Said the Obscure

Lucy Van on Edward Said

One of my favourite fragments of lyric poetry, attributed to Sappho, contains an epithet for Eros that was frequently used by early Greek lyricists: λυσιμέλης, or lusimeles, from the verb luo, to loosen, and the noun mele, for limbs. Eros was the loosener of limbs, the possessor of ‘a force so powerful it dissolves the joints and disjoins the body, disarticulating the parts from the whole’, as Yopie Prins so memorably puts it. The poem-fragment’s subject, Eros lusimeles, transforms the speaking ‘me’ into its vanquished object, who dissolves in the present crisis of contradictory sensations (glukupikron, sweet-bitter) that is, paradoxically, to be repeated again and again (deute, an untranslatable temporal designation, now-then). In borrowing lusimeles from their epic predecessors, who had used the word to describe the moment warriors lost consciousness on the battlefield, the love lyricists introduced into erotic love a kind of death.

The painful pleasure indicated by this epithet might be transposed to the interrelated realms of interpretation, criticism, and analysis. Analysis itself shares an etymological root in luo (in ancient Greek, ἀνάλυσις indicates the action of loosing or releasing, the fact of dissolving, and the resolution of a problem; in Hellenistic Greek this also indicates the solution of a problem < ἀναλύειν to unloose, undo (< ἀνά- ana - prefix + λύειν to loose) ① Oxford English Dictionary, under ‘analysis’ – Etymology, accessed March 2024. , and, at least when thinking of metrical poetry, it is not difficult to see how literary analysis might have something to do with the loosening of feet, fingers (dactyl), legs (kola) and so on, after the traditions that have measured poetry by body parts. Given poetry’s precedence, a form often held at the top of other traditions of knowledge, it is not difficult to see how analytic practices continue to flow from this primal disarticulation.

We can analyse something to death—at least, what bystanders might say when they see us ‘overthink’ the text message, the television series, the thermal immersion cooker. Students may voice their dismay when they feel we analyse beloved texts to their detriment (Middlemarch is ruined! Hmph!). But perhaps there is another way in which death persists in analysis. This arises in the something that refuses to submit to our endeavours to understand; an opacity riddles and confounds us, causing considerable pain and costing exorbitant energy in our efforts to know. This would also be present, I think, in the something that means to wreck the sanctity of these very endeavours—that which puts up a fight precisely when we try (to know). Conrad’s monster, Flaubert’s couch... these are some well-known presentations of such wrecking power. What is it that prevents the completion of a sentence (Flaubert flings himself on his couch at every crisis this prevention precipitates; Conrad’s monster knows that the more Conrad writes, the less substance is in his work)? What is this undoing, and why does it reside within the heart of the text? Let what is the death—in-love of love poetry be understood, in analysis, as the death in knowing, as the unknown, the meaning we are unable to rescue from the chaos of experience, the unanalysable figured by Freud as the ‘tangle of thoughts’ at the navel of the dream.

