[In the following conversation following a presentation, Said, Logan, Donato, and others discuss some theoretical implications of deconstruction for the study of history.]

EDWARD Said:
I'm sorry, I'm not sure that I can be as brief as you would like, because I have a number of things to say on what both of the speakers have said. I think these things are important for the general discussion of critical theory that we have been having here. Now, as you know, I have a great admiration for both of your work, and certainly I find absolutely nothing to disagree with on what you said about Flaubert and the whole question of the end of history as you discussed it, Eugenio. But let me preface what I have to say with one comment: that the notion of deconstruction is not a Derridean idea exclusively, that is to say—if you were to go before Derrida to Marx, for example, who in the Eighteenth Brumaire refers to the weapons of criticism, and before him, to Vico and so on, right back to Aristotle—there is an activity called criticism which exactly exists to use intellectual means to understand what it is texts are saying, what they are not saying, what they are doing. So, rather than repeat, you might say, the litany of virtues—and they are great—of the Derridean moment, I think it is important here to use the weapons of criticism to affiliate what you said with, in fact, history. Now, it would seem to me that to understand Flaubert in a real context, the larger context of his time, you'd have to say, first of all, that Flaubert is writing what he has to say about the present, his hatred of the present, his fear of the future, his nostalgia for the past and his sense of representation against something that was taking place, not only in France but in Europe generally and that is exactly the scientific power of representing the world. Much of what you said, for example, Eugenio, about Flaubert should be read against Renan and L'Avenir de la Science subtitled Pensée du dixhuits cent quarente-huits, published in 1890, in which Renan says that science is really the world, that the future of the world resides in science, because science can do certain things, among them philological things. Renan is not an original thinker by any means, but he represents the era of the spirit of things against which Flaubert as a novelist is reacting, that is to say, the power of science—philological science, natural science, social science—to deliver the world, to reconstruct the world—in the case specifically, since you were talking about it, of the Orient—regions of the world lost to Europe, lost even to the Orient which the scientists were delivering. The linguists did it—Sassez did it, Bopp did it, Schlegel did it, etc., etc. The list can go on indefinitely. But these people were able to go into the past and to represent the past in such a way that the past became actual in their writing, not only into the past but across great distances, into the Orient in particular. Flaubert's reaction, which you described brilliantly, and with which I have no quarrel whatever, was—and his novels are exactly a reaction to that—his reaction was that the only thing left for the novelist to do is to criticize the representation, that is to say, by virtue of what you call deconstruction, and to show that the power of art is precisely its powerlessness, that it is unable to do what is going on at large in society. That is to say, that at the same time that Flaubert was writing about the loss and showing the nostalgia for the Orient in Salâmmbo, what he was talking about in La Tentation de Saint Antoine, the temptation of all knowledge which was now available to Europe, was precisely being written out in the history of Europe. Because, you have, for instance, not only the invasion of the Orient by Napoleon at the beginning of the 19th century, but also the invasion by France exactly of Algiers in 1830. And during the entire 19th century you have a period during which European accession over the entire non-European world went to the extent of occupying 85٪ of the world. And it is against this vision of advancing recuperation precisely in the fundamental literal sense of the word, the recuperative march of science upon the rest of the world, that Flaubert finds himself working as a novelist, having nostalgia for the past, trying to create his own past in contradistinction to what was taking place in his time. And this also applies to Hegel, because Hegel, at the same time that he said there is only representation of the natural object and so on and so forth, as you again have perfectly accurately described, if you push further and you affiliate the rest of Hegel to this, it is finally within the recuperative and totally representative power of the state to include everything which we have lost in nature. That is to say, it is the structure of the state which is able to deliver the lost nature which has disappeared but which can be, in fact, reconstructed and restored, you might say, by the power of the modern state. The point of all this is to note that the interest in