Affiliating with Edward Said

Joseph Massad

Perhaps one of the more important principles that Edward Said abided by in his life and career was the centrality of his role as secular critic. He saw criticism as constitutive of the life of the intellectual, who must "speak truth to power" Indeed, it was his commitment to persistent criticism as a basis for thinking that made him so controversial, whether in the United States, Europe, or the Arab world. Said insisted on affiliative forms of intellectual belonging and community in the expansive sense of the term, forsaking filiative forms as too limiting. The intellectuals and political figures with whom he affiliated and the ideas to which he sought to belong guided his intellectual project of reading and interpreting not only the modern experience of colonizing and colonized subjects but also the way in which both informed his own intellectual constitution and production.

Said believed that the life of an intellectual should be that of a migrant and an exile. He used the term exile in a metaphorical sense, referring not to leaving one's physical home but rather to leaving the conventions and accepted truths of one's community, insistently criticizing these truths, and not shrinking from addressing the failures of one's audience, no matter how powerful. In his view, intellectuals must be outsiders "so far as privileges, powers and honors, are concerned"1 While respectful of religion as a personal relationship to the metaphysical, Said was a committed secularist in his intellectual life. He insisted on being politically godless in an age dominated by the worship of political deities—the "West," Soviet Communism, U.S. imperialism, nationalisms of all varieties, to name the most prominent. His political atheism, however, was not equivalent to neutrality; rather it was an insistent critical stance toward all political religions. He mocked the rites and rituals staged by worshippers of such gods and insisted that these were proof of moral bankruptcy.

Said used the ideas and philosophies associated with these gods but refused to accede to their terms of worship and conversion. This stance was to become his hallmark. Commitment to secular criticism for him was consistent with his conviction that these gods always fail to deliver on their promises and that intellectual life must be lived according to the understanding that "situations are contingent, not ... inevitable ... the result of a series of historical choices made by men and women, ... facts of society made by human beings, and not ... natural or God-given, therefore unchangeable, permanent, irreversible."

In this sense, Said resisted being enclosed by any type of society, including—and especially—nationality: "Does the fact of nationality commit the individual intellectual ... to the public mood for reasons of solidarity, primordial loyalty, or national patriotism? Or can a better case be made for the intellectual as a dissenter from the corporate ensemble?" He expected such dissent from Palestinian as well as American intellectuals. "The history of thought, to say nothing of political movements, is extravagantly illustrative of how the dictum 'solidarity before criticism,' means the end of criticism. I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the very midst of battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for."

Said took this dictum to heart in addressing the politics of Palestinian liberation, posing autocritique as central to its success. In this vein, he launched his attack against the Oslo capitulation. His commitment to the rights of the Palestinian people mobilized his hostility to what he rightly predicted would be the Bantustan solution signed in Oslo and celebrated on the White House lawn. The subsequent metamorphosis of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) into the Palestinian Authority (PA), from a liberation movement into a police authority subcontracted to the Israeli occupation, confirmed his predictions. Moreover, Oslo marked another transformation—with a number of well-known Palestinian intellectuals switching allegiance from national liberation to what came to be known as political pragmatism. They suspended their critical faculties in the name of pragmatism and national unity and were paid handsomely by the PAs new funders. Some quit academic jobs to...