4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST practices. The questions Said and his fellow-theorists deserve to be asked, concern the relationship, even the fit, between their thesis and their method. In the case of Orientalism^ Said clearly states in his Introduction that his method derives from Gramsci, Vico, Kuhn and predominantly from the writings of Foucault. In a hostile reading, Said's application of Foucaulfs theories may seem imitative. Readers may well ask : is Said's indictment of Orientalist texts for their Eurocentrism merely a duplication of the Foucauldian project—which is to make Western man rigorously st^lf-cis scious about the furthest limits of his discourse ? Is it possible for Said ^ ^ijze the post-structuralist method without surrendering to its id^Gio^^. In effect, is Said's method at odds with his thesis ? The purpose of this paper is to examine the implications of this question by isolating the specific character of Foucault's influence on Said's Orientalism. The Theme of Origins The nature of influence inheres in and circulates around the theme of origins. In an earlier book titled Beginnings (1975) one notices, from hindsight, Said's preoccupation with the problem of origins. The notion of an originary moment in the history of an individual, race or civilization where an idea or a set of ideas or a particular mode of perceiving reality may be said to have emerged is recognized by post-structuralist thinkers like Foucault to be a highly problematic notion, for it leads to nostalgia and all its attendant falsifications. Foucault's unfolding of the theme of origins needs quoting in order that we might appreciate its particular quality which Said has elsewhere described as "a poetics of thought"3 Why does Nietzsche challenge the pursuit of the origin (Ursprung), at least on those occasions when he is truly a genealogist ? First, because it is an attempt to capture the exact essence of things, their purest possibilities, and their carefully protected identities, because this search assumes the existence of immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession. This search is directed to 'that which was already there,' the image of a primordial truth fully adequate to its nature $ it necessitates the removal of every mask to ultimately disclose an original identity. However if the genealogist refuses to extend his faith in metaphysics, if he listens to history, he finds that there is "something altogether different' behind things : not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essences were fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms. . . . What is found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their origin ; it is the dissension of other things. It is disparity. History also teaches how to laugh at the solemnities of the origin. . . . The origin always precedes the Fall ... it is associated