Description

Are intellectuals merely the servants of special interests or do they have a larger responsibility? In these wide-ranging essays, one of our most brilliant and fiercely independent public thinkers addresses this question with extraordinary eloquence. Said sees the intellectual as an exile and amateur whose role it is ‘to speak the truth to power’ even at the risk of ostracism or imprisonment. Drawing on the examples of Jonathan Swift and Theodor Adorno, Robert Oppenheimer and Henry Kissinger, Vietnam and the Gulf War, Said explores the implications of this idea and shows what happens when intellectuals succumb to the lures of money, power, or specialization.

Publisher Review

‘Representations of the Intellectual is a masterly meditation on some of the most important questions with which intellectuals must grapple, notably their relation to power and their responsibility to speak the truth out of a commitment to a bedrock of universal values. It speaks of such issues in a way that is satisfying and at the same time whets the reader’s appetite for more, surely the sign of an important work.’

– Rashid Khalidi, author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine ‘Edward Said defines a corrective way to think about politics, drawing an urgent and absolutely necessary line between individual responsibility and authority of consensus.’

– Joan Didion ‘Edward Said helps us to understand who we are and what we must do if we aspire to be moral agents, not servants of power.’

– Noam Chomsky ‘Edward Said is that rare sort of intellectual who is able to illuminate even the stormiest of human prospects with serene, often revelatory, light that shows us not only the obligatory two sides to every question, but the often overlooked third dimension as well.’

– Gore Vidal ‘Edward Said is among the truly important intellectuals of our century.’

– Nadine Gordimer ‘When Edward Said died in September 2003, after a decade-long battle against leukemia, he was probably the best-known intellectual in the world…. Over three decades, virtually single-handedly, he wedged open a conversation in America about Israel, Palestine and the Palestinians. In so doing he performed an inestimable public service at considerable personal risk.’

– Tony Judt ‘[A]rguably New York’s most famous public intellectual after Hannah Arendt and Susan Sontag, and America’s most prominent advocate for Palestinian rights.’

– Pankaj Mishra, New Yorker