By HOMERO SANTIAGO*

Said synthesizes a fruitful contradiction that was able to motivate the most notable, most combative and most current part of his work inside and outside the academy.

1.

In a world where for so long, especially after September 11, 2001, tensions between East and West, two undefined but active geopolitical poles in our imagination, have been in a process of turmoil always on the verge of exploding, the name of Edward Wadid Said, a Palestinian-American born in Jerusalem in 1935 and who died in New York in 2003, epitomizes a fertile contradiction that was able to motivate the most notable, most combative and most current part of his work inside and outside academia.

In 1978, he published orientalism,[I] a seminal study that quickly, even before becoming a classic in the humanities of our time, would inspire a wide range of new research, especially in those fields that were gradually named subaltern studies, postcolonial studies, de(s)colonial studies, etc. It is very difficult to determine the scope and specificities of such areas of research, especially since, as if their recent emergence were not enough, they seem like those waves in which the tide is just around the next bend, due to the next trend and even before a consistent and solid breeding ground has been established to the point of persisting.

In any case, it is incredible to realize that, as one of those responsible for all this renewal of old fields and the opening of new ones, Said's thought knew how to cultivate the best and protect itself from the worst of these waves; in particular, free from prejudice, averse to pettiness and conceptual pigeonholes, he never suppressed from his horizon the idea of ​​a single humanity, of a culture whose universality results from being the product of a single mind, the human one. This is where his commitment, of which we will seek to reconstruct some aspects here, comes from, in favor of a “radical humanism”.

2.

Some of Edward Said's main works involve and deepen a question of method that has among its primary references humanist philology, with emphasis on the name of Giambattista Vico, who assumes the role of theoretical pillar of this discipline, or rather of this procedure whose contemporary practical model, in Said's eyes, is Erich Auerbach, the famous author of mimesis.[ii] The method in question is, fundamentally, a reading method, since the key question is: how to read?

We consider this to be a fascinating aspect that is not usually sufficiently highlighted: many of the novelties in Edward Said's work, including the most original and influential, are rooted in methodological innovations. There is no point in presenting this in detail, which would imply a study of different proportions and purpose. As an example, it is enough to note that a book as fundamental as Culture and imperialism, from 1993, can be read as a major stance on the appropriate method for approaching certain works and their connection with history.

My method is to focus as much as possible on a few individual works, to read them first as great fruits of the creative or interpretative imagination, and then to show them as part of the relationship between culture and empire. I do not believe that writers are mechanically determined by ideology, class, or economic history, but I do think that they are deeply connected to the history of their societies, shaping and shaped by that history and their social experiences to varying degrees. Culture and its aesthetic forms derive from historical experience.[iii]

One of the privileged ways of achieving this is by practicing what Edward Said sometimes calls “history in counterpoint” and which aims to restore to works, especially the classics, that which, although crucial to their composition, ended up for various reasons remaining outside them; it is a question, from this point of view, of reading and understanding especially the silences of these major works that tradition has bequeathed to us.

“We must therefore read the great canonical texts, and perhaps also the entire archive of pre-modern European and American culture, striving to extract, extend, emphasize, and give voice to what is silent, or marginally present or ideologically represented. […] in reading a text, we must open it both to what is contained within it and to what has been excluded by the author.”^[iv]

Easy to say and hard to do, as the critic well knows. A lot of work is required, not only for the preparatory study but, mainly, to learn how to control the reader's own temper, who must know how to approach works, even and especially those that displease him, with the open heart of someone who strives to understand the other, and not just depreciate him, ridicule him as the "evil" one in the story, the enemy to be punished in the public square, I mean, virtually (see, a little later, how Said deplores the "us-versus-them" mentality, a Schmittian thing to the core, by the way).

Combining experience and culture is, evidently, reading texts from the metropolitan center and the peripheries in a counterpoint, neither according to the privilege of the “objectivity” of “our side”, nor due to the hindrance of the “subjectivity” of “their side”. The question is knowing how to read, as deconstructionists say, and not separating it from the question of knowing what to read.[v]

This alone illustrates the centrality and novelty of the question of the reading method in Edward Said. From there, the question that arises is: how can this procedure be substantiated?

3.

A few years after the publication of orientalism, when Said's name was beginning to gain authority, the anthropologist James Clifford published a critical review of the book accusing it of involving a petition of principle or, worse, a contradiction in terms: Edward Said would star in an irresolvable conflict between his humanist inclination, on the one hand, and what would be an anti-humanism demanded by the themes and the approach, on the other.[vi] Taking the words of the person concerned himself when describing the criticism he received, it is as if he, from James Clifford's point of view, were “ambivalently entangled in the totalizing habits of Western humanism”; a “disturbing difficulty”, for example, would be to use Foucault, a supposedly anti-humanist author, and at the same time flirt with “the essentializing and totalizing modes of humanism”.[vii]

In his defense, Edward Said's first step is to discuss the meaning of the term "humanism." Its use in the United States, he explains, was actually tainted by French structuralism, which gave it the labels of subject sovereignty, cogito, enlightenment, etc., all of which today are considered the foes of the most recent waves of thought. It is not this humanism, however, that he advocates. He is more interested in the humanism that has its roots in Dante and Vico, and which was practiced by philologists such as Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitz.