Japan in Huysmans, Claudel, Valery and others in the twentieth century has to be seen against this extraordinary background of la découverte de l'asile, as it was called, which meant not just, you know, recuperation, it meant actual historical and political accumulation. It meant actual acquisition, and therefore, the novelistic project, as I see it, of Flaubert was in fact to institute a counter-acquisition or counter-accumulation by narrative and descriptive technique of restoring his Orient as a kind of competing discourse to the other one. And in so doing, he merely illustrated, as Lukács perfectly says about Salâmmbo, the singular powerlessness of the artist in that society. And I think that is the reading that in a sense completes what you're saying. I don't think that it by any means contradicts what you're saying, but as I say, I think what is necessary here is to affiliate it with [history]—and the last point I wanted to make—one does not necessarily have to see this as a result of the démarche Derridienne, that is to say, this kind of criticism, “weapons of criticism,” you might say, the Marxist critique, the Vichian critique, the Gramscian critique, or it could be the right-wing critique, etc. The great historistic projects of the nineteenth century are all part of this. The last irony I would like to draw attention to is that the great deconstructive schema, which emerged out of Derrida—which is not noticed enough—is that Derrida, at the same time, through his method, is attempting in some way to recuperate all previous methods, too. I mean, I think this is an important step that can be made. It is not just a free emanation in the spirit of science and so on, but the Derridean theory is precisely a theory to recapture all other theories and one has to see them in those power relations. You see, I think that is an important point to be made.
M.-R. Logan:
Yes, but without going into Harold Bloom, I would say that that is the characteristic of any strong criticism. That in a sense you are a deconstructor, too.
SAID:
Marx was a deconstructor. …
M.-R. Logan:
Fine, take Marxists, take deconstructors, call it whatever you want, you are the ones who have brought about that kind of awareness. So that is a parallel gesture; if it is not the same it is parallel.
SAID:
But I am trying to say that it cannot be done endlessly on the level of theory, or at least, of theory pretending only to be theory.
M.-R. Logan:
I never said that. But I said we must not deny theory, we must not rush to practice. Which is exactly what you have been doing. Now, you know the whole question of nineteenth century text and this use of the Oriental foreign countries is far more complex than we have expressed it here in one form or another. Because one could bring it about the way certain writers will use this fantasizing on the Orient as a weapon against their own society. And I'm thinking of Rimbaud, for instance, who as a young college student wrote poetry in Latin—again the distantiation of the language—right after Algeria had been conquered, right after the defeat of Abd el-Kader and said some day will come, some day they will overcome. Sometime the French will have to get out of Algeria. I mean, it is said almost as directly but in somewhat more poetic language. And he does the same thing with Africa: “moi, le negre …” and so forth.
SAID:
And if I might first add an historical footnote … this will amuse you, since I noticed that as you were reading from Huysmans, Eugenio was nodding his head. Huysmans is an important figure for this. Huysmans was the Godfather of the greatest French Orientalist of the twentieth century, Louis Massignon. And Massignon's book, La Passion de Husayn Ibn mansur Hallaj, was dedicated to Huysmans, at the same time, in other words, that Massignon admired, you might say, the decadence, the fin de siècle, the fatigue of a century coming to its end. He was at the same time working for the service de renseignement, the French Government, he was an agent, along with T. E. Lawrence, in the Hejäz, and his job was at the same time that he preserved his interest in the Orient as “decorative,” etc., etc., he was at the same time acting in behalf of the French government as indeed was Flaubert when he went to the Orient. He was traveling around with French consular papers, making it possible for him to go through the Orient with the power of Europe. I think these things are important. I'm sorry I took so long.
DONATO:
I will be perhaps as long in answering!
SAID:
I hope so.
DONATO:
I'll take my point of departure from something very marginal to what you [M.-R. Logan] said. But to come to something that I think is at the heart of the problem in many ways and then come to the question of history. There is a point on which I disagree completely with Serres, and it has precisely to do with this problem of history, which we will leave until the question of “history” versus “real history” is taken up. In the nineteenth century, the classifications and the encyclopaedia do indeed become constituted by this accumulation of memory.
