Said and Political Theory

 
Said and Political Theory

Jeanne Morefield
In his  poem, “Edward Said: A Contrapuntal Reading,” Mahmoud

Darwish reflected on Said’s intellectual and emotional struggles with
identity, politics, and the fact of living in exile. The poem, written on
the occasion of Said’s death, is an imagined conversation of sorts between
Darwish and Said in which, at one point, the fictional Darwish asks the
fictional Said about a visit to his childhood home in Jerusalem, now
occupied by Israeli Jews. The Said of the poem – Darwish’s Said – explains
that he did not enter the house and, instead, stood at the door, wondering
what the current residents would think of him:
Would they ask:

Who is that prying foreign visitor? And how
could I talk about war and peace
among the victims and the victims’ victims,
without additions, without an interjection?
And would they tell me: There is no place for two dreams
in one bedroom?
I have chosen to begin a chapter on political theory, imperialism, and the

importance of Said’s thought with Darwish’s poem rather than with a
straightforward unpacking of Said’s method because I am interested in
cultivating this approach as a disposition toward critique rather than a
theoretical framework into which we can fit aspects of empire, like puzzle
pieces, and make sense of the whole. Beginning with Darwish’s contra-
puntal reading allows us to back into this disposition through the eyes of
another, waking up to its complexities and contradictions through the to
and fro of dialogue. And it is deeply complex. For instance, Darwish’s
questions about Said’s return to his childhood home and Said’s answers
appear initially to be about the possibility of peaceful cohabitation in
Israel/Palestine. Importantly, however, the Said of the poem doesn’t ask

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Said and Political Theory 
whether it is possible for Jews and Palestinians to coexist – for two dreams
to find a place in one bedroom – because Darwish knew that for Said,
the long, multiethnic history of Palestine obviated the feasibility of such
a future. Rather, the poet’s Said questions whether others – the victims
and the victims’ victims – can imagine this possible world. This latter
question, so evident in the trepidation Said expresses about his reception,
is not only more complicated than the former but also goes straight to the
necessary tensions – between domination and resistance, identity
and narration, history and the present – at the heart of what Said called
counterpoint and the democratic form of humanism that accompanied this
critical vision. These complexities are also precisely what makes a Saidian
approach so potentially valuable for political theorists interested in ques-
tions of empire and imperialism.
I realize full well that suggesting Said might be useful for thinking
about imperialism will no doubt strike anyone outside the deeply
isolationist subfield that is political theory as absurdly obvious. This is
a man whose  book, Orientalism, ignited a scholarly movement
dedicated to the study of imperialism, inaugurated the field of post-
colonial studies, and became for many scholars of comparative litera-
ture, history, cultural studies, and anthropology, a virtual classic learnt
“by osmosis.” Said was also an astonishingly productive scholar and his
work has been the subject of sustained attention for decades by some of
the most well-known scholars of our era. And yet, aside from passing
references, political theorists have largely ignored Said’s writings, a
strange lacunae given that over the last  years, increasing numbers
of them have become interested in imperialism. In opposition to this
trend, I make the case here that political theorists would do well to
embrace Said’s approach because it speaks precisely to the kinds of
analyses political theory does well by pushing theorists toward what
they often avoid: interdisciplinarity and a willingness to engage what
Said called “untidy” modes of inquiry that engage multiple political
visions and identities – multiple dreams – simultaneously. Moreover,
I argue, a Saidian disposition can help bridge what is often an unfortu-
nate gap in political theory scholarship between historical analyses of
imperialism and contemporary critiques of American power. The chap-
ter first touches on the “turn to empire” in political theory, moves to an
analysis of Said’s interdisciplinarity, and concludes – with Darwish – by
reflecting on some of the frustrations and promises of this critical
disposition.
  
