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Economic and Political Weekly January 1, 2005 30 VINAY LAL W hen Edward Said, a public in- tellectual and professor of lit- erature at Columbia for over three decades, passed away in late autumn 2003, an era appeared to have come to an end. The worldwide outpouring of grief upon his death is ample testimony to the extraordinary, indeed magisterial, pres- ence that Said came to exercise on the American intellectual scene, and the widespread approbation with which his peerless efforts to secure justice to the Palestinians were received. As anyone who has used Orientalism in the classroom can attest, some in the present generation of students still experience Said as the intel- lectual figure who, uniquely, introduced them to critical thinking and instilled in them a form of political awareness they hardly thought possible. Partha Chatterjee, whose own imprint on postcolonial stud- ies and the study of history is palpable to scholars in numerous disciplines, wrote some two decades ago that Said jolted him from his slumbers. 1 I Said on Politics Sometimes Said is likened to Noam Chomsky, another relentless critic of American foreign policy. The intellectual trajectories of these two figures certainly bear comparison in some respects: if Chomsky established himself as the domi- nant figure in linguistics before he launched into his political critiques of the American establishment and its appetite for adventurism, Said demonstrated his mas- tery over literary texts before he acquired a wider reputation as an unflinching advocate of Palestinian rights and an exponent of secular humanism. One might say, perhaps in hindsight, that both Chomsky and Said had the prudence to recognise that their scholarship equipped them to take on larger problems and broaden the horizons of their thinking. Though Said openly decried certain forms of ‘expertise’, and rubbished the alleged expertise of policy planners, Pentagon consultants, counter-terrorism specialists, and the myriad number of other mandarins stalking the corridors of power, both he and Chomsky understood that their exper- tise in their own disciplines lent authority to their political views. Neither could have been unaware that from their positions of privilege as tenured professors at Ivy League institutions, their views were calculated to receive a hearing often denied to others of like sensibility. Yet, for all their similarities, and their guaranteed place in certain segments of American public life, Said and Chomsky furnish vastly different conceptions of the life of the mind, the role of the public intellectual, and political and intellectual ecumenism. Easily the most commanding figure in the field of linguistics, Chomsky nonetheless wrote nothing that would have as wide an application, in disciplines across the humanities and the social sciences, as Thomas Kuhn’s notion of the ‘paradigm shift’ or, two decades later, Said’s notion of Orientalism. 2 One of the most startling things about Orientalism is how widely it came to be read in fields as varied as film studies, literature, history, and anthropology, not to mention area studies – barring, of course, the professional and lay study alike of west Asia, whose exponents remained largely impervious to the with- ering critique Said directed principally at them. On the other hand, if Said’s world- wide reputation may reasonably be viewed as arising from a keen awareness of his political views rather than from any sus- tained acquaintance, even among moder- ately well-educated people, with his more scholarly books, then one cannot doubt that Chomsky retained a much wider outlook on world politics. Whatever the limitations of Chomsky’s world view, such as his abiding (and, some would aver, morally necessary) faith in the American people as a repository of goodness who have been simply led astray by corporate fat dogs and jingoistic politicians, or his inability to offer a systemic critique of modern knowledge systems as the bed- rock of the institutionalised forms of violence so widely prevalent today, one cannot but be wholly admiring of his political and moral sensitivities which ensured that no form of injustice was outside the ambit of his concern. Said, by contrast, leaves behind a dif- ferent impression. He commented cease- lessly on Israel’s atrocities and rightfully condemned Arafat’s authoritarianism; and he was visibly angered by the wars waged upon Iraq in 1991 and 2003. Said had only undisguised scorn for the ‘leaders’ of the Arab world. Yet, as far as his overtly political writings are in question, most of the rest of the world seemed to matter relatively little. Said was inclined to view Israel’s policies towards Palestinians as genocidal, and one would think that this would have brought him to a broader engagement with the genocidal violence of the 20th century. Yet, from the dozen interviews that Said gave in the second half of the 1990s, no one would have known that 8,00,000 people were brutally dispatched to their graves over a short period of three months of 1994 in Rwanda. 3 Why should it matter? Should we have expected Said to comment on everything, and would it not be reasonable to infer that someone with his broad humanistic out- look, political commitments, and moral sympathies would have felt the injustices wherever they might have been taking place? It matters because, in an ironic and even disturbing reversal, the suffering of Enigmas of Exile Reflections on Edward Said The idea of ‘exile’ formed the principal narrative behind Edward Said’s life and work. In Said’s own words, his early life was a series of displacements; later in life, he came to see western culture as fundamentally a creation of exiles. But to understand the idea of exile as Said construed it, would entail a ‘contrapuntal’ reading of it. For Said, exile was a ‘permanent’ state and not as conventionally understood, a transient stage. While this contrasted ironically with his empathy for the Palestinian cause – a nation of people in exile – for Said, the exilic mind was one that refuses to habituate itself to academic pieties, to accepted readings of texts, to the satisfactions of power and to the comforts of surrender to some transcendent force.

