Pankaj Mishra reviews a new biography about Edward Said, which shows the theorist immersed in the Western tradition he critiqued.
” . Scanting Said’s private life, including his marriages and other romantic liaisons, Brennan concerns himself with tracing an intellectual and political trajectory. One of the half-concealed revelations in the book is how close Said came, with his Levantine wealth and Ivy League education, to being a somewhat refined playboy, chasing women around the Eastern Seaboard in his Alfa Romeo. In Jerusalem, Said went to St. George’s, a boys’ school for the region’s ruling castes.
Nonetheless, his own early impulse, born of an immigrant’s insecurity, was, as he later put it, to make himself over “into something the system required.” His earliest intellectual mentors were such iconic figures of American literary culture as R. P. Blackmur and Lionel Trilling. He wrote a prize-winning dissertation on Conrad; he read Sartre and Lukács. In his early writings, he faithfully absorbed all the trends then dominant in English departments, from existentialism to structuralism.
It was the Six-Day War, in 1967, and the exultant American media coverage of Israel’s crushing victory over Arab countries, that killed Said’s desire to please his white mentors. He began reaching out to other Arabs and methodically studying Western writings about the Middle East.
When the book was attacked by old-style Orientalists such as Bernard Lewis, who questioned its author’s grasp of Arab and Islamic history, Said could effortlessly defend himself. Lewis, later a favorite historian of Dick Cheney and a theorist of “Muslim rage,” was too damning an illustration of Said’s thesis. Said was much more vulnerable to criticisms from the Oriental subjects whose debasing misrepresentations he had set out to expose.
At home, Said found himself up against a reactionary right that, rolling back the gains of the progressive movements of the nineteen-sixties, had created a much stronger basis for itself than the academic left had. Embedded deep within the Reagan Administration, it could, Kazin wrote in 1983, “always be depended upon to support Begin.” This right-wing network exercised outsized influence.
Said, having once been slow to express his political views, made up for lost time in his last decade. He repeatedly skewered Fouad Ajami, Daniel Pipes, Kanan Makiya, and others anointed as experts on the Middle East by the mainstream media and think tanks. He often attacked Naipaul, whose powerfully literary but intellectually languid journalism about Muslim societies was embraced by both establishment liberals and conservatives.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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