Irish academics and boycott - Intellectuals in the Public Sphere

On November 4th last, the Irish Times published a letter organised by my colleagues and comrades at Academics for Palestine (Academics for Palestine – Academia Against Apartheid), the Irish campaigning group which advocates for the boycott of Israeli institutions of higher education, which I helped to set up with Ronit Lentin, David Landy and Jim Roche in 2014.  This letter protests at the current genocidal campaign being waged by the Israeli Defence Forces in the Gaza Strip, and argues that all Irish universities and colleges should immediately sever any and all ties with their Israeli counterparts.   The letter as published had 633 signatories.    Posted later on the website for Academics for Palestine, it has since garnered hundreds more signatures, bringing the total over 1000.   Here is the letter:

We write as academics and scholars in or from Ireland. The scale and severity of Israel’s current war on the Gaza Strip has exceeded all previous levels of violence in the prolonged and brutal Israeli occupation of Palestine. It is a campaign of ethnic cleansing and, according to many experts, genocidal violence. The incursion by Palestinian armed groups on 7th October included criminal attacks against civilians. But under no circumstances does international law permit the systematic bombardment and collective punishment of civilians in a besieged occupied territory.

The dehumanising language and tropes widely used by Israeli leaders in reference to Palestinians echo those typically associated with genocidal incitement and intent. In the past three weeks, Israel’s military acts have matched those words, killing more than 9,000 Palestinians inside Gaza, including some 3,760 children (more than the annual number of children killed in the rest of the world’s armed conflicts combined). Many more Palestinians are dying from the lack of fuel, water, electricity and medical supplies due to the deliberate blockade. Gaza’s hospitals are barely able to function – no power for ventilators, using vinegar as antiseptic, performing surgeries without anaesthetic – and continue to be hit by Israeli airstrikes. The situation is beyond inhumane.

Leading Jewish and Israeli scholars of Holocaust and genocide studies have called this ‘a textbook case of genocide’. Bosnian genocide experts have likewise stated that “what is happening in Gaza is genocide”. After the first week of Israel’s onslaught, a group of more than 800 international lawyers and genocide scholars were “compelled to sound the alarm about the possibility of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces”, while UN human rights special rapporteurs warned of “the risk of genocide against the Palestinian people”, calling on all states and international organisations to fulfil their duties to prevent genocide. The killing and destruction has only escalated since then. More than 60 UN member states have now used the language of genocide to describe Israel’s attacks on Gaza’s population. This week, the South African foreign minister referenced the Rwandan genocide and “reminded the international community not to stand idle while another genocide is unfolding”. 

With the atrocities in Gaza now added to Israel’s 75 years of colonisation and occupation of Palestinian lands, there should be nothing remotely approximate to “business as usual” continuing. Many Irish universities and EU-funded research projects have active collaborations with Israeli universities. Israeli universities are, in the words of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, “major, willing and persistent accomplices in Israel’s regime of occupation” and its military infrastructures. Meanwhile, several Palestinian universities in Gaza have been destroyed by the Israeli airstrikes, with some 70 academics and 2,000 students among the civilians killed.

We call on all universities in Ireland to immediately sever any existing institutional partnerships or affiliations with Israeli institutions. Those ties should be suspended until the occupation of Palestinian territory is ended, the Palestinian rights to equality and self-determination are vindicated, and the right of Palestinian refugees to return is facilitated. Anything less at this point amounts to tacit support for crimes against humanity.

Some days after the original letter was published, the Irish Times published a letter by other Irish academics, critical of our letter.   AfP wrote to the Irish Times to seek to reply to this critique but our reaction was not published.   It has therefore been posted on the AfP website.  I post it here:

ACADEMICS FOR PALESTINE STATEMENT ON ACADEMIC BOYCOTT & ACADEMIC FREEDOM

Standard

17th November 2023

A letter organised by Academics for Palestine and signed by over 600 scholars calling on universities in Ireland to sever any existing institutional partnerships or affiliations with Israeli institutions was published in The Irish Times on 4th November 2023.  That letter remains open for signature by academics and scholars in or from Ireland via the Academics for Palestine website, and now counts upwards of 900 signatures. 

