tJSES AtW LIMITS OF FOUCAUtT 5 with the gods, and its story is always sung as a theogony. But historical beginnings are lowly : not in the sense of modest or dis-cret like the steps of a dove, but derisive and ironic, capable of undoing every infatuation.4 Foucault's point is that the search for origins is essentialist and militates against a proper sense of historicity. For the colonized people, such a search for their origins is doubly foreclosed, 'derisive and ironic/ because the process of colonization meant precisely the wiping out of their history, traditions and language. As an instance of this foreclosure. Said glances at the Middle East as the locus for their biblical origins : 'All pilgrimages to the Orient passed through, or had to pass through, the Biblical lands ; most of them in fact were attempts either to relive or to liberate from the large, incredibly fecund Orient some portion of Judaeo-Christian/Greco-Roman actuality.'5 The consequence of these investments, as Said has repeatedly emphasized in his writings, is the denial of human rights, legal right of residence, the status of nationhood and the historical identity accruing to the Palestinian people.6 The Palestinian problem is a dramatic case of the ways in which the colonizing impulse veils its real economic, political and ideological origins by the simple expedient of calling every Palestinian a terrorist. Fanon had recognized that in the triangular dialogue between the settler, the native and the native intellectual there is 'a permanent confrontation on the phantasmic plane.'7 In this realm versions of origins are offered and resisted in a continuing dialectic ; thus Fanon likens the self-justifying ideological operation of colonialism to the mother 'who unceasingly restrains her fundamentally perverse offspring from managing to commit suicide and from giving free rein to its evil instincts. The colonial mother protects her child from itself, from its ego, and from its physiology, its biology and its own unhappiness which is its very essence.'8 In this Oedipal tyranny the search for identity by the colonized people continually returns to the terms of opposition set by the colonial mother. In effect the search for Aryan/Islamic/Semite origins becomes for the colonized people a longing for an impossible purity and a yearning for the fullness of meaning that is not only uncritical but also politically suspect in that it can unwittingly serve the reactionary forces of revivalism. Nowhere is this danger greater than in the Indian context, where the search for the source of Hindu identity in the Vedic times has almost invariably led to a loss of commitment to our contemporary plural/secular identity. In Beginnings Said is therefore engaged in the project of decolonization by divesting himself of the illusion of origins, a project which involves an extensive play with its theoretical possibilities : Those traditional conceptions of primacy such as source and origin, the principles of continuity and development, and those metaphors for originating authority such as author, discipline, and the will to