Decadent Orientalisms

The Decay of Colonial Modernity

David Fieni

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780823286416
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Decadent Orientalisms presents a sustained critique of the ways Orientalism and decadence have formed a joint discursive mode of the imperial imagination. Attentive to historical and literary configurations of language, race, religion, and power, Fieni shows the importance of understanding Western discourses of Eastern decline and obsolescence together with Arab and Islamic responses in which the language of decadence returns as a characteristic of the West.Taking seriously Edward Said's claim that Orientalism is a "style of having power, " Fieni works historically through the aesthetic and ideological effects of Orientalist style, showing how it is at once comparative, descriptive, and performative. Orientalism, the book argues, relies upon decadence as the figure through which its positivist scientific claims become redistributed as speech acts—"truths" that establish dominance. Rather than attending to Orientalism as a repertoire of clichés and stereotypes, Decadent Orientalisms considers the systemic epistemological consequences of the diffuse, yet coherent network of institutions that have constituted Orientalism's power.

PART I

(Dis)integrating Semitism: French and Arabic in the Twilight of the Ottoman Empire

CHAPTER 1

French Decadence, Arab Awakenings Figures of Decay in the Nahda

Edward Said’s unrelenting and unapologetic effort to rethink and transform the interrelated critical fields of philology, humanism, and the secular continues to give pause and, in some cases, causes great consternation to critics of his work. The question often posed is this: Why would such a staunch opponent of cultural imperialism persist in using the very methodologies that his work goes to such great lengths to dismantle? I would argue that it is on this same field of operations that the viability of Saidian “secular criticism,” or even the continued value of anti-Orientalist critique for the twenty-first century, must be defended. The point of departure for this chapter is this crucial constellation of terms, specifically as they came to be articulated by the nineteenth-century French philologist Ernest Renan. For Said, Renan represented the apotheosis of the capture of secular, philological humanism for the metaphysics of colonial command. This chapter returns not just to Renan but also to his reception by thinkers confessing Arab and Islamic affiliations in the Ottoman fin de siècle, focusing primarily on the period from 1883 to 1902. The aim of this return to Renan and the trope of decadence is thus to demonstrate the necessity, from Said’s perspective and for our own, of radicalizing, not abandoning, all three critical tasks: humanism, philology, and the secular.¹

Why, then, decadence? My argument is that Orientalism uses decadence as the figure through which its positivist scientific claims become redistributed as performative speech acts, meaning its “truths” about Oriental decadence are distributed among the objects of its study (“Orientals”) within the terrain over which it seeks textual (and ultimately, political) authority (“the Orient”). Yet at the same time, the situation I am trying to give an account of here is also one of asymmetrical defamiliarization, since the European epistemological structures that get embedded outside of Europe also get overcoded and altered, not just through the interference generated through translation but also more effectively—and belatedly, I should add—via the long processes of decolonization and anti-imperialist and anti-Orientalist critique. Of course, this mutual defamiliarization is asymmetrical, because the flow of ideas and armatures of representation from Europe eastward was often almost immediate and sometimes widespread, whereas the resurgent flow back toward Europe took more time, moving along the most improbable currents of transmission and dissemination (as I will describe in relation to Renan and Farah Antun), constituting a version of Nietzschean “nomad thought” avant la lettre. The thinkers and writers of the Arab nahda (awakening, or renaissance) I will be discussing—Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi, and Antun— devised their texts at ground level, shifting their tactics on a dynamic field of operations in response to the rapidly adapting strategies of imperial geopolitics and ideology. The mutual defamiliarization effected by the thought of decadence was asymmetrical also in terms of what we would now call institutional support, an important part of which was access to the archive; the differences between Renan and his Arab and Muslim interlocutors illustrate this clearly. (In fact, it is through Renan’s scholarship that Antun was first introduced to the works of the great twelfth-century Cordovan philosopher, jurisconsult, and polymath Ibn Rushd, or Averroes, a fact discussed later in this chapter.) In order to understand how “Islam became an object in the struggle of interpretive space” during the nineteenth century (al-Azmeh 1993, 106), this chapter begins with how Renan and Afghani use the archive as they conceive of race and religion as functions of the relationship between progress and decline. Whereas Renan’s version of the secular conceals the intensely religious spirit of European nationalism, Afghani’s instrumentalization of Islam exposes the political will emerging within the object of Europe’s supposedly mute other. Renan imagines Europe’s coming-to-consciousness within the twin enclosures of Hegelian idealism and academic Orientalism. Afghani, al-Kawakibi, and Antun, on the other hand, redeploy elements of these discourses in order to “awaken” from the spell of decadence cast upon them, while also falling into the sleep of the homogenous time carried within the very idea of authenticity.