In response, a small number of academics wrote to express their opposition to our call to suspend ties with Israeli institutions, and instead proposed doing nothing. 

They emphasised the need for dialogue with Israeli academic colleagues, but it is important to be clear that suspending institutional collaborations and complicity does not stop dialogue between scholars – there are many ways and spaces where those dialogues can and do continue to happen. 

The responses to our letter also highlighted the need to stand with critical and dissenting scholars in Israeli universities. Those making that call are very welcome to join Academics for Palestine in the work that we are actively continuing to do on this front – such as intervening in defence of scholars like Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Nurit Peled-Elhanan who have been suspended or threatened with dismissal by their own universities in Israel for voicing anti-war or anti-genocide positions. 

The reality is that while plenty of individual scholars in Israel may not support the occupation or the siege of Gaza, at an institutional level their universities do – in a whole variety of ways. Israeli universities have joint projects with arms and weapons companies. They are heavily involved in the research and development of Israeli military security and surveillance technologies. They train personnel, advisors and lawyers for an army that has now bombed all 11 of Gaza’s universities and killed thousands of students. They hold the corpses of some Palestinians killed by occupation forces at their campus facilities. They are in some cases physically built on illegally expropriated lands in occupied Palestinian territory. And at this moment in time they are heavily engaged in the repression of Gaza solidarity positions adopted by Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian staff and students alike.

So yes, dialogue is important, but entrenched military occupation, colonisation and siege won’t be ended by dialogue between scholars. It will require a whole range of international sanctions and pressure to support the Palestinian movements for freedom and equality. An institutional academic boycott is the one small but concrete step that we as scholars and university communities can take in that direction, and is the one thing our Palestinian colleagues have asked of us. Those who continue to object to it (especially now as the Palestinian death toll continues to mount and the effects of mass displacement and collective punishment get worse by the day) seem scarcely different from those who opposed the boycott of apartheid South Africa for its duration, before later trying to claim they had supported it all along.

'History is the history of the unceasing overthrow of the objective forms which shape the life of man' - Lukács in the Levant

Today I gave a talk on Edward Said's life and work.  The core of the talk was an account of Said's understanding of Georg Lukács's great essay on 'Reification and the Class Consciousness of the Proletariat', and how this essay underpinned much of Said's own 'worldly' and activist criticism.    Said, like Lukács, envisaged critique as emerging most importantly in a moment of crisis - a moment of crisis where the normal 'laws' which govern or seem to govern society and economy are thrown into a new light and shown not to grasp the chaos of actuality.  Further, this moment is the crux moment when the consciousness of the proletariat becomes a full 'class consciousness', and offers the potential for critique, knowledge and change.

I argue that this Lukácsian formulation fed directly into Said's great essay 'Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims', where he suggests that the most powerful or fundamental knowledge of Zionism is that made by its victims, as they come to collective consciousness under its terrifying and awesome subjugation.

Thinking about this essay again today makes me believe that we can use it as a prism through which to think about Gaza.   This is not complicated - it's simply the recognition that Israel's Gaza campaign is the logical endpoint of Zionism's treatment of Palestinians.    The catastrophic damage wrought in Gaza shows us that the desired endpoint of Zionism is either the destruction of the Palestinians, or their being pushed out of the Strip.  Genocide or murderous ethnic cleansing.  A logic of elimination.  Gaza brings out into the open the tremendous violence of state-Zionism, which has always been part of the creation of Israel but which has been, for extended periods at least, hidden or euphemized in forms of ideological obfuscation - socialist Zionism, the kibbutz movement, the two state solution, Camp David, the Oslo process.  We must remember that all states are violent entities, even if only implicitly.   Max Weber's famous definition - that the state is the agency in society which has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence - tells us that all states are constituted by a centralization and unifying of certain violent agencies and the delegitimation, exclusion and elimination of all others.    Those states are most successful which can conceal their violent undergirding.   Israel, being an ethnic state, as argued by Oren Yiftachel, shows and has always showed its violence in its efforts to get rid of the ethnic detritus or waste or surplus which it cannot handle: non-Jews, meaning in Israel overwhelmingly Palestinian Arabs.   Gaza, therefore, offers us a profound knowledge of the meaning of Zionism by bringing out into the open the core logic of Zionism, of its craving for more land and less Palestinians, its need to reify or objectify Palestinians as less than human - 'human animals' - and then to extrude or kill these wasted people, as Zygmunt Bauman has argued of the logics of contemporary capitalism.  Mouin Rabbani has noted how the Israeli authorities have called their cyclical attacks on Gaza 'mowing the lawn' - a form of waste disposal or management.   This is, at the moment, the best that Palestinians can hope for from Zionism.

