Acknowledgments
Dedicated to Janet and Ibrahim
I have lectured on Orientalism for a number of years, but most of this book was written in 1975-1976, when I was a fellow at the Stanford Center for Basic Research in Behavioral Sciences, California. At this unique and generous institution, I was fortunate enough to benefit from not only the kindly provided scholarship, but also the help of Joan Warmbruen, Chris Hot, Jane Kielsmeier, Preston Cutler and the center's director, Gardner Lindsay. The list of friends, colleagues and students who have read or viewed part or all of this manuscript is so long that it confuses me. And now the fact that it has finally appeared in the form of a book confuses them too. However, I would like to acknowledge the continued helpful support from Janet and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Noam Chomsky and Roger Owen who went through this project from start to finish. It is also with great gratitude that I acknowledge the fruitful and critical interest of colleagues, friends and students from various places, whose questions and opinions have helped me greatly sharpen this text. Andre Shifrin and Jeanne Morton from the publishing house Pantheon Books were respectively the ideal publisher and editor, they managed to turn the painful (at least for the author) process of preparing a manuscript into an instructive and truly fascinating process. Miriam Said helped me a lot with her research into the early modern history of Orientalist institutions. Above all, her loving support has indeed made most of the work on this book not only joyful, but possible.
New York E. V. S.
September-October 1977
They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented by others.
Karl Marx... 18 Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
The East is a profession.
Benjamin Disraeli... Tancred.
Introduction
After visiting Beirut during the horrific civil war of 1975-1976, a French journalist wrote with sorrow about the ruined downtown area: “It once seemed like… this is the East of Chateaubriand and Nerval” (1). Of course, he is right, especially when you consider that this is a European speaking. The Orient (2) is almost entirely a European invention, since antiquity it has been a repository of romance, exotic creatures, painful and enchanting memories and landscapes, amazing experiences. Now he was disappearing before our eyes, in a certain sense he had already disappeared - his time had passed. It seemed completely inappropriate that the Eastern people in the course of this process could have any interests of their own, that even in the days of Chateaubriand and Nerval they lived here, and now it is they who are in danger. The main thing for this European visitor was his own, European idea of \u200b\u200bthe East and its present fate, and for the journalist and his French readers both these things had a special collective meaning.
For Americans, the East does not evoke such a feeling, since for them the East is primarily associated with the Far East (mainly with China and Japan). Unlike Americans, the French and British - to a lesser extent Germans, Russians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians and Swiss - have a long tradition of what I will refer to in what follows. orientalism, a certain way of communication with the East, based on the special place of the East in the experience of Western Europe. The East is not only Europe's neighbor, but also the location of its largest, richest and oldest colonies; it is the source of European languages \u200b\u200band civilizations, its cultural rival, and one of the deepest and most persistent images of the Other. In addition, the East helped Europe (or the West) to define, based on the principle of contrast, its own image, idea, personality, experience. However, nothing in such an East is purely imaginary. The East is an integral part of the European material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents this part culturally and even ideologically as a kind of discourse with corresponding institutions, vocabulary, scholarly tradition, imagery, doctrines, and even colonial bureaucracies and colonial style. On the contrary, the American way of understanding the East turns out to be much less dense, although our recent Japanese, Korean and Indo-Chinese adventures should now make this image more sober and more realistic. Moreover, America's significantly increased political and economic role in the Middle East (3) now places more serious demands on our understanding of the East.
First, let's do something like a squeeze from Said's own conclusions. This is a bitter infusion; let's dilute it with our own considerations, complementing the picture drawn by the author. Let's get through throughbook - and beyond.
The relationship of the West to the East was established - immediately and forever - in the first and greatest Western history book - Herodotus, writing about the Greco-Persian wars. The set of stamps that define the attitude towards "bearded barbarians in women's dress" has changed very little since then. Nor were they original. Persians are low and selfish; their culture is low and unworthy; they attacked first; if they won, it was only because of their myriad numbers and cunning, while the Greeks won with courage, military training and foresight; Persians are vicious and effeminate, do not know freedom and live in slavery, which they deserve. Absolutely the same set of self-justifications and self-praises, presented in the negative - as a set of insults addressed to a defeated, but not finished off enemy - can be found in any stories about the war. Essentially, it's eternal enemy image... The West (then - the Greek) projected it onto the entire non-Western world, "Asia", the future "East".
