The Routledge Companion To Humanism and Literature - (4 "A Different Kind of Humanism" Edward Said's Césairian Critical Huma... )

4
“A Different Kind of Humanism”

Edward Said’s Césairian Critical Humanism
Sauleha Kamal
DOI: 10.4324/9781003046004-6
Perhaps the most divisive aspect of Edward Said’s scholarship in postcolonial circles is his
unshakable adherence to humanism. In the final years of his life, Edward Said dedicated his
energies toward defending humanism, a system that had at the time of post-humanism, and,
in the wake of the anti-humanism of the 1960s and 1970s, become a largely dormant issue.1
As he underwent intense chemotherapy, he delivered a series of lectures on humanism at
Cambridge and Columbia2 and later developed these lectures into his final book, Humanism
and Democratic Criticism, published posthumously in 2004. While Said had viewed himself
as a humanist throughout his academic career, what is known as his late style was marked by
a renewed insistence on academic humanism in the philological vein of Auerbach and
Spitzer3—the tradition in which Said was originally trained. In this return, critics such as
James Clifford read a contradiction owing to the dependence of his arguments on
Foucauldian and other (anti-humanist) French theory.4 But Said, who insisted that this
engagement did not affect his own affiliation to the humanist tradition, explains to his readers
that, at its core, his humanism is based on the premise that “attacking the abuses of
something is not the same thing as dismissing or entirely destroying that thing,”5 a premise
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that is very Césairian at heart. The relationship between Aimé Césaire’s biting critique of
humanism in Discourse on Colonialism (1950) and Said’s humanism is one that has been
sorely overlooked in assessments of Said’s humanism. This relationship, however, is
infinitely useful in understanding Said’s loyalty to humanism.
This chapter will explore Said’s critical humanism as developing from Césaire’s critique
of a certain kind of humanism before moving on to establish the difference between Said’s
Césairian humanism and later modes, including Fanon’s ethical anti-humanism and the anti-
humanism that gained popularity thereafter. It will use this exploration to examine the
“different humanism” that Said creates out of Césaire’s work to finally confront the question
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of why Said chooses to adhere to humanism at all. For the purposes of this chapter,
humanism is primarily defined in two distinct Saidian ways:
1. Traditional, Eurocentric humanism, which Said argues is a distortion of humanism;