Political Theory, Imperialism, and Said

In her important  review essay, Jennifer Pitts notes that political
theory “has come slowly and late to the study of empire,” only turning
its full attention to an area of inquiry that, for decades, has preoccupied
scholars in other disciplines, after September , . While political
theorists may be showing up slowly and late to empire, however, they have
not yet arrived at an appreciation of Said and continue to ignore almost
entirely the work of a man whose influence on the study of imperialism in
nearly every other academic field is incalculable. A scholar of astonishing
breadth, Said wrote about literature, culture, ideology, history, philosophy,
and all these at the same time, as well as dozens of books and articles on the
political question of Palestine and the mechanisms by which Palestinians
were denied “permission to narrate” their own experiences. Indeed, as a
Palestinian exile – constantly negotiating the space between the history of
imperialism, the Palestinian present, and the global impact of America’s
militarism – Said brought an acute sensitivity toward the relationship
between culture, politics, imperialism, and resistance to nearly all his
writings. As Akeel Bilgrami notes in his loving introduction to Humanism
and Democratic Criticism, because of his commitment to Palestinian free-
dom and because politics was so integral to his most important writing,
“Edward Said’s intellectual legacy will be primarily political – not just in
the popular imagination, but also perhaps in the eyes of academic
research.” The centrality of politics to Said’s work makes it all the
more ironic then that the majority of political theorists have remained so
steadfastly immune to his charms.
What accounts for this lack of engagement? In many ways, Said’s critical
disposition runs perfectly counter to the two modes of political theorizing
that have dominated the North American academy for the last  years:
a canon-oriented approach to the history of political thought, on the one
hand, and a normative approach that abstracts questions about justice
from analyses of actual politics and history, on the other. More to
the point, even for theorists interested in questions of empire, Said’s
“nomadic” orientation toward critique – his radical interdisciplinarity,
the expansive palate of genres he investigated, and the breadth of inter-
pretive strategies he employed – simply flies in the face of the subfield’s
general resistance to methodologies and orientations that pull from too
many theoretical approaches at once or appear to lack systematic rigor.
Some of Said’s most important critical interventions regarding the study
of imperialism, however, flow precisely from developing the insights of,
Said and Political Theory 
in his words, “people who are unsystematic.” As he explained, one “cannot
derive a systematic theory” from Antonio Gramsci, Franz Fanon, or
C. L. R. James precisely because they were “involved in culture, in political
struggle” and in the adaptation of conventional disciplines and genres to
the study of politics. And yet, from Said’s perspective, creative engage-
ment with culture and politics was absolutely essential for interrogating a
global phenomenon as culturally and politically complex as imperialism.
He thus cultivated a perspective that straddled what he identified in his
critical evaluation of Frederick Jameson’s work as the “dichotomy between
two kinds of ‘Politics’”: a politics “defined by political theory from Hegel
to Louis Althusser and Ernst Bloch” and a politics “of struggle and power
in the everyday world.” Such an approach is inherently interdisciplinary
and engaged with history in ways that provide neither normative solutions
to political/ethical problems nor the conceptual scaffolding political theor-
ists often desire to explain political phenomena in systematic terms.
Indeed, from the perspective of political theorists interested in conceptual
clarity, Said’s intellectual “nomadism” (as he called it) can seem hopelessly
muddled or, in Iskander and Rustom’s words, “untidy and spatially
fluid.” In addition, because political theorists are often trained to think
through a particular theorist’s mode of inquiry into the world – to provide a
Rawlsian perspective on global justice for instance – following the diverse
theoretical influences that exit and enter through the revolving door of
Said’s prose (from Vico to Foucault, Adorno to Fanon, Auerbach to
Cesaire) can feel like an exhausting form of intellectual whiplash.
In addition, political theory’s avoidance of Said might also be related to
one of the main institutional impediments to its engagement with imperi-
alism in the first place: the relationship of the subdiscipline to political
science. As a field, political science – particularly in North America – not
only segregates thinking about domestic politics and political theory from
international relations but it has also been notoriously reluctant to study
global politics through the lens of imperialism. Indeed, even critics of
American hegemony are loathe to utter the word empire aloud. When
political scientists do analyze the politics of empire, these analyses tend be
couched almost entirely in a state-centric language that views imperialism,
in Michael Doyle’s terms, as “simply the process or policy of establishing
or maintaining an empire.” The parsimony of this definition presents
two problems for scholars interested in how imperialism circulates histor-
ically or in the contemporary world. First, there is nothing simple about
“establishing or maintaining an empire” because the process entails con-
stantly asserting, reasserting, rationalizing, and expanding differences in
  