However, the same Herodotus has descriptions of travels in the "eastern" - as we would now call them - countries. Here the tone changes: it turns out that in Egypt or Libya there are many interesting curiosities, rarities, riches (wealth is a kind of rarity). However, all these interesting things lie badly- Herodotus and all further travelers in the East always have an intonation that all the curiosities of the barbarians are worse used and are more neglected than among the Greeks. Subsequently, the matter was corrected: the British Museum and other cultural institutions of the West saved many valuable things from Eastern barbarism, from the gold of the pharaohs to the marble of the Parthenon ... Intangible values \u200b\u200b- for example, cultural ones - are also interesting and also desirable ... In general, "Orient" is also eternal loot image.
Now let's "let the gender". The enemy and prey as a whole is female... In any case, in that coordinate system where there is an enemy and prey, this is exactly the case. Thus, the East as a whole acquires feminine features. This is a beauty waiting to be seduced, kidnapped and raped. Of course, she does not admit this - women generally hide their feelings - but a real man (the West) always knows what they really want. Let's not forget about the whip, as Nietzsche advised.
Of course, a woman can and should even be the object of dreams. Unlike a man, who is all given in his fullness at once - he is what he is - in order to know a woman, you need a fantasy. Imagination unwinds endless veils in which she hides her charms. By the way: if the charms are not so pretty, the woman is to blame. Said writes about "oriental romance" - "any direct contact with the real East turned into an ironic commentary on its romantic assessment." The same claim is always put forward against a woman: she must correspond to the ideal that has formed her conqueror in her head, or she will find herself (more precisely, remain) guilty before him - which guilt will take a long time to atone. The East is guilty before the West because it is not what the enthusiastic and greedy gaze of the white man saw it. Therefore, the deeper he delves into the flesh of the East, the less he experiences remorse, even if he had them.
What does the West want to do with the East? Concept colonies- the closest political analogue of the concept concubines(do not forget that "East" in the minds of the West is the land of harems). Strong states have many concubines and receive the relying pleasure. However, Victorian (more precisely, general Western) hypocrisy forces us to disguise legalized promiscuity as something else. For example, under "guardianship", under "education and training", fortunately in the Western tradition - since the time of the same Greeks - these are related things - or under "treatment" (a doctor can hurt a patient).
A separate but noteworthy topic is the dialectics of "freedom" and "culture". The West appropriates for itself both: its sons are brave, because they are free, and at the same time are full of high culture. In short, "culture" usually means Western customs, and "freedom" means freedom from non-Western customs. The downside is the “savagery” of Eastern people (that is, their unfamiliarity or unwillingness to follow Western taboos and worship Western totems) and their “slavery” (that is, following their own customs). 631
Understandably, the right to call their order with good words "freedom" and "culture", and the eastern ones - "savagery" and "slavery" is supported by the Kipling argument - a machine gun: "We have Maxim, but you don't." When the East manages to get its hands on weapons that are superior or comparable to those in the West, these weapons are declared "illegal", "illegal", "criminal." The invasion of Iraq was justified by the fact that Saddam Hussein allegedly tried to acquire atomic and biological weapons. Nothing of the kind was found and could not have been, but the stamps worked flawlessly.
But there is also a secret, pulpy lining of Orientalist discourse - "East" as forbidden temptation... It is "known" that the wild customs of the East make it possible to realize the most secret and sweet desires of a European, squeezed in the grip of public morality. Here a special love for the East arises as an inexhaustible source of pleasure associated primarily with power and sexuality. Nietzsche's whip turns into a delicious carrot. To a young English Victorian officer was for whatgo overseas and fight the natives.
Finally, the last, the most subtle - eastern spirituality... Said walked past figures like Blavatsky or, which should have been closer to him, Gurdjieff. Meanwhile, the activities of these people - as well as the patented Eastern teachers, all these "Sufis" and "gurus" - are extremely important for the West, even ideologically: through the East goes launderingnew ideological and religious developments (in the same sense as they talk about money laundering). Hesse's "pilgrimage to the Land of the East" turns into operations through a spiritual offshore, where the West sells the West another "opium for the people."
