Trying to trace the preoccupations, anxieties, and ambition of Edward Said’s repertoire, one is struck by the constancy and repetition, the rigorous development of critical themes and variations, which, true to the vocation of the public intellectual, retain their integrity and their affiliative connections across disciplines, genres, and discourses. This line of varied repetition is doubly effective. On the one hand, it establishes the coherence and authority of a scholar’s body of work, an authority that once grounded is transferred, its rigor traveling across discursive boundaries. But repetition, on the other hand, obeys another motive, which is more tactical than strategic, more improvisational than deliberate. In moving from Said’s cultural to his political writings (traveling across an imposed boundary), we rediscover, and recover, familiar themes: this time not as masterful articulations of Western philosophy and critique but as the recourses of necessity — Vichian ricorsi remapping and retreading cultural and historical trajectories.1 Tracing the genealogy of culture, of morals, of literature, of politics, of received ideas, that repetition provides ways to challenge hierarchy and pull at the loose threads and false naturalism, the subtle tissue, of hegemony.
