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[Expositions 7.2 (2013) 55–61]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 
 

Edward Said: a Remembrance and a Tribute  

MAHDI TEIMOURI 
University of Malaya   

 
 

I want to begin this paper on a personal note and in an intimately confessional mode. I want to 
make a confession about the superficial way I was attracted to Edward Said. I first stumbled 
upon the name “Edward Said” rather indirectly during my M.A. studies while I was reading 
about post-colonialism in what I think was Raman Selden’s succinct yet profoundly informative 
A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory.1 The first thing that arrested my attention 
was the anomalous juxtaposition of a Western name (Edward) with an Arabic one (Said). The 
exquisite combination intrigued me to know more about him and his ideas.  

Said and his masterpiece Orientalism2 dominated my early reading in post-colonialism and to 
some extent formed the backbone of my Master’s dissertation where I compared the post-
colonial with the postmodern theories in a crude and naive comparative study.  

 
Said and Orientalism  
 
Part of my dissertation was devoted to a postmodern look at Said’s Orientalism, which revolved 
around the use of the concept of “simulation” by Said to describe the representational mode of 
textual re-presentation of the East by the West. Said’s attribution of simulative quality to the 
construction of the East by Western scholars resonated alluringly with the idea of “simulation” 
introduced by Jean Baudrillard. By attempting to demonstrate the link between reality and 
representation, Said in Orientalism, to my mind, follows a postmodern strategy. A holistic view 
of his work displays an analogy between the theory of Orientalism and Baudrillard’s theory of 
simulacrum. Just as Baudrillard3 believes that the involvement of images in cyclic 
representational processes leads first to the reflection of reality, secondly to perversion, then to 
the concealment of the absence of reality, and, finally, to the creation of a simulation of that, 
Said implies that the same procedure is working in a textual way – the image that is produced in 
a text is of an abstract (mental) nature. Baudrillard proposes that a simulacrum is not unreal or 
false representation but it “never again exchang[es] for what is real, but exchang[es] in itself, in 
an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.”4 The referent of representation is 
the real but the referent of a simulacrum is another image. Simulations are the product of a 
successive layering of images which becomes so convoluted that telling the real from the image 
is hardly possible. 

The death of the real (the Orient) in Orientalism constitutes the core of Said’s argument. Said 
maintains that to overcome the Orient, it should be first “possessed, then re-created by scholars, 
soldiers and judges” who embarked upon the excavation of “forgotten languages, histories, races 
and cultures in order to posit them [...] as the true classical Orient that could be used to judge and 



Edward Said: a Remembrance and a Tribute  56 

rule the modern Orient.”5 There are two noteworthy points here: (a) the re-creation of the Orient 
through the biased and subjective point of view of particular groups, and (b) the re-creation 
based on an old, trite and fixed image inherited from the predecessors in the respective field.  

The current and real Orient once for all is put aside. In its place an image is mounted which 
itself is an image produced at second hand while being passed down to scholars, writers, etc., 
who  instead of referring to the real Orient are generally content with the representational legacy 
of the past or are too complacent to double-check their inferred findings. Sacy's case (a French 
Orientalist) is a good case in point:  

 
[A]s a European he ransacked the Oriental archives, and he could do so without leaving 
France. What texts he isolated, he then brought back; he doctored them; then he 
annotated, codified, arranged, and commented on them. In time, the Orient as such 
became less important than what the Orientalist made of it; thus, drawn by Sacy into the 
scaled discursive place of a pedagogical tableau, the Orientalist's Orient was thereafter 
reluctant to emerge into reality.6 

 
There is a parallel paradigm here which is comparable to Baudrillard’s conception of simulation. 
It implies that the superimposition of textual layers ends in a simulation of the real. Apart from 
this general impression, Said explicitly points to the generation of simulacrum in the 
representational process of scholarly undertakings of the orientalists:  

 
[O]n the one hand, Orientalism acquired the Orient as literally and as widely as 
possible; on the other, it domesticated this knowledge to the West, filtering it through 
regulatory codes, classifications, specimen cases [...] all of each together formed a 
simulacrum of the Orient and reproduced it materially in the West, for the West.7  

 
Said gives us an insight into the modus operandi of the Orientalists’ epistemological efforts 
involved in the construction of the orient in the mind of the West. 

