Exiles in the City

Among the critics who continue to make a decisive contribution to our understanding of Edward W. Said's work, few have effectively placed his theories into praxis in the way William V. Spanos has. His most recent book is no exception. Exiles in the City: Hannah Arendt and Edward W. Said in Counterpoint is the first sustained study of the shared but discrepant connections between Edward W. Said and Hannah Arendt. It is a long-overdue analysis of the surprisingly overlooked historical, political, and ideological implications of the parallel and paradoxical exilic experiences of two of the twentieth century's most formidable intellectuals. While works such as Aamir Mufti's Enlightenment in the Colony (Princeton, 2007) and Jacqueline Rose's The Question of Zionism (Princeton, 2005) have discussed their affiliation, until the publication of Exiles in the City, no text has attempted to think through the overlapping experiences of both Arendt's and Said's exile and the critical consciousness their dislocation produced (232). That this historical connection between two of the last century's most prominent Palestinian American and German Jewish intellectuals has never been examined together testifies, on the one hand, to just how persistent American Zionism has been in keeping the two figures culturally, ideologically, and philosophically closed off from each other, just as it marks, as indicated by the publication of Spanos's book, the coming end of that taboo.The strength of the book is Spanos's critical awareness that Arendt's and Said's experiences of exile are under no circumstances historically and ideologically independent of each other. To understand how these experiences unevenly coincide requires that Arendt's flight from Germany in 1933, her survival of the Holocaust in 1941, and Said's expulsion from Palestine in 1947, they must be thought through concurrently in order to allow us to grasp a new perspective that has been lost by keeping these two figure sequestered from each other. Hannah Arendt, after all, was among the first intellectuals in the West to understand that the “the solution of the Jewish Question merely produced a new category of refugees, the [Palestinian] Arabs,” just as Said was later to observe that the Palestinians were “the victims of the victims” (181). Only by comprehending Jewish and Palestinian history together, Said was to argue throughout his oeuvre, could the tragedy of the Holocaust and the subsequent displacement of the Palestinians (al-nakba) be given their full force (174–75). In this respect, Spanos's interpretative account of Arendt's and Said's parallel and paradoxical experiences of exile and the exilic perspectives they enabled is tantamount to an epistemological shift.Each of the book's first four chapters recapitulates the “supreme theme exile” and anticipates the fundamental significance of the book's fifth and final chapter, “Arendt and Said: An Affiliation in Counterpoint,” where the exilic is placed into “loving strife” (3). In chapter 1, “The Devastation of Language Under Dictatorship in the Public Realm,” Spanos presents an endlessly fascinating interpretation of how Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, her Life of the Mind, and Said's Humanism and Democratic Criticism discloses the distortions and silences inherent in official discourse in texts including The Pentagon Papers and the RAND Corporation's Enlisting Madison Avenue: The Marketing Approach to Earning Popular Support in Theaters of Operation in the 2003 Iraq War. Bringing together Said's call for a “return to philology” and Arendt's argument about the banality of discourse, Spanos demonstrates how both Said and Arendt, in their nearly irreconcilable ways, develop a theory and practice of reception and resistance that discloses what is hidden or concealed by the conventions of official discourse (45, 47). In chapter 2, “The Exilic Consciousness and the Imperatives of Betweeness,” Spanos relates Said's “radically secular awareness” to his conception that identity can neither be thought through its own, nor imagined without some original break, loss, or absence that is other to identity (61).The broader philosophical implications of this negative conception of identity are further elaborated in the book's third chapter, “Calling into Question,” which emphasizes Said's “radical secular awareness” that the new postcolonial states and boundaries that arose after the former colonies had achieved their national independence from France and Britain not only has produced countless numbers of refugees, but has called into question the teleological interpellation of the nation-state by empire in such a way as to redefine the temporal arrhythmias of exile as well as the temporality of displacement (101). In this respect, Spanos argues that Said advances a “radically secular and profane ‘time of now’” by drawing out its intriguing connections with Giorgio Agamben's The Time That Remains: A Commentary on a Letter to the Romans and Alain Badiou's Saint Paul: The Foundations of Universalism (99). This “radically new spatio-temporal” dimension is the secular grounds on which these non-imagined communities not only contest the institutional structures of power and authority, but also signal an imagined alternative to it (101).As each chapter develops as the antinomy of what precedes it, Exiles in the City is thus constantly elaborating itself as a praxis that situates Arendt's and Said's exile synchronically. In Said's interpretation of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, a Christian poem structured on the “tonality of the sonata form,” Spanos shows how Said's re-inscription of Eliot's “the complete consort dancing together” is as dialectically fraught as the experience as the exile's is interstitial. Said renders Eliot's phrase in counterpoint—“the complete consort dancing together, contrapuntally”—in order to emphasize that dissonance is not the a priori negation of tonality (no “consort” can be complete without another against which it identifies itself as complete) (58). Observing that the “resonant caesura that separates ‘the complete consort dancing together’” is Eliot's “metonym standing for the Christian humanist city,” Spanos incisively argues that Said vaccinates the clause with so strong an adverb as “contrapuntally” that even the “caesura” cannot be coherent without some kind of radical break from itself (58). That is to say, contrapuntal criticism is the secular and exilic awareness that even the most resolute and intransigent forms of communal identity can never inherently or fully incorporate themselves as the one and only one, singular identity a priori.Explaining just how central Said's elaboration of Isaac Deutscher's figure of “the non-Jewish Jew” is to the exiles' lived awareness that identity can only imagine itself through some rupture or break that is ontologically prior it, Spanos makes the theoretically decisive choice to interpret Said as a “non-Palestinian Palestinian” and Arendt as a “non-Jewish Jew” together (164). Thinking these tropes together enables us to apprehend just how transformative interpreting al-nakba and Holocaust together is to not only undoing the epistemic deformations of “humanity” and “humanitarianism,” but also reformulating the praxis of human rights for which the Holocaust and al-nakba remain both a touchstone and a cipher (143).Introducing Arendt's (mostly overlooked) exilic writings to the current discussion surrounding Giorgio Agamben's theory of the liminality of the category of the refugee (151–97), Exiles in the City also provides the new theoretical groundwork for a critical reconsideration of Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer—a subject that not only goes against the book's tendency to rescue Agamben from his very strange exclusion of the Palestinian's shared experience with the survivor of the Holocaust (199), but, in all fairness, extends beyond the book's already impressive scope. In a certain respect, however, Spanos enables us to grasp how and why the theory of a state of exception fails to confront the Orientalist presuppositions underlying the figure of the homo sacer, the historical invention of the figure of the Semite, and finally the latter's relationship to the historical development of the discipline of philology to which Ernst Renan made a historically decisive contribution (93). Exiles in the City is thus a crucial contribution to a critical discourse that has, for some time, resisted thinking through Hannah Arendt's and Edward W. Said's exile together, both historically and philosophically. Above all, it allows us to see just how central both Edward W. Said and Hannah Arendt are to understanding our modernity and to establishing the conditions that enable us to imagine alternatives to it, without exception (204)

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