Paul A. Bové 1354 Royal Oak Drive Wexford, PA 15090
Humanism and Democratic Criticism is a lesson for America. It has epistolary force. It warns that that America, which is the last remaining superpower, is nothing less than a threat to thought itself; but it embraces another America, which is radical in its desire for freedom and blessed by its intersecting cultures and histories. The battle for America, which is nothing less than what this book is about, is also a battle for much of the world, and, without any hyperbole, I say it is a book about the survival of the human species as a form of mind interested in and capable of knowing itself and its works and of desiring freedom and liberty. As I read this book, so many things struck me, that for quite a while it disabled me. It is a book that lets a reader start anywhere and follow it to almost any place in current life and politics as well as anywhere in history and knowledge. Above all, however, I found and continue to find it to be the most compelling reading of the consequences of not successfully counterpoising the neo-conservative revolution that has seized control of US state and a great deal of American cultural power—in addition to the partial control of economy and technology—and through these things, much of the world. On a very few occasions, Edward Said mentions the neo-conservatives and, for several paragraphs, rightly ridicules the late Allen Bloom and his sponsors, including Saul Bellow. But the critique of what underlies the neoconservatives and the US policy of preemptive war and domestic right-wing political maximalism is very textured and ubiquitous, deeply meaningful and relentless in mapping extreme dangers and suggesting needed alternatives. Said quotes Spitzer to the effect that re-readings will produce a sense of a work’s sun, its authorial center, its ‘etymology,’ with the vision of the author taken as itself the ‘etymon.’ Said always admirably insists that readers must responsibly assert their interpretation and judgment knowing all along that the fallen, historical, and if you will tragic limitation of human perspective never produces a final reading. Yet each strong reading presents itself as authoritative and what I would like to assert here—since there is no time for analytic demonstration—is simply that this book best maps the ubiquitous forces and capillary realities that form the present moment’s cultural and political dominant as a threat to human being as primarily a threat to historicism and historical life. And it does this because Edward Said formed himself as a person whose closeness to language allowed him to embed and expose a range of interlocking realities that critics otherwise rarely represent. I do not mean that others do not address the problems of religious fundamentalism or Hayekian neo-liberalism. What I mean rather is that Said’s book dramatizes the way a certain mind works, how it reads, how it is formed in relation to language and awareness, how it reconstructs the relations of culture and politics with an attention to the notated nuances that in our time so define the complexity of culture, knowledge, and politics. Said invokes the figure in carpet to weave an incomplete but magisterial pattern. His vision generously aspires to inclusion and critique based on knowledge, and rests on preternatural skills of composition and a sensibility resulting from a life-long exercise of his faculties upon and in language—the privileged common material practice of historical human life. Said wrote Humanism and Democratic Criticism at a time when neo-conservative aspirants seized power on a well-prepared cultural, intellectual, and political terrain—a favorite figure of this book, since for Said, politics has to do principally with occupying and leaving territory. If we had any doubt that the current political regime intends to occupy territories once and for all and aspires to put an end to the historical transformations defining an immigrant culture and a migrant world-order, then this book dispels them. Philological criticism begins with a text and reader, but never rests until as much as possible of the expanding and interlocking contexts and conditions for writing and reading stand exposed for pleasure, education, and judgment. In this book, the exilic authorial voice achieves that love for all the world promised in leaving behind one country or one identity. Let me be clear: Said’s voice does not achieve a sort of universal vision of the world as it is; on the contrary, it stands against such a possibility in large part because it sees that the effort to impose such a vision through dehumanizing power threatens freedom and the species itself. This last point requires clarification. Never could we accuse Said of pessimism, of the belief that resistance and human historical agency might be, once and for all, arrested by the applications of dominant power. He testifies for us that his experience of resistant people, in Palestine and elsewhere, assures heroic resistance in the struggle for freedom and control. Nonetheless, the sole remaining superpower has a unique opportunity, consequent upon the historical nexus of military power, the ideology and power of globalized markets, and the emergence of an imperial state strategy of preemption, to impose itself upon the world in a way that cannot succeed but nonetheless aspires to destroy the historical truth of humanity, itself. And to destroy with it, those modes of culture that might produce alternatives. So we hear a great deal in this book of how humanists, academic literary humanists in particular, must adopt the different temporalities of rumination, scholarship, and