SAID:
And “Territory”.
DONATO:
But the moment they enter into that system—let me grant you, I hope I made clear, that the whole constructive recuperative movement goes throughout the nineteenth century and the deconstructive goes throughout the nineteenth century. But if for the moment we remain on the deconstructive moment, that encyclopaedic project was failed from the very beginning. It has failed in its project in Novalis; or if you take an encyclopaedic project like Bouvard et Pecuchet, it is a deconstruction and an epistemological critique of all the classifications which in fact represent an older science versus a new science. Now, comes somebody like Michel Serres, who is a great historian of science—and a historian of science we usually have to cope with—who sees throughout the nineteenth century a certain number of breaks, but then at a certain point the scientific discourse becomes an absolutely overriding discourse with the only ontological grounding, it becomes completely atemporal and nonhistorical. There is a more interesting question which I could have gone through which connects, I believe, with what you were saying last night, that namely this quest for pure form, in fact, which I was trying to describe. … Let us put the question in a broader way. Is there a way within representational history, not “real history,” at least to create an historical space for science which it then erases in its own constitution? Is there a successful pure form? Indeed, in the nineteenth century we do see the birth of a successful pure form in the constitutions of mathematics qua totally independent syntax without any content. In that sense I would put it perhaps in shorthand notation. Before the Cantos, and so on, before the nineteenth century constituted this ideal form, there is no mathematics, there is only physics inasmuch as the reality of the mathematical object is always embedded in the real object. And, hence, mathematics becomes a mirage which literary critics use as an idea of pure form.
SAID:
You don't just find it in mathematics; you also find it in linguistics.
DONATO:
You find it in linguistics, you find it in music, and so on and so forth. So … But, once a language like mathematics is constituted, or the same thing could be said with music, I don't want to put linguistics on the same plane because linguistics does not maintain that absolute synthetic form that mathematics maintains. Can you then say, we can just forget about mathematics? In a way your paper last night was saying, translating it into the problems that I'm doing now, let us at some point forget doing mathematics and let's do physics, in the terms which I have said it. And, fine, let's do by all means physics, too.
SAID:
No, I agree.
DONATO:
But one cannot—let me elaborate this point a moment. One cannot give up the continuation of this fusion of mathematics and physics; one must allow mathematics to function in relationship to physics as that mirage of pure form with which it has to be integrated constantly; and yet their cleavage is always maintained and the two can never become adequate one to the other. So that brings me to another question about what you said. When you talk about “real history,” I do not deny that there is a “real history” which is a totally different order than that which I was speaking of. The one thing I would deny is that after the beginning of the nineteenth century, after the analytics of representation are opened up, there is a way of talking of “real history” without talking about the problematics of representation of history. Treat them in any key you want, treat them in any ideology you want, treat them in any fashion you want, but those two things are not separable. In fact, this is, in part, the pregnant dilemma, the seminal dilemma that you are showing in your work on Orientalism. Because, indeed, the Orient is not the West, but the Orient gets constituted as an object within the Western representational scheme, but once it becomes constituted as an object, then the dialectic between the otherness of the Orient and the Orient as representation enter into a mechanism which you yourself show is inextricable, that we have to read and so on, but the dilemma then becomes if you try to do a radical critique of the enmeshing representation with the object, once the space of representation is open, where does it leave the object? In other words, the only alternative is to say there is a totally different thing there which has to be studied with totally different categories, and so on and so forth, independently from the constitution of this. But the thing is, in everything I'm saying, literary discourse does not have the privilege of mathematical discourse, and that's why it is doomed for me in this constant, once the space of representation is open, in this constant repetitive mechanism which—I really don't like this word deconstruction, although I use it, I wish I had cast it, I could have cast it in a different language from the language of deconstruction. And what interests me at this point—and let me say what is behind all this in my own mind—is that in the last analysis, all of the systems that we have inherited from the nineteenth century are all, whether they admit it or they don't admit it, caught within the analytics of representation. And all I'm saying is that in this ironical moment, at least of the awareness inscribed in the analytics of representation, one is caught within the analytics of representation. What I want to say is that behind my project there is something. My project, failed as it may be, is to at one point, within no matter which representational scheme you want to choose. … I do it from an ironic key … but the question I want to raise is the problem of the “Object”—capital “O” in italics between quotes; this becomes extremely problematical and it still remains extremely problematical.