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Economic and Political Weekly January 1, 200530

VINAY LAL

When Edward Said, a public in-tellectual and professor of lit-erature at Columbia for over

three decades, passed away in late autumn2003, an era appeared to have come to anend. The worldwide outpouring of griefupon his death is ample testimony to theextraordinary, indeed magisterial, pres-ence that Said came to exercise on theAmerican intellectual scene, and thewidespread approbation with which hispeerless efforts to secure justice to thePalestinians were received. As anyone whohas used Orientalism in the classroom canattest, some in the present generation ofstudents still experience Said as the intel-lectual figure who, uniquely, introducedthem to critical thinking and instilled inthem a form of political awareness theyhardly thought possible. Partha Chatterjee,whose own imprint on postcolonial stud-ies and the study of history is palpable toscholars in numerous disciplines, wrotesome two decades ago that Said jolted himfrom his slumbers.1

ISaid on Politics

Sometimes Said is likened to NoamChomsky, another relentless critic ofAmerican foreign policy. The intellectualtrajectories of these two figures certainlybear comparison in some respects: ifChomsky established himself as the domi-nant figure in linguistics before he launchedinto his political critiques of the American

establishment and its appetite foradventurism, Said demonstrated his mas-tery over literary texts before he acquireda wider reputation as an unflinchingadvocate of Palestinian rights and anexponent of secular humanism. One mightsay, perhaps in hindsight, that bothChomsky and Said had the prudence torecognise that their scholarship equippedthem to take on larger problems andbroaden the horizons of their thinking.Though Said openly decried certain formsof ‘expertise’, and rubbished the allegedexpertise of policy planners, Pentagonconsultants, counter-terrorism specialists,and the myriad number of other mandarinsstalking the corridors of power, both heand Chomsky understood that their exper-tise in their own disciplines lent authorityto their political views. Neither could havebeen unaware that from their positions ofprivilege as tenured professors at IvyLeague institutions, their views werecalculated to receive a hearing often deniedto others of like sensibility.

Yet, for all their similarities, and theirguaranteed place in certain segments ofAmerican public life, Said and Chomskyfurnish vastly different conceptions of thelife of the mind, the role of the publicintellectual, and political and intellectualecumenism. Easily the most commandingfigure in the field of linguistics, Chomskynonetheless wrote nothing that would haveas wide an application, in disciplines acrossthe humanities and the social sciences, asThomas Kuhn’s notion of the ‘paradigmshift’ or, two decades later, Said’s notionof Orientalism.2 One of the most startling

things about Orientalism is how widelyit came to be read in fields as varied asfilm studies, literature, history, andanthropology, not to mention area studies– barring, of course, the professional and laystudy alike of west Asia, whose exponentsremained largely impervious to the with-ering critique Said directed principally atthem. On the other hand, if Said’s world-wide reputation may reasonably be viewedas arising from a keen awareness of hispolitical views rather than from any sus-tained acquaintance, even among moder-ately well-educated people, with his morescholarly books, then one cannot doubtthat Chomsky retained a much wideroutlook on world politics. Whatever thelimitations of Chomsky’s world view, suchas his abiding (and, some would aver,morally necessary) faith in the Americanpeople as a repository of goodness whohave been simply led astray by corporatefat dogs and jingoistic politicians, or hisinability to offer a systemic critique ofmodern knowledge systems as the bed-rock of the institutionalised forms ofviolence so widely prevalent today, onecannot but be wholly admiring of hispolitical and moral sensitivities whichensured that no form of injustice wasoutside the ambit of his concern.

