{"id":195432,"date":"2026-06-24T19:53:32","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T03:53:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=195432"},"modified":"2026-06-24T20:09:38","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T04:09:38","slug":"edward-wadie-said-1935-2003","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=195432","title":{"rendered":"Edward Wadie Said (1935-2003)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Edward Said<\/a> was a founder of postcolonial studies and a leading literary critic, cultural theorist, public intellectual, and political activist of the late twentieth century. His 1978 book Orientalism<\/a> remade the humanities. In it he argues that Western scholarship, literature, and political discourse had built an image of “the Orient” that served imperial power rather than knowledge. He draws on literary criticism, philosophy, history, philology, music, and political analysis, and he challenges old assumptions about the tie between culture and power. His work reshaped literary studies, history, anthropology, political science, Middle Eastern studies, and comparative literature, and it made Orientalism a defining humanities book of its era.<\/p>\n

Said was born in Jerusalem<\/a> during the British Mandate for Palestine<\/a>, into a prosperous Palestinian Christian family. His father, Wadie Said, ran a business, had served in the United States Army<\/a> during the First World War, and had become an American citizen. His mother, Hilda Moussa Said, came from a distinguished Christian family in Nazareth<\/a>, and she nurtured his lifelong love of literature and classical music. The family kept homes in Jerusalem and Cairo<\/a>, and Said passed much of his childhood between the two cities while attending elite British colonial schools. This divided upbringing left him suspended between Arab and Western worlds, and that condition became the defining theme of his identity and his thought.<\/p>\n

He describes the experience in his memoir Out of Place<\/a> (1999), whose title names his sense of belonging fully to neither Palestine, nor Egypt, nor America. He came to read exile less as private loss than as a critical vantage. Distance from one’s own society, he argues, allows intellectual independence and resistance to ideological conformity, and it lets the displaced man see what settled men take for granted.<\/p>\n

After Victoria College<\/a> in Cairo and the Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts, Said entered Princeton University<\/a> and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1957. He then took a master’s degree and a doctorate in English literature at Harvard University<\/a>, where his dissertation on Joseph Conrad<\/a> (1857-1924) became Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966). Conrad remained a lifelong companion in thought, an expatriate writer whose own displacement shaped Said’s reflections on exile and fractured identity.<\/p>\n

In 1963 Said joined the faculty of Columbia University<\/a>, and he spent the rest of his career there. He rose to University Professor, the institution’s highest academic honor, and he taught English and comparative literature while expanding into philosophy, cultural criticism, history, music, and political thought. Columbia became the base from which he built an international reputation.<\/p>\n

His earliest scholarship sits within traditional literary criticism. The first two books, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography and Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975), examine how literary works establish authority, identity, and meaning. They introduce the themes that later dominate his work, above all the tie between narrative, interpretation, and power.<\/p>\n

Said’s foundations combine several traditions. A deep influence is the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico<\/a> (1668 to 1744). In The New Science<\/a>, Vico argues that men can truly know only what men themselves make. Said takes this principle as the ground of secular criticism. Since cultures, empires, and systems of knowledge are human works rather than divine or natural facts, men can analyze them, criticize them, and change them. Another foundation is the German Jewish philologist Erich Auerbach<\/a> (1892 to 1957), who wrote Mimesis<\/a> in Istanbul while living in exile from Nazi Germany and showed how close reading of literary texts can illuminate whole civilizations. Said regards Auerbach as the model scholar in exile, a man whose displacement sharpened rather than dimmed his vision. From him Said inherits a commitment to philology, historical scholarship, and careful textual analysis, and that commitment sets him apart from many French poststructuralists. He borrows from contemporary theory, but he never abandons the humanistic practice of close reading.<\/p>\n

Orientalism in 1978 transformed both his career and his field. Drawing on Michel Foucault<\/a>‘s (1926-1984) idea of discourse, Said argues that European scholarship about the Middle East and Asia had never been politically neutral. Literature, history, travel writing, anthropology, art, and colonial administration together produced an image of “the Orient” as irrational, passive, backward, feminine, and unfit for self-rule, and these representations helped make European empire look natural and necessary. He does not claim that every Orientalist consciously served empire. He argues that a broader discourse set the assumptions within which scholars worked, so that knowledge and political power reinforced each other. Europeans defined themselves as rational, modern, and civilized by building an opposite image of the East.<\/p>\n

