who faces world catastrophe whoand as Said notes-comments: "Butthe struggleis not over yet."43 Reflecting in 2003 on Orientalism,twentry-fiveyears after its publication,Said again identifies himself as a humanist:
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My idea in Orientalismis to use humanisticcritique to open up the fields of struggle, to introduce a longer sequence of thought and analysis to replace the short bursts of polemical, thought-stopping fury that so a imprisonus. I have called what I try to do "humanism," stubbornlydespite the scornful word I continue to use dismissal of the term by sophisticatedpost-modem critics. By humanism I mean first of all attemptingto dissolve Blake's mind-forg'd manacles so as to be able to use one's mind historicallyand rationallyfor the purpose Moreoverhumanismis susof reflective understanding. tained 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.44 Said speaks with a sense of tremendousurgency of the need to revivcommunitariify humanismas a rational,secular,historically-minded an enterprise that may stand as a shield against the "fragmented knowledge availableon the internetand in the mass media"which nationalist and religious orthodoxies often disseminated by the mass media as they focus ahistorically and sensationally on the distant electronic wars that give viewers the sense of surgical precision, but in fact obscure the terrible suffering and destruction produced by modern warfare.45 Said directly connects the decline of humanistic studies with the of depredations Westem and especially US foreign policy. In the same essay, Said writes: "... [H]umanismis the only and I would go so far as saying the final resistance we have against the inhumanpractices and injustices that disfigurehumanhistory"(n. pag.). EdwardSaid engages explicitly with the question of humanism once more in a collection of essays entitled Humanism and Democratic Criticism,completedjust before his death. In the first of these essays, "Humanism'sSphere,"Said reflects on the historicaland culturalcircumstancesthatdemandwhat he calls a criticalhumanism: the perennial "crisis" of the humanities (the question of their relevance), the influence of Frenchtheory on the Americanacademy, the emergence of resistance movements to racism and imperialism,and 80 Alif25 (2005)

the corporatizationof universities. In this context, Said argues, it is vital to conceive of humanismas a dynamic criticalpractice: Humanismis the exertion of one's faculties in language in order to understand,reinterpret,and grapple with the products of language in history, other languages and other histories. In my understandingof its relevance today, humanism is not a way of consolidating and affirming what "we" have always known and felt, but rathera means of questioning,upsetting,and reformulating so much of what is presentedto us as commodified, packaged, uncontroversial,and uncriticallycodified certainties, including those contained in the masterpieces herdedunderthe rubricof "theclassics."46 Said emphasizes that humanism,properlyunderstood,has an unsettling ratherthan a stabilizingeffect. He rejectsthe dominantmodel of humanism advanced by conservative intellectuals such as Allan Bloom, one that aims to protecta traditionalEuropeancanon and socalled "European values." The latteris in a continuumwith an earlier American strandof "New Humanism,"the exponents of which make "a surreptitious equationbetween popularand multicultural, multilingual democracy,on the one hand, and a horrendous decline in humanistic and aesthetic, not to say also ethical standards,on the other."47 Said reprovesthe elitism and close-mindednessof these trumpeters of culturaldoom. At the same time, he once again distanceshimself from the views of postmoderncritics, such as Foucaultand Lyotard,whose arguments,accordingto Said, in their anti-essentialismand rejection of grand narratives,are antitheticalto possibilities of resistance to political oppressionand willed humanliberationmovements. In a second essay in the book, "The Changing Bases of Humanistic StudyandPractice," Saidrehearses cultural political the and changesthatrequirea radicalrethinking humanism, highlightsthe of and work of "thenew generation humanistscholars[that]is more attuned of than any before it to the non-European, genderized,decolonized, and decenteredenergies and currentsof our time."48In this essay, Edward Said emphasizesthe multicultural basis of contemporary Americanculture,and characterizes humanismas a mode of scholarship repudithat ates Eurocentrism is committedto exploringandharnessing critand the ical andtransformative potentialof cultural differences.
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Said's last work, of which we have only the briefest of sketches in published form, puts him squarely in the traditionof humanist scholarship. In his essay "Thoughts on Late Style," he discusses canonicalEuropeanwritersand artists,and turnsto proverbiallytimeless and universalthemes: art and death. Again, I would suggest that Said's project is not primarilyto affirm the greatness of canonical Europeanart;rather,he is specifically interestedin certainartistsand writers who, at the end of their lives, are at odds with the world and express this variancein theirlate works. These writersdepartfrom the commonly held notion that the dusk of one's life is a period of mellowness and reconciliation.Rather,they convey a sense of detached alienationin their last years. Their late work has an intransigentquality, "an increasing sense of apartnessand exile and anachronism."49 Said sees the late work of Beethoven, Lampedusa's sole novel The Leopard, and Cavafy's late poetry as exemplary of this kind of late style. He turnsto Adorno's essay "LateStyle in Beethoven"to expand on the fragmentariness Beethoven's late work with its characterisof tic repetitiveness,carelessness, and distraction: Adorno's thesis is that all this is predicatedon two considerations:first, that when he was young, Beethoven's work had been vigorous and organically whole, but became more waywardand eccentric;and second, that as an older man facing death, Beethoven realized that his work proclaimsthat "no synthesisis conceivable":it is in effect "the remainsof a synthesis, the vestige of an individual humansubject sorely awareof the wholeness, and consequentlythe survival,thathas eluded it for ever." . . . Beethoven's late works remain unco-opted by a higher synthesis:they do not fit any scheme, and they cannotbe reconciled or resolved, since their irresolutionand fragmentarinessare constitutive,neitherornamental symnor bolic of something else. The late works are about "lost totality,"andit is in this sense thatthey arecatastrophic.50 Whereasin his readingof Fanon,Said identifies a dialectic thatis projected into the future,a process of liberationthe end point of which is not known, in his accountof Beethoven's late style, Said sees (as does Adorno) a refusal of synthesis, an eschewing of dialecticalresolution. Beethoven's late compositions stand apart and confound incorpora82 Alif 25 (2005)