A strange book moves me to these thoughts. The book is not by Freud, though I am frequently dazzled by its middle section, which gives a beautiful exposition of his Interpretation of Dreams. The book is Edward Said’s Beginnings: Intention and Method, a book that I am obliged to summarise if I wish to speak in any way fruitful about it here. But, how else to put it—the premium the book places on the value of unsummarisability makes me cautious, or rather, makes me the person who draws a blank. I don’t know how to describe it. Though cowardice holds some natural appeal (for then I would no longer have to perform a difficult task), I grasp around in the dark and read secondary criticism (licensed cowardice?). Cheers to H. Aram Veeser, who pulls the constitutive parts of Beginnings apart and then sends them back on their way in his book about Said’s charisma. ② H. Aram Veeser, Edward Said: The Charisma of Criticism (Taylor & Francis, 2010).
Said began Beginnings, his second book, in 1967—an important year for him, and for literary criticism generally. That year marked the emergence of a new generation of literary critics, whose radical energies both nourished, and were nourished by, the new radical student body. Importantly, 1967 was the year when global consciousness surrounding Palestine’s occupation by the zionist state of Israel expanded, following what is now known as the Seven-Day War. 1967 was the sabbatical year when Said wrote his first political essay, a breaking of silence that would come to define him. ③ Breaking silence was the point of the intellectual, Said held, over the course of his career as one. Impotence, passivity, quietism, standing aside—all were indefensible states hated by Said, and the author (or teacher, or intellectual) was the figure who ought to stand in defiance of them: ‘[w]hat distinguishes the truly struggling intellectual is […] the conception of his or her work as activity, not as passive contemplation’; ‘[t]he tension between teachers and students remains, but better the tension than the peace of passivity, or the unresisting assent to authority.’ Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 210; Edward W. Said, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (Pantheon Books, 1986), 44. It was also the year he decided to leave his unhappy first marriage, and, if a metaphor may be made of this, also the year he left his unhappy marriage to the English departments of yore (those places at once dweeby and necrotic, filled with ‘Anglophilic men who quoted only themselves’ ④ Veeser, Edward Said, 41. ).
Why do I say the book is strange? At the time it first appeared, in 1975, critics located it in what they then called ‘uncanny criticism’—that is, says Said in the preface to the 1985 Morningside edition, ‘criticism not primarily based on the traditions, common-sense conventions and, we should add in honesty, pieties (as opposed to the practice) of historical or philological scholarship’. ⑤ Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (Columbia University Press, 1985), xi. Subsequent citations in-text. Enjoying himself in that second preface, Said baulked at the implications of the ‘uncanny’. His work was not part of that labyrinthine attempt to escape from the logic of words into regions illogical and absurd (pace J. Hillis Miller)—a not atypical Anglospheric response to the sexy new theory coming out of the continent:

[This does not characterise] what I was trying to do in Beginnings, at least not in the association between uncanny criticism and a certain futile or impotent irrationality (whose presence has come to be represented by such words as ‘the abyss’ or ‘aporia’). For in isolating beginnings as a subject of study my whole attempt was precisely to set a beginning off as rational and enabling … ⑥ Said, Beginnings.

What, then, was the relation between the new critical departure—the siren call of post-structuralist thinking—and Said’s own? It might be a way of saying no—though this is by no means clear as one reads the text. The distinction between, say, Foucault’s reconception of beginnings, and Said’s, is difficult to detect, right up to the moment it arrives. Said hails Foucault’s technique as a ‘technique of trouble’, writing that ‘[t]he contemporary need for a beginning, as reflected in the concerns of the French thinkers … testifies to an active search ... for a nonnarrative way of dealing with nonnarratable units of knowledge’. In Foucault, according to Said, we witness history not as a chronicle of events but as the functional conditions that give rise not only to knowledge, but ‘man [sic] himself’. Foucault’s job of getting to the bottom of all this is thus ‘permanently hampered by language, which is the first, and in a sense the last, instrument at his disposal’—only to yield that ‘man [sic] is a temporary interruption, a figure of thought, of what is already begun’. ‘Man’ dissolves in discourse, like Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. This was not a point unique to Foucault, for ‘[n]early every one of the structuralists acknowledges a tyrannical feedback system in which man is the speaking subject’; but Foucault was he who tried most (extravagantly) to ‘overcome this tyranny by laying bare these workings’.

The textuality of this example on Foucault—taken almost at random (I could have equally turned to his discussion of Barthes, or Derrida), indicates something of the difficulty in summarising that I alluded to earlier. Densely described—and if I’m honest, effectively boring—it is also analytically dispersed: I don’t locate a clear point until about 40 pages after the section on Foucault. Said abruptly turns from an account of Foucault’s peculiar brand of coherence to make a broader statement about the structuralists who, in their effort to study the ‘residual form of the violence [of structure]’ make a sign of a ‘difficult mixture of need, absence, loss, and uncertain appropriation’. Should we read the structuralists as a memorial to unceasing loss? Perhaps we do not know the extent to which we still do—and Said shocks us there in Beginnings when he writes,

Yet there is a comic side to their industry. The intensity of their dedication often reminds one of Molière’s* characters who are so single-minded about their work that they cannot detect the irony in a job done too rationally; as Chrysale says in Les Femmes savantes, ‘Raisonner est l’emploi de toute ma maison, / Et le raisonnement en bannit la raison.’

