Edward W Said as Critical Intellectual, Liam O Ruairc, Scholars Press, 2020
Since his death in 2003, the political and theoretical contributions of Palestinian intellectual Edward Said have preoccupied many academics and activists keen to understand his legacy. Spanning decades of critically engaged thought, allied to fighting for a Palestinian narrative on the world stage, the significance of Said’s work has eluded many who call themselves Marxists. But as Liam O Ruairc shows in this concise and well-organised introduction, the internationalist and confrontational spirit wielded by Said offers us vital tools to deepen our analysis of imperialism, and for understanding the crisis and opportunity presented by the present phase of Palestinian struggle.
Coming from a wealthy family in urban Palestine, Said later reflected on his ‘out of place’ position in the world, whether in exile circles in Egypt after the 1948 Nakba or in elite schooling and academia in the US. Palestine had been ‘a place I took for granted’ and had a remote existence until Israel’s 1967 war of colonisation and the re-emergence of the Palestinian liberation movement had a pivotal effect on many of his generation. Like many others:
‘I had become much more conscious than before of Palestinians as a people sharing a lot in common with the Vietnamese, Cubans, South Africans, Angolans, and others in the Third World struggling for national liberation… we modelled ourselves on the Vietnamese people, whose resistance to US intervention seemed exactly what we should undertake.’
In this context Said would develop his most influential works, including Orientalism (1978) and The Question of Palestine (1979). Setting out to show the relevance of Said’s work to the problems faced in today’s world, O Ruairc argues that this linking of philosophy, politics and aesthetics offers a vital emancipatory perspective. Exploring the main themes recurring through books, essays, articles and public speaking, the writer finds in speaking ‘truth in the face of power’ a kind of intellectual activism that fiercely criticises modern tendencies towards detached individualism, identity-focus or academia devoid of action. For Said, the role of the intellectual meant truth and critique, even of those whose frameworks he borrowed. Though he drew on French philosopher Michel Foucault, for example, he opposed him politically, as a figure rejecting class definitions of power and taking on a ‘passive and sterile view.’
For O Ruairc, Said’s interventions in academic worlds were shaped by an activist vision:
‘Said was a public educator first because he believed education to be a constitutive element of the public sphere and second because he saw that sphere to be seriously at risk through fragmentation and privatisation.’
This quest for democratic truths also led Said towards one of his most enduring legacies, in his scathing assessment of the 1993 Oslo accords and ‘peace process,’ amounting to a ‘Palestinian Versailles,’ with a dictatorial ‘Vichy government’ in Ramallah, totally dependent on Zionism and imperialism. Fearing the popularity of this rejectionist message, Said’s books were banned under then PLO leader Yasser Arafat. This role is explored in passing here but forms an important part of O Ruairc’s book Peace or Pacification (2019), on the Oslo-inspired ‘peace’ adopted in the British occupied North of Ireland.
A background to Said’s post-Oslo position can be found in his writings on the cultural phenomena accompanying the imperialist plunder of the world, where he saw imperialism as ‘the major, I would say determining, political horizon of modern Western culture’. In Orientalism, Said had turned his radar towards how European empires had represented the Islamic ‘East,’ during waves of conquest. Orientalism, the static depiction of Arab and Muslim peoples by European culture, was ‘a discursive mechanism by which the West produced and reproduced its domination’. Elsewhere Said clarifies, ‘It is the official culture itself, not just media distortions, which has complicity.’ Literary works were a primary mode for ‘fortifying’ imperialism. At the same time, Said found the seeds of an alternative, citing in particular the works of Irish anti-imperialist poet WB Yeats, and concluding:
‘Just as culture may predispose and actively prepare one society for the overseas domination of another, it may also prepare that society to relinquish or modify the idea of overseas domination.’
Though Said’s understanding would propel his attack on orientalist discourse over ‘terrorism,’ including during Zionist wars on Lebanon and US and British-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, his conceptualisation of imperialism did not draw on Lenin’s theoretical foundations. This point – and Said’s inclusion of Marx in a critique of 19th Century orientalist representations – led to fierce debate among Arab Marxists. For Syrian communist Sadik Jalal al-’Azm, Said’s analysis had been upside down in seeing orientalism as preceding imperialism. O Ruairc narrates these debates by pointing out the contradictions of the Foucauldian view of knowledge as giving power: ‘a shift from a materialist explanation to a culturalist one.’
At the same time, Said’s work draws heavily on Marx, whom he credited with a ‘methodological revolution’ for critical consciousness, and Said found common cause with the revolutionary writings of Franz Fanon and Georg Lukacs. While debates over Orientalism raged, Said’s focus became more concrete, defending the Palestinian revolution and offering withering assessments of the self-styled ‘academic Marxists’ who refused to take a political stand. He powerfully took down the ‘Western Marxism’ of the Frankfurt School, pointing to their silence on anti-imperialist resistance and their rejection of the ‘agitational force’ and ‘movement’ that formed the essence of Marxist thought. Figures like Frederick Jameson and Theodor Adorno had ‘given up the real game, which is communication with actual people and communities.’ Said’s concern was building a political movement around the ‘insurrectionary consciousness’ he found in the Marxism of Lukacs in particular.
Said’s early critique of identity politics showed that identities ‘are no more than starting-points,’ and he strongly opposed the idea that ‘only women can understand feminine experience, only Jews can understand Jewish suffering, only formerly colonial subjects can understand colonial experience.’ Seeing the deconstruction of ‘identity’ as ‘a political and moral imperative,’ Said’s reading of figures like Trinidadian socialist CLR James alongside his assessment of the orientalist cultures of imperialism led him to internationalist conclusions. For James:
‘No race possesses the monopoly of beauty, of intelligence, of force, and there is a place for all at the rendezvous of victory.’
Though he didn’t cite Lenin – or the political works of Palestinian fighter Ghassan Kanafani – the explanations of nationalism found in Said’s writing show similarities to these Marxist thinkers. For Said, the Palestinian struggle represented a nationalism of the oppressed, distinguished from ‘triumphant,’ ‘ethnocentric’ versions found in oppressor nations. Opposing the racist power structure at the heart of these forms of national sentiment, Said wrote:
‘Defensive nationalism, movements of the weak and oppressed, I very much support. One has to distinguish between types of nationalism and between phases. At the heart of many nationalist movements in the phase of decolonization, there was a critique of nationalism, as in Frantz Fanon, for example. It said, on the one hand we need nationalism; but we must also realize that it’s never sufficient.’
The insufficiency of bourgeois nationalism was seen in the results of the post-intifada ‘peace deal’ which Said vigorously opposed, writing against the ‘security’ collaboration of the PA with Israeli colonisation. O Ruairc draws on his study of Irish anti-imperialist struggle to point out that a century before Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993) was published, ‘James Connolly, Ireland’s greatest Marxist thinker, had already anticipated Said’s argument.’ Connolly had written that defeating the British occupation and hoisting the green flag in Dublin would be in vain without the organisation of a socialist republic.
There remains much to debate about the legacy of Edward Said and, as O Ruairc shows, his theoretical and political contributions sparked intense discussion among revolutionaries and activists in their time. More perniciously, the enemies of the Palestinian liberation movement have set out to destroy this legacy, not limited to infamous right wing articles in the US, labelling him a ‘professor of terror’; his academic offices were attacked, and the FBI kept him under surveillance for his efforts. This book is an important step towards understanding why. For socialists, Said’s critique of imperialism and the cultural-political effects of bourgeois power remain powerful weapons in the international struggle for an alternative.
Louis Brehony
