Orientalism - autonomous learning

130 ORIENTALISM
Orientalist Structures and Restructures
131
elusive presence. Sacy placed the Arabs in the Orient, which was
itself placed in the general tableau of modern learning. Orientalism
belonged therefore to European scholarship, but its material had
to be re-created by the Orientalist before it could enter the arcades
alongside Latinism and Hellenism. Each Orientalist re-created his
own Orient according to the fundamental epistemological rules of
loss and gain first supplied and enacted by Sacy. Just as he was the
father of Orientalism, he was also the discipline's first sacrifice, for
in translating new texts, fragments, and extracts subsequent
Orientalists entirely displaced Sacy's work by supplying their own
restored Orient. Nevertheless the process he started would continue,
as philology in particular developed systematic and institutional
powers Sacy had never exploited. This was Renan's accomplishment:
to have associated the Orient with the most recent comparative
disciplines, of which philology was one of the most eminent.
The difference between Sacy and Renan is the difference between
inauguration and continuity; Sacy is the originator, whose work
represents the field's emergence and its status as a nineteenth-century
discipline with roots in revolutionary Romanticism. Renan derives
from Orientalism's second generation: it was his task to solidify the
official discourse of Orientalism, to systematize its insights, and to
establish its intellectual and worldly institutions. For Sacy, it was
his personal efforts that launched and vitalized the field and its
structures; for Renan, it was his adaptation of Orientalism to
philology and both of them to the intellectual culture of his time
that perpetuated the Orientalist structures intellectually and gave
them greater visibility.
Renan was a figure in his own right neither of total originality
nor of absolute derivativeness. Therefore as a cultural force or as
an important Orientalist he cannot be reduced simply to his
personality nor to a set of schematic ideas in which he believed.
Rather, Renan is best grasped as a dynamic force whose opportunities
were already created for him by pioneers like Sacy, yet who
brought their achievements into the culture as a kind of currency
which he circulated and recirculated with (to force the image a
little further) his own unmistakable re-currency. Renan is a figure
who must be grasped, in short, as a type of cultural and intellectual
praxis, as a style for making Orientalist statements within what
Michel Foucault would call the archive of his time. 21 What matters
is not only the things that Renan said but also how he said them,
what, given his background and training, he chose to use as his
subject matter, what to combine with what, and so forth. Renan's
relations with his Oriental subject matter, with his time and
audience, even with his own work, can be described, then, without
resorting to formulae that depend on an unexamined assumption
of ontological stability (e.g., the Zeitgeist, the history of ideas, lifeand-times).
Instead we are able to read Renan as a writer doing
something describable, in a place defined temporally, spatially, and
culturally (hence archivally), for an audience and, no less important,
for the furtherance of his own position in the Orientalism
of his era.
I Renan carne to Orientalism from philology, and it is the
extraordinarily rich and celebrated cultural position of that
discipline that endowed Orientalism with its most important technical
characteristics. For anyone to whom the word philology
suggests dry-as-dust and inconsequential word-study, however,
Nietzsche's proclamation that along with the greatest minds of the
nineteenth century he is a philologist will corne as a surprise-­
though not if Balzac's Louis Lambert is recalled:
What a marvelous book one would write by narrating the life and
adventures of a word! Und0ubtedly a word has received various
impressions of the events for which it was used; depending on the
places it was used, a word has awakened different kinds of impressions
in different people; but is it not more grand still to consider
a word in its triple aspect of soul, body, and movement?22
What is the category, Nietzsche will ask later, that includes himself,
Wagner, Schopenhauer, Leopardi, all as philologists? The term
seems to include both a gift for exceptional spiritual insight into
language· and the ability to produce work whose articulation is of
aesthetic and historical power. Although the profession of philology
was born the day in 1777 "when F. A. Wolf invented for himself
.the name of stud. philol.," Nietzsche is nevertheless at pains to show
that professional students of the Greek and Roman classics are
commonly incapable of understanding their discipline: "they never
reach the roots of the matter: they never adduce philology as a
problem." For simply "as knowledge of the ancient world philology
cannot, of course, last forever; its material is exhaustible."23 It is
this that the herd of philologists cannot understand. But what distinguishes
the few exceptional spirits whom Nietzsche deems worthy