Reasoning is the job of my whole house, / And reasoning banishes reason from it. Comedy holds onto reason? Comedy is Said’s way of saying ‘no … maybe, yes’. ⑦ Veeser, Edward Said, 40. Comedy: what happens when a someone (usually a young man) wants a someone else (usually a young woman). There is resistance—Northrop Frye says this opposition is usually paternal—and then, near the end, some twist enables the marriage of desire to reality. ⑧ Veeser, Edward Said, 41.
Beginnings is a book of six chapters. Read as comedy, we see how the first five register both seduction and blocking in their charting of writing in modernity as failure (in ample ways) of linearity, narrative, succession. Then something catches my eye: after Jude the Obscure, Said observes, Thomas Hardy turns away from the novel and writes only in poetry. But what lifts Said’s text out of the mire of disenchantment is the sixth chapter—the rom-com twist called ‘Conclusion: Vico in His Work and in This’, the only chapter in Beginnings about a single writer. How else to explain the union of Giambattista Vico, out of place in his own time, the early (counter-) Enlightenment, and out of place here, in a book essentially about French post-structuralist theory? Veeser views this addition as giving Beginnings the form of traditional comedy: adding Vico removes the blocking humours, and the book, having survived ‘its encounters with theory, swings open onto a new set of possibilities.’ ⑨ Veeser, Edward Said, 43.
This new set of possibilities would point to an instability different to that which the first five chapters chart, a kind of copiousness that would (potentially) help to rescue those chapters’ beleaguered subject: the author. Said loves Vico’s emphasis on invention, his insistence that a beginning had something to do with effort—‘a beginning is at once never given and always indefinite or divined at yet always asserted at considerable expense.’ Said loves Vico’s method, which was—and perhaps now more than ever is—often in flagrant violation of established norms of analysis, interpretation, and other allied thinking methods (what Michael Taussig calls ‘agribusiness writing’ when describing academic prose, ⑩ Michael Taussig, The Corn Wolf (University of Chicago Press, 2015), 5–7. writing that ‘knows no wonder’ and ‘wants mastery’). Vico is a major reason Said’s style would outrage all bureaucratic standards of writing today. Said celebrates Vico’s turning away from schematic method: it is precisely the point that schema can’t be lifted out of The New Science, and the same can be said of Beginnings:

[I]nstead, he advocated wideness of scope, broad comparisons, the love of detail linked to large universal principles—all intended to load down schemata beyond usefulness. The power of Vico’s rhetoric always takes one away from method, rationalistically considered, to knowledge as pathos, invention, imagination—with their pitfalls unobscured.

It’s so nice to see detail thought about this way—loading down the knowledge machine beyond usefulness as a form of contamination to be admired, rather than avoided or suppressed. Vico’s supersession of post-structuralism is super great; I love thinking about the author—alive again!—as Said reads Vico in the fresh wake of the author’s’ death. Who wouldn’t love this seat-of-your-pants etymology, like so:

Here begins also a philosophy of authority, a second principal aspect of this Science, taking the word ‘authority’ in its original meaning of property. The word is always used in this sense in the Law of the Twelve Tables, and the term auctores was accordingly applied to those from whom we derived title to property. Auctor certainly comes from autos (= proprius or suus ipsius); and many scholars write autor and autoritias, leaving out the aspirate. ⑪ The New Science of Giambattista Vico, eds. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch, abridged translation of the 3rd edition (1744), (Cornell University Press, 1970), sec. II, paragraph 386, 80.

But it is strange, too; though I love Veeser’s reading of the Vico chapter as the happy twist in Beginnings, the chapter places a premium on something I find difficult to reconcile with. If the chapter serves a kind of ‘disenchantment of disenchantment,’ could we not see in this equally a kind of wrecking, as much as a kind of reconciliation?

