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immigrant communities in the North/West, but also in the South/East. Inanother instance in Out of Place, Said

discloses concealing his command ofArabic as a pupil at the Cairo School forAmerican Children. Eventually, he endsup not feeling fully at home in the Arabiclanguage, despite its being his mothertongue (Al-Ahram Weekly, February1218, 2004).

This process also points to the centralityof concepts such as place, time, andtravel. The importance of places, no less

than time, in Saids view, results from thefact that territory is the place that you doit, i.e., where one does things (Boundary

2, Spring 1993). Moreover, for him,an uncompromised mode of thinking,especially when political, keeps oneitinerant a traveller. Travellers suspendthe claim of customary routine in order toexperience new rhythms and rituals. Thetraveller unlike the Sultan who mustguard one place and defend its frontiers

traverses territory and thus abandons

The Urge to Recall Edward W. Saids ThoughtToday

By Adania Shibli

Upon his death in New York onSeptember 25, 2003, Edward W. Saida public intellectual. During his lifetime,he produced a body of work fromOrientalism (1978) to On Late Style

(posthumously, 2006) that has retainedits resonance until today, in a variety of

Indeed, tributes to the late Said,conferences and symposia held byeducational and cultural institutionsto discuss and explore his work, areall a sign of his immense, continuingcaused paradigm shifts in the humanitiesand the social sciences. However,his ideas have also trespassed theboundaries of academic discussions.During the political revolts and upheavalsin several Arab countries, revolutionariesturned his concepts into their slogans,

writings on the walls of Tunisian streets-in-revolt. In so doing, revolutionariesnot only thwarted a regime but alsothe possibility of Saids thought beingtreated as a status quo, as a frozenunderstanding and as institutionalisedinterpretations, through which he becameconcepts, as enacted by the authorityof academia and certain intellectualdiscussions.

One of the underlying endeavourswhich can be traced throughout Saidscorpus of work, and which remainsparticularly relevant to todays concerns,

be they political, social or economic,is going beyond the logic of binary,oppositional relations. Such relationsunfortunately have come to dominatethe understanding and analysis of socialrelations and interactions. Its simplestorder of an I/Us, (whoever this might be)against an Other, is what Said repeatedlyproblematised and criticised. Throughoutthis effort to go beyond dichotomies,

Said investigated concepts such asknowledge, power, representation,place, time, and travel. Given thatseveral of Saids ideas are alreadyquite well-known, such as his critique ofOrientalism, or his investigation of the

relation between culture and imperialism,the following recalls some of the lesscelebrated, often more personal, of histreatments of the above concepts.

To start with, one may recall whatSaid writes in Out of Place (1999) abouthimself, being a Palestinian and an

American, as well as his being in twolanguages Arabic and English bothacting as his mother tongue and bothinforming his own language in such away that he was never able to graspor to separate. This type of being canbe found more and more nowadays, asthe West/North has large non-Westernimmigrant communities in its midst for

of cultures and societies have becomehighly volatile, extremely contentiousnames counter-cultures: an ensembleof practices associated with variouskinds of outsiders, including not onlyimmigrants, but also the poor, artisticbohemians, workers, and rebels. It isalso important to note here that Said,via Fanon, has effectively argued fora social consciousness in place of anational consciousness, which, accordingto him, is the reactive, atavistic assertion

of a separate colonial or native identity.This urge to seek social consciousnessover national consciousness evidentin his call for a one-state solution tothe question of Palestine/Israel anddissociating it from imperialism.

Otherwise, as repercussions ofexclusion, there will result a split in theself, especially amongst members of

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according to Said, deviating from alreadyknown and assigned paths is an act of

liberation. It results in fugitive momentsof freedom (Out of Place, p. 24).

At the same time, spaces have amulti-layered nature resulting from beingsituated out of a place or inside it, and nothaving a right to it or to its opposite, whichpoints to Saids experience in relationto Palestine: the unreconciled duality I

so many distorted lives, including mine[] its status as an admirable countryforthem (but of course not for us) (Outof Place, p. 142).

On this occasion, Said goes on todescribe his familys, especially hisfathers, reaction to the loss of Palestine, a

place the family would lose the possibilityto return to after its occupation in 1948 andits re-designation as the state of Israel.Saids father, with the fall of Palestine,seems to have resorted to playing cards.Recalling sitting beside his father, a sortof punishment for misbehaving, Said

dispiriting blankness; an act signifyingminimal emotional investment; a way tosubliminate anxieties; an escape from aconfrontation with reality, all requiring theleast words: Silence. Said thus concludedand moral subordination, increasing thesense of anothers authority over oneself.

As he watched his father play cards, Saiddissociated himself from the situationby imagining. The imagination, for him,works as a release from the authority ofothers in reality.

So true power structures exist withgreat destructive effects, several of whichSaid himself has well exposed. Yet he

also sees opportunities and possibilitiesto counter and modify them. Suchopportunities can be traced in Saidscase even in the least seeming places,behaviours, or emotions. Fragility, pain,

fear, and loneliness are all recurringfeelings in his early life, but also later,

when physical, namely his illness,and sometimes, emotional weaknesscharacterised certain periods of his being.Facing critique through disembodiment,biting nails, all surface in his life as meansof resistance against the powerful, be ithis father or educational institutions he

attended. The very techniques associatedwith weakness, such as failing andmisbehaving, up to stone throwingand playing music (the latter beingand wordlessly), could indeed helpfoster what Said describes on a differentoccasion as a spirit not of conformity butof resistance; of individual agency ratherthan of collective determinism, preciselyin situations of excessive authority anddomination, where one lacks the physical

To Said, forcing one to accept thatbeyond what is being presented as anabyss, about which we can do nothing,

is an apparatus for putting the potentiallycritical mind to sleep. However, to riska way, building a bridge, imaginativelyand critically, is what would put a halt topassivity, to the sense of defeat, and tohopelessness.

Text is based on Shiblis researchwhile conceptualising and curatingthe symposium A Journey of Ideas

Across: In Dialogue with Edward Said,to be held in Berlin, at the Houseof World Cultures, October 31 toNovember 2, 2013, http://www.hkw.de/en/programm/2013/edward_said_konferenz/veranstaltungen_83195/

veranstaltungsdetail_93111.php. Aspart of the symposium, Dialogue Caf-Ramallah, in cooperation with A.M.Qattan Foundation and the Goethe-Institut Ramallah, will host a paneldiscussion on November 2, 2013.