Notes 1 Democratic Aspirations, Democratic Ambiguities 1 . Bill Ashcroft, “Representation and Liberation: From Orientalism to the Palestinian Crisis,” in Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation , ed. Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 295. 2 . Ibid. 3 . I have tried to work through the complexity of Said’s postcolonial positionality in “Camus, Said, and the Dilemma of Home: Space, Identity, and the Limits of Postcolonial Political Theory,” Strategies: Journal of Theory, Culture and Politics 15, no. 2 (2002): 239–258. 4 . Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). 5 . Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 2. 6 . The self-analysis of Israel as a democracy and the working through of the tensions between the requirements of Zionism and democracy are ongoing. See for example the work of Bernard Avishai, The Tragedy of Zionism: How Its Revolutionary Past Haunts Israeli Democracy (New York: Allworth Press, 2002) and The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace at Last (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008). More recently, Ben White considers the problem posed by Palestinians for Israeli democracy in Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy (London: Pluto Press, 2012). 7 . An excellent example of this kind of negotiation between the idea of democracy and the way it manifests itself in different practices in different locations can be found in Lisa Wedeen, “Concepts and Commitments in the Study of Democracy,” in Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics , ed. Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith, and Tarek E. Masoud (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 274– 306. In this case, Wedeen discusses the qat chews of Yemen as demo- cratic practices in public spaces. 8 . See, for example, Shmuel Rosner, “You Asked for Democracy: What Hamas’ Election Means for the Peace Process” Slate , January 26, 2006, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners 148 NOTES /2006/01/you_asked_for_democracy.html (accessed January 30, 2006); and Denis Loof, “Democratic Double Standards: The Election of Hamas and the Aftermath,” Lexington University Circuit, March 16, 2011, https://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/luc/2011/03/dem ocratic-double-standards-the-election-of-hamas-and-the-aftermath / (accessed March 31, 2011). 9 . Edward W. Said, Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward Said , ed. Gauri Viswanathan (New York: Pantheon Books, 2001), 249. 10 . See James Bohman, Democracy across Borders: From Demos to Demoi (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). 11 . Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 47. 12 . Edward W. Said, The Politics of Dispossession (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), xix. 13 . Edward Said, The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 209. 14 . Ian Shapiro illustrates the propensity for institutional design among democratic theorists when speaking of the need for deliberation among democratic citizens: “Because people cannot really be forced to deliberate, the challenge for democratic institutional designers is to structure the incentives so that people will want to deploy delib- eration to minimize domination in the course of their endeavors.” See Shapiro, The State of Democratic Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 5. While the problem of institutional design is a vexing and important one, it puts the cart before the horse in our present discussion. People must first agree to live in conditions con- ducive to democratic practices before the latter can be efficaciously engaged in. Marla Brettschneider is closer to our problem when she proposes that “as we engage with the ‘how’ question, of how to get on together in a democracy based on the experiences and insights from the margins, we find that we must reevaluate concepts that are currently seen as core facets of Western democratic thought.” See Brettschneider, Democratic Theorizing from the Margins (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007), 199–200. 15 . Edward W. Said, Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said , ed. Gauri Viswanathan (New York: Pantheon Books, 2001), 249. 16 . The Arab Spring is an interesting manifestation of this idea. See Michaele L. Ferguson, Sharing Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3–11. 17 . The difficulties of making assumptions about democratic possibilities are illustrated by the Arab Spring and afterward. See for example Sheri Berman, “The Promise of the Arab Spring: In Political Development, No Gain without Pain,” Foreign Affairs , January/February 2013, http:// www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/138479/sheri-berman/the -promise-of-the-arab-spring (accessed February 15, 2013). NOTES 149 18 . See Paul Woodruff, First Democracy: The Challenge of an Ancient Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 19 . See Peter Y. Medding, The Founding of Israeli Democracy: 1948–1967 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) and David Engel, Zionism (Harlow, UK: Pearson Education Limited, 2009). Compare with the account of, for instance, Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (New York: Norton, 2001). 20 . Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 29. 21 . See Avishai, The Hebrew Republic . 22 . See As’ad Ghanem, Palestinian Politics after Arafat: A Failed National Movement (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010). Said’s criticism of the Arafat regime is ongo- ing from the first Gulf War through Oslo and until Said’s death. See the occasional essays in and commentaries in Edward Said, Peace and Its Discontents (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), End of the Peace Process , and From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map: Essays (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004). 23 . Bonnie Honig interrogates the near centrality of “foreigners” to democratic self-understandings and development in Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 24 . Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994). 25 . Said, Politics of Dispossession , 233. 26 . Edward Said with David Barsamian. Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W. Said (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2003), 105. 27 . Said, Politics of Dispossession , 291. 28 . Said, End of the Peace Process , 33. 29 . See note 5 above. 30 . Said, End of the Peace Process , 19. 31 . Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism . 32 . Said, Power, Politics, and Culture , 401–02. 33 . Said, End of the Peace Process , 36. 34 . Said, From Oslo to Iraq , 241. 35 . Ibid. 36 . In End of the Peace Process (36–37), Said, in the run-up to 1996 Palestinian elections, argued that elections were encouraging but that “they must be part of a continuing dynamic in which the government is entirely accountable to citizens who have the right to vote and thereby directly affect the government’s performance. For this, we need a func- tional civil society, with trade and professional associations, an inde- pendent judiciary, a relatively free press, and a well-endowed education system.” See also Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism , 192. 37 . Said, End of the Peace Process , xviii. 150 NOTES 38 . Wendy Brown, “We Are All Democrats Now . ” in Giorgio Agamben, et al., Democracy in What State? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 44. 39 . Ibid., 44–45. 40 . Ibid., 49. 41 . Ibid., 57. 42 . Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 603. 43 . Ibid., 602. 44 . Ibid., 587. 45 . Ibid., 602. 46 . Ibid., 586. 47 . Sheldon Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political , ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 43. 48 . Ferguson, Sharing Democracy , 161. 49 . Ibid., 162. 50 . Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (Brooklyn, NY and London: Verso Books, 2009), 33–34. 51 . Edward Said, “Traveling Theory” in The World, The Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 226–247. 52 . Ibid., 239. 53 . Said, From Oslo to Iraq , 278. 54 . Said, The World, The Text, and The Critic , 241. 55 . Ibid., 239. 56 . Ibid., 241. 57 . Ibid. 58 . Ibid., 242. 59 . Ibid., 247; my emphasis. 60 . Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 438. 61 . Ibid.; my emphasis. 62 . Carlos Forment, “Peripheral Peoples and Narrative Identities: Arendtian Reflections on Late Modernity,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political , ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996): 314–330. 63 . See a neo-Kantian argument for human rights in Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 64 . For example, see Said, End of the Peace Process , 36–37; 227. 65 . See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt- Brace, 1973), especially “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man,” 267–302. 66 . Said, Question of Palestine , 29. NOTES 151 67 . Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter History (London: Verso Books, 2011). 68 . Said, Question of Palestine, 29. 69 . The rhetoric of the “peace process” is still colored by this kind of lan- guage and the accompanying assumptions. For instance, during the 2012 American presidential campaign,