Said, by contrast, leaves behind a dif-ferent impression. He commented cease-lessly on Israel’s atrocities and rightfullycondemned Arafat’s authoritarianism; andhe was visibly angered by the wars wagedupon Iraq in 1991 and 2003. Said had onlyundisguised scorn for the ‘leaders’ of theArab world. Yet, as far as his overtlypolitical writings are in question, most ofthe rest of the world seemed to matterrelatively little. Said was inclined to viewIsrael’s policies towards Palestinians asgenocidal, and one would think that thiswould have brought him to a broaderengagement with the genocidal violenceof the 20th century. Yet, from the dozeninterviews that Said gave in the secondhalf of the 1990s, no one would haveknown that 8,00,000 people were brutallydispatched to their graves over a shortperiod of three months of 1994 in Rwanda.3

Why should it matter? Should we haveexpected Said to comment on everything,and would it not be reasonable to infer thatsomeone with his broad humanistic out-look, political commitments, and moralsympathies would have felt the injusticeswherever they might have been takingplace? It matters because, in an ironic andeven disturbing reversal, the suffering of

Enigmas of ExileReflections on Edward Said

The idea of ‘exile’ formed the principal narrative behind EdwardSaid’s life and work. In Said’s own words, his early life was aseries of displacements; later in life, he came to see western cultureas fundamentally a creation of exiles. But to understand the ideaof exile as Said construed it, would entail a ‘contrapuntal’ readingof it. For Said, exile was a ‘permanent’ state and not asconventionally understood, a transient stage. While this contrastedironically with his empathy for the Palestinian cause – a nationof people in exile – for Said, the exilic mind was one that refuses tohabituate itself to academic pieties, to accepted readings oftexts, to the satisfactions of power and to the comforts of surrenderto some transcendent force.

Economic and Political Weekly January 1, 2005 31

the Palestinians became for Said the para-digmatic case of oppression in our timesjust as the Holocaust became for theJewish people (and the state of Israel) theparadigmatic case of ‘exterminationist’violence in the 20th century.

However hazardous this suggestion, isit all that much of a stretch to think thatSaid’s obsession with the oppressionunleashed upon Palestinians, and his vis-ceral contempt for Zionism, at least partlyblinded him to other forms of injustice?Said, by his own admission, came to politicscomparatively late in his life and the tur-bulence of the 1960s left no impact on hislife.4 When he did turn to politics, he didso with the proverbial zeal of the convert– and with the convert’s extraordinarypartiality for the chosen cause. Said be-came convinced, and said so often, thatArabs and Muslims were the only culturalor ethnic group against whom vile andracist nonsense could be uttered with nearlyutter impunity in the west. “There’s anugly phenomenon in this country”, he toldan interviewer in 1987, and it “is this: Thelast permissible racism here – and by per-missible, I mean it’s okay publicly in themedia and elsewhere – is to be racist againstArabs.”5 Five years later, complainingabout representations of Muslims as ‘de-praved’, Said reaffirmed that such com-mentaries “could not be written about anyother ethnic cultural group in the worldtoday”.6 Considering that only this year theHarvard political scientist Samuel Hun-tington has published, to wide recognition,a large book whose central theme is thatthe growing Hispanic population is calcu-lated to degrade the Anglo foundations ofAmerican democracy and thus suck the lifeblood of this country,7 one can only con-clude that Said was unaware, which seemsaltogether improbable, of the contempt withwhich Hispanics and blacks are still viewedby large segments of white Americans, orthat he was, without much justification,inclined to view the racism directed atArabs and Muslims as sui generis.

The aforementioned collection of inter-views furnishes other instances whereSaid’s vision became peculiarly partial: totake one example, where for the rest of theworld Martin Luther King, Jr is chiefly andjustly remembered as one of the chiefarchitects of the civil rights movement, thepre-eminent prophetic voice of an ag-grieved black America, King appears inSaid’s text twice only as an unequivocalsupporter of Zionism.8 As far as I amaware, most of King’s biographers have

nothing to say on the subject.9 Doubtless,King had public differences with StokeyCarmichael and such members of theStudent Nonviolent Coordinating Com-mittee (SNCC) whose critique of Zionistimperialism verged, in King’s view, onanti-Semitism. “You cannot substitute onetyranny for another,” he explained, “andfor the black man to be struggling forjustice and then turn around and be anti-Semitic is not only a very irrational coursebut it is a very immoral course, and whereverwe have seen anti-Semitism we havecondemned it with all our might.”10 But,supposing that King were a virulent Zion-ist, should not Said have asked himselfhow King, whose adherence to the prin-ciple that freedom is indivisible seemsunquestionable, came to embrace thisanomalous position? And is King’s Zion-ism all that we need to know of him?

