Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Paul A. Bové is Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

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Edward Said and the work of the critic

Duke University Press

Contents

PAUL A. BOV / Introduction.....................................................................................................1JACQUELINE ROSE / Edward Said talks to Jacqueline Rose..........................................................................9W. J. T. MITCHELL / The panic of the visual: a conversation with Edward W. Said.................................................31GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK / Race before racism: the disappearance of the American..............................................51JONATHAN ARAC / Criticism between opposition and counterpoint...................................................................66TERRY COCHRAN / The matter of language..........................................................................................78LINDSAY WATERS / In responses begins responsibility: music and emotion..........................................................97JIM MEROD / The sublime lyrical abstractions of Edward W. Said..................................................................114KOJIN KARATANI / Uses of aesthetics: after orientalism..........................................................................139RASHID I. KHALIDI / Edward W. Said and the American public sphere: speaking truth to power......................................152BARBARA HARLOW / Sappers in the stacks: colonial archives, land mines, and truth commissions....................................165MUSTAPHA MARROUCHI / Counternarratives, recoveries, refusals....................................................................187AAMIR R. MUFTI / Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, secular criticism, and the question of minority culture.....................229RALPH P. LOCKE / Exoticism and orientalism in music: problems for the worldly critic............................................257Notes...........................................................................................................................283Index...........................................................................................................................313

Chapter One

Edward Said talks to Jacqueline Rose

JR I wanted to start this evening by way of introduction with Edward Said's own words from two of my favorite books of his. The first from After the Last Sky, his extraordinary and eloquent tribute to the Palestinian people:

Homecoming is out of the question.... A part of something is for the foreseeable future going to be better than all of it. Fragments over wholes. Restless nomadic activity over the settlements of held territory. Criticism over resignation. The Palestinian as self-consciousness in a barren plain of investments and consumer appetites. The heroism of anger over the begging-bowl, limited independence over the status of clients. Attention, alertness, focus. To do as others do, but somehow to stand apart. To tell your story in pieces, as it is.

The second I take from Musical Elaborations, which is his wonderful excursus into modern music which he brings to an end with a celebration of a type of music:

whose pleasures and discoveries are premised upon letting go, upon not asserting a central authorizing identity ... an art not primarily ... about authorial power and social authority, but a mode for thinking through or thinking with the integral variety of human cultural practices, generously, non-coercively, in a utopian cast, if by utopian we mean worldly, possible, attainable, knowable.

I chose these two quotes not just because I like them or because they immediately give you a sense of the extraordinary range of Edward Said's work, but also because I think they give such a strong impression of the affirmative aspect of his work.

In his 1993 Representations of the Intellectual, Edward Said described the intellectual as somebody who strikes us with "the unremitting force of his questioning and deeply confrontational intellect" and slightly less flatteringly-he wasn't talking about himself, I should say-of the intellectual whose point was to be "embarrassing, contrary, and even unpleasant." Now, some of these epithets have been thrown his way in his time, so I started with these two quotes so as to convey the spirit-in which I hope this interview and discussion can be conducted-of his positive, inspirational commitment to a future that would be non-coercive, generous, integrally various.

I'm also hoping that we can use this evening as an opportunity to give Edward Said a chance to reply to some of the criticisms, not to say misrepresentations, that on occasion he rather dramatically seems to provoke. I have a personal interest in this. I'm here this evening as a Jewish woman and a feminist with a long-standing commitment to psychoanalytic thinking, and, let's face it, on the surface of it, none of these epithets could be said to apply to you. I'm therefore also hoping this evening that we will have a chance to demonstrate the possibility of undreamt of forms of dialogue across what have often seemed to be insurmountable barriers of historical difference.

My first question is about writing. You've talked about writing all throughout your work, and, at one point, you say: "for man who no longer has a homeland writing becomes a place to live." You also say: "the main hope of the intellectual"-this is a bit surprising-"the main hope of the intellectual is not that he will have an effect on the world, but that someday, somewhere, someone will recall what he wrote exactly as he wrote it." In Beginnings, you say the first question-which is why it's my first question-the first question is "Why writing?-a choice is made over the desire to speak, to gesture, to dance." In fact, you do speak and you do gesture. I don't know about dancing.

EWS (inaudible) I don't dance....

JR So, my question is not what it is you write about and why you've chosen to write about those things, but what does writing do for you? Why do you think you do it?

EWS Well, in many cases, at a very simple level, it's because I get pleasure from it. There is something direct about it that gives me a sense that I'm entering the world. I'm one of the few people who doesn't use a computer. I use a pen. I've resisted all of these technological advances, simply because the irreducible pleasure of putting pen to paper with black ink is a way of trying out thought, of expressing ideas, of trying to reach people that I otherwise couldn't reach. In a certain way, it's a refusal of the silence that most of us experience as ordinary citizens who are unable to effect change in a political and economic society that is obviously moved by larger forces than individuals.

But, also, I think there's a certain expression in the writing, of not exactly resignation. Your quote, about the hope of the intellectual that somebody would read their words, I borrowed from Adorno at a time when I felt that things were going very wrong for the Palestinians, and that being left out of the progress of history is a fate which I didn't want to settle for. What I felt that I could at least do was to testify, to be a witness to a certain kind of history and to get it right. I think in the end that is probably the most fundamental challenge of all, to try to get it right, to find words that will fit a situation and that will not change as the situation changes, but which will at...