If Said was a major influence in shaping part of my academic studies, Emmanuel Levinas 
should definitely take the credit for the rest. Orientalism, with its reverse-engineering 
performative function, is marked with ethical considerations. By ethics here I do not mean roles 
of proper private or public conduct but what is defined as the relationship between the self and 
the other, and the person who among other scholars investigated and theorized this relationship 
and gave it an extreme form is no one but the Jewish French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. If 
we take ethics as an avoidance of a kind reductivism in dealing with the other, then Said’s 
achievement in Orientalism is an ethical statement as it has been referred to in his own 2003 
preface to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Orientalism: “The point I want to conclude 
with now is to insist that the terrible reductive conflicts that herd people under falsely unifying 
rubrics like ‘America,’ ‘The West’ or ‘Islam’ and invent collective identities for large numbers 
of individuals who are actually quite diverse, cannot remain as potent as they are, and must be 



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opposed.”8 I do not want to explore ethics in Orientalism but my purpose is to compare Said’s 
ethical politics with Levinas’s political ethics.  
 
Levinas and Alterity    
 
Levinas explores and mulls over the history of Western philosophy to substantiate his claim that 
philosophy as the love of wisdom is inherently totalitarian. The entire project of philosophy from 
its start in Plato’s Parmenides through to Heidegger is awash with the desire to reduce the other 
into the same. The manifestations of this reductive approach are evidenced by war, particularly 
the Second World War, which inflicted tremendous pain and suffering on the Jews. Levinas, who 
lost his family members to the plight of anti-Semitism, spent some time as a prisoner of the war 
at a Nazi camp where he drafted his early groundbreaking ethical writings.  

In recent decades Levinas’s scholarship has surged in popularity after his two magnum opuses 
were translated into English. Totality and Infinity9 and Otherwise than Being10 present the main 
principles of his ethics which he calls “first philosophy.” I do not intend to go into details about 
his complicated philosophy here. But, in short, what he means by ethics is based on an 
intersubjective relationship. As it was mentioned above, Levinas strives to outline a new relation 
between the self and the other, refusing to follow the trajectory of the Western philosophy which 
in his opinion betrays a tendency toward reduction and totalitarianism. Levinas envisions a 
relation between the same and the other in which the other is always one step ahead of the self. 
Thus he argues that tools employed by the mind to comprehend the other in fact reduce it to 
certain limited categories. To escape this reductive approach, Levinas has no choice but to place 
the other far beyond the self’s comprehension, describing it in terms of infinity and attributing to 
it an excess which is never comprehended by the mind. It is because of this incomprehensibility 
that the self should hold itself responsible for the other to the point of death and annihilation.  

Reading Levinas, one is struck with the vigor and passion with which he describes one’s 
irrecusable responsibility towards a transcendent other. The relation between the self and the 
other is illustrated by Levinas in terms of proximity, emphasizing the simultaneous separation 
and connection of them. Levinas argues fervently about the existence of an asymmetrical relation 
between the self and the other. He tries to deconstruct our conception of the truth, history, 
justice, language, subjectivity, etc., through a series of arguments which locate the origin of all 
these notions in one’s being addressed by the other and thus summoned to justify his presence 
and place. In short, we are already accused of failing to fulfill our commitments toward the other 
even before we encounter or perceive it.  
 
Said and Levinas in Perspective  
 
Said and Levinas are interesting cases of comparison from different points of view. Said and 
Levinas led a life in exile. They both experienced displacement. Levinas was subject to 
persecution on account of being a Jew before and during the Second World War. He derived his 



Edward Said: a Remembrance and a Tribute  58 

philosophy from Talmudic teachings. He managed to incorporate his religious background with 
his intellectual career. After the war, he endorsed the formation of Israel and came to be known 
as a towering figure in ethics. Said was a Palestinian-born Christian whose downright opposition 
to the state of Israel was loud and clear from the beginning. He was an active supporter of the 
rights of Palestinians. Now the interesting part about Said and Levinas is that in the realm of 
theory they tend to argue in favor of recognizing the right of the other. They draw attentions to 
the inadequacy of representational tools and their biased reductivism. As a philosopher, 
Levinas’s ethics sound much too other-worldly and esoteric.  

