At the end of the introduction to Unsettling the World, Jeanne Morefield adds, as part of an apology-of-sort: ‘I often found, in the midst of writing, that I would lose track of where [Said’s] voice ended and mine had begun’ (p. lviii). Writing about Morefield writing about Said, it is indeed often difficult to disentangle their voices and therefore, to stabilize the objects of my writing; it is also sometimes difficult to disentangle their interconnected voices from my own, from the here and now. Said—and certainly Morefield’s Said— is key not just to political thought, but also to engaging with, and even being in the world, especially in a moment of so much polarization, so much violence (and a moment, significantly, of and in Palestine/Israel). Hence simply writing a book-review seems almost inappropriate. It certainly seems to betray the mode of engaging with theory-making Morefield calls for: a call to ‘inhabit the world, as…scholar[s] and…political being[s]’ (p. xx), in more committed ways; to always theorize in ‘conversation with power and context’ (p. xxix). As she puts it, ‘the world itself is the work’ (p. 56). Indeed, the inability to stabilize and separate voices stands at the heart of a political project—a political project that is conditioned on one’s ability to move between sides, to inhabit different worlds even if it means one could never fully settle, and in so doing to make a world possible.

There is a section in the book where Morefield painfully and beautifully describes her impossibility either of holding on to—or letting go of—an object of love and care. This impossibility to both be in/with and without/away is the structure of exile, as she shows (exile as a metaphor, she claims, but perhaps this is to show that exile is one example of this wider structure). As I was writing this review, I thought that perhaps, Said himself has become such an impossible object. Recently, I have heard his work being dismissed (or completely distorted) from unexpected directions in the Left and have begun wondering whether it is still possible to hold on to his imperatives: to see the world for all the violence, power structures, loss, and pain it is steeped in, and still insist on a possibility of a ‘we’ that transcends those.

‘We’ is a term Morefield repeatedly questions in her analysis—a risky political category that often serves to erase others, to foreclose rather than open. But this future ‘we’ in Palestine/Israel that Said urges us to imagine is different. It is a ‘we’ made through a history of violence (colonized and colonizers were shaped in the ‘connective tissue of imperialism,’ p. 64), that must be accounted for, Said insists, yet without erasing the fact of shared experience (and a shared land), which is also the reality of our present, and the only possibility of our future. In the end, we either find ways to live together or we end up dying together.

Morefield notes that writing about Said is always somewhat of an impossibility: it is ‘like standing in the middle of a raging cyclone, with all the moving pieces of imperialism … swirling about you at the same time, and it is your job, as a critic, to engage them all. At the same time. Despite the wind. Despite the mess. Not to reconcile them, just to hold them together’ (p. 22). At this moment, this may be our most difficult, most impossible task as intellectuals–and simply as people: to hold on to both sides (or better: all sides, as the framing of ‘both’ is already part of the problem). This ‘both’ is not about ‘symmetry.’ As Morefield shows, Said’s ‘both sides’ were never symmetrical; his arguments were never about moral equivalences. The ‘two sides’ for Said ‘are in many ways antithetical,’ (p. 85) and yet he refused to imagine a justice for one at the expense of the other.

Perhaps above all, this emerges from Said’s call to inhabit loss differently (and Morefield shows this on so many levels, from the most political to the most intimate, and indeed her book is an act of questioning this very distinction). Loss can consume us, and, as it does, it can become the grounds from which we destroy others. Loss can make us retreat inward, refuse the political bonds, refuse the world, or, when we do turn outward, it can make us resent and hate and desire revenge and thus justify more loss and more pain in spirals that end up consuming everything. But Said—without undermining loss and the difficulty to ‘meet loss face to face’ (p. xxiv), without thinking loss can be embraced, and certainly not reconciled or healed once and for all—nevertheless insists on remaining open also to the loss (potential or actual) of others, even if they are the ones who brought about our loss. One can be steeped in loss, Morefield shows through Said or with him, and still have a capacity to hold to the ‘many voices playing off against each other’ (p. 9)—no matter how difficult it is, no matter how open one’s wounds are. ‘A politics of outward-facing coexistence rather than a politics of in-dwelling attention to a “people”, no matter how creatively or democratically defined’ (p. 94).

How can one hold to the other’s loss amidst genocidal violence? Israelis on their part would ask how one can hold to the other’s loss after a brutal massacre—and the fact that these two sides can ask this question—indeed ask this question—does not suggest a symmetry; yet accounting for radically differential power relations also does not mean that the other side must be erased—indeed, this is one of the key lessons Morefield calls us to learn from Said. And what do we do when loss itself is the grounds upon which genocide is facilitated, justified, pushed forward? Perhaps ‘hold,’ then, carries the wrong spatial metaphor. Perhaps all we can do is to let all these losses swirl, to see them, even sit with them for some time, to recognize that we will be carried away in the wind, overwhelmed by it, but to insist on moving between these losses. ‘despite the wind.’ Or precisely because of it.

And there is a whole other layer of openness at play in Morefield’s book, an ‘openness to approach, context, and genre’ (p. xlvii); a disciplinary openness that, as she shows, political theory is largely missing. Unsettling the World is a labor of love to Said, and an act of ambivalence, at best, toward political theory. It offers the reader a rich and extensive window into Said’s work, well above the corpus that has been more-or-less canonized. It does so alongside a map** of political theory and IR theory, and a discussion of their limitations.

Morefield persuasively accounts for these limitations: first, through a sociology of knowledge of sorts, a compelling account of the subfield’s refusal to seriously think of empire and to be open to interdisciplinarity; and second, through a more structural analysis of theory itself. At times, I found the former slightly unfair. While Morefield’s critique is well substantiated, this dichotomy, in which political theory comes to represent everything we should not do and Said everything we should do, forces her into some interpretations that do not always do justice to the texts she reads. This is the case, for example, when Morefield talks about poststructuralists as having the ‘tendency to imagine people as inescapably bamboozled by power’ (p. 102), or when she unfolds Said’s historical approach to subjectivity as emerging from ‘the lens of exile,’ rather than (at least also) from his Foucauldian framework (e.g., p. 39). There are other such moments, but they are marginal to Morefield’s critique. Her structural observation concerning theory as such is more interesting. Comparing Arendt’s boomerang theory to Said’s analysis of empire, she shows that the very effort of theory to be systematic, to have a clear trajectory and a solid argument, or a certain impulse toward closures (e.g., p. 129), blinds theory to the plurality that is the world, to its complexity and essential messiness. The preference ‘to forced coherence’ (p. 21), which Morefield identifies as a disciplinary one, is thus thought opposite to Said’s insistence on the impossibility of reconciliation or harmonization, and his preference to think through clusters of ‘flowing currents’ (p. 25). And it is this very disciplinary closure of political theory (its desire for—or training in—closures) that not only mirrors but is also part of the production of, and at the same time is itself a product of, the political/ethical/affective failure to be open to others (those racially, geographically, or disciplinarily othered).

Morefield states that the primary goal of her book ‘is to argue that Said’s unsettled and unsettling disposition toward culture, power, and politics, has much to offer political theory today’ (p. xxv). At stake is not ‘Said-as-a-method’ kind of book (after all, he provides ‘not a method but an unsettling disposition’). Rather, Morefield promotes a certain ‘orientation’: to the world, to conflicts and contradictions, to other disciplines, to the objects that we deem worthy of our analysis. Above all, Unsettling the World is a call to inhabit Said’s ‘critical, compassionate, and necessary counterweight to political and cultural narratives’ (p. 13). As such, it is an imperative reading for our moment.