Towards a Hermeneutics of Hope: The legacy of Edward W. Said

Abstract

This paper focuses primarily on the later work of Said. After a brief review of what Said himself saw as formative events in his life it reviews the tradition of “philological hermeneutics” as Said himself defined it and within which he located his own work as a scholar. His key themes of intertextuality, post-colonialism, and receptivity/resistance are discussed as important elements linking that tradition to the particular style and substance of his political engagements. Finally, the paper returns to the question of Said's legacy as a possible contribution to our thinking about the purpose of humanistic scholarship and the role of the scholar-teacher as Said conceived it. His hermeneutics and his politics, it is argued, are all of a piece.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Fred Inglis, Bob Lingard, John Quicke, and Stewart Ranson for their constructive and insightful comments on matters relating to this paper.

Notes

1. This of course is only one of the conversations Said would be enjoying. In an open letter to Said Abu-Lughod (2005) wrote movingly of the three-way friendship between Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Eqbal Ahmed, and Said: “I like to imagine the three of you now sitting up there in heaven, drinking Johnnnie Walker Black and talking politics” (p. 25).

2. For a brief summary of the criticisms levelled against Said (1978) see Sardar (1999, pp. 65–76); for a highly critical review of Said (1994a) see Gellner (1993).

3. On this point Said was, as Walia (2001, pp. 30–31) pointed out, much closer to the position adopted by Raymond Williams. See, for example, Williams (1977, pp. 121–127) for a discussion of “dominant, residual and emergent” cultural elements and Williams (1979, p. 252) for a later summary of this argument.

4. So, for example, Said's reading of Yeats as an “indispensably great national poet who articulates the experiences, the aspirations, and the vision of a people suffering under the domination of an offshore power” (p. 69) involved comparisons with other “great nationalist artists of decolonisation and revolutionary nationalism” (p. 73), such as Mahmoud Darwish, the poet of the Palestinian diaspora, and Pablo Neruda, the great Chilean poet (see Eagleton, Jameson, & Said, 1990).

5. See Said (1994a, pp. 100–116) for his analysis of Austen's Mansfield Park and Said (1994a, pp. 24–29) for a discussion of Conrad's Heart of darkness.

6. Notwithstanding this shift of emphasis, there are strong lines of methodological continuity running from Said's first major work (Said, 1975), through his first collection of critical essays (Said, 1984), to his final, posthumously published critical text (Said, 2004b). As Hussein (2002) showed, Said (1975) was “a study of great theoretical importance for Said's entire career” (p. 12). Similarly, the introductory chapter (entitled “secular criticism”) of Said (1984) prefigures many of the key themes developed in Said (2004b): the “situatedness” of criticism, its oppositionality, scepticism, and secularity, and, above all, its goal of “noncoercive knowledge produced in the interests of freedom” (Said, 1984, p. 29).

7. Readers wishing to test this claim may wish to refer to Said's public controversy with Michael Walzer about the meaning of the Exodus story and about the question of Palestine. The relevant exchange of letters is reproduced in Hart (2000, pp. 187–199).