Fall 1998
Volume 25, Number 1

Edward Said has never left any doubt as to the significance he attaches to what he calls secular criticism. It is by this term, not postcolonial criticism, that he identifies his critical practice as a whole. The meaning of this term is a theme he has returned to repeatedly since first elaborating it at length in the introduction to The World, the Text, and the Critic. But this facet of the Saidian project has recieved nothing like the attention that, for instance, has been lavished upon the concept of Orientalism or the strategy of what he calls the contrapuntal reading. Nor does it seem to have been productive for younger scholars in quite the same way as these two latter conceptual constellations. There may even appear to be something odd about the persistence of this concern in Said's work, at least within the context of the Anglo-American academy. Could all this conceptual and rhetorical energy and all this ethical seriousness really be directed at literary readings of the Bible or at works concerning the traditions of Judeo-Christian hermeneutics, as a few stray comments towards the end of World, the Text, and the Critic might lead one to believe?

Interpreters have often shied away from this aspect of Saidian criticism, despite its undeniable importance in the corpus of his work. There are, of course, exceptions, the most notable from my point of view being Bruce Robbins. But in Robbins' work, too, one senses an extraordinary effort at interpretation and a dislodging of the term secular from its usual meanings. Secular, Robbins argues, stands in opposition not to religious concerns or beliefs per se but to the nation and nationalism as belief system.1 It is, I think, an ingenious suggestion, one that I would like to hold on to for the moment in order later to expand upon it and also perhaps to recontextualize and partially to displace it.

I would like to begin mapping out the meaning of secular criticism by arguing that a concern with minority culture and existence occupies a central place within it. This is not, I shall argue, an accidental concern, such as one might expect from my progressive critical practice. It is, rather, a fundamental and constitutive concern, a condition of possibility of the critical practice itself. Furthermore, it is my view that careful attention to this subtext will help clear up some fundamental and widely held misconceptions about Saidian criticism, in particular concerning the concepts of culture, canon, and community that it deploys. The Saidian critical position implies, I shall argue, not a contentless cosmopolitanism but a secularism imbued with the experience of minority--a secularism for which minority is not simply the name of a crisis. Such a rethinking of the meaning of Saidian criticism is, of course, an enormous project. I can only hint here at one possible direction this rereading might take. I shall focus on the repeated appearance in Said's writings of Erich Auerbach, a figure I consider to be a locus both for the minority problematic I am speaking of and for the misunderstandings to which I have already alluded. Said's turn to Auerbach will serve as a starting point or Ansatzpunkt--in the sense in which Said, following Auerbach, himself uses that term--from which I shall approach and enter the field of secular criticism.2 Along the way I shall argue that Saidian criticism carries certain definite implications for debates about secularism in the postcolonial world, that it offers the means for overcoming many impasses generated by these debates, and that these latter cultural and political contexts provide some of the impulse for the critical notions themselves.

There are scattered references to Auerbach and his works throughout Said's major critical writings from Beginnings onwards--to the tradition of German romance scholarship of which he was a representative, to the breadth of philological knowledge that scholars such as he and Ernst Curtius brought to their work, to the importance of Vico for his conception of comparative scholarship, to Auerbach himslef as a figure of exile. Like the notion of secular criticism--and for related reasons, as I shall try to show--the meaning and function of this figure for Said have also proved difficult to interpret. One possibility has been to read Said's interest in Auerbach as an instance of his interest in philology--his treatments of Ernest Renan, Louis Massignon, and Raymond Schwab being among other instances. Tim Brennan, for example, has made an interesting case for what appears to him to be the paradoxical importance of the European philological tradition for Said's critical practice. Said's relationship to philology is indispensable, Brennan argues, for his success as "TV celebrity," adding that "philology is what has helped Said matter to political life in this country in a way that many Left theorists and acedemic Marxists do not." 3 Brennan has read Said's references to Auerbach within this larger argument.4 I shall follow a somewhat different direction here and argue that Said's concern with Auerbach as philology is inseperable from his interest in the latter as a figure of exile. Auerbach in Turkish exile appears at length in the essay on secular criticism and returns repeatedly in later works, including Culture and Imperialism.

1. See Bruce Robbins, "Secularism, Elitism, Progress, and Other Transgressions: On Edward Said's 'Voyage In,'" Social Text, no. 40 (Fall 1994): 26.

2. See Edward W. Said, Beginnings, Intention and Method (New York, 1975), p. 68. See also Erich Auerbach, "Philology and Weltliteratur," trans. Maire and Edward W. Said, Centenial Review 13 (Winter 1969): 11; hereafter abbreviated "PW."

3. Tim Brennan, "Places of Mind, Occupied Lands; Edward Said and Philology," in Edward Said: A Critical Reader, ed. Michael Sprinker (Oxford, 1992), pp.81, 92.

4. See ibid., p.80.

Aamir R. Mufti is assistant professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and coeditor of Dangerous Liasons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Persepctives (1997)