Edward Said and Michel Foucault:

Affinities and Dissonances

KARLIS RACEVSKIS
The Ohio State University

A BST R ACT
Edward Said played a key role in introducing Foucault’s work to academics
in the United States. While this initial appreciation of Foucault’s thought was
also reflected in his own work, it was not to last, however. Said’s growing
disenchantment with Foucault’s thinking is reflected in the many essays he
wrote and the interviews he gave over the years following the publication of
Orientalism. At the same time, while Said’s reflections point to his reasons
for rejecting a Foucaultian approach to texts and the world, they also reveal
a number of misunderstandings regarding Foucault’s purpose. Said would
eventually rectify these misperceptions and offer an eloquent and succinct
analysis of Foucault’s contribution to contemporary critical theory in the last
essay he wrote on the French thinker.

E dward Said has acknowledged the existence of a fundamental paradox at the

heart of his critical enterprise and he credited James Clifford with having
disclosed it, earlier than anyone else. It was, as Said explains it, “the conflict
between my avowed and unmistakable humanistic bias and the antihumanism of my
subject and my approach toward it” (Humanism and Democratic Criticism 8). The source
of the discrepancy, evidently, was Said’s reliance on a particular kind of advanced
theory—Michel Foucault’s, to be exact—that Clifford had perceptively characterized,
in Said’s estimation, “as having largely disposed of humanism’s essentializing and
totalizing modes” (9). The paradox becomes even more pronounced when we take
into account Said’s leading role in promoting Foucault and his thought in this country.
Said’s first essays on Michel Foucault appeared as early as 1971 and 1972 eventu-
ally constituting an important chapter in Beginnings.1 While the chapter is devoted
to a general discussion as well as a critical evaluation of what Said characterizes as
“contemporary French thought,” that is, of what could generally be subsumed under
the label of “structuralism,” its main focus is clearly on Foucault. Said describes him
as a thinker to be credited with the creation of “a new mental domain—not history,

RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Fall 2005). © 2005

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nor philosophy, but ‘archeology’ and ‘discourse’—and a new habit of thought, a set
of rules for knowledge to dominate truth, to make truth as an issue secondary to
the successful ordering and wielding of huge masses of actual present knowledge”
(291). The key to this reversal in the traditional priority truth had always been given
over knowledge is what Said calls “the loss of the subject,” that is, the rejection of the
Cartesian paradigm for establishing the truth of knowledge in terms of a Cogito—an
inherent quality of the mind giving humans the capacity for gauging objectively the
world. Although the refusal to take human consciousness as the ground for true
knowledge was something Foucault shared with other French thinkers, he did not fall
prey to the “linguacentricity” that was a general and—to Said’s mind—a regrettable
characteristic of structuralist thought. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze was
another thinker who rejected the subject as ground for certainty; Said therefore finds
both Foucault and Deleuze justified in “seeing their philosophy of decenterment as
revolutionary” and places them in the lineage of a distinguished tradition of radical
thinkers. As intellectuals, “Foucault and Deleuze rejoin the adversarial epistemologi-
cal current found in Vico, in Marx and Engels, in Lukacs, in Fanon, and also in the
radical political writings of Chomsky, Kolko, Bertrand Russell, William A. Williams,
and others” (378).
This initial appreciation of Foucault’s theories would be reflected in Said’s own
theoretical approach. In the preface to Orientalism, Said recognizes his debt to Fou-
cault, mentioning the importance of The Archaeology of Knowledge and Discipline and
Punish in particular (3). It is indeed possible to suppose that Orientalism, the book
most responsible for Said’s prominence in the field of postcolonial studies, could
not have been written, as Valerie Kennedy suggests, “without Foucault’s concepts of
discourse and of discursive formations, his discussions of the relationships between
power and knowledge, and his view that representations are always influenced by
the systems of power in which they are located” (25). At the same time, the book also
revealed areas of theoretical divergence between the two thinkers. Kennedy detects
“two major inconsistencies in Said’s use of Foucault’s concept of discourse”: one
concerns the question of representation and its relationship to truth, the other is the
distinction to be made between an objective and a subjective knowledge, “which is
problematic for Said in a way that it is not for the French philosopher” (27–28). Thus
Said appears to alternate “between the idea that true representation is theoretically
possible and the opposite position that all representation is necessarily misrepresenta-
tion” (29). Said himself would eventually recognize that the book was indeed theoreti-
cally inconsistent, claiming that “I designed it that way” (Criticism in Society 137). The
main reason for this, he explained to Imre Salusinszky some eight years later, was that
“I didn’t want Foucault’s method, or anybody’s method to override what I was trying
to put forward” (137). He went so far as to suggest that by the end of the book he had
developed an approach “which was deliberately anti-Foucault” (137).
It is not clear whether the approach developed as he was writing Orientalism
or whether it became apparent only in retrospect; what is evident is that his initial
enthusiasm for Foucault’s ideas had waned considerably by the time of the interview
with Salusinszky. One of the causes for his growing disenchantment with Foucault
had to do with the question of Palestine. In the spring of 1979, Said was invited to a
seminar on the question of peace in the Middle East organized by Jean-Paul Sartre and
Simone de Beauvoir in Paris. The seminar, curiously enough, was held in Foucault’s
apartment, although Foucault himself was not a participant. The seminar turned out
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to be deeply disappointing and Said was forced to conclude that de Beauvoir and
Sartre “knew nothing about the Arab world and were both fantastically pro-Israel”
(Interviews with Edward Said 75). The highlight of the gathering was a presentation by
Sartre, who “talked for fifteen or twenty minutes on how great Anwar Sadat was,” but,
to Said’s amazement, there was “not a word about the Palestinians!” (75)
Said did meet Foucault on this occasion but the conversation he had with him
was also very disappointing. “I could tell he was withdrawing from politics,” Said
remembers, “he had lost interest in politics” (101). Years later, Said was to discover that
what he had interpreted as a lack of interest in politics had actually been Foucault’s
way of avoiding a discussion about the Palestinians. “In the late ’80s,” Said recalls,
“I was told by Gilles Deleuze that he and Foucault, once the closest of friends, had
clashed fatally because of their differences over Palestine, Foucault expressing sup-
port for Israel, Deleuze for the Palestinians. No wonder then that he hadn’t wanted to
discuss the Middle East with me” (qtd. in Marrouchi, Edward Said at the Limits 92).2
In addition to these real or perceived political discordances, there were also
philosophical and theoretical differences of which Said was becoming increasingly
conscious at the time. He notes, in the same interview, that his encounter with Fou-
cault took place at a time when he was discovering some basic flaws in Foucault’s
notion of a disciplinary society in particular. More specifically, according to Said, it
was while reading E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class that he
became convinced that there was something more to society than “just the smooth
working out of a massive system of domination.” As a result, he adds, “I separated
from Foucault at that point” (Interviews 101). In this regard, the book that followed
Orientalism can be read most profitably for the many rationalizations and justifica-
tions it offers as reasons for definitely rejecting a Foucaultian approach to either texts
or the world.
The World, the Text, and the Critic contributed to further solidify Said’s position
as critic by outlining what could be considered his credo as a politically engaged
intellectual. The book of essays also presents what could be termed a systematic
critique of all those contemporaries who, in Said’s view, were guilty of the latest ver-
sion of a trahison des clercs.3 He notes that, originally, the source of the intellectual
effervescence marking the ’50s and ’60s in France had been a desire to transform
society. Unfortunately, as it gained in popularity and—especially—after it found itself
transplanted to the United States, literary theory turned into mainly an academic
exercise and “retreated into a labyrinth of ‘textuality,’ dragging along with it the most
recent apostles of European revolutionary textuality—Derrida and Foucault—whose
trans-Atlantic canonization and domestication they themselves seemed sadly enough
to be encouraging” (The World 3). The qualifier “sadly enough” sums up Said’s experi-
ence with French theory, a spectrum of intellectual innovations in which he was all
the more disappointed because it had seemed so promising at first. The influence
of Derrida and Foucault was understandably the most dangerous of all—precisely
because of their “canonization”—and, judging by the length of the list of entries in
the index, Said was intent on devoting more time to these two critics than to anyone
else in his book.
Said’s position on the responsibility of critics as well as his views on their alleged
treason can be formulated most readily in terms of the concepts making up the book’s
title. The critic, to put it simply, is situated between Text and World and his or her
responsibility is to reveal the connections linking the two in order to advance such
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traditional humanistic aims as the pursuit of freedom, truth, and justice. The point,
in addition, is to devise and provide concrete solutions and practical answers to “the
questions that trouble the reader of a daily newspaper,” Said tells us (25). To do this,
a critic must first understand his or her involvement with the “Text,” which, for Said,
serves as a shorthand designation for the cultural process that serves to maintain a
certain social order: it is the glue binding together the various components of a State
providing it with its authority and justifying its power. What literary critics often fail
to realize, Said argues, is that their practice has contributed to the establishment of a
domain of critical practice called “literature” that is no longer aware of the legitimizing
role it plays in society and, as a result, “’literature’ as a cultural agency has become
more and more blind to its actual complicities with power” (175). This is also why
literary critics have been remarkably silent on such questions as “to what degree has
culture collaborated in the worst excesses of the State, from its imperial wars and
colonial settlements to its self-justifying institutions of antihuman repression, racial
hatred, economic and behavioral manipulation?” (177). Offering a diagnosis of the ills
besetting the practice of literary criticism, Said finds that “our critical ethos is formed
by a pernicious analytic of blind demarcation by which, for example, imagination is
separated from thought, culture from power, history from form, texts from everything
that is hors texte, and so forth” (169). The main consequence of this blindness has been
a general abdication of a responsibility Said considers to be implicit in the literary
critic’s—or the humanist’s—calling:
In having given up the world entirely for the aporias and unthinkable paradoxes
of a text, contemporary criticism has retreated from its constituency, the citizens
of modern society, who have been left to the hands of “free” market forces, multi-
national corporations, the manipulations of consumer appetites. (4)