Nevertheless, in thinking of Said thatcliched expression, ‘larger than life’, readilycomes to mind. The photograph that ap-peared of him on the front page of the NewYork Times in March 2001, hurling a stonefrom the Lebanese border at Israeli sol-diers – so said the caption, quite incorrectly– is indelibly etched in the minds of hisadmirers and detractors alike.11 Many astone had been hurled at Said, but no onehad previously seen an eminent publicintellectual throw a stone. Said was, evi-dently, a man of immense passion, not tomention erudition and cultivation. He readwidely, and his love of literature, music,and art permeates his voluminous writ-ings. When someone such as ChristopherHitchens, who is accustomed to thinkingof himself as an unusually daring, perspi-cacious, and enlightened Marxist, admitsto feeling humbled in the presence of Said,12

one can be certain that Said justly cameto be viewed as a man of immense erudi-tion. He had little patience for those whoshouted themselves hoarse over ‘dead whitemen’, but his love of the classics neverprevented him from engaging in close andcritical readings of texts. How else, as Saidwould have said, could one read them? Atthe same time, Said eagerly embraced whathe deemed to be progressive, innovative,and politically enabling interpretations oftexts or intellectual traditions, as his en-thusiastic advocacy of the ‘SubalternSchool’ of Indian history demonstrates.He made a genuine effort to acquire ver-satility in at least the ‘high’ end of variouscultural and literary traditions, and did sowithout ever conveying the appearance ofbeing a consumer. The publication of

Orientalism in 1978 gave him a readershipthat extended beyond the circle of literaryscholars and other humanists; his writingson Islam and Palestine made him wellknown outside the academy; and his ru-minations on music earned him still newaudiences. He wrote for the Nation formany years; contributed frequently to theLondon Review of Books, and became acolumnist for al-Ahram Weekly in the lastdecade of his life.

Course of Defiance

Had Said achieved only this, he wouldhave been exceptional; but, remarkably,his accomplishments grew as he struggledwith an illness that eventually claimed himat 67. Diagnosed with leukaemia duringthe Persian Gulf War of 1991, and warnedby his physician to curtail his intellectualactivities, Said scarcely slowed down. Quiteto the contrary, he appeared to be set ona course of defiance. He wrote, lectured,and travelled at a frenetic pace, andperiodically had himself admitted to a hos-pital for recovery and treatment. Onesuspects that, by plunging himself into hispassions, Said prolonged his life byseveral years. In the last years of his life,Said entered into an unusual musicalpartnership with the famous Jewish pianistand life conductor of the Chicago Sym-phony Orchestra, Daniel Barenboim.13 TheWest-Eastern Divan Orchestra stood forthas a striking testimony of the collaborationpossible between an Israeli and a Pales-tinian, though one wonders what Saidwould have made of the bubbly enthusi-asm with which all such enterprises arereceived by some people as expressions of‘the essential goodness of the human spirit’,the quest for ‘universalism’, the supposedability of art to transcend the politicaldivide, and so on.14 Even in his illness, andamidst the large range of activities intowhich he had thrown himself, Said alsomanaged to retain the sartorial elegancefor which he became equally famous amongfriends. Interestingly, the growing interestin the cultural and political history ofmaterial objects,15 no commentator hassought to inquire into the relationshipbetween Said’s tastes in music and lite-rature and his dress sense. If one considers,by way of comparison, the life of Gandhi,it is abundantly clear that his endeavourto simplify his life, and his gradual trans-formation from a man in coat-tails and tophat to the ‘“half-naked fakir” of Churchill’sinfamous expression, is inextricably tied

Economic and Political Weekly January 1, 200532

to his advocacy of ‘ahimsa’ (non-violence)and ‘aparigraha’ (non-possession). Despitethe catholicity of his intellectual interests,it is striking that Said never had any timefor lowbrow literature, mass culture, popu-lar music, or even those social and politicalmovements which did not have in them thesense of the epic that one associates withthe Palestinian struggle in an ancient landor with the resistance, in war-torn Iraq, ofa people battered in the last few decadesby the naked aggression of the US.16

Whether one is speaking of Said’spolitics, his aesthetic sensibilities, hiscapacity for public engagements, or hissteadfast and principled critique of iden-tity politics, it is unequivocally clear thatSaid was seldom tentative in his outlookor in the expression of his views. At onetime, he worked closely alongside Arafat;but when they drifted apart, Said not onlynever looked back but was unremittinglyharsh in his denunciation of Arafat’sshortsightedness, authoritarian tendenciesand hunger for power. But is there a majorpolitical figure anywhere that one wouldnot be inclined to indict? Or consider theseother examples. In a long interview in theearly 1990s, he described as “utter non-sense”, and as a species of “sentimental-ism”, discussions and evocations of “uni-versal values”.17 He thought the notionthat the media had encouraged the intifadato be “total nonsense”, and used preciselythe same expression to characterise theview, attributed to the likes of WilliamBennett and Dinesh D’Souza, that westernculture can be hermetically sealed from allother cultures.18 In his defence, it can beaverred that Said had generally good rea-sons, and particularly in the spoken andmore informal medium of the interview,to take the positions that he did. The ideaof ‘universal values’ doesn’t have muchanalytical purchase, and one can usefullyinquire into the alleged universalism of‘universal values’. As Said noted onanother occasion, he could not speak in“favour of an abstract universalism, be-cause it’s usually the universalism ofwhoever happens to be most powerful”.19