the longer forms to resist, expose, and displace, whenever possible, the commodified products that restrict not only civic knowledge but also human desire. Said tells us the lesson of profound cultural changes by accounting for the differences that take place in the university and humanism’s spheres of practice since the Cold War. One of the most interesting parts of the book, this tale neatly exposes the profound mutual entanglement of state policy, cultural production, and commodified forms of especially nationalistic humanism. It is as if this supremely self-aware book wanted us to see that its humanist author, attuned to current realities, aware of history, and sensitive to situation can re-justify humanism for our time by exposing linkages otherwise unseen while himself exemplifying what a human-ist can yet do. And so we realize too what is at stake if the humanist Said loses: all the capacity of life, illumination, pleasure, wit, critique, and joy—all those things we so miss now—it were as if they were to go out of being altogether. It cannot be a coincidence that Said bothers himself with the late Allen Bloom, whose work lacks gravitas and interest. Bloom represents “the reemergence of what might charitably be called reductive and didactic humanism” (p. 17). The assertive, resentful flatulence of Bloom’s complaints—“a dyspepsia of tone”—not only represent the worst reaction among those reactionary humanists of the Cold War and other nationalist pasts, but, specifically embody the neo-conservative and more precisely the Straussian antagonism to historicism and democracy. Notorious for his tasteless program to remove illicit others from university campuses—to purify the agora of those sorts of cultural collisions that fructify in their coexistence—Bloom (and his woeful followers) ridiculously assert the right, in a democratic republic, of a classically trained elite to hover above the demos and the agora. What this means is simple: the Straussian Bloom intends to make Americans accept the fact that their own immigrant, mixed, and surprising society is a failure for its perspectivism, relativism, mass culture, mass politics, voting, and liberalism. Moreover, in Said’s own words, Bloom’s “book seems to me to represent the nadir of what Richard Hofstadter calls anti-intellectualism in American life.” For Bloom, “education ideally was to be a matter less of investigation, criticism, and humanistic enlargement of consciousness than a series of unsmiling restrictions” (p. 18). In other words, Bloom’s weak mind literalizes Strauss’ worry that the US is the next Weimar, a failed state suffering from the consequences of historicism, liberalism, and modernity. Of course, we know the solution: elites rule and the masses conform. Associate this aspiration to tyranny with the world-ruining power of the ‘sole remaining superpower,’ and we have a threat to humanism. As US state intellectuals bray about excesses of democracy, Said convinces us that they see the very idea and fact of humans as historical beings as something to be destroyed. They do not welcome a world in which humans struggle to create and understand a world they would like to make as a place to live freely and with pleasure. Ant-humanism, in this historical moment, is anti-democratic, anti-historical, and opposed to justice. Said’s book contains within it an implicit but well-staged argument against the deepest claims of Straussian neo-conservatives and their allies. His remarks about the brutality of the US policy of preemptive war are central to these essays revised exactly in their light. Opponents will describe the book as unpatriotic and unfair to US interests, as failing to be balanced for not condemning the terrorist of 9/11. This is the position asserted by the all too aptly named Kurtz of the Hoover Institute in urging Congress to establish direct control over the teaching of foreign languages, culture, and policy—in order to suppress the supposed corrupting influence of Edward Said. Such neo-conservative state intellectuals never treat history for the simple reason that in their philosophy, history is of no matter, especially when force is available. But it is of no matter for more profound anthropological reasons. Straussians simply do not believe, as Said does, in the truth of Vico’s discoveries about the historical nature of humanity or about the implicit democratic possibilities implied by human resistance to oppression and injustice in their largest as well as most quotidian efforts to make spaces of freedom. Rather, as we know from Strauss’ debates with Kojève—who belongs to a tradition related to that of Auerbach and Spitzer whom Said so much admires—he holds to a view of the species as ineffably weak, incapable of self-rule, maddeningly threatening to elites in general and philosophical wisdom in particular. So densely woven is Said’s text that so seemingly small a detail as his invocation of Cola di Rienzi in a list of passionately democratic and joyous humanists—including Erasmus and Rabelais—draws in the historical details of a long human struggle. With di Rienzi’s death in Rome, the last democratic national movement (enabled by the Papacy) came to an end to be replaced as a political ideal in the Italian Renaissance by the ideal of classical imperialism. The truth of that moment indicates the unique power of Vico’s contribution of historicist anthropology over and against the ahistorical ambitions of imperial politics. Rienzi’s defeat has a small place in Said’s figural construction of the ongoing war for democratic empowerment. Early in this book, Said comes near to invoking participatory democracy as the threat the