Prof. Haidar Eid: “like Hamlet in his pretended madness who claimed to be reading “words, words, words” — with the implcation that words failed to signify anything.”
The present book by Professor Haidar Eid, “Worlding” (Post) modernism: Interpretive Possibiities of Critical Theory, is an impressive contribution among many efforts to salvage from the shipwreck of literary theory elements that are usable and sane. The book’s dedication to Edward Said is an important sign of its underlying spirit and leitmotif. Long before the crisis of which Menand speaks, Said stated , in (1975):
“For most of my generation, mind, culture, history, tradition, and the humanities both as words and as ideas, carry an authentic ring of truth, even if for one or another reason they do not lie easily within our grasp. I have no desire to have done with them, if only because as words and ideas they still seem partially to anchor the world we inhabit, if only because they also are still objects of our regard – and also because . . . they are machines to think with.” (Beginnings, Intention and Method 1975:19) (italics in original)
(...)As Eid states in the Introduction, the reconstructed theory he envisions “ultimately aims to achieve . . . a dialectical critical theory that combines (post) modern and ‘traditional’ micro and macro analysis.” The formulation he calls for is “informed by theories of rationality, reason and knowledge without falling into essentialism and apriori epistemology.” What has happened under the influence of primarily French theorists, the system which suffered the “crisis” that Louis Menand located twenty-five years ago, was, Eid maintains, “the penetration of global capital in almost all fields of life as well as the disintegration of the liberal public sphere”.
If we need a recent example of the penetration of global capital, we have only to look at Arundhati Roy‘s The Cost of Living documenting the devastation to the environment and the displacement of millions of lower-caste Indians by the government’s pursuit of massive dam projects, the profits from which accrue to political elites and multi-national corporations. An even more contemporary example comes with the global outrage at Israeli massacres in Gaza in which UN shelters, family homes, hospitals, power-generators, mosques, ambulances, playgrounds and schools are targeted with lethal force while Israel, backed by US weapons, prestige, and money, acts with complete impunity. US power blocks any functioning of the wider “liberal public sphere” to secure justice for the indigenous Palestinians, increasingly at the mercy of a highly militarized colonial settler state armed by the global superpower. In the face of widespread moral outrage at the magnitude and sheer malice of the onslaught, representatives of the hegemonic power(s) repeat justifications amounting to the centrality to the globsl capital system of what should be a pariah state. To establish this connection between theory and social justice, Eid quotes Edward Said’s comments on the political and economic ramifications of poststructuralism:
It is significant that the emergence of so narrowly defined a philosophy of pure textuality and critical non-interference has coincided with the ascendancy of Reaganism, or for that matter with a new cold war, increased militarism and defence spending, and a massive turn to the right on matters touching the economy, social services, and organized labor. (Said, 1983: 4).
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