power and status between the colonizers and the colonized and among the
colonized. To sustain this scalar world, imperialism – as an ideology and
political practice – must function on a number of different registers
simultaneously. Cultivating an intellectual orientation committed to
understanding these complexities thus requires the critic to challenge
political science’s fixation with the state and focus, instead, on unknotting
the tangled set of connections between imperialism and the culture
sustaining it.
Second, and relatedly, a definition of empire or imperialism that does not
consider the dense ideological and cultural assemblage necessary to ration-
alize and naturalize domination cannot adequately grapple with the way
imperialism functions in a putatively postimperial age. In other words, any
definition of imperialism that stops at the level of state control will
necessarily fail to fully account for the means through which the termin-
ologies and institutional structures associated with our contemporary
global order have been determined by former empires. Political theorists
have largely emulated political science’s blind spots in this regard, only
recently and slowly turning their attention to what Pitts calls the “discur-
sive features of empire,” those ideological/cultural/rhetorical practices that
reflect the historical presence of imperial sensibilities in contemporary
American and international discourse but that frequently go unseen or
misidentified because they aren’t couched in explicitly imperialist lan-
guage. Terms such as structural adjustment and development and insti-
tutions like the World Bank mirror what James Tully describes as the
“complex network of unequal relationships of power between the west and
the non-west” that have persisted since the onset of European imperial-
ism. Moreover, Said argued, while it is largely true that direct coloniza-
tion ended in the middle of the twentieth century, “the meaning of
colonial rule was by no means transformed into a settled question,” and
spirited intellectual debates over imperialist practices and their sustaining
ideologies continue unabated within the formerly colonized world.
Imperialism, in this contemporary context, necessarily overflows its defin-
itional floodgates, filling up postcolonial space. Any theoretical approach
wanting to grapple with both the presence of the imperial past and
contemporary imperialist practices has to be able to think in more cap-
acious ways about what the word empire means in the world now.
Said approached imperialism precisely in this spirit as a “constantly
expanding,” “inexorably integrative” ideological formation that buttressed
domination in the past, rationalizes imperial politics in the present, and
renders the impact of the former invisible on the latter. For Said,
Said and Political Theory 
imperialism was/is a dynamic process, ordering the world spatially and
temporally through, first, the discursive and political construction of what
he famously called “imagined geographies,” forms of knowledge and carto-
graphic common sense that naturalize fundamental differences between
the Orient and the West, the colonizing and the colonized. The develop-
ing and the developed. In this sense, Orientalism ’s most profound
innovation was its assertion that understanding how the West came to
dominate the East politically requires a deeper understanding of this
geographic thinking and of the ways the West studied, imagined, quanti-
fied, and described the Orient. Moreover, Said’s inquiry also exposed the
discursive mechanisms through which imperialism orders the world by
telling developmental stories about peoples and places, narrowing the
narrative aperture of history such that alternative accounts of colonization,
precolonial time, and resistance simply disappear and “history” becomes
the history of colonization alone. By this logic, active traces of the
imperial past on the present (including the grotesque inequality of
resources between the Global North and South) appear sui generis,
untethered from a history of imperialism, dispossession, and resource
extraction – the natural order of things.
In essence, for Said, culture “works very effectively to make invisible and
even ‘impossible’ the actual affiliations that exist between the world of ideas
and scholarship, on the one hand, and the world of brute politics, corpor-
ate and state power, and military force on the other.” Rendering such
affiliations visible – writing back to the densely skeined, discursive land-
scape that was and is the relationship between the politics of modern
imperialism and its culture – required, for Said, a commodious intellec-
tual disposition capable of moving between the social/cultural/political
context of colonialism in the past and present and the broad geographic
and military systems that sustain(ed) it. In this sense, Said argued,
the “[W]ork of theory, of criticism, demystification, deconsecration, and
decentralization [is] never finished.” Rather, theory must commit to
exceeding its boundaries in the same way as does imperialism, “to travel,
always to move beyond its confinements, to emigrate, to remain in a sense
in exile.” Such an orientation entailed, first and foremost, a rejection of
specialized disciplinary attachments that produce increasingly narrow
“constituencies and interpretive communities,” reifying and privatizing
the otherwise untidy landscape of history. In an intellectual environment
where academic fields tend to “subdivide and proliferate,” scholars often
fail to perceive the astonishingly complex overlap of the discourses, polit-
ics, and cultural formations buttressing imperialism. Said preferred
  