“There Is No Decadence”

Ernest Renan’s L’avenir de la science (The Future of Science), written at the beginning of his career in 1848 but not published until 1890, two years before his death, represents the self-fulfilling prophecy of the science of the New Philology as it was practiced in Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century. In his 1890 preface, Renan validates ex post facto the predications he had made about the science of philology forty-two years earlier: “En somme,” he writes, “j’avais raison.”² The only error to which he admits, the core truth that he discovered and disseminated through his teaching and writing over the course of his career, was that, in 1848, he did not possess “a sufficiently clear idea of the inequality of the races” (1995 [1890], 71–72), which, by 1890, had been “verified” by both science and colonization: “The rights of each human family to a more or less honorable mention in the history of progress are more or less determined” (73).

The text has much to say about philology, progress, secularism, and race, but, crucially, Renan disavows the validity of the concept of decadence. He writes, “There is no decadence from the point of view of humanity. Decadence is a word that must be definitively banished from the philosophy of history” (1995 [1890], 136). Just as the concept of decadence must be cut from the lexicon of progress, so, too, must the category of nationality. The one exception to these apparently sovereign rules is that there is, in fact, decadence at the level of race and nation. He continues, “We only call upon the principle of nationality when the oppressed nation is superior in spirit to the oppressor. Absolute partisans of nationality can only be narrow-minded. Human perfection is the goal. From this point of view, civilization always triumphs” (136). The relative, hierarchical values of the different “human families” are not mere accidents of Renan’s personal prejudices, however, but rather serve to illustrate the function that racial and national categories serve within his philosophy of history. For there to be no decadence from the point of view of “human” history, Renan simply has to excommunicate the nonhuman elements from his secular temple of history. The idea of decadence, he argues, “only has meaning from the restricted view of politics and nationalities” (137). “When specific races atrophy,” he continues, “humanity has reserve power to supplement these weaknesses” (137). Such a confession is typical of his writing, which would expose as the errors of others the very limits of his own thought: the purportedly universal category of “humanity” is, for Renan, absolutely dependent on race, nationality, and the possibility of their degeneration and decline.

Despite traces of social-constructivist gestures that his philological training seems to have left on his thought, Renan ultimately upholds a religious hierarchy that he supports primarily through his racial typology. This becomes especially clear in his celebrated study of Ibn Rushd, which offers positivistic support for his thesis about the incompatibility between the Arab mind, Islam, and a rational secular viewpoint. Renan’s cancellation of the Semitic and affirmation of the Indo-European, as critics have pointed out, reads like a parody of Hegel.³ “Enclosed,” Renan writes, “like all Semitic peoples, in the narrow circle of lyricism and prophecy, the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula have never had the least idea about what might be called science or rationalism.”⁴ While Renan superficially intimates the event of medieval Arabic philosophy as a moment in the dialectic of human progress, his text ultimately denies it even the dimmed glory of such a role: “Arab Aristotelianism, personified by Averroes, was one of the great obstacles encountered by those then working so actively to found modern culture among the ruins of the middle ages” (1949 [1852], 289). The ancient science of the Greeks “returned” to the West (164) despite, not because of, the great age of Arabic philosophy (292). The difference between Oriental fatalism and Euro-Christian resistance to fate becomes the very “knot of the problem” for Renan, who explains that “the entire struggle is now taking place between the old and the new ideas of theism and morality” (1995 [1890], 102). The passage continues,