SAID:
I'm sorry, but may I respond? First of all I think I agree with a lot of what you said but I would not make the distinction between “history” and “real history.” I don't know what that means. I never used that word. Exactly what I thought was particularly valuable and important in your paper was that it was done within, you might say, a historical dimension which I don't want to compare to something called a “real history.” Quite the contrary, I want to open what you said, and because you gave it to me, I want to connect it with simply more history. That's what I mean. …
DONATO:
You used the word “real,” that's what bothered me. …
SAID:
I don't mean to make an invidious distinction between “real history” and “deconstructive history” and so on. That's not the point. But the other thing about the object is a very important point. Now take this thing that I've been working on for a long time: I mean, it does seem, doesn't it, that all the descriptions of the Orient are, in fact, representations of the Orient? Then the question, which is a perfectly legitimate question to ask, if someone would ask it is: “Well, O.K., if what you're saying is the whole enormous tradition comprising sixty or seventy thousand books in a hundred years, never mind articles and so on, if this is all a structure of myths, or at least a structure, to use your work of representation, which it is, then, where is the ‘real Orient?” And my point is precisely that there is no such thing as a “real Orient.” Since the designations “Orient,” “Occident,” etc., all of these are themselves made. … And so the problematic status of the object remains or at least the nonexistence of the object remains. But, what is more important than that is that these representations which you talked about acquire the status of objects or representations without history, like mathematics, and this is, I think, true of linguistics, certainly in the models constructed in the first forty years of the nineteenth century, by people like Humboldt and many others. These [representations] acquire precisely a kind of force which, although they seem to be abstract models, become, in fact, models for doing certain things. And what I'm talking about, what I'm interested in, is that these certain things acquire the status, for instance, of learning. The important status of knowledge. And at least in the limited case in which I have been interested, namely, the Orient, they become, in fact, the ways by which Europe administers and rules millions upon millions of people. Therefore, they are not simply representations which exist, you might say, in the discursive history that we write as scholars, but they also become facts of a certain kind that have impinged upon—I give the example of Macauley, who over and over again, in 1835, stood up in the House of Commons and said, “Well, here is the whole question of Indian education. There is now before the House the decision as to what we are going to allow these Indians to learn. Should we let them study in India, in the native languages, or are we going to let them do it all in England?” He then goes through a whole series of arguments proving abstractly, by a system exactly of representation—He represents English or European culture as superior. Well, this becomes then an administrative decision because in 1835 the entire educational system of India was changed to an English system. So, here, as you might say, is a pure representation by Macauley, who had the force of power, standing in the House of Commons to, in fact, change the lives of people. I mean, I am interested in following these things out. So, I am not by any means saying that there are not representations, but that there are representations and representations. Some representations have power and some don't. The representations of Flaubert precisely are interesting because they don't have power and have to be read against the representation of power.
WILLIAM Warner:
I'd like to raise a question about Professor Donato's talk and ask you in some sense to relate it to Nietzsche's The Uses and Abuses of History as a way, perhaps, of re-engaging the debate between yourself and Professor Said. Because, it seems to me that Nietzsche annunciates a kind of admiration toward the monumental historian who is able to remake the past to generate the representations which effect or enable him to act in the present politically and locally and he then moves through the description of antiquarian history where we get a movement towards a kind of willfulness now as knowledge as interpretation. And I was wondering if it was possible for you to relate your analysis or your deconstruction of history to that sequence and then raise the question: Is that a deconstruction of a historical moment of representation? Is that incompatible with a certain aspect of monumental history as, in other words, history acted, as well as politics in the present?
