Said’s era-spanning generalizations misuse Foucault’s historically bounded concept of discourse

Evidence

On page 204, having by that point already conveyed much of what his book was intended to accomplish, Said reaches this stunning conclusion: “It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.” Nowhere is there a qualification of any sort to limit this to a particular contingent of scholars, to a historical period, to a certain formation of power that gave such a phenomenon its conditions of possibility. The statement is sweeping and massive, again lumping together in it, so it seems to the careful reader of Orientalism, every figure who pronounced on the Orient, stretching back to Aeschylus and reaching down to the deserving Bernard Lewis and his likes. Needless to say, given the historically and culturally specific notion of discursive formations elaborated by Foucault (which generally do not travel back beyond the seventeenth century), and considering Said’s own admission of the influence Foucault exercised on him (23), Said’s wanderings into classical Greece and early-fourteenth-century Vienna suggest a questionable understanding of what Foucault meant by discursive formation. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 57

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies Foucault’s discursive formation as historically specific, generally not extending back before the seventeenth century — a definitional point that sharpens why Said’s sweep to Aeschylus is anachronistic.
• XREF: Connects to the Foucault-vs-Said methodological tension also central to ‘Reflections on Exile’ critiques and to the general reception of Orientalism in postcolonial studies. — connects to: Foucault’s ‘discourse’ cannot span pre-modern centuries and capitalist eras alike — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 665; Foucault’s concept of discourse cannot legitimately span ancient and modern history — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 665