tion. In the same vein, he interprets GiuseppeTomasi di Lampedusa's TheLeopardas the work of an organicintellectualof a dying southern Italian aristocracy,and its protagonist,the Prince Don Fabrizio, as a personificationof this decline. Unlike Gramsci,who in "TheSouthern Question"envisionedthe possibility of a revolutionary synthesisof the rural southernpeasantryand the northernindustrialproletariat,"the Prince stands for a pessimism of the intelligence and a pessimism of the will."51At the same time, the Princedoes not compromisehis dignity or his style; he has no desire to change, but, rather,stands apart, an anachronism.Said views the Alexandrianpoet C. P. Cavafy as a thirdexemplarof late style: "His poems enact a form of minimal survival between the past and the present, and his aesthetic of non-production, expressed in a non-metaphorical,almost prosaic unrhymed verse, enforces the sense of exile which is at the core of his work."52 Said observes in Cavafy's poetry an equable expression of contrary emotions without any attemptto forcibly resolve the tension between them. He attributes all of these artistsa degree of maturedetachment to and absence of egotism that enables them to forego any strainedresolution of antipathetic forces. EdwardSaid's commentson late style shed light on his own last works. In his early and middle career,EdwardSaid eschews the false universalism of Eurocentric thought and gestures, towards a new humanismthatis trulyinclusive; at the same time, he maintainsa commitmentto humanismover and againstthe objections of its postmodern and poststructuralist critics because he believes it to be politically enabling. He understandshumanism as a philosophical stance that transcends and breaks down boundaries and affords a model of agency. Said extols the humanist scholar for being committed to rationalcritiquein the face of growing economic inequalities,hostile political conditions, confusing experiential landscapes, and a selfregardingand obscurantisttendency in scholarlydiscourse.In his late work, Said embracesthe style of the artistshe admiresfor their"deliberately unproductiveproductiveness, a going against." Like that of these artists, Said's work manifests "an increasing sense of apartness and exile and anachronism."53 his work, the tensions between In humanismand the nouvelle critique are not resolved. More appalled than ever by the aggressive intensificationof American imperialism, disheartened the continuedand unremitting by inhumanitywith which Palestiniansare treated,and disenchantedwith the directionscholarly discourse has taken, Said distances himself from postmoderntheory Alif25 (2005) 83