I am not making any very sophisticated statement.    There is far too much talk, both about the Gaza crisis and about the Israel-Palestine conflict generally, which tells us that it is 'very complex', that it is morally riven, that it's hard to understand.    This has always struck me as a highly problematic vision: it tells us that the situation is beyond the knowledge of most people and beyond their capacity to learn.  And, as Seamus Deane wrote in another locus of late colonialism, to declare that a political problem is too complex for one to hold a clear opinion on it is 'a scandalously unintelligent position'.  Actually, of course, the situation is not so complicated.   A powerful first world state is stamping savagely on a largely defenceless people (and has been doing so since 1948), which does not possess a state or state apparatus, which lacks the protection of a legal jurisdiction or a security machinery, or safe borders, let alone a stable economy and an enabling and humanizing culture.   It's in that sense that we can, in fact, say that what is happening in Gaza at the moment is Zionism, for its Palestinian victims.

Death in the Air

Gaza One Month Later: An Interview with Norman Finkelstein and Mouin Rabbani

Michel Warschawski: “We have gone beyond war crimes in Gaza.”

"Zionists don't speak for me": On Jewish action for Palestinian Liberation

Conor

Waiting for the Barbarians

As we wait - as the 2.3 million people of Gaza wait - for the IDF's 'ground offensive' to begin, with its inevitable enormous suffering and loss of life inflicted, and its potential ethnic cleansing and genocidal effects, civil society in the Middle East and in the Atlantic West is galvanised.    Petitions of writers are organised, protest marches take place, the media is alive with discussion.   Governments, alas, ooze on in their nefarious, dishonest and Orwellian support for the cruelty of the powerful - Netanyahu, Macron, Biden, Sunak, Scholz among the greasiest slugs heedlessly and hypocritically trailing their slime over the international discourse.   If the worst happens, and there are plenty of signs that it may, these craven and shitty politicians will have nowhere to hide.  It will not be possible to say 'I didn't know' or 'If I'd known what was going to happen, I'd have taken action'.   What is happening and going to happen is clear - it is clear all across the Israeli political spectrum - and the time for action has actually already passed.

The London Review of Books, awful as its Irish coverage often is, has long been a place where strong writing on Palestine was published.   Veterans of this work were and are Edward Said and Judith Butler.    The current issue carries excellent pieces by Adam Shatz, the brilliant Israeli architect Eyal Weizman, Amjad Iraqi and Francis Gooding.

Adam Shatz · Vengeful Pathologies · LRB 20 October 2023

Eyal Weizman · Exchange Rate · LRB 2 November 2023

Amjad Iraqi · After the Flood · LRB 21 October 2023

Francis Gooding · The Leaflet · LRB 2 November 2023

Conor

Gaza: Darkness Visible

Hi comrades

This posting consists just of suggested reading, though I realise that most of us now have lots of good places to go for information on Palestine and Gaza.

