Scattered throughout the Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques are reflections on the links between linguistics and anatomy, and—for Renan this is equally important—remarks on how these links could be employed to do human history (les sciences historiques). But first we should consider the implicit links. I do not think it wrong or an exaggeration to say that a typical page of Renan’s Orientalist Histoire générale was constructed typographically and structurally with a page of comparative philosophical anatomy, in the style of Cuvier or Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, kept in mind. Both linguists and anatomists purport to be speaking about matters not directly obtainable or observable in nature; a skeleton and a detailed line drawing of a muscle, as much as paradigms constituted by the linguists out of a purely hypothetical proto-Semitic or proto-Indo-European, are similarly products of the laboratory and of the library. The text of a linguistic or an anatomical work bears the same general relation to nature (or actuality) that a museum case exhibiting a specimen mammal or organ does. What is given on the page and in the museum case is a truncated exaggeration, like many of Sacy’s Oriental extracts, whose purpose is to exhibit a relationship between the science (or scientist) and the object, not one between the object and nature. Read almost any page by Renan on Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, or proto-Semitic and you read a fact of power, by which the Orientalist philologist’s authority summons out of the library at will examples of man’s speech, and ranges them there surrounded by a suave European prose that points out defects, virtues, barbarisms, and shortcomings in the language, the people, and the civilization. The tone and the tense of the exhibition are cast almost uniformly in the contemporary present, so that one is given an impression of a pedagogical demonstration during which the scholar-scientist stands before us on a lecture-laboratory platform, creating, confining, and judging the material he discusses.
This anxiety on Renan’s part to convey the sense of a demonstration actually taking place is heightened when he remarks explicitly that whereas anatomy employs stable and visible signs by which to consign objects to classes, linguistics does not.49 Therefore the philologist must make a given linguistic fact correspond in some way to a historical period: hence the possibility of a classification. Yet, as Renan was often to say, linguistic temporality and history are full of lacunae, enormous discontinuities, hypothetical periods. Therefore linguistic events occur in a nonlinear and essentially discontinuous temporal dimension controlled by the linguist in a, very particular way. That way, as Renan’s whole treatise on the Semitic branch of the Oriental languages goes very far to show, is comparative: Indo-European is taken as the living, organic norm, and Semitic Oriental languages are seen comparatively to be inorganic.50 Time is transformed into the space of comparative classification, which at bottom is based on a rigid binary opposition between organic and inorganic languages. So on the one hand there is the organic, biologically generative process represented by Indo-European, while on the other there is an inorganic, essentially unregenerative process, ossified into Semitic: most important, Renan makes it absolutely clear that such an imperious judgment is made by the Oriental philologist in his laboratory, for distinctions of the kind he has been concerned with are neither possible nor available for anyone except the trained professional. “Nous refusons donc aux langues sémitiques la faculté de se régénérer, toute en reconnaissant qu’elles n’échappent pas plus que les autres oeuvres de la conscience humaine à la nécessité du changement et des modifications successives” (Therefore we refuse to allow that the Semitic languages have the capacity to regenerate themselves, even while recognizing that they do not escape—any more than other products of human consciousness—the necessity of change or of successive modifications).51
Yet behind even this radical opposition, there is another one working in Renan’s mind, and for several pages in the first chapter of book 5 he exposes his position quite candidly to the reader. This occurs when he introduces Saint-Hilaire’s views on the “degradation, of types.”52 Although Renan does not specify which Saint-Hilaire he refers to, the reference is clear enough. For both Étienne and his son Isidore were biological speculators of extraordinary fame and influence, particularly among literary intellectuals during the first half of the nineteenth century in France. Étienne, we recall, had been a member of the Napoleonic expedition, and Balzac dedicated an important section of the preface for La Comédie humaine to him; there is also much evidence that Flaubert read both the father and the son and used their views in his work.53 Not only were Étienne and Isidore legatees of the tradition of “Romantic” biology, which included Goethe and Cuvier, with a strong interest in analogy, homology, and organic ur-form among species, but they were also specialists in the philosophy and anatomy of monstrosity—teratology, as Isidore called it—in which the most horrendous physiological aberrations were considered a result of internal degradation within the species-life.54 I cannot here go into the intricacies (as well as the macabre fascination) of teratology, though it is enough to mention that both Étienne and Isidore exploited the theoretical power of the linguistic paradigm to explain the deviations possible within a biological system. Thus Étienne’s notion was that a monster is an anomaly, in the same sense that in language words exist in analogical as well as anomalous relations with each other: in linguistics the idea is at least as old as Varro’s De Lingua Latina. No anomaly can be considered simply as a gratuitous exception; rather anomalies confirm the regular structure binding together all members of the same class. Such a view is quite daring in anatomy. At one moment in the “Préliminaire” to his Philosophie anatomique Étienne says:
And, indeed, such is the character of our epoch that it becomes impossible today to enclose oneself strictly within the framework of a simple monograph. Study an object in isolation and you will only be able to bring it back to itself; consequently you can never have perfect knowledge of it. But see it in the midst of beings who are connected with each other in many different ways, and which are isolated from each other in different ways, and you will discover for this object a wider scope of relationships. First of all, you will know it better, even in its specificity: but more important, by considering it in the very center of its own sphere of activity, you will know precisely how it behaves in its own exterior world, and you will also know how its own features are constituted in reaction to its surrounding milieu.55
Not only is Saint-Hilaire saying that it is the specific character of contemporary study (he was writing in 1822) to examine phenomena comparatively; he is also saying that for the scientist there is no such thing as a phenomenon, no matter how aberrant and exceptional, that cannot be explained with reference to other phenomena. Note also how Saint-Hilaire employs the metaphor of centrality (le centre de sa sphère d’activité) used later by Renan in L’Avenir de la science to describe the position occupied by any object in nature—including even the philologist—once the object is scientifically placed there by the examining scientist. Thereafter between the object and the scientist a bond of sympathy is established. Of course, this can only take place during the laboratory experience, and not elsewhere. The point being made is that a scientist has at his disposal a sort of leverage by which even the totally unusual occurrence can be seen naturally and known scientifically, which in this case means without recourse to the supernatural, and with recourse only to an enveloping environment constituted by the scientist. As a result nature itself can be reperceived as continuous, harmoniously coherent, and fundamentally intelligible.
