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Chapter 2, Part 1
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Orientalism, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The West’s View of the Eastern World
Knowledge and Power
Belief, Consensus, and Reality
The Persistence of Racism
The Personal as Political
Summary
Analysis
Born in 1757, Silvestre de Sacy was a gifted and devoted student of the Orient who studied Arabic, Syriac, Chaldean, and Hebrew. He ultimately became a scholar, teacher, government consultant, and an active member of several learned societies. Thus, it’s not an exaggeration to name him as one of the founding fathers of modern Orientalism. The conversational tone in which he writes his books creates a sense of intimacy that suggests the relationship between a student and a trusted teacher. Writing as if he’s in the classroom, Sacy teaches his readers by displaying and interpreting carefully selected excerpts from history and literature. He expects his readers to passively receive his wisdom, which he offers via static and mediated forms like anthologies and tableaus.
Said positions Sacy as a typical 18th-century Orientalist in two regards: first, he comes to his study of the Orient through the study of languages. Second, he self-consciously positions himself as an expert, part of whose job entails disseminating knowledge to others. Said shows how Sacy carefully controls his readers’ access to his source material by offering them excerpts and snippets. His knowledge of the raw material becomes a way that he can exercise power both over his subject (by presenting it the way he wants to) and his audience (by allowing them only to see what he thinks they should see).
Themes
Said analyzes Sacy’s contribution to the Tableau historique de l’érudition française (an authoritative accounting of all French knowledge commissioned by Napoleon) to explain his methodology. In it, Sacy describes the Orientalist as uncovering and explicating his “obscure matter” to help build the edifice of human (or French) knowledge. Implicitly, his academic study is a “technology of power” by which experts like himself mediate material and present interpretations for others to consume. He defends this interventionist approach by appealing to European sensibilities, which he claims would find unmediated Oriental texts unrefined if not incomprehensible—ideas that are commonplace by the 19th century.
Sacy is a modern Orientalist, too, because his intellectual project is intimately tied up with the interests of the French empire of which he was a citizen. Said’s interpretation of Sacy’s words emphasizes the ways in which Sacy’s distance from his subject isn’t a neutral or critical distance, but an overdetermined distance in which he sees himself as superior to that which he studies. And it shows how self-consciously experts like Sacy use the creation of knowledge and the control of information as tools. There’s nothing neutral about the work, no matter how scientific and impersonal Sacy makes it sound.
Themes
Nineteenth-century Ernest Renan inherits and expands on Sacy’s ideas. Renan was a philologist—a scholar of language and word histories. Philology was a prestigious field of study in the 19th century, and Orientalists like Renan used it to articulate a relationship between the ancient past and modern present—one which unsurprisingly, privileged the modern Westerner’s powerful application of pure rationality and scientific inquiry to the study of humanity.
Sacy studied ancient languages in the 18th century; by Renan’s day the study of ancient languages had become integral to the intellectual project of Europe. Nineteenth century philologists were making exciting discoveries about the ancient historical connections between modern-day languages that initially seemed quite distinct from each other, like Sanskrit and English or French. But, Said points out, rather than letting these discoveries stand on their own rights, they were immediately put to use confirming European ideas of superiority.
Themes
Renan displaces the drama of the encounter between the philologist and the Orient (specifically, for him, the study of Semitic languages and people) from a religious framework to a scientific one. In this light, he understands the Semitic as not just his subject but also, to a great extent, his creation, a thing he isolates from its context, compels to reveal its secrets, and fits into the grand edifice of human understanding.
This is one of several points where Said touches on the ways Orientalist discourse didn’t—and doesn’t—just serve large, society- or nation-wide goals (like colonizing another country) but works on the individual level. Insofar as it gives him power (and assures him of his own superiority), Orientalism fills Renan’s emotional needs.
Themes
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Renan gives his works an air of objectivity by evoking the library, the museum, the laboratory, and the biological science of anatomy. But Said points out that Renan’s justification for his studies—based on the foundational idea that the Semitic (person, language or culture) is somehow aberrant—is circular. By identifying the Semitic as different, he isolates it for study; in studying it, he both declares and itemizes its differences from the norms. And his scholarship, full of “remarkably harsh […] and unfounded” ideas, demonstrates the generous application of his biases, namely that Semitic people are basically inhuman, inorganic phenomena given real meaning only through his study.
Although Renan uses the language of scientific objectivity he inherits from the Enlightenment, Said claims here that a close reading of Renan’s work disproves his objectivity, because Renan isolates the Semitic as a category by looking not for its inherent traits but its deviance from alleged norms. He starts, in other words, with the idea that the Oriental subject (the Semitic subject) is wholly different from the European subject—an idea he inherits from Orientalist discourse stretching back at least to the Middle Ages. Then, he looks for evidence that proves his idea. And his findings thus always reinforce it. To make matters worse, his ideas are dehumanizing and racist, so his scholarship reinforces the very racism that suggested it to him in the first place.
Themes
Said sees Renan’s later career—which turned from languages to history—as an extension of this quest to revivify a dead past through the Orientalist’s salutary attention. Said also notes a deeply patriarchal strand that runs subtly but persistently though Renan’s ideas and work, which not only generally fails to mention women but also consistently locates the generative force in the world in the actions of (male) scientists and thinkers who order (rather than give birth to) life. Notably, this imposition of power can best be achieved when the objects of study are unchanging—inorganic, unliving, abstract.
Renn’s career shift exemplifies a dynamic by which an Orientalist expert in one subject could, because of the Orient’s alleged simplicity, meaningfully comment on any other subject. Renan’s judgment of Semitic languages as debased turns effortlessly into ideas about the debasement of Oriental subjects. This further demonstrates the ways in which Orientalist discourse grows from received ideas rather than empirical observation. Renan’s sexism merely confirms something Said has already claimed: that discourses serve not to expand human knowledge, but to concentrate power in the hands of a few people. Patriarchy, in this interpretation, is a discourse aligned with Orientalism and serving similar goals.
Themes
