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The demise of a giant: Edward Said, 1935 - 2003

An incandescent intellectual light went out on September 25, 2003 with the demise of Edward Said, at the age of sixty seven. He was the professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and the author of more than 20 books including his ground-breaking orientalism.

The range of his intellectual acumen and curiosity was astonishing.

In his Representations of the Intellectual, Said noted that "one task of the intellectual is to break down the stereotypes and reductive categories that are so limiting to human thought and communication". What was unique to him was his endeavour to trace back his Palestinian ancestry. He remarked that when journalists and commentators found out that he was Palestinian, they often made the assumption that he was "violent, fanatical and supported the killing of Jews".

In a 2001 interview with Palestine Report, he stated that "there is simply no understanding at all of the Palestinian narrative. We are still largely seen as extremists, fundamentalists and terrorists". His efforts to breakdown limiting stereotypes and dehumanizing ideologies became the cornerstone of his intellectual life. Further it is what allowed him to formulate an all-embracing ethical stance that countered the often competitive nature of the Academy; "No race possesses the monopoly of beauty, of intelligence, of force; there is a place for all at the rendezvous of victory".

In writing his approbation for Edward Said's memoir, Out of Place, Salmon Rushdie claims that what Said has given us is nothing less than an "eloquent personal experience of the experience of multiplicity: its torments and confusions, but also its liberations and possibilities".

Edward Said, an American citizen, a Christian and a Palestinian, gave voice to what he claimed was the "existential density of human life", a world that is characterised by flux, and a reality in which "many things go on simultaneously". His utilisation of a Foucauldian analysis in orientalism demonstrates why the experience of multiplicity in life may become a site of "torment and confusion", particularly when the sledgehammer of imperial control meets the elegance of the world's multiplicity".

In Michael Foucault's eyes, at least, there is not much that can be done about that; in Edward Said's eyes, however, everything must be done about that.

What grounds both the command to and hope for the world's transfiguration is found in an interview with Said that is entitled: Wild Orchids and Trotsky: Messages from American Universities and in his work as a political activist. Drawing from the work of Antonio Gramsci, political activist and philosopher, Edward Said understands the Socratic dictum, "know thyself" to including finding out what "historical processes have deposited in you an infinity of traces without leaving a deposit." Said learns that, in so doing, one has created a structure that may be used to confront and dismantle the onslaught of imperial discourse. Drawing from his over forty years of experience as a political activist, Said finds hope and is humbled by those who are in the streets and who refuse to give up the struggle for liberation.

His engagement in political activism began in the 1960s while he was a young professor at Colombia University. While he followed the lead of his students into the fray of organising against the North American war in Vietnam, he found that his activist foothold located itself within Palestinian politics. For him, Israel's 1967 conquest of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights, was the defining event of his political life. In 1977 he became a member of the Palestinian National Council, which is the top forum of all Palestinian organisations, and remained deeply involved in practical Palestinian politics until he resigned from the Council in 1997.

Though immersed in the heady world of organisational politics Edward Said's voice was never that of the psycophant's: indeed he was quite willing to take on the Great Beast, even if his loyalties favoured its founding principles.

When Said writes about liberation, it is the movement away from the "repeated gesture" that figures most prominently. We are to locate liberation neither in a state nor in a bureaucracy but rather in a kind of energy that facilitates the "freeing of ones self from the need to repeat the past".

When he received the diagnosis of his leukaemia in 1991, he set upon the task of writing his memoirs. In the final stages of that book, he notes that more often than not he experiences himself as a "cluster of flowing currents". Further he notes that he prefers this way of existing rather than that of "the solid self, the identity of which so many attach so much significance".

These musings remind me of what the German critical theorist Theodor Adorno, points to as the highest form of morality, "not to feel at home in one's own home". Another way of making the same point is to recall the example of Christ, whose "homeless existence" allowed the pouring out of God's gifts to flow gracefully though Him and therefore enriching the lives of all around Him.

(Abridged version of an article by Anna Brown in the CW, Dec. 2003)

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