DONATO:
Well, that would have been another question which I would like to discuss with Said following last night's paper. It's a very difficult question, and I think that in the last analysis, on the one hand, one can do an analysis of the problem, but the analysis of the problem will not bring one any closer to praxis of the problem. That mainly, indeed, within the nineteenth century, you have the coexistence of Macauley's historiography, which influences many millions of people in India and then you have Nietzsche's historiography, which could be used against Macauley's, but which has no effect within the nineteenth century. So that between those two types of representation, by what critical strategy would one be able to produce a wedge? I think that the only way that one could work oneself into the question—and I have not thought the question out, and I am not ready to answer publicly—but I suspect that it would go through a problematic of values. And by going through a problematic of values, it goes also necessarily in the deconstructive moment of Nietzsche with relationship to values. Since you cannot avoid going through the Nietzschean moment, which suspends the kind of opposition that would permit you within the context of values, to put stable oppositions, it would be impossible then, in fact, to be able to say, within this context, let's adhere to this representation because it permits an action outside. Actually, all representation, if one wishes them, would define a certain kind of action. There is no doubt about that. Now the question then becomes why one instead of the other. But one instead of the other goes through the Nietzschean problematic of values and the Nietzschean problematic of values undermines the whole problem in such a way that in the last analysis I think that one is left with an act of Faith.
STEPHEN Crites:
Yes, this question about the end of history and its Hegelian/Marxist context. I think there is an aspect of it that you did not put forth in the lecture that has some material bearing on the issue here. For Hegel, certainly, one of the things that happened with the notion of the end of history is precisely the collapsing of a certain kind of specialization of labor that is characteristic of the historical moment, a specialization, not only of work and means of subsistence but also of those special labors called philosophy, religion, aesthetics, politics. The subjects of his great lectures, all of which end by the collapse, or the overcoming of them as such and collapse into something else that no longer represents the rigid kind of compartmentalization in which they have appeared historically. That bears on his notion of Erinnerrung, which is not simply the representation of the past, but involves the taking in within the social substance of a people, the internalization in what had appeared to be merely representation, merely facts and events of the past and this understood as the outcome of history, it seems to me, is mutatis mutandis, involved in the Marxian notion of revolution and revolution as the end of a particular kind of alienated history. What this means, it seems to me, is partly that the sense, for instance, of the privileged position of the political over against the literary and philosophical theoretical substance of culture is not an adequate way of understanding the affiliations that exist in the different claims of authority that are recognized and represented. That is, there are types of authority—in this case, a certain sort of moral authority that is constituted precisely by the notion of the end or of this fullness or this abundance, understood as the end of history, that cannot simply be reduced, let us say, to aspects, hidden representations of the authority of the state. What I'm saying as far as the question of affiliation is that it is indeed more complicated and more fine grained than the notion that all authority derives in some sense from the state.
SAID:
I agree. No, No, I didn't say that at all. Quite the contrary. My reason for soliciting Gramsci on this point, was precisely to insist exactly on the heterogeneity of the culture and the multiple, in some cases not only interlocking but contradictory, stands of authority which nevertheless in spite of this, are dominated by the structure of the state. Which is to say that the state is a kind of enormous, you might say, spatial configuration in which all kinds of authorities and activities, elaborations, etc., affiliate with each other, differently—at some moment one thing is more important than another and so on and so forth, it is by no means static and by no means rigidly hierarchical and dominated in the crude sort of deterministic way by the central administration. Of course, there are models for that. But that's not what I mean. Sorry.
DONATO:
Now, I basically don't disagree with that. The only footnote that I would add, though, to what you said, has to do with the encyclopaedic project of Hegel, indeed, it is there and, indeed, he believes that it is successful. I think that one could do a close analysis to show that in some way the failure of that project is also already written in Hegel. But that is something that would have to be done.