2. Critical humanism, for which he advocates and under which he constellates criticism
and humanism.6
I argue that Said develops his critical humanism out of Césaire’s fledgling “alter-humanism”7
because of its positioning as an alternative to traditional, Eurocentric humanism. Said’s
ambitious rehabilitation of humanism is, then, a “two-pronged” project8 which must reclaim
humanism from both “French theory tout court anti-humanism” and traditional, Eurocentric
humanism9. To begin, it inherits and incorporates Césaire’s criticism of traditional humanism
—Said, after all, as Timothy Brennan observes, saw himself as building on a postcolonial
tradition, the direction of which he saw as having “come ultimately from earlier
generations.”10
Césaire’s polemical Discourse on Colonialism features a biting critique of humanism and
its complicity in the colonial project in a memorably poetic rhythm. Here, Césaire focuses on
exposing the hypocrisy of Western humanists, such as Renan, Gobineau, and Caillois, who
appeal to Enlightenment universal humanism11 even as they employ its logic to sanction the
violence of colonialism. As Mara De Gennaro notes, what most disgusts Césaire about the
humanists is “their failure to universalize the humanism they claim for their ‘race’ alone.”12
This racial exclusivity cements the argument that theirs is not a universal humanism at all but
a racialism that simply masquerades as humanism.13 That they have called this racialism
“humanism” is evidence of the narrow, racialized definition of “human” to which so-called
traditional humanists subscribe. Césaire considers the reaction of horror to Hitler’s crimes,
which, he notes, stands in direct contradiction to the perpetration of crimes in the colonies:
The very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century
… has a Hitler inside him … that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at
bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not a crime in itself, the crime against man, it is
not the humiliation of man as such, it is a crime against the white man, the humiliation of the
white man.14
The strategic juxtaposition of the “humiliation of man” and “humiliation of the white
man” drives home the inconsistencies in Western humanism. Russell West-Pavlov reads
Césaire as explicating Europe’s “shocked reaction to colonial practices on its own continent
that would hitherto only be found elsewhere.”15 This exclusive humanism is flawed, then,
precisely because it is premised on a very narrow definition of human. Césaire, notably, does
not reject humanism tout court on the basis of this narrow definition; instead, he overturns it
in “the name of something truly universal”16 and imagines its potential power to “effect
political and moral good” once it is rid of its corruptions.17
What, then, is this other, truly universal humanism? Malreddy Kumar calls it “alter-
humanism”18: “a humanism that positively enables the colonizer’s ascribed otherness”19 and
Bashir Abu-Manneh dubs it “political humanism,”20 a term that captures Said’s commitment
to humanism and “his preoccupation with uncovering culture’s complicities in injustice and
power and exposing its role in historical injury.”21 It is this humanism that Said extends into
his critical humanism when he inherits the task of curing humanism of these corruptions.
When Said writes against the idea that “we [the global West] represent a humane culture;
they [the rest of the world], violence and hatred. We are civilized, they are barbarians,”22 he
explicitly defines the kind of “us and them” humanisms in which he is not interested; ones
that purport Western culture (“we”) as the defender of humanism against Othered cultures
(“they”). Humanism, instead, does not belong to any particular race or nation in its Césairian
and Saidian inception. Hence, Said strategically stresses Spitzer’s emphasis on the human,
not European, mind.23 When humanism is defined as a system reliant on the human, not
European, mind’s capacity for critique, then, pseudo-humanism can no longer be treated as
humanism.
Something must change now that the colonial discourse that “canonized European
humanism” is a device with the potential to “transform the ‘raw man’ (native) into a ‘real
man’”24 no longer holds. Postcolonial theory, with its insistence that the native had “always
already been ‘human,’ but had simply been disfigured as the ‘not-yet-human’ in the
discourses of European humanism,”25 imagines another humanism. This humanism is both
beyond the “narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased,”26 “de-humanizing”27 elitist
humanism espoused by the new humanists, and conservatives, such as Allan Bloom,28 that
“[aimed] to protect a traditional European canon and so-called ‘European values.’”29 To
separate his universal humanism from these humanisms, Said uses the example of Northrop
Frye’s “The Anatomy of Criticism,”30 which, though it “claimed to be talking about
literature, humanistically” was “almost entirely Eurocentric,” divorced from historical and
political contexts and devoid of any reference to women’s or minority genres and notions of
“the humanistic world of agency and work.” Said calls this type of “humanism” outdated and
narrow and, in fact, not humanistic at all,31 despite its claims to the contrary, much as Césaire
previously censured pseudo-humanism as de-humanizing. It is easy to hear echoes of
Césaire’s indictment of Renan when Said points to the basic hypocrisy of traditional
humanists: Petrarch and Boccaccio raised no objections to colonialism, writes Said, even as
they lauded “the human” and the American founding fathers’ insisted on the “rights of men”
even as they stood for inhumane offenses such as slave trade and Native American
genocide.32 Again, we come to the problem of differing definitions of human.
Said’s solution is to re-define human as a universal term. He does this by stressing a
universal, cosmopolitan humanism33 and focusing on cultural exchange, true to the Césairian
belief that “exchange is oxygen.”34 Consider Said’s reading of Césaire:
If I may quote some lines by the great Martiniqueian poet, Aime Cesaire that I used in
my book On Culture and Imperialism, and I never tire of quoting these lines, and he
speaks here for man, l’homme in French, but ‘the work of man is only just beginning
and it remains to conquer all the violence entrenched in the recesses of our passion and
no race possesses the monopoly of beauty, of intelligence, of force, and there’s a place
for all at the rendezvous of victory’ and what they imply, these sentiments prepare the
way for dissolution of cultural barriers as a kind of blockage between cultures as well as
of the pride that prevents … benign globalism.35
Said chooses to quote Césaire at a moment where he underlines the importance of the work
of man “which is just beginning,” work that Said continues in his defense of humanism. This
much is clear in his reading of this passage and Césaire’s l’homme, or man,36 as “[preparing]
the way for [the] dissolution of cultural barriers” in order to move toward a more globalized
world. When Said argues that Samuel Huntington and Harold Bloom both “radically
misinterpreted what it is about cultures and civilizations that makes them interesting,” he
does so on the basis of them ignoring the “combinations and diversity, [and] countercurrents
[of civilizations], the way they [conduct] compelling dialogue with other civilizations.”37
Like Césaire, Said understands the value of cultural exchange and is afraid that, in our haste
to dissociate ourselves from the evils of colonialism carried out in the name of humanism, we
would also lose a system that can be effectively engaged in the service of human unity and
intercultural coexistence.38 That Said imagines a real or universal humanism, then, is not
unfounded, but to realize it Said must disabuse his readers of the notion that humanistic
inclinations are exclusive to the Western world and shatter the myth of the “Western
miracle.”39 Quoting George Makdisi’s studies on Islamic contributions to the rise of
humanism that trace humanistic practice to twelfth-century Muslim madaris, college, and
universities,40 Said notes that, while he primarily cites evidence of an Islamic humanistic
tradition, this is only because of his own familiarity with it and not for any shortage of
humanistic practice in Indian, Chinese, African, or Japanese traditions.41 Said makes a point
to define his humanism as transhistorical and global, displacing humanism from the West
rather than succumbing to the erasure of non-Western traditions from humanism or,
conversely, to reject humanism altogether. This move allows Said to both drive home
Césaire’s belief that Europe succeeded because of exchange, not exceptionalism, and
preserve humanism in the postcolonial world.
Instead of simply abandoning humanism altogether, a tempting proposition,42 Said intends
to separate his critical, “real”43 humanism from the abhorrent traditional humanism and its
abuses. To use his term from the inaugural chapter of Humanism and Democratic Criticism,
“Humanism’s Sphere,”44 Said is interested in re-defining what deserves to be included within
humanism’s sphere. If humanism is a pre-existing sphere, then, its bounds are set by its
values, not any particular culture. If all humans are human and no culture is privileged, then
certain outdated modes that masquerade as humanism must be expelled from this sphere. The
humanism of this sphere is, then, a humanism that “prompts an activist return to the ‘great
works’ of humanism, with the understanding that humanism itself be rezoned to avoid
misleading cartographic divisions between European and non-European cultures.”45 Like
Césaire’s humanism, with its “reconfiguration of geographical space, which, far from simply
returning the black man to Africa, brings him into contact with territories across the
world,”46 Said’s rezoning embraces Césaire’s rejection of European humanism as corrupt
racialism47 without dismissing humanism. Where Césaire merely refuses to dismiss “a
universalism that is removed from its abuses,”48 however, Said sets out to find this universal
humanism, which for him, is real humanism, since Europe was never essential to humanism.
In an earlier work, The World, Text and Critic, Said’s discomfort with the role of critics
and theorists, as well as with the limited definition of humanism, is apparent. He writes,
we are humanists because there is something called humanism, legitimated by the