Now let's take the telescope. how arranged"Orientalist" East?
There is no need to look at geographic maps - semantics are important here. For Europeans, the East is a complicated world, the gateway to which is the Middle East, primarily the Levant. In the semantic space, it is the intersection point of several systems of prejudice. In particular, the ancient hatred of the destroyed Byzantium lies in the shadow of the European attitude to the Middle East (Said seems to underestimate this circumstance, but in vain). Another shadow is the attitude towards Jews and Judaism (here Said is detailed to the point of boring). The images of a Byzantine and a Jew are thrown onto the "Arab," who, incidentally, also has his own face, the face of an old enemy with whom Jerusalem was not divided.
From this point there are two lines, on the map - down and to the right: Africa and India. There is no doubt that Africa is the East: Egypt, Algeria, Ethiopia, then down to the unknown sources of the Nile. The gradient of change towards the south is run wild: from comparatively civilized Egypt with pyramids and good food to the jungle. The Negro regions are no longer even "East", but "South", that is, an area that is even lower in terms of development than the "East". The side of the world is also important: the eastern coast of Africa is perceived precisely as “eastern” in the Orientalist sense, the West Bank is the kingdom of black darkness, the land of slave traders and slaves, the “South” as such. They converge on the wastelands of the Horn of Africa, where Cecile Rhodes is establishing new "white kingdoms" of South Africa.
The path to the right is the path to India and then to China. Gradient - decrepitude: the Middle East is still relatively young (hence the ambivalence in assessing Islam, which turns out to be either “old” or “new”; Arabs are “old” people professing a “young” religion), India is a ringing piggy bank of millennia, China - something decrepit, decomposed from old age, chewing on vague memories of time immemorial, some kind of "Xia kingdoms" or "Shang Yang". Side - Japan. The Japanese are the opposite of the Arabs: a young people who fell under the rule of an ancient culture. Hence the ease of discharging Japan from "Vostok": the guys changed their minds, stopped doing Chinese things and began to build railways, stuff shells with "shimoza" and fight the Russians (by the way, the latter circumstance in itself is a sign of civilization).
Let's put two points - one on the border of the developed Africa, the other - in the Hokkaido region. Let's draw perpendiculars. They will intersect in a deserted oceanic region with many islands. This is the last point of the "Orientalist" East, the final station: "Polynesian paradise", where under the gentle sun, surrounded by luxurious nature, all carnal desires are beautifully fulfilled. Again, Said does not notice such manifestations of Orientalism as the writings of European anthropologists. Meanwhile, the same works by Margaret Mead about Samoa are typical creations of "Orientalism."
So, there is a closed contour, a frame outlining the "true East". Outside it remains the Horn of Africa and Australia and New Zealand: in essence, the enclaves of Europe. However, in Europe itself there are “orientalized” areas in which the East is “felt”. First, the Balkans, with their Orthodox and Muslim populations and a history of submission to Ottoman rule. Secondly, the southern extremities of Italy and France: Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, balancing on the brink of belonging to Europe - something like "Macedonia", from where Alexander came (Napoleon was born in Corsica). There are states that have experienced Eastern influences (for example, Spain). Finally, there is the huge and terrible East of Europe - that is, we.
For some reason we don’t realize that the very expression “Eastern Europe” sounds unpleasant to the European ear: what does the word “eastern” mean, we have already figured out. In short, "Eastern Europe" is "corrupted Europe", "Europe that became the East." Here it is appropriate to recall Tolkien: orcs are elves mutilated by "torment and witchcraft" ... Further, however, we will not go, although we really want to. Read, say, Larry Niven, "Inventing Eastern Europe" - a book comparable to Said's: the same method, the same quality of work with the material.