As these remarks suggest, the principal culprit to be blamed for these develop-
ments was obviously Derrida, the critic most readily identified with what Said terms
“the extraordinarily Laputan idea that to a certain extent everything can be regarded
as a text” (173). In this particular regard, it is also evident that Said still gives a certain
preference to Foucault. Thus, when he observes that contemporary Left criticism “is
for the most part stunningly silent” about the collusion intellectuals engage into with
the State’s almost absolute power,” he does mention exceptions to this sort of apathy
or blindness, among which “Foucault is one, and Ohmann, and Poulantzas.” In addi-
tion, he is pleased to note that “feminist critics have opened up this question part of
the way” (169). It is also when he examines the particular manner in which the two
French critics deal with texts that Said discovers that “the divergence between Derrida
and Foucault becomes very dramatic” (212). What makes Foucault’s approach clearly
distinguishable from Derrida’s is his attempt to make “the text assume its affiliations
with institutions, offices, agencies, classes, academies, corporations, groups, guilds,
ideologically defined parties and professions” (212). In other words, by elucidating the
connections linking discursive with nondiscursive power/knowledge networks or, to
put it differently, the texte with the hors-texte—Foucault is able to take into account
not only the semantic but also the material reality of the text, that is, the text’s mate-
rial conditions of emergence and deployment. Thus, it is clear to Said that “Foucault’s
greatest intellectual contribution is to an understanding of how the will to exercise
dominant control in society and history has also discovered a way to clothe, disguise,
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rarefy, and wrap itself systematically in the language of truth, discipline, rationality,
utilitarian value, and knowledge” (216).
Nevertheless, when all is said and done, and although important differences do
exist between the two French thinkers, they both stand accused of practicing “textu-
alism,” and doing it rather badly at that. “One is a philosopher,” Said points out, “the
other a philosophic historian” (185). “But note,” he also reminds us, “that Foucault’s
history is ultimately textual, or rather textualized” (246). What Said ends up detecting
in both Derrida and Foucault is “a fundamental uncertainty in their work as to what
it is doing, theorizing over the problem of textuality or . . . practicing an alternate
textuality of their own” (185). Such a practice stands in marked contrast with that
of other critics much more attuned to the world. Thus, Said admires Georg Lukacs,
because “theory for him was what consciousness produced, not as an avoidance of
reality but as a revolutionary will completely committed to worldliness and change”
(234). He found equally commendable the critical practice of Noam Chomsky, who
once debated Foucault on a special program for Dutch television moderated by the
philosopher Fons Elders.4 The debate mainly seemed to reveal the lack of a com-
mon ground of philosophical or epistemological assumptions—“neither Fons Elders
nor his two guests appeared to be talking about the same thing most of the time,”
Said notes (142). But Said also finds reason to be critical of Foucault’s performance
claiming that it illustrated “the disturbing circularity of Foucault’s theory of power.”
Moreover, Said judges equally disturbing the impression that “one could not imagine
Foucault undertaking a sustained analysis of powerfully controlled political issues,
nor, like Chomsky himself and writers like John Berger, would Foucault commit
himself to descriptions of power and oppression with some intention of alleviating
human suffering, pain, or betrayed hope” (247). To be sure, this is a rather astounding
statement, considering Foucault’s often reiterated and clearly demonstrated concern
for the oppressed, the disenfranchised, and the marginalized. It is nonetheless quite
accurate in terms of Foucault’s own ideas about what he was hoping to accomplish
as a critic. Thus he found it impossible to posit the sort of cause/effect relationship
between his theorizing and historical and social change that Said believed could be
effected. According to Said, “it is the critic’s job to provide resistances to theory, to
open it up toward historical reality, toward society, toward human needs and inter-
ests, to point up those concrete instances drawn from everyday reality” (242). What
is striking about this statement, however, is that it could very well be applied to
Foucault’s own views concerning the aims of the critic. Foucault frequently stressed
the need to submit theory to the test of reality, of practical everyday experiences:
[J]’ai toujours tenu à ce qu’il se passe en moi et pour moi une sorte d’aller et venue,
d’interférence, d’interconnection entre les activités pratiques et le travail théorique
ou le travail historique que je faisais. [. . .] C’est pour avoir passé un certain temps
dans les hôpitaux psychiatriques que j’ai écrit Naissance de la clinique. Dans les
prisons, j’ai commencé à faire un certain nombre de choses et j’ai ensuite écrit
Surveiller et Punir.

I always made certain that what happened in me and for me was a sort of coming
and going, of interference, of interconnection between practical activities and
the theoretical or historical work I was doing. [. . .] It’s because I spent a certain
amount of time in psychiatric hospitals that I wrote The Birth of the Clinic. In
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prisons, I began doing a certain number of things and then I wrote Discipline and
Punish. (Dits et écrits 4: 748)