Bashir Abu-Manneh, brilliant Palestinian scholar at the University of Kent, and a contributing editor at Jacobin, explains a great deal in this superb interview/article:

We Must Mobilize Against the Carnage Being Inflicted on the Palestinian People

Daniel Finn, features editor at Jacobin, has published several excellent articles:

Israel’s Western Backers Are Still Running Interference for Netanyahu’s War Crimes

Israel’s Western Allies Have Done Everything Possible to Criminalize Nonviolent Resistance

The Verso site has several excellent articles on its blog:

Gideon Levy, distinguished Israeli columnist at Ha'aretz:

Israel Can’t Imprison Two Million Gazans Without Paying a Cruel Price

Shadi Chalesh

For the last time: Rejecting the conversation ‘between the sword and the neck’

Richard Seymour

The equanimity of lunatics

Alberto Toscano

The War on Gaza and Israel’s Fascism Debate

Conor

Eyeless in Gaza - Scattered Thoughts on the Present Crisis

I. The State of Israel may be about to commit grave crimes against humanity - ethnic cleansing or genocide - against the people of Gaza.   Warnings about this terrible and apocalyptic prospect come from sources as various as Jewish Voice for Peace, the American Middle East news site Mondoweiss, and the respected Palestinian politician Mustafa Bargouthi. 

Here is the account of the Gaza Strip given by the renowned Israeli human rights organisation, B'Tselem.  This is not up-to-the-minute, but gives essential background:

The Gaza Strip | B'Tselem

And here is a video lecture by Sara Roy, a brilliant scholar of Gaza:

(220) Gaza: When is life grievable? Personal reflections on decades of research in Palestine by Sara Roy - YouTube

Here is Dutch scholar Sai Englert on the impending threat of genocide:  

Sai Englert, Impending Genocide — Sidecar (newleftreview.org)

II.  Irish politicians and commentators, and politicians and commentators everywhere, keep on talking about Israel's 'right to defend itself', but committing crimes against humanity against the civilian population of a territory of which Israel is the occupier is not a mode of self-defence.

III. Irish politicians and commentators, and politicians and commentators everywhere, keep on talking about Israel's 'right to defend itself', but they very rarely talk about the right of the Palestinians to self-determination,  and the right of an occupied population to resistance, including armed resistance.

IV.   Many commentators make much of Hamas, according to its charter, being 'sworn to Israel's destruction', as a BBC website puts it.   There are a couple of things to say about this.  First, while it is true that Hamas sees Israel and Zionism as its enemy, it must be recognised that it has done very little to achieve this alleged aim.  This is because it is incapable of doing much, militarily, to achieve this aim.   Hamas's Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades constitute a popular resistance militia, or 'terrorist group'.   But nothing in this formation's military capacity could bring about Israel's demise.   On the other hand, while Israel may not be 'sworn to destroy' the Palestinian people', in some explicitly articulated doctrine, its very presence and juridical being is predicated on exclusion of non-Jews, who are, in practical terms, Palestinian Arabs.  Further, it is equipped with every modern weapon which such a task might require, and it has done a very great deal to scatter, dispossess, expel, break and destroy the Palestinian people, from 1947 to this day.   What is more important - a political-ideological document, or the 'facts on the ground'?   The facts on the ground suggest that Israeli policy is driven by the intention to ruin the Palestinian nation in every way possible - political and military but also economic, cultural, legal and social.   This is what should be our focus, not the Hamas charter.

V. In Terrorism and the Ethics of War (2010), Stephen Nathanson argues that condemnation of terrorism is really only credible when combined with sincere. unbiased and consistent opposition to the targeting of the innocent, no matter the identity of the killers or the victims, and no matter the cause.   This puts most of the condemnation of Hamas we've been hearing or reading in the non-credible category.

VI. Those who demand of Palestine activists that before any other discussion of the Gaza crisis can take place, they condemn Hamas, need to be challenged as to their adhering to the tenets in V above.  Where were these blowhards, when the opportunity was presented to condemn the treatment of Gaza over the last 15 years?   Where were these blowhards when Israelis murdered or lynched hundreds of Palestinians in the last year?    The fact is that the display of moral outrage comes very cheap, and it is always more about virtue signalling and anti-intellectual self-pleasuring than any real thought or understanding.  It nearly always is unrelated to a real connection to the people or situation in whose interest it is apparently deployed - indeed, it stands in for and occludes such a connection.

VII.   Defenders of Israel who ask Palestine activists not to endlessly have recourse to the past to justify their positions need to cop themselves on and remember the Holocaust.

