Michel Foucault and Edward Said: discourse, archive, and authorship in Orientalism (1978)

Abstract

Orientalism (1978), by Edward Said, has become a central work for understanding the ways in which the “Orient” was historically produced in the West as an object of knowledge, representation, and political administration, and is often associated with the foundational gesture of postcolonial studies. By criticizing the naturalization of the East/West dichotomy, Said defines Orientalism as an articulated set of statements, institutions, and forms of authority that render the Orient representable, intelligible, and governable. Thus, the analysis shifts from the examination of isolated images or supposed misrepresentations to the investigation of the historical conditions of discursive production that stabilize cultural differences as essences and sustain colonial and imperial projects. This study examines the specific dialogue between Said and Michel Foucault, taking Orientalism as a privileged object through which to observe the functioning of the Foucauldian categories of “discourse” and “archive,” as formulated in The Archaeology of Knowledge. It argues that Said mobilizes the concept of discourse to describe dispersed yet systematically articulated enunciative regularities that traverse literature, science, politics, economics, and historiography, thereby constituting Orientalism as a relatively stable discursive formation. Correlatively, the study shows that Said operates with a notion of archive compatible with Foucault’s definition of the archive as the “law of what can be said,” understanding it as a principle of accumulation and memory that organizes repertoires and regimes of truth about the Orient over time. Finally, the study discusses the most decisive point of divergence between the two authors: whereas Foucault conceives the author as a historically variable function decentered from empirical individuality, Said reinscribes the intellectual and political responsibility of the individual author into the functioning of Orientalist discourse, emphasizing the historical and institutional inscription of intellectual production.