“Beginning as Zero”or How Did Said Begin to Be“Truly Contemporary”?

“Beginning as Zero”or How Did Said Begin to Be“Truly Contemporary”?

Edward W. Said’s Beginnings: Intention & Method (1975) is a monstrous text—like Frankenstein’s Creature—with heterogeneous body parts stitched together to form an“entirely new”book, composed primarily of two distinct temporalities and/or localities: Urbana, 1967-68, and Beirut, 1972-73. In Urbana, Said, isolated from worldly politics, concentrated on theoretical issues related to phenomenology, structuralism, etc.; in Beirut, while staying close to the epicenter of the Palestine liberation movement, he consolidated his past theoretical achievements so as to“procreate”Beginnings by inscribing“the second temporality”(i.e., revisions, additions, and fresh writings in Beirut) upon his earlier critical essays, mostly written in Urbana, that comprise“the first temporality.”This paper attempts to vivisect the sprawling body of Beginnings, closely analyze the implanted/excised body parts, and precisely carve out the“leap”Said made between those two temporalities, making full use of various archival materials unearthed at Columbia University Library. The leap in question is ultimately identified as Said’s turn from a perceptive follower of the“highly contemporary”French Theory to an untimely critic-thinker who is, to use Agamben’s phrase,“truly contemporary”—with Gilles Deleuze, or the Deleuzian Foucault, playing the pivotal methodological (hence, political) role.