Thus for Renan Semitic is a phenomenon of arrested development in comparison with the mature languages and cultures of the Indo-European group, and even with the other Semitic Oriental languages.56 The paradox that Renan sustains, however, is that even as he encourages us to see languages as in some way corresponding to “êtres vivants de la nature,” he is everywhere else proving that his Oriental languages, the Semitic languages, are inorganic, arrested, totally ossified, incapable of self-regeneration; in other
words, he proves that Semitic is not a live language, and for that matter, neither are Semites live creatures. Moreover, Indo-European language and culture are alive and organic because of the laboratory, not despite it. But far from being a marginal issue in Renan’s work, this paradox stands, I believe, at the very center of his entire work, his style, and his archival existence in the culture of his time, a culture to which—as people so unlike each other as Matthew Arnold, Oscar Wilde, James Frazer, and Marcel Proust concurred—he was a very important contributor. To be able to sustain a vision that incorporates and holds together life and quasi-living creatures (Indo-European, European culture) as well as quasimonstrous, parallel inorganic phenomena (Semitic, Oriental culture) is precisely the achievement of the European scientist in his laboratory. He constructs, and the very act of construction is a sign of imperial power over recalcitrant phenomena, as well as a confirmation of the dominating culture and its “naturalization.” Indeed, it is not too much to say that Renan’s philological laboratory is the actual locale of his European ethnocentrism; but what needs emphasis here is that the philological laboratory has no existence outside the discourse, the writing by which it is constantly produced and experienced. Thus even the culture he calls organic and alive—Europe’s—is also a creature being created in the laboratory and by philology.
Renan’s entire later career was European and cultural. Its accomplishments were varied and celebrated. Whatever authority his style possessed can, I think, be traced back to his technique for constructing the inorganic (or the missing) and for giving it the appearance of life. He was most famous, of course, for his Vie de Jésus, the work that inaugurated his monumental histories of Christianity and the Jewish people. Yet we must realize that the Vie was exactly the same type of feat that the Histoire générale was, a construction enabled by the historian’s capacity for skillfully crafting a dead (dead for Renan in the double sense of a dead faith and a lost, hence dead, historical period) Oriental biography—and the paradox is immediately apparent—as if it were the truthful narrative of a natural life. Whatever Renan said had first passed through the philological laboratory; when it appeared in print woven through the text, there was in it the life-giving force of a contemporary cultural signature, which drew from modernity all its scientific power and all its uncritical self-approbation. For that sort of culture such genealogies as dynasty, tradition, religion, ethnic communities were all simply functions of a theory whose job was to instruct the world. In borrowing this latter phrase from Cuvier, Renan was circumspectly placing scientific demonstration over experience; temporality was relegated to the scientifically useless realm of ordinary experience, while to the special periodicity of culture and cultural comparativism (which spawned ethnocentrism, racial theory, and economic oppression) were given powers far in advance of moral vision.
Renan’s style, his career as Orientalist and man of letters, the circumstances of the meaning he communicates, his peculiarly intimate relationship with the European scholarly and general culture of his time—liberal, exclusivist, imperious, antihuman except in a very conditional sense—all these are what I would call celibate and scientific. Generation for him is consigned to the realm of l’avenir, which in his famous manifesto he associated with science. Although as a historian of culture he belongs to the school of men like Turgot, Condorcet, Guizot, Cousin, Jouffroy, and Ballanche, and in scholarship to the school of Sacy, Caussin de Perceval, Ozanam, Fauriel, and Burnouf, Renan’s is a peculiarly ravaged, ragingly masculine world of history and learning; it is indeed the world, not of fathers, mothers, and children, but of men like his Jesus, his Marcus Aurelius, his Caliban, his solar god (the last as described in “Rêves” of the Dialogues philosophiques).57 He cherished the power of science and Orientalist philology particularly; he sought its insights and its techniques; he used it to intervene, often with considerable effectiveness, in the life of his epoch. And yet his ideal role was that of spectator.