No matter how promising and humanitarian and at the same time implausibly, impractically, 
and inconceivably demanding and strenuous Levinasian ethics appears on paper, it only takes 
one important yet tragic event to put his lofty ideas to the test. Throughout his writings Levinas 
does not specify who “the other” is for him. Having survived and witnessed the horrendous 
ordeal of the Shoah, Levinas’s “other” looms as an uncanny entity whose face serves as an 
ethical command on its own. Contrary to his writings, Levinas employs double standards when it 
comes to applying his ethical injunctions in real-life situations. As such “the other” for Levinas, 
in order to be “the other” of the face-to-face encounter, requires certain qualifications.  

Levinas’s worldview, unlike the idealism of his philosophy, suffers from myopia if not self-
inflicted blindness, as it seems to be tainted with hesitation and abstention. He doesn’t sound as 
vocal as one who has read his grandiose words on the superiority of “the other” expects him to 
be. Let me cite an example. In an interview on Radio Communaute on 28 September 1982, 
which was conducted in the wake of Sabra and Chatila massacre, Alain Finkielkraut, using the 
phrase “the temptation of innocence,”11 questions the grounds on which the state of Israel 
justifies its acts of brutality by referring to its history of victimhood. Levinas seems to 
prevaricate on the matter and never condescends to explicitly condemn the massacre at the 
camps, failing to speak “of the direct guilt.” Later in the interview, Shlomo Malka, the program’s 
presenter, puts the following question to Levinas: “Emmanuel Levinas, you are the philosopher 
of the ‘other.’ Isn’t history, isn’t politics the very site of the encounter with the ‘other,’ and for 
the Israeli, isn’t the ‘other’ above all the Palestinian?”12  

Levinas’s answer doesn’t touch the right chord:  
 

My definition of the other is completely different. The other is the neighbor, who is not 
necessarily kin, but who can be. And in that sense, if you’re for the other, you’re for the 
neighbor. But if your neighbor attacks another neighbor or treats him unjustly, what can 
you do? Then alterity takes on another character, in alterity we can find an enemy, or at 
least then we are faced with the problem of knowing who is right and who is wrong, 
who is just and who is unjust. There are people who are wrong.13   

 
Levinas’s non-committal reply alerts us to be cautious about an unquestioned endorsement of a 
public intellectual. Obviously there is a disparity between grandiloquent pontification and 



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practicing what one has preached. In the case of Levinas, his “reactions seem to fail the test of 
his own rigorous ethics.”14  

Now let me get back to Said by changing the scene. It is the year 2003 and the venue is the 
University of Washington. It is The Walker-Ames Lecture Series and Said is answering Dr. 
Hollerun’s questions about the historical claim of Zionists to the land of Israel. Said’s answer is a 
reiteration and affirmation of an ethically informed solution. He simply argues that the Jewish 
claim is “a claim among many others.”15 Said explains that there are many who rightfully have 
claims to the ownership of the land on the grounds of their historical residence. Said adds that 
choosing one claim and backing it up by professing that God has approved of it is preposterous. 
Religion can never be used to buttress such claims. Said’s argument is rooted in his belief that no 
claim overrides others. The equality and equity of Said’s solution is a poignant reminder of the 
inefficiency of approaches that are grounded on the insistence on the separability of Arabs and 
Jews, stemming from a disposition to dichotomization of the self/same and the other.  

My point here is that Said is more politically ethical than Levinas, who is noted for promoting 
an ethics of alterity. Said jeopardizes his academic and intellectual fame by principally taking a 
position of non-positionality which establishes continuity between politics and ethics about 
which Levinas seems to be reluctant or doubtful of. As Hochberg has emphatically maintained in 
his article exploring the “ethical implications of Said’s investment in memory as a means for 
political intervention,”16 Said is wedded to a conviction that neutralizes enmity through the 
occurrence of a mutual comprehension, recognition, and identification between the Arabs and the 
Jews. Hochberg quotes important lines from Said which embody Said’s opinion:  

 
[N]o Arab today has an identity that can be unconscious of the Jew, that can rule out the 
Jew as a psychic factor in the Arab identity; conversely, I think, no Jew can ignore the 
Arab in general, nor can he immerse himself in his ancient tradition and lose the 
Palestinian Arab and what Zionism has done to him. The more intense the modern 
struggles for identity, the more attention is paid by the Arab or the Jew to his chosen 
opponent, or partner. Each is the other.17  

  
The last line is highly important as it is charged with ethical significance. Unlike Levinas, whose 
conception of the other in the political realm is subject to variation and arbitrary adjudication, 
Said’s stance skips the entanglement of the abstraction of theory and offers a practical ethical 
solution.  

