The Humanities and Intellectual Agency: Grounding Dissonance between Michel Foucault and Edward Said

In 2005, Karlis Racevkis, a Foucaultian scholar, published an article entitled "Edward Said and Michel Foucault: Affinities and Dissonances." He argues that the dissonances between the two started when Said discovered Michel Foucault's pro-Zionist politics after a meeting between the two in 1979. After that Said grew disenchanted with Foucault, and this disenchantment for Racevskis accounts for the divergence of the scholarly project of the two. This article seeks to correct this allegation. The differences between the two figures, I argue, had earlier precedents than this date. The differences originate in the beginning theoretical maxims of each. While Foucault rejects humanism, subjective will and agency, favoring instead a historiography that valorizes system over agency, history over individual will and discourse over intention and method, the latter items in the comparison were Said's theoretical prerogatives as his intellectual project stands on the firmer grounds of premeditated design on the part of meaning-producers to initiate oppositional meaning to the dominant discourse/power.