While I am writing this, I have a dream. I’m in clear sea water, watching a single sentence string made of golden letters move from right to left, ‘across the page’, with the current. This subtitle is legible in the dream, though I don’t remember what I read when I wake. As the letters disperse through the water in sudden fragmentation, my toddler daughter pokes me in the eye. This is what wakes me. Even fleeting legibility is followed by a would-be blinding. Insight is acquired with pain, as the story of Oedipus teaches us.

‘Vico’, as a conclusion that raises more questions than it answers, throws me back into Beginnings. In the final chapter’s double emphases on intention and inadequacy, it seems too enigmatic to resolve the problems of the text (or to be more specific, the problem of the relationship between human beings and their texts—that is to say, the problem of writers): ‘Theirs is a poetic world where poetic is an adjective that Vico intends in three ways: as imagistic and hence inadequate, as creative and hence human and grand, and as a description of the beginning’. ‘Inadequate’, as in losing one’s way—Said was writing about how Vico imagined the ‘first men’: imaginative, poetic characters in a state of ‘unconscious ferality’ until lightning flashes and they create Jove. But this strikes me as Said’s description for any living person possessing the conscious will to do something otherwise. Could this person survive the acquiescence-inducement of structure?

For Said, this survival depended on (and what Adorno had insisted was) a fundamental distinction between the aesthetic and the nonaesthetic: ‘[a]rt is not simply there: it exists intensely in a state of unreconciled opposition to the depredations of daily life’. ⑫ Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (Columbia University Press, 2004), 63. It was probably still somewhat contentious for him to say it later, right before his death in the early 2000s—reading Tolstoy was different to reading a magazine, and listening to Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis different to listening to the call-waiting music of a doctor’s office. This follows the difference that underwrites the making of work—a point that Said emphasises from the beginning. For instance, chapter three showcases an elaborate, frequently dazzling treatment of the effort that accompanies the task of writing, primarily in relation to the making of the modern novel. As Michael Wood writes, Said seems forever marked by his encounter with Conrad and the problems of rescue and completion of ‘the work’. ⑬ Michael Wood, ‘Beginnings Again’, in Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation, ed. Adel Iskander and Hakem Rustom (University of California Press, 2010), 61. Said’s first book, from his doctoral thesis, had been on Conrad, which Veeser has described as ‘the dark love tryst of failure’. Accordingly, writing Nostromo or Heart of Darkness is different to writing prolific posts on X, or recording, I don’t know, an episode of Citations Needed. The difference matters so much to Said that he quotes Conrad’s 1899 letter to Edward Garnett twice—once in Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Beginnings and once in Beginnings:

The more I write the less substance do I see in my work. The scales are falling off my eyes. It is tolerably awful. And I face it, I face it but the first is growing on me. My fortitude is shaken by the view of the monster. It does not move; its eyes are baleful; it is as still as death—and it will devour me. Its share has eaten into my soul already deep, deep. I am alone with it in a chasm with perpendicular sides of black basalt. Never were sides so perpendicular and smooth, and high. Above your anxious head against a bit of sky peers down—in vain—in vain. There’s no rope long enough for that rescue. ⑭ Joseph Conrad, ‘Letter to Garnet 1899’, in Edward Garnett, Letters from Joseph Conrad, 1895–1924 (Bobbs-Merrill, 1928), 153; cited in Edward W. Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (Harvard University Press, 1966), 55; also cited in Said, Beginnings, 129.

