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Silvestre de Sacy was a French nobleman, diplomat, and Orientalist who studied Semitic languages before deciding to stake his career on Orientalism, which was a growing field in the late 18th century. Sacy’s contributions to the field of Orientalism include three textbooks on Arabic, in which he collected educational and instructive excerpts for students to study. Because of his position and because his excerpts were heavily drawn on by subsequent generations of scholars, Said names Sacy one of the founding fathers of modern (that is, 18th and 19th century) Orientalism. As such, he doesn’t just help to define the limits of the field of study but to establish the tone of Orientalist discourse. In this vein, Sacy favors the excerpt and the tableau—forms of representation that freeze and isolate elements of the Orient which are presented as typical—and he emphasizes the necessary role of the trained expert—the Orientalist—in mediating between the primary sources and the modern public.
Silvestre de Sacy Quotes in Orientalism
The Orientalism quotes below are all either spoken by Silvestre de Sacy or refer to Silvestre de Sacy. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 2, Part 2 Quotes
The importance of Tableau historique for an understanding of Orientalism’s inaugural phase is that it exteriorizes the form of Orientalist knowledge and its features, as it also describes the Orientalist’s relationship to his subject matter. In Sacy’s pages on Orientalism—as elsewhere in his writing—he speaks of his own work as having uncovered, brought to light, rescued a vast among of obscure matter. Why? In order to place it before the student. For like all his learned contemporaries, Sacy considered a learned work a positive addition to an edifice that all scholars erected together. Knowledge as essentially the making visible of material, and the aim of a tableau was the construction of a sort of Benthamite Panopticon. Scholarly discipline was therefore a specific technology of power: it gained for its user (and his students) tools of knowledge which (if he was a historian) had hitherto been lost.
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Edward Said (speaker), Silvestre de Sacy, Orientalists
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127
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In his discussion of what he calls modern (18th- and 19th-century) Orientalism, Said starts with Silvestre de Sacy, who contributed an essay on Orientalism for a French book outlining the state of human knowledge (at least in France) at the turn of the 19th century. In this passage, Said looks at the way Sacy describes his—and all Orientalists’—work in that book. Essentially, Said sees Sacy constructing a view of the world in which everything—even living things like languages and cultures—can be boiled down to an unchanging essence which can then be described by a sufficiently knowledgeable expert. This is the kind of thinking that underwrites Orientalism’s tendency to create an Orient that is stuck in an imagined past.
This kind of rhetoric also serves to burnish the image of Orientalism as a disinterested science. When Sacy imagines himself as the humble servant of civilization who brings information to light, he speaks and acts with no acknowledgement of his own work as a scholar. Yet Said rejects the idea that knowledge can be produced in a vacuum, instead arguing that a researcher’s biases, received ideas, and cultural alignments will always influence their work. The Panopticon is an idea for a prison designed by 18th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham in which a single guard in a high tower would be able to observe each cell without the inmates seeing. Because they would never know when they were being watched or not, the theory went, the inmates would always behave. Yet, experience shows that people will misbehave even when they’re being watched. So, Said uses this metaphor to mock the naïve idea of Sacy and others that seeing everything—understanding and categorizing everything—is possible at all.
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 of 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.
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Chapter 3, Part 3 Quotes
Because we have become accustomed to think of a contemporary expert on some branch of the Orient […] as a specialist in “area studies,” we have lost a vivid sense of how, until around World War II, the Orientalist was considered to be a generalist […] who had highly developed skills for making summational statements. By summational statements I mean that in formulating a relatively uncomplicated idea, say, about Arabic grammar or Indian religion, the Orientalist would be understood […] to be making a statement about the Orient as a whole, thereby summing it up. Thus every discrete study of one bit of Oriental material would also confirm in a summary way the profound Orientality of the material. And since it was commonly believed that the Orient hung together in some profoundly organic way, it made good hermeneutical sense for the Orientalist scholar to regard the material evidence he dealt with as ultimately leading to a better understanding of such things and the Oriental character, mind, ethos, or world-spirit.
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Silvestre de Sacy Character Timeline in Orientalism
The timeline below shows where the character Silvestre de Sacy appears in Orientalism. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Introduction
...few representative examples, including the scholarly work of Edward William Lane, Ernest Renan, Silvestre de Sacy, and the literary work of Alphonse Lamartine, Gustave Flaubert, and others. Yet, because the topic...
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Chapter 2, Part 1
...force of quasi-religious beliefs. This chapter examines the legacies of two key Orientalists, Silvestre de Sacy and Ernest Renan, whose work bears witness to these shifts and the way that Orientalism...
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Chapter 2, Part 2
Born in 1757, Silvestre de Sacy was a gifted and devoted student of the Orient who studied Arabic, Syriac, Chaldean, and...
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Said analyzes Sacy’s contribution to the Tableau historique de l’érudition française (an authoritative accounting of all French knowledge...
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Nineteenth-century Ernest Renan inherits and expands on Sacy’s ideas. Renan was a philologist—a scholar of language and word histories. Philology was a prestigious...
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Chapter 2, Part 3
Through his case studies of Sacy and Renan, Said argues that part of the way modern Orientalism entrenched itself was by...
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Chapter 2, Part 4
...than a “domain of […] scholarly rule and […] imperial sway.” Early Orientalists like Renan, Sacy, and Lane gave both the Orient and their academic discipline a setting and rules; later...
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