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Whilst Stoler makes Foucault groan in an ethnographic context, Said enlists him for the kind of literary purposes that have more recognisable links to this book. In two essays (‘Michel Foucault, 1927–1984’ and ‘Foucault and the Imagination of Power’), Said adopts a similar approach to Stoler’s, both heralding the possibilities and probing the limitations of Foucault’s work. Joining axiomatic figures such as Adorno, Gramsci, Vico and Williams, Foucault becomes a discursive touchstone for Said. The essays focus on the enigmatic qualities that speak to the recuperative spirit of Reassessing Foucault, amongst many other collections. ‘Even after [Foucault’s] biological death ... those who work within his shadow prefer to use his writings as a springboard ... rather than fall back on pious repetition and incantation’ (Jones & Porter 1994: 12–13). Like Jones and Porter, Said’s objectives are dialectical; taking account of Foucault’s ‘tunnel vision of the West’, he also extols the philosopher’s ‘transnational vocation’ (Said 2001: 197). This suggests how Foucault’s work, beyond its focus on microsites and microphysics of power, functions as an extensive meditation on the nature as well as the necessity of self-reflexive methodologies. As noted, Foucault used the fissures in his work to extend invitations to future writers and thinkers: ‘they were like an outline for something. It’s up to you to go on with them or give them a different configuration’ (Foucault 2003: 4).

Once again, it is perhaps the more personal and personable tone of Said’s reflections that suggests Foucault’s haunting influence, within and beyond the academy. As above, he shows how the opening of Discipline and Punish captures the visceral force of Foucault’s destabilising analyses:

There is no such thing as being at home in his writing, neither for reader nor for writer. Dislocations, a dizzying and physically powerful prose (for example, the description of torture that opens Discipline and Punish ...), the uncanny ability to invent whole fields of investigation: these come from Foucault’s everlasting effort to formulate otherness and heterodoxy without domesticating them or turning them into doctrine. (Said 2001: 191–192)

As with Foucault’s own description of getting to grips with Nietzsche, Said employs deliberately robust rhetoric. Once the labyrinth has been entered, if not fully fathomed, it becomes clear that, in a suitably literary sense, Foucault is at his striking best when grounding his critiques and investigations at the level of contested corporeality. This is one uncanny link I pursue throughout this book, arguing that, from his earliest novel to his most recent, the poetics and politics of Farah’s oeuvre are anchored by fleshy materiality.

Like Stoler, Said suggests that Foucault’s blind spots are both highly revealing and in more urgent need of interrogation than ever before. He too mounts a critique against both a discursive provider and public who fail to differentiate rigorously between theories and practices of power. This has prompted Neil Lazarus, amongst others, to bemoan Foucault’s ‘talismanic’ status (Lazarus 1999: 11). It is when such speculations are situated in a specifically postcolonial context, where the use and abuse of this power assumes greater immediacy, that Said’s oppositional stance comes to the fore:

[Foucault] showed no real interest in the relationships his work had with feminist or postcolonial writers facing problems of exclusion, confinement, and domination. Indeed, his Eurocentrism was almost total, as if ‘history’ itself took place only among a group of French and German thinkers ... But whether Foucault is read and benefited from as a philosopher or as a superb intelligence riskily deploying language and learning to various, often contradictory ends, his work will retain its unsettling, antiutopian influence for generations to come. (Said 2001: 196)

It appears no coincidence that the same phrase recurs in two distinct contexts to capture Foucault’s anxiety of influence. For both Said and Stoler, the key term remains ‘unsettling’. It is for the identification and illumination of such antiutopian impulses that Foucault retains a peculiar place on the inventory of this study. This Gramscian notion remains critical.

The title of the series to which Reflections on Exile belongs is significant. ‘Convergences – Inventories of the Present’ should elicit nods of recognition from those even casually acquainted with Orientalism. As Said’s critical project developed, the term would only assume greater burdens of significance. In the introduction’s third section, ‘The personal dimension’, Said shows how something of crucial importance was previously lost in translation:

In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci says: ‘The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is “knowing thyself” as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.’ The only available English translation inexplicably leaves Gramsci’s comment at that, whereas in fact Gramsci’s Italian text concludes by adding, ‘therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory.’ (Said 2003: 25)

If Foucault would later become preoccupied with the project of ‘knowing thyself’ of greatest interest here is how Said begins to construct an inventory of sorts to flesh out his critique of the French philosopher (Foucault 2005: 12–19). He takes him on, in the most explicitly postcolonial sense, in ‘Foucault and The Imagination of Power’, adopting the same contrapuntal approach as Stoler:

Many of the people who admire and have learned from Foucault, including myself, have commented on the undifferentiated power he seemed to ascribe to modern society. With this profoundly pessimistic view went also a singular lack of interest in the force of effective resistance to it, in choosing particular sites of intensity, choices which, we see from evidence on all sides, always exist and are often successful in impeding, if not actually stopping, the progress of tyrannical power. (Said 2001: 241)

Charges against Foucault’s all-engrossing pessimism are familiar. This intervention, however, prefigures the essay’s rhetorical crescendo. Like Stoler, Said pays the greatest of tributes by identifying and making the case for the ‘but’ that is pivotal, because stubbornly resistant. He continues, ‘... there is no doubt at all that Foucault is nevertheless extraordinarily brilliant as a visionary of power who calls forth in his reader a whole gamut of responses testifying not so much to the rightness of Foucault’s reports but to alternative visions of power not entirely suppressed or obliterated by his work, but stimulated and enlivened by it’ (Said 2001: 242–243).