I think Said owes this particular worldview to his life in exile, which enables him to 
disentangle himself from allegiance to any sides of disputes. John Barbour argues that according 
to Said exile creates “a scrupulous subjectivity, independence of mind, critical perspective and 
originality of vision. Being attuned to more than one culture can give the exile ‘contrapuntal’ 
awareness of simultaneous dimensions of reality.”18 Ashcroft explains that as an exiled 
intellectual Said is concerned with his location in the world:  



Edward Said: a Remembrance and a Tribute  60 

This is the core of worldliness, which itself is the driving energy of all Said’s work. 
Both text and critic have a location from which and within which they speak. 
Worldliness demands a Secular Criticism, not bound to the priestly rites of High Theory 
[…] No matter how strongly intellectuals may believe that their interests are of “higher 
things or ultimate values,” he contends, the morality of the intellectual’s practice begins 
with its location in the secular world and is affected by “where it takes place, whose 
interests it serves, how it jibes with a consistent and universalist ethic, how it 
discriminates between power and justice, what it reveals of one’s choices and 
priorities.”19 

 
Although Levinas, inspired by the Talmudic teachings, imputed divine positionality to the other 
by transcendentalizing it, in practice he falls short of acknowledging their worldly existence and 
as a result presents a lopsided argument. Whereas Said rejects the abstraction of theory, or 
reliance on any “High Theory” which could sanctify one’s position, and thus demonstrates a 
deeper and more practical ethical responsibility than Levinas as the most prominent Jewish 
philosopher and theoretician of ethics of the previous century.  

To conclude this paper, let me get back to the beginning and the appeal of the names 
“Edward” and “Said.” Just as his first name and last name counterpoint each other, Said has been 
able to project a contrapuntal look on world affairs. In an interview with an Israeli daily in 2000, 
Said scandalized the reader by concluding that “I am the last Jewish intellectual […] the only 
true follower of Adorno. […] Let me put it this way: I am a Jewish-Palestinian.”20  

 
 

Notes 

1. Selden, Ramon. 1989. A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. Lexington: 
University Press of Kentucky. 

2. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage. 
3. Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. Simulations. Trans. Phil Beitchman, Paul Foss, and Paul Patton. Los 

Angeles: Semiotext(e). 
4. Baudrillard 1983, 11. 
5. Said 1978, 92. 
6. Said 1978, 127–128. 
7. Said 1978, 166 (my emphasis). 
8. Said, Edward. 2003. Orientalism: 25th Anniversary Edition. New York: Vintage, xxii. 
9. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1961. Totalité et Infini. Essai sur l’extériorité. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. 
10. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1974. Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence. The Hague: Martinus 

Nijhoff. 
11. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1989. “Ethics and Politics.” Trans. Jonathan Romney. The Levinas Reader. 

Ed. Seán Hand. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 290.  
12. Levinas 1989, 294. 
13. Levinas 1989, 294. 



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14. Hand, Seán. 2009. Emmanuel Levinas. New York: Routledge. 107. 
15. Said, Edward. 2003. “Imperial Continuity – Palestine, Iraq, and U.S. Policy.” The Walker-Ames 

Lecture Series, University of Washington. <www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgteoJ1LihU> (accessed 
Oct 10, 2012). 

16. Hochberg, Gil. 2006. “Edward Said: ‘The Last Jewish Intellectual’: On Identity, Alterity, and the 
Politics of Memory.” Social Text 24.2, 48. 

17. Hochberg 2006, 59. 
18. Barbour, John. 2007. “Edward Said and the Space of Exile.” Literature & Theology 21.3, 295.  
19. Ashcroft, Bill. 2007. “Exile and representation: Edward Said as public intellectual.” Edward 

Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 79. 
20. Said qtd. in Hochberg 2006, 47. 