The interchange between the academic and more or less imaginative versions of the understanding of Orientalism is ongoing, and since the end of the 18th century it has assumed considerable dimensions, has an orderly - perhaps even regulated - character on both sides. Now I come to a third understanding of Orientalism, somewhat more historically and materially definite than the previous two. Beginning around the end of the 18th century, Orientalism can be considered a corporate institution aimed at communicating with the East - communicating through judgments about it, certain sanctioned views, describing it, mastering and managing it - in short, Orientalism is a Western style of domination. restructuring and exercising power over the East. In order to define Orientalism, I find it useful to turn here to Michel Foucault's notion of discourse as he develops it in The Archeology of Knowledge and Discipline and Punish. My position is that without examining Orientalism as a discourse, it is impossible to understand the highly systematic discipline by which European culture could govern - even produce it - politically, sociologically, ideologically, militarily, scientifically, and even imaginatively in the post-Enlightenment period. ... Moreover, Orientalism held such an authoritative position that, I am sure, no one who writes, thinks about the East, or acts there, could go about his business, regardless of the restrictions imposed on thought and action by Orientalism. In short, because of Orientalism, the East was not (and still is not) a free subject of thought and activity. This does not mean that Orientalism unilaterally determines everything that can be said about the East, rather, it means that there is a whole network of interests that are inevitably affected (and therefore always moreover) whenever it comes to this specific entity called "East". I will try to show how this happens in this book. I will also try to show that European culture has gained in strength and identity by opposing itself to the East as a kind of surrogate and even secret "I".
Historically and culturally, there is a qualitative and quantitative difference between Franco-British participation in the affairs of the East and - before the onset of American domination after World War II - the participation of any other European and Atlantic power. Talking about Orientalism means talking first of all (though not only) about a British and French cultural enterprise, a project that touches upon such diverse areas as the imagination in general, India and the Levant in general, biblical texts and biblical geography, the spice trade, colonial armies and a long tradition of colonial administration, a giant academic corps; countless "experts" and "specialists" in the East, professors, a complex complex of "oriental" ideas (oriental despotism, oriental luxury, cruelty, sensuality), many oriental sects, philosophies and wisdom, adapted for local European needs - the list goes on. or less is infinite. My position is that Orientalism stems from the special closeness that existed between Britain and France on the one hand, and the East on the other, which until the early 19th century really meant only India and the biblical lands. From the beginning of the 19th century until the end of World War II, France and Britain dominated the East and the sphere of Orientalism. After the Second World War, both in the sphere of domination in the East and in the sphere of its understanding, America replaced them. From this proximity, whose dynamism is extremely productive, even if it invariably demonstrates the relatively great strength of the West (England, France or America), most of the texts that I call Orientalist originate.
It is necessary to immediately make a reservation that, despite the significant number of books and authors that I have mentioned, a much larger number of them had to be ignored. For my reasoning, however, neither an exhaustive list of Oriental-related texts nor a clearly delineated list of texts, authors or ideas, which together form the canon of Orientalism, is not so important. Instead, I will proceed from a different methodological alternative - one whose backbone is, in a sense, a set of historical generalizations that I have already noted in this Introduction - and this is what I want to talk about in more detail now.
I started with the assumption that the East is not an inert fact of nature. He is not easy there is, as well as the West itself. We should take Vico's profound observation seriously that people make their own history, and what they can learn depends on what they can do - and extend it to geography, since both geographical and cultural entities ( not to mention historical) - such as individual locations, regions, geographic sectors such as "West" and "East" - are man-made. And therefore, just like the West itself, the East is an idea that has a history and tradition of thinking, a figurative line and its own vocabulary, which determined their reality and presence in the West and for the West. Thus, these two geographic entities support and reflect each other to a certain extent.
Having made such a statement, we will have to expand it into a number of well-founded reservations. The first is that it would be wrong to assume that the East is essentially idea, or creation that has nothing to do with reality. When Disraeli says in his novel Tancred that the East is a profession, he means that an interest in the East will become an all-consuming passion for brilliant young Westerners. It would be wrong to understand him as if for a man of the West, the East is only profession. There were before (and still are) cultures and nations that are spatially located in the East, and their life, history and customs constitute a gross reality - obviously greater than anything that could be said about them in the West. On this point, our study of Orientalism has little to add, except to acknowledge it explicitly. However, the phenomenon of Orientalism in the form in which it will be discussed here is associated not so much with the correspondence between Orientalism and the East, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its views on the East (East as a profession), in spite of and in addition to any correspondence or its absence with the "real" East. My position is that Disraeli's statement about the East refers primarily to that man-made coherence, to that ordered set of ideas that seems to be the most important in relation to the East, and not simply, in the words of Wallace Stephen, its existence.