Such a procedure, obviously, could hardly be called “practicing textuality. Said shows
himself to be equally misguided or misinformed when he reproaches Foucault of a
complete lack of concern for “human suffering, pain, or betrayed hope.” In a radio
interview given in 1975, for example, Foucault recounts the suffering he experi-
enced in a psychiatric hospital at the sight of the inmates’ suffering. It was a feeling
of empathy that contrasted sharply, he thought, with the scientific detachment and
seeming impassivity of the doctors (Dits et écrits 2: 783–802). Similarly, in the prisons
he visited, what struck Foucault most was the manner in which the act of confin-
ing human beings was taken as something perfectly natural, as a procedure whose
legitimacy was self-evident. The naturalness of this power to subject others led him
to reflect on the historical process that had yielded the necessary truths for justifying
and institutionalizing procedures of confinement.
Foucault’s affective investment in the subjects of his investigations is an aspect
Said does not seem to take at all into consideration. It is possible that he was not able
to appreciate Foucault’s deeply humane and compassionate involvement with the
objects of research because, by this time, he had developed a growing resentment for
many of the things to which, in his mind, Foucault’s critical methodology lent sup-
port. He was growing ever more impatient with what he construed to be a betrayal
by leftist critics in general and Foucault—as one of the most visible of these—in
particular. It is a resentment that occasionally surfaces in The World, the Text, and
the Critic. Thus Foucault’s approach is seen as both deluded and intended to delude
others because his theory of power, Said claims, “has captivated not only Foucault
himself but many of his readers” and mainly serves to “justify political quietism
with sophisticated intellectualism” (245). Said’s annoyance with what he sees as an
academic exercise masquerading as radical or subversive thought emerges as well in
the many interviews he gave over the years following the publication of The World,
the Text, and the Critic. When invited to comment on the relative merits of Chomsky’s
and Foucault’s critical practices, Said declared that “Chomsky’s is the more consis-
tently honorable [. . .] position. It’s certainly a less cynical position than Foucault’s”:
Foucault’s alleged cynicism being attributable to the simple fact that he eventually
became “uninterested in any direct political involvement of any sort” (Power, Politics,
and Culture 77). Foucault is also characterized as a man obsessed with a single idea
or theme: he “becomes the scribe of domination” (138), he is “at times hysterically
anti-Marxist,” and “everything is an aspect of the process of the carceral society for
Foucault” (65).
On one particular occasion, Said offered what could be considered a fairly com-
plete list of everything he thought was wrong with the direction Foucault’s thinking
had taken since the late sixties. In an interview that was to be published under the title
of “Overlapping Territories: The World, the Text, and the Critic,” Said found it useful
and revealing to contrast Foucault’s political stance with that of Frantz Fanon:
Foucault’s trajectory as a scholar and researcher noted for his interest in sites
of political intensity—the asylum, the hospital, the prison, the academy, the
army, and so on—moved from what appeared to be insurrectionary scholarship
to a kind of scholarship that confronted the problem of power from the posi-
tion of someone who believed that ultimately very little resistance was possible
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to the controls of a disciplinary or carceral society. There is a kind of quietism

that emerges at various points in Foucault’s career: the sense that everything is
historically determined, that ideas of justice, of good and evil, and so forth, have
no innate significance, because they are constituted by whoever is using them.
Whereas the whole of Fanon’s work is based upon the notion of genuine histori-
cal change by which oppressed classes are capable of liberating themselves from
their oppressors. (53–54)

It has been suggested that Said needed to distance himself at this time from Foucault
in order to reinforce and legitimize his own standing as critic. Mustapha Marrouchi
proposes that
in moving away from Foucault, in borrowing from such revolutionary intellectu-
als as Fanon, Gramsci, and Williams [. . .]. Said is, in essence, carving a niche for
himself and thereby charting a course that would make him not only a leading
critic of colonialism but also the champion of the counterdiscourse of theory that
Foucault pioneered. (Edward Said at the Limits 91–92)

Paul Bové also finds that “in Said’s later work, Foucault is a necessary adversary, a cru-
cial element in the tactics he deploys to empower his own position” (214). Bové takes
the argument one step further, however, by attempting to show that the contrast Said
strives to establish between himself and Foucault may actually work to discredit Said’s
position rather than Foucault’s. What Said refuses to recognize at his peril, is the fact
that Foucault’s work “poses a direct challenge to the legitimacy of both traditional
and oppositional intellectuals” (224). “Said has chosen to ignore Foucault’s figure of
a ‘regime of truth,’ ” Bové argues; as a consequence, he has not been in a position to
sufficiently appreciate the critical importance this notion has with regard to the role
of intellectuals. According to Foucault, “Chaque société a son régime de vérité, sa
politique générale de la vérité: c’est-à-dire les types de discours qu’elle accueille et fait
fonctionner comme vrais” ‘Each society has its regime of truth, its general politics of
truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true’ (Dits
et écrits 3: 158). Moreover, this “politics of truth” also serves to determine “le statut
de ceux qui ont la charge de dire ce qui fonctionne comme vrai” ‘the status of those
who are charged with saying what counts as true’ (3: 158). Foremost among these
are the intellectuals and it therefore behooves them to realize the extent to which
their activity and pronouncements fit into or resist a particular regime of truth. The
noteworthy merit of Foucault, Bové suggests, has been to demonstrate that “many of
the ‘oppositional’ rhetorics are in complicity with the hegemony of power” (224). That
is why, contrary to what Said asserts, Foucault’s aims are indeed political because
“in his genealogies Foucault is actually attacking both the belief in the revolutionary
potential of these empowering discourses and the intellectual type they empower”
(225). Seen in this light, Said’s implicit claims of moral superiority for his brand of
“insurrectionary scholarship” appear remarkably devoid of a critical self-awareness.
As Bové points out, “Said is specifically defending the traditional and privileged role
of the leading intellectual by making Foucault, a critic of that role, seem morally cul-
pable for abandoning it” (225). It is an ironic reversal noted by other critics as well.
Valerie Kennedy, for example, uncovers one such instance in Said’s stated preference
for Fanon’s politics. In Culture and Imperialism, Said contrasts once more the political
stance of Foucault with that of Fanon, arguing that
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Fanon represents the interests of a double constituency, native and Western,

moving from confinement to liberation; ignoring the imperial context of his own
theories, Foucault seems actually to represent an irresistible colonizing movement
that paradoxically fortifies the prestige of both the lonely individual scholar and
the system that contains him. (278)

