David Pryce-Jones
Malignant Charlatanry
For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies
By Robert Irwin
Allen Lane The Penguin Press 409pp £25
Nearly thirty years have passed since Edward Said published Orientalism. That book shifted the intellectual climate – more exactly, degraded it – by propagating a new and unusual sort of hatred, aimed at scholarship and scholars. In Said’s opinion, everybody who had ever studied or written about the Middle East had done so in bad faith. Epigraphists, archaeologists, grammarians and linguists, papyrologists, geographers, the lot, including poets and travellers, had nothing to do with the advancement of learning or the recording of their findings and impressions. With sinister purpose, they were imposing themselves upon innocent and harmless people. Century after century, the activity of these assorted men was not at all what it might seem but only ‘a rationalisation of colonial rule’ and, since for most of the time there was no colonial rule, a justification of it ‘in advance’.
Said fashioned this massive international conspiracy out of the vulgar Marxist concept that knowledge only and always serves the interest of the ruling class, and therefore cannot be objective. He spiced it up with a supportive concept, this time taken from Michel Foucault, that there is no such thing as
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Interview with Iris Murdoch by John Haffenden via @Lit_Review
I love Helen Garner and this, by @chris_power in @Lit_Review, is excellent.
Yesterday was Fredric Jameson's 90th birthday.
This month's Archive newsletter includes Terry Eagleton on The Political Unconscious, and other pieces from our April 1983 issue.
Terry Eagleton - Supermarket of the Mind
Terry Eagleton: Supermarket of the Mind - The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson
literaryreview.co.uk