Said

Orientalism it is one of those text that are part of the intellectual canon in humanities nowadays. This text had a huge impact in the critical and cultural studies in general because propose an idea that still today is hard to understand (and to believe) for many people. This is a text abut the power of culture. And also, about the power of a hegemonic culture, the “Western Culture”. The main point of this text is the “Orientalism”, not “the Orient” as the author points at the beginning of his book. The main issue is to present how did “the west” represented and appropriated “the east”. “Orientalism” is a name that was selected from the people in the west to talk about “the other” who was not them.

I found a very interesting idea at the beginning of this text that I really like. The issue that “orient” would not be an idea. Every time we speak about representations and the ways that a dominant culture represents another one, we usually think that we are facing some kind of “idea”.  There is, in this case, a “real” reference for “the Orient” that we can’t say doesn’t exist. The thing is that the link between “Orientalism” and “Orient” is a relation made by the strength of power of “the west”.

I would like to stop in one final point. The notion of author. Even when it is not the main topic of his discussion, Said refers to this problem in a few pages. He says nowadays there are some discussion about the relation of text and context. He cites the case of philosophy where many scholars just say “Locke”, “Hume”, etc., without taking into account the context where these authors were involved. For his argument, this idea doesn’t work. If we split the text to its author and context we miss the relations of power (the main topic in his text) that are under them. So, he ends this point saying that “investigations must formulate the nature of that connection in the specific context of the study, the subject matter, and it’s historical circumstances” (15).

Foucault

It is impossible to read this text and not recall Barthes’s text “Death of the Author”. Foucault mentioned it without name when he says “criticism and philosophy took note of the disappearance –or death- of the author some time ago” (103). But, here, the issue is not if the author is dead or alive, the main issue is, as the title says, “What is an Author?” Even when this may sound obvious, we must know what an author is before we kill him.

I don’t think that Foucault is “against” the figure of the author. He starts saying first of all that this is a very complex concept and the there are big varieties depending when we use the word. For him, the author doesn’t mean “the final signification” of a text. It is important to say that Foucault doesn’t use the word “text” very often, as Barthes does, he prefers to use one of his favourite concepts, discourse. In Foucault’s argument, author is not the meaning, there is, in same way, “something” that it is “out” of the text and whose functions are related to the existence modes and the circulation of the discourses. So, the author is not “someone/thing” that pre existed the text, the author is just a function, not a meaning.

For me was very interesting the distinction he makes between any author of a book, and those authors who created a tradition. Authors like Freud and Marx allows a wide variety of perspectives and reinterpretations. And every time reading may be reinterpreted. The case of the science discourse is quiet difference, as he pointed. If we read and re-read Galileo we are not going to be able to transform our era and the way we understand our time and life. But we do can rethink our time if we re-read Marx’s texts.