In fact, Edward Said uses the latter as a precise characterization, which, in our view, is an excellent gateway to understanding the scope and content of his work. According to Leo Spitz, in words taken up by Edward Said, humanism is based on the conviction “in the power of the human mind to investigate the human mind.”[viii] This is the most basic humanist creed, which still lacks a caveat that Edward Said proposes right after: it is not about the European or Asian mind, or anything like that, but about the “human mind.” tout court".[ix]

The effects of this courageous stance are of extreme importance and permeate Edward Said’s work. It is what allows him, for example, exorcising the practice of claiming that this or that is simply a property of this or that tradition – “one of the most debilitating exercises imaginable” – to affirm the need to understand that a Beethoven “belongs as much to the Caribbean as to the Germans, insofar as his music is now part of the human heritage”.[X] One of the critic's tasks will be to understand, based on the supposed universality of the mind, its local manifestations, that is, how the mind's creative power works in a specific way.

It is worth noting – even to reassure those who are about to cross themselves – that the foundation of this aspect of the human mind does not rest on a Cartesian-style subject, which would be universal and endowed with clear and distinct ideas; instead, it presupposes the Viquian conception of “poetic wisdom”, as synthesized in the principle of verum/factum.

According to Edward Said, “the core of humanism is the secular notion that the historical world is made by men and women, not by God, and that it can be rationally understood according to the principle formulated by Vico in The new science, that we can only really know what we do or, to put it another way, we can know things according to the way they were done”.[xi]

Among the many consequences of this position, we will limit ourselves here to highlighting just one in terms of the method of reading, which goes under the name of worldliness. “Worldliness,” explains the critic, is a word he uses to “denote the real historical world from whose circumstances none of us can ever be separated, even in theory.”[xii] This “in theory” stands out"; that is to say, the Cartesian doubt that abstracts from the body and the exterior is innocuous in practice and impossible in theory. To affirm this, Edward Said relies on Viquian criticisms of Descartes.[xiii]

In his view, one of the crucial objectives of New science was “to contest the Cartesian thesis that it would be possible to have clear and distinct ideas, and that these were free not only from the real mind that possesses them, but also from history.”[xiv] The concept of worldliness refers precisely to the restitution of the inextricable link (more or less like that between figure and background) between our mind and an “indefinite nature”, diametrically different from that of clear and distinct ideas; this is what Said also characterizes as a “tragic flaw” that prevents definitive knowledge.

Let us set aside and ignore this expression “tragic flaw,” which is really not a happy one (it is easier to be post- or anti-colonial than to escape the clutches of old theology); what Vico seems to want to indicate is perhaps something like that infinity that makes our knowledge, even when exact, necessarily unfinished, an indeterminacy (which does not necessarily imply imperfection) like that determined by what a philosopher might call the “infinite nexus of causes.” Now, what really matters to us is that this “failure” can be circumvented by method; it “can be remedied and mitigated by the disciplines of philological erudition and philosophical understanding […], but it can never be annulled.”[xv]

In this way, we can perfectly understand what constitutes the basis of one of the fundamental errors, for example, of a traditional Eurocentric view of literature: an epistemic error, since abstraction and partiality amputate works of art from everything to which they are connected, a bit like Descartes did with ideas in order to clarify and distinguish them. Contrary to this procedure, the philological method, when well understood and practiced, is capable of being much more rigorous than the traditional view.

I have in mind a much more rigorous rational and intellectual approach that, as I have already suggested, draws on a fairly accurate notion of what it means to read philologically, in a worldly and integrative way [similar to what in Culture and imperialism was called “counterpoint reading”], in opposition to what separates or divides, and, at the same time, a resistance to the great reductive and vulgarizing us-versus-them thought patterns of our time.[xvi]

These are the reasons why Edward Said proposes, according to the title of one of his essays, a return to philology, allowing the establishment of a more rigorous, more rational and, above all, politically committed type of criticism, as a democratic criticism, according to the title of the work on which we are now basing ourselves.

In short, in a fascinating way, we discover that the critical or philological method is justified by virtue of a certain constitution of reality and of the human being. If you like, by virtue of an ontology that is not that of this one that one (being as being) entirely abstract, but something close to what we can call the this quatenus entia (being as entities, beings), which can only be grasped through the integration of all its infinite historical modalities.

