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Foucault regards the term “human” as a problematic, socially
constructed category or “episteme” (often opposed to the equally
dubious “savage”), Said insists that only a humanistic critique can
provide a sane and rational alternative to the hegemonic discourse
of Orientalism. However, to avoid the possibility of contradicting
himself, Said ignores the “suspicion that the ontological category of
‘the human’ and ‘human nature’” have become inextricably tied to
the “violence of Western history” (163).
Young also points to the way that Orientalism is viewed as
both a “discourse” and “reality,” despite Said’s denial that the
Orient is a “real” place or territory. Therefore, a “major theoretical
problem” arises when Said invokes Orientalism as a Western
discourse while affirming that such knowledge about the Orient
was put to real uses, including “the service of colonial conquest,
occupation, and administration” (169). For Young, it seems almost
paradoxical that something unreal or imaginary could have such an
impact on an actual region (in this case, South Asia and the Middle
East) and its history.
Unlike Foucault, Said refuses to abandon the notion of the
author. It is here where he begins to radically diverge from the
rigidity of Foucault’s philosophy. Whereas Foucault dismisses the
author in the same manner that he discredits the “role of individual
agency,” Said on the other hand reinforces the humanist idea of a
“determining imprint of individual writers upon the otherwise
anonymous collective body of texts constituting a discursive
formation like Orientalism” (Said, 1978: 23). As a result, he adopts
what he calls a “hybrid perspective” which is not only theoretical
but “broadly historical” as well, presupposing that “all texts” are
“worldly and circumstantial” (23).
For critics like Clifford and Young, Said’s equivocal position
want also to connect these principles to the world in which they live as citizens”
(2004a: 6).