Edward Said: The Politics of an Oppositional Intellectual

Political scientist Hovsepian (Palestinian State Formation) delivers an incisive portrait of his “dear friend,” the Palestinian American activist and theorist Edward Said (1935–2003). Writing warmly of Said’s “intellectual honesty and commitment to truth,” Hovsepian asks “How does Said’s humanism inform his politics?” To answer this question, he analyzes how Said, as a thinker who embraced a “philosophical anarchism... suspicious of statist authority,” still “chose to represent Palestine,” viewing the cause as a “test-case for true universalism.” Said also made his exile from Palestine into a guiding personal philosophy, thinking of himself as “one whose ideas must remain unhoused.” Hovsepian traces how this perspective of humanism-in-exile undergirded Said’s seminal writings on Orientalism—in which Said, from his “unhoused” viewpoint, provides a “contrapuntal reading” of the European classics that deconstructs the ways in which “European high culture” is “complicit with imperialism”—as well as in his clashes with hawkish public intellectuals during the 1991 Gulf War and 2003 Iraq War, in whose rhetoric Said noted an Orientalist framework that dehumanized Arabs. Hovsepian concludes with a stirring look at Said’s end-of-life study of “Late Style,” or writers’ and artists’ work in their final years that “confronts mortality,” when Said wrote inspiringly of “the importance of resisting resignation at moments of defeat.” It’s a moving tribute to an intellectual giant and a first-rate work of scholarship in its own right. (June)