Might Said’s unease with ‘universalvalues’ have stemmed, in part, from histransparent reluctance to engage with thelanguage of transcendence, or with his fearthat, considering the prerogative that re-ligion claims over ‘universal values’, hewould have had to enter into a dialoguefor which he had absolutely no inclination?Still, in view of his advocacy ofin-betweenness and delight in liminality,

and his conviction that, so to speak, theproblem of modern culture is the conflict“between the unhoused and housed”,20

Said’s unwavering firmness of opinion isat least a trifle surprising.

IIThoughts on ‘Exile’

The ‘unhoused’ and the ‘housed’: In thatopposition is writ large the tale of theprincipal narratives that have informed thelife and work of Said. The largest collec-tion of his essays appeared under the title‘Reflections on Exile’,21 and it can beargued that the entire tapestry of Said’swritings is woven around multiple ideasof exile. The Marxist critic, Aijaz Ahmad,alleged that post-colonial intellectuals suchas Said, quite oblivious of their ownpositions of immense privilege, hadfetishised the intellectual in exile.22 Ahmadviewed post-colonial theory as the handi-work of scholars who conveniently over-looked considerations of class and evenmade themselves out to be ‘refugee’ in-tellectuals. But Ahmad is scarcely the firstcritic to have pounced upon the fact thatexile is a knotty subject. The poet Ovid,banished from Rome by Augustus in 8AD,famously declared, “Exilium mors est”(‘Exile is death’). Most likely any urbaniteremoved to a garrison town, rendered utterlybereft of the company of poets, aesthetes,and women, would have felt the same.Victor Hugo, by contrast, found exilerejuvenating. In 15 years of exile on theisland of Guernsey, Hugo penned some ofhis most famous works. He may well havesaid, ‘exilium vita est’. So what is the spaceof exile occupied by Said? Did he havethe comfort of embracing either positionopenly, or did he live somewhere in thespace between banishment and belong-ing? What forms of banishment were akinto belonging, and what forms of belongingcould Said only pity?

Said had a rather nomadic upbringing,one of many reasons why throughout hislife he refused to be satisfied by any simpleand nurturing conception of ‘home’. Hehas often related how his life was a seriesof displacements and he felt himself tobelong, if at all he belonged, betweencultures. Though Said was born in Jerusa-lem in 1935, his parents shuttled betweenEgypt and Palestine. His childhood sum-mers were spent in Lebanon. In the pre-dominantly Muslim Levant, where theChristians largely belonged to the GreekOrthodox Church, Said’s father – who had

acquired American citizenship – was anEpiscopalian, while his mother was aBaptist. Asked to say something on hismemoir, Out of Place, Said described thetitle as meaning “not being able to go back.It’s really a strong feeling I have. I woulddescribe my life as a series of departuresand returns. But the departure is alwaysanxious. The return always uncertain.Precarious.”23 One can speculate that Saidmust have found it apposite, alarminglyapposite, that his family home in Jerusalemhad been taken over by a fundamentalistChristian organisation based in SouthAfrica.24 Not only did Said view Israel asan apartheid state, but he understood thatfundamentalists gravitate towards eachother just as rogues find rogues. Why shouldChristian fundamentalists not have foundIsrael hospitable, if not to their ambitions,at least to their idioms of totalitarianism?The house of humanism, Said saw forhimself, had been built over by religiousfundamentalists. Yet, however much Saidmight have wanted to reclaim the housewhere he had been born, he remaineduncertain about wanting to be “completelyat home”. “I suppose it’s sour grapes”,Said told an interlocutor in 1996, “that Inow think it’s maybe not worth the effortto find out” what it means to be at home.25

