Sayyid in 1983
Intellectuals who venture into the public eye are more or less misunderstood, but the Orientalist scholar Edward Sayyid (1935-2003) and his work must have encountered more than other scholars.
The scholar seen by the world in the media is the embodiment of what Tomwolfe calls "radical fashion" — he was born in Jerusalem, of Arab descent, very sophisticated, has friends on Park Avenue in New York, custom-made clothes on London's Savile Street (some have heard him complain that he is too busy to go to the tailors), people say he supports the left wing of the campus and Palestinian terrorism (in a widely circulated photo, He symbolically threw stones at the disputed Israeli-Lebanese border wall).) Academically, the publication of Oriental studies in 1978 seemed to have opened up the so-called "blame politics", which was a great success and was also heavily criticized.
And only his students and readers can appreciate such a man who is inspired by a passionate moral conscience, and his humanistic knowledge and integrity. Recently, Timothybrennan, a student of Sayyid, published his biography, Placesofmind: Alifeofedwardsaid, which uses extensive material to give the first comprehensive portrait of America's preeminent postwar intellectual.
The title undoubtedly echoes the title of his autobiography, "outofplace", which translates in Chinese as "out of place" and "where the countryside passes". "Place" is the key word in Sayyid's life, and the book focuses on the biography of knowledge, that is, the coordinates of the characters in his thoughts, between him and the "two worlds".
After traveling from Egypt to the United States, Said came to Princeton University, and he was hesitant to pursue music or medicine, so he simply chose a path called "special humanities"—that is, comparative literature, which allowed him to combine his love of literature, music, French, and philosophy.
He then completed his Ph.D. at Harvard, writing a treatise on Conrad under the guidance of comparative literature pioneer Harry Levin. Said later called himself a Comparativeist, and he became obsessed with the medieval Arab historian Ibn Hellerdun, as he was with the Italian Philosopher Vico of the Enlightenment.
He eventually served as a professor of English at Columbia University for 40 years, as Brennan puts it: "If he, like Chomsky, Arendt, and Sontag, was the most prominent intellectual in postwar America, he was the only one of them who made a living teaching literature." Sayyid rejoiced at this fact. ”
At that time, the field of literary research was full of gunpowder. Saeed, like a magpie who loved to collect bits and pieces, borrowed all the major ideological positions of the time: the "new criticism" that focused on textual analysis, Lukács's Marxism, Raymond Williams's socialism, The Liberalism of Lionel Trirlin (both of whom were colleagues in Columbia's English department), and later French structuralism and post-structuralism.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Said became a major disseminator of French theory, writing articles for American readers on the development of ideas on the European continent. However, when American universities experienced the peak of "theory", Saeed rejected French theory and refuted the obscure writing of Derrida and others, indicating that they had withdrawn from the political world.
Mr. Chaomsky's friendship helped Chomsky in writing the tome of Orientalism, Mr. Brennan said, as Chomsky's thorough understanding of the U.S. media's doorways and his relentless criticism of the complicity of academic institutions in the U.S. War on Vietnam, said, and once considered co-authoring with Chomsky a book criticizing the West's false depiction of Middle Eastern culture. However, Chomsky was too busy to complete the project, leaving Saeed to go forward alone, and the result was this Orientalist.
Many of the cases in this book can be traced back to Raymond Williams's Country and The City (1973) and the linguistic theories of the Italian communist intellectual Gramsci in the 1920s.
Both of these may sound as if they had nothing to do with Orientalism. Country and City depicts English country life in the 18th and early 19th centuries, but after this curtain, Williams was interested in how utopian idylls distorted the history of terrain and landscapes. The countryside is opposite to the city, but it is neither the same as backwardness and ignorance, nor the joyful homeland described in the poems; in the same way, the city does not necessarily represent progress. This contradiction and tension between the English countryside and the city reflects the confrontation between the periphery and the global metropolises, which replicate each other on different scales. For Williams, it was the critic, not the poet, who led us out of euphemisms to the climax of his argument: "One of the ultimate models of the city and the countryside is the imperialist system as we know it now." Long before the rise of postcolonial studies, Williams had moved beyond his contemporaries in search of alternative traditions.
The same goes for Gramsci. He was a prisoner of Mussolini, one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, and a culturally Catholic revolutionary in the environment dominated by Jewish Marxists at the time. Geographical conditions determine Gramsci's identity. As a native of the rural regions of southern Italy, he continued his studies in the industrial regions of northern Italy, where he was considered inferior. In Some Cases of the Southern Question (1926), an essay that Sayyid often teaches in his classrooms, Gramsci found some examples of rural and urban conflicts, which Said later called "imaginary geography" in his book Orientalism, in which the land itself became a symbol of discriminatory cultural distinctions.
In addition, the biography describes his contacts with the philosophies of Vico and Adorno. Like Adorno, banishment, in Sayyid's view, is a central metaphor for defining the role of university professors. In The Representative of intellectuals, Sayyid argues that banishment refers to a space of participation and criticism, that he strives not to make others feel good, and that he is an unconventional and embarrassing person on important occasions. The long-standing mystery of Sayyid's life was his ability to stay in and out of the halls of power at the same time, and he had close ties with Palestinian liberation leader Arafat, but the two parted ways after the Oslo peace deal, which demonstrated the humanist's position that changing his mind in public was part of an intellectual's growing understanding of the world.
In the preface, Brennan calls the book an "intellectual biography," and many critics consider it not well written and reads like a doctoral dissertation. There have been comments that the author appears to be talking to others in his field of expertise rather than confronting an eager and curious general reader, such as a typical sentence like this: "There is no doubt that Sayyid's view of musical space was negatively influenced by Schenck's analysis." ”
Compiler: Peng Bo
Editor: Chen Shaoxu