His synthesis draws on more than Foucault. From the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci<\/a> (1891-1937) he takes cultural hegemony, the idea that intellectual institutions help sustain political domination. Yet he rejects economic reductionism. Unlike many Marxists, he argues that culture holds a relative autonomy of its own and shapes political reality rather than merely mirroring economic structure.<\/p>\n

Said’s later work carries these insights in several directions. The Question of Palestine<\/a> (1979) brought Palestinian history and nationalism to Western readers. Covering Islam<\/a> (1981) examines how Western journalism distorts Muslim societies. The World, the Text, and the Critic<\/a> (1983) gives his fullest statement of secular criticism, arguing that the intellectual must set texts within history while resisting both academic withdrawal and political dogma. Culture and Imperialism<\/a> (1993) widens the argument of Orientalism by showing how imperial assumptions run through the canon of European fiction, from Jane Austen<\/a> (1775-1817) and Conrad to Rudyard Kipling<\/a> (1865-1936).<\/p>\n

An original contribution is the idea of contrapuntal reading. Borrowing the musical figure of counterpoint, Said argues that men should read literary works at once from the metropolitan and the colonial side. The great European novels carry the history of Europe and also the silenced histories of empire that paid for European prosperity. He does not reject the Western canon. He reinterprets it within a global frame.<\/p>\n

Music held a central place in his life. A concert-level amateur pianist, he wrote as a music critic for The Nation<\/a>, and he treated counterpoint as a model for historical understanding, where many voices and traditions sound together without collapsing into one. His friendship with the conductor Daniel Barenboim<\/a> (b. 1942) produced the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra<\/a>, founded in 1999 to bring together young Israeli and Arab musicians, and the joint book Parallels and Paradoxes (2002). Music became for him both an art and an image of political coexistence.<\/p>\n

Throughout his career Said defended the ideal of the secular intellectual. He held that scholars should stand apart from governments, corporations, religious authorities, parties, and movements. In his 1993 BBC Reith Lectures<\/a>, published as Representations of the Intellectual, he argues that the intellectual must remain an outsider, an amateur rather than a credentialed expert, and a steady disturber of the settled order. The public intellectual challenges orthodoxy rather than props it up.<\/p>\n

His last phase turned harder toward humanism. He never threw off what he learned from structuralism and poststructuralism, but he argued more and more that philology, close reading, historical knowledge, and humanistic criticism remain indispensable. These convictions shape Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004), published after his death, which defends secular humanism against both postmodern relativism and religious fundamentalism. His final project, On Late Style<\/a> (2006), also appeared posthumously. Drawing on Theodor W. Adorno<\/a> (1903-1969), Said studies the last works of Ludwig van Beethoven<\/a> (1770-1827), Richard Strauss<\/a> (1864-1949), and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa<\/a> (1896-1957). Many artists end not in serenity but in difficult, unresolved work that refuses harmony and closure, and Said reads that refusal as the mark of true late style. He saw his own life in the pattern.<\/p>\n

Alongside the scholarship, Said became the most visible advocate for Palestinian national rights in the West. He joined the Palestine National Council<\/a> in 1977 and served until 1991. He supported Yasser Arafat<\/a> (1929-2004) and the Palestine Liberation Organization<\/a> at first, then turned into a severe critic of Arafat after the Oslo Accords<\/a> of 1993, which he charged had locked in Palestinian weakness while securing no real sovereignty. Near the end of his life he argued for a democratic binational state of equal political rights for Israelis and Palestinians. He also criticized authoritarian Arab governments, and he held that the fight against Israeli occupation could not excuse repression, corruption, or conformity within Arab societies.<\/p>\n

