Orientalist philology fabricates lifelike biographies of dead cultures to serve imperial science

Evidence

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 Jésus, 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 générale 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 narrative 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. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 376

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains Said’s core mechanism of ‘constructing the inorganic’ — the philological laboratory’s fabrication of deceased Oriental life as natural-seeming narrative.
• XREF: Directly scaffolds the critical-theory vocabulary the reader is building: the philological laboratory as a productive mechanism of Orientalist representation will recur in the later Islamophobia readings.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: Said links cultural comparativism to ‘ethnocentrism, racial theory, and economic oppression’ — a causal chain worth unpacking against the biopolitics genealogy readings.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 376