culture, given a positive value by it … the formal, restricted analysis of literary-aesthetic
works validates the culture, the culture validates the humanist, the humanist the critic,
and the whole enterprise the state. Thus authority is maintained by virtue of the cultural
process, and anything more than refining power is denied the refining critic.49
Chafing against the idea of humanism as an ideology that ends up upholding existing power
structures, Said attempts to insert political action into humanism. Here, he specifically takes
issue with “the harmless rhetoric of self-delighting humanism”50 and calls on critics to
instead “read and write with a sense of the greater stake in historical and political
effectiveness.”51 As Pannian observes, Said emphasizes “the oppositional potential of
Western humanism”52 and endeavors to deploy “the very strengths of the West in the struggle
against the West [believing that] the values of humanism can be used against imperialist
notions of culture.”53 This is, doubtless, incompatible with Foucauldian understandings of
humanism which consistently tie humanism to subjective European judgment. Given Said’s
reliance on Foucault and his structuralism, underpinned as it was by anti-humanistic
assumptions, it makes sense that questions arise about Said’s humanism, but before
addressing more of these questions, it is useful to point out that while Said’s Orientalism was
grounded in Foucault, he nevertheless evokes Vico in the introduction to Orientalism. This
small instance of coexistence between the humanist Vico and the anti-humanist Foucault
suggests that for Said, the two thoughts need not be contradictory. Indeed, Pannian54 and
Ashcroft55 agree that Said ultimately saw his humanism as simultaneously traditional and
oppositional.
For Said, humanism becomes the very system that questions and criticizes pseudo-
humanism56 and, in “questioning, upsetting, and reformulating,”57 becomes the very force
that prevents “mummification” into tradition58 or, what Césaire calls the atrophying of
civilization.59 Yumna Siddiqi understands this about Said’s humanism, which she says,
“properly understood, has an unsettling rather than a stabilizing effect.”60 Said’s humanism
must, therefore, be looked at primarily as a critical practice, distinct from the larger historical
body of humanism. Said’s definition of humanism in his 1999 MLA address is useful here,
Humanism is disclosure; it is agency; it is immersing oneself in the element of history; it
is recovering what Vico calls the topics of mind from the turbulent actualities of human
life … and then submitting them painstakingly to the rational processes of judgment and
criticism.61
This humanism involves a Vichian commitment to submitting to “rational processes of

judgment and criticism.” The distinction that the abuses of a thing are not the thing itself62 is
an important one for Said and understanding this distinction helps in answering the larger
question of why the author of Orientalism should align himself with a belief system that
endorsed its offenses. Evidently, Said is looking to point to a different kind of humanism63
altogether, one that, as the next section will discuss, is, for Said, the “real” humanism.
Defining Real Humanism