VIII. Liberals who tell us that violence is committed by 'both sides' need to remember that what we are observing in reality is a rich first-world state, with an economy predicated on advanced technology, with one of the most formidable military apparatuses in the world, which is armed with unacknowledged nuclear weapons, crushing a people without a state, without a standing army or airforce or navy, a people impoverished, scattered and abused, denied most of its rights, dispossessed of its homeland, and armed only with rifles, shoulder-held grenade-launchers and crude unguided rockets of the most limited effectiveness.  The 'conflict' is not one of equals, and never has been.   As Frantz Fanon once suggested, the native knows that liberal Western 'objectivity' will always be used against him.

IX.   In the actions it has taken since the weekend, and in the actions it seems about to take, Israel has enjoyed almost total support from 'the international community' - that is, from the United States and its European allies, including Britain, Germany and France.  If ethnic cleansing or genocide are committed by Israel, those other countries will be complicit in these crimes against humanity.  

X.   Israel removed its illegal settlements from Gaza in 2005, in a unilateral 'disengagement' plan led by Ariel Sharon's government.   But Israel has constructed a security fence around the entire Strip (other than along the Egyptian border), and it controls the airspace and the coastline.  Israel controls all food supplies, medical supplies, fuel, and electricity for Gaza.  Dov Weisglass, a former adviser to the Israeli government, suggested in 2006 of the regulation of produce allowed into Gaza that 'the idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger'.   An Israeli report, compiled in 2008, but repressed by the government until 2012,  revealed that calculations had been made of the calorific intake Gazans needed to avoid starvation and malnutrition.    Yet Israel, precisely because of this extraordinary amount of control of the Strip, and in spite of the 'disengagement', remains in international law the occupying power.  An occupying power has, in fact, a duty of care to the civilian population under its control.   Reducing that population to a condition of 'bare life', in Giorgio Agamben's famous term, is a crime against humanity.

XI.  Returning to VI. above, when challenged to 'condemn Hamas', one needs to pause and think.  What exactly is at stake in such a demand?  What lies behind it?  What does the person making the demand hope to achieve by it?    It seems to me to be a very particular kind of rhetorical-ideological manoeuvre.   Firstly, in any discussion or debate, to make a forcible demand of one's interlocutor is to demand control of the discussion.   Second, it is implicit in the demand that the person to whom it is made will be reduced, weakened, arm-twisted, by both the request and the problem of reacting to it, whether or not a 'condemnation' is issued.  Third, the language of 'condemnation' is a moral or ethical language, not a political language, and so the demand seeks to shift the ground of discussion from politics to morality.  Fourth, the demand is present-ist: it seeks to strip a concrete human and political situation of any of the wider frameworks which help to constitute that situation.  Implicit in the demand is the idea that trying to think or learn any kind of background or context, any kind of establishing historical narrative, is irrelevant or even, of course, immoral.   To talk of the past or of context is, apparently, to indulge in 'whataboutery', or, as the historians call it, counterfactual speculation.  The point, though, is that one party to a purported discussion, in issuing the demand to 'condemn Hamas', is arrogating to themselves the right to police that discussion.  And it is incorrect to suggest that seeking knowledge about an action amounts to justifying that action - indeed, a proper 'condemnation' of an action requires a full understanding of what that action was and where it came from.

The overall conclusion one comes to, then, is that the demand to 'condemn Hamas' is more a matter of form than of content.   The claim of the person making the demand to be concerned about the situation in Israel or the situation in Gaza, is fictional.   The demand is made as a debating point; it is not made from or even seeking to take up, a coherent moral position.   The demand should, therefore, be refused.

Here is Judith Butler, in the London Review of Books, saying similar things to me, but saying them better:

The Compass of Mourning

And Frédéric Lordon, also:

Totalitarian catalysis

Conor

"What is critical consciousness, if not an unstoppable predilection for alternatives?" - Remembering Edward Said

Twenty years ago today, Edward Said finally succumbed to the leukaemia he had so bravely battled for the previous decade.     His early death - he was only 67 - was greeted with sadness and dismay by his allies and friends, and no doubt with a grim glee by his enemies.   I can still remember getting the news by phone from a scholar friend, and feeling that the world would never be quite the same again.

