There was no Second World in Said's universe. One of the reasons becomes clear from his memoirs, which present an unexpectedly lonely, apolitical portrait of his youth. Protected from real life by the wealth of his father and the warmth of his mother, Edward was awakened by the Egyptian revolution of 1952. As a result of the coup, Edward's father lost a large part of his business, and his mother became an ardent supporter of the militant and increasingly pro- Soviet leader of the revolution, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Edward, then aged 17, became involved in the family debates, the Cold War in miniature. His sympathies were with his Nasserite mother, though he sometimes disagreed with her "socialist pan-Arabism" (Said 1999: 264). The opposite pole, however, was embodied not by his father who was busy restoring his business, but by a relative, Charles Malik, the husband of an aunt.
A philosopher who studied with Heidegger and a statesman who wrote the Declaration of Human Rights together with Eleanor
Figure 2: Charles Malik and Eleanor Roosevelt working on the Declaration of Human Rights, 1948. Edward Said could have been among these children.
Source: http://www.chahadatouna.com/2006/2006-12/Dr. %20Charles %20Malik/Dr%20Charles%20Malik%20Bio.htm
Roosevelt, Malik was an outstanding figure. The Lebanese Ambassador to the US, he also served as the country's Foreign Minister and later, at the end of the 1950s, as President of the United Nations General Assembly. "Polarizing" and "charismatic," as Said depicted him, but also cosmopolitan and visionary, Malik was a true Cold War warrior. Among many subjects of his speeches and pamphlets, the most salient subject was anti-communism.
The young Edward Said was initially attracted to his famous relative, but later found him "troubling." Ascribing to the Soviet Union "the missionary fervor and the imperialist vision," Malik warned the free world of the threat of enslavement. However, when in 1960 he shared a podium with the father of the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller, Malik chose to espouse his dream of the peaceful disintegration of communism from within. He saw "infinite possibilities, short of war," to help this happen (Teller and Malik 1960). He hated "neutralism" and eagerly operated with the concepts of west and east.
Devoting pages to the philosophical analysis of their relations, he saw two forces, Soviet Communism and Islam, occupying two "intermediary" and "inauthentic" positions between east and west. A Lebanese Christian, Malik distrusted them both, but his passions were focused on the Soviets. "Communism is almost infinitely resourceful in poisoning any normal relationship between East and West," wrote Malik (1953) during the Egyptian revolution. Around this time, Said learned from Malik "about the clash of civilizations, the war between West and East, communism and freedom, Christianity and all the other, lesser religions." Said's distrust is clear in these words, but the intensity and longevity of his struggle against Malik's influence needed another passage: "I see it as the great negative intellectual lesson of my life." For the last three decades, wrote Said in 1999, he was still living through Malik's "lesson," analyzing it "over and over and over with regret, mystification, and bottomless disappointment" (Said 1999: 264-5).
For many Third World intellectuals, the Soviet Union was an inspiration and a model; for some, it was also a source of support. The most notable thinkers of the radical Left took part in the emancipation efforts that were led, and sometimes manipulated, by the Soviet Union. The fate of the American John Reed, a participant of the Bolshevik Revolution who died in 1920 in Moscow after taking part in the Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku, illustrates this early twentieth-century convergence between communism and anti- imperialism. The lives and works of Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, and Jean-Paul Sartre give further, intellectually more significant, examples. But as the Soviet Union shaped itself into a major imperialist power that competed with other global powers, the free- minded Marxist-leaning intellectuals found themselves deprived of their mental tools. There is a disturbing split between the ways in which many twentieth-century thinkers understood two major developments of the period, decolonization and the collapse of the imperialist order on the one hand, and the Cold War and the collapse of the socialist order, on the other.
Said's oeuvre features the same partial worldliness, which omits the Second World as a nuisance. If, for those who believed in "modernization theory," the Second World did not seem much different from the Third World because both were just steps in the modernization process that led to the First World, then postcolonial critics performed the opposite operation. In their minds, the Second World was not much different from the First World because they both failed to support the Third World. This indifference calcified after fellow-travelers of the Soviet regime watched its collapse, with their hopes betrayed and their respect having turned to contempt. However, Said was never a Soviet fellow-traveler. His memories of his early debates with his mother, the supporter of Nasser, could signal his lifelong disavowal of the pro-Soviet ideas that were popular in his circle. He was trying to find his own, creative way, one that would ignore Nasser and Malik alike. But then not only the Nasserian regime but the Soviet Union also collapsed. Were Malik still alive in 1991, he could have celebrated the triumph of his prediction about the non-violent demise of the socialist system from within. Said had nothing to say about this and subsequent events in the Second World; to comment on them would have amounted to agreeing with his uncle.
However, in one of his last books, Said experimented with a closer look at Eastern Europe. In Freud and the Non-European (2003), Said appreciated Freud's reading of Moses, the founder of Judaism, as a non-Jewish Egyptian. Said was right to emphasize Freud's interest in the Orient, but Freud was equally involved in the "non-traditional" east. A subtler analysis would have shown that in Freud's circle, German and Austrian Jews viewed the Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe with stereotypes that were similar to Said's portrait of orientalism. Freud's clientele in Vienna was largely composed of East European Jews (Etkind 1997). As with his Moses, Freud did not trade in stereotypes.
Said's wonderful book on Freud ends in the most unexpected way, with a tribute to Isaac Deutscher, "a non-Jewish Jew," a Polish Trotskyite who became a British critic of both Stalinism and Zionism. Freud chose Moses, Said chose Deutscher: two non-Zionist Jews, non-Western Europeans, betrayed revolutionaries, adopted founders. It was an extraordinary choice that showed Said's late, mature interest in the Second World.
Part II
Writing from Scratch
Chasing Rurik
Ascribed to a twelfth-century monk, Nestor, the Primary Chronicle narrates a moment from the ninth century, when some northern tribes failed to settle their disputes and invited a Varangian, named Rurik, to bring order to their "plentiful land." Rurik's name was given to the first Russian dynasty, the Rurukides, which preceded the Romanovs and ruled for twice as long. "The Origin is a silent zero point, locked within itself," writes Edward Said; an Origin, or rather a myth of origin, "centrally dominates what derives from it" (Said 1985: 318, 372). But in modern Russian, "to start from Rurik" means to engage in boring and irrelevant talk, to refer to origins instead of confronting problems. Already in 1841, the critic Vissarion Belinsky complained that the debates about Rurik were "bringing boredom and sadness to the thinking public" (1954: 5/94). In this chapter, I will re-visit the debate on Rurik in the context of Michel Foucault's course on French historiography (2003), a remarkable and controversial model.
Inviting Leviathan