In his essay “On Late Style: Edward Said’s Humanism,” Pal Ahluwalia contends that Saidian
humanism is a Fanonian project64, but as I have argued, Said’s humanism is more akin to
Césaire’s. Notably, Said re-defines humanism after proving that traditional humanism is not
humanism at all and introducing his own universal version, while Fanon proposes a “strategic
anti-humanism knowledgeable of the history of humanism.”65 Even when he turns to Fanon,
it is with Césaire that Said associates him66: “Like Césaire before him,” writes Said, “Fanon
impugns imperialism for what it has created by acts of powerful rhetoric and structured
summary.”67 This suggests that he sees Fanon as participating in a Césairian project, much
like himself, albeit in different ways. Though Said recognizes the need for an
“epistemological revolution” for Fanon and understands his use of violence as “a cleansing
force” in the anti-colonial struggle68 he does not adopt his model into his own work, nor does
he rely on life to “spring up again [only] out of the rotting corpse of the settler.”69
A memorable moment, here, is when Said praises Fanon for his use of the word
“humanism” in a context free from “the narcissistic individualism, divisiveness, and
colonialist egoism.”70 It is this freeing of humanism that Said attempts in creating another
sphere for humanism in Humanism and Democratic Criticism. It is worth examining how
Said reads Fanon. Of Fanon’s “Pitfalls of Nationalism,” Said writes,
National consciousness, he says, “must now be enriched and deepened by a very rapid
transformation into a consciousness of social and political needs, in other words into
[real] humanism.”71
Said’s addition of the word “real” in the square brackets is telling. With it, Said alludes to
both the distinction between critical humanism and traditional humanism and the idea that
there is a “real,” universal humanism somewhere that can and must be recuperated.72 That
Said is invested in recuperating humanism, rather than creating it anew, is precisely why, for
all his praise of—and respect for—Fanon, it is not surprising that he comes to fault Fanon in
Freud & the Non-European.73 Fanon, writes Said, indicts Europe and its ways but fails to
provide his readers with “anything like a blueprint for the new ways he has in mind.”74 This
omission is especially frustrating for the pragmatist in Said, who is thoroughly committed to
usable, worldly critique.75 Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan criticizes Said for expecting Fanon,
who was “writing in and during and through colonialism,” to provide such a blueprint when
Said himself cannot articulate a complete solution “fifty years after the momentous decades
of decolonization.”76 While Said’s purpose in pointing out this deficiency in Fanon’s work
appears to be rooted in a desire to create a space to provide a blueprint himself, a practical
next step, this is nevertheless a blind spot for Said. However, it is fair to say that what Said
resists is not Fanon’s work, or his own work in Orientalism, but the lack of direction for a
way forward after acknowledging Walter Benjamin’s observation that “every document of
civilization is also a document of barbarism.”77 Remarking that “humanists should especially
be able to see exactly what [this observation] means,”78 Said completes the transformation of
humanism from traditional humanism to critical, Saidian, or “real,” humanism.
Whether this transformation is wholly convincing or not is another matter and one that
anti-humanists and scholars continue to debate. Chief among these complaints is that Said’s
work is immersed in secular criticism—a relevant concern in a post-Talal Asad world in
which scholars question whether there can even be such a thing as secularism. For Said,
however, secular criticism does not “imply the rejection of universalism”79 but the exact
opposite. As is apparent from the above, Said is aware that knowledge is not innocent, and he
makes no attempts to argue otherwise. Even Said’s secularism is very much a secularism
articulated from what Mufti has called a minority position.80 Abu-Manneh views Said’s
propensity toward secular criticism as a way to “re-engage with the world, actively interfere
in it, and undermine the unjust status quo.”81 Indeed, Radhakrishnan also notes that Said’s
criticism of high theory is connected to his humanism and Said finds in humanism, the tools
to resist “the elitism of an exclusively academic-specialist paradigm of knowledge [in favor
of] a possibility for alternatives and the perennial widening of human possibilities.”82 Even
on its own, this changes how we approach Said’s arguments, but additionally it is also
apparent that while Saidian humanism may be modeled on Auerbach and Spitzer’s
philological humanism, it is, as Pannian observes, also filtered through “the anti-humanist
period of the 1960s.”83 Viewed in this manner, Said’s humanism and secular criticism take on
qualities that make them very different from their traditional understandings.
“A Usable Praxis”: Why Humanism?
What concerns me is humanism as a usable praxis for intellectuals and academics who
want to know what they are doing, what they are committed to as scholars, and who
want also to connect these principles to the world in which they live as citizens.84
Having discussed Said’s use of Césairian critique to formulate his critical humanism, it is
worth asking why Said undertakes this project in the first place. As Radhakrishnan puts it,
why does Said choose to “locate critical activity within the body proper of humanism, rather
than situate it without?”85 For Said, the value of humanism as a system of criticism is too
great to throw out with the “bathwater of discredited colonial or racist projects.”86
Radhakrishnan attributes this to humanism’s “usable past,”87 which provides Said with the
opportunity to engage with “a continuous macropolitical horizon that will enable certain
progressive connections, which eventually will result in the formation of a canon, i.e., a good
and inclusive canon.”88 Viewed as such, Said’s yearning for a pragmatic solution, “a usable
praxis” already allows him to separate the humanism he favors from traditional humanism.
However, it is also important to keep in view other reasons for Said’s commitment to
humanism. Jane Hiddleston has attributed the enduring allure of this “grand yet curiously
empty”89 term over postcolonial criticism to the simple fact that it “requires an understanding
at once of collectivity and of irreducible otherness”90 and while this consideration, may not
be foremost in Said’s thought, it is certainly worth mentioning especially in light of Said’s
Césairian commitment to cultural coexistence91 with an acknowledgment of difference or
heterogeneity.92 As Apter notes, Said’s insistence on fashioning a different humanism does
not simply emerge from his admiration of the literary merit of “great books” but from his
belief that humanism is the key to “futural parameters for defining secular criticism in a
world increasingly governed by a sense of identitarian ethnic destiny.”93 Finally, another
point to consider is the relatively minor matter of Said’s propensity toward reclamation. Just
as Said previously plucked out the term “Orientalism,” “which lay dormant in Western
philology”94 and reanimated it as “a critical episteme … for an anti-imperialist understanding
of world culture,”95 so he mobilizes the term “humanism” to his own ends so that it comes to
denote the universalist understanding of “human,” an understanding he posits it should have
always had, but for the corruption that came to permeate it.
Despite Said’s attempts to reclaim this term and promote “a different kind of humanism,”
objections continue to be leveled against him for having used it at all. Robert Young and
James Clifford96 find it problematic that Said appropriates the idea of the human from
Western humanist tradition to critique the “anti-humanist nature of Orientalism.”97 Said
responds that “it is possible to be critical of humanism in the name of humanism.”98 This is a
rewriting of the Calibanian moment:99 you taught me the tools of critique, now my profit is to
apply them back onto you. Said chooses to, in the words of De Gennaro’s title, “fight
humanism with humanism.”100 Radhakrishnan casts doubt over the possibility of such an
endeavor. He argues that “contrary to Said,”101 the abuses committed in the name of
humanism were “very much in the spirit of humanism.”102 This is the crux of the main
debate over Said’s attempt to rescue humanism. That humanism has a history of abuse is an