I've spent much of my adult life reading Said, and, I hope, learning from him.  I first became aware of him as a third year undergraduate, when I heard about this book of his called Orientalism, which was represented to me as the greatest Foucauldian book by someone other than Foucault.    This was long before the internet or Amazon or other modes of rapid access to books, and my first copy of Orientalism was brought to me by a friend and former teacher from Minneapolis.   Now I would say that Orientalism is only superficially a Foucauldian book, but one's knowledge - one's critical consciousness - has to begin somewhere.

A year or so later, I took a Master's degree at University College Dublin, and began to read Said properly.   I was very fortunate that teaching me on that MA programme was a trio of brilliant and important scholars - Seamus Deane, Declan Kiberd and Thomas Docherty - who took criticism very seriously, and who thought with rigour and intelligence about what it meant to be, or to try to be, an intellectual.   Not merely this but Deane and Kiberd had been crucial to the mediation into Irish literary studies of what we then called 'postcolonial theory': Kiberd, after all, had invited Said to the Yeats Summer School in 1986, and Deane had published the resulting talk as a Field Day pamphlet in 1988.  In those days, this 'theory' mostly consisted still in the work of Said and Spivak and Bhabha - postcolonial studies was still something relatively new and radical in the Irish academy and it was not yet a full orthodoxy elsewhere in the Anglophone world.    I gravitated to Said most of all - not only because his writing, while never simplistic, avoided the extraordinary obscurantism and neologisms with which the Indian critics larded their discourse, but I also was excited by the sense that, of the three, Said was most clearly an intellectual, an activist-writer who reached and addressed much wider audiences than those of the seminar room.

I read Orientalism with Kiberd, and immediately was compelled by it - the erudition, the wonderful readings it contains (those of French writers such as Nerval and Lamartine and Flaubert in particular), its polemical verve and urgency.  I could see, too, how the discourse of 'Orientalism' could be compared fruitfully to that of 'Celticism': that body of colonial themes and ideas which suffused much writing in and about Ireland in the nineteenth century, and which could be politicized by English figures such as Arnold and Froude, and their Irish antagonists such as Yeats and Synge.   

But I also independently was reading the book which I now consider superior to Orientalism, and to be  Said's masterpiece: The World, the Text, and the Critic.   The World, as I'll call it, is a collection of essays Said published between 1969 and 1982, and it's mostly concerned with the politics of intellectuals in the academy.     If Orientalism's scandalous success was partly attributable to its steely intervention in the realm of European and American ideas and policy in the Middle East, The World turned its critical weapons on Said's own institution - the university and the discourse of critique.   Part of what was so exciting about these essays - 'Roads Taken and Not Taken in Contemporary Criticism', 'Travelling Theory', 'Reflections on American "Left" Literary Criticism' - was that Said could write convincingly about the then-new and vogue-ish poststructuralist scholars in the ascendant in America and Britain - Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Barthes - while showing himself to be equally comfortable with the themes and  ideas of the New Criticism and, even more, the great tradition of Romance philology, whose legatee he could justly claim to be. This was the world of Leo Spitzer, Erich Auerbach, Karl Vossler and Ernst Robert Curtius, extraordinary scholars who helped in the early twentieth-century to invent modern comparative literature.   Furtheremore, Said was also imbued with ideas taken from the greatest names of Western Marxism - Lukács and Gramsci - and these in particular helped him work out his devastating readings of the ever-widening gulf between the radical rhetoric of the 'New New Criticism', and its actual and dreary institutionalization and self-reification in journals, curricula, conferences and departments.   Said could notice all of this, and call powerfully for what he called a 'worldly' criticism, which was, and is, a criticism which is aware of the relationship between the classroom and the street, and seeks to bridge it and analyze it.   