humanism"that, though it is not and turnstowardsan "anti-humanist in to achieve culturaland political transformation the conditions able of postcolonial modernity,nonethelessrefuses to compromise. If in his work on late style Said embraces a form of negative dialectics, this is not to say that he retreatsaltogetherfrom a transformative vision. One of his last projects,the settingup of the East-West Diwan Orchestrawith Daniel Barenboim,is a living testamentto his belief that,despitetheirdifferences,people-in this instanceArabsand fashionto form a harmonic Israelis-can come togetherin contrapuntal whole. Said and Barenboimdescribethe first meeting of the Orchestra in Weimarin 1999 in Parallels and Paradoxes,a collectionculled from Said writesof this experiment: together.54 theirconversations It was remarkableto witness the group, despite the tension of the first week or ten days, turnthemselves into a real orchestra.In my opinion, what you saw happenhad no political overtones at all. One set of identities was supersededby another set. There was an Israeli group, and a Russian group, and a Syrian group, a Lebanese group, a Palestinian group, and a group of Palestinian Israelis. All of them suddenlybecame cellists and violinists playing the same piece in the same orchestraunder the same conductor.55 Said suggests that the musicians spontaneouslymoved beyond political differences by identifying not along ethnic lines, but as musical performersplaying in concert with each other. He implies that, in the right circumstancesand with the right leadership,people can set aside their divisive political identities and assume new forms of identification that allow for collaborationand unity. Discussing the East-West Diwan project and other musical interests in a joint interview with Barenboim broadcaston National Public Radio in December 2002, power of music: Said describesthe transcendent Beethoven in the firstplace really transcendsthe time and place of which he was a part.He was an Austro-Germanic composerwho speaksto anyone who likes music no matter whether that person is African or Middle Easternor accomAmerican or European.And that extraordinary plishment is entirely due to this music of striving and 84 Alif25 (2005)

development and of somehow expressing the highest human ideals, ideals of brotherhood,of community, of yearning, also, perhaps in many instances, unfulfilled
yearning.... Music making and listening at the same

time present a kind of fascinating dialectic between the individual and the collective, and that back and forth is very precious and gets over a lot of ground that is not commonly traversedin everyday life.56 Said imputes to the work of the great composer the ability to appeal to universal human ideals, across the differences of nationality and location. An anti-humanisthumanist to the last, Said sees in the process of collaborative music-making the possibility of moving beyond the prison-house of political differences and creating new forms of identity and community.
Notes 1 EdwardSaid, Orientalism(NY: Vintage, 1978). 2 Edward Said, "Thoughtson Late Style," London Review of Books 26.15 (August 5, 2004): 3-7. 3 EdwardSaid, "Presidential Address 1999: Humanismand Heroism,"PMLA 115.3 (2000): 285-91. 4 Said, Orientalism,7. 5 EdwardSaid was not by any means the first scholar to study writersfrom the former Europeancolonies. In fact, the study of so-called "commonwealth literature"had long been a staple of university curricula, in Britain and in its former colonies. The Commonwealthof Nations, formerly the British Commonwealth,a voluntaryassociation of the former colonies of GreatBritain,saw as its mandatethe promotionof culturalties between members, and in 1987 the CommonwealthFoundationestablished a writers' prize "to encourage and reward the upsurge of new Commonwealthfiction and ensurethatworks of meritreacha wider audience outside their country of origin" (from the Website of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize: <http://www.commonwealthwriters. com>). However, Commonwealth Literaturehad, by and large, been with a view to its appreciation transmission.EdwardSaid approached and definitively shifted this focus in an overtly political direction,to the study of the relationshipbetween literature, colonialism, nationalism,and decolonization. Following his lead, scholars took up the challenge of reading

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in such literature the light of political struggleand transformation. genIn eral, postcolonial critics and theorists have focused on the operationof in discourse,ideology, andrepresentation postcolonialwriting.They have coined and adoptedtermssuch as 'nationalallegory,' 'diaspora,''ambivalence,' 'mimicry,' 'hybridity,''creolite,' 'negritude,' 'syncretism,' 'globalization,' 'modernity,' 'hegemony,' and 'subaltern'to interpretcolonial and postcolonial experience. 6 Some of the importantstudies in this vein are: Abdul R. JanMohamed's Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa (Amherst,MA: U of MassachussettsP, 1983), PatrickBrantlinger'sRule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988), Gauri Viswanathan's Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (NY: Columbia UP, 1989), Anne McClintock's Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (NY, London: Routledge, 1995), and Christopher Miller's Blank Darkness:AfricanistDiscourse in French (Chicago:U of Chicago P, 1985). 7 For example, Kim Hall's Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca:Cornell UP, 1995) addressed the discourse of alterity in relation to Renaissance literature;Laura Brown's Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early EighteenthCenturyEnglish Literature(Ithaca:Cornell UP, 1993) focused on texts such as Aphra Behn's Oroonoko from the eighteenth century; Nigel Leask's British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge,UK: CambridgeUP, 1993) explored Orientalistrepresentation in writing of the Romantic period; and HowardJ. Booth and Nigel Rigby, eds. Modernism and Empire: Writing and British Coloniality 1890-1940 (Manchester: ManchesterUP, 2000) demonstrated signifithe cance of Empirein a numberof texts of literarymodernism. 8 EdwardSaid, Cultureand Imperialism(NY: Vintage, 1994), 12-13. 9 Said, Cultureand Imperialism,51. 10 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin:U of Texas P, 1983). 11 Said, Cultureand Imperialism,66-67. 12 W. J. T. Mitchell, "Secular Divination: Edward Said's Humanism," Critical Inquiry31.2 (Winter2005): 462. 13 Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory:A Critical Introduction(Edinburgh: EdinburghUP, 1998). 14 Gandhi,42. Thereis anotherstrandof postcolonialcriticismthatis Marxist and humanistin its orientation-for example, the work of Fanon, Stuart