4.

Let us return to James Clifford’s critique. Has it been answered? Not completely. In fact, it is irresistible to see that Said, when he appears before the anthropologist’s court, clumsily confesses more, not less, than his accuser could have expected. Something like this: the champion of discourses that question Western culture and its “imperialist” vocation (the expression is terrible, but it is not difficult to spot it somewhere) acts as an infiltrator; the theoretical cant is betrayed by a practice that only takes shape and acquires consistency – here is the key point – through this same culture and by operating categories that are its own and as handled by some of its most notorious representatives (Vico and Auerbach, to name just a couple of oxen from a huge herd).

We are dramatizing a bit, but this is ultimately what is at stake in James Clifford’s critique. And we believe that Edward Said himself knows that he cannot answer this point satisfactorily by simply explaining the meaning of humanism; which is why, in the aforementioned essay “The Return to Philology”, he also proposes an instructive comparison between his work and that of the seventeenth-century philosopher Benedict Spinoza.

The task of the humanist is not just to occupy a position or a place, nor simply to belong to some place, but rather to be at the same time inside and outside the circulating ideas and values ​​that are being debated in our society, in someone else's society or in the society of the other.[xvii]

To justify this conception of the humanist as someone who, from within, positions himself against, Edward Said refers to a book by the Polish writer Isaac Deutscher entitled The non-Jewish Jew. There, he recalls, we find: “an account of how the great Jewish thinkers – Spinoza chief among them, as well as Freud, Heine and Deutscher himself – were within their tradition and at the same time rejected it, preserving the original bond by subjecting it to a corrosive questioning that took them far beyond that tradition, sometimes banishing them from the community in the process.”[xviii]

Although the reference is not restricted to Spinoza, apparently it is he who provides the mirror (the “main” one among all) in which Edward Said intends to see himself: Palestinian and North American, humanist and anti-humanist, like Spinoza, born in the Jewish community of Amsterdam and banished from it at the age of 23.

Not many of us can or would want to belong to a class of individuals so dialectically charged, so sensitively localized, but it is illuminating to see in this destiny the crystallized role of the American humanist, the non-humanist humanist, as it were.[xx]

Here, unequivocally, that contradiction we spoke of at the beginning flourishes. Dialectically. Critically. Both Spinoza and Edward Said combine humanism with the exercise of a philological or critical method of a “humanist” type that carries within itself the tension of a practice that, from within a cultural system and using the best weapons provided by that same system, rises up against it.

Let us understand. It would have been easy for the young Jew Spinoza, after his banishment, to become anti-Jewish (in today's terms: anti-Zionist) and go around ranting against everyone; what was more difficult was to continue being a non-Jew who was not anti-Jewish and, as we discovered with wonder when we read the Political theological treatise, had the ability to combat the Jewish reading of the Scriptures using the best weapons gathered precisely from Jewish literature. In the same way, being a Palestinian who vociferates against Israel and the United States is not difficult, it is natural; what is difficult is a Palestinian American who, without ever despising the culture he received, knows how to direct it in the fight in favor of the oppressed.

Well, perhaps James Clifford was not completely wrong. He just would not have understood that the paradox or contradiction he accused and denounced, in this case, was precisely the most fruitful aspect of the critical procedure advocated by Edward Said. “Humanism […] is a technique of disturbance”; “we have to practice a paradoxical mode of thought”.[xx] Something that is significantly better revealed in Spinoza's mirror: the North American humanist displeases both Greeks and Trojans, just as the Dutchman of old displeased Jews and Cartesians. And how to accomplish this feat of fruitful disturbance of doxa programmatically fetched?

Let us return to the beginning: by the method of reading. “Humanism is about reading,”[xxx] Said reiterates once and for all; in a certain sense, the whole question boils down to knowing how to read, to read well, whatever one reads. First of all, because this implies “thinking well”. The practice of philology involves a way of thinking, and thinking critically. Like few others, Friedrich Nietzsche understood this from his youth and never ceased to praise the “philological spirit” as a kind of effective training of the intellect (we train a horse to walk and, curiously, we believe that good thinking will emerge naturally?).^[xxiii] In any case, we ask permission to illustrate the subject in a more prosaic way, so to speak.

The Laws of Lidia Poët, an Italian series tells the story of the struggles of a young law graduate in Turin at the end of the 19th century, trying to become a lawyer. In the first episode, Dr. Poët takes on the defense of a young man accused of murder. Everyone already considers the case to be solved, arguing that circumstances and clues irrefutably incriminate the defendant; the only sentence expected, therefore, is capital punishment. Now, everything seems so crystal clear, so incisively incriminating that... the young woman, against all odds, distrusts the anticipated verdict.

