Edward Said
The Politics of an Oppositional Intellectual
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- 459,00 kr
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- 459,00 kr
Publisher Description
“A learned and intimate exploration of Said’s thought with deep relevance for today’s debates about Palestine and Israel and American intellectual life.”—Peter Beinart, author of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza
An exploration of the political thought of one of the twentieth century's most influential thinkers and the foremost advocate for the Palestinian cause in the West
Edward Said was one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century. A literary scholar with an aesthete’s temperament, he did not experience his political awakening until the 1967 Arab–Israeli war, which transformed his thinking and led him to forge ties with political groups and like-minded scholars. Said’s subsequent writings, which cast light on the interplay between cultural representation and the exercise of Western political power, caused a seismic shift in scholarly circles and beyond. In this intimate intellectual biography, by a close friend and confidant, Nubar Hovsepian offers fascinating insight into the evolution of Said’s political thought.
Through analysis of Said’s seminal works and the debates surrounding them, Edward Said: The Politics of an Oppositional Intellectual traces the influence of Foucault on Said, and how Said eventually diverged from this influence to arrive at a more pronounced understanding of agency, resistance, and liberation. He consequently affiliated more closely with Raymond Williams, Antonio Gramsci, and more contemporaneously, with his friends the late Eqbal Ahmad and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod.
Said held that it is the intellectual’s responsibility to expose lies and deceptions of the holders of power. A passionate advocate for the Palestinian cause, his solidarity did not prevent him from launching a sustained critique of the Palestinian leadership. Hovsepian charts both Said’s engagement with the Palestinian national movement and his exchanges with a host of intellectuals over Palestine, arguing that Said’s interventions have succeeded in changing the parameters of the discourse in the humanities, and among younger Jews searching for political affiliation.
Drawing on his diaries, in which he recorded his meetings with Said, as well as access to some of Said’s private letters, Hovsepian illuminates, in rich detail, the trajectory of Said’s political thinking and the depth and breadth of his engagement with peers and critics over issues that continue to resonate to this day.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Political scientist Hovsepian (Palestinian State Formation) delivers an incisive portrait of his "dear friend," the Palestinian American activist and theorist Edward Said (1935–2003). Writing warmly of Said's "intellectual honesty and commitment to truth," Hovsepian asks "How does Said's humanism inform his politics?" To answer this question, he analyzes how Said, as a thinker who embraced a "philosophical anarchism... suspicious of statist authority," still "chose to represent Palestine," viewing the cause as a "test-case for true universalism." Said also made his exile from Palestine into a guiding personal philosophy, thinking of himself as "one whose ideas must remain unhoused." Hovsepian traces how this perspective of humanism-in-exile undergirded Said's seminal writings on Orientalism—in which Said, from his "unhoused" viewpoint, provides a "contrapuntal reading" of the European classics that deconstructs the ways in which "European high culture" is "complicit with imperialism"—as well as in his clashes with hawkish public intellectuals during the 1991 Gulf War and 2003 Iraq War, in whose rhetoric Said noted an Orientalist framework that dehumanized Arabs. Hovsepian concludes with a stirring look at Said's end-of-life study of "Late Style," or writers' and artists' work in their final years that "confronts mortality," when Said wrote inspiringly of "the importance of resisting resignation at moments of defeat." It's a moving tribute to an intellectual giant and a first-rate work of scholarship in its own right.
