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Matthew Abraham
2 MATTHEW ABRAHAM
work “in the world” to the realm of the unattainable and naive.2 As
Said wrote in his essay “Humanism’s Sphere,” “humanism [is] some-
thing fundamentally discordant with advanced theory.”3 Add to these
troubling tendencies within intellectual criticism the rise of the cult
of expertise and the strong academic inclination toward political qui-
etism; Said found himself continually disturbed by both.
Throughout his career as a literary critic and political activist,
including during his last days when he was suffering a terrible illness,
Said again and again conWrmed that secular criticism and worldliness
were the very conditions of possibility for a New Humanism that
would lead future public intellectuals toward formulating just resolu-
tions to intransigent ethnic and religious conXicts within a world full
of so many seemingly lost causes. The rise of the new orientalism and
the growing specter of a new intellectual McCarthyism, to a degree,
prove the general tenor of Said’s theses as these were developed
throughout his oeuvre.
Now, in this moment of grave political uncertainty inside and
outside the university, how can Edward W. Said’s extensive and path-
breaking literary and political work—in addition to his inspirational
life and example—be deployed to advance a critical humanism for the
creation of noncoercive knowledge and to bring together discrepant
experiences, which were central aspects of Said’s work as a commit-
ted intellectual? How does one begin to assess Said’s commitment to
humanism, his afWrmation of the power of human beings to shape
the world through their will and efforts instead of through unfath-
omable forces caused by abstract, ahistorical, and decontextualized
entities like “market forces” and “structural underpinnings,” when
so much within contemporary culture seeks to deny the power and
efWcacy of human action and individual effort? By challenging essen-
tialized and given categories such as “culture,” “the Arab mind,”
and “the clash of civilizations,” Said sought to recuperate through
careful analysis what others had left as immutable, uncontested, and
forgotten.
This special issue of Cultural Critique seeks to examine and under-
stand what Said’s humanistic legacy provides the critical intellectual
at this historical moment, when so much about the potential of the
human remains diminished and uncertain, even belittled by those
who have moved beyond the human. Said’s frustration with what
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INTRODUCTION 3
4 MATTHEW ABRAHAM
INTRODUCTION 5
for a perception and artistic expression that represents the full Xow-
ering of one’s energies. The power of one’s human embodiment, the
will to go on living long after the body has faltered, Wnds a site of
articulation through the summit of the writer’s or artist’s creative
talents.
In his 1999 MLA Presidential address, “Heroism and Human-
ism,” Said called the profession of English studies to order; he sought
a return to a coherent method of inquiry for English departments
and a resolution of petty squabbles between varying schools of post-
modern criticism. Said wished to see a return to rigorous historical
scholarship, which, in his mind, was exempliWed in the work of Erich
Auerbach, Ernst Robert Curtius, and Leo Spitzer. Humanism, as a
form of intellectual and physical resistance against various forms of
cultural commodiWcation and accommodation, resists all forms of
prepackaging and scripting, seeking an individualist way where a
conformist tendency might be indicated and prevalent. In a world
dominated by information systems and complex technology, the
human—as a concept and as an ideal—still held a place for Edward
Said. Humanism is ultimately a belief in the power of the human,
contra those who believe that human effort no longer matters in shap-
ing the political.
Said sought to “use humanistic critique to open up the Weld of
struggle, to introduce a longer sequence of thought and analysis to
replace the thought-stopping fury of popular culture and the mass
media whose goals often appear to be the creation of collective pas-
sion rather than understanding and genuine disclosure.”9 Said called
this striving for community, coexistence, and understanding—in the
face of factionalism and impending barbarism—“humanism.” By this
he meant the attempt to dissolve “Blake’s mind-forged manacles” so
as to be able to use one’s mind historically and rationally for the pur-
pose of “reXective understanding and genuine disclosure.” Moreover,
humanism is sustained by “a sense of community with other inter-
preters and other societies and periods.” Strictly speaking, “there is
no such thing as an isolated humanist.” Humanism is centered on the
agency of human individuality and subjective intuition rather than
on received ideas and approved authorities. Texts have to be read as
texts that will produce and live on in the historical realm in all sorts
of, what Said called, “worldly ways.” This by no means excludes the
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INTRODUCTION 9
devices have upon human beings. Nixon identiWes how Rachel Car-
son (the environmental scientist), in “exposing the euphemisms and
bromides promulgated by the Cold War’s military-industrial com-
plex,” shared a commitment to public intellectualism with Said, doc-
umenting how herbicides and insecticides, in reality, biocides—“these
supposedly precise weapons in the war on pests”—“in fact targeted
nothing more precise than life itself.”