Controversy followed his public life. The historian Bernard Lewis<\/a> (1916-2018) became his most prominent academic critic and argued that Orientalism caricatured generations of serious scholarship and discouraged honest study of the Middle East. Their exchanges in The New York Review of Books<\/a> became a defining debate over postcolonial theory. The Marxist critic Aijaz Ahmad<\/a> (1941-2022) argued that Said yoked Foucauldian discourse theory to an older liberal humanism without reconciling the two. Other critics held that Orientalism sometimes essentializes both “the West” and “the Orient” even while it attacks essentialist thinking. Within the field, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak<\/a> (b. 1942) and Homi K. Bhabha<\/a> (b. 1949) carried his work forward, Spivak toward the subaltern voices missing from elite colonial archives, Bhabha toward hybridity, mimicry, and ambivalence rather than the binary opposition of East and West. Their work widened his insights rather than displaced them.<\/p>\n

Two disputes drew wide attention late in his life. In 1999 the attorney Justus Reid Weiner challenged the autobiographical account in Out of Place and argued that Said had overstated his family’s residence in Jerusalem and his own displacement. Said answered with documents, including property and school records, and held that his family had lived in Jerusalem and Cairo and that the larger experience of exile stood as described. The next year a photograph showed him throwing a stone across the Israeli-Lebanese border after Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon. Critics denounced the image and asked Columbia to discipline him. Said called the act a symbolic, nonviolent mark of the occupation’s end, and Columbia declined to act, citing academic freedom.<\/p>\n

Said married Mariam Cortas, a Lebanese academic and activist, and they had two children, Wadih and Najla. He balanced scholarship, activism, music criticism, and teaching while he stayed engaged in public debate. In 1991 doctors diagnosed him with chronic lymphocytic leukemia. He kept writing, lecturing, publishing, and arguing for Palestinian rights for more than a decade, and his later work reflects on mortality while it reaffirms his commitment to inquiry and to independence of mind. Edward Said died in New York City on September 25, 2003, at the age of sixty-seven.<\/p>\n

His influence runs far past literary criticism. Orientalism changed the argument about colonialism, representation, race, culture, nationalism, and empire. His ideas of discourse, contrapuntal reading, exile, and secular criticism still shape work across the humanities and social sciences. The controversies keep him among the most debated intellectuals of the modern age. Admirers call him the foremost critic of cultural imperialism. Critics fault his historical method and his theoretical synthesis. Few scholars, though, have left a longer mark on how men now think about the tie between knowledge, culture, and political power.<\/p>\n