current political reaction most opposes. A Vichian anthropology, Said powerfully contends, creates not only a fuller more interesting and creative possibility for the human as a species that loves freedom, but tightly links that historicist ambition to the multicultural, radical tradition of American democracy. In short, the last remaining superpower is a threat to American democracy. With its end of history crazes and its mad impositions of ‘democracy’ by force, it expresses its profound hatred and fear of participatory democratic possibility and has committed itself, on the foundation of capitalist commodification, to the extinction of the species as capable of thinking and living historically. It has committed itself to make the species over into something other than the human that stands at the center of high philological humanism. For if the human becomes merely the creature that consumes under the illusion that ready-made certainties and corporate totalities define reality, truth, and the limits of desire, then the very idea that the human is mind capable of understanding itself, in its own forms and those of others—the very species that lives and thinks and creates culture in that way will no longer exist. But Said was nothing if not committed to the power of resistance and optimism that human struggles for freedom can be achieved. Moreover, his life and this work embody the exemplary figure needed to understand how and why historicism is such a valuable science. Let’s take this book as something like a novel, as it is in many ways an extended essay, in the spirit Said gave the notion years ago in reading Lukács. The essay is a form of permanent optimism in that fear of death cannot interrupt it. The paradigm of course is Socrates life and death show that death is always external to thinking and desiring. Only death can stop his mind, but death had no place limiting the finitude of his life’s project. In this book, Said produces as he always does in his later writings, a very strong authorial voice that clearly incarnates qualities of mind and humanity that stand as an example of how interesting, how profound, how generous, and how lovingly contentious a fully human being can be. Like all good works of art, this essay tells the story that is the key to its own reading and we are told, in clear and unmistakable terms, by precursors cast as heroic characters and others as dire but weak-minded enemies, how agonistic is life but how uniquely and importantly the humanist critic can enrich society not only by critique but by the creation of attractive, seductive, honest, and indeed heroic achievements. The speaker of this book, this Saidian voice, this accomplished work is the proof of what can be done and what is at stake in the battle waged to keep humanists who love words alive, to make them and the rest of us into humans most likely to value complexity of interest, honesty of history, and nuance in the expression of those mixed struggles that are the species life. Throughout, the book exposes the deadly work done by veneration, hallowing, and herding. It links the rise of empire to the death of history. It castigates humanists who ignore current pressures that make them less than they might in a role that demands their best efforts at self-making and the overcoming of narrow constraints, prejudice, and ignorance. It ties the rise of apolitical professionalism to the forms of religious quietism that power requires to convince us all that its commodities stand there as if by nature. And the book weaves other sets of words, such as that favorite of Spitzer, “situation,”—which means conjunction and constellation in the spirit of astronomy—to troping and punning that allow the given of language and history to be remade by agents committed to the work needed both to preserve their own history and create objects that endure, even for those who must then correct or revise them. Details make up the book and their weight and consequence first cause one to stop, feeling incredibly inadequate both to the admirable voice that speaks and the responsibilities to embodies and leaves to all of us. But it is never Said effect to silence others unless they violently aim to censor or suppress. The aim rather is to overlay, to ruffle, to sting, to unsettle, and to trouble so that exciting and interesting things might result, so that imposed burdens can be rearranged and simplifications, those dangers to life and mind, can be set aside. The book stops a reader only long enough to realize its achievement and the burden it imposes as a generous invitation to join the collective effort to return the humanities to the relevant task of preserving the species that creates free life.
this from Bill Spanos re EWS' book and my few notes: resuming our conversation from China:
"Paul, I read your piece on Said, but as I expected on the basis of our discussion of humanism in Nanjing, I just didn't find it persuasive. I've also been rereding Edward's Humanism and Democratic Criticism, and have to say that Ihqven't , so far, changed my mind about the book. It is of course, very powerful as you say. But I know too much about humanism to be satisfied with a justification based on a brief reference to Vico and a not very informative account of philology both of which you refer to but with no more depth than I find in Said's. And the couple of sentences, picking up on Clifford's critique of Orientalism, dismissing Foucault for his his refusal of agency strike me as arbitrary if not gratuitous. Maybe it my book The End of Educaton: Toward Posthumanism, where I trace the genealogy of humanism back to the Romans that at fault. But I doubt it."
