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Orientalism
’s Discourse
285
Yet, despite the influence of poststructuralism on his first
major publication,
Beginnings: Intention and Method
(1975), Said’s
liaison with French theory was for the most part short-lived. Not
long after the success of
Orientalism
, he began to lament what he
described as a one-way “dialogue” between French and American
scholars, which he blamed on the insular “self-quarantined” world
of Parisian academics, who regarded all things French as universally
important.
5
Likewise, he railed against American scholars for
“institutionalizing” theory and in the process trivializing and
rarefying many of its ideas. In the case of Foucault, “[o]ne
immediate result was that certain terms like
episteme
and
discourse
,” which he labored with precision to define, “now clotted
the prose” of all those who “wrote criticism” and who “seized on
the words as if they were magic wands by which to transform [their]
humdrum scholastic readings into eye-catching theoretical ‘texts’”
(Said, 1999: 146).
Of course, it would hardly be unfair to ask why Said himself
does not also deserve to be included among those accused of
trivializing Foucault’s ideas. In his original treatise on traveling
theory, Said refers to Lukács’s
History and Class Consciousness
(1923) in order to illustrate how the author’s concept of
“reification,” which originated in revolutionary struggle, became
watered down by the time that it reached institutional settings like
(Said, 1999: 146).
5
According to Perry Anderson, “if one looks at the social sciences, political thought
or even in some respects philosophy in France, the impression left is that for long
periods there has been a notable degree of closure, and ignorance of intellectual
developments outside the country. Examples of the resulting lag could be
multiplied: a very belated and incomplete encounter with Anglo-Saxon analytic
philosophy or neo-contractualism; with the Frankfurt School or the legacy of
Gramsci; with German stylistics or American New Criticism; British historical
sociology or Italian political science. A country that has translated scarcely
anything of Fredric Jameson or Peter Wollen, and could not even find a publisher
for Eric Hobsbawm’s
Age of Extremes
, might well be termed a rearguard in the
intellectual exchange of ideas” (2004).