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140 ORIENTALISM
Orientalist Structures and Restructures
141
tions that Semites and Semitic were creations of Orientalist philological
study.41 Since he was the man who did the study, there was
meant to be little ambiguity about the centrality of his role in this
new, artificial creation. But how did Renan mean the word creation
in these instances? And how was this creation connected with either
natural creation, or the creation ascribed by Renan and others to
the laboratory and to the classificatory and natural sciences,
principally what was called philosophical anatomy? Here we must
speculate a little. Throughout his career Ren!ln seemed to imagine
the role of science in human life as (and I quote in translation as
literally as I can) "telling (speaking or articulating) definitively
to man the word [logos?] of things."42 Science gives speech to
things; better yet, science brings out, causes to be pronounced, a
potential speech within things. The special value of linguistics (as
the new philology was then often called) is not that natural science
resembles it, but rather that it treats words as natural, otherwise
silent objects, which are made to give up their secrets. Remember
that the major breakthrough in the study of inscriptions and hieroglyphs
was the discovery by Champollion that the symbols on the
Rosetta Stone .had a phonetic as well as a semantic component. 43
To make objects speak was like making words speak, giving them
circumstantial value, and a precise place in a rule-governed order
of regularity. In its first sense, creation, as Renan used the word,
signified the articulation by which an object like Semitic could be
seen as a creature of sorts. Second, creation also signified the setting
-in the case of Semitic it meant Oriental history, culture, race,
mind-illuminated and brought forward from its reticence by the
scientist. Finally, creation was the formulation of a system of classification
by which it was possible to see the object in question
comparatively with other like objects; and by "comparatively"
Renan intended a complex network of paradigmatic relations that
obtained between Semitic and Indo-European languages.
If in what I have so far said I have insisted so much on Renan's
comparatively forgotten study of Semitic languages, it has been for
several important reasons. Semitic was the scientific study to which
Renan turned right after the loss of his Christian faith; I described
above how he came to see the study of Semitic as replacing his
faith and enabling a critical future relation with it. The study of
tory of the Jews as it was a propaedeutic for them. In intention,
if not perhaps in achievement-interestingly, few of the standard or
contemporary works in either linguistic history or the history of
Orientalism cite Renan with anything more than cursory attention 44
-his Semitic opus was proposed as a philological breakthrough,
from which in later years he was always to draw retrospective authority
for his positions (almost always bad ones) on religion, race,
and nationalism. 45 Whenever Renan wished to make a statement
about either the Jews or the Muslims, for example, it was always
with his remarkably harsh (and unfounded, except according to the
science he was practicing) strictures on the Semites in mind. Furthermore,
Renan's Semitic was meant as a contribution both to the
development of Indo-European linguistics and to the differentiation
of Orientalisms. To the former Semitic was a degraded form, degraded
in both the moral and the biological sense, whereas to the
latter Semitic was a-if not the-stable form of cultural decadence.
Lastly, Semitic was Renan's first creation, a fiction invented by him
in the philological laboratory to satisfy his sense of public place
and mission. It should by no means be lost on us that Semitic was
for Renan's ego the symbol of European (and consequently his)
dominion over the Orient and over his own era.
Therefore, as a branch of ' the Orient, Semitic was not fully a
natural object-like a species of monkey, for instance-nor fully
an unnatural or a divine object, as it had once been considered.
Rather, Semitic occupied a median position, legitimated in its oddities
(regularity being defined by Indo-European) by an inverse
relation to normal languages, comprehended as an eccentric, quasimonstrous
phenomenon partly because libraries, laboratories, and
museums could serve as its place of exhibition and analysis. In his
treatise, Renan adopted a tone of voice and a method of exposition
that drew the maximum from book-learning and from natural observation
as practiced by men like Cuvier and the Geoffroy Saint­
Hilaires pere et fils. This is an important stylistic achievement, for
it allowed Renan consistently to avail himself of the library, rather
than either primitivity or divine fiat, as a conceptual framework in
which to understand language, together with the museum, which is
where the results of laboratory observation are delivered for exhibition,
study, and teaching. 46 Everywhere Renan treats of normal
Semitic was Renan's first full-length Orientalist and scientific study ';; human facts-language, history, culture, mind, imagination-as
(finished in 1847, published first in 1855), and was as much a part
transformed into something else, as something peculiarly deviant,
of his late major works on the origins of Christianity and the his-
because they are Semitic and Oriental, and because they end up for