Edward Said - Life and Critique

All my readers know that I am a keen reader and admirer of Edward Said.   I've been reading his work for a long time, and I've written about his work a fair bit.    So I've also got a good grip on the expanding literature on Said.   And in that literature, no writer has been of greater importance for me than Timothy Brennan.   A former student of Said's, Brennan has been writing intelligently and in an original way about Said since the early 1990s.   In a body of work which is still often composed of ideological or disciplinary policing of Said - he is insufficiently Marxist or Foucauldian, or his readings of Dickens or Austen or Kipling displease the professional Victorianists or theorists of the novel - Brennan's essays and treatments of Said have always stood out as reaching beyond these local critiques and taking hold of the major issues at stake in his work and positions.   This is not to say that Brennan has been uncritical - as a Marxist scholar, he has taken Said's partial appropriations of Lukacs, Gramsci or Adorno on and pointed out his weaknesses with a finely judged mix of rigour and sympathy.

Accordingly, when I learned a few years ago that Brennan was writing a biography of Said, I was very excited (not to mention a little envious).   Here was a writer who I felt could do justice to the wide range of Said's interests and activities.   And Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said is no disappointment - it powerfully and often radically illuminates aspects of Said's work and thought which have mostly hitherto been hidden.    No one book that is not of Proustian proportions could cover 'all' of Said's life, thoughts or doings.   Timothy Brennan's book gives us a rich portrait to learn from and explore.   

I've reviewed this book for the redoubtable Dublin Review of Books, Ireland's best literary journal.    Warm thanks go to Maurice Earls for his help in making this review possible.    

Conor

Intellectual Insurrection

Academics and intellectuals - Adorno, eyes, and splinters

Dear old Teddy. His sheer grumpiness, his sheer will to look at the world and its phenomena not just from one angle, not just from two angles, but perpetually from multiple angles - his prismatic vision - remains an inspiration at a time when 'scholarly work' consists more and more of dreary truisms and moralisms, delivered in the boilerplate prose of managed automatons. Adorno holds all such threats at bay. Here he is pouring scorn on the academic world of late capitalism. He may have written this - Section 84 of Minima Moralia - in the middle 1940s, but the integrity of his vision remains, and remains compelling. 

Conor 

Timetable. – Few things differentiate the mode of life appropriate to intellectuals so deeply from that of the bourgeoisie than the fact that the former do not recognize the alternative between labor and pleasure. The labor which need not, in order to cope with reality, initially do all the evil to its subject, which it later does to others, is pleasure even in the desperate exertion. The freedom, which it means, is the same which bourgeois society reserves solely for recuperation and through such regimentation at once takes back. Conversely, those who know of freedom find everything about what this society tolerates as pleasure unbearable, and outside of their work, which to be sure includes what the bourgeoisie displace to the holidays as “culture,” refuse to engage in substitute pleasures. “Work while you work, play while you play” [in English in original] – this counts as one of the founding principles of repressive self-discipline. The parents who wanted their children to bring home good grades as a matter of prestige, could least bear it when the latter read too long at night or, in the parents’ judgment, intellectually overexerted themselves. Yet out of their foolishness spoke the genius of their class. The doctrine drilled in since Aristoteles, of moderation as the virtue befitting reason, is among other things an attempt, to establish the socially necessary division of human beings into functions independent of each other so firmly that none of these functions would get the idea of crossing over to others and calling to mind actual human beings. One could no more imagine Nietzsche in an office, the secretary answering the telephone in the foyer, sitting at a desk until five, than playing golf after a full days work. Under the pressure of society, only the cunning intertwining of happiness and labor would leave the door open for actual experience. It is constantly less tolerated. Even the so-called intellectual occupations are being utterly divested of pleasure, by their increasing resemblance to business. Atomization advances not only between human beings, but also in the single individual [Individuum: individuated], in its life-spheres. No fulfillment may be attached to labor, which would otherwise lose its functional obscurity in the totality of purpose, no spark of sensibility [Besinnung] may fall in free time, because it might spring into the work-world and set it aflame. While labor and pleasure are becoming more and more similar in their structure, they are at the same time separated ever more strictly by invisible lines of demarcation. Pleasure and Spirit [Geist] are being driven out of both in equal measure. In one as the other, brute seriousness and pseudo-activity prevails.