I should admit that it took me a while to grasp fully the implications of this work of Said's, and that I initially read him in a rather instrumental and callow way - when I wanted to investigate Foucault's ideas but recoiled from the difficulty of some of his texts, I turned to Said for a handy gloss.   When I wanted to understand Gramsci, I turned to Said for a handy gloss.  I would find my interest in cultural geography fired up by his spatialized criticism in Culture and Imperialism, and my reading of Adorno was stimulated by his lucid readings of the Western classical music tradition in Musical Elaborations.   Later, of course, I came to realise that Said was always a heterodox Foucauldian, that his geography was insufficiently grounded in the material realities of capital, that his reading of Adorno was arguably incomplete.  But I always went back to Said's work and read it again, each time learning a little more, each time maybe understanding it a bit more, and gradually allowing it its own integrity and heuristic power.   Said was berated so often by putative allies for being insufficiently Foucauldian or Marxist or, indeed, humanistic, that one came to long for due attention to be paid to the constructive and innovative and effective things he did and thought with Foucault or Lukács or Adorno or Auerbach, and his capacity to conjugate them together.   Equally peculiarly, such critique still continues in some quarters, making one wonder just what is at stake in such repetitive polemics.  Somehow, Said's putatively sympathetic critics need at once to possess him and to renounce and apparently transcend him and his work.  

I became familiar with some of the developing literature about Said's work.  I learned from Abdirahman Hussein's splendid reading of the whole oeuvre.  I thrilled to Paul Bové's appropriation of Said in his magnificent Intellectuals in Power.   I winced at Aijaz Ahmad's withering and doctrinaire critique in In Theory.   It dawned on me that Said was, in fact, not a Marxist or a post-structuralist - he'd never toe the line that Ahmad demanded or that Robert Young demanded.   Rather, Said was a radicalized humanist, who had realised with Gaston Bachelard that a humanism that did not press itself up to its own limits was not worthy of the name.   

It took me a while to read Said's first book, on a writer who obsessed him throughout his life, and who happens to be one of my own favourites - Joseph Conrad.   It took me a while, too, to read Said on Palestine: I read the literary criticism long before I read After the Last Sky or The Question of Palestine.     I realised immediately, though, how he had brilliantly deployed the weapons he'd acquired as a critic in his political writing - 'Zionism from the Standpoint of its  Victims', a major chapter of The Question of Palestine, has to be one of the most impressive instances of the 'worldly' criticism Said advocated so passionately.  

Timothy Brennan's biography of Said, Places of Mind, portrayed a fiercely engaged and active life.    Reception of the book has not been without controversy - with such a subject, how could it be otherwise? - but I enjoyed it very much.   I might have wished for a little more of the private man - someone who clearly lived, felt, acted, argued so intensely, right up to his very last hours, could only be fascinating and intriguing.  I myself met Said on a few occasions but could not properly claim to be a friend of his.    But his brilliance, warmth, and, in spite of the big ego, his interest in the people around him, no matter their high prestige or complete lack of importance - these were immediately obvious, and wonderful and admirable traits.    The world is, as many said at the time of Said's death, a quieter, dimmer, less interesting place without him.   

For a while after the death, I wondered what we, what I, could do without Said in the world.   And then, with colleagues and friends, and with all due modesty, I realised that the best way to honour his memory was to try to do similar or proximate or affiliated work, and to try to think my way to my own positions as he, autodidact in the style of Vico that he was, had sought to do.

To help with the task of remembering Said today, I am posting five pieces here.  Two are my own - my review of Tim Brennan's biography, in the Dublin Review of Books, and an essay commissioned by Dan Finn at Jacobin on Said's worldly intellectual performance.    The third article is the excellent and intelligent review of Places of Mind in the Boston Review, by Esmat Elhalaby.   The last two articles are the wonderful and heartfelt obituaries by Alexander Cockburn at CounterPunch (which never fails to make me emotional), and Michael Wood at the London Review of Books.  

My DRB review of Places of Mind: 

Intellectual Insurrection

My Jacobin essay:

Edward Said Showed Intellectuals How to Bring Politics to Their Work

Elhalaby's review of Places of Mind:

The World of Edward Said

Michael Wood at the LRB:

 Edward Said

And Alex Cockburn at Counterpunch:

Edward Said: a Mighty and Passionate Heart

Conor