The Legacy of Edward W. Said

by William V. Spanos

With the untimely death of Edward W. Said in 2003, various academic and public intellectuals worldwide have begun to reassess the writings of this powerful oppositional intellectual. Figures on the neoconservative right have already begun to discredit Said’s work as that of a subversive intent on slandering America’s benign global image and undermining its global authority. On the left, a significant number of oppositional intellectuals are eager to counter this neoconservative vilification, proffering a Said who, in marked opposition to the “anti-humanism” of the great poststructuralist thinkers who were his contemporaries--Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault--reaffirms humanism and thus rejects poststructuralist theory. In this provocative assessment of Edward Said’s lifework, William V. Spanos argues that Said’s lifelong anti-imperialist project is actually a fulfillment of the revolutionary possibilities of poststructuralist theory. Spanos examines Said, his legacy, and the various texts he wrote--including Orientalism, Culture and Imperialism, and Humanism and Democratic Criticism --that are now being considered for their lasting political impact.

Genres: Philosophy

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Bertrand · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spanos catered to my most secret and shameful vice: he deploys a bulky, exotic and intimidating terminology, push it on his unsuspecting reader thanks to his gifts and his dedication, as well as, in the last instance, to the relative simplicity of his argument, and once you are hooked, high on jargon and your new-found ability to grasp it effortlessly, you find yourself following him wherever he goes.
Luckily, he seems like a relatively stand-up chap, so you wont come down to any nasty STDs.
Said, the central figure of his narrative, despite stretching his roots in the post-structuralist soil (Foucault in particular), famously rejected that school and its antihumanism, in favour of a somewhat nebulous alternative I have had difficulties reconciling with the sweeping, genealogical statements he is known for. Spanos, a Heideggerian literary scholar, Saidian in mood but "de-(con)strukt(ion)ist" in practice, sets out to argue against the words of Said himself in his last book, that his decolonial project can only be fulfilled with a critique of the onto-theological tradition, and proposes a corrective.
I should say I, myself, harbour some doubts as to the methodological consistency of Said's approach in Orientalism (many of which are expressed better than I ever could put them in James Clifford's article 'On Orientalism') - in particular when it comes to the tension between the historicity and ontological character of the East-West relation as depicted by Said. As such I was probably a favourable terrain for Spanos' thesis:
Spanos attempts to link Said's critique of Western knowledge and taxonomies, by way of (genealogical) Foucault and (pre-black notebooks...) Heidegger, with the post-structuralist critique of presence, of "identity as the condition of difference". This he does first by "re-constellating" (one of his absolute favs, along with "de-structing" and "over-dertermination") Heidegger's elusive critique of imperialism, which he does thanks to a little known (at least, to me) text of his, the Parmenides lectures he gave during WW2:
Spanos makes a compelling case, out of a few quotes, for reading Heidegger's thought as concerned with the (substantial, self-same) humanism having emerged from the Roman recycling and systematising of Greek post-socratic philosophy - with the transition from aletheia (truth, literally "unveiled") to veritas (truth, not as a lack but as presence).
He then proceeds to tie it all to Foucault's panopticism, via various philogical reflections, evidencing the fact that both Said's "taxonomic" orientalism and Heidegger's "ontologic" tradition, relie on visuality, as much as does Foucault's critique of the power/knowledge relation.
At this point if you have not read Foucault or Heidegger, all this might sound a bit forbidding, so let me stress that neither have I: Foucault I never got around, despite some indirect knowledge of his concepts, while Heidegger's linguistic fortifications have so far thwarted all my attempts at entering Being and Time. So fear not, Spanos' thesis could have fitted in a journal article: he takes such pains for making it accessible, if not to the lay reader, then at least to the non-specialist, that I think anyone who has read Orientalism will find it all understandable enough - and even enjoyable, if you are as vain and insecure as me.
After introducing this Heidegger (ontology) / Foucault (institution) / Said (imperialism) axis, Spanos reads three books of Said, namely Orientalism, Culture and Imperialism and his posthumous Humanism and Democratic Criticism, before concluding with a separate chapter, by recollecting his youthful experiences and his encounters with Said, musing somewhat surprisingly (for a vocally "secular" thinker in a book concerned with a radically "secular" one) on the impact of the Christian existentialist movement (Union Theological Seminary, mainly) on the protest movements of the sixties.
All in all, beyond the guilty pleasure of reading and understanding effortlessly something that looks very complicated (but which is actually quite simple) the book is quite good: I am not much familiar with any of the thinkers or movements at its core, but I feel Spanos' thesis, if it wouldn't have pleased any of them, none the less makes much sense, and in a way shed some light on my own reservations as to Said: in that regard, by bringing to the surface the relationship between Said's idea of Orientalism and the "ontological tradition", Spanos makes apparent (but does not mention) one obvious paradox: the Greek -Aristotelian in particular- tradition, that which privileges identity over difference, was by no means exclusively occidental... The "occultation" or internalisation of the disciplinary, which seems ascribed to modernity, was in fact already at play in religions and culture all over the world. The book also makes (this I will have to confirm) a good introduction to Foucault, and might well also contribute to making Heidegger less unreadable. Spanos himself seems like a lovely chap, with an interesting, unusual career, and a gifted pedagogue. I shall try and get hold of his textbooks on existentialism.