The second caveat is that these ideas, culture and history cannot be understood in any serious way without considering their strength, or more precisely, the configuration of power. To believe that the East is man-made - or, as I say, "orientalized" - and at the same time to believe that this happened only by virtue of the laws of the imagination, is to be completely insincere. The relationship between the West and the East is the relationship of strength, domination, various degrees of complex hegemony, which is quite accurately reflected in the title of KM Panikkar's classic work Asia and the Dominance of the West. The East underwent "orientalization" not only because its "oriental" character was revealed in all those senses that were considered a common place in Europe in the mid-19th century, but also because its could be done "oriental" (that is, he was forced to be so). So, for example, one can hardly agree that Flaubert's meeting with an Egyptian courtesan set the model of an oriental woman that has received wide circulation: she never speaks about herself, never betrays her emotions, presence or history. is he spoke for her and represented her. He is a foreigner, a relatively well-to-do man. Such were the historical circumstances of domination that they not only allowed him to possess Kuchuk Khanem physically, but also to speak for her and tell readers in what sense she was a "typically Eastern" woman. My position is that Flaubert's situation of strength in relation to Kuchuk Hanem is not at all an isolated, isolated case. It only aptly symbolizes the scheme of the distribution of power between East and West and the discourse about the East, which Kuchuk Khanem gave the opportunity to manifest.
An evil, but fundamental book for entering the world of the Middle East, which leaves no room for traditional European views of the region. Arab American Edward Wadi Said lived between two worlds and therefore was able to see how the ideas about the culture and history of Islam are distorted in the political consciousness of Western civilization. "Orientalism" tells how the culture of domination and the myth of the deserted East, incapable of development, were created. Said's work radically changes the lens of vision to a situation that is mired in a vicious circle of hatred and violence.
Acknowledgments
Dedicated to Janet and Ibrahim
I have lectured on Orientalism for a number of years, but most of this book was written in 1975-1976, when I was a fellow at the Stanford Center for Basic Research in Behavioral Sciences, California. At this unique and generous institution, I was fortunate enough to benefit from not only the kindly provided scholarship, but also the help of Joan Warmbruen, Chris Hot, Jane Kielsmeier, Preston Cutler and the center's director, Gardner Lindsay. The list of friends, colleagues and students who have read or viewed part or all of this manuscript is so long that it confuses me. And now the fact that it has finally appeared in the form of a book confuses them too. However, I would like to acknowledge the continued helpful support from Janet and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Noam Chomsky and Roger Owen who went through this project from start to finish. It is also with great gratitude that I acknowledge the fruitful and critical interest of colleagues, friends and students from various places, whose questions and opinions have helped me greatly sharpen this text. Andre Shifrin and Jeanne Morton from the publishing house Pantheon Books were respectively the ideal publisher and editor, they managed to turn the painful (at least for the author) process of preparing a manuscript into an instructive and truly fascinating process. Miriam Said helped me a lot with her research into the early modern history of Orientalist institutions. Above all, her loving support has indeed made most of the work on this book not only joyful, but possible.
New York E. V. S.
September-October 1977
They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented by others.
Karl Marx... 18 Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
The East is a profession.
Benjamin Disraeli... Tancred.
Introduction
After visiting Beirut during the horrific civil war of 1975-1976, a French journalist wrote with grief about the ruined downtown area: “It once seemed like… this is the East of Chateaubriand and Nerval” (1). Of course, he is right, especially when you consider that this is a European speaking. The Orient (2) is almost entirely a European invention, since antiquity it has been a repository of romance, exotic creatures, painful and enchanting memories and landscapes, and amazing experiences. Now he was disappearing before our eyes, in a certain sense he had already disappeared - his time had passed. It seemed completely inappropriate that Eastern people in the course of this process could have any interests of their own, that even in the days of Chateaubriand and Nerval they lived here, and now it is they who are in danger. The main thing for this European visitor was his own, European idea of \u200b\u200bthe East and its present fate, and for the journalist and his French readers both these things had a special collective meaning.