2 comments:
Paul A. Bové
1354 Royal Oak Drive
Wexford, PA 15090
Humanism and Democratic Criticism is a lesson for America. It has epistolary force. It warns that that America, which is the last remaining superpower, is nothing less than a threat to thought itself; but it embraces another America, which is radical in its desire for freedom and blessed by its intersecting cultures and histories. The battle for America, which is nothing less than what this book is about, is also a battle for much of the world, and, without any hyperbole, I say it is a book about the survival of the human species as a form of mind interested in and capable of knowing itself and its works and of desiring freedom and liberty.
As I read this book, so many things struck me, that for quite a while it disabled me. It is a book that lets a reader start anywhere and follow it to almost any place in current life and politics as well as anywhere in history and knowledge. Above all, however, I found and continue to find it to be the most compelling reading of the consequences of not successfully counterpoising the neo-conservative revolution that has seized control of US state and a great deal of American cultural power—in addition to the partial control of economy and technology—and through these things, much of the world.
On a very few occasions, Edward Said mentions the neo-conservatives and, for several paragraphs, rightly ridicules the late Allen Bloom and his sponsors, including Saul Bellow. But the critique of what underlies the neoconservatives and the US policy of preemptive war and domestic right-wing political maximalism is very textured and ubiquitous, deeply meaningful and relentless in mapping extreme dangers and suggesting needed alternatives. Said quotes Spitzer to the effect that re-readings will produce a sense of a work’s sun, its authorial center, its ‘etymology,’ with the vision of the author taken as itself the ‘etymon.’ Said always admirably insists that readers must responsibly assert their interpretation and judgment knowing all along that the fallen, historical, and if you will tragic limitation of human perspective never produces a final reading. Yet each strong reading presents itself as authoritative and what I would like to assert here—since there is no time for analytic demonstration—is simply that this book best maps the ubiquitous forces and capillary realities that form the present moment’s cultural and political dominant as a threat to human being as primarily a threat to historicism and historical life.
And it does this because Edward Said formed himself as a person whose closeness to language allowed him to embed and expose a range of interlocking realities that critics otherwise rarely represent. I do not mean that others do not address the problems of religious fundamentalism or Hayekian neo-liberalism. What I mean rather is that Said’s book dramatizes the way a certain mind works, how it reads, how it is formed in relation to language and awareness, how it reconstructs the relations of culture and politics with an attention to the notated nuances that in our time so define the complexity of culture, knowledge, and politics. Said invokes the figure in carpet to weave an incomplete but magisterial pattern. His vision generously aspires to inclusion and critique based on knowledge, and rests on preternatural skills of composition and a sensibility resulting from a life-long exercise of his faculties upon and in language—the privileged common material practice of historical human life.
Said wrote Humanism and Democratic Criticism at a time when neo-conservative aspirants seized power on a well-prepared cultural, intellectual, and political terrain—a favorite figure of this book, since for Said, politics has to do principally with occupying and leaving territory. If we had any doubt that the current political regime intends to occupy territories once and for all and aspires to put an end to the historical transformations defining an immigrant culture and a migrant world-order, then this book dispels them. Philological criticism begins with a text and reader, but never rests until as much as possible of the expanding and interlocking contexts and conditions for writing and reading stand exposed for pleasure, education, and judgment. In this book, the exilic authorial voice achieves that love for all the world promised in leaving behind one country or one identity. Let me be clear: Said’s voice does not achieve a sort of universal vision of the world as it is; on the contrary, it stands against such a possibility in large part because it sees that the effort to impose such a vision through dehumanizing power threatens freedom and the species itself.
This last point requires clarification. Never could we accuse Said of pessimism, of the belief that resistance and human historical agency might be, once and for all, arrested by the applications of dominant power. He testifies for us that his experience of resistant people, in Palestine and elsewhere, assures heroic resistance in the struggle for freedom and control. Nonetheless, the sole remaining superpower has a unique opportunity, consequent upon the historical nexus of military power, the ideology and power of globalized markets, and the emergence of an imperial state strategy of preemption, to impose itself upon the world in a way that cannot succeed but nonetheless aspires to destroy the historical truth of humanity, itself. And to destroy with it, those modes of culture that might produce alternatives. So we hear a great deal in this book of how humanists, academic literary humanists in particular, must adopt the different temporalities of rumination, scholarship, and the longer forms to resist, expose, and displace, whenever possible, the commodified products that restrict not only civic knowledge but also human desire.