It seems evident to Kennedy, that Said’s characterization of Foucault and what he

supposedly represents “does apply, ironically enough, to Said himself, to a certain
extent. His voice is both that of the ‘lonely individual scholar’ [. . .] and that of
someone positioned in a prestigious part of the Western academy” (110).
At the same time, Said cannot be accused of acting in bad faith or being cynical.
His disillusionment with the direction taken by Foucault’s investigations is doubtless
genuine—as is his astonishment at the seemingly lasting effects of Foucault’s influ-
ence. In a somewhat poetic essay on the interrelationship of sound and silence, he
concludes his discussion of Foucault by voicing both his disappointment and disbe-
lief: “What puzzles me is not only how someone as remarkably brilliant as Foucault
could have arrived at so impoverished and masochistically informed a vision of sound
and silence, but also how so many readers in Europe and the United States have rou-
tinely accepted it as anything more than an intensely private, deeply eccentric, and
insular version of history” (Reflections on Exile 523). Here again, for a reader familiar
with Foucault’s work, what may appear striking is the utter disaccord between Fou-
cault’s own often expressed views of his project and Said’s characterization of it. In the
first place, the somewhat clumsy mixed metaphor of “a vision of sound and silence”
completely misses the point in regard to the role of silence in Foucault’s work. For
Said, the two terms are meant to dramatize the interaction between the observer and
the observed in a disciplinary society, where “the silence of the delinquent behavior
is made to speak, to expose itself, to order itself before the watchful eye of a silent
authoritarian observer.” Eventually, and in accordance with “the sadism of an always
victorious logic” that Said takes to be the marking characteristic of Foucault’s disci-
plinary system, “silence and indeed resistance to disciplinary power are gradually
eliminated” (522). Whence the poverty and masochism of Foucault’s theory. Such an
explanation tells little about Foucault or the importance of silence in his oeuvre.
In the preface to his book on the history of madness, Foucault points out
that the language of psychiatry, “qui est monologue de la raison surr la folie, n’a pu
s’établir que sur un tel silence” ‘which is a monologue of reason about madness, has
been established only on the basis of such a silence’ (Dits et écrits 1: 160). As a result,
Foucault tells us, “Je n’ai pas voulu faire l’histoire de ce langage; plutôt l’archéologie
de ce silence” ‘I have not tried to write the history of that language, but rather the
archaeology of that silence’ (160). Silence could also be taken as a metaphor for
everything about which Western civilization had preferred to keep silent over the
ages. As Foucault explains:
Il m’a paru intéressant d’essayer de comprendre notre société et notre civilisation
à travers leurs systèmes d’exclusion, de rejet, de refus, à travers ce dont elles
ne veulent pas, leurs limites, l’obligation dans laquelle elles sont de supprimer
un certain nombre de choses, de gens, de processus, ce qu’elles doivent laisser
sombrer dans l’oubli.

It seemed to me interesting to try to understand our society and our civilization

through their systems of exclusion, of rejection and refusal, through everything
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91

they do not want, their limits, the obligation they feel to suppress a certain number
of things, of people, of processes, of everything they must allow to be submerged
into forgetfulness. (Dits et écrits 2: 184)

