Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation

Due to the fact that there is constant interaction with the Other(s), discourses of modernity cannot afford not to resolve the critical issues raised by otherness and differences. Paradoxically however, these discourses, derived from a strong Western rationalist and universalistic posture, reduce the “ethical space” for the Other to represent itself independently of Western universalism, in its own cultural specificity and its own history. In fact, the history of what can be called “the modernity debate” reveals that though the need to know the Other is, and has always been, strongly emphasized, the dominant mode in which such knowledge is realized has been the accumulation of diverse “empirical” knowledge of other peoples, other nations, other regions and other cultures, with a taken-for-granted assumption that more knowledge automatically ensures and produces a better understanding of the Other. The reason for this is that what was at stake was, and still is, not only considering the Other in order to discover cultural similarities and differences (so that other cultures become included within the dominant scientific discourse, i.e., the reproduction of Western universalism) but also maintaining the privileged role of the Western self as a rational, Cartesian modern cogito in order to define the course of historical development as progress.