Hero System<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

In July 2000, after Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon, Said walked to the border fence near the village of Kfar Kila, picked up a stone, and threw it across the wire toward an abandoned guard post on the far side. A photographer caught the motion. The picture moved fast. Letters reached Columbia. Critics asked the university to discipline him, and he answered that the throw marked the end of an occupation and harmed no one, since the post stood empty and the soldiers had gone.
\nHold the picture still and read the status of the man inside it. A University Professor, the highest rank Columbia confers. A concert pianist in all but profession. A literary critic whose book had reorganized whole departments. A man four years into the leukemia that would kill him. He stands at a rural fence in good shoes and throws a rock at no one. The professional reading writes itself. Beneath him. Theatrical. A waste of a serious man’s dignity. The professional reading misses everything, because the throw is not an argument and was never meant as one. The throw tells you what Said holds sacred, and a man’s sacred things sit below his arguments and outlast them.
\nErnest Becker (1924-1974) gives the tool for reading the throw. Men know they will die, and the knowledge would unmake them if they faced it bare, so each culture hands its members a hero system, a scheme of value that lets a man earn significance and feel that some part of his work will stand after the body fails. The hero system tells a man what counts as courage and what counts as shame, which deaths he may accept and which he must refuse. It is a death-denial dressed as a life-purpose. Becker’s point cuts deeper than the truism that men want meaning. The hero system decides what a given word even names. Courage, purity, home, freedom, honor: these are not constants that men weigh differently. They are variables that take their value only inside the system that hosts them. The recovering drinker and the libertarian both prize freedom and mean nothing in common by it. The first means freedom from a substance that ran his life. The second means freedom from a state that would run it. Put them in a room and the word will fool them into thinking they agree.
\nSaid’s hero system is the secular humanist intellectual’s, and it carries a paradox at the center that sets it apart from most of the ones Becker described. The ordinary hero system offers a man a home in a durable order and the promise of reconciliation, the sense that the broken thing will be made whole, that the exile will return, that the late work will resolve into peace. Said built a system that refuses the consolation. His immortality runs through the text that endures and through the cause that outlives the advocate, and his signature move is to sacralize the unhealed, the unresolved, the unreconciled. He made a death-denial out of refusing the usual denials of death. That refusal organizes his sacred values, and it explains why the stone went across the fence.
\nTake the first of those values. Exile.
\nFor most of the men who have lived it, exile names a wound. The word carries punishment, catastrophe, a sentence served, a return longed for. Said took the word and made it the seat of vision. The exile, he argued, sees what the settled man cannot, because he stands outside the assumptions that the settled man breathes without noticing. Distance becomes a discipline. Homelessness becomes a vantage. He turned the curse into the qualification.
\nNow watch the same word move through other systems and refuse to hold still.
\nFor the Tibetan monk in Dharamsala, exile is a spiritual condition with a fixed horizon. He carries Lhasa in the liturgy and holds the homeland in the mind while he waits, and his teacher tells him that attachment to the lost place is the very thing the practice works to loosen. Exile for him is a trial of detachment with a return folded into its hope, religious in its grammar and patient in its time sense. He does not prize the standpoint. He prizes the going home, and the discipline of not needing it too much.
\nFor the Cuban who came on a raft and now runs a body shop in Hialeah, exile is suspension. He keeps the deed to a house in Havana in a drawer. He says he will go back when the regime falls, and he has said it for forty years, and the saying is itself the form his loyalty takes. Exile for him is a held breath, redeemed only by the return that may never come. He does not read his displacement as insight. He reads it as theft, and the thief still holds the goods.
\nFor the Jew who reads his condition through galut, exile is a theological state of the whole people, a fall from the land that the tradition orients toward repair. The point of exile is its end. Ingathering, return, the negation of the diaspora: the sacred energy runs toward closing the gap, and a movement rose in the twentieth century to close it by force of settlement and statehood. Here the collision with Said runs deepest, and it runs at the level of the sacred rather than the level of policy. The Zionist and Said can use the one word and mean opposite goods. For the one, exile is the problem and return is the salvation. For the other, exile is the salvation, the very seat of the critical soul, and a return that dissolved the vantage would cost him the thing he built his life upon. Two hero systems meet at a single word and find that the word names, for the one, the disease, and for the other, the cure.
\nFor the Filipina who cleans apartments in Dubai and wires the money to Cebu, exile has no romance in it at all. It is wage labor across a distance, endured for the children, narrated in no theory. She would laugh at the suggestion that her sixteen-hour days off the books grant her a privileged standpoint on the societies she serves. Exile for her is arithmetic. So much sent home, so many years until she can stop.
\nLay these beside Said and the shape of his achievement stands clear. He did not discover a truth about exile that the monk and the Cuban and the Zionist and the maid had missed. He performed a conversion that made sense inside one hero system and inside no other. The convert, the man who turns a deficit into the proof of election, appears in every faith. Said converted within the church of secular criticism, where the highest good is the unillusioned eye, and where the man who belongs nowhere can therefore see everywhere. That is why his exile must never resolve. Resolution would return him to a tribe and blind the eye. The monk wants the journey home. Said wants the road.
\nThe second sacred value runs through the piano, so begin there.
