“They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented”

“They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented” is a statement by Karl Marx that Edward Said makes central to his account of Orientalist representation. The phrase names a political and representational inequality: the authority to describe the Orient is held by outsiders who make it legible to Western audiences, while the people described are denied comparable authority to represent themselves. Said’s argument turns the quotation from a general claim about representation into a way of examining who speaks, from what position, and with what material power.

Text and Attribution

The English sentence appears as an epigraph alongside the attribution to Karl Marx and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Said later returns to its underlying proposition, quoting Marx’s German wording while discussing the exteriority of Orientalist representation. In that discussion, the phrase is not merely a compact description of a text’s subject: it identifies the asymmetry built into the act of speaking for another people.

Said places the epigraph near Benjamin Disraeli’s statement that “The East is a career.” The juxtaposition links representation to professional and institutional authority: the Orient becomes not only something written about, but a field in which Western observers can establish careers and produce influential accounts. The Marx quotation therefore frames the book’s inquiry into how claims to represent others are enabled by a larger distribution of power.

Representation and Exteriority

Said argues that Orientalism depends on exteriority: the Orientalist describes the Orient from outside it, making its supposed mysteries intelligible to a Western audience. The resulting representation is not a transparent presence of the Orient itself. It is a mediated account shaped by language, conventions, and institutions, and it can displace the people and histories it claims to render visible.

The quotation crystallizes the political logic Said finds in that arrangement. The representation presents itself as necessary because the Orient is treated as unable to speak for itself; the outsider’s account then occupies the space that this assumption has opened. Said stresses that the important evidence lies in how representation is constructed—through style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, and historical circumstances—not in measuring it against a supposedly unmediated original. The claim to speak for the Orient is thus itself part of what must be examined.

Unequal Power in Practice

Said connects this structure of representation to relations of domination rather than treating Orientalist writing as a harmless collection of mistaken ideas. He describes the relationship between Occident and Orient as one of power and hegemony: the Orient was not only imagined as Oriental but could be made subject to the processes that defined it that way. The capacity to describe and classify was joined to the capacity to act upon the people being described.

His example of Gustave Flaubert and Kuchuk Hanem gives the argument a specific human consequence. Flaubert’s encounter with the Egyptian dancer and courtesan produced an influential model of the Oriental woman, but, in Said’s account, she did not speak for herself in that representation. Flaubert spoke for her and presented her to readers as typically Oriental. His position as a foreign, comparatively wealthy man gave him a relative strength that enabled both personal possession and representational authority. Said treats the episode not as an isolated encounter but as an instance of a wider imbalance between East and West.

The Phrase’s Critical Force

The phrase does not mean that representation is simply false and could be undone by substituting an uncontested truth. Said warns against reducing Orientalism to lies or myths that would disappear once corrected. Its strength comes from its close connection to social, economic, and political institutions and from the continued investment that made it an accepted framework for understanding the Orient. The problem, accordingly, is not only inaccurate description but a durable system that gives some speakers authority while making others objects of knowledge.

Said also rejects the idea that there is a single “real” Orient that criticism can simply recover and defend. He instead affirms the capacity of Arab and Muslim peoples to struggle for their own visions of who they are and want to become. This distinction separates understanding grounded in careful study and a wish for coexistence from knowledge enlisted in self-affirmation, belligerence, control, and external dominion. Read in that context, Marx’s sentence is both a diagnosis of imposed representation and a warning about the unequal conditions that allow it to speak in another’s place.