"Said is a brilliant and unique amalgam of scholar, aesthete, and political activist." — Washington Post Book World
"Solidarity before criticism means the end of criticism."
"When one learns something one first performs an act of will, because only by willing to learn can one learn."
"It isn’t enough to speak generally of peace. One must provide the concrete grounds for it, and those can only come from moral vision, and neither from “pragmatism” nor “practicality.” If we are all to live—this is our imperative—we must capture the imagination not just of our people but of our oppressors."
"As the Arab world spins into further incoherence and shame, it is up to every one of us to speak up against these terrible abuses of power... If we accuse Israel of what it has done to the Palestinians, we must be willing to apply exactly the same standards of behavior to our own countries."
The standard way of describing Edward Said (1935-2003) is by listing the things he was that supposedly don't go together: a Palestinian partisan who loved Mozart and well-tailored suits, a fierce political polemicist who wrote detailed analysis of on Cosi fan tutte, "a pure politician and a pure aesthete," in one critic's phrase, as though those were contradictions. The resulting type is indeed a bit self-contradictory. Said's main type was an EIE — the passionate, eloquent, crusading public intellectual, the speaker of truth to power, the man who made a vocation of representing a cause to the world — with a strong LII accent supplying the systematic analytical apparatus that turned his eloquence into a discipline. In fact, I've typed another Edward as this combination, and it does seem to stand as a unique "archetype" of its own, a passionate crusader for a people's dignity with a worked-out intellectual framework to ground it. His drive to influence the world through powerful, emotional communication and a grand historical narrative was combined with a sharp analytical mind.
The political academic role he chose is fine for an LII, but the temperature at which he played it is definitely more EIE. Said did not merely hold positions; he crusaded for them, with a fervor and a gift for public eloquence that made him, virtually single-handedly, the voice of the Palestinian cause in the West. His most influential book of essays defined the intellectual as an exile whose duty is to speak truth to power at the risk of ostracism, and the whole conception is shot through with a near-prophetic sense of mission. Said saw his role not as a niche academic but as a militant intellectual who takes on the world stage. He had a powerful, self-aware, and emotionally suggestive, in a Fe-leading way, persona, and was described as having the "self-confident air of a movie star: the Al Pacino of the academic world", with a forceful personality. He was fully conscious of his own unique, charismatic presence, a public performer who, in the words of his biographer, "fought with molten fury". This passion was infectious, earning him both admiration and enmity. At the same time, he often was "startingly vulnerable", although even this doesn't contradict Ni-ego EIE. Even the stone-throwing-at-Israel incident in Lebanon was a political theater gesture, performed for the image, and he very likely understood the symbolic and provocative charge it would carry, since it was being photographed.
The LII accent is what makes him a credible scholar. Orientalism is an act of system-building: Said constructs a worked-out analytical model of how a whole "discourse" operates, how ostensibly neutral Western scholarship encodes and serves imperial power, and the model was rigorous enough to found an entire academic discipline. This is Ti in its constructive mode — building a framework one believes in and can deploy across hundreds of cases. This rational-ascending-intuitive combination resulted in his conviction (defended to a medical student who demanded to know why he studied literature in a poor and hungry country) that ideas matter for the unfortunate even when they cannot feed them. Orientalism was repeatedly faulted for essentializing — for corralling unlike thinkers into a single camp, for treating "the West" as one unchanging essence from Aeschylus to the nineteenth century.
This totalizing sweep is more EIE, although I have to say that the book contains caveats acknowledging the limits of its own thesis, and across his career he was conciliatory and self-critical enough that radicals attacked him for it — for instance, more aggressive Palestinian nationalists didn't like his famous proposal of a binational Israeli-Palestinian state. The EIE lead generates the totalizing rhetorical sweep; the LII accent keeps inserting the scholar's qualifications. As far as Talanov's new functions go, I think the characterization here already points to both Qi and Qe being quite strong. Mixed types do exist, and Said, while being different from "classical" LII, also deviates in some ways from "classical" EIE. A mix is a more precise claim than either pure label would be. He had an analytical-intellectual conscience that valued criticism as such, including self-criticism, including criticism that embarrassed his own side. This was what made him all the more credible advocate for it.
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