Said tells us the lesson of profound cultural changes by accounting for the differences that take place in the university and humanism’s spheres of practice since the Cold War. One of the most interesting parts of the book, this tale neatly exposes the profound mutual entanglement of state policy, cultural production, and commodified forms of especially nationalistic humanism. It is as if this supremely self-aware book wanted us to see that its humanist author, attuned to current realities, aware of history, and sensitive to situation can re-justify humanism for our time by exposing linkages otherwise unseen while himself exemplifying what a human-ist can yet do. And so we realize too what is at stake if the humanist Said loses: all the capacity of life, illumination, pleasure, wit, critique, and joy—all those things we so miss now—it were as if they were to go out of being altogether.
It cannot be a coincidence that Said bothers himself with the late Allen Bloom, whose work lacks gravitas and interest. Bloom represents “the reemergence of what might charitably be called reductive and didactic humanism” (p. 17). The assertive, resentful flatulence of Bloom’s complaints—“a dyspepsia of tone”—not only represent the worst reaction among those reactionary humanists of the Cold War and other nationalist pasts, but, specifically embody the neo-conservative and more precisely the Straussian antagonism to historicism and democracy. Notorious for his tasteless program to remove illicit others from university campuses—to purify the agora of those sorts of cultural collisions that fructify in their coexistence—Bloom (and his woeful followers) ridiculously assert the right, in a democratic republic, of a classically trained elite to hover above the demos and the agora. What this means is simple: the Straussian Bloom intends to make Americans accept the fact that their own immigrant, mixed, and surprising society is a failure for its perspectivism, relativism, mass culture, mass politics, voting, and liberalism. Moreover, in Said’s own words, Bloom’s “book seems to me to represent the nadir of what Richard Hofstadter calls anti-intellectualism in American life.” For Bloom, “education ideally was to be a matter less of investigation, criticism, and humanistic enlargement of consciousness than a series of unsmiling restrictions” (p. 18). In other words, Bloom’s weak mind literalizes Strauss’ worry that the US is the next Weimar, a failed state suffering from the consequences of historicism, liberalism, and modernity. Of course, we know the solution: elites rule and the masses conform. Associate this aspiration to tyranny with the world-ruining power of the ‘sole remaining superpower,’ and we have a threat to humanism. As US state intellectuals bray about excesses of democracy, Said convinces us that they see the very idea and fact of humans as historical beings as something to be destroyed. They do not welcome a world in which humans struggle to create and understand a world they would like to make as a place to live freely and with pleasure. Ant-humanism, in this historical moment, is anti-democratic, anti-historical, and opposed to justice.
Said’s book contains within it an implicit but well-staged argument against the deepest claims of Straussian neo-conservatives and their allies. His remarks about the brutality of the US policy of preemptive war are central to these essays revised exactly in their light. Opponents will describe the book as unpatriotic and unfair to US interests, as failing to be balanced for not condemning the terrorist of 9/11. This is the position asserted by the all too aptly named Kurtz of the Hoover Institute in urging Congress to establish direct control over the teaching of foreign languages, culture, and policy—in order to suppress the supposed corrupting influence of Edward Said. Such neo-conservative state intellectuals never treat history for the simple reason that in their philosophy, history is of no matter, especially when force is available. But it is of no matter for more profound anthropological reasons. Straussians simply do not believe, as Said does, in the truth of Vico’s discoveries about the historical nature of humanity or about the implicit democratic possibilities implied by human resistance to oppression and injustice in their largest as well as most quotidian efforts to make spaces of freedom. Rather, as we know from Strauss’ debates with Kojève—who belongs to a tradition related to that of Auerbach and Spitzer whom Said so much admires—he holds to a view of the species as ineffably weak, incapable of self-rule, maddeningly threatening to elites in general and philosophical wisdom in particular. So densely woven is Said’s text that so seemingly small a detail as his invocation of Cola di Rienzi in a list of passionately democratic and joyous humanists—including Erasmus and Rabelais—draws in the historical details of a long human struggle. With di Rienzi’s death in Rome, the last democratic national movement (enabled by the Papacy) came to an end to be replaced as a political ideal in the Italian Renaissance by the ideal of classical imperialism. The truth of that moment indicates the unique power of Vico’s contribution of historicist anthropology over and against the ahistorical ambitions of imperial politics. Rienzi’s defeat has a small place in Said’s figural construction of the ongoing war for democratic empowerment. Early in this book, Said comes near to invoking participatory democracy as the threat the current political reaction most opposes. A Vichian anthropology, Said powerfully contends, creates not only a fuller more interesting and creative possibility for the human as a species that loves freedom, but tightly links that historicist ambition to the multicultural, radical tradition of American democracy.
