The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W. Said

Spatiality, Critical Humanism, and Comparative Literature

Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137487209
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Edward W. Said is considered one of the most influential literary and postcolonial theorists in the world. Affirming Said's multifaceted and enormous critical impact, this collection features essays that highlight the significance of Said's work for contemporary spatial criticism, comparative literary studies, and the humanities in general.

CHAPTER 1

SAID, SPACE, AND BIOPOLITICS: GIORGIO AGAMBEN’S AND D.H. LAWRENCE’S STATES OF EXCEPTION

Russell West-Pavlov

The almost photographic memory Edward W. Said was reputed to possess has been ascribed, in a recent assessment, to a “topographic” mnemonic mode that recalls the early modern techniques of memory based upon “common places” or imagined geographies.¹ Yet, once brought together in autobiographical form, Said’s memories transpired to be less rooted in place than in a sense of being “out of place,”² or, to put it more accurately, the formative experience of dislocation perhaps informed all Said’s subsequent attention to the politics of place and space, which a later school of literary reading might well describe as a geocriticism.³ In this chapter, I suggest that the double vision arising out of the experience of being “outside in the teaching machine,”⁴ to purloin the expression of one of Said’s most famous colleagues, may endow his work with many features in common with another contemporary thinker, Giorgio Agamben.

Agamben’s sustained attention to what has come to be known as “biopolitics” has constant recourse to the notion of being “outside within the system.” My analysis will take the leitmotif of the blurring of inside/outside locations to suggest a number of parallels between Said’s interest in spatiality and the contemporary field of biopolitical analysis represented by the work of Agamben and Roberto Esposito. Beginning with a comparison of Said’s analyses of the Palestinian question and the central topoi of Agamben’s biopolitical theories, I propose that two of Said’s concepts for the spatial analysis of literary texts, those of “imaginative geographies” and of “contrapuntal reading” may be helpful in rendering more concrete the manifest spatial abstraction of Agamben’s biopolitical “topologies.” To this extent, Said’s work may contribute to the urgent ethical and political task of grounding and contextualizing Agamben’s already intensely relevant, if controversial, biopolitical analyses. In order to illustrate my points, I will turn to an oft-neglected text of literary modernism, D. H. Lawrence’s Australian novel Kangaroo (1923), to show how the “contrapuntal reading” of “imaginative geographies” of modern biopolitics may lay bare the global reach of such strategies of control and oppression, based upon the entangled relationships of metropolitan and colonial biopolitics.

SAID AND BIOPOLITICS?

Said’s descriptions of the plight of his Palestinian compatriots in the occupied territories may have an ominously familiar ring to them for those scholars working in the field of “biopolitics.” For those critical humanities researchers implementing the instruments of “biopolitical” analysis invented by Foucault in his late lectures and developed by Giorgio Agamben’s multi-volume Homo Sacer series,⁵ Said’s polemical interventions into the condition of the stateless Palestinian people, from The Question of Palestine (1979)⁶ onwards, have all the hallmarks of an interrogation of biopolitics avant la lettre. It is paradoxical that those survivors of the Lager that Agamben has so controversially identified as the paradigm of biopolitical modernity⁷ in turn instigated the establishment of a network of (refugee) camps and set up a system of camp-like zones (the Gaza strip or the West Bank enclaves) that strongly resembled the geography of the univers concentrationnaire.⁸ Said’s portrayal of the desperate situation of the Palestinian people since 1948 is redolent of the panoply of biopolitical strategies enumerated by Agamben in his influential recasting of Foucault:

Until 1966, the Arab citizens of Israel were ruled by a military government exclusively in existence to control, bend, manipulate, terrorize, tamper with every facet of Arab life from birth virtually to death. After 1966 the situation is scarcely better [ . . . ] the Emergency Defense regulations were used to expropriate tens of thousands of acres of Arab lands [ . . . ] Any Palestinian can tell you the meaning of the Absentee’s Property Law of 1950, the Land Acquisition Law of 1953, the Law for Requisitioning of Property in Time of Emergency (1949), the Prescription Law of 1958. Moreover, Arabs were and are forbidden to travel freely, to lease land from Jews, or ever to speak, agitate, be educated freely.⁹

What is striking is the way that Said’s description of the tribulations of Palestinians in Israel or in the occupied territories segues from “biopolitical” interventions to the politics of spatial expropriation and back again, remaining at all times brutally specific in its attention to the concrete detail of Palestinian experience.