We are here at the sacred line where doctrines part ways; one point of divergence between two lines coming out from a center places the infinite between them. It should at least be remembered that theories of progress are irreconcilable with the old theodicy, that they have no meaning apart from attributing divine action to the human spirit, in a word, by admitting as the primordial force in the world the reformative power of spirit. (1995 [1890], 102)

The least surprising aspect of this passage is the way that Renan allocates religion and science as radiating from the same source. Renan’s oeuvre testifies to the fact that, as Said pointed out, the “secularizing tendency” that he represents did not seek to remove “the old religious patterns of human history and destiny” but rather to reconstitute, redeploy, and redistribute them in new frameworks.⁵ Nor does Renan’s admission to his sister that L’avenir de la science would be his “profession of scientific faith” quite come as a revelation, as the text itself is explicit enough concerning the thoroughly Catholic nature of Renan’s secularism. Renan further reveals the uncanny resemblance between his version of secularism and Christianity in his attempt to preempt the indignation of the religious reader who would accuse him of heresy: “ ‘Oh, no!’ I would say to him: ‘I am your brother’ ” (1995 [1890], 111). It is this kind of partial sincerity that evokes for Nietzsche Renan’s “broad smirk of the cleric,” which Nietzsche considers to be one of Renan’s “lies of seduction”; “like all priests,” Nietzsche adds, “he becomes dangerous only when he falls in love” (1998, 43).

The legerdemain of Renan’s “philological” method ultimately allows him to equate race with religion by employing the generalized migrancy of identifications, affiliations, and meanings common to so many forms of Orientalism, continuing through to the present day. Renan accomplishes this equation in order to explain Oriental decadence and Occidental progress: “The religions of the Orient say to man: ‘Suffer Evil.’ European religion may be summed up in this word: ‘Fight Evil.’ This race is indeed the daughter of Japheth: she is bold against God” (Cette race est bien fille de Japet: elle est hardie contre Dieu) (1995 [1890], 102). What he had explained elsewhere in terms of the universality of reason caught in a battle against religion, he here explains in terms of a monolithic Orient, whose multiplicity of similar religions reinforces the “lyrical and prophetic” essence of the Oriental mind that created them. Against this unphilosophical Orient, Renan posits a single European race-religion. By referring to the latter as the “daughter of Japheth,” Renan reproduces, however ironically, the biblical genealogy of all human races, one of the sons of Noah being Japheth, whose offspring, according to exegetes, had spread westward to people Europe. Renan’s historical projection thus reproduces the distortions of T-O maps from medieval Europe that distributed the world’s people according to an edenic origin and the subsequent racial-tribal diasporas of biblical myth.⁶

What is truly remarkable about Renan’s geometry of secular difference is the sacredness of the separation between the theory of Providence and that of progress, a sacredness that consists in progress’s very irreconcilability with and difference from Providence. Such a sanctification of difference manufactures an infinite chasm between the time of European progress, which is also the time of Renan’s writing, and the time of the other, a chasm that Johannes Fabian has famously dubbed “allochronism.”⁷ Renan’s visualization of this temporal divergence attempts to establish the hygiene of secularism in a way that reinscribes the gestures of divine medieval cartography as an act of chronotopic faith. While he asserts the categorical purity of his secular scientific viewpoint as distinct from religious perspectives, he simultaneously argues for the proximity of Christianity to rational science and maps “the religions of the Orient” as its antipodes. Such an avowal of purity obviously masks the mixed nature of Renan’s own comparativist discourse, which grafts together lexical and theoretical elements from a variety of genres and disciplines ranging from philology and philosophy to theology and sentimental narrative, all in its attempt to provide a universal and secular philosophy of history. At the site where language, race, and religion—the positive symptoms of decadence—are knotted together, Renan conceives what can only be called a political theology of the color line, making it so internal to the logic of colonial modernity that it would lastingly remain scarcely perceptible beneath debates about race or language or secularism, considered in isolation from one another. Renan’s deep Orientalism thus fuses race to religion under the rubric of anti-Semitic decadence. Such is the genesis of the Orientalist secular.

