Said held contradictory claims about authorial agency to evade Foucault’s theory

Evidence

Simply put, Said lacked the theoretical tools—Foucauldian or not—to handle the concept and practice of the author. This lack is not a mere register of critique against Said, as many Orientalists have understood it; for us, it is an additional index of the failure to identify the true nature of Orientalism, to pin its malevolent effects on a group of scholars and their “guild’s” intimate association with a vague and perhaps incoherent concept of power, domination, and coloniality. It is my argument here that Said at once made too much and too little of the author. On the one hand, and as a theoretical claim, the author in the tradition of Orientalism—and, he seems to argue, at large—possesses a “determining imprint,” while, on the other hand, the Orientalist author has effectively been declared “dead,” for in that discursive formation he appears as an “effaced” entity, to use Foucault’s term. The contradiction aside, his declaration that “Foucault believes that in general the individual text or author counts for very little” is highly problematic, especially in the way Foucault’s position, which might have been extremely useful for Said’s analysis, was dismissed immediately. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 80

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the author-function debates (Foucault, Barthes, poststructuralism) familiar from literary theory courses. — connects to: Said’s work embodies the contradictions of the literary theory tradition — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 68