established fact for Said; Said’s distinction is that humanism is also the only cure for the
abuses practiced in its name.103 For Said, humanism is explicitly not the humanism of the
“Cartesian sovereign consciousness or autonomous subject celebrated by Western
Enlightenment thought,”104 but a deliberately re-defined humanism that has separated itself
from the essentializing and totalizing105 humanism “in the spirit” of which those abuses were
committed. Said uses the term “humanism,” then, to his own pragmatic political ends in his
creation of the sphere of critical humanism, which simultaneously stands in defiance to both
traditional tout court humanism and anti-humanism.
The possibility of such a new, untainted humanism continues to be a source of debate,
however, and most anti-humanist scholars have read a contradiction between the Said of
Orientalism and the humanist. Terry Eagleton reads Said’s late style overtures into humanism
as a moment that sees merging of the two Saids: “Said the cultivated middle-class academic
converg[ing] with Said the courageous champion of the oppressed.” However, he does chide
Said for “never really tak[ing] issue with the suspiciously sanguine aspects of humanism.”106
Similarly, like Radhakrishnan, who argues that it is not possible to exorcise humanism from
the abuses committed in its name, Wael Hallaq also contends that such a return to humanism
is untenable considering the racism embedded within Auerbach’s original work. However,
rather than imagining two different Saids converging or existing in opposition to one another,
Hallaq posits that Said’s humanism does not so much as contradict Orientalism as form a key
part of it. In his introduction to Restating Orientalism (2018), Hallaq argues that a “true
political critique of Orientalism”107 would have to go beyond Said and start with the
“foundations that gave rise to a particular conception of nature, liberalism, secularism,
secular humanism, anthropocentrism, capitalism, the modern state, and much else that
modernity developed as central to its project.”108 For Hallaq, Said leaves these foundations
largely intact109 such that Orientalism is “defined by a series of premises and assumptions
that reinforce the very modernist and liberal positions that gave rise to Orientalism in the first
place.”110
While this critique opens too many larger questions for one chapter to adequately address,
I will focus on the aspects of it that pertain to humanism. For Hallaq, there is no conflict
between the two Saids because he observes, “Said’s narrative, reflecting a particular and
narrowly defined conception of power and knowledge claimed to hail from Foucault,
remained faithful to the Enlightenment notions of secular humanism.”111 I would like to
offer, here, that Said never purported to be completely aligned with Foucault, even though
some of his most well-known theories build on Foucault and French theory. Said, who is
concerned with humanism as critical practice, recounts how at the time that he is writing,
French theory has long since brought about “a severe if not crippling defeat of what was
considered traditional humanism by the forces of structuralism and post-structuralism”112 and
moved academic practice toward anti-humanism instead. Said insists that despite this, he
continues to adhere to humanism largely because he “[does not] see in humanism only …
totalizing essentializing trends.”113 By saying this, Said returns to his insistence that there is a
humanism beyond the traditional, Eurocentric humanism that is complicit in colonialism.
That other traditional humanism is what anti-humanism and Said’s humanism—inclusive and
universal in its scope and character—both stand against. That this humanism exists is
unquestionable for Said, who points toward examples of what he sees as humanistic
endeavors outside the West, for instance, in the South African liberation struggle.114
Said’s humanist scholarship ultimately emerges out of his commitment to secular criticism
that “must think of itself as life-enhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of
tyranny, domination, and abuse; its social goals are noncoercive knowledge produced in the
interests of human freedom.”115 A humanism that is unequivocally “opposed to every form of
tyranny, domination, and abuse” certainly cannot be the traditional humanism which was
used, in many instances, to justify “tyranny, domination, and abuse” with its rigid definitions
of the word human itself. It is telling that Said’s break with Foucault is grounded not in his
radicalism but in what Said criticized as a “false universalism, making broad generalizations
on the basis of French evidence”116 as well as the fact that Foucault “showed no real interest
in the relationships his work had with feminist or postcolonial writers facing problems of
exclusion, confinement, and domination.”117 This is apparent in the way in which, as Siddiqi,
who calls Said “an anti-humanist humanist to the last,”118 notes, Said rejects the dominant
humanism of conservative intellectuals such as Allan Bloom who attempt to emphasize what
they call European values and who try to protect the traditional canon through their
humanism.119 Ultimately, Said’s attempt to preserve humanism, then, is an attempt to unsettle
it and expand or even collapse its borders. The question of whether such an attempt is
possible has, of course, drawn its share of skeptical looks.
Perhaps it is in anticipation of such skepticism that Said turns to Césaire and Fanon in his
attempts, and perhaps this is also why a “usable praxis”120 is crucial to Said owing to the
intertwined history of humanism and criticism.121 As such, he could hardly be persuaded to
give up humanism for anti-humanism, a system that, for him, is highly impractical.122
Pannian concentrates on Said’s use of the word “usable” here. He points out that the word
differentiates Said’s intended project from one that would merely be “instrumental,” before
going on to note that “while the instrumental scope presupposes possession, the usable scope
involves practice.”123 If, for Said, humanism and criticism are “invariably associated,” then
as Hole notes, anti-humanist theory’s dismissal of humanism altogether indicates a dangerous
fate for criticism as well.124 With the methods of critique, he articulates under the umbrella of
humanism in Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Said hopes to preserve anti-humanist
theory’s powerful critique of humanism’s abuses while retaining humanism as a system.
The strategies that allow Said to accomplish this are a contrapuntal reading and a return to
philology. Derived from music, contrapuntal reading is a Saidian method of reading texts in
light of their structural dependency on historically disadvantaged groups, in order to recover
the forgotten other back into the text.125 It is this method that makes it possible for Said to
read Joseph Conrad and Jane Austen126 on their own merits without losing sight of their
historical contexts and complicity in the colonial project. For Said, it is imperative that
readers, in the time of post- and anti-colonialism, realize that novels cannot be reduced to the
historical, socio-political forces that shaped them as they are in what he calls “an unresolved
dialectical relationship with them.”127 When viewed from this perspective, it is possible to
understand the urgency with which Said sought to save humanism from anti-humanist forces.
Introducing this contrapuntal reading into humanism, allows Said to incorporate criticism of
humanism into the humanist project itself.
Furthermore, the return to philology,128 that Timothy Brennan associates with Said’s
inquisitive voice,129 lies at the heart of the humanistic tradition for Said. It is not surprising
that he finds a solution to the problems that plague humanism in the long-neglected practice
of philology: “literally, the love of words.”130 Said turns to philology as a discipline to
reinvigorate the act of reading. Even Hallaq’s critique of Orientalism retains a belief in the
value of philology to the extent that the new path that Hallaq charts for the future of
Orientalism involves improving upon philology to create
a new philology centered on what may be called heuristic historicism; the Oriental
traditions will cease to be the locus of revaluation and reengineering, and will instead
stand as the repertoire of thought that will instruct in refashioning a new Orientalist
self.131
The enduring value of philology is as evident here as it is for Said.