Foucault’s purpose was surely not to “make silence disappear” but to give a voice to
those who had been silenced and, perhaps, to help resurrect discredited languages
and forgotten knowledges.
As can be seen from Said’s explanation, his interpretation of Foucault is fi x-
ated on one theme: the disciplinary or carceral society in which the mechanisms of
power are so entrenched that resistance becomes futile. He is therefore puzzled as to
why Foucault let himself be trapped in what looked like a theoretical dead end, “why
he went as far as he did in imagining power to be so irresistible and unopposable”
(Imagination of Powerr 123). He therefore tries to come up with psychological explana-
tions suggesting, for example, that Foucault’s decision to disengage from politics and
his “pessimistic determinism” were attributable to his “disenchantment with both
the insurrections of the 1960s and the Iranian Revolution” (Culture and Imperialism
278).5 Said tried to explain, in a similar manner, what for him was a puzzling turn
to a concern with the self in Foucault’s last two volumes on the history of sexuality:
“What caused this particular and overdetermined shift from the political to the per-
sonal was, among other things, the effect of some disenchantment with the public
sphere, more particularly perhaps because he felt that there was little he could do to
affect it” (Reflections on Exile 194). Said’s attempts at psychologizing all that he found
incomprehensible in Foucault’s work indicates also that he was clearly not interested
in evaluating it on its own terms—or even in light of the many explanations and clari-
fications Foucault offered about his critical procedure and purpose over the last years
of his life. Quite possibly, Said had simply stopped paying attention to what Foucault
had to say, having written him off as a useful ally in his own critical undertaking.
In any case, it is not difficult to find answers that address the major misgivings Said
harbored about the evolution of Foucault’s project. Thus, in response to a question
about his alleged nihilism and determinism, Foucault responded that he was “ahuri
de constater que des gens ont pu voir dans mes études historiques l’affirmation d’un
déterminisme auquel on ne peut pas échapper” ‘astounded to learn that people could
have seen the affirmation of an inescapable determinism in my historical studies’
(Dits et écrits 4: 693). He further explained that his studies were meant to bring out
precisely the opposite, that is, the precariousness, the impending transformations,
and the contingency of social structures rather than their necessity or immobility.
“Ces relations de pouvoir,” he pointed out, “sont des relations mobiles, c’est-à-dire
qu’elles peuvent se modifier, qu’elles ne sont pas données une fois pour toutes” ‘these
power relations are mobile relations, that is, they may become modified, they are not
given once and for all’ (4: 720). Foucault also found it important to explain that these
relations of power, in the sense that he understood them, could only exist “dans la
mesure où les sujets sont libres” ‘to the extent that subjects are free.’ This is because,
he went on, “dans les relations de pouvoir il y a forcément possibilité de résistence,
car s’il n’y avait pas possibilité de résistance—de résistance violente, de fuite, de ruse,
de stratégies qui renversent la situation—, il n’y aurait pas du tout de relations de
pouvoir” ‘in relations of power, there is necessarily a possibility of resistance, because
if there were no possibility of resistance—of a violent resistence, of flight, of ruse,
of strategies that invert the situation—, there would be no power relations at all’ (4:
720). Foucault admits also that he has not always been able to express himself clearly
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or unambiguously on the subject because he was trying to grasp something for which
normal everyday language and concepts were simply inadequate.
What becomes apparent, in the context of these explanations, is that Said and
Foucault approached the question of power from two different, one could even say
diametrically opposite, perspectives. For Said, power is something someone possesses
and there is always an intention or a will using, exploiting, abusing power relations.
What Foucault strives to understand and to bring to light are the impersonal, anony-
mous ways in which power networks function. Thus, when Said points out that Fou-
cault “surely underestimates such motive forces in history as profit, ambition, ideas,
the sheer love of power,” his objection is still formulated in terms of a traditional
Cartesian/Kantian model of human agency (The World, the Text, and the Critic 222).
Equally beside the point is the remark that “Foucault takes a curiously passive and
sterile view not so much of the uses of power, but of how and why power is gained,
used, and held on to” (221). Power, for Foucault, is not a thing, but a relation no one
controls. It is not something to be gained or lost but an interplay of strategies in which
a subject’s involvement is predicated on the position it occupies in the field of power
and, more specifically, of power/knowledge relations. Contrary to what Said suggests
repeatedly, Foucault’s notion of power does not derive from the model of a carceral or
disicplinary society: he first became aware of power/knowledge relations psychiatric
hospital, as he explained in a radio interview:
Je dirais que c’est à partir de l’asile que m’est apparue une espèce de problème qui
n’a pas cessé de me hanter, qui est le problème du pouvoir. C’est-à-dire qu’il n’est
pas vrai que la connaissance puisse fonctionner ou que l’on puisse découvrir la
vérité, la réalité, l’objectivité des choses, sans mettre en jeu un certain pouvoir, une
certaine forme de domination, une certaine forme d’assujettissement.

I would say that it is in the asylum that I became aware of a kind of problem that
has not stopped haunting me ever since—it is the problem of power. That is, it is
not true that knowledge can function or that truth, reality, the objectivity of things
can be discovered without the putting into play of a certain power, a certain form
of domination, a certain form of subjection. (2: 790)

This subjection is made possible then by the subject’s relation to truth—to the truth
that determines its very being in society: “Si je dis vrai sur moi même comme je le
fais, c’est que, en partie, je me constitue comme sujet à travers un certain nombre de
relations de pouvoir qui sont exercées sur moi et que j’exerce sur les autres” ‘If I say
the truth about myself, as I do, It is because, in part, I constitute myself as a subject
through a certain number of power relations that are exercised over me and that I
exercise over others’ (4: 451).
Another aspect of power that Foucault stressed was its propensity for remain-
ing hidden. The visible part of power was but a façade for Foucault, the part that was
generally known as “la ‘vie politique’ depuis le 19e siècle” ‘political life since the nine-
teenth century.’ Paradoxically, “le pouvoir en Occident, c’est ce qui se montre le plus,
donc ce qui se cache le mieux” ‘[Paradoxically,] power in the West is what shows itself
most, thus what hides itself best’ (3: 263). To understand the politics of the bourgeoisie
in the way it dealt with such issues as delinquency, sexuality, or mental illness, it was
important for Foucault to study the hidden part, the play of strategies beneath the
official political representations: “C’est en partant de ces techniques de pouvoir et en
 K ARLIS R ACEVSKIS
93

