Timothy Brennan > Quotes

“It is not simply as release or play, in other words, that popular music saves society from its routine murders; it is not just relief from the long day's work or the joy that comes from cutting loose or the affirmation of community that makes it attractive, although all of these play their parts. In the Americas, popular music is a mission and strategy to recover the deep theoretical roots that extend far into the past and constitutes nothing less an alternative history of Western civilization.”
― Timothy Brennan, Secular Devotion: Afro-Latin Music and Imperial Jazz

“As soon as the AUC experience was over, he announced he would spend a year in Palestine. His father did not believe him. When it was clear that Wadie was serious, Said tried to fathom the significance of the act, because he himself had been unwilling to do the same, even though there had been some unstated pressure to make such a gesture.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“By the end of the 1990s, postcolonial studies was no longer simply an academic field. Its watchwords—“the other,” “hybridity,” “difference,” “Eurocentrism”—could now be found in theater programs and publishers’ lists, museum catalogs, and even Hollywood film. It had become part of the general culture, partly due to his influence, which posed a problem because he denied that a postcolonial condition even existed. “I’m not sure if in fact the break between the colonial and post-colonial period is that great,” he said, and later confessed to a colleague, “I don’t think the ‘post’ applies at all.”26 The duty of the critic was to show that colonialism was still thriving, yesterday in India and Egypt, today in South Africa, Nicaragua, and Palestine.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“Said was in this way caught between stodgy traditionalists upset by anything new and a vanguard that to him had thrown out some of the most critical thinking of the past on the grounds that it was white and male. He had become the nominal father of a field that he was reluctant to disown but that no longer resonated with his vision.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“Or, altogether differently, because writing was for him a sensual experience, it might have been that the different tactilities jostled him out of an impasse.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“With a reading knowledge of Arabic, French, Italian, Latin, German, and Spanish, Said possessed the skills to become a comparatist in Levin’s mold and like him was eager to steer English studies more in the direction of world literature.96”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“The motives of postcolonial studies, by contrast, might be described as a general loathing for a Western entity vaguely dubbed “modernity.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“Apart from meaning simply a period of art (roughly 1880 to 1940), “modernism” referred to a loose ensemble of aesthetic positions and artistic attitudes including avant-garde formal experimentalism, hatred of democracy, and revolt against mass culture.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“Already enfeebled by age and surrounded by pro-Israeli protégés, Sartre remained mostly silent at the event until shamed into speaking by Said, at which point he could manage only platitudes.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“Despite their many solidarities, the two public intellectuals—already close friends by the early 1970s—held opposing views on key aspects of language. The setting for the conflict arose a year earlier in Said’s elaborate treatment of Chomsky’s linguistic revolution in an essay Said titled “Linguistics and the Archeology of Mind” (1971), in which he provocatively pitted him against a thinker Chomsky considered a charlatan, the post-Freudian analyst and quintessential French theorist Jacques Lacan.76 For his part, Chomsky recalled being “utterly astonished that Ed could even begin to take this stuff seriously”—“this stuff” referring to language as pure creative expression or, in Lacan’s case, as the mirror of the unconscious and the structure of social and libidinal desire.77 Said respectfully held his ground.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“Authors may at times read their work aloud, but essentially they compose in silence and their audience consumes the work in silence.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“His closest companions at Princeton were mostly Jewish and urban, the children of store owners or professionals, whereas his roommates tended to be from obscure towns in the Midwest and working class.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“The process of composing the book had been fitful. He would get up in the morning, pace around, fiddle with things.50 His daughter, Najla, recognized the pattern later in life, her father always anxious, restless and energetically moving, tortured. His work, then as later, took place in spurts.51 “I felt the freedom of virtually creating the subject as I went along . . . Thus, I discussed what I wanted to, no prescribed material, no