\nSaid played at a concert level and never went professional. He wrote music criticism for The Nation. He cared more about the keyboard than a serious man in his position should, and he knew the word for a man who loves an art without taking pay for it. Amateur, from the Latin for the one who loves. He took the word that the modern professions use as a slur and raised it into a creed. The intellectual, he argued in his 1993 Reith Lectures, must remain an amateur and an outsider, must speak because he cares and not because a salary or a guild or a government has bought his tongue. The amateur stays free because no one owns him. The expert sells his independence for a chair and a clearance.
\nRun amateur through the other systems and it inverts.
\nFor the surgeon, amateur is the worst word in the language. The amateur is the man who opens a body he was never trained to open, and people die of him. The whole hero system of medicine builds toward the credential, the boards, the licensure that separates the hand you may trust from the hand that kills. Tell the surgeon that the amateur stands free and uncaptured and he will tell you the amateur stands over a corpse he made.
\nFor the luthier in Cremona who spends a year on one violin, amateur names the man who debases the craft, the weekend hobbyist whose slack work floods the market and teaches the customer to expect less. His hero system runs through mastery passed hand to hand across generations, and the amateur is the leak in the dike, the one who never paid the long apprenticeship and pretends the price was never owed.
\nFor the venture man on Sand Hill Road, amateur is the founder he will not fund. The word means unserious, unscaled, a hobby mistaking itself for a company. His system worships the professional operator who can take the thing to size, and the amateur is the dreamer who loves his product too much to grow it.
\nSo when Said calls the intellectual an amateur and means a man of honor, he speaks a sentence that three other systems hear as an insult, a danger, and a joke. The word holds the same letters and carries the opposite charge, and the charge comes from the system, not from the word. Said’s amateur is the free critic. The surgeon’s amateur is the killer. The same Latin root, the same five syllables, two goods at war.
\nThese two values, the exile and the amateur, share a structure, and the structure is the heart of the system. Both refuse a closure that the rival systems treat as the reward. The exile refuses the homecoming. The amateur refuses the credential that would settle him into a profession and a paycheck. Said’s whole scheme of value runs on the refusal of settlement, and his last work names the refusal and makes it a doctrine. In On Late Style, the book his executors brought out after his death, he studied the final works of Beethoven and Strauss and others and found that the great late work does not resolve into serenity. It ends rough, broken, unreconciled, at war with its own moment. Said read that refusal of harmony as the mark of the true late style, and he saw his own life in the pattern. Most men, facing the end, want the reconciliation. They want the broken thing made whole before they go, the homeland regained in the mind if not in fact, the quarrel laid down, the peace made. Said wanted the wound kept open. He had a reason that the frame makes plain. To accept reconciliation would mean accepting that the homeland was lost for good, that the cause had failed, that the exile was only exile and not also a calling. The open wound was the immortality of a man who would not let the wound close, because the closing would have killed the thing he served before the leukemia killed the body.
\nThis is where the rival systems press hardest on him, and where a fair essay has to let them speak. Bernard Lewis spent his career inside the hero system of the philological expert, the man who earns his standing through decades in the archive and the languages, and to that man Said’s amateur is the resentful outsider who never did the work and wrote a brilliant book telling those who did that their labor served power. The Zionist, building a state to end the exile, hears Said’s love of exile as a luxury bought with someone else’s homelessness, the aesthete who sanctifies a condition that ordinary refugees would trade in an instant for a roof and a flag. The professional diplomat watches the stone fly across the fence and sees a man indulging a gesture when the cause needed a negotiator. Each of these readings holds together inside its own system. None of them can reach Said, because they price his sacred goods in a currency his system does not accept. To the expert, the amateur is worthless. To Said, the expert is bought. There is no exchange rate between them.
\nBecker would not ask which system is right, and the question may have no answer that stands outside all systems. He would ask what each one does for the man who holds it. Said’s system did a hard thing well. It let a man face a long death and a lost cause without the two consolations that most men reach for at the end, the consolation of going home and the consolation of being proven right. He had neither. The homeland did not return to him. Oslo, which he might have called a settlement, he called a surrender, and he died with the question of Palestine open and the answer he wanted further off than when he began. A lesser system would have broken under that. His did not break, because it had been built from the start to draw its strength from the wound rather than from the cure. The man who sacralizes exile cannot be defeated by exile. The man who sacralizes the unresolved cannot be defeated by a quarrel that fails to resolve. He had built the one hero system that the facts of his life could not refute, and he had built it, if Becker is right, for the reason all men build such things, to stand against the knowledge that he was going to die and that the thing he loved might die with him.
\nThe stone, then, was not foolish and not theatrical. It was a man performing his creed in a single motion. The professional would have written a measured op-ed. The expert would have cited the relevant law. Said threw a rock across a fence at an empty post, the free act of a man who answered to no guild and no government, who marked the end of an occupation with his own arm because the arm was his and the occupation was the wound and he had spent a life refusing to let such wounds close quietly. He died the next year but one, in New York, with the work done and the cause unfinished, which is the only ending his hero system would allow him to call a victory.<\/p>\n