In short, the last remaining superpower is a threat to American democracy. With its end of history crazes and its mad impositions of ‘democracy’ by force, it expresses its profound hatred and fear of participatory democratic possibility and has committed itself, on the foundation of capitalist commodification, to the extinction of the species as capable of thinking and living historically. It has committed itself to make the species over into something other than the human that stands at the center of high philological humanism. For if the human becomes merely the creature that consumes under the illusion that ready-made certainties and corporate totalities define reality, truth, and the limits of desire, then the very idea that the human is mind capable of understanding itself, in its own forms and those of others—the very species that lives and thinks and creates culture in that way will no longer exist.
But Said was nothing if not committed to the power of resistance and optimism that human struggles for freedom can be achieved. Moreover, his life and this work embody the exemplary figure needed to understand how and why historicism is such a valuable science. Let’s take this book as something like a novel, as it is in many ways an extended essay, in the spirit Said gave the notion years ago in reading Lukács. The essay is a form of permanent optimism in that fear of death cannot interrupt it. The paradigm of course is Socrates life and death show that death is always external to thinking and desiring. Only death can stop his mind, but death had no place limiting the finitude of his life’s project. In this book, Said produces as he always does in his later writings, a very strong authorial voice that clearly incarnates qualities of mind and humanity that stand as an example of how interesting, how profound, how generous, and how lovingly contentious a fully human being can be. Like all good works of art, this essay tells the story that is the key to its own reading and we are told, in clear and unmistakable terms, by precursors cast as heroic characters and others as dire but weak-minded enemies, how agonistic is life but how uniquely and importantly the humanist critic can enrich society not only by critique but by the creation of attractive, seductive, honest, and indeed heroic achievements. The speaker of this book, this Saidian voice, this accomplished work is the proof of what can be done and what is at stake in the battle waged to keep humanists who love words alive, to make them and the rest of us into humans most likely to value complexity of interest, honesty of history, and nuance in the expression of those mixed struggles that are the species life.
Throughout, the book exposes the deadly work done by veneration, hallowing, and herding. It links the rise of empire to the death of history. It castigates humanists who ignore current pressures that make them less than they might in a role that demands their best efforts at self-making and the overcoming of narrow constraints, prejudice, and ignorance. It ties the rise of apolitical professionalism to the forms of religious quietism that power requires to convince us all that its commodities stand there as if by nature.
And the book weaves other sets of words, such as that favorite of Spitzer, “situation,”—which means conjunction and constellation in the spirit of astronomy—to troping and punning that allow the given of language and history to be remade by agents committed to the work needed both to preserve their own history and create objects that endure, even for those who must then correct or revise them. Details make up the book and their weight and consequence first cause one to stop, feeling incredibly inadequate both to the admirable voice that speaks and the responsibilities to embodies and leaves to all of us. But it is never Said effect to silence others unless they violently aim to censor or suppress. The aim rather is to overlay, to ruffle, to sting, to unsettle, and to trouble so that exciting and interesting things might result, so that imposed burdens can be rearranged and simplifications, those dangers to life and mind, can be set aside. The book stops a reader only long enough to realize its achievement and the burden it imposes as a generous invitation to join the collective effort to return the humanities to the relevant task of preserving the species that creates free life.
this from Bill Spanos re EWS' book and my few notes: resuming our conversation from China:
"Paul, I read your piece on Said, but as I expected on the basis of our discussion of humanism in Nanjing, I just didn't find it persuasive. I've also been rereding Edward's Humanism and Democratic Criticism, and have to say that Ihqven't , so far, changed my mind about the book. It is of course, very powerful as you say. But I know too much about humanism to be satisfied with a justification based on a brief reference to Vico and a not very informative account of philology both of which you refer to but with no more depth than I find in Said's. And the couple of sentences, picking up on Clifford's critique of Orientalism, dismissing Foucault for his his refusal of agency strike me as arbitrary if not gratuitous. Maybe it my book The End of Educaton: Toward Posthumanism, where I trace the genealogy of humanism back to the Romans that at fault. But I doubt it."
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