146 ORIENTALISM firmation of the dominating culture and its “naturalization.” Indeed, itis not too much to say that Renan’s philological laboratory is the actual locale of his European ethnocentrism; but what needs emphasis here is that the philological laboratory has no existence outside the discourse, the writing by which it is constantly produced and experienced. Thus even the culture he calls organic and alive Europe’s—-is also a creature being created in the laboratory and by philology. Renan’s entire later career was European and cultural. Its accomplishments were varied and celebrated. Whatever authority his style possessed can, I think, be traced back to his technique for constructing the inorganic (or the missing) and for giving it the appearance of life. He was most famous, of course, for his Vie de Jésus, the work that inaugurated his monumental histories of Christianity and the Jewish people. Yet we must realize that the Vie was exactly the same type of feat that the Histoire générale was, a construction enabled by the historian’s capacity for skillfully crafting a dead (dead for Renan in the double sense of a dead faith and a lost, hence dead, historical period) Oriental biography and the paradox is immediately apparent—as if if were the truthful narcative of a natural life. Whatever Renan said had first passed through the philological jaboratory, when it appeared in print woven through the text, there was in it the life-giving force of a contemporary cultural signature, which drew from modernity all its scientific power and all its uncritical self-approbation. For that sort of culture such genealogies as dynasty, tradition, religion, ethnic communities were all simply functions of a theory whose job was to instruct the world. In borrowing this latter phrase from Cuvier, Renan was circumspectly placing scientific demonstration over experience; temporality was relegated to the scientifically useless cealm of ordinary experience, while to the special periodicity of culture and cultural comparativism (which spawned ethnocentrism, racial theory, and economic oppression) were given powers far in advance of moral vision. Renan’s style, his career as Orientalist and man of letters, the circumstances of the meaning he communicates, his peculiarly intimate relationship with the European scholarly and general culture of his time—liberal, exciusivist, imperious, antihuman except in a very conditional sense—all these are what I would call celibate and scientific. Generation for him is consigned to the realm of

Orientalist Structures and Restructures 147 l'avenir, which in his famous manifesto he associated with science. Although as a historian of culture he belongs to the school of men like Turgot, Condorcet, Guizot, Cousin, Jouffroy, and Ballanche, and in scholarship to the school of Sacy, Caussin de Perceval, Ozanam, Fauriel, and Burnouf, Renan’s is a peculiarly ravaged, ragingly masculine world of history and learning; it is indeed the world, not of fathers, mothers, and children, but of men like his Jesus, his Marcus Aurelius, his Caliban, his solar god (the last as described in “Réves” of the Dialogues philosophiques).*’ He cherished the power of science and Orientalist philology particularly; he sought its insights and its techniques; he used it to intervene, often with considerable effectiveness, in the life of his epoch. And yet his ideal role was that of spectator. According to Renan, a philologist ought to prefer bonheur to jouissance: the preference expresses a choice of elevated, if sterile, happiness over sexual pleasure. Words belong to the realm of bonheur, as does the study of words, ideally speaking. To my knowledge, there are very few moments in all of Renan’s public writing where a beneficent and instrumental role is assigned to women. One occurs when Renan opines that foreign women (nurses, maids) must have instructed the conquering Normans’ children, and hence we can account for the changes that take place in language. Note how productivity and dissemination are not the functions aided, but rather interna} change, and a subsidiary one at that. “Man,” he says at the end of the same essay, “belongs neither to his language nor to his race; he belongs to himself before all, since before all he is a free being and a moral one.”** Man was free and moral, but enchained by race, history, and science as Renan saw them, conditions imposed by the scholar on man. The study of Oriental languages took Renan to the heart of these conditions, and philology made it concretely apparent that knowledge of man was—to paraphrase Emst Cassirer—poetically transfigucing® only if it had been previously severed from raw actuality (as Sacy had necessarily severed his Arabic fragments from their actuality) and then put into a doxological straitjacket. By becoming philology, the study of words as once practiced by Vico, Herder, Rousseau, Michelet, and Quinet lost its plot and its dramatic ptesentational quality, as Schelling once called it. Instead, philology became epistemologically complex; Sprachgefiihi was no longer enough since words themselves pertained less to the senses or the