instead what he called a “worldly” approach to inquiry committed to
reading texts as objects that are “produced and live on in the historical
realm,” always leavened by the “insinuations, the imbrications of power”
and the multiplicity of cultural and political expressions woven into the
imperial experience. Such an approach requires that the critic situate
texts within the whole “economy” of discourses that give empire life and to
expand the boundaries of what counts as “texts” worthy of inquiry to
include, for instance, the rhetorical utterances of public intellectuals, travel
narratives, and educational manuals. Theory must be capacious enough to
travel across areas of expertise, between high and popular culture, while
scholars must be willing to “make connections across lines and barriers.”
Making “connections across lines and barriers” was also fundamental to
an approach Said called counterpoint. Drawing conceptual inspiration from
Western classical music, he described counterpoint as the interplay of
“various themes” with “only a provisional privilege being given to any
particular one.” The “resulting polyphony,” Said argued, cautioned
against approaching the West’s “cultural archive” as the univocal efflux
of one, unsullied source flowing into the world, touching and reshaping
the inert cultures of the non-West along the way. Rather, he maintained, it
is essential to analyze these texts contrapuntally, “with a simultaneous
awareness both of the metropolitan history” narrated by Western authors
and “those other histories against which (and together with which) the
dominating discourse acts.” Reading nineteenth-century British novels
in this manner, for instance, means reading them with an awareness of
how they were shaped by the often-hidden or suppressed presence of the
West Indies or India. Moreover, extracting cultural forms from the
“autonomous enclosures” in which they are usually analyzed and placing
them back into the “dynamic global environment” created by imperialism
required, for Said, that we read Western culture in the context of antic-
olonial revolt and the competing discourses of domination and resistance
within which nationalist and liberationist movements circulate. Such
attention to “the continuity of resistance” requires reframing imperialism
as a multivocal, “contested and joint experience.”
This contrapuntal emphasis played a crucial political role in Said’s
critical vision. On the one hand, reading imperialism for both domination
and resistance disrupts universalizing narratives that locate progress and
“development” in the West alone, reducing the rest of the world to passive
recipients of enlightened discourse. For Said, imperial history is fissured
throughout by “overlapping” experiences of resistance and relationships
forged between participants in protest movements in Africa, India, “and
Said and Political Theory 
elsewhere in the peripheries.” As such, it was simply never the case that
the imperial encounter “pitted an active Western intruder against a supine
or inert non-Western native” because “there was always some form of
active resistance, and in the overwhelming majority of cases, the resistance
finally won out.” On the other hand, Said argued, imagining power
purely through the lens of domination (as he sometimes accused post-
structuralists of doing) allowed critique to draw “a circle around itself” and
eschew the search for political change. By contrast, he understood
“critical practice as a form of resistance” whose goal was to further the
emergence of “non-dominative and non-coercive modes of life and know-
ledge.” Taking his inspiration from Gramsci, Said believed intellectuals
to be uniquely positioned to challenge orthodoxy and dogma, to raise
embarrassing questions for the power elite, and to fight for people and
causes that are perennially forgotten or “swept under the rug.” Moreover,
Said argued, given the global reach of American military, political, and
economic power, intellectuals who benefit from that power have a “par-
ticular responsibility” to analyze the relationship between the United
States and the rest of the world from “within the actuality” of those
relationships, not from the perspective of “detached outside observers.”
Thus, the global fight for justice and against imperialism was, by Said’s
lights, “the functional idiom of the intellectual vocation,” an idiom that
could only be sustained if scholars coupled inquiry into domination with
inquiry into resistance: past, present, and future.
Counterpoint and Humanism

While it is generally agreed that the  publication of Orientalism
provided the inspiration for postcolonial studies as an emerging mode of
inquiry and critique, Said was not, as Rosi Bradioti puts it, “very keen” on
the field that “nonetheless celebrated him as a foundational figure.”
While he shared with postcolonial scholars an enduring interest in the
critique of universal theory and an appreciation for the discursive apparatus
enabling imperialism, he did have two major political complaints about
much postcolonial scholarship. One way to begin unpacking Said’s polit-
ical thought, then, is to examine these moments of departure more closely.
Said’s first objection to postcolonial studies lay in an affiliation he
sometimes observed between postcolonial scholarship and identity politics,
an approach to the “politics of knowledge” that, he argued, often substi-
tuted “approved names” for the kind of contrapuntal theorizing he cher-
ished as an intellectual. Moreover, Said was uncomfortable with what he
  