According to Renan, a philologist ought to prefer bonheur to jouissance: the preference expresses a choice of elevated, if sterile, happiness over sexual pleasure. Words belong to the realm of bonheur, as does the study of words, ideally speaking. To my knowledge, there are very few moments in all of Renan’s public writing where a beneficent and instrumental role is assigned to women. One occurs when Renan opines that foreign women (nurses, maids) must have instructed the conquering Normans’ children, and hence we can account for the changes that take place in language. Note how productivity and dissemination are not the functions aided, but rather internal change, and a subsidiary one at that. “Man,” he says at the end of the same essay, “belongs neither to his language nor to his race; he belongs to himself before all, since before all he is a free being and a moral one.”58 Man was free and moral, but enchained by race, history, and science as Renan saw them, conditions imposed by the scholar on man.
The study of Oriental languages took Renan to the heart of these conditions, and philology made it concretely apparent that knowledge of man was—to paraphrase Ernst Cassirer—poetically transfiguring59 only if it had been previously severed from raw actuality (as Sacy had necessarily severed his Arabic fragments from their actuality) and then put into a doxological straitjacket. By becoming philology, the study of words as once practiced by Vico, Herder, Rousseau, Michelet, and Quinet lost its plot and its dramatic presentational quality, as Schelling once called it. Instead, philology became epistemologically complex; Sprachgefühl was no longer enough since words themselves pertained less to the senses or the body (as they had for Vico) and more to a sightless, imageless, and abstract realm ruled over by such hothouse formulations as race, mind, culture, and nation. In that realm, which was discursively constructed and called the Orient, certain kinds of assertions could be made, all of them possessing the same powerful generality and cultural validity. For all of Renan’s effort was to deny Oriental culture the right to be generated, except artificially in the philological laboratory. A man was not a child of the culture; that dynastic conception had been too effectively challenged by philology. Philology taught one how culture is a construct, an articulation (in the sense that Dickens used the word for Mr. Venus’s profession in Our Mutual Friend), even a creation, but not anything more than a quasi-organic structure.
What is specially interesting in Renan is how much he knew himself to be a creature of his time and of his ethnocentric culture. On the occasion of an academic response to a speech made by Ferdinand de Lesseps in 1885, Renan averred as how “it was so sad to be a wiser man than one’s nation.… One cannot feel bitterness towards one’s homeland. Better to be mistaken along with the nation than to be too right with those who tell it hard truths.”60 The economy of such a statement is almost too perfect to be true. For does not the old Renan say that the best relationship is one of parity with one’s own culture, its morality, and its ethos during one’s time, that and not a dynastic relation by which one is either the child of his times or their parent? And here we return to the laboratory, for it is there—as Renan thought of it—that filial and ultimately social responsibilities cease and scientific and Orientalist ones take over. His laboratory was the platform from which as an Orientalist he addressed the world; it mediated the statements he made, gave them confidence and general precision, as well as continuity. Thus the philological laboratory as Renan understood it redefined not only his epoch and his culture, dating and shaping them in new ways; it gave his Oriental subject matter a scholarly coherence, and more, it made him (and later Orientalists in his tradition) into the Occidental cultural figure he then became. We may well wonder whether this new autonomy within the culture was the freedom Renan hoped his philological Orientalist science would bring or whether, so far as a critical historian of Orientalism is concerned, it set up a complex affiliation between Orientalism and its putative human subject matter that is based finally on power and not really on disinterested objectivity.
III
Oriental Residence and Scholarship: T
he Requirements of Lexicography and Imagination
Renan’s views of the Oriental Semites belong, of course, less to the realm of popular prejudice and common anti-Semitism than they do to the realm of scientific Oriental philology. When we read Renan and Sacy, we readily observe the way cultural generalization had begun to acquire the armor of scientific statement and the ambience of corrective study. Like many academic specialties in their early phases, modern Orientalism held its subject matter, which it defined, in a viselike grip which it did almost everything in its power to sustain. Thus a knowing vocabulary developed, and its functions, as much as its style, located the Orient in a comparative framework, of the sort employed and manipulated by Renan. Such comparatism is rarely descriptive; most often, it is both evaluative and expository. Here is Renan comparing typically:
One sees that in all things the Semitic race appears to us to be an incomplete race, by virtue of its simplicity. This race—if I dare use the analogy—is to the Indo-European family what a pencil sketch is to painting; it lacks that variety, that amplitude, that abundance of life which is the condition of perfectibility. Like those individuals who possess so little fecundity that, after a gracious childhood, they attain only the most mediocre virility, the Semitic nations experienced their fullest flowering in their first age and have never been able to achieve true maturity.61
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