For Americans, the East does not evoke such a feeling, since for them the East is primarily associated with the Far East (mainly with China and Japan). Unlike Americans, the French and British - to a lesser extent Germans, Russians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians and Swiss - have a long tradition of what I will refer to in what follows. orientalism, a certain way of communication with the East, based on the special place of the East in the experience of Western Europe. The East is not only Europe's neighbor, but also the location of its largest, richest and oldest colonies; it is the source of European languages \u200b\u200band civilizations, its cultural rival, and one of the deepest and most persistent images of the Other. In addition, the East helped Europe (or the West) to define, based on the principle of contrast, its own image, idea, personality, experience. However, nothing in such an East is purely imaginary. The East is an integral part of the European material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents this part culturally and even ideologically as a kind of discourse with corresponding institutions, vocabulary, scholarly tradition, imagery, doctrines, and even colonial bureaucracies and colonial style. On the contrary, the American way of understanding the East turns out to be much less dense, although our recent Japanese, Korean and Indo-Chinese adventures should now make this image more sober and more realistic. Moreover, America's significantly increased political and economic role in the Middle East (3) now places more serious demands on our understanding of the East.
It will become clear to the reader (and I will try to clarify this as you read on) that by Orientalism I mean several things, all of which, in my opinion, are interrelated. The academic definition of Orientalism is most readily accepted. Indeed, this label is still used in some academic institutions. Anyone who teaches the East, writes about it, or studies it - and this applies to anthropologists, sociologists, historians or philologists - whether in its general or particular aspects, turns out to be an Orientalist, and what he / she does is this is Orientalism. However, today experts prefer the terms "Oriental studies" or "area studies" to him, both because of its too general and vague nature, and because it is associated with the arrogant administrative attitude of European colonialism of the XIX - early XX century. Nevertheless, books are written about the "East" and congresses are held, where Orientalists of the new or old model act as the main authorities. The fact is that even if it is not in its former form, Orientalism continues to live in an academic environment, in doctrines and dissertations about the East and the people of the East.
In addition to this academic tradition, whose fates, transmigration, specialization and transfers were also partly the subject of this study, there is also Orientalism in a broader sense. Orientalism is a style of thinking based on an ontological and epistemological distinction between the "East" and (almost always) the "West". So a significant proportion of authors, including poets, writers, philosophers, theorists, political scientists, economists and imperial administrators, have adopted this basic distinction between East and West as a starting point for their theories, poems, novels, social descriptions and political calculations regarding the East. its peoples, customs, "mind", fate, etc. Such Orientalism contains, say, Aeschylus and Victor Hugo, Dante and Karl Marx. Below, I will touch upon the methodological problems that we face in such a broadly defined "field" as this.
Edward W. Said. Orientalism. Western concepts of the East. SPb .: Russian Mip, 2006 / Per. from English. A. V. Govorunova. 637 p.
The monograph by Edward Wadi Said (1935-2003), written in 1978, but only recently translated into Russian, over the years has not lost either its relevance or fascination. This is the most famous work of the author, who was born in the family of a prominent Arab businessman in Jerusalem, educated in Egypt and the United States, and had a brilliant academic career. Said defended his doctoral dissertation at the elite Harvard, began teaching at the prestigious Columbia University in New York, here he also wrote his first book about the British writer of Polish origin Joseph Konrad, and then another - a study on the novels of Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann. In 1977 he received the title of Professor of English Literature and Comparative Literature. By the end of his life, Said was a member of several academies and scientific societies, holder of honorary academic titles and awards, a welcome guest of universities around the world.
However, it was not his academic achievements that made Said a world celebrity - his interests spilled over into literary science quite early. In the short span of the Six Day War, Said experienced an internal coup. A sophisticated connoisseur of classical music, polyglot and cosmopolitan, who long ago severed ties with the cities of his birth and youth, Jerusalem and Cairo, after Israel's seizure of the Palestinian territories, he felt like a “Palestinian refugee”. The nature of this awakened sense of solidarity with the Palestinians was quite rational.