saw as a similarity between identity politics and nationalism’s tendency
to read domination and resistance through a singular interpretation of
oppression that eliminated multiplicity and hybridity. Fixed approaches
to origins and identity, he argued, imposed “constitutive limitations” on
historical experiences which were actually “polarized, radically uneven”
and “remembered differently,” transforming these experiences into primal,
unhealable wounds. Ultimately, he maintained, lassoing the experiences
of dispossession associated with the historical overlap of the “metropolitan
and ex-colonized worlds” to immutable identities resulted in a “politics of
blame” that vitiated possibilities for solidarity. By contrast, Said took
inspiration from the experience of exile, arguing in a  interview that,
as an exile, “you always bear within yourself a recollection of what you’ve
left behind and what you can remember, and you play it against the
current experience.” From this perspective, he continued, “the notion of
a single identity” becomes especially fraught because it mutes the tensions
and contradictions of the exilic experience, demanding “simple reconcili-
ation” between competing visions of home and identity that, from the
perspective of exile, can never be made to cohere. Said’s own exilic and
generous understanding of identity rejected simple reconciliation and
embraced the “many voices playing off against each other,” insisting on
the need “just to hold them together.”
At yet, at the same time Said argued against fixed identities and a “politics
of blame,” he also resolutely refused to forget the historical and ongoing
forms of imperial domination that shaped the contemporary world. His call
to reject the insistent return of identity politics to fixed and univocal
narratives of imperial oppression thus differs profoundly from the pre-
sentism of many in the foreign policy commentariat who refuse to see the
current global political environment in terms of its imperial past. He took
direct aim at this dangerously bland species of amnesia in ’s “Always on
Top,” wherein he challenged the post–September th trend of nostalgically
praising classical imperialism. How convenient, Said argued, “after years of
degeneration following the white man’s departure, the empires that ruled
Africa and Asia don’t seem quite as bad” to imperial apologists like Niall
Ferguson, pundits who insist that the cessation of formal European rule in
the s implies that the problems faced by residents of the formerly
colonized world today are entirely of their own invention. Said was
troubled by this dismissal of the “enabling rift” between black and white,
colonized and colonizing that was the essence of formal imperialism at its
height, a dismissal that leads (at best) to a form of “just get over it” politics
Said and Political Theory 
and (at worst) to a Ferguson-like neo-imperialism. “Who decides,” Said
demanded to know, “when (and if ) the influence of imperialism ended?”
Additionally, even as he critiqued nationalism and the “politics of
blame,” Said was profoundly sympathetic to the conditions in which
anticolonial nationalism resonated precisely because he was attentive – in
ways Ferguson and his ilk are not – to the relationship between the ongoing
trauma of imperial occupation and the construction of national identity.
Moreover, he was also well aware that his own experience – as an exiled
Palestinian academic at an Ivy League, American university – allowed him
to step back from trauma. As he put it in After the Last Sky: “I write at a
distance. I haven’t experienced the ravages. If I had, possibly there would
be no problem in finding a direct and simple narrative to tell the tale of our
history.” Here Said is both open to the experiences that make sense of
nationalism while still resisting nationalism’s capacity to reduce competing
experiences to a single “plot of a logically unfolding conspiracy against us.”
“Holding” these two perspectives together without feeling compelled to
reconcile them allowed Said to both tell imperial history through lenses
focused on the “enabling rift” of occupation, dispossession, and settler
colonialism as well as on those moments of polyphony and connection that
trouble simplistic nationalist accounts of the present. It is particularly
important, he argued, to hold together these competing visions when
analyzing works of art and culture. For instance, he noted in “Always on
Top,” Kipling’s Kim “is a sympathetic and profound work about India,
but it is informed by the imperial vision just the same.” The real problem,
he continued, “is to keep in mind two ideas that are in many ways
antithetical – the fact of the imperial divide, on the one hand, and the
notion of shared experiences, on the other – without diminishing the force
of either.”
For Said, a criticism that assumed such “holding and crossing over”
between imperialism, postcolonialism, and resistance also assumed a
“common enterprise shared with others,” or, as he put it in his early
defense of Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, a deep awareness that, “although it
contains many spheres, the contemporary world of men and women is one
world.” It is precisely in this commitment to a “common enterprise” that
we find Said’s second major disagreement with much postcolonial schol-
arship. Thus, while the deconstructive impulses of his work resisted
universalizing theories claiming to reconcile all difference – be they Orien-
talist geographies or Enlightenment notions of civilization – Said was also
critical of the tendency he identified in postcolonial studies to abandon the
  