Critically, the stimulating supplement derives not only from the oppositional, if still Eurocentric, discourse of Williams and Gramsci, but also from a more worldly literary grouping. After juxtaposing Foucault with a notable entrant on his own inventory (Ibn Khaldun), Said somewhat inevitably turns to Frantz Fanon. He is a fitting adversary: charged with dragging Foucault groaning and protesting into an anti-colonial/postcolonial context where power and the myriad strategies set in opposition to it take on more embodied immediacy. As the essay moves towards its denouement, Said unfurls an eclectic lineup to reinforce his critique:

Fanon himself, Sayed Atlas, Abdallah Laroui, Panikkar, Shariati, Mazrui, novelists like Ngugi and Rushdie – all these as well as the enormously powerful adversarial work of feminists and minority cultures in the West and the Third World amply record the continuing attraction to libertarian struggle, for which I have gathered Foucault and others in his camp felt either resignation or spectatorial indifference after the Iranian Revolution. (Said 2001: 244)³

The inventory is impressive. Yet, with its necessarily fleeting survey of figures all but canonised in postcolonial studies, it provides an invitation as compelling as Foucault’s own. Like Stoler’s cursory reference to contemporaneous biopolitics in Eastern Europe and, via Davidson’s intervention, a Balkanised Africa, Said leaves the discursive door ajar. In what follows, I explore how Nuruddin Farah, with intense personal and political investments in Foucauldian matters such as biopower, body politics and the nation, might be added to Said’s list.

Both Foucault’s and Said’s work serve as provocative catalysts for others. It is the candour with which the former admits this that has enabled it to be revised, reconfigured and in places ‘unlearnt’ with such provocative results. As discussed in The Hermeneutics of the Subject, for instance, for Foucault, ‘[to] ‘unlearn’ (dediscere) is an important task of the culture of the self’ (Foucault 2005: 495). In a postcolonial context, of course, the idea of ‘unlearning’ is central to the work of Gayatri Spivak, amongst many others (Spivak 1999: 118–125). Said is typically lucid when assessing these qualities:

The great invigoration of [Foucault’s] work, in its extremism and its constant savaging of limits and reifications, is its disquieting recollection of what, sometimes explicitly but often implicitly, it leaves out, neglects, circumvents, or displaces ... But nowhere is this engagement more gripping than in the conflict between Foucault’s archaeologies and social change itself, which it must remain for his students ... to expose and if possible resolve. (Said 2001: 245)

Terms such as ‘disquieting’ and ‘displaces’ recur throughout a critical survey of those who have reflected on their various Foucauldian encounters. It is the notion of a ‘constant savaging of limits’, however, that I find particularly valuable.

It is at this juncture that Foucault’s comments on heterogeneous power begin to chime with his notion of expedient and self-reflexive thought. In the second Collège lecture, he considers problems relating to totalising conceptions of power. Whilst I discuss the significance of such analytics in relation to Farah’s critical project, a semantic transplant might be useful here. By substituting ‘power’ for ‘Foucault’s discourse’, the warning he delivers becomes even more salutary:

Do not regard power as a phenomenon of mass and homogenous domination ... keep it clearly in mind that unless we are looking at it from a great height and from a very great distance, power is not something divided between those who have it and hold it exclusively, and those who do not have it and are subject to it. Power must, I think, be analyzed as something that circulates, or rather as something that only functions as part of a chain ... Power functions. Power is exercised through networks, and individuals do not simply circulate in those networks; they are in a position to both submit to and exercise this power. They are never inert or consenting targets of power; they are always its relays. In other words, power passes through individuals. It is not applied to them. (Foucault 2003: 29)

This simple act of substitution illuminates the key knowledge/power dialectic at the core of Foucault’s thinking. It is one in which the chain is not rhetorically employed to link master and slave and/or tutor and student in unbreakable bonds of domination. Indeed, for many, replacing ‘power’ with ‘Foucault’s discourse’ may make what is being said here a little more palatable. As Stoler, Said and Sawicki rigorously maintain from their own strategic positions, there is an urgent need to distinguish between theories and threats to exercise repressive power and their ever more practical applications. Once again, therefore, Foucault’s own words have an eerie prescience:

I think that you are completely free to do what you like with what I am saying. These are suggestions for research, ideas, schemata, outlines, instruments ... Ultimately, what you do with them both concerns me and is none of my business ... it does concern me to the extent that, one way or another, what you do with it is connected, related to what I am doing. (Foucault 2003: 2)