"Revisiting Said's "Secular Criticism": Anarchism, Enabling Ethics, and Oppositional Ethics" (original) (raw)

In this dissertation, my main purpose is to address Edward Said's secular criticism in relation to his two works namely Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993). Said conceives of his criticism as critical consciousness. It is a theoretical work that addresses itself to the real world and is antagonistic to former traditions, particularly formalists and post-structuralists. Art and literature within formalist and post-structuralist schools of criticism are not tainted by political and historical discourses and practices -- art as an autonomous realm. Said departs from the Kantian disinterestedness of art and proposes his secular criticism.

This plenary presentation eulogizes Edward Said and speaks to his courage, passion, and scholarship, while simultaneously acknowledging his discomfort with the problematic category of " great men. " Shohat traces Said's early scholarship , the vitriolic backlash against his words, and the way his work consolidated what would, a decade later, become the fields of postcolonial studies and cultural studies. Shohat's presentation then delves into the circulation and reception of his critique of Orientalism as an example of " traveling theory. " In Middle East studies, Said has been criticized as a deficient political scientist or historian or anthropologist , with critics ignoring the central concern of his work: the problem of representation and the necessity of a political critique that is also a cultural critique. In postcolonial studies in Israel, a certain post-Zionist discourse privileged Homi Bhabha's theories of hybridity, which were translated into Hebrew, over Said's not-yet-translated and allegedly binaristic notions of coloniality. In the final moments of the presentation, Shohat reflects on her friendship with Edward Said, remembering his courage in the face of consistent attacks and his willingness to inhabit the ever-uncomfortable space of the worldly yet " out-of-place " intellectual.

Edward Said (1935-2003) is known to the world through his path-reaking work Orientalism. But Orientalism and Said’s other key works can be properly known through an understanding of what he means by ‘secular criticism.’ His clear view of secular criticism is found in his introduction to the 1983 work The World, the Text, and the Critic, which bears the same title ’Secular Criticism’. In this paper I will try to define Said’s view of secular criticisim. Said gave his theory of secular criticism when such postmordernist theories as poststructuralism and deconnstrution were at the zenith of their influence on the both sides of the Atlantic. So, here I will also try to compare and contrast between secular criticism and poststructuralism, deconstruction and other traditional traditional literary criticism and theories.

Abstract: There have been many attempts in recent years to discredit Edward Said's tbesis of tbe "affiliation of knov>/ledge with power" (1997: xlix) by those who argue that Orientalist scholarship represents genuine and accurate knowledge of the Arab/Islamic world. Said's detractors claim that much of Orientalist scholarship has been "sympathetic" to the Orient and is free from any power motive. However, this article will attempt to show how all of these arguments fall apart when put to the test of reality, past and present, in literature. Orientalist scholarship and politics. After all the arguments of Bernard Lewis, Ibn Warraq and think tank and area experts, it is Said's voice of humanism that drowns out all of his dissenters' voices in this Orientalist war of words, which as Said believed, is "richly symptomatic of precisely what is denied" (1985: 91).

The facts, figures and experience of the world have established beyond doubt the impossibility of any given society being perfect, in complete equilibrium. In fact, to use a term popularized by Prof Radhakrishnan, we live in an "uneven world." This gives rise to the need for a sustained and engaged critique of politics, cultures, values and ideas. From time immeorial, intellectuals have been taking leading positions and roles in resisting dominations and countering hegemonic practices. However, in the contemporary world of ever increasing free market forces and consequent conformist values, intellectuals seem to be withdrawing from the world into the narrow alleys of textualities and narratologies, into decontextualized specializations. Edward W. Said has been a constant and consistent critic of this trend, whose life and works strongly resent the "vanishing history" of committed, engaged intellectuals. He works and words constantly reiterate the need for ethical action on the part of the intellectuals. The present paper seeks to engage with certain crucial aspects of the Saidian formulations of and about the intellectuals. An Arab Palestinian working as a professor of literature in an elite American institution, Said was fighting injustice and discrimination at all levels all through. This struggle against his overarching surroundings of power and politics also gets reflected in his deliberations on the role of the intellectuals in an increasingly globalized and conformist world.