Thursday, October 21, 2004

Palestine's Voice

By Seth Sandronsky

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Posted 10/21 | Add a Comment

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  1. I have not got a hold of ‘From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map’ yet. The photography in ‘After the Last Sky’ helped crystallize my understanding of the situation in Palestine as did the collection of essays ‘Blaming the Victims’ co-edited with you know who. So much of his work really made it clear to me that the Anglo-American West was keeping on “keeping down the darkies.” I always enjoy reading Said’s prose; it’s illuminating and there is so much of it to enjoy. “Culture and Imperialism” was fantastic. Something that really resonated with me was his definition of the intellectual in his Reith lectures as someone who is “neither a pacifier nor a consensus-builder, but someone whose whole being is staked on a critical sense, a sense of being unwilling to accept easy formulas, or ready-made cliches, or the smooth, ever-so-accommodating confirmations of what the powerful or conventional have to say, and what they do. Not just passively unwilling, but actively willing to say so in public.” That and, more recently, this: “If some of these fickle journalistic acrobats (who have served so many masters that they don’t have any moral bearings at all) can also manage to quote Marx and German scholars--despite their avowed anti-Marxism and their rank ignorance of any languages or scholarship not English--in their favor, then how much cleverer they seem.” Very sad. Very true. I never knew him but I miss him.

    Posted by Theo Papathanasis from  on  10/21  at  11:39 AM

  2. The Reith Lectures, Freud and the Non European, Beginnings (his most underrated - and some say, including him, I hear, his most important work,) the other posthumous book Secularism and Democratic Criticism.  I cannot think of a thinker/philosopher who had such a personal effect/affect on me (yes, both.0 His was the only death of someone I did not know, yet did weep.  It affected me heavily.

    One of the great ironies of Said is that in his critical/theoretical work, he was carrying on what he himself avowed was a secular Jewish tradition, his influences being German Jewish exiles.  I was personally profoundly affected by this revelation, and Said’s work on exile and origins led to a deeper understanding of the paradox of Jewish/human nature.  His cultural work led me to a greater understanding not only of Palestine, of course, but of Beethoven, Adorno and Glenn Gould.

    This book you reviewed though - pardon me for being longwinded - is perhaps his best.  It is not his “day job” (he once said “I am a literary thinker who got into politics by accident") but I agree that it is his most passionate writing, and his most important.  Reading it is like a grim travelogue of the last few years.  It is like the world made Edward die of a broken heart. 

    I often think of what Said would say/write about events of the last year.  How futile the ABB cause would be with Said forcefully reminding the left of the Democrats’ Israel fealty, while perhaps pushing to undermine that in a more forceful effective way.

    Posted by j cummings from  on  10/21  at  11:47 PM
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