Edward W. Said's Legacy

Abstract

Drive apartment near Columbia University. Reprinted in this little book, they were quite wide ranging in topic, moving from Said's youth prior to coming to the US, through his abiding interest in music and literature, to his engagement with the question of Palestine (his relation to the PLO and Yasser Arafat), the reception of his work, his idea of the relationship between the intellectual and politics, his view of things American, and, at the end, his identity as an exile. As usual, Said in these conversations is remarkably rational yet passionate in his responses, enormously erudite, yet lucid, a sophisticated intellectual who nevertheless comes across as a profoundly humanhumane and finitehuman being. More specifically, Said is consistently contrapuntal in his readings of the hegemonic truths of the issues he discusses with his interlocutor, whether these pertain to Israel's monolithic representation of the Palestinians or the Arab world's monolithic representation of the Western world. He is always, out of principle, evokingbringing to center stage that which the hegemonic discourse leaves unsaid (silences) or relegates to the irrelevant margins, thus always preserving the question from the brutal answerers. This, however, without forgetting, as is the wont of liberals or pragmatists, that opposing ideas or positions in this world are not equal, that some are infused with power and some are not.