Orientalism - autonomous learning

146 ORIENTALISM
Orientalist Structures and Restructures
147
firmation of the dominating culture and its "naturalization." Indeed,
it is not too much to say that Renan's philological laboratory is the
actual locale of his European ethnocentrism; but what needs
emphasis here is that the philological laboratory has no existence
outside the discourse, the writing by which it is constantly produced
and experienced. Thus even the culture he calls organic and alive­
Europe's-is also a creature being created in the laboratory and
by philology.
Renan's entire later career was European and cultural. Its accomplishments
were varied and celebrated. Whatever authority his style
possessed can, I think, be. traced back to his technique for constructing
the inorganic (or the missing) and for giving it the
appearance of life. He was most famous, of course, for his Vie de
Jesus, the work that inaugurated his monumental histories of
Christianity and the Jewish people. Yet we must realize that the
Vie was exactly the same type of feat that the Histoire generale
was, a construction enabled by the historian's capacity for skillfully
crafting a dead (dead for Renan in the double sense of a dead
faith and a lost, hence dead, historical period) Oriental biography
-and the paradox is immediately apparent-as if it were the
truthful narmtive of a natural life. Whatever Renan said had first
passed through the philological laboratory; when it appeared in
print woven through the text, there was in it the life-giving force
of a contemporary cultural signature, which drew from modernity
all its scientific power and all its uncritical self-approbation. For
that sort of culture such genealogies as dynasty, tradition, religion,
ethnic communities were all simply functions of a theory whose
job was to instruct the world. In borrowing this latter phrase from
Cuvier, Renan was circumspectly placing scientific demonstration
over experience; temporality was relegated to the scientifically useless
realm of ordinary experience, while to the special periodicity
of culture and cultural comparativism (which spawned ethnocentrism,
racial theory, and economic oppression) were given
powers far in advance of moral vision.
Renan's style, his career as Orientalist and man of letters, the
circumstances of the meaning he communicates, his peculiarly
intimate relationship with the European scholarly and general culture
of his time-liberal, exc1usivist, imperious, antihuman except
in a very conditional sense-all these are what I would call celibate
and scientific. Generation for him is consigned to the realm of
ravenir, which in his famous manifesto he associated with science.
Although as a historian of culture he belongs to the school of men
like Turgot, Condorcet, Guizot, Cousin, Jouffroy, and Ballanche,
and in scholarship to the school of Sacy, Caussin de Perceval,
Ozanam, Fauriel, and Burnouf, Renan's is a peculiarly ravaged,
ragingly masculine world of history and learning; it is indeed the
world, not of fathers, mothers, and children, but of men like his
Jesus, his Marcus Aurelius, his Caliban, his solar god (the last
as described in "Reves" of the Dialogues philosophiques) .57 He
cherished the power of science and Orientalist philology particularly;
he sought its insights and its techniques; he used it to intervene,
often with considerable effectiveness, in the life of his epoch.
And yet his ideal role was that of spectator.
According to Renan, a philologist ought to prefer bonheur to
jouissance: the preference expresses a choice of elevated, if sterile,
happiness over sexual pleasure. Words belong to the realm of
bonheur, as does the study of words, ideally speaking. To my
knowledge, there are very few moments in all of Renan's public
writing where a beneficent and instrumental role is assigned to
women. One occurs when Renan opines that foreign women (nurses,
maids) must have instructed the conquering Normans' children,
and hence we can account for the changes that take place in
language. Note how productivity and dissemination are not the
functions aided, but rather internal change, and a subsidiary one
at that. "Man," he says at the end oi',the same essay, "belongs
neither to his language nor to his race; he belongs to himself before
all, since before all he is a free being and a moral one."5B Man was
free and moral, but enchained by race, history, and science as
Renan saw them, conditions imposed by the scholar on man.
The study of Oriental languages took Renan to the heart of these
conditions, and philology made it concretely apparent that knowledge
of man was-to paraphrase Ernst Cassirer-poetically transfigurintD
only if it had been previously severed from raw actuality
(as Sacy had necessarily severed his Arabic fragments from their
actuality) and then put into a doxological straitjacket. By becoming
philology, the study of words as once practiced by Vico, Herder,
Rousseau, Michelet, and Quinet lost its plot and its dramatic
presentational quality, as Schelling once called it. Instead, philology
became epistemologically complex; Sprachgefiihl was no longer
enough since words themselves pertained less to the senses or the