Abstract
A third of a century after the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism and after Michel Foucault’s death, it is difficult to think of two intellectuals who have been more influential not just within their respective fields, but whose influence has travelled beyond the confines of their disciplines. The intellectual and personal relationship between Edward Said and Michel Foucault - particularly the former’s assessment of the latter - has been the subject of a considerable amount of controversy, generated not least by Said himself. Said’s very public disenchantment with Foucault’s theoretical project and its political implications - in particular, Foucault’s supposed unwillingness to translate ‘insurrectionary scholarship’ into political activism - has been the subject of much debate, not least because it resonates with much (mostly positivist) criticism of post-structuralism generally, and because it came from such a prominent figure, noted for both his contribution to post-positivist theory and for his activism on the Palestinian question. One would not be alone in finding this reading of Foucault’s analysis and of his political practice questionable,1 but the aim of this contribution will not be to offer yet another attempt to ‘rule’ over the dispute by arriving at a ‘correct’ interpretation of these two intellectuals’ thought, not least because it attempts to take seriously warnings by both scholars concerning the political implications of ruling on ‘truth.’
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Notes
For example, Paul A. Bové, ‘Intellectuals at War: Michel Foucault and the Analytics of Power,’ SubStance 11, no. 4 (1982–3), 36–55.
For example, Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London and New York: Routledge, 1990); Aijaz Ahmed, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992); William Ashcroft and Pal Ahluwalia, Edward Said, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2009), 65–7.
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003), 3.
Said reported becoming disenchanted with the couple because they ‘knew nothing about the Arab world and were both fantastically pro-Israel’ in Interviews with Edward Said, eds., Amritjit Singh and B. G. Johnson (Jackson: Mississippi University Press, 2004), 75, and then recounts the famously pro- Palestinian Gilles Deleuze telling him of a disagreement between him and Foucault on the question of Palestine (what about we do not know), inferring Foucault was pro-Israeli and had wanted to avoid the topic with Said for this reason. As Racevkis points out, however, Foucault’s views on the Israel were far from one-sided. In a 1982 interview, he condemned the massacre of Palestinians in the camps of Sabra and Shatila which the IDF were responsible for allowing it to happen, expressing distrust in both Menachem Begin and Yasser Arafat. Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, vol. I-II (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 1168.
Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 3. Offering a diagnosis of the ills of contemporary 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’ (The World, the Text, 169). ‘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 routinely accepted it as anything more than an intensely private, deeply eccentric, and insular version of history.’ Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays (London: Granta, 2000), 523.
Said, Power, Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 77.
Said, The World, the Text, 245. It ought to be pointed out that Foucault always resisted formulating a theory of power, but rather focused on providing tools for an analytic of power, arguing that ‘theories’ of power were inextricably involved in the (re)production of particular forms of political order in the first place. For example, Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge (London: Penguin, 1998), 82–3; Said, Interviews with Edward Said, eds. A. Singh and B. G. Johnson (Jackson: Mississippi University Press, 2004), 63.
Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1993), 278.
Ibid. For an overview of the debate concerning Said’s misappropriation of Foucault, see Ashcroft and Ahluwalia, Edward Said; Young, White Mythologies; James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988) and Ahmad, In Theory.
Valerie Kennedy, Edward Said: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Polity, 2000), 29.
Foucault as cited in The Foucault Reader ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1991), 74.
For an early, brilliant but much-neglected analysis of neo-Orientalism - a social scientific ‘reincarnation’ of earlier generations of Orientalism rooted in the humanities - albeit not formulated in explicitly Foucaultian terms, see Yahya Sadowski, ‘The New Orientalism and the Democracy Debate,’ in Political Islam: Essays from Middle East Report, eds. Joel Beinin and Joe Stork (London: I. B. Tauris, 1997), 33–50.
The debate is reproduced in John Rajchman, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate (New York: The New Press, 2006), and available online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= kawGakdNoT0
Foucault, ‘Interview with Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino,’ in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1991), 63.
Embodying a Western liberal tradition sceptical of democracy, Robert Dahl, for example, argues that active participation by lower-class citizenry is likely to have negative effects on democracy. See Dahl, Polyarchy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), 89. Despite considerable differences between them, Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, Max Weber, Alois Schumpeter and Samuel Huntington all variously incarnate this liberal scepticism of mass democratic participation.
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© 2013 Andrea Teti
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Teti, A. (2013). Confessions of a Dangerous (Arab) Mind. In: Elmarsafy, Z., Bernard, A., Attwell, D. (eds) Debating Orientalism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137341112_8
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