During the trials and tribulations that this positioning costs him, we witness a brief and sagacious dialogue. Is the defendant really guilty, asks a journalist? “Let’s just say that when everyone thinks so, I always have doubts,” Poët replies. “In these cases, how do you proceed?”, the journalist insists, and then come the words that interest us most closely: “Have you never studied philology? […] When a text is transmitted in several versions, the easiest is often the least likely. I discard it and concentrate on all the others.”

It is almost impossible to find a clearer way of demonstrating that philological reading, methodical patience, well-trained distrust, a keen eye for contradictions (the bad contradictions, of course, those that are tricks that seek to deceive us), prepare and involve a form of critical thinking. This is no small thing, much less with regard to its ethical and political effects.

Since, as the humanist well knows, “writing is a series of decisions and choices expressed in words”,[xxiii] there is no way to conceive of reading other than as an operation that is as intellectual as it is political, which reiterates the importance of the appropriate method. There is no such thing as naïve or apolitical reading; just like writing, the way of reading is always a matter of taking a position. Edward Said's humanist philology can thus become a figure of criticism, of democratic criticism, especially after September 11.

5.

Although it is not usual to define Said's work in this way, I am convinced that his work expresses a firm position philosophical. For most of his career, he was assigned to an English department teaching comparative literature. He lived in the United States; if he were in France or Brazil, for example, he would never be denied his credentials as a philosopher. Local traditions have an unavoidable weight in labels; it is normal.

The fact is that what he proposes to us is a philosophically robust proposal that could perhaps be characterized as a transition, or rather a “return,” to use his own word, from philosophy to philology. As if reversing the programmatic slogan of the young Nietzsche in his inaugural lecture in Basel, namely, philosophia facta is what philology is, “what was philology became philosophy”,[xxv] Said could summarize the purposes of his work in the following thesis: “what was philosophy must become philology”.

It is a pity, a very painful pity, that although we continue along the paths opened by Edward Said, so many often fail to read him. At least that is my impression.

It is no coincidence that it seems that the more the spectrum of literary, philosophical, etc. readings expands, as he always defended, the weaker concerns become regarding the quality of the reading undertaken, as if the act of reading, taken seriously, were dissociable from that of thinking critically, as if it were sufficient in itself, as if this could be done without major consequences.

So, one reads badly, thinks badly and, above all, speaks badly, in both senses that the adverb admits; this is how it is when the bones of the philological profession are replaced by the ease of immediate and unreflective, anachronistic and emotional condemnations; those same ones that within a couple of years (hopefully) will have become irrelevant, contrary to the destiny that we foresee and wish for the works of Edward Wadid Said.

* Homer Santiago He is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at USP.

Notes

[I] Cf. Said, orientalism: the East as an invention of the West, São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 2007.

[ii] Cf. Auerbach, Mimesis. The representation of reality in Western literature, São Paulo, Perspectiva, 2021. See the “Introduction to mimesis” by Said included in this edition.

[iii] Said, Culture and imperialism, São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 1995, p. 23.

[iv] Same, pp. 104-105.

[v] Same, pp. 321-322.

[vi] Cf. Clifford, “On orientalism", in Dilemmas of culture. Anthropology, literature and art from a postmodern perspective, Barcelona, ​​Gedisa, 2001.

[vii] Said, Humanism and democratic criticism, São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 2007, p. 27.

[viii] Ditto, p. 47.

[ix] Same, same.

[X] Culture and imperialism, ob. cit., p. 27.

[xi] Humanism and democratic criticism, ob. cit., pp. 29-30.

[xii] Ditto, p. 71.

[xiii] In this, Said's main reference seems to be a text by Auerbach, of course, on Viqui's critique of Cartesianism; cf. “Vico alle prese con Descartes”, in Auerbach, Global literature and method, Milan, Nottetempo, 2022.

[xiv] Ditto, p. 31.

[xv] Same, same.

[xvi] Ditto, p. 73.

[xvii] Ditto, p. 101.

[xviii] Idem, pp. 101-102. Deutscher's beautiful essay is translated in The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays, Rio de Janeiro, Brazilian Civilization, 1970.

[xx] Ditto, p. 102.

[xx] Ibid., pp. 102, 108.

[xxx] Ditto, p. 105.

[xxiii] A single example: “Philology, in an age when people read too much, is the art of learning and teaching how to read. Only the philologist reads slowly and meditates for half an hour on six lines. It is not the result obtained, but this habit that makes his merit.” (Nietzsche, Complete Works, vol. Human, all too human, I, frag.19 [1], Paris, Gallimard, 1988)

[xxiii] Humanism and democratic criticism, ob. cit., p. 85.

[xxv] Nietzsche, Home et la philologie classique, Encyclopédie de la philologie classique, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2022, p. 45.

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