‘A Big Misunderstanding’<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra sits down to rehearse in Seville. A cellist from Tel Aviv shares a stand with a violist from Ramallah. Barenboim raises the baton. The two young people spent the morning arguing about whose grandfather lost what, and now they play Beethoven together, a German foundation pays for the hall, and the press files the story under one word. Understanding. If the Israeli and the Arab hear each other across the music, the reasoning goes, their fathers might hear each other across the wire, and the wire might come down.
\nSaid helped found the orchestra in 1999 with Barenboim. He believed in it. He held that the conflict ran in part on representation, on each side carrying a frozen and false picture of the other, and that art and criticism might thaw the picture and let something truer through. That belief sits at the center of his life’s work. David Pinsof has built an argument that takes the belief apart.
\nPinsof’s claim is short. Intellectuals trace the world’s troubles to misunderstanding, because the story flatters them. If war and bigotry and partisan hatred come from false beliefs, then the men whose trade is correcting false beliefs become the saviors of mankind. The story is too convenient to trust. Pinsof’s counter-claim is that the troubles come from motive rather than belief. Men understand what they have an incentive to understand. The bigot, the warmonger, the propagandist, each grasps his situation well enough. He fights over status, over resources, over the coercive apparatus of the state, and he dresses the fight in high language because the language wins allies and because cynicism reads as mean. Stated motives cover actual motives the way a mission statement covers a profit margin.
\nRun Said through that and the orchestra turns into the purest specimen of the thing Pinsof names. Two coalitions contend over a strip of land and over which flag commands the police, the courts, and the army on that land. Beethoven changes none of it. The cellist and the violist can love each other through the slow movement and go home to families whose claims on the same ground stay zero-sum after the last note. Pinsof would say the orchestra does not fail to make peace. The orchestra succeeds at what it is for, which is to confer high moral standing on its founders and its funders and its players, and to let everyone involved feel like a sweetie. The misunderstanding it claims to heal was never the cause of the war.
\nNow press the frame against the book that made Said. Orientalism argues that Western scholarship built a false image of the East, an image of the Oriental as irrational and passive and unfit to rule himself, and that the image served empire. Read one way the book is Pinsof’s ally. Said says knowledge served power. Pinsof says the same. The break comes over a single word that Said never quite says and Pinsof says on every page. Said treats the Orientalist image as a distortion, a thing the discourse got wrong, a misunderstanding that better criticism might correct and replace with a truer humanism. Pinsof treats the image as savvy. The colonial administrator who called the natives unfit to rule themselves understood his interest all too well. The stereotype was a weapon, not an error, and you do not fix a weapon by explaining to its owner that he has misunderstood the target. So Said diagnosed the disease of his enemies as false belief, which set him up as the physician, and Pinsof’s whole argument says there was no disease of belief to cure. There was a fight over land and rule, and the scholarship was ammunition.
\nThis is the heart of it, and it carries a sharper edge than the orchestra. Said spent a career teaching readers to hear the interest beneath the claim to neutral knowledge. He taught a generation to ask, when a man says he speaks for truth, whose power the truth happens to serve. Pinsof turns the question on Said. When Said says he speaks for the human, for secular criticism free of nation and party and creed, whose power does that serve? The answer the frame returns is not flattering. It serves Said. It serves the Palestinian cause he gave the most prestigious idiom available in the Western academy. It serves a man climbing a hierarchy that runs from Princeton through Harvard to the highest professorship Columbia grants, derogating his rivals as he climbs. The man who unmasked the interested knowledge of others built his own program on a knowledge he declined to unmask. Pinsof has a name for the move, borrowed from the literature on bias. We think we are less biased than others. The bias bias is self-serving, like all the rest.
\nTake the values one at a time and watch the frame strip the idealism off each.