Said saw modern western culture asfundamentally a creation of exiles. Onemight be tempted to think that the ex-perience of his own people, whom hedescribed as largely “dispersed exiles”, ledSaid to this conclusion. The ironies, Saidwould have been the first to recognise,were compounded in that the Palestinianshad been rendered into exiles by anotherpeople of exile. Israel’s “War of Indepen-dence”, Said has reminded us, “was acatastrophe for Palestinians: two-thirdswere driven out of their homes and coun-try, many were killed, all their propertywas seized, and to all intents and purposesthey ceased to exist as a people”.26 Pitexiles against exiles, and out comes a nationstate. And nation states, as we know, arenotoriously protective of boundaries, in-corrigibly hostile to the nomadic modes oflife. However much this may be the moderncondition, and notwithstanding the fond-ness of a literary scholar for irony, Saidhad much more in mind in thinking of theinextricably exilic foundations of moder-nity. “In the United States,” Said wrote inhis 1984 essay, ‘Reflections on Exile’,“academic, intellectual and aestheticthought is what it is today because ofrefugees from fascism, communism, and

Economic and Political Weekly January 1, 2005 33

other regimes given to the oppression andexpulsion of dissidents”.27 Nearly all thefigures that Said held in esteem – CLRJames and Joseph Conrad, Erich Auerbachand Theodor Adorno, Mahmoud Darwishand Faiz Ahmad Faiz – were émigrés andintellectual refugees, as were those, suchas TS Eliot, with whose aesthetic andpolitical views Said was in acute disagree-ment but whose centrality to the cultureof the modern west was beyond question.

Throughout his life, Said retained aprolific interest in intellectuals and writerswho had trafficked across borders, cuttingacross territorial and cultural boundaries.He was greatly moved by the idea of thenoble life of the labouring intellectual inexile – an exile in which the labour wasrendered more difficult, more poignant,marked by the “sense of dissonance en-gendered by estrangement, distance, dis-persion, years of lostness and disorient-ation”, and thus requiring “an almost ex-cessive deliberation, effort, expenditure ofintellectual energy at restoration, reitera-tion, and affirmation that are undercut bydoubt and irony.”28 If Auerbach andAdorno remained for Said towering ex-amples of the discerning intellect,29 onehas to ask how far Said thought that theirexperience of exile had furnished themwith insights not ordinarily available toothers. Joseph Conrad, a Polish émigré toBritain who scarcely knew a word ofEnglish before he was 20 and went on tobecome one of the greatest novelists in theEnglish language, was the subject of Said’sdoctoral dissertation, and he appears fre-quently in Said’s writings as the supremeexample of the exilic consciousness.30

Though Said remained unceasingly criticalof Conrad’s inability to see the non-westexcept through western eyes, and scathinglycharacterised him as possessed of “gringoeyes” that would not allow him to fathom“other histories, other aspirations”,31 henever begrudged Conrad his literary genius,and, much more to the point for us, wasquite certain that Conrad’s writings borethe mark of the “sensitive émigré’s obses-sion with his own fate” and his ceaselessstruggles to be securely moored in his newsurroundings.32 The exile not only seeswith sharpened eyes, but ultimately givesbirth to a new form of consciousness, theconsciousness of those who are “housed”by virtue of being “unhoused”.

The idea of exile, then, must be read (inSaid’s language) contrapuntally, that isagainst the grain, in intersection and con-versation with thoughts that might be

construed as the very opposite. In doingso, one begins to approximate Said’s ownunderstanding of the notion of “exile asa permanent state”,33 a notion otherwiseat odds with the conventional sense ofexile as a transient stage, a country fromwhich one returns to one’s homeland. Theexile bears within herself or himself arecollection of what has been left behindand plays this against the present experi-ence. Said has described this as “counter-point” in music, and it is illustrative of hismethod that he should have, so effortlesslyand with such (dare we say) panache, carriedover an argument from music to a muchwider domain.34 For Said, the notion ofexile entails a different form of space-timecompression as his essay, ‘On Last Causes’,originally delivered as one of the TannerLectures in Human Values, so ellipticallysuggests. “In contrast” to resigned capitu-lation, Said quotes Adorno, “the uncom-promisingly critical thinker, who neithersuperscribes his conscience nor permitshimself to be terrorised into action, is intruth the one who does not give up. Fur-thermore, thinking is not the spiritualreproduction of that which exists. As longas thinking is not interrupted, it has a firmgrasp upon possibility. Its insatiable qual-ity, the resistance against petty satiety,rejects the foolish wisdom of resig-nation”.35 The exilic mind, Said is herearguing, refuses to habituate itself to aca-demic pieties, to accepted readings of texts,to the satisfactions of power, and to thecomforts of surrender to some transcen-dent force. Elsewhere calling to mindAdorno’s Minima Moralia (Reflectionsfrom a Mutilated Life), Said says that“language is jargon, objects are for sale.To refuse this stage of affairs is the exile’sintellectual mission”.36 To be alert, vigi-lant, critical, contrarian – to be all this isto be always in exile. Only the exile hasthat awareness which comes with contra-puntal understanding. One might add paren-thetically that if the intellectual engagedin criticism is always in exile, one can alsounderstand why Said had little sympathyfor those who, abjuring the more difficultand enduring task of subjecting the clas-sics to sustained inquiry and oppositionalreadings, launched into the ‘canon wars’and found their salvation in ‘identitypolitics’, the recovery of lost histories, andother puerile exercises.37