The repetition is itself expressive of something significant to Said. Across his career he hewed pretty closely to the same key authors and novels (Flaubert, Hardy, Conrad, Swift); moreover, he would repeat citations in different contexts as we see in Marx’s ‘they cannot represent themselves; they must be represented’ which appeared in his essay ‘On Repetition’ and famously, as the epigraph to Orientalism. ⑮ Edward W. Said, ‘On Repetition’, in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Harvard University Press, 1983), 123. But what I find most striking, and rather impossible to reconcile, is how the difficulty, anxiety, and torment of writing—the sheerness of effort in facing the monster, the impossibility of climbing through the task for which no rope is long enough—remains the abiding fascination of a writer whose writing feels notably effortless.
To be repetitive: all this depends on the beginning. At precisely the time that Barthes was relishing Flaubert’s interminable corrections as a turning to zero where ‘writing is the book’s goal, not publication’, and ‘ellipsis now acquires the vertigo of expansion’, Said rejected the infinitude of the signifier-in-play by insisting on an entry point to language. ⑯ Roland Barthes, ‘Flaubert and the Sentence’, in New Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Hill and Wang, 1980), 70, 75. That this entry is one of pain and anguish, without any guarantee or consolation of completion, is at the heart of Said’s endeavours. Writing always proceeds in jeopardy with its own realisation—all depends on what its maker does next, and they often do not know what to do.
The mental activity might at any point wreck itself and, crucially, its maker: ‘I have set myself a hard task, and one to which my powers of exposition are scarcely equal … I am paying the penalty for the fact that I have been unable to follow the historical development of my own views.’ ⑰ Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition, vols. 3 and 4 (Hogarth Press, 1953), 588. Sound like Conrad? It’s Freud. Citing Freud’s remarks on the writing of The Interpretation of Dreams, which the latter includes at the end of that book, Said emphasises: ‘if his text is one result of these insufficiencies, Freud is admitting here that it cannot be regarded as the unequivocally happy realisation of his plans for it’. Freud has bravely returned to the peace of the battlefield of his prior psychological insights (I’m displacing Freud’s own metaphor for dream analysis), conscious that he risked sabotaging the safety of his own thought. For Said, what was equally pioneering as Freud’s general theory of dreams and the unconscious was the textual practice itself in the Interpretation. Said draws from Nietzsche when he refers to this ‘insane task of gaining knowledge’: ‘Why did we choose this insane task? Or: “why have knowledge at all?”’ ⑱ Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufman (Vintage, 1966), 161.
‘Insane’: perhaps that supply of sanity in Said is shorter than we tend to suppose. For Said, and for us, too, the poster boy for dangerous thinking remains Oedipus: ‘[t]hat which resists interpretation—the tangle of thoughts—can be unravelled by the poet, but not without sacrificing Oedipus and, indeed, our pride and ignorance’. Said follows Freud, who writes that, more impressive than the traditional lesson of Sophocles’ play (‘submission to the divine will and realisation of [man’s] impotence’) is the sense that ‘the poet, as he unravels the past, brings to light the guilt of Oedipus, [and] he is at the same time compelling us to recognise our own inner minds, in which these same impulses, though suppressed, are still to be found.’ ⑲ Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 262, 263. That our efforts to know are under threat not only from external forces and methods, but internally, too, finds its strongest evidence in what Freud designates—and which Said embraces—as the antithetical meaning of words. ⑳ Sigmund Freud, ‘The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words’, in The Standard Edition, vol. 11 (Hogarth Press, 1957), 154–61; Wood, ‘Beginnings Again’, 63. Said provides a (casually) brilliant definition of reading along these lines:

Reading thus involves us in a regressive movement away from the text to what the words drag along with them, whether that is the memory of the writing or some other, hidden, and perhaps subversive opposite.

In a contrapuntal scene of reading, words not only allude to their opposite, they are their opposite. Tellingly, that word—‘will’, for the conscious effort he associates with the author—means both ‘volition’ and ‘inheritance’ in Beginnings, as in ‘the main character in each [Moby Dick and Great Expectations] discovers that he has substituted volition for inheritance’. Hence, too, the tautology we reproduce whenever we think of beginning:

We find ourselves restoring that we know now and always have known how to begin—whether in terms of speaking, feeling, thinking, or acting in one way rather than in another—and that we will continue to know and to do so. If that is beginning, then that is what we do. When? Where? How? At the beginning.

Beginning is therefore necessarily a way of thinking about not-beginning. It is a way to think about, among other things, how we don’t know how to begin (‘there’s no rope long enough for that rescue’). It is also a way of thinking about ending: ‘[f]ormally, the mind wants to conceive a point in either time or space that marks the beginning of all things (or at least of a limited set of central things), but like Oedipus the mind risks discovering, at that point, where all things will end as well.’

