Orientalism - autonomous learning

142 ORIENTALISM
Orientalist Structures and Restructures
143
in the laboratory. Thus the Semites are rabid monotheists
who produced no mythology, no art, no commerce, no civilization;
their consciousness is a narrow and rigid one; all in all they represent
"une combinaison inferieure de la nature humaine."*7 At the
same time Renan wants it understood that he speaks of a prototype,
not a real Semitic type with actual existence (although he violated
this too by discussing present-day Jews and Muslims with less than
scientific detachment in many places in his writings) .48 So on the
one hand we have the transformation of the human into the specimen,
and on the other the comparative judgment rendered by which
the specimen remains a specimen and a subject for philological,
scientific study.
Scattered throughout the Histoire generale et systeme compare
des langues semitiques are reflections on the links between linguistics
and anatomy, and-for Renan this is equally important-remarks
on how these links could be employed to do human history
(les sciences historiques). But first we should consider the implicit
links. I do not think it wrong or an exaggeration to say that a
typical page of Renan's Orientalist Histoire generale was constructed
typographically and structurally with a page of comparative
philosophical anatomy, in the style of Cuvier or Geoffroy
Saint-Hilaire, kept in mind. Both linguists and anatomists purport
to be speaking about matters not directly obtainable or observable
in nature; a skeleton and a detailed line drawing of a muscle, as
much as paradigms constituted by the linguists out of a
hypothetical proto-Semitic or proto-Indo-European, are
products of the laboratory and of the library. The text of a linguistic
or an anatomical work bears the same general relation to nature
(or actuality) that a museum case exhibiting a specimen mammal
or organ does. What is given on the page and in the museum case
is a truncated exaggeration, like many of Sacy's Oriental extracts,
whose purpose is to exhibit a relationship between the science (or
scientist) and the object, not one between the object and nature.
Read almost any page by Renan on Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, or
proto-Semitic and you read a fact of power, by which the Orientalist
philologist's authority summons out of the library at will examples
of man's speech, and ranges them there surrounded by a suave
European prose that points out defects, virtues, barbarisms, and
shortcomings in the language, the people, and the civilization; The
tone and the tense of the exhibition are cast almost uniformly in
the contemporary present, so that one is given an impression of a
pedagogical demonstration during which the scholar-scientist stands
before us on a lecture-laboratory platform, creating, confining, and
judging the material he discusses.
This anxiety on Renan's part to convey the sense of a demonstration
actually taking place is heightened when he remarks explicitly
that whereas anatomy employs stable and visible signs by which to
consign objects to classes, linguistics does not. 49 Therefore the
philologist must make a given linguistic fact correspond in some
way to a historical period: hence the possibility of a classification.
Yet, as Renan was often to say, linguistic temporality and history
are full of lacunae, enormous discontinuities, hypothetical periods.
11herefore linguistic events occur in a nonlinear and essentially discontinuous
temporal dimension controlled by the linguist in a very
particular way. That way, as Renan's whole treatise on the Semitic
branch of the Oriental languages goes very far to show, is comparative:
Indo-European is taken as the living, organic norm, and
Semitic Oriental languages are seen comparatively to be inorganic.
50 Time is transformed into the space of comparative classification,
which at bottom is based on a rigid binary opposition
between organic and inorganic languages. So on the one hand there
is the organic, biologically generative process represented by Indo­
European, while on the other there is an inorganic, essentially unregenerative
process, ossified into Semitic: most important, Renan
makes it absolutely clear that such an imperious judgment is made
by the Oriental philologist in his laboratory, for distinctions of the
kind he has been concerned with are neither possible nor available
for anyone except the trained professional. "Nous refusons donc
aux langues semitiques la faculte de se regenerer, toute en reconnaissant
qu'elles n'echappent pas plus que les autres oeuvres de la
conscience humaine a la necessite du changement et des modifications
successives" (Therefore we. refuse to allow that the Semitic
languages have the capacity to regenerate themselves, even while
recognizing that they do not escape-any more than other products
of human consciousness-the necessity of change or of successive
modifications) .51
Yet behind even this radical opposition, there is another one
working in Renan's mind, and for several pages in the first chapter
ofbook 5 he exposes his position quite candidly to the reader. This
occurs when he introduces Saint-Hilaire's views on the "degradation
of types."52 Although Renan does not specify which Saint­
Hilaire he refers to, the reference is clear enough. For both :£tienne