In his biographical notes, Said recalled with horror how his father sent him to a Lebanese village for the summer, so that his son, having lived the life of a peasant boy, could touch his family roots, and personally felt that he belonged to the Arab people. A refined urban boy, a student at an English college in Cairo, painfully endured the dirt of the Arab countryside, the savagery of local customs and the hard boredom of peasant labor. By 1967, Said had already spent 16 years in America, practically his entire adult life. This means that the transformation of the son of American civilization into an Arab-Palestinian was the result of a conscious intellectual choice.
Said began to take an active part in politics, became one of the leaders of the Palestinian National Council (the governing body of the Palestine Liberation Organization), collaborated with the main Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, in 1988 participated in the preparation of the Council's declaration, which softened the most radical formulations of the Palestinian Charter and opened the way to peace negotiations with Israel. In 1991, due to differences with Arafat, Said withdrew from the PNC - this happened during the lengthy negotiations between Palestine and Israel, as a result of which, in 1993, the Oslo-1 Agreement was finally adopted. But long before Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the document, Said convinced Arafat that such an agreement would only postpone the formation of an independent state, and that Palestine was giving up positions. Said's radical attitude was out of place. And in the end Said preferred the role of a sarcastic commentator of events to participation in practical politics. He has consistently spoken out on Arab-Israeli topics in print, both in English, French and Arabic. Towards the end of his life, he managed, for example, to harshly criticize the US president for the war in Iraq.
So, the author of a book about "Western concepts of the East", about the bias of Eastern studies of European science - is not just an interested person, but also the most biased person. A Konrad specialist, literary theorist, a scientist who had never been an orientalist, he became one due to biographical circumstances.
The key concept of the treatise is included in the title - "orientalism". Said saturates it with additional meanings not included in its dictionary meaning. The researcher calls "Orientalism" not only Oriental studies, but also, first, the "style of thinking" of Western intellectuals, based on the "ontological and epistemological distinction" between East and West. Secondly, the domination of the West over the East through a certain discursive practice.
Said proposes to analyze Orientalism as a discourse, following Michel Foucault in understanding the term (a set of speech practices that create the objects they talk about), since without studying the discourse of Orientalism, Said believes, it is impossible to understand how “European culture could rule the East - even to produce it - politically, sociologically, ideologically, militarily and scientifically, and even imaginatively in the period after the Enlightenment ”(the tongue-tied translation of A. V. Govorunov should not be attributed to the author of the monograph).
"Europe speaks for the East", starting from the time of Aeschylus, recalls Said, the ancient Greek tragedian, who in the play "Persians" "represents Asia, makes it speak through the mouth of the elderly Persian queen, mother of Xerxes." Aeschylus animates and represents "a silent and dangerous space that lies beyond familiar boundaries." The key word here, of course, is “dangerous” - from the very first pages of the history of the Western “representation” of the East, his image is invariably endowed with the features of a “cunning and insinuating enemy”.
In other words, the history of the comprehension of Asia comes down to the West inventing its “own” East, “its” Eastern people, culture, universe, unfolded in time colonization and subjugation of a frightening “alien”, but not cognition and comprehension of this alien. Consequently, European ideas about the East - Eastern luxury, Eastern cruelty, sensuality, despotism, as well as romantic exaltation about Eastern exoticism, naturalness, nature - are nothing more than a complex set of myths and representations, a "dogmatic dream" generated by political interests. Europe and America in the East and contributing to the domination of the West over the East. In a word, orientalism is "the extension of geopolitical consciousness to aesthetic, humanitarian, economic, sociological, historical and philological texts."
The most disturbing thing, says Said, is that Europeans and Americans have become prisoners of Orientalism, which has turned into "a filter through which the East penetrated into Western consciousness." As a result, we are not dealing with the real, but with the "orientalized" East.