Ample as has been the climate of feelingand thought engendered by the frequentoccurrence of the trope of ‘exile’ in Said’sthought, the contrapuntal reading of Said

must necessarily lead to at least a highlyabbreviated note on the complete banish-ment of religion from Said’s work. Saidpushed religion into a fugitive existence.He was a steadfast and uncompromisingsecularist, and he frequently pointed outthat it is from the Italian humanistGiambattista Vico that he learned that menmake their own history.38 Said consis-tently argued for “worldliness” – a sus-tained interest in the affairs of the world,an advocacy for the “space of history”rather than the “space of the sacred ordivine”, and an awareness of the fact,which Said brought out with great subtletyin Culture and Imperialism (1993), thatmany forms of otherworldliness and de-tachment were disguised forms of engage-ment with the world.39 “Worldliness,secularity, etc, are key terms for me,” Saidremarked in 1993, and adds that alongsidehis “critique of and discomfort with reli-gion” he had become “ill at ease withjargons and obfuscations”, with “specialprivate languages of criticism and profes-sionalism”.40 In this respect, at least, Saidwas to signal his departure from thework of some famous contemporary post-colonial theorists.

‘Late Style’

I have remarked that Said remained, tothe end of his life, a staunch secularist.Late in his life, as he grappled more in-tensely with his illness, Said became in-terested in what he has called ‘late style’.Many people in his position would haveturned to the comforts of religion. Some-where the late and irascible NiradChaudhuri, who lived to a ripe 101 years,doubtless drawing much sustenance fromhis chosen vocation as gadfly, has remarkedthat scratch the skin of an atheist in Indiaand he turns out to be a believer. The IndianMarxist, on his deathbed, invariably re-veals himself a Hindu. (Being a Bengali,Chaudhuri was in the know.) Said deniedhimself this outcome: if men and womenmake their own history, he was not aboutto call upon his Maker. Said’s integrity,intellectual liveliness, and passion drovehim, at this juncture, to a fuller explorationof some of the ideas which had crossedhis mind over the years and were nowfertilising into a new set of reflections onmusic, the subject of exile, and the rela-tionship of style and exile to death. Thearguments of his posthumously publishedessay, ‘Thoughts on Late Style’, are toocomplex to be taken up here in full, but

Economic and Political Weekly January 1, 200534

even in passing form a fitting conclusionto this essay as they do to Said’s own life.41

It is Adorno, once again, who had sug-gested, apropos the works – the last fivepiano sonatas, the Ninth Symphony, thelast six string quartets, among others –belonging to Beethoven’s third and lastperiod, that ‘late style’ might constitute aform of multiple estrangement. Beethovenabandoned all interest in ensuring somecommensurability between his music andthe social order; indeed, Adorno has ar-gued, he displayed indifference to thequestion of continuities in his own work.It is characteristic of ‘late style’ that theartist, in Said’s language, “achieves acontradictory, alienated relationship” withthe social ethos of the time. The “lateworks” of the artist “are a form of exilefrom his milieu.” Said departed this lifejust as he came into it – in exile.

Notes

1 “Orientalism was a book”, wrote Chatterjeemany years after its publication, “which talkedof things I felt I had known all along but hadnever found the language to formulate withclarity. Like many great books, it seemed tosay for the first time what one had alwayswanted to say.” See Partha Chatterjee, “OwnWords”, in Edward Said: A Critical Reader,ed, Michael Sprinker (Oxford: Blackwell,1992), p 194.

2 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of ScientificRevolutions (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1992); Edward Said, Orientalism (NewYork: Random House, 1978).

3 Edward Said, Power, Politics and Culture:Interviews with Edward Said, ed, with anintroduction by Gauri Viswanathan (London:Bloomsbury, 2004).

