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Imperialism
(1993) is the Nietzschean-cum-Foucauldian idea that
the will to knowledge leads to the will to power, and that the
notion of “pure” scholarship is at best a fiction. If anything,
Orientalism
teaches us that as soon as knowledge “becomes
institutionalized, culturally accumulated, overly restrictive in its
definitions, it must actively be opposed by counterknowledge”
(Clifford, 1988: 256). A quarter century after its initial publication,
Said reiterated this point by suggesting that the main idea of the
book was to “use humanistic critique to open up the fields of
struggle, to introduce a longer sequence of thought and analysis to
replace the short bursts of polemical, thought-stopping fury that so
imprison us” (Said, 2004b: 874 ).
Still, Said’s “humanistic critique” relies on the anti-humanistic
notion of “discourse” introduced by Foucault in
The Archaeology of
Knowledge
(
L’archéologie du savoir
), a groundbreaking work that
first appeared in 1969, three years after the now-famous Johns
Hopkins conference on structuralism which introduced to North
America many of the rising stars in French theory, including
Jacques Derrida, Lucien Goldmann, Jacques Lacan, and Roland
Barthes, all of whom would leave their mark on the Anglo-
American academy.
As a young scholar fluent in French, Said made his first foray
into the “Franco-American dialogue in literary theory” (Said, 1999:
134) during the early 1970s when he published in
boundary 2
an
article titled “Michel Foucault as an Intellectual Imagination,”
which helped introduce the philosopher’s ideas to a wider audience
in the US who were still unfamiliar with his work and the “new
habit of thought” that it presented (1972: 4).
4
4
See Spanos (2001). It is of course important to remember that at the time Said’s
article was published, the flow of information was much slower and less regular.
For instance, the proceedings from the 1966 Johns Hopkins conference were not
published in book form until 1970, two years before the appearance of Said’s
article. Moreover, since Foucault’s writings were largely the product of dense
“bibliographic saturations” and were thus difficult to reproduce through “simple
mimicry,” he was also, among his French cohorts, “one of the last to be imitated”