Said proves these propositions on the basis of extensive historical and literary material. Touching upon the ideas of classical Greece about the East, Said then examines the stages of the "orientalization" of the East step by step: he describes the image of Islam that developed in the Christian Middle Ages, analyzes the dictionary of the French orientalist d "Erbelo" Oriental Library "(1651), studies and translations of the 18th century enlighteners, in detail dwells on the history of the conquest of Egypt by Napoleon and the construction of the Suez Canal, abundantly quoting the novels, poems and "travels" of Goethe, Hugo, Nerval, Flaubert, Scott, Byron, Alfred de Vigny, Eliot, Gauthier, Forster, and then the works of Orientalists and the statements of politicians XX century, Said does not recall that it was the fascination with the East of the romantics that became the impetus for the development of oriental studies, that it was the Western scientists who discovered the Eastern culture not only to Europe, but also to the East itself.Archaeological excavations of the 19th and 20th centuries on the territory of present-day Palestine and subsequent scientific discoveries - decoding of cuneiform, for example, - were made were excluded flax by Europeans. Said remains adamant: the “orientalization” of the East continues, the mental matrices that took shape in medieval Europe, based on the premise that an abyss lies between East and West, are still in effect.
And here Said's revelatory pathos is broken against the reality of modern academic life. Said is well aware that scientists who could not only describe (as he himself did in his book) the history of misunderstanding of the East, but capture the real, "empirical" East, finally break all templates, dispel Eastern myths about harems and insidious tyrants born of a "white man" - such scientists do not exist in the world. Such dispassionate researchers simply have nowhere to come from. All scientific centers for Oriental studies are located in universities in Europe and America, all major journals on Arabic studies are published there, and therefore even a researcher
of oriental origin, vitally interested in an adequate study of the East, having been educated at an American university, he will involuntarily become a confessor of Orientalism.
In fact, Said himself, a fierce opponent of Orientalism, unwittingly found himself on the field, which he stomps so angrily with his feet. In all catalogs, Said's work is located in the "Orientalism" section, it is designed for a Western audience, and it uses the tools of Western scientists who prefer "interdisciplinary" research to "pure" sciences. It is characteristic that, carefully describing the "mythical East", Said is limited to that, without even hinting at what the real East looks like. And it would be difficult to expect realistic ideas from a person who left his homeland in his youth. This biographical circumstance gave rise to accusations of imposture on Said: according to many, he should not have represented the interests of the Palestinians, since he had not lived in Palestine for too long. Others, on the contrary, considered Said's Arab origin an obstacle on the path of balanced scientific analysis: the "hot oriental man" could not objectively judge the development of oriental studies.
Said's book quite seriously disturbed academic thought and gave rise to intense controversy, partly continuing to this day. Said's opponents emphasized that, focusing on the studies of French and English Orientalists, the scientist ignored the work of German orientalists (who had a noticeable influence in oriental studies of the 19th century), as well as Italian and Hungarian ones - in a word, those who lived in states whose foreign policy was not directly related to the establishment of control in the East - wrote about this Roger Owen, Robert Irwin and others. Albert Hurani pointed out that Said underestimated the objectivity of scientific knowledge and in vain ascribed "orientalism" not only to politicians and poets, but also to orientalists. One of Said's most persistent critics, historian and expert on the Middle East, Bernard Lewis, wrote that Said's attempt to pass off the Middle East (without Turkey, Persia, and Israel) as "the East in general" is grotesque. In the afterword to the new edition of the 1995 book, published in the Russian edition, Said responded to these attacks - we refer the reader to the final part of his work, which has become one of the most cited in Oriental studies and has long been recognized as a classic in the field of "postcolonial studies." Said has an army of followers in Western universities, at the same time, his book gained fame not only in a narrow academic environment, in the United States and several European countries "Orientalism" remained an intellectual bestseller for many years.
In Russia, Said's book, translated into Russian with a delay of 18 years, obviously does not threaten such a fate. The problem of the "Other" and European narcissism is not the favorite topic of Russian intellectuals; It is significant that the Russian media greeted Said's death in 2003 with total silence. As political scientist Vladimir Malakhov rightly noted in an obituary dedicated to Edward Said, the mystery of scandalous ignorance of the event "should be sought not in the provincialism of our audience, but in its specific insensitivity to certain subjects."
Washbrook A. Orients and Occidents: Colonial Discourse Theory and the Historiography of the British Empire // Historiography. Vol. 5 of The Oxford History of the British Empire.
Owen R. The musterious orient // Monthly Review. 1979. Vol. 31. No. 4; Irwin R. For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies. London: Penguin, 2003.
Hourani A. The road to Morocco / Ed. by Robert L. Brubaker "Contemporary Issues Criticism". Yale Research Company, 1984.