It is through philology that Said articulates a thorough method of reading that involves
engaging with a text deeply and on multiple levels.132 For this, Said couples Spitzerian
philology that encourages the “scholar-humanist-reader” to read from “the surface to the
inward life-center”133 with Ijtihad, a technique he borrows from the Islamic tradition. Ijtihad,
which Said defines as “a component of personal commitment and extraordinary effort,” is
indispensable to his philological reading. He recalls, here, the way the Quran is meant to be
read by Muslims: repeatedly and with rapt attention, revered as it is as the Word of God that
can never be fully understood. While Said’s purpose is not to suggest that all readers imitate
Spitzerian or Auerbachian levels of close reading,134 he does insist that readers make the best
attempt to engage with texts in the humanistic vein. This is crucial precisely because, for
him, humanism is not an elitist engagement for the select few that holds no bearing on the so-
called real world. As Ahluwalia notes, Said “reminds us about the centrality of the
worldliness of theory” and the need to recognize the “connection between texts and the
existential actualities of human, life, politics, societies, and events.”135 Engagement with
theory is important, then, precisely because it is not divorced from the socio-political realities
of life at all.
In conclusion, Said realizes the universal humanism that lingers in the margins of
Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism by demarcating a new sphere for humanism, one that is
both separate from the various discredited humanisms, and critical and inclusive at its very
core. This humanism, for Said, is the first step in achieving the true potential of humanistic
culture as “coexistence and sharing.” Despite questions presented to him about adherence to
Foucauldian paradigms, Said’s strategy remains to leverage the “values of humanism …
against imperialist notions of culture.”136 Thus, Said continues to operate in an
Enlightenment paradigm even though his ends are not the original ends of the Enlightenment.
Said’s turn to humanism is a call to recover it from “the abuses of humanism.”137 Even as
questions arise around the rehabilitation of humanism, Said accomplishes what he set out to
do in his volume on humanism: issuing the positive reminder that “far more than they fight,
cultures coexist and interact fruitfully with each other.”138
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Anticolonialism,” New Introduction, Robin D.G. Kelley (New York: Monthly Review
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10.1215/01903659-31-2–35
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Notes
1. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Secular Divination: Edward Said’s Humanism,” Critical Inquiry, 31,
2 (2005), 462.
2. Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 1st ed. (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2004), xvi.
3. W. J. T. Mitchell, 462.
4. Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 8–9.
5. Ibid., 13.
6. Ibid., 7.
7. Malreddy Kumar “(An)other Way of Being Human: ‘Indigenous’ Alternative(s) to
Postcolonial Humanism.” Third World Quarterly 32, 9 (2016), 1561.
8. Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, “Edward Said’s Literary Humanism,” Cultural Critique,
67, 1 (2007), 13.
9. Ibid.
10. Timothy Brennan, “Edward—Timothy Brennan,” politicsandculture.org, 2004, n.p.
11. Aimé Césaire and Robin D. G. Kelley, Discourse On Colonialism, 1st ed. (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2000), 37
12. M. De Gennaro, “Fighting ‘Humanism’ On Its Own Terms,” Differences, 14, 1 (2003),
57–58.
13. Ibid.
14. Aimé Césaire and Robin D. G. Kelley, Discourse On Colonialism, 3.
15. Russell West-Pavlov, “Said, Space and Biopolitics: Giorgio Agamben’s and D. H.
Lawrence’s States of Exception” in The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W. Said, 1st ed.
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 17–41.
16. De Gennaro, M., “Fighting ‘Humanism’ On Its Own Terms,” Differences, 14, 1 (2003),
58.
17. Ibid., 58.
18. Malreddy Kumar, 1561.
19. Ibid.
20. Bashir Abu Manneh, “Said’s Political Humanism: An Introduction,” 1–19.
21. Ibid., 3.
22. Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 8.
23. Ibid., 26.

