BIOGRAPHY: Edward Said a Palestinian exile long resident in New York, has been one of the most influential literary and cultural critics in the Anglophone world. Abdirahman Hussein's ambitious and important book on the man has set the standard by which studies of this essential figure will be measured for a long time to come, writes Conor McCarthy.
Edward Said: Criticism and Society. By Abdirahman A. Hussein. Verso, 340pp. £19
'One must have tradition in oneself," wrote Adorno in the Minima Moralia, "to hate it properly." There could hardly be a better description of Edward Said, a writer at once intensely European yet simultaneously deeply alienated from the European cultural tradition.
Said, a Palestinian exile long resident in New York, has been one of the most influential literary and cultural critics in the Anglophone world over the last quarter century. He is best known in the West as a passionate advocate of the cause of Palestine and, since 1993, as a prescient critic of the Oslo peace process. But he built his reputation as an avant-garde critic in the US in the 1970s and 1980s, one of a handful, such as Jameson and De Man, who rivalled their Continental counterparts - Foucault, Derrida, Habermas, Althusser.
Said has become most associated with an academic subdiscipline variously called post-colonial theory or colonial discourse analysis. This is derived from his most famous book, Orientalism, a brilliant and erudite critique of Western representations of the Middle East since the late 18th century. This book has been so successful, and so controversial that, even now, it dominates most discussion of Said's work.
Not so in Abdirahman Hussein's fascinating study of Said, which places the stress firmly on Beginnings: Intention and Method, an earlier work that combines, in a unique mix, literary criticism and theory, philosophy and history. For Hussein, Beginnings is an investigation of the nature of intellectual consciousness in modernity. Hussein argues that a proper examination of Beginnings reveals Said as a radicalised humanist, profoundly influenced by phenomenology, as evidenced in his early study of Conrad; he has absorbed French structuralist and post-structuralist theory, but is also engaged in a great effort to reconcile this new thinking with the much older Romance philology exemplified by its 20th-century avatars, Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer and E.R. Curtius.
To tax Said with being insufficiently post-structuralist, then, or insufficiently Marxist, is really to miss the point: Said is as indebted to Vico as he is to Foucault, and it has been Vico's emphasis on secular history constructed by human agency, rather than the bleak determinism of the French thinker, that has been most important for Said.
Hussein's originality, then, is to argue that Said's career and interests, often described as "eclectic", are in fact coherent and consistent. At the heart of the work lies a concern with what Said calls "critical consciousness": that mode of worldly intellectual being that Hussein ably demonstrates to have been the ground base for Said's work. This he traces all the way from the analysis of the loneliness and pessimism of Conrad, through the valorisation of Swift and the critique of the institutionalisation of critical theory in the American academy, to the rebarbative recalcitrance of Adorno's embodiment of what Said calls "late style".
Hussein argues that an autobiographical reading of Said's increasing recourse to the German thinker is permissible, given Said's own illness and the ever-grimmer situation in Palestine. Adorno, Said has written, "was the quintessential intellectual, hating all systems . . . with equal distaste", and Said clearly sees in Adorno a model of critical consciousness permanently exiled, always alert, unwilling to accommodate itself or to be accommodated.
That Adorno was partly Jewish only makes the point more strongly for Said, and allows him dialectically to politicise the world of the mandarin intellectual: interviewed by the Israeli elite daily, Ha'aretz, two years ago, he provocatively but perhaps accurately described himself as "the last Jewish intellectual . . . the only true follower of Adorno".
Abdirahman Hussein's ambitious and important book has set the standard by which studies of this essential figure will be measured for a long time to come.
Conor McCarthy teaches English at NUI Maynooth. His Modernisation, Crisis and Culture in Ireland 1969-1992 was published by Four Courts Press in 2000