very idea of “humanity” as a unifying principle in the first place. By
contrast, he argued, it was possible “to be critical of Humanism in the
name of Humanism” if, as scholars, we remain aware of the extent to
which this historically Eurocentric conception was used to justify imperi-
alism, civilizational improvement, racism, sexism, settler colonialism, and
so forth. He thus argued for a form of humanist critique that was both
explicitly cosmopolitan and “text-and-language-bound,” attuned to history
while remaining resolutely open “to the emergent voices and currents of
the present, many of them exilic, extraterritorial and unhoused.”
For Said, the key to fostering a humanism capable of escaping Euro-
centrism’s yawning maw – always poised to swallow up difference through
appeals to reason – was to keep its conceptual assumptions narrow. In
other words, rather than nesting his attachment to the category of
“human” in some ideal moral theory, or in a list of human attributes
cobbled together from European high culture, Said was inspired by Vico’s
commitment to the “secular notion that the historical world is made by
men and women and not by God.” For Vico, Said explained, human
beings are fundamentally makers of history and “we know what we make”
or, rather, “we know how to see it from the point of view of its human
maker.” Limiting humanism’s definitional reach to “making history” frees
it from the expansive set of specific requirements attached to Enlighten-
ment conceptions of “reason” or “dignity.” Moreover, understanding
human beings as united by their shared “capacity to make knowledge”
pushes back against the poststructuralist tendency to imagine people as
inescapably bamboozled by power, capable only of “passively, reactively,
and dully” absorbing its weight. Finally, the flip side of this definition –
that we know how to see what we make from the point of view of another
because we understand each other as makers – opens up humanistic
practice to more expansively generative forms of reading and politics.
Said contrasted this approach with the bland universalism found in so
much liberal imperialist thought and policy making. Rather than write
“prescriptive articles for ‘liberals,’ à la Michael Ignatieff, that urge more
destruction and death for distant civilians under the banner of a benign
imperialism,” for instance, Said suggested liberals concerned with foreign
policy would do well “to imagine the person whom you are discussing – in
this case, the person on whom the bombs will fall – reading in your
presence.” Imagining the person on whom the bombs will fall as a reader
and thinker shifts the intellectual authority away from the policy makers at
Harvard, Princeton, or the Council on Foreign Relations, to the person
being discussed. Said’s insistence that we understand human beings first
Said and Political Theory 
and foremost as makers of history acknowledges the person you imagine in
your presence as having alternative histories to tell and – because they are
also readers and therefore interpreters of experience – having different
prescriptions to offer and analyses to relate. Understanding this reading
person as like you and yet as someone who potentially reads/theorizes/
imagines history and the world differently from you, necessarily evokes a
sense of counterpoint: of familiarity and remoteness. Said’s democratic
humanism thus urges the critic to begin thinking about specific events like
the invasion of Iraq, or seemingly irreconcilable conflicts such as in Israel-
Palestine, contrapuntally by looking for “what has been left out” (which
histories, which voices) and then reading these absences against the dom-
inating discourse, “recovering what has been left out of peace processes
that have been determined by the powerful, and then placing that missing
actuality back in the center of things.”
Said modeled this kind of reading in both his scholarly and political
writings. For instance, he argued, a contrapuntal reading of Israel-Palestine
similarly refused to empty the current conflict of its history, specifically, its
imperial history. In The Question of Palestine, he thus combined contem-
porary analysis with a historical critique of Zionist discourse during the
period leading up to the creation of the state of Israel, focusing in
particular on narratives that imagined the future state as emerging from
the nearly empty ruins of an older, Arab Palestine. Said examined the way
this discourse mirrored conceptions crucial to “high European imperial-
ism”; Orientalist ideas of lazy Arabs who were passing into obscurity,
rationalized plans requiring European ingenuity to make the barren desert
bloom, descriptions of Palestine as a virtual terra nullius. The Balfour
Declaration of , in which the British (soon to be the Mandatory
power in Palestine) declared that they viewed “with favor the establish-
ment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” was, Said
argued, similarly imperialist in its logic and execution. Here and in many
of his political writings, Said braided these evolving acts of dispossession,
disclosure, and disappearing into an account of the way Palestinian voices
are rendered invisible in the dominant iteration of whatever “peace pro-
cess” currently consumes world leaders.
Again, however, Said’s exilic commitment to hold together the “polyph-
ony of many voices playing off against each other” rather than resolve them
into a single historical plot meant that the kinds of counternarratives he
routinely told about Palestine were committed to revealing the lived world
of the Palestinian people as a discrete nation without ever essentializing
nationalism. In the wake of the failed Oslo Accords – of which he was
  
tremendously critical – this contrapuntal vision evolved into support for a
politics of “binational” citizenship that did not require either “a diminish-
ing of Jewish life as Jewish life or a surrendering of Palestinian Arabs.”
For Said, however, “real” as opposed to “simple” reconciliation could not
take place in a context in which apartheid and denial structured everyday
life but, rather, required both reciprocal recognition and a commitment to
equality between Palestinians and Jews, as well as a discursive environment
in which the ongoing history of Palestinian dispossession was acknow-
ledged. In contrast to the “prescriptions” of liberal academics like Ignatieff,
Said did not reach his “binational” solution through the imposition of an
ideal theory. Rather, as a scholar who believed humans make and interpret
history and who understood that history produces contrapuntal realities,
Said found his binationalism, in part, in the history of Palestine:
Palestine is and has always been a land of many histories; it is a radical