Renan vs. Afghani

Despite the disingenuous disavowal of decadence by Renan, his brand of Orientalist decadence was the very banner under which Arab and Muslim intellectuals first gained access to colonial modernity. The price of entry was a confession of decadence. That is to say that, from the outset, the Orientalist perspective tended to conceive of intellectual exchanges with such interlocutors as abstractly ideological battle royals—between West and East, secularism and religion, or science and Islam. Such was the case in the celebrated debate between Renan and the Persian Islamic reformist Afghani, which took place in 1883. This classic Orientalist ideological smoke screen—West vs. East— obscures the very different conditions that obtained with regard to the production of each man’s discourse. A brief comparison of Renan’s and Afghani’s positions in their respective intellectual spheres in 1883, when their famous exchange on “Islam and Science” took place, can help clear some of this ideological smoke. On the one hand, there is Renan, whose understanding of history shows that he fashions himself to become a symptom of his own age, race, and nation: he construes the supposed vitality of his own Celtic heritage, mixed with his modern, rational, and French perspective, into signs of humanity’s health and vitality. He is a man proud in his identifications (Celtic, French, male), confident enough in his place (Paris, the Sorbonne), and secure enough in his position (Grand-officier de la Légion d’honneur since 1880, member of l’Académie Française since 1878) to openly assert his anticlerical ideas during his blunt attacks on Arabs and Islam.

On the other hand, there is Afghani. While Renan trumpets his Celtic heritage, Jamal al-Din bears the pseudonym he adopted in 1869, “al-Afghani”—“the Afghan”—possibly as a way to conceal his Persian Shi’ite origins and to dissimulate the influence on him of certain heterodox philosophical trends associated with Shi’ism.⁸ Renan is aware of Afghani’s semi-covert Persian heritage, by which he justifies his guarded admiration for Afghani, who, after all, would not then be a degenerate Semite but a healthy Indo-European. Afghani, on the other hand, asserts the past greatness of the Arab people and counters Renan’s European concept of race (as something determined primarily by science) with a broader concept of race that considers the role of language and culture in the construction of the category “Arab.”⁹ As Renan becomes more and more certain of the rigidity of racial categories over the course of his career, Afghani exemplifies their malleability, even as he engages Renan in the intellectual arena that the latter has determined, in his language, and in his city. Renan’s institutional security and settled contentment contrast sharply with Afghani’s cosmopolitan, nomadic life of exile. Most likely born and raised in northwest Iran (Keddie 1968, 11), Afghani spent substantial time in Afghanistan, Egypt, India, Russia, Istanbul, London, and Paris, involved in sometimes secret activities that forced local authorities to keep track of him and deport him when they deemed it necessary. While Renan’s wide-ranging literary interests reveal the scope of this “armchair scholar’s” (the phrase is Nietzsche’s) textual preoccupation of the globe, Afghani’s career brings to light the networks of contact made possible by the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire as it confronted its neighbors to the west and to the east, while also revealing the fluidity of individual political positions called forth by the volatility of colonial European and late Ottoman geopolitics.

Whereas the elite French philologist discovers lost authors, fashioning a proprietary relationship to “his Arabs,” using “his” Arabic to explain the decadence of the Arabs or declaring the impossibility of “Arab science” to an actual Arab or Muslim, the practitioners of the nahda, or nahdawis, deploy a variety of critical tools in their bricolage of tactics, which I consider in this book variously under the titles of nahda, awakening, carnival, traversal of fantasy. The Sorbonne debate remains especially significant for the diagram it gives us of the ways that French Orientalism set the terms and conditions, both in the world and in the text, of the great transactional exchange of ideas that constituted the nahda.

Renan’s understanding of secularism redistributes religious patterns of history in order to disguise the profound antagonism between the secular and the religious that his legend has come to signify in France. He refuses the universal truth of the gospels while affirming the particular pedigree of rationalism entrusted by the Christian legacy to the Aryan race. Renan reminds us that the de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Orientalist Decadence
• Part I: (Dis)integrating Semitism: French and Arabic in the Twilight of the Ottoman Empire
• Part II: Working Through Postcolonial Decadence
• Conclusion: Toward a Contrapuntal Double Critique of Colonial Modernity
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index