eS Se 140 ORIENT ALISM tions that Semites and Semitic were creations of Orientalist philological study.*1 Since he was the man who did the study, there was meant to be little ambiguity about the centrality of his role in this new, artificial creation. But how did Renan mean the word creation in these instances? And how was this creation connected with either natural creation, or the creation ascribed by Renan and others to the laboratory and to the classificatory and natural sciences, principally what was called philosophical anatomy? Here we must speculate a little. Throughout his career Renan seemed to imagine the role of science in human life as (and ¥ quote in translation as literally as I can) “telling (speaking or articulating) definitively to man the word [logos?] of things.’*? Science gives speech to things; better yet, science brings out, causes to be pronounced, a potential speech within things. The special value of linguistics (as the new philology was then often called) is not that natural science resembles it, but rather that it treats words as natural, otherwise silent objects, which are made to give up their secrets. Remember that the major breakthrough in the study of inscriptions and hieroglyphs was the discovery by Champollion that the symbols on the Rosetta Stone had a phonetic as well as a semantic component.* To make objects speak was like making words speak, giving them circumstantial value, and a precise place in a rule-governed order of regularity. In its first sense, creation, as Renan used the word, signified the articulation by which an object like Semitic could be seen as a creature of sorts. Second, creation also signified the setting —in the case of Semitic it meant Oriental history, culture, race, mind— illuminated and brought forward from its reticence by the scientist. Finally, creation was the formulation of a system of classification by which it was possible to see the object in question comparatively with other like objects; and by “comparatively” Renan intended a compiex network of paradigmatic relations that obtained between Semitic and Indo-European languages. If in what ¥ have so far said J have insisted so much on Renan’s comparatively forgotten study of Semitic languages, it has been for several important reasons, Semitic was the scientific study to which Renan turned right after the loss of his Christian faith, I described above how he came to see the study of Semitic as replacing his faith and enabling a critica) future relation with it. The study of Semitic was Renan’s first full-length Orientalist and scientific study (finished in 1847, published first in 1855), and was as much a part of bis late major works on the origins of Christianity and the his 

Orientalist Structures and Restructures 141 tory of the Jews as it was a propaedeutic for them. In intention, if not perhaps in achievement—interestingly, few of the standard or contemporary works in either linguistic history or the history of Orientalism cite Renan with anything more than cursory attention™ —his Semitic opus was proposed as a philological breakthrough, from which in later years he was always to draw retrospective authority for his positions (almost always bad ones) on religion, race, and nationalism.** Whenever Renan wished to make a statement about either the Jews or the Muslims, for example, it was always with his remarkably harsh (and unfounded, except according to the science he was practicing) strictures on the Semites in mind. Furthermore, Renan's Semitic was meant as a contribution both to the development of Indo-European linguistics and to the differentiation of Orientalisms, To the former Semitic was a degraded form, degraded in both the moral and the biological sense, whereas to the latter Semitic was a—if not the-—stable form of cultural decadence. Lastly, Semitic was Renan’s first creation, a fiction invented by him in the philological laboratory to satisfy his sense of public place and mission. It should by no means be lost on us that Semitic was for Renan’s ego the symbol of European (and consequently his) dominion over the Orient and over his own era. Therefore, as a branch of the Orient, Semitic was not fully a natural object—like a species of monkey, for instance—nor fully an unnatural or a divine object, as it had once been considered. Rather, Semitic occupied a median position, legitimated in its oddities (regularity being defined by Indo-European) by an inverse relation to normal languages, comprehended as an eccentric, quasimonstrous phenomenon partly because libraries, laboratories, and museums could serve as its place of exhibition and analysis. In his treatise, Renan adopted a tone of voice and a method of exposition that drew the maximum from book-learning and from naturai observation as practiced by men like Cuvier and the Geoffroy SaintHilaires pére et fils. This is an important stylistic achievement, for it allowed Renan consistently to avail himself of the i/érary, rather than either primitivity or divine fiat, as a conceptual framework in which to understand language, together with the museum, which is where the results of laboratory observation are delivered for exhibition, study, and teaching.“* Everywhere Renan treats of norma! human facts—language, history, culture, mind, imagination—as transformed into something else, as something peculiarly deviant, because they are Semitic and Oriental, and because they end up for