Said, Auerbach, and the Return to Philological Hermeneutics

ABSTRACT

This essay explores the relationship between Edward Said’s well-known contrapuntal reading of history and Erich Auerbach’s Ansatzpunkt, or point of departure, as a means of entering a given hermeneutic circle. Although Auerbach occupied an increasingly prominent place in Said’s critical thought, his engagement with the work of the German philologist has been largely ignored or downplayed. In this essay I take the figure of exile, which is so central to Said’s scholarship and which he explicitly links with the intellectual mission of critique, as a point of departure for a deepened exploration of Said’s critical method—a method developed in critical dialogue with Auerbach’s work. Building on the existing literature, I argue that Auerbach offers more than simply a way for Said to problematize identity politics and to challenge the dogmatism of received notions of home and political belonging. More than this, I argue that the German philologist provides Said with a way to reconfigure the dialectic between history and literature; to develop his contrapuntal approach to reading history; and to rethink the parameters of a historicist humanism that, in turn, enables him to reactivate the critical potential of philological hermeneutics.

KEYWORDS:

• Erich Auerbach
• Edward Said
• hermeneutics
• philology
• Ansatzpunkt
• contrapuntal history
• theory of reading

Notes

1. Said, Reflections on Exile, xiv.

2. Ibid., 174.

3. Ibid., 184.

4. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 333.

5. Said, Reflections on Exile, xviii.

6. Said, Orientalism, xxi.

7. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 144.

8. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 22.

9. Apter, “Saidian Humanism,” 36.

10. Said, Orientalism, xxiii.

11. See, e.g., Dallmayr, “Beyond Monologue”; Dallmayr, Beyond Orientalism; Thomas, “Orientalism and Comparative Political Theory;” Von Vacano, “Scope of Comparative Political Theory;” Jenco, “‘What Does Heaven Ever Say?”

12. Indeed, this is the impression one is left with after reading Orientalism where Said very explicitly admits that alternatives to Orientalism are not his subject: “My project has been to describe a particular system of ideas, not by any means to displace the system with a new one” (325). “Perhaps the most important task of all would be to undertake studies in contemporary alternatives to Orientalism, to ask how one can study other cultures and people from a libertarian, or a nonrepressive and nonmanipulative, perspective. But then one would have to rethink the whole complex problem of knowledge and power. These are all tasks left embarrassingly incomplete in this study” (24).

13. Rubin, Archives or Authority, 88.

14. Ibid., 89.

15. Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” 200. In this context, Said’s discussion of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in Culture and Imperialism is also instructive. While Conrad “does not give us a sense that he could imagine a fully realized alternative to imperialism,” because he dates imperialism thereby revealing its contingency, because he “records its illusions and tremendous violence and waste… he permits his later readers to imagine something other than an Africa carved up into dozens of European colonies, even if, for his own part, he had little notion of what that Africa might be” (Culture and Imperialism, 26). Very much the same could be said of Said’s critical interventions on this topic.

16. Said, Orientalism, 26. Quoted in Said, Power, Politics and Culture, xv.

17. Viswanathan, “Introduction,” in Said, Power, Politics and Culture, xv–xvi.

18. Rubin, Archives or Authority, 88.

19. Mufti, “Auerbach in Istanbul,” 98. For a critique of Said’s interpretation of Auerbach’s exile, see Konuk, East West Mimesis.

20. Mufti, “Auerbach in Istanbul,” 103.

21. Apter, “Saidian Humanism,” 43.

22. Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” trans., Edward Said and Maire Said, 1–17.

23. Said and Said, “Translators’ Introduction” to Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” 1.

24. Rubin, Archives or Authority, 95.

25. Auerbach, Time, History, and Literature, 253, 254.

26. Ibid., 255–56.

27. Ibid., 256.

28. Rubin, Archives or Authority, 96.

29. Said, “History, Literature, and Geography,” 455. See also Vico, New Science, 310, and the chapter “Discovery of the True Homer.”

30. Said, “History, Literature, and Geography,” 456.

31. Rubin, Archives or Authority, 97.

32. Zakai, Erich Auerbach, 2.

33. Ibid., 3, 4.

34. Auerbach, Time, History, and Literature, 262.

35. Doran, “Erich Auerbach’s Humanism,” 105.

36. Auerbach, Time, History, and Literature, 263.

37. Ibid., 264.

38. Holdheim, “Hermeneutic Significance of Auerbach’s Ansatz,” 628.

39. Doran, “Erich Auerbach’s Humanism,” 105.

40. Said, Beginnings, xiii, 68, 3. See also 72.

41. Ibid., xvii, 370, 372.

42. Ibid., 373, 352.

43. Said, “History, Literature, Geography,” 457.

44. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 47.

45. Said, “History, Literature, Geography,” 471.

46. Ibid., 470.

47. Rubin, Archives or Authority, 101.

48. Said, “History, Literature, Geography,” 467–68.

49. In another essay, Said, for example, elaborates on the importance of geography and landscape in the analysis of a literary work. Given that we cannot have a novel without a setting, one of the aims of literary analysis is to elucidate this setting, which, in turn, “puts the work in touch with the larger historical experience of domination and being dominated”—something that Said explores in great detail in Culture and Imperialism. See also Said, Power, Politics and Culture, 193.

50. Said, “Between Worlds,” 565.

51. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 61.

52. Said, Introduction to Auerbach's Mimesis, xxvii.

53. Auerbach, Time, History, and Literature, 36.

54. Mali, “Erich Auerbach,” 188.

55. Said, Introduction to Auerbach's Mimesis, xvi.

56. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 51, 32, xii, 279, 14.

57. Auerbach, Time, History, and Literature, 265. Said cites this passage on at least four occasions: in Culture and Imperialism, in Orientalism, in “Reflections on Exile,” and in The World, the Text, and the Critic.

58. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 7.

59. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” 185.

60. Ibid., 186.

61. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 336.

62. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 6.

63. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 47.

64. Ibid., 336.

65. Said, Orientalism, 258.

66. Ibid., 259, 260.

67. Said and Said, “Translators’ Introduction” to Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” 2.

68. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 6.

69. In the first lecture Said identifies three problems at the heart of contemporary humanism: its elitism and tendency to exclude certain texts and authors from what is considered as the “canon”; the supposed opposition between tradition/canon and the unwelcome intervention of the new; the view of the past as complete history vs. a view of the past as still open and unresolved.

70. Apter, “Saidian Humanism,” 45.

71. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 11.

72. Said, Beginnings, 361.

73. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 26.

74. Ibid., 28, 43, 46, 49, 50.

75. See Said’s introduction to his translation of Auerbach’s “Philology and Weltliteratur,” 2.

76. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 59, 61.

77. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 33.

78. Ibid.

79. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 61–62.

80. Auerbach quoted in Said, Beginnings, 363.

81. Said, Orientalism, xxv.

82. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 71, 74, 81.

83. Ibid., 143.

84. Said, Orientalism, xxix.

85. Ibid.

86. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 3.

87. Ibid., 292, 27.

Additional information

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Evgenia Ilieva

Evgenia Ilieva is Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY. The focus of her research and teaching is political theory.