simplification to think of it as principally or exclusively Jewish or Arab.
While the Jewish presence is longstanding, it is by no means the main
one . . . Palestine is multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious. There is as
little historical justification for homogeneity as there is for notions of
national or ethnic and religious purity today.
A critical engagement with Palestine’s polyphonous history, Said conclu-

ded, allows us to imagine a future in which “real reconciliation” between
Palestinians and Jews is possible, a reconciliation rendered invisible to
liberal pundits who bunker themselves within prescriptive circles of their
own devising. Such an approach requires the critic to step outside of their
circle, look around, and ask: “Who is allowed to narrate this situation?
Whose experiences are obscured by dominant narratives? What forms of
connection are being denied by fixed identities? What practices of resist-
ance have been ignored? What futures remain unseen behind the wall of
modular solutions?” In the end, this humanist attention to the other
reading in your presence – and the contrapuntal critique such attention
generates – not only exposes the provincialism of some ideas but also it
opens our horizons to the broad possibilities of others.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, a Saidian disposition toward imperialism and
politics asks political theorists to do two things at once: resist specific
identity narratives that mute polyphony while challenging universal narra-
tives that obscure historical and contemporary forms of domination. For
Said, humanism was both a “technique of trouble” that disrupts fixed
Said and Political Theory 
identities and an instrument for imagining human comity found in our
shared capacity to make/interpret/read history and in the fact that Western
and non-Western experiences belong together “because they are connected
by imperialism.” Reading history and politics through Saidian lenses
thus demands we restore our analyses of cultural works and political
phenomenon to “their place in the global setting” through an appreciation
“not of some tiny, defensively constituted corner of the world, but of the
large, many-windowed house of human culture as a whole.”
This many-windowed disposition, I argue, deserves the enthusiastic
attention of political theorists because it both allows us to paint richer
accounts of the complex imperial pasts and suggest ways of thinking
through that past to the politics of the present. There is nothing, however,
straightforward or easy about embracing this disposition. What political
theorists will not find in the work of Said is either a well-articulated
method for deconstruction that ends at the moment of disruption or a
conceptual framework providing ideal solutions to political problems. Not
only can this unfinished quality be deeply frustrating, the sheer breadth
of knowledge necessary for writing contrapuntal history is so overwhelm-
ing, but also it’s enough to drive even the most interdisciplinary political
theorist back into the sheltering arms of Kant or Arendt to mull overwell-
contained questions about justice and “the political.” Said’s “method” is
thus neither methodologically complete nor always intellectually coher-
ent and his unremitting insistence on having it all – polyphony and
unity, resistance and solidarity, recognition of the victims and the
victims’ victims – can be exhausting. Even more maddening is Said’s
insistence that “the task” of humanist, contrapuntal inquiry is “consti-
tutively an unending one” that resists conclusions even as it demands we
continue the search for solutions to injustice. Thus, perhaps not
surprisingly, Darwish concludes his poetic ode to Said by similarly
resisting conclusions, imagining Said’s final farewell as both a directive
and a puzzle:
And now, don’t forget:
If I die before you, my will is the impossible.
In the end, it is Said’s impossible will – his refusal to abandon or resolve
opposed visions and experiences but, rather, to just “hold them together” –
that makes this disposition so crucial for approaching the complex, overlap-
ping, ethically charged history and contemporary politics of imperialism.
These are the two dreams in one bedroom and as much as they may fight
to push each other out, Said wouldn’t let either of them go. And neither,
I argue, should we.
  
