Bookforum has an excellent piece on Edward Said and Frank Kermode’s latest books.
My favourite bit:
For Said, humanism is never a fixed or totalizing system of belief; nor is it an adjunct to sterile tradition. “When,” he asks, “will we stop allowing ourselves to think of humanism as a form of smugness and not as an unsettling adventure in difference, in alternative traditions, in texts that need a new deciphering within a much wider context than has hitherto been given them?” He notes that humanism is hardly a pure product of the West, referring us to the Islamic textual practices of medieval Muslim universities, which were handmaidens of the European Renaissance lorded over by the two Blooms.
In Said’s view, the genuine humanist is someone who heeds tradition while at the same time subjecting it to merciless scrutiny. This is not a recipe for contentment, it is a prescription for agony. It is sometimes hard to tell if Said took any joy from his passions; he could be a humorless writer and had an irritating weakness for bien pensant gestures. Always on the lookout for unpleasant collusions and squalid complicities, Said labored under a heavy burden, namely, how one should reconcile pleasure with political obligation. Thus his version of humanism is burdened with an enormous responsibility. Said shuns “lazy or laissez-faire feel-good multiculturalism” but calls on humanism to do nothing less than “excavate the silences, the world of memory, of itinerant, barely surviving groups, the places of exclusion and invisibility.”