Said notes that the “present security situation on the West Bank gives the military governor the power to censor everything written; to deport, detain, and destroy the houses of suspected subversives; to take virtually any action whose purpose is to protect the state of Israel.”¹⁰ Summing up, he concludes that “every Arab is subject to military regulations,” evoking the “martial law and the state of siege” that legislates the lawless zone of the camp, and state of “legal civil war” that according to Agamben has characterized the state of exception in its twentieth-century manifestations around the globe.¹¹ Said’s evocation of the way in which the “the non-Jew in Israel represents a permanent banishment from his as well as all other past, present, and future benefits in Palestine”¹² echoes Agamben’s semantics of the ban, and recalls explorations of the tendency of the state of exception not only to expand to a global phenomenon, but to become a permanent state of affairs: “Palestinian autonomy will give the Israeli government and army the right to continue this state of affairs more or less indefinitely. [ . . . ] [D]etention, deportation and collective punishment will continue since the army will remain on the West Bank.”¹³ Said’s commentaries on the “separation wall,” which cordons off hundreds of Palestinian enclaves from their inhabitants’ places of work, and from each other, throw up striking resemblances to the zones of exclusion within the polity, an exterior at the interior of the state “[a]t once excluding bare life from and capturing it within the political order”, for which Agamben proposes the camp as the paradigmatic model.¹⁴ Finally, the experience of Said’s Palestinian family—“To have lived as a member of society [ . . . ] one day, and then suddenly on another day not to be able to do that, was [ . . . ] a living death”— echoes in its phrasing Agamben’s description of those consigned and resigned to death, the “living dead of the camps.”¹⁵ This accumulation of conceptual and even phraseological similarities between Said’s polemics about the Palestinian situation and Agamben’s mapping of twentieth-century biopolitics points toward salient resemblances that have not gone unnoticed by other theoreticians. Thus Žižek in Welcome to the Desert of the Real can claim that “Palestinians in the occupied territories are reduced to the status of Homo sacer, the object of disciplinary measures and/or even humanitarian help, but not full citizens.”¹⁶ Mbembe sees in the Gaza strip and the occupied territories the exercise of “necropower,” the deathly face of an administrative biopolitics.¹⁷

Yet at the same time, Said’s insistent repetition of the crucial topos of place in postcolonial studies—“The main battle in imperialism is over land,”¹⁸ as he puts it in Culture and Imperialism—which translates into a sustained attention to the loss of territory suffered by the Palestinian people, distinguishes the focus of Said’s analyses from those of Agamben. “In a very literal way,” Said observes, “the Palestinian predicament since 1948 is that to be a Palestinian at all has been to live in a utopia, a nonplace, of some sort [ . . . ] the Palestinian struggle today is profoundly topical [ . . . ] it is focussed on the goal of getting a place, a territory, on which to be located nationally.” Said concludes, “Palestinian self-determination has come to rest by and large on the need for a liberated part of the original territory of Palestine.”¹⁹ All subsequent struggle has aimed toward the “restoration of Palestinian identity and of actual land”;²⁰ the former is defined by the latter, by the “Palestinian impulse to stay on the land.”²¹ This salient aspect of Said’s writing on the Palestinian issue may be salutary in correcting a curious spatial blind spot within biopolitical theory.

Agamben’s analyses return constantly to the topos of the blurred inside/outside border. “Bare life” is on the border between life and death; it is excluded from the polity (abandoned by the law) while being exposed to the full force of a lawless law; the camp concretizes this anomalous situation as “the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule.”²² The camp is a domain that is either inside the state geographies but outside its jurisdiction (as in Auschwitz, or in the detention centers for asylum seekers in international airports, or the Australian government’s 2001 excision of offshore “immigration zones” to deprive illegal immigrants of the right to demand asylum),²³ or outside the state boundaries but within the purview of the state to suspend the law (as in Guantánamo); the state of exception itself constitutes a zone of juridical undecidability, which is simultaneously included within juridical power yet beyond its boundaries.²⁴

Yet Agamben deliberately eschews a spatial analysis that is too concrete in its applicability:

The simple topographic opposition (inside/outside) implicit in these theories seems insufficient to account for the phenomenon that it should explain. If the state of exception’s characteristic property is a (total or partial) suspension of the juridical order, how can such a suspension be contained within it? [ . . . ] In truth, the state of exception is neither external nor internal to the juridical order, and the problem of defining it concerns precisely a threshold, or a zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other. [ . . . ] Hence the interest of those theories that [ . . . ] complicate the topographical opposition into a more complex topological relation, in which the very limit of the juridical order is at issue.²⁵

Thus the inside/outside “topology” of “bare life” and the “state of exception,” appears to displace more concrete issues of “topography.” Agamben’s demand for complexity is one of the most powerful and suggestive components of his analysis, yet its benefits come at the risk of abstraction. Agamben’s neglect of real spaces, from those of the micrological camp to those of macrological geopolitics, is puzzling, given, for instance, the salience of “territory” as one of the key terms within Foucault’s early working-out of a theory of biopower.²⁶ This neglect also explains one of the main weaknesses of Agamben’s theory, namely its tendency to “superimpose Nazi thanatopolitics too directly over contemporary biopolitics.”²⁷ Agamben fails to articula...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The World, the Text, and the Geocritic
• 1. Said, Space, and Biopolitics: Giorgio Agamben’s and D.H. Lawrence’s States of Exception
• 2. Orient Within, Orient Without: Said’s “Hostipitality” toward Arnoldian Culture
• 3. Edward W. Said, the Sphere of Humanism, and the Neoliberal University
• 4. Back to Beginnings: Reading between Aesthetics and Politics
• 5. Revisiting Said’s “Secular Criticism”: Anarchism, Enabling Ethics, and Oppositional Ethics
• 6. Transnational Identity in Crisis: Re-reading Edward W. Said’s Out of Place
• 7. De-Orienting Aesthetic Education
• 8. Dangerous Insight: (Not) Seeing Australian Aborigines in the Narrative of James Murrells
• 9. Exilic Consciousness and Alternative Modernist Geographies in the Work of Olive Schreiner and Katherine Mansfield
• 10. Mundus Totus Exilium Est: Reflections on the Critic in Exile
• Notes on Contributors
• Index