Approaching Edward Said's Humanism

Abstract

The presence of the idea of humanism in Edward Said’s work is one of the most important problem of his thinking. In fact, the presence of both the reference to “humanist” legacy and a style of thinking rooted in French Post-structuralism  appears as an unsolvable conundrum.

In order to fully understand Saidian humanism it is important, first, to situate it in the postcolonial background. In particular, it must be grasped the relation between humanism and anti-colonial struggles. From a theoretical point of view, the best way to study the meaning of humanism is to start from Humanism and Democratic Criticism, that allows to analyse retrospectively the whole of Said’s works, showing the hidden coherence of his thought.

 Said’s theoretical elaboration, always very concise and sometimes unsatisfactory, is grounded mainly on two assumptionas inspired by the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico.  First, the idea that human beings make their own history, and since they make it they can know it. Second, is that the “human nature” is constitutively undetermined. These assumptions permit to understand Saidian humanism, from a philosophical point of view, as a “humanism without man”, i.e a humanism that renounce to elaborate any onological-anthropological idea of “Man”. This idea cannot be “fixed” making it more inclusive, but the idea of “humanity” may be the basis of a non-binary and non-discriminative postcolonial thinking, if we accept the idea that humanity cannot be defined by any type of apriori rationality.