4 Ibid, pp 209, 264.5 Ibid, p 320.6 Ibid, p 388.7 Samuel P Huntington, Who Are We: The

Challenges to America’s National Identity(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004); idem,The Clash of Civilisations and the Remakingof World Order (New York: Simon andSchuster, 1998).

8 In an interview given in 1993, Said revealedthat he had been “turned off by Martin LutherKing, who revealed himself to be a tremendousZionist...” In a previous interview given to thewell known journal Social Text in 1988, Kingis mentioned alongside Reinhold Niebuhr andRoger Baldwin as a “powerful advocate of theJewish state”. See Said, Power, Politics andCulture, pp 209, 327.

9 There is no mention of King’s alleged Zionismin any of these well known biographies: StephenOates, Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life ofMartin Luther King, Jr (New York: MentorBooks, 1982); King: A Critical Biography(New York: Praeger, 1970); and Taylor Branch,Parting the Waters: America in the King Years1954-63 (New York: Simon and Schuster,1988).

10 Cited by Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound, p 456.11 The New York Times ran a correction the

following day, stating that Said had flung thestone at an Israeli guardhouse, which was inany case half a mile away.

12 See Christopher Hitchens, “Edward Said”, Slate(26 Sept. 2003), online at: http://slate.msn.com/id/2088944/

13 Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said, Parallelsand Paradoxes: Explorations in Music andSociety (New York: Pantheon, 2002).

14 For one moving and nuanced account of Said’swarm admiration for Barenboim, see TaniaTamari Nasir, ‘No ordinary concert’, Al-AhramWeekly Online (September 4-10, 2003), onlineat http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/654/feature.htm

15 See, for example, Emma Tarlo, ClothingMatters: Dress and Identity in India (London:C Hurst, 1996).

16 On the subject of ‘popular music’, Saidremarked, in an interview published in 1992,that he did not “obviously” accept “all thehideously limited and silly remarks made aboutit by Adorno,” while conceding that it did notspeak to him in the same way as it did to hisinterviewer or to his children. “I’m veryconservative that way”, Said admitted. Said’sresponse to the arresting suggesting that thetradition of western classical music was an“unproblematic refuge of greatness” for himis an uncharacteristic silence, followed by anassertion about the “persistence “ of the westernclassical tradition. See Power, Politics, andCulture, p 145. I know of only one essay, anda relatively uninteresting one at that, by Saidon lowbrow culture – in this case, on theTarzan movies of Johnny Weismuller. See“Jungle Calling”, in Edward W Said,Reflections on Exile and Other Essays(Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard Uni-versity Press, 2000), pp 327-36.

17 Ibid, pp 132-33.18 Ibid, p 137, 271.19 Ibid, p 390.

20 Ibid, p 139.21 Edward W Said, Reflections on Exile and

Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass: HarvardUniversity Press, 2000).

22 Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes,Literatures (London: Verso, 1992); the chapteron Said was also published as “Orientalismand After: Ambivalence and CosmopolitanLocation in the Work of Edward Said”,Economic and Political Weekly 27, no 30(July 25, 1992), Section on Political Economy,p 98-116.

23 Said, Power, Politics and Culture, p 456.24 Ibid, p 454.25 Ibid, p 237.26 Said, “On Lost Causes”, in his Reflections on

Exile, pp 544-46.27 Said, “Reflections on Exile”, in ibid, p 172.28 Said, “Introduction”, in ibid, p xxxiii.29 See, for example, Said, Power, Politics and

Culture, pp 126-28, 217.30 Said has written that more than once he was

brought to the recognition that Conrad hadbeen “there” before him. See “BetweenWorlds”, in Reflections on Exile, p 556.

31 Said, “Through Gringo Eyes: With Conrad inLatin America”, in ibid, p 277.

32 Said, “Reflections on Exile”, in ibid, p 179.33 Said, Power, Politics, and Culture, p 56.34 Ibid, p 99.35 Quoted in “On Last Causes”, in Reflections

on Exile, p 553.36 Said, “Reflections on Exile”, in ibid, p 184.37 Said, Power, Politics, and Culture, pp 224-25,

240-41.38 Ibid, pp 78-9, 129, 389. Said admits that the

“oppositional” quality of Vico’s work, “hisbeing anti-Cartesian, anti-rationalistic, anti-Catholic”, appealed to him (p 78).

39 Ibid, p 222.40 Ibid, p 176.41 Edward Said, “Thoughts on Late Style”, London

Review of Books (August 5, 2004), pp 3, 5-7.

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