Foucault And Edward Said Essay

Michel Foucault is considered one of the leading theorists in the subject of "discourse", he believes that "in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its ponderous, formidable materiality." (Foucault, 52) Accordingly, Edward Said has used Foucault's concept of discourse to analyze Orientalism; in "The Orientalism" he stated that: "I have found it useful here to employ is a Foucault’s notion of a discourse, as described by him in The Archaeology of Knowledge and in Discipline and Punish, to identify Orientalism."(Said, 3) As such, this paper will mainly discuss how Said used Foucault concept of discourse to analyze orientalism. It is true that Said and Foucault share multiple principals such as viewing knowledge as an agency of power; however, Said differ on serious level from Foucault in his perspective of individual; he believes " in determining imprint of individual writers upon the otherwise anonymous collective …show more content…
There are several similarities and differences between Said and Foucault's believes. They are similar in considering knowledge as an agency of power, and in interpreting the political imperialism; they both believe that social sciences and literature could parallelly work with politics. However, they differ in their perspective towards the individual; Foucault belittle the individual and believe it should be limited, yet Said believes in the "determined imprint" of the individual. It is important to mention that through understanding the power/knowledge relationship and Said’s discourse, we realize that the relationship between the colony and the colonized is much more complicated than merely a one directional