Notes
 M. Darwish, “Edward Said: A Contrapuntal Reading,” trans. by Mona Anis,
Cultural Critique  (), –.
 Eqbal Ahmad, “Introduction to the  Edition,” in The Pen and the Sword:
Conversations with Edward Said, ed. by David Barsamian (Chicago: Haymar-
ket Press, ), p. .
 See, for instance, the recent collection of essays edited by Rosi Braidotti and
Paul Gilroy, Conflicting Humanities (London: Bloomsbury, ), whose
contributors include Gayatri Spivak, Akeel Bilgrami, and Judith Butler.
 See Jennifer Pitts, “Political Theory of Empire and Imperialism,” Annual
Review of Political Science  (), –.
 Ibid., p. .
 A welcome exception of a book-length treatment of Said by a political theorist
is John Randolph LeBlanc, Edward Said and the Prospects of Peace in Palestine
and Israel (London: Palgrave MacMillan, ).
 Edward Said, “Permission to Narrate,” The Politics of Dispossession (New York:
Vintage Books, ), pp. –.
 Akeel Bilgrami, “Foreword,” Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criti-
cism (New York: Columbia University Press, ), p. ix.
 See John Gunnell’s description of how the history of political thought
is predominantly framed by the discipline in, “Dislocated Rhetoric: The
Anomaly of Political Theory,” Journal of Politics . (), –. The
normative approach is best captured in the work of John Rawls and Ralwsian
liberals since the s.
 Te-hsing Shan, “An Interview with Edward Said (),” Interviews with
Edward W. Said, ed. by Amritjit Singh and Bruce G. Johnson (Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, ), p. .
 Edward Said, “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community,”
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, ), p. .
 Adel Iskander and Hakem Rustom, “Introduction,” Edward Said: A Legacy
of Emancipation and Representation (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, ), p. .
 See, e.g., R. N. Lebow and S. Reich’s argument against American power that
refuses to label that power imperial. Lebow and Reich, Goodbye Hegemony
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ).
 Michael W. Doyle, Empires (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), p. .
 Craig Calhoun, Frederick Cooper, Kevin W. Moore, eds. Lessons of Empire:
Imperial Histories and American Power (New York: New Press, ), p. .
 Pitts, “Political Theory of Empire and Imperialism,” p. .
 John Tully, “Lineages of Contemporary Imperialism” in Lineages of Empire,
ed. by Duncan Kelly (London: Oxford University Press, ), p. .
 Edward Said, “Intellectuals in the Postcolonial World,” Salmagundi /
(), .
Said and Political Theory 
 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, ), p. , p. .
 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, ), pp. –.
 Said, “Intellectuals in the Post-Colonial World,” p. .
 Said, “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community,” p. .
 Said, “Travelling Theory Reconsidered,” in Reflections on Exile and Other
Essays, p. .
 Said, “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Communities,” p. .
 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. .
 Edward Said, “Orientalism  Years Later: Worldly Humanism v. the
Empire-builders,” Counter Punch, , www.counterpunch.org///
/orientalism/.
 Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Vintage Book,
), p. .
 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. .
 Ibid.
 Said, The Pen and the Sword, pp. –.
 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 
 Ibid., p. xii.
 Edward Said, “Travelling Theory” (), The Edward Said Reader (New
York: Vintage, ), p. . Also see Said’s critique of Foucault in “Criti-
cism and the Art of Politics,” in Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with
Edward W. Said, ed. by Gauri Viswanathan (New York: Vintage, ),
p. .
 Said, “The Future of Criticism,” Reflections on Exile, p. .
 Said, Representations of the Intellectual, p. .
 Edward Said, “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors,”
Critical Inquiry . (), –; Said, Culture and Imperialism, –.
 Edward Said, “The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals,” in Nation,
Language, and the Ethics of Translation, ed. by Sandra Bermann and Michael
Woods (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, ), pp. –.
 Bradiotti and Gilroy, “The Contested Post-Humanities,” Conflicting Humani-
ties, .
 Said, “The Politics of Knowledge,” Reflections on Exile, p. .
 Said, “Intellectuals in the Post-Colonial World,” p. .
 Ibid., p. .
 Said, “Criticism, Culture, and Performance,” Power, Politics, and Culture,
p. .
 Edward Said, “Always on Top,” London Review of Books, March , ,
www.lrb.co.uk/v/n/edward-said/always-on-top.
 Edward Said (with Jean Mohr), Under the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (New
York: Columbia University Press, ), p. .
 Ibid.
 Said, “Intellectuals in the Postcolonial World,” ; Said, Humanism and
Democratic Criticism, p. ; Edward Said, “The Satanic Verses and Demo-
cratic Freedoms,” The Black Scholar . (March–April ), – ().
  
 Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, p. .
 Ibid.
 Ibid., pp. –.
 Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, ),
pp. –.
 Ibid., p. .
 See, for instance, Said’s “Permission to Narrate,” pp. –.
 Edward Said, “The One State Solution,” The New York Times Magazine,
January , , www.nytimes.com////magazine/the-one-state-
solution.html?_r=.
 Ibid.
 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. .
 Said, “The Politics of Knowledge,” p. .
 Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, p. .

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 

In his  poem, “Edward Said: A Contrapuntal Reading,” Mahmoud

Would they ask:

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Counterpoint and Humanism

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