Nixon’s engagement with and exposure of the “politesse” of the
State Department in its instrumentalization of mass death highlights
how language stands in service to imperialism. Continuing a theme
developed in Radakrishnan’s trenchant essay, Nixon takes the reader
back to the famous passage in the early pages of The World, the Text,
and the Critic, where Said recounts his encounter with an “old college
friend,” who speaks respectfully—almost affectionately—of the sec-
retary of defense during the Vietnam era as “a complex human being:
he doesn’t Wt the picture you may have formed of the cold-blooded
imperialist murderer. The last time I was in his ofWce I noticed Dur-
rell’s Alexandria Quartet on his desk.”11 For Said, such moments capture
the tragedy and irony of living with the contradictions of an imperial
mindset that could use “the cultural world . . . for that particular sort
of camouXaging.”12 Nixon uses the Durrell reference as a starting point
for “Land Mines and Cluster Bombs,” where he embraces Said’s
commitment to responsible public intellectualism, resistance to state
worship, and a continual remembrance that “that particular sort of
camouXaging” exacts a human toll on populations in a not-so-distant
part of the world.
If Nixon’s essay spurs us to read Human Rights Watch’s report
Off Target: The Conduct of the War and Civilian Casualties in Iraq, which
describes in great detail the U.S. military’s use of cluster bombs and
this ordnance’s effects upon Iraqi civilian life, this special issue will
have made a serious move toward enacting Said’s New Humanism.
The cluster bomb, as an “antipersonnel weapon,” seeks out human
beings on whom it inXicts maximum injury. It is “clustered” so as to
maximize the likelihood of casualties. As Nixon points out, “What
distinguishes cluster bombs is less their clustering than the dispersal
of their malign effects.”
This special issue concludes with a poem entitled “Edward Said”
by Mahmoud Darwish, which has been ably translated into English
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10 MATTHEW ABRAHAM
Every single empire in its ofWcial discourse has said that it is not like all
the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to
enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only
as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intel-
lectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires.13
A New Humanism, then, might lead the way in rescuing what Said
called “that precarious exilic realm” where one can “truly grasp
the difWculty of what cannot be grasped and then go forth and try
anyway.”14
Notes
Much of the initial work on this project was completed while I was on a Hodges
Better English Fund Research Leave at the University at Tennessee at Knoxville. I
would like to acknowledge Professor Andrew Rubin’s assistance in helping me to
pull together the contributors for this special issue. In addition, all credit is due to
Professor Rubin for coming up with the title of the special issue—“Edward Said
and After: Toward a New Humanism.” I would like to extend a special thank you
to Professors Keya Ganguly and Timothy Brennan at the University of Minnesota
for encouraging me to make this special issue on Edward Said a reality. Finally, I
must acknowledge the expert editorial assistance of Steve Groening and Alicia
Gibson at Cultural Critique.
1. See Emily Apter’s “Saidian Humanism,” boundary 2 31, no. 2 (2004): 35–
53. Apter claims that “Said was taking up the challenge of using Auerbachian
humanism to fashion new humanisms, not merely because of a sober conviction
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INTRODUCTION 11
that great books, on the grounds of their intrinsic merit, should continue to have
traction in a global, increasingly mediatized cultural industry but more because
of his belief that humanism provides futural parameters for deWning secular
criticism in a world increasingly governed by a sense of identitarian ethnic des-
tiny and competing sacred tongues” (43). Also see William Hart’s Edward Said
and the Religious Effects of Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
which deals extensively with Said’s efforts to expose how even intellectual move-
ments, such as poststructural theory, can manifest religious enthusiasm through
cults of discipleship and expertise. For example, in the World, the Text, and the
Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), Said takes aim at “the
growing resemblance between professed political neoconservatives and the re-
ligiously inclined critics, for whom the privatized condition of social life and
cultural discourse are made possible by a belief in the benign quasi-divine mar-
ketplace” (292).
