se —-130 ORIENTALISM elusive presence. Sacy placed the Arabs in the Orient, which was itself placed in the general tableau of modern learning. Orientalism belonged therefore to European scholarship, but its material had to be re-created by the Orientalist before it could enter the arcades alongside Latinism and Hellenism. Each Orientalist re-created his own Orient according to the fundamental epistemological rules of loss and gain first supplied and enacted by Sacy. Just as he was the father of Orientalism, he was aiso the discipline’s first sacrifice, for in translating new texts, fragments, and extracts subsequent Orientalists entirely displaced Sacy’s work by supplying their own restored Orient. Nevertheless the process he started would continue, as philology in particular developed systematic and institutional powers Sacy had never exploited. This was Renan’s accomplishment: to have associated the Orient with the most recent comparative disciplines, of which philology was one of the most eminent. The difference between Sacy and Renan is the difference between inauguration and continuity. Sacy is the originator, whose work represents the field's emergence and its status as a nineteenth-century discipline with roots in revolutionary Romanticism. Renan derives from Orientalism’s second generation: it was his task to solidify the official discourse of Orientalism. to systematize its insights, and to establish its intellectual and worldly institutions. For Sacy, it was his persona) efforts that launched and vitalized the field and its structures; for Renan, it was his adaptation of Orientalism to philology and both of them to the intellectual culture of his time that perpetuated the Orientalist structures intellectually and gave them greater visibility. Renan was a figure in his own right neither of total originality nor of absolute derivativeness. Therefore as a cultural force or as an important Orientalist he cannot be reduced simply to his personality nor to a set of schematic ideas in which he believed. Rather, Renan is best grasped as a dynamic force whose opportunities were already created for him by pioneers like Sacy, yet who brought their achievements into the culture as a kind of currency which he circulated and recirculated with (to force the image a little further) his own unmistakable re-currency. Renan is a figure who must be grasped, in short, as a type of cultural and intellectual praxis, as a style for making Orientalist statements within what Michel Foucault would call the archive of his time.** What matters is not only the things that Renan said but also how he said them,

Orientalist Structures and Restructures 131 what, given his background and training, he chose to use as his subject matter, what to combine with what, and so forth. Renan’s relations with his Oriental subject matter, with his time and audience, even with his own work, can be described, then, without resorting to formulae that depend on an unexamined assumption of ontological stability (e.g., the Zeitgeist, the history of ideas, lifeand-times). Instead we are able to read Renan as a writer doing something describable, in a place defined temporally, spatially, and culturally (hence archivally), for an audience and, no less important, for the furtherance of his own position in the Orientalism of his era. Renan came to Orientalism from philology, and it is the extraordinarily rich and celebrated cultura! position of that discipline that endowed Orientalism with its most important technical characteristics. For anyone to whom the word philology suggests dry-as-dust and inconsequential word-study, however, Nietzsche’s proclamation that along with the greatest minds of the nineteenth century he is a philologist will come as a surprise— though not if Balzac’s Louis Lambert is recalled: What a marvelous book one would write by narrating the life and adventures of a word! Undoubtedly a word has received various impressions of the events for which it was used; depending on the places it was used, a word has awakened different kinds of impressions in different people; but is it not more grand still to consider a word in its triple aspect of soul, body, and movement??? What is the category, Nietzsche will ask later, that includes himself, Wagner, Schopenhauer, Leopardi, al! as philologists? The term seems to include both a gift for exceptional spiritua! insight into language and the ability to produce work whose articulation is of aesthetic and historical power. Although the profession of philology was born the day in 1777 “when F. A. Wolf invented for himself the name of stud. philol.,” Nietzsche is nevertheless at pains to show that professional students of the Greek and Roman classics are commonly incapable of understanding their discipline: “they never reach the roots of the matter: they never adduce philology as a problem.” For simply “as knowledge of the ancient world philology cannot, of course, last forever; its material is exhaustible.”™ It is this that the herd of philologists cannot understand. But what distinguishes the few exceptional spirits whom Nietzsche deems worthy