Rhetoric precedes and enables political action between states

Evidence

The back-and-forth between the West and Islam, the challenging and the answering, the opening of certain rhetorical spaces and the closing of others: all this makes up the “word politics” by which each side sets up situations, justifies actions, forecloses options, and presses alternatives on the other. Thus, when Iranians seized the United States Embassy in Teheran they were responding, not just to the former shah’s entry into the United States, but to what they perceived as a long history of humiliation inflicted on them by superior American power: past American actions “spoke” to them of constant intervention in their lives, and therefore as Muslims who, they felt, had been held prisoner in their own country, they took American prisoners and held them as hostages on United States territory, the Teheran embassy. Although the actions themselves made the point, it was the words, and the movements of power they adumbrated, that prepared the way and, to a very great extent, made the actions possible. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 79

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the book’s central concept of ‘word politics’ with a concrete example.
• XREF: connects to: Discourse fuses language and action, dissolving any ideology-movement split — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 45