\nThe amateur. Said held that the intellectual should stay an amateur and an outsider, owned by no guild and no government, free to speak because he cares rather than because a salary bought his tongue. The pose has a stated motive, independence, and Pinsof asks after the actual one. Claiming to be incorruptible is the oldest status move in the trade. The man who announces that he answers to no one and nothing places himself above the men who hold chairs and clearances and contracts, and he banks the standing that the announcement earns. Bernard Lewis (1916-2018) held the chair and did the decades in the archive, and Said called him a servant of power. Lewis called Said a resentful outsider who never did the work. Pinsof would not ask which man told the truth. He would point out that two men competed over who got to define a field and who got to advise the men who set Middle East policy, that the field and the advice ran on real money and real influence, and that each man cast the contest as a quarrel about truth because no one wins allies by saying out loud that he wants the prize.
\nExile. Said made exile the seat of vision, the standpoint from which the displaced man sees what the settled man cannot. Stated motive, clarity. Pinsof reads the actual one as the conversion of a deficit into a credential. A man with no clean tribe to speak for claims the higher ground of speaking for all men, and the claim to universality is itself a bid for status in a marketplace that pays well for the appearance of standing above the fray. The exile who says he belongs nowhere has found a way to belong everywhere, at the top.
\nHumanism. Here the frame closes its hand. Said’s positive program rests on universal human rights and secular humanism, on the dream that men of every nation share one set of claims and one human inheritance. Pinsof files that idiom under feel-good idealistic signaling, the talk that marks the speaker as a sweetie rather than a meanie. He would say that Said could not state the conflict in its cynical and accurate terms, two coalitions fighting over land and the gun, because stating it that way costs the speaker his moral standing. So Said reached for the beautiful option that the trade keeps stocked for exactly this purpose. He called the fight a misunderstanding, a problem of representation, a wound that humanism might heal, and the reach was rational, because the humanist idiom recruited the readers and the prestige that a colder vocabulary never could.
\nThe argument has force. It also overreaches, and a fair reading has to mark where.
\nPinsof’s frame explains why a man adopts an idealistic vocabulary. It does less to show the man insincere. Said gave fourteen years to the Palestine National Council and broke with Arafat (1929-2004) after Oslo at real cost to his standing on his own side, when silence might have served his coalition better. He attacked Arab authoritarian governments and refused the easy solidarity that asks a man to mute his own people’s failings. The frame can absorb these acts. It reads the break with Arafat as a bid to define the cause rather than serve the existing leadership of it, and it reads the criticism of Arab regimes as a play for the high ground of the man who scolds his own side. The readings hold. They hold a little too easily, and that is the weakness of the frame and not its strength. An argument that converts every act of apparent independence into a hidden status move has made itself hard to test. If loyalty proves the cynical case and disloyalty proves it too, the case has stopped predicting and started decorating.
\nThe deeper trouble sits in the part of Said that Pinsof should claim and cannot fully use. Said anticipated half of the frame. He knew that knowledge serves power, that the universal often hides the particular, that the claim to neutral standing rewards the man who makes it. He built a method out of the suspicion. Pinsof’s move is to run Said’s own suspicion back against Said, and the move works, but it works by granting that Said saw the engine clearly. The student who turns the master’s tool on the master has conceded that the tool cuts. The honest verdict is that Said and Pinsof share a low view of stated motive and a sharp eye for interest beneath the universal, and that they part over one question. Said thought criticism might reach a truer account once it cleared away the interested distortions. Pinsof thinks there is no truer account waiting underneath, only the next coalition’s propaganda, and that the search for the clean view is one more status game played by men who get paid to look like they have found it.
\nSo the frame leaves Said as a man who understood a great deal and exempted himself from his own understanding. He saw that the Orientalist’s neutral knowledge served empire. He did not turn the lamp on the humanist’s neutral knowledge, which served a cause and a career and a class of readers who paid in prestige for the comfort of believing that the world’s wars come from misunderstanding and that men like them might end the wars by understanding better. The orchestra plays on in Seville. The cellist and the violist understand each other now. The land is still contested, the gun still answers to a flag, and the German foundation writes another check, and everyone in the hall goes home feeling like a sweetie, which, Pinsof would say, is what the music was for.<\/p>\n

