Second Thoughts on Edward W. Said
William David Hart
September 4, 2025
2025 is the twenty-fifth anniversary year of the publication of my first book, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2000). It is part of the series Cambridge Studies in Religion and Critical Thought 8, edited by Nicholas Wolterstorff, Wayne Proudfoot, and Jeffrey Stout. In The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), Said distinguishes between religious criticism and secular criticism. Simply put, religious criticism refers to a dogmatic and obscurantist mode of analysis that refuse to consider unfavorable arguments. Secular criticism, in contrast, puts its claims at risk by opening itself to criticism and revision. Intrigued by this distinction, I turned the tables and used it to critique significant portions of Said heterogenous work: from his literary criticism to Orientalism (1978), his most influential contribution to high theory, to his work as an advocate of the Palestinian people and as a public intellectual.
When I began my PhD studies in 1989, the era of high theory was in decline but Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida still dominated the discourse. It seemed necessary to acquire jargon literacy in poststructuralist and postmodernist theory. One got caught-up in debates that no longer seem compelling. Within these swirling currents, graduate students felt that they had to make a choice. I chose Foucault and under the influence of his Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) and his non-Nietzschean genealogies, I approached religion as a discursive formation that produces an archive, themes, objects, and subject positions. This fit well, I thought, with Said’s use of “religious” and “secular” as all-purpose metaphors for enlightened and non-enlightened modes of inquiry. In addition to this discursive concept of religion, I also relied heavily on Emile Durkheim’s social-anthropological approach to religion, especially as filtered through Ernest Becker’s Kierkegaardian-inflected psychoanalytic anthropology. Meanwhile, I had come under the influence of the Princeton pragmatists—Cornel West, Jeffrey Stout, and Richard Rorty—whose views were sometimes compatible, sometimes incompatible with my working theory of religion. From this potpourri of influences and some that I will not enumerate, I approached Said’s work.
In retrospect, I would revise some claims. These claims circle Said’s most influential text, Orientalism, which seeded the ground for a discursive formation called postcolonial critique. When it comes to Said’s use of the Marxist tradition, I was wrong and Aijaz Ahmad was right. In my effort to defend Said against what now strikes me as a compelling critique, I was too dogmatic, too dismissive. My language was intemperate: mea culpa. I now regard Said’s jaundiced reading of Marx and the Marxist tradition as his chief deficiency as a critic. Said’s critics came at him from both Marxist and Foucauldian directions. If Ahmad rightly defended Marx against Said’s charge that he was an Orientalist, then James Clifford criticized Said for his incongruous marriage of Foucault’s anonymous discourses with an argument for the romantic (creative) agency of the individual author. In theorizing Orientalism, Said larded Foucault’s austere discursive formations with romance, with his high humanist regard for specific authors. I defend Said by arguing that discursive formations are not as austere as Foucauldian critics claim. After all, Foucault makes his own limited argument in favor of the author with his concept of founders of discursivity. What are these founders if not authorizing authors, “authorial cuts” within the otherwise anonymity of discursive formations? In any event, the value of Said’s paradoxical approach of combining anonymity and authorial agency is practical rather than logical; it lies in the power to illuminate and not in fidelity to Foucault’s analysis.
Clifford’s critique was buttressed by Paul Bove who also criticized Said from the poststructuralist left. I may have been too polemical in my remarks on Bove’s criticism of Said’s use of Foucault’s genealogical method, but I think that the substance is correct. There is a world of difference between Foucault’s genealogies and those of Nietzsche, which are pretty much everything that Foucault says genealogy is not. Foucault displaces Nietzsche’s ad hominem, black and white, rank-order-driven genealogical method with his own. I do not claim that Nietzsche’s genealogies are better, only that they are different. The conflation of Nietzschean and Foucauldian genealogies remains a minor scandal in too much of the scholarship. I’m sure that I will offend when I say that so-called left-Nietzscheanism is an error.
Methodologically, I applied the tools of religious studies to Said’s English language body of work. This was not the first time that a scholar had used these tools to explicate aspects of culture and society that are ostensibly nonreligious. Said was a self-described secular humanist and his work was ostensibly nonreligious. And yet, he could not resist distinguishing between religious and secular approaches to his own vocation as a critic. This seduction is on display in his trenchant book review essay—“Michael Walzer’s ‘Exodus and Revolution’: a Canaanite Reading” (1986). He harshly criticizes Walzer’s claim that the Exodus story in the Hebrew Bible is a paradigm for revolutionary politics. Taking Said’s own categories at face value, I engage in an internal critique of his critical apparatus, especially as displayed in Orientalism and The World, the Text, and the Critic, but also in scattered comments. I argue that Said Orientalizes religion. He does to religion what orientalists do to Asia and the Middle East. He mummifies and essentializes religion when he associates it principally if not solely with its worst features. He primitivizes religion by placing it within a temporality that is not contemporaneous with Enlightened modernity. Religion is irremediably dogmatic. Religion can only be atavistic. A monstrous sign from a time—of pitchforks, torches, and witch-burning, of violently-enforced conformity and groupthink—we have rightfully left behind. I think now as I did then that Said is wrong.
I first engaged Said's work thirty-five years ago, which eventually resulted in a dissertation and then a book. The theoretical controversies and debates that captured my attention then, now seem secondary to Said’s achievements. While fastidiousness is essential to scholarly health, neither mine nor that of others discounts Said’s brilliance as intellectual, critic, and freedom-fighter. In After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986), Said offers elegiac reflections on dispossession, occupation, and exile. At a time when the state of Israel is perpetrating genocide in Gaza, we can only imagine what Said would write if he were still alive. More than ever, we need Said’s eloquent, elegant, and urgent voice, his courageous witness and rock-throwing solidarity with those resisting the occupation.