Orientalism - autonomous learning

122 ORIENTALISM
Orientalist Structures and Restructures
123
the careers of Silvestre de Sacy and Ernest Renan, no such danger
was apparent.
My thesis is that the essential aspects of modern Orientalist
theory and praxis (from which present-day Orientalism derives)
can be understood, not as a sudden access of objective knowledge
about the Orient, but as a set of structures inherited from the past,
secularized, redisposed, and re-formed. by such disciplines as
philology, which in turn were naturalized, modernized, and laicized
substitutes for (or versions of) Christian supernaturalism. In the
form of new texts and ideas, the East was accommodated to these
structures. Linguists and explorers like Jones and Anquetil were
contributors to modern Orientalism, certainly, but what distinguishes
modem Orientalism as a field, a group of ideas, a discourse,
is the work of a later generation than theirs. Ifwe use the Napoleonic
expedition (1798-1801) as a sort of first enabling experience for
modem Orientalism, we can consider its inaugural heroes-'-in
Islamic studies, Sacy and Renan and Lane-to be builders of the
field, creators of a tradition, progenitors of the Orientalist brotherhood.
What Sacy, Renan, and Lane did was to place Orientalism
on a scientific and rational basis. This entailed not only their own
exemplary work but also the creation of a vocabulary and ideas
that could be used impersonally by anyone who wished to become
an Orientalist. Their inauguration of Orientalism was a considerable
feat. It made possible a scientific terminology; it banished obscurity
and instated a special form of illumination for the Orient; it established
the figure of the Orientalist as central authority for the Orient;
it legitimized a special kind of specifically coherent Orienta list work;
it put into cultural circulation a form of discursive currency by
whose presence the Orient henceforth would be spoken for; above
all, the work of the inaugurators carved out a field of study and' a
family of ideas which in tum could form a community of scholars
whose lineage, traditions, and ambitions were at once internal to
the field and external enough for general prestige. The more Europe
encroached upon the Orient during the nineteenth century, the
more Orientalism gained in public confidence. Yet if this gain
coincided with a loss in originality, we should not be entirely
surprised, since its mode, from the beginning, was reconstruction
and repetition.
One final observation: The late-eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century
ideas, institutions, and figures I shall deal with in
this chapter are an important part, a crucial elaboration, of the first
phase of the greatest age of territorial acquisition ever known. By
the end of World War I Europe had colonized 85 percent of the
earth. To say simply that modern Orientalism has been an aspect of
both imperialism and colonialism is not to say anything very
disputable. Yet it is not enough to say it; it needs to be worked
through analytically and historically. I am interested in showing
how modern Orientalism, unlike the precolonial awareness of
Dante and d'Herbelot, embodies a systematic discipline of accumulation.
And far from this being exclusively an intellectual or
theoretical feature, it made Oriental ism fatally tend towards the
systematic accumulation of human beings and territories. To reconstruct
a dead or lost Oriental language meant ultimately to reconstruct
a dead or neglected Orient; it also meant that reconstructive
precision, science, even imagination could prepare the way for what
armies, administrations, and bureaucracies would later do on the
ground, in the Orient. In a sense, the vindication of Orientalism
was not only its intellectual or artistic successes but its later effectiveness,
its usefulness, its authority. Surely it deserves serious attention
on all those counts.
II
Silvestre de Sacy
and Ernest Renan:
Rational Anthropology and
Philological Laboratory
The two great themes of Silvestre de Sacy's life are heroic effort
and a dedicated sense of pedagogic and rational utility. Born in
1757 into a Jansenist family whose occupation was traditionally
that of notaire, Antoine-Isaac-Silvestre was privately tutored at a
Benedictine abbey, first in Arabic, Syriac, and Chaldean, then in
Hebrew. Arabic in particular was the language that opened the
Orient to him since it was in Arabic, according to Joseph Reinaud.
'.1