The Great Delusion<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities<\/em><\/a>, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:<\/p>\n

\nMy view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism\u2014everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights\u2014and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. \u201cHuman rights,\u201d Samuel Moyn notes, \u201chave come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities\u2014state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.\u201d
\n[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If Mearsheimer (b. 1947) is right, three of Said’s key ideas lose their foundation.
\nThe first is the secular intellectual as outsider. Said builds his ideal around the man who frees himself from nation, party, religion, and movement, who reasons his way to a standpoint above the tribe, and who answers to truth rather than to his fellows. Mearsheimer ranks reason last among the three sources of preference, behind innate sentiment and behind socialization, and he dates the decisive value infusion to a long childhood that runs its course before the critical faculties come online. On that account the independent reasoner arrives late and arrives weak. The tribe gets there first. Said’s outsider is not the natural condition that disciplined thought recovers. He is an exception the frame predicts to be rare, fragile, and mostly honored in the breach.
\nThe second is exile as liberation. Said treats distance from one’s own society as the condition that allows independence and resistance to conformity. Mearsheimer’s claim about the long childhood cuts against this directly. A man who moves between Cairo, Jerusalem, and New York carries the value infusion with him. He does not shed it at the border. The exile sees what settled men miss, but he sees it through attachments laid down before he could weigh them. Said’s own life supplies the test. His displacement did not make him post-national. It made him the most visible advocate of a particular national cause on earth.
\nThe third is the universalism of human rights and humanism. Said’s positive program rests on it: secular criticism that speaks for the human, a humanism defended against relativism and fundamentalism alike, a Palestinian claim pressed in the idiom of universal right. Mearsheimer files all of this under the liberal error, the habit of treating men as atomistic bearers of an identical set of inalienable rights while almost ignoring the social and tribal substrate. He cites Samuel Moyn (b. 1972) precisely on how human rights came to carry the highest moral hopes of the modern age. The frame counts that idiom as a recent and parochial Western product mistaking itself for a view from nowhere.
\nHere the frame turns Said into evidence against himself. Said spent a career showing how one universalism, the scholarship of the Orient, carried particular power inside a claim to neutral knowledge. Mearsheimer runs the same move on Said’s own humanism. The man who taught a generation to hear the interest beneath the universal built his program on a universal. His critique of Orientalist objectivity rested on a humanist objectivity he did not subject to the same suspicion. By Mearsheimer’s lights the secular critic never left the cave. He swapped one universalism for another and called the second one freedom.
\nSaid criticized Yasser Arafat after Oslo, criticized Arab authoritarian governments, and refused the easy solidarity that asks a man to mute his own side. That looks like the independent critic the frame says should be rare. He also gave fourteen years to the Palestine National Council and never abandoned the cause to his death. That looks like the embedded member who makes sacrifices for his fellows, which is what Mearsheimer predicts. The frame absorbs the first fact without strain. It reads criticism inside the tribe as a quarrel about how best to serve the tribe, a mode of loyalty rather than an exit from it. The man who scolds his own people for failing the cause has not stepped outside the cause. He has staked a claim to define it.
\nOne detail complicates the frame in Said’s favor. Said grew up between worlds, with no single clean socialization. A reader might take that as the frame’s weak point, the case where childhood infusion fails to fix a man to one tribe. The better reading runs the other way. Competing value infusions are still infusions. A divided childhood hands a man rival inheritances rather than freedom from inheritance, and the choice among them comes from sentiment and circumstance as much as from reason. Even Said’s marginality, on this account, is something he was given, not something he reasoned his way to.
\nSo if Mearsheimer is right, Said survives as a reduced figure. The anthropology stands with him. The program does not. The independent secular intellectual shrinks to a rare and unstable type rather than the human norm that learning recovers. Exile loses its power to cleanse. The humanism and the rights talk read as the local idiom of a particular moment dressed as the voice of mankind. What remains is a worldly, affiliated, deeply socialized man who pressed a national claim with great learning and great force, and who told himself, as such men do, that he spoke for more than his own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Edward Said was a founder of postcolonial studies and a leading literary critic, cultural theorist, public intellectual, and political activist of the late twentieth century. His 1978 book Orientalism remade the humanities. In it he argues that Western scholarship, literature, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-195432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-israel","category-literature"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t