On Edward Said’s Life and Work
A key word in Nubar Hovespian’s excellent study of the intellectual legacy Edward Said (1935–2003) is contrapuntal. Hovespian writes that Said had “contrapuntal insights into the political controversies of the day,” and that in his cultural criticism, he displayed a “contrapuntal reading of Europe’s cultural practices.”
Counterpoint is a musical term, most associated with the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Said wrote extensively about Bach and other classical composers, and for Said, “The essence of counterpoint is simultaneity of voices, preternatural control of resources, apparently endless inventiveness,” a theme with many variations. Controlled complexity, the juggling of many voices, keeping the lines separate but entwined, without reducing it to either a false harmony or cacophony is the goal of successful counterpart. It is a difficult task.
Said’s life was one lived in counterpoint. It was a remarkable life. He was born in Jerusalem, raised in Egypt, and an academic at Columbia University by the early 1960s. Said became the most celebrated champion of the Palestinian cause in the United States in the 1970s at a time when criticism of Zionism and Israeli policies was greatly marginalized in mainstream American media. No longer. And probably no one is as responsible for this turnabout—with a healthy assist from Benjamin Netanyahu and Itamar Ben-Gvir—than Said himself. What a striking figure he posed in the 1970s and 1980s as an upholder of the Palestinian cause; handsome, elegantly attired, extraordinarily well-spoken, polite but ferocious in debate, a hasbara (Israeli public relations) nightmare. But if today the Palestinian cause is more popular than ever, the status and fate of the Palestinian people in the two decades since his death has greatly declined. It is a deep, contrapuntal irony.
I wish Hovespian’s book had contained a little more about Said’s life. His book he writes is only a partial, though not a “comprehensive intellectual biography” of its subject. An odd phrase, that. Timothy Brennan, the author of Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said (2021) also described his book as an “intellectual biography.” But an intellectual biography is not a full biography. I gather Said had a complex private life, and sometimes exhibited sharp elbows to friends and foes alike, as Hovespian makes clear. Like all great intellectuals, Said needs and deserves a comprehensive “non-intellectual” biography, more clearly linking the life and the thought. That said, Hovespian makes a considerable addition to the Said literature with this well-written and carefully argued book. Born in Egypt of an exiled Armenian family, he spent many years in Lebanon where he identified with the Palestinian cause, eventually moving to the United States where he taught and became a close friend of Said, eventually serving as the executive director of Said’s American Council for Palestinian Affairs. His account of his interactions with Said are some of the most valuable and moving parts of the book. The book is generally supportive of Said’s positions though not uncritically.
Said of course was not just a Palestinian activist or propagandist. His best-known book, Orientalism (1978), a stinging critique of how imperialism and colonial dismissal of “the Arab other,” shaped Western thought about the non-Western world, created a field of study and launched a thousand dissertations. It is a book, for its influence, that ranks with classics such as Protestantism and the Spirit of Capitalism and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions as among the most influential works of scholarship written in the 20th century.
The tension between Said’s admiration and disdain for the European scholarly study of the non-European world is at the heart of Orientalism. Hovespian’s chapter on it is excellent, and rather than the usual suspects, notably the egregious Bernard Lewis, Hosevpian primarily deals with the Arabic language and Marxist responses to Said’s book. It is easy to read Orientalism as reducing the acquisition of knowledge to unbreakable epistemic “discourses,” a la Foucault, reducing Western knowledge of the Arab “other” to a simple imperial will to power and domination, from which there is no possible escape, and no possible way for those in the West to truly understand non-western societies. Although he later complained of readings of Orientalism that argued for what he called “possessive exclusivism,” this was a popular interpretation and misreading of his work. Orientalism is probably better understood as arguing for the opposite proposition, that contrapuntal knowledge of the “other” is both possible and necessary, but only if the pitfalls and traps he outlined can be avoided.
And certainly this sort of knowledge of “the other” was central to Said’s understanding of the Palestine-Israel question. Some of the best chapters in the book concern Said’s involvement with Arafat and the PLO, strengthened by Hovespian’s knowledge of many of the players. The 1967 War led him to become more actively involved in Palestinian politics. The Palestinian cause needed someone as articulate as Said to make their case in the U.S., and Said was looking for a place for his political energies. He became a member of the Palestinian National Council and in the 1970s and 1980s was a participant, though never a dominant voice, in the endlessly internecine world of Palestinian politics. Like most Palestinians his post-Six Day War politics tried to align two contradictory imperatives. A military response to Israel is necessary because Israel only respects power, and any negotiation with Israel from a position of military weakness is bound to be one-sided. But given the overwhelming preponderance of Israeli military strength, a military solution to Palestine’s problem is impossible. Negotiation is the only way forward. This is the wicked contrapuntal trap from which both Israel and Palestine have been unable to escape. Said was in favor of negotiation, but when Arafat agreed to Oslo, Said broke irremediably with him and the PLO, arguing that Arafat was giving up far too much in exchange for far too little. In retrospect, Said’s criticisms of Oslo certainly seem prescient, though I suppose betting against Israel-Palestine breakthroughs will always earn you big bucks on the prediction markets. Whether Oslo was doomed from the outset is a question for another day, though certainly Rabin’s assassination and Netanyahu’s election didn’t help matters. In any event, the dilemma that Said faced; armed struggle is suicidal, negotiations with Israel from a position of weakness is fruitless, has only grown exponentially worse. Oslo was the last moment of general optimism about the Israeli-Palestinian future. I don’t see it returning anytime soon.
Again and again Said returned to that most occidental and most orientalizing of cultural forms, classical music, as his touchstone. He was the classical music critic for The Nation for several decades, wrote several books on the subject, and most famously, was the co-creator, with Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim, of the joint Arab-Israeli West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, surely one of Said’s greatest accomplishments. For Said, beautiful music was not only an escape, a release from grim realities, but a necessary way of understanding the world.
In his last years, haunted by the threat of his imminent death from leukemia, borrowing from the philosopher, Theodor Adorno, a Jewish refugee from Nazism, Said wrote extensively on “late style,” which Adorno had derived from the his study of the late works of Beethoven. Adorno and Said saw Beethoven’s late piano sonatas and string quartets as shattered statements about a world that is fragmentary and unwhole Late style is death haunted, ravaged by memory and history, without the possibility of transcendence, unity, or exit. Said always fought against the pessimistic implications of his musings on late style, but I wonder what he would say in 2026. I am not the first to suggest that late Beethoven for Said was a stand-in for Palestine and Israel post-Oslo, like an endless opera (by Wagner?) about people who feel trapped in a situation they did not create, cannot leave, and every effort to leave just drags them more deeply into the morass. There’s an old silly joke. Q: “What is Schubert doing in his grave? A: Decomposing.” The situation has been decomposing for many years. Can there be a way forward? Can it be recomposed? If so, it will be a composition that Said would have approved, unsentimental and unsaccharine, in dense counterpoint, in which the separate voices of hope and despair play off one another in intricate patterns. For Said, for Barenboim, for many of us, it is music that is unwritten, unheard and like Schubert’s most famous symphony, unfinished.