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Hall, Neil Lazarus,the early SubalternStudies work-that Gandhi does not adequatelyrecognize. 15 James Clifford, "On Orientalism," The Predicament of Culture HarvardUP, 1998), 269. (Cambridge: 16 Entry for "counterpoint"in the Merriam-WebsterDictionary Online, <http://m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=counterpoint &x=16&y=9>. 17 Said, Orientalism,7. 18 Said, Cultureand Imperialism,244. 19 Said, Cultureand Imperialism,276. 20 Said, Cultureand Imperialism,273. 21 Edward Said, The World, The Text and the Critic, (Cambridge,MA: HarvardUP, 1983), 29. 22 Aamir Mufti, "Auerbachin Istanbul:EdwardSaid, SecularCriticism,and the Question of Minority Culture,"Critical Inquiry 25 (Autumn 1998): 95- 125. 23 Mufti, 112. 24 Said, Orientalism,3. 25 EdwardSaid, "MichelFoucault, 1926-1984,"After Foucault: Humanistic Knowledge,PostmodernChallenges,ed. Jonathan Arac (New Brunswick: RutgersUP, 1988), 5. 26 Said, "MichelFoucault, 1926-1984," 5. 27 Said, "MichelFoucault, 1926-1984," 9-10. 28 Said, "MichelFoucault, 1926-1984," 9. 29 Edward Said, "Foucaultand the Imaginationof Power," Reflections on Exile and OtherEssays (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000), 242. 30 Said, "Foucaultand the Imaginationof Power,"243-44. 31 Said, Cultureand Imperialism,278. 32 Michel Foucault,"Afterword: The Subject and Power,"Michel Foucault: BeyondStructuralism Hermeneutics,eds. HubertL. Dreyfus and Paul and Rabinow (Chicago:U of Chicago P, 1982), 208-26. 33 Said, Cultureand Imperialism,268-69. 34 Robert Bemasconi, "Castingthe Slough: Fanon's New Humanismfor a New Humanity,"Fanon: A Critical Reader, eds. Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Renee T. White (Malden,MA: Blackwell, and 1996), 113-21. 35 Said, Cultureand Imperialism,270. 36 Said, Cultureand Imperialism,274. 37 Anthony Alessandrini, "Humanismin Question: Fanon and Said," A Companionto Postcolonial Studies, eds. Henry Schwartz and Sangeeta

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Ray (Malden,MA: Blackwell, 2000,) 431-50. 38 Said, "Humanism and Heroism,"286. 39 Said, "Humanism and Heroism,"288. 40 Said, "Humanismand Heroism,"288. 41 Said, "Humanism Heroism,"290. and 42 Said, "Humanismand Heroism,"291. 43 Said, "Humanism Heroism,"286. and 44 Edward Said, "Orientalism25 Years Later: Worldly Humanism v. the Empire-builders,"August4, 2003, <http:flwww.counterpunch.org/said 08052003.html>. 45 Said, "Orientalism Years Later,"n. pag. 25 46 Edward Said, "Humanism's Sphere," Humanism and Democratic Criticism(NY: ColumbiaUP, 2004), 28. 47 Said, "Humanism'sSphere,"19-20. 48 Said, "TheChangingBasis of HumanisticStudy and Practice,"Humanism and Democratic Criticism,47. 49 Said, "Thoughtson Late Style," 4. 50 Said, "Thoughtson Late Style," 2-3. 51 Said, "Thoughtson Late Style," 5. 52 Said, "Thoughtson Late Style," 8. 53 Said, "Thoughtson Late Style," 4. 54 Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorationsin Music and Society (NY: Vintage, 2004). 55 Daniel Barenboimand EdwardSaid, Parallels and Paradoxes, 9-10. 56 Daniel Barenboimand EdwardSaid, "Interviewon NPR," December 28, 2002, <http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyld=892575>.

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