24. Malreddy Kumar, 1560.
25. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
29. Yumna Siddiqi, “Edward Said, Humanism, and Secular Criticism,” Alif: Journal of
Comparative Poetics 25 (2005), 81.
31. Ibid., 27.
32. Ibid., 46.
33. Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, “Edward Said’s Literary Humanism,” Cultural Critique,
67, 1 (2007), 19.
35. Edward W. Said, “The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations,” Media Education
Foundation, 1998.
36. Note that, here, Said takes issue with the gendered “l’homme,” or “man” and treats
Cesaire’s l’homme, thereafter, as meaning “human” rather than just man alone.
38. Ibid., xvi.
39. Ibid., 53–54.
40. Ibid., 54.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., 33.
43. The idea of a real humanism will be explained shortly.
44. Ibid., 1.
45. Emily Apter, “Saidian Humanism,” Boundary 2, 31.2 (2004), 52.
46. Jane Hiddleston, “Aimé Césaire and Postcolonial Humanism,” The Modern Language
Review 105, 1 (2010), 90.
47. Ibid., 95–100.
48. M. De Gennaro, 58.
49. Edward W. Said. The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1983), 175.
50. Ibid., 225.
51. Ibid.
52. Pannian, 118.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid., 119.
55. Ashcroft, “Edward Said’s Humanism,” 4–5.
57. Ibid., 28.
58. Ibid., 32.
60. Yumna Siddiqi, 81.