Bringing some things together to a close, a repetition, across Said’s work, draws me back, again and again. This repetition is around his response to Jude the Obscure, a book that I think of as the most brutal campus novel ever written. In Beginnings, Jude appears in a discussion on the breakdown of dynastic relation, Hardy’s comment on the tragedy of human existence (captured in Little Father Time’s outrageous homophone, ‘done because we are too menny’). Later, it appears again in Said’s essay, ‘On Lost Causes’ (where we are reminded that Jude is Christian patron saint of the lost cause—strange, given this is the point of Jesus). ㉑ Edward W. Said, ‘On Lost Causes’, in Reflections on Exile: And Other Literary and Cultural Essays (Granta, 2012), 535. Why did Said make a repetition of Jude? What was Jude, or even, Jude, to him? Poor old Jude, who as a country lad gets hooked on an image of life at the University (Christminster, a fictionalised Oxbridge university town), only to discover rejection, failure and impossibility. Jude is incapacitated from the start, and he never gets it going. As Said writes, ‘all he encounters is setback, disappointment, and more and more entanglements that lead him into desperate degradation.’ ㉒ Said, ‘On Lost Causes’, 535. Early on, Jude manages to acquire grammars in Ancient Greek and Latin, only to encounter his utter inadequacy before the task:

Jude flung down the books, lay backward along the broad trunk of the elm, and was an utterly miserable boy for the space of a quarter of an hour. As he had often done before, he pulled his hat over his face and watched the sun peering insidiously at him through the interstices of the straw. This was Latin and Greek, then, was it, this grand delusion! The charm he had supposed in store for him was really a labour like that of Israel in Egypt.

What brains they must have in Christminster and the great schools, he presently thought, to learn words one by one up to tens of thousands! There were no brains in his head equal to this business; and as the little sun-rays continued to stream in through his hat at him, he wished he had never seen a book, that he might never see another, that he had never been born. ㉓ Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (Penguin Classics, 1998), 31.

What brains they must have at Christminster, indeed, or for that matter, Columbia University. Said never gave up on a particular idea of the university—a protected, quasi-utopia where government, bureaucracies and interests held negligible authority. What would the opposite of this idea be, dragged in the wake of this image? What does it mean that Said—that prolific, award-winning, discipline- and purpose-redefining intellectual—might have carried this unconscious figure within him: the would-be academic who doesn’t succeed, who can’t do it? Why did this figure fascinate Said? I find in this dragging along of impotency, this subversive opposite to his fabulous academic success, a fugitive figure embodying resistance itself. Jude’s end is tragic in many (menny?) ways, but as I end here, I think of his predicament, near the end of the novel, making his living precariously in Christminster by selling gingerbread replicas of the University in town. What felt precedence did these gingerbread universities hold for Said, who may have known (in his unknowing) more about the rise (and fate) of the corporate university than he was willing to tell himself? In this way, Said’s Jude tells us much of the unconscious feelings of the violations to come.

I half-wake from a half-dream and write something down: ‘words made from rocks.’ In the morning, I look at these words and think, oh—dreaming of Édouard Glissant, when I’m writing about Edward Said? For it is in his early book, Poetic Intention, that Glissant writes, ‘I build my language out of rocks. I write, indeed, with the feeling of some scribe, like an instructor from Fort-de-France (or maybe Fort-Lamy?) But it is word-for-word my language that instructs me. I abuse the blissful parenthesis: (it is my way of breathing).’ ㉔ Édouard Glissant, Poetic Intention, trans. Nathalie Stephens (Nightboat Books, 2010), 43.
A formative influence on Said, Richard Poirier, had a reproduction of Michelangelo’s unfinished ‘Captive’ printed on the cover of his seminal book, The Performing Self. In the preface to that book, Poirier attends to the scene rendered by the artist, describing ‘the imagined head [that] cannot be conceived except as part of the material that will not willingly yield itself to the head’s existence.’ I’m grateful for Jacqueline Rose’s essay on Said’s psychoanalytic passion (she describes Beginnings as his major exposition on Freud), where I find an echo of this head-of-unyielding-rock in ‘the mind’s conscious rebuttal of what would sabotage its own safety, a safety that is of course illusory, which is why the conscious mind holds onto it for dear life.’ ㉕ Jacqueline Rose, ‘The Psychoanalytic Passion of Edward Said’, Raritan 36, no. 3 (2017), 13. What is the unbearable knowledge born by this imagined head? That Rose line directly follows a passage in which she describes the world’s (deliberatively suppressed) thought on Palestine, particularly in the West:

This time what cannot be thought or imagined arises out of obduracy. It is the consequence of historic failure to find a place for the Palestinians, a place of accountability that would recognise the injustice perpetrated toward them, in the Western mind. Palestine has been rendered invisible, pushed beyond the realms of what can be seen or conceptualised. Said is clear that this is a deliberative act, based on ‘everyone’s unwillingness to allow for a Palestinian presence.’ ㉖ Rose, ‘The Psychoanalytic Passion of Edward Said’, 13.

One commits to the hope that we live in times when this deliberative obduracy is shifting, that we (and I intend for this word to apply to as many people as possible) having taken our lesson from Oedipus, no longer reduce ourselves to wilfully turning a blind eye.

During the time I prepared this reflection on Said’s Beginnings, Israel destroyed every higher education institution in Gaza. Israel killed thousands of students and their teachers. At home, Australian university students acting in solidarity with Palestine have been spuriously surveilled and brought to academic misconduct hearings, whose outcomes include ‘warnings’, suspensions, and expulsions. This grand delusion! Said’s unconscious indictment: Jude’s gingerbread replicas.

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Works cited 

✷ Barthes, Roland. ‘Flaubert and the Sentence’, in New Critical Essays. Translated by Richard Howard. Hill and Wang, 1980.
✷ Conrad, Joseph. ‘Letter to Garnet 1899’, in Garnett, Edward. Letters from Joseph Conrad, 1895–1924. Bobbs-Merrill, 1928.
✷ Freud, Sigmund. ‘The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words’, in The Standard Edition, vol. 11. Hogarth Press, 1957.
———. The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition, vols. 3 and 4. Hogarth Press, 1953.
✷ Glissant, Édouard. Poetic Intention. Translated by Nathalie Stephens. Nightboat Books, 2010.
✷ Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. Penguin Classics, 1998.
✷ The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Edited by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch. Abridged translation of the 3rd edition (1744). Cornell University Press, 1970.
✷ Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Translated by Walter Kaufman. Vintage, 1966.
✷ Rose, Jacqueline. ‘The Psychoanalytic Passion of Edward Said’. Raritan 36, no. 3 (2017).
✷ Said, Edward W. After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives. Pantheon Books, 1986), 44.
———. Beginnings: Intention and Method. Columbia University Press, 1985.
———. Culture and Imperialism. Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
———. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. Columbia University Press, 2004.
———. Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography. Harvard University Press, 1966.
———. ‘On Lost Causes’, in Reflections on Exile: And Other Literary and Cultural Essays. Granta, 2012.
———. ‘On Repetition’, in The World, the Text, and the Critic. Harvard University Press, 1983.
✷ Taussig, Michael. The Corn Wolf. University of Chicago Press, 2015.
✷ Veeser, H. Aram. Edward Said: The Charisma of Criticism. Taylor & Francis, 2010.
✷ Wood, Michael. ‘Beginnings Again’, in Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation. Edited by Adel Iskander and Hakem Rustom. University of California Press, 2010.

Lucy Van is a Lockie Fellow at the University of Melbourne, where she also teaches literary studies. Her poetry collection, The Open (Cordite), was longlisted for the Stella prize. With Anne Maxwell, her new book is Australian Women’s Historical Photography: Other Times, Other Views (Anthem).

 
Leah McIntosh