2. In “Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Ques-
tion of Minority Culture” (in Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth
to Power, ed. Paul A. Bové, 229–56 [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000]),
Aamir Mufti writes, “Secular criticism seeks continually to make it perceptible
that the experience of being at home can only be produced by rendering some
other homeless” (239). Observations such as Mufti’s have become commonplace
in postcolonial criticism and minority studies. For a critique of essays such as
Mufti’s in the Bové collection, see Timothy Brennan’s “Once Again, with Feel-
ing,” a review of Edward Said and the Work of the Critic published in Ariel, Fall 2002.
Many of the insights, which were presented as new and illuminating in Edward
Said and the Work of the Critic, were initially evinced in Edward Said: A Critical Reader
(ed. Michael Sprinker [London: Blackwell, 1992]).
3. Edward Said, “Humanism’s Sphere,” in Humanism and Democratic Criticism,
1–30 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 15.
4. “Targeting the University,” Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, June 2–8, 2005,
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2005/745/op2.htm.
5. See Michele Goldberg’s “Osama University” in Salon.com News at http://
archive.salon.com/news/feature/2003/11/06/middle_east/index_np.html.
6. In his essay “The Intellectual Life of Edward Said,” Joseph Massad writes:
“[For this,] Said is portrayed as dangerous by the self-appointed neoconservative
commissars of academe. But in fact, the neocons in this sense may be right, for
Said’s ideas are indeed dangerous to cultural commissars everywhere. It is this
element of danger that inspires fear in the hearts of those who administer culture,
and hope in the hearts of those who resist them. It is this element of danger that
makes Said’s voice so hard to silence, so difWcult to mute” (Journal of Palestine
Studies 33, no. 3 [Spring 2004]: 13).
7. See Nabia Abu-El-Haj’s “Edward Said and the Political Present” (American
Ethnologist 32, no. 4: 538–55) for a rich theoretical explication of these issues.
8. I would like to highlight here the slanderous campaign launched against
several members of Columbia’s Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures
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Department (Joseph Massad, Rashid Khalidi, and Hamid Dabashi) by the Boston-
based group, The David Project. Palestinian intellectuals who have refused what
Massad has called “Zionism’s deal” have been particularly vulnerable to attacks
against their free speech, their profession and livelihood, and even their person.
Even after his passing, Said’s legacy has not been immune from attack. Consider
also Alan M. Dershowitz’s scurrilous article “Edward Said: The Palestinian Meir
Kahane” (Congressional Monthly, September/October 2003, 8–9), which alleges that
“like Kahane, Said opposed the two-state solution. Like Kahane, Said believed
that those seeking peace were too soft on their enemies. And like Kahane, Said
refused to condemn terrorism and himself demonstrated symbolic support for
terrorists” (9). Needless to say, those who have read a single book—much less a
single sentence—of what Said wrote, will be hard pressed to understand Der-
showitz’s comparison between Said and Meir Kahane, the Jewish Defense League
ideologue. While Said sought mutual recognition and reconciliation within the
context of the U.S.–Israel–Palestine conXict, Kahane represented a not-unfamiliar
brand of Zionist chauvinism and extremism actively opposed—often quite vio-
lently so—to the peace efforts of the PLO and the Arab states since the mid-
seventies. I would be remiss in not also mentioning Dershowitz’s unprecedented
attempts to inXuence the University of California Press’s review process of Nor-
man Finkelstein’s Beyond Chutzpah: The Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of
History throughout the spring and summer of 2005. While Dershowitz insisted
that he never sought to prevent publication of the book, only to ensure that every
statement made about him be fact-checked, he did suggest that he was the target
of a vast, left-wing defamation campaign. Participants, according to Dershowitz,
included Norman Finkelstein, Alexander Cockburn, and Noam Chomsky. When
the Palestinian presence cannot be vanquished through sheer assertion—as Golda
Meir’s famous statement that “There are no Palestinians” attempted to do—cul-
tural commissars must regulate what can be claimed about it in scholarship and
the classroom.
9. Edward Said, “Orientalism 25 Years Later: Worldly Humanism v. the
Empire Builders,” Counterpunch, August 4, 2003, http://www.counterpunch.org/
said08052003.htm.
10. Ibid.
11. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 3.
12. Ibid.
13. “Orientalism 25 Years Later,” n.p.
14. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 44.