61. Said, Edward W., “Presidential Address 1999: Humanism and Heroism,” PMLA 115
(2000), 290.
62. Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism,13.
63. Ibid., 11.
64. Pal Ahluwalia, “On Late Style: Edward Said’s Humanism,” in Edward Said and the
Literary, Social, and Political World, 1st ed. (New York: Routledge, 2009), 152.
65. Samir Dayal, “Ethical Antihumanism” in Edward Said and Jacques Derrida, 1st ed.
(Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 220.
66. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, 1993), 324–325.
67. Ibid., 325.
68. Ibid., 327.
69. Ibid., 328.
70. Ibid., 325.
71. Ibid., 325.
72. Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, 16.
73. Edward W. Said and Jacqueline Rose, Freud and The Non-European, 1st ed. (London:
Verso, 2003), 20–21.
74. Ibid.
75. Pal Ahluwalia, 151–152.
76. Ibid.
77. Ibid.
78. Ibid.
79. Siddiqi, 73.
80. Mufti, 112.
81. Bashir Abu-Manneh, 4.
82. Radhakrishnan, 27.
83. Pannian, 118.
84. Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism,6.
85. Radhakrishnan, 18.
86. Priyamvada Gopal, “Humanism for a Globalised World,” newhumanist.org.uk, 2013.
87. Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, 19.
88. Ibid.
89. Jane Hiddleston, “Aimé Césaire and Postcolonial Humanism,” The Modern Language
Review, 105, 1 (2010), 101.
90. Ibid.
91. Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism,xvi.
92. Ibid., 21.
93. Emily Apter, 43.
94. Ibid., 52.
95. Ibid.
96. James Clifford, “On Orientalism.” The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century
Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 225–
276.
97. Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge,
1990), 131.
99. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. by Frank Kermode (London: Methuen, 1964), I.
2.
100. M. De Gennaro, 57.
101. Rajahopalan Radhakrishnan, 17.
102. Ibid.
104. Victor Li, “Edward Said’s Untidiness,” postcolonial.org, 2016.
106. Terry Eagleton, “Human, All Too Human,” April 22, 2004, n.p.
107. Wael Hallaq. Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2018), 4
108. Ibid.
109. Ibid.
110. Ibid., 242.
111. Ibid., 232.
112. Ibid., 9.
113. Ibid.
114. Ibid.
115. Said, “World, Text and Critic,” 29.
117. Edward W. Said, “Michel Foucault, 1926–1984,” in After Foucault: Humanistic
Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges, ed. by Jonathan Arac and University of Illinois at
Chicago (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 9.
118. Siddiqi, 85.
119. Ibid., 81.
120. Ibid., 6.
121. Ibid., 23.
122. Ibid., 33.
123. Pannian, Prasad. “Intellectuals as Subjects of Action in the Age of New Humanism.” In
Edward Said and the Question of Subjectivity, by Prasad Pannian, 93–125 (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan US, 2016), 118.
124. Jeffrey Hole, “Said, Humanism and the Neoliberal University” in The Geocritical
Legacies of Edward W. Said, 1st ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 71.
125. “Contrapuntal Reading—Oxford Reference,” oxfordreference.com, 2016.
127. Ibid.
128. Ibid., 57–83.
129. Timothy Brennan, “Edward—Timothy Brennan,” politicsandculture.org, 2004.
130. Ibid., 58.
131. Hallaq, 257.

132. Brennan, 59.
133. Ibid., 64.
134. 67.
135. Pal Ahluwalia, 151–152.
136. Pannian, 118.
138. Ibid., xvi.

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4

“A Different Kind of Humanism”

1. Traditional, Eurocentric humanism, which Said argues is a distortion of humanism;

we are humanists because there is something called humanism, legitimated by the

This humanism involves a Vichian commitment to submitting to “rational processes of

Defining Real Humanism

“A Usable Praxis”: Why Humanism?

The enduring value of philology is as evident here as it is for Said.

23. Ibid., 26.

60. Yumna Siddiqi, 81.

131. Hallaq, 257.

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