The great post-Freudian psycho-analyst, Jacques Lacan.
LACAN:
This passion of the signifier now becomes a new dimension of the human condition in that it is not only man who speaks, but that in man and through man it speaks, that his nature is woven by effects in which is to be found the structure of language, of which he becomes the material, and that therefore resounds in him, beyond what could be conceived of by a psychology of ideas, the relation of speech.
It speaks in the Other, I say, designating by the Other the very locus evoked by the recourse to speech in any relation in which the Other intervenes.
The phallus reveals its function here. In Freudian doctrine, the phallus is not a phantasy, if by that we mean an imaginary effect. Nor is it such an object (part-, internal, good, bad, etc.) in the sense that this term tends to accentuate the reality pertaining in a relation. It is even less the organ, penis or clitoris, that it symbolizes. And it is not without reason that Freud used the reference to the simulacrum that it represented for the Ancients.
For the phallus is a signifier, a signifier whose function, in the intra-subjective economy of the analysis, lifts the veil perhaps from the function it performed in the mysteries. For it is the signifier intended to designate as a whole the effect of the signified, in that the signifier conditions them by its presence as a signifier.
SAID:
We must take seriously Vico’s great observation that men make their own history; that what they can know is what they have made.
The Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be “Oriental” in all those ways considered commonplace by an average nineteenth-century European, but also because it could be—that is, submitted to being—made Oriental. There is very little consent to be found, for example, in the fact that Flaubert’s encounter with an Egyptian courtesan produced a widely influential model of the Oriental woman; she never spoke of herself, she never represented her emotions, presence, or history. He spoke for and represented her. He was foreign, comparatively wealthy, male, and these were historical facts of domination that allowed him not only to possess Kuchuk Hanem physically but to speak for her and tell his readers in what way she was “typically Oriental.” My argument is that Flaubert’s situation of strength in relation to Kuchuk Hanem was not an isolated instance.
It is very easy to argue that knowledge about Shakespeare or Wordsworth is not political whereas knowledge about contemporary China or the Soviet Union is.
The determining impingement on most knowledge produced in the contemporary West (and here I speak mainly about the United States) is that it be nonpolitical, that is, scholarly, academic, impartial, above partisan or small-minded doctrinal belief. One can have no quarrel with such an ambition in theory, perhaps, but in practice the reality is much more problematic. No one has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar from the circumstances of life.
We may as well face it: 20th century scholarship and intellectualism is mostly pure horror. Is this the way of literature? Has it always—must it always—be this way? Writing happens when something is wrong. Otherwise, it wouldn’t exist: who needs ink if all of us are eating melons in the garden? Who needs letters sent—when no one is absent? But the trials and tribulations of the 20th century were so complex, massive, and malicious, scholarship seemed to lose its mind. Everything became hidden—words were used to hide.
We see the two poles above:
Jacques Lacan (b: 1901): A rhetoric obsessed with absence: so absent it is present, ad infinitum. The rhetoric of psychology and language—we do not speak language, language speaks us, etc.— as opposed to politics.
Edward Said (b:1935): The rhetoric of massively present political inequality, colonial, imperial, racist, gendered, tallied up in the plainest way possible, but finally done in such a general way, that it becomes a rhetoric of insult which insults no one, the inequality so staggering that no complaint has any effect.
The reader witnesses a kind of atom bomb explosion, but learns nothing specific or useful—nothing to make their life happier or easier.
Morality, overly poetic because of religion, becomes not more accessible and scientific, but is simply abandoned.
Philosophy is given over to impotence in the face of oppressive, material power.
It makes no difference who we choose here: the hopelessly obscure (Lacan) or the self-evidently obvious (Said).
WINNER: SAID