montrant les profits économiques ou les utilités politiques qui en dérivent, c’est à par-
tir de là que l’on peut comprendre comment effectivement ces méchanismes finissent
par faire partie de l’ensemble” ‘It is by starting with these techniques of power and by
showing the economic profits or political utility deriving from them, it is from there
that it is possible to understand how indeed these mechanisms of power end up as
part of the whole’ (3: 183). This need to analyze such mechanisms from the bottom
up, as it were, was only reaffirmed in later years, as Foucault’s theory of power grew
ever more complex; thus he eventually would distinguish three interrelated levels of
analysis, “les relations stratégiques, les techniques de gouvernement et les états de
domination” ‘strategic relations, techniques of government, and states of domination’
(4: 728) in an interview given one month before his untimely death in 1984.
In light of the foregoing considerations, it is also understandable why Foucault’s
purpose was never to design political strategies for changing society or the world
because he was always acutely aware of the dangers of designing programs for
political action without really knowing what their effects might be. This refusal was
very much in keeping with his understanding of the critic’s responsibilities and his
preference for what he termed was the stance of the specific—as opposed to the
universal—intellectual: the purpose being not to tell others what to do but to make
knowledge available to them on the basis of which they could then decide on the best
course of action. It was a distinction Said rejected out of hand, calling it “a phony set
of categories invented by Foucault” (Power, Politics, and Culture 222). The categories
were quite meaningful for Foucault, however, and just like his theory of power, were
constantly evolving and gaining in complexity as a result of the changing orientation
in Foucault’s thinking and the new emphases in his research. In the last two years of
his life, Foucault turned increasingly to an approach he found most fruitful, which
he termed “problématisation” ‘problematizing.’ Its purpose was to “rendre problé-
matiques et douteuses des évidences, des pratiques, des règles, des institutions et
des habitudes qui s’étaient sédimentées depuis des décennies et des décennies” ‘to
make problematic and suspect evidences, practices, rules, institutions, and habits
that had been sedimenting for tens and tens of years’ (Dits et écrits 4: 688). This was
an approach that Said was able to appreciate, because it had helped provide the tools
with which he himself had been able to problematize a notion such as the Orient.
Thus in an essay he wrote commemorating Foucault’s passing he supposed that if this
brilliant man “was less interested in how the rules could be changed, it was perhaps
because as a first discoverer of their enormously detailed power he wanted everyone
to be aware of what disciplines, discourses, epistemes, and statements were really all
about, without illusion” (Reflections on Exile 196). Said was thus able to appreciate a
particular characteristic of Foucault’s mind and rationalize his methodology in terms
of the overall thrust of his project. At the same time, he was also forced to recognize
an unbridgeable gap which, in the final account, made Foucault’s intellectual and
political assumptions so much different from his: he was French, and his French-
ness made him blind to the ethnically bound evidence of his research: “The most
striking of his blind spots,” Said tells us, “was, for example, his insouciance about
the discrepancies between his basically limited French evidence and his ostensibly
universal conclusions.” Indeed, Said goes on, “his Eurocentrism was almost total,
as if ‘history’ itself took place only among a group of French and German thinkers”
(Reflections on Exile 196–97). As a result of this narrow focus, Foucault showed no
interest in either feminist or postcolonial issues and since his theoretical concerns
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were equally limited, “he didn’t understand the colonial dynamic at all,” Said is forced
to conclude (Interviews 130).
Foucault, of course, never undertook to produce a theoretical corpus to be used
in the service of feminist or postcolonial causes. At the same time, this has not pre-
vented feminists or postcolonial critics from fi nding applications they deemed quite
useful for their causes. Moreover, Said’s rather rash pronouncements about Foucault’s
blindness to his own limitations or nationalistic preconceptions are perhaps more
noteworthy for revealing Said’s own self-imposed blindness to certain aspects of
Foucault’s life and work. Here is what Foucault writes in 1960, as he composes the
preface to his book on the history of madness:
Dans l’universalité de la ratio occidentale, il y a ce partage qu’est l’Orient: l’Orient,
pensé comme l’origine, rêvé comme le point vertigineux d’où naissent les nostal-
gies et les promesses de retour, l’Orient offert à la raison colonisatrice de l’Occi-
dent, mais indéfi niment inaccessible, car il demeure toujours la limite: nuit du
commencement, en quoi l’Occident s’est formé, mais dans laquelle il a tracé une
ligne de partage, l’Orient est pour lui tout ce qu’il n’est pas, encore qu’il doive y
chercher ce qu’est sa vérité primitive.

In the universality of Western reason, there is a partition, which is the Orient: the
Orient, thought of as origin, dreamt of as the vertiginous point from which are
born nostalgias and promises of a return, the Orient, offered to the West’s coloniz-
ing reason yet indefinitely inaccessible, because it remains forever the limit: night
of the beginning in which the West formed itself but in which it drew a dividing
line, the Orient is everything for it that it is not, even though it still must try to
fi nd its own primitive truth in it. (Dits et écrits 1: 161–62)

For someone whose Eurocentrism was “total,” the insight evident in this passage is
rather remarkable: it not only offers a definition of Orientalism—probably before Said
thought of it, it suggests the project itself: “Il faudra faire une histoire de ce grand
partage, tout au long du devenir occidental” ‘Someone will have to write a history of
this great divide, as it accompanies the West’s coming into being,’ Foucault proposes.
Though Foucault was French, and European, he was not entirely blind to what was
going on in the rest of the world. In the early part of his career, he had occasion to
spend several years teaching in Sweden, Poland, and Tunisia. The experience of liv-
ing in these countries, especially in Poland and Tunisia, had an important formative
effect on his thinking about the subjects of his research. In an interview given in 1975,
he remembers that, while in Poland he had witnessed what oppression was like in a
socialist country, whereas in Tunisia “j’ai découvert ce que pouvaient être les restes
d’une colonisation capitaliste, et la naissance d’un développement de type capitaliste
avec tous les phénomènes d’exploitation et d’oppression économiques et politiques”
‘I discovered what the remainders of a capitalist colonization could be like, as well
as the birth of a capitalistic type of development with all the characteristics of eco-
nomic and political exploitation and oppression’ (“Confessions” 90).6 The techniques
of surveillance in Poland, instances of injustice and police brutality in Tunisia, while
affecting him emotionally, also made him realize “l’importance de l’exercice du pou-
voir, ces lignes de contact entre le corps, la vie, le discours et le pouvoir politique”
‘the importance of the exercise of power, these lines of contact between bodies, life,
discourse, and political power’ (90). These were events, Foucault says, that obsessed
 K ARLIS R ACEVSKIS
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him, “même si je n’en ai tiré la leçon théorique que très tardivement. Je me suis aperçu
que j’aurais dû parler depuis longtemps de ces problèmes de rapport entre le pouvoir
et le corps à quoi j’ai abouti, finalement, dans Surveiller et punir” ‘even though I drew a
theoretical lesson from them rather belatedly. I realized that I should have been speak-
ing long ago of these problems of relations between power and the body—something
I wound up doing in Discipline and punish’ (90).
What Foucault shows in the numerous interviews he gave is a propensity for
remaining constantly open to the experience of the world around him—a capacity
for being moved by this experience but also for integrating it within the intellectual
framework of his ongoing investigations. His books were, in a real sense, inseparable
from his life. As he once pointed out, “j’ai toujours tenu à ce que mes livres soient, en
un sens, des fragments d’autobiographie. Mes livres ont toujours été mes problèmes
personnels avec la folie, la prison, la sexualité” ‘I have always wanted my books to be,
in a sense, like autobiographical fragments. My books have always been my personal
problems with madness, prison, sexuality’ (Dits et écrits 4: 747–48). The four-volume
compilation of Dits et écrits has therefore become an indispensable aid for reading his
books. Although belatedly, Said did get an opportunity to immerse himself in these
occasional reflections when he was asked to review volume three of the selections
translated in English. He evidently discovered a side of Foucault he had not really
known, as he explains:
What I found especially valuable in the collection were the unexpected pleasures
of essays like ‘Lives of Infamous Men’ and a magnificent long discussion, ‘Interview
with Michel Foucault,’ originally published in Italy around 1980. Not only can
one hear him elaborate on the continuity of his thought and its relationships with
the Frankfurt School, Freud, Marx, Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem
(his main teacher, the eminent French historian of science), but we are also given
a rare opportunity to see how a great and original mind produces its work as well
as itself at the same time, clarifying issues while discovering new problems in
thought and life. (17)

While Said also expresses reservations about Foucault’s “maddening, unsupported

assertions” and “grand statements about society as a whole . . . presented without
evidence or proof,” the rest of the article is equally laudatory and perceptive. In a
few paragraphs, Said manages to capture the essential aspects of Foucault’s thought,
evoke the “formidably ascetic work ethic” driving what Foucault himself termed his
“relentless erudition,” and effectively summarize his most important contributions
to contemporary critical thinking. In addition, Said corrects some of his own, earlier,
somewhat rash generalizations, when he points out, for example, that “Foucault’s
extraordinary blend of energy and pessimism gives a remarkable dignity to his
work, which is anything but an exercise in professorial abstraction” (17). In a sense,
Said rediscovers here what first attracted him to Foucault, which was a dignity of
purpose and an ethical commitment to intellectual work—values they both clearly
shared. Said concludes his last book by speaking of the desire “to grasp the difficulty
of what cannot be grasped” (Humanism and Democratic Criticism 144). One would be
hard pressed to find a better way to characterize the moving force behind Foucault’s
“relentless erudition.”
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RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITER ATURES

NOT ES
1. The two articles in question were “Abecedarium culturae: Structuralism, Absence,
Writing” and “Michel Foucault as an Intellectual Imagination,” which became the chapter
entitled “Abecedarium culturae: Absence, Writing Statement, Discourse, Archaeology,
Structuralism” (pp. 279–343 in Beginnings).
2. Foucault’s views on the conflict between Israel and Palestine were certainly not as
one sided as this anecdote would suggest. In an interview he gave in 1982, for example,
he condemned the massacre of Palestinians in the camps of Sabra and Chatila by Israeli
forces. He expressed the hope that this tragedy would help initiate a critical thinking
process on both sides that would somehow escape their respective ideological bounds
since the leaders of either side, i.e. Begin or Arafat, could hardly be trusted (Dits et écrits
4: 349).
3. Julien Benda, whose title of a book he published in 1927 quickly became this
proverbial expression of disappointment with the role and responsibility of intellectuals,
is also someone whom Said admired for his uncompromising critical stance. The phrase
does occasionally appear under Said’s pen.
4. The transcript of the debate was published as Reflexive Water.
5. Said is referring to the events of 1968, in particular, and to the fact that Foucault
did, at one time, hold out hope for a bright future for Iran under Khomeni’s leadership.
It should be noted that the events of 1968 had little effect on Foucault because he was in
Tunisia at the time. He talks about these in his interview published recently in Le Point.
6. The interview was given to the philosopher Roger-Pol Droit who has only now
decided to publish it, on the twentieth anniversary of Foucault’s death.

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