Only a year (already a year?) has passed since Edward Said's death in September 2003. His extraordinary life and work as a 'public intellectual' (a term he rather unsuccessfully deconstructs in one chapter of this book) defies the rules of time. He has already been memorialised, yet remains a living presence; his work seems timeless, yet also embedded in every minute of the political history that shaped him and that he tried to change. Decades of intellectual work will be generated by Said's legacy unique because his subjects were not just culturally resonant but also 'belonged' to his personal biography: cosmopolitan exile; commitment to social justice and equality; humanist literary criticism and, of course, his special identification with the Palestinian fate. But ever more unique was his devotion to understanding the spaces and lines between these subjects. Future work about or influenced by Said will no doubt be more grandiose and heavyweight than this collection of lectures and essays from the last years of his life. But no other work can be as inspiring as this. The three main chapters of the book were first given in 2000 as part of a Columbia University lecture series on American culture. Said then reworked and revised them in the light (dark ?) of the events of 11 September, 2001. As a fourth chapter on the theme of 'American humanism', he added his introduction to a new edition of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis. Said's very interest in this dense work of literary criticism is enough to undermine the absurd image of him as a mere political demagogue. He goes further: "Mimesis is the greatest and most influential literaryhumanistic work of the past half century."
The raw story is fascinating in itself: Auerbach, a Prussian Jew, writes this book in German in Istanbul during World War II; it appears in English in the United States in 1953; in 1956 he becomes a Professor of Romance Philology at Yale. But this points to the far wider story of three subjects: humanism in the political sense, critical practice in the literary sense and the task of teaching in universities after 11 September. Rather than define his subjects never Said's style or strong point he weaves through an intellectual maze of his own making. One master route can only be found in word, text and language. Thus a whole chapter is titled 'The Return to Philology'. There we find the new voices that are "exilic, extraterritorial and unhoused".
Here is a coincidence, an obscure academic footnote, merely a clever exam question: why have two of the great public intellectuals of our time, Said and Chomsky, have placed language at the centre of their intellectual lives and made the cause of justice for the Palestinians the driving force of their political lives?
For me, Said's most important message lies in his repeated and clear refutations of the antihumanist agenda which he himself is thought to support. (Chomsky, of course, has always regarded scepticism about the Enlightenment sense of universal values as a bizarre waste of time). Far from dismissing the grand narratives of enlightenment and emancipation, he explains in the simple tone of explaining something obvious to a retarded child how his political activism assured him that "people all over the world can be and are moved by ideals of justice and equality." The humanistic ideals of liberty, learning and resistance are "alive and well". Very quickly, though, Said leaves aside this simple tone and returns to academic complexity. His dismissal of these ideas as "shallow but influential" is merely his personal opinion. Furthermore, he is not being totalising. His critique refers only to a "certain facile type of radical antifoundationalism."
His final 'belief' might look gnomic, but is perfectly clear and obvious: "it is possible to be critical of humanism in the name of humanism." There is something eerie about Edward Said's voice here a utopian rallying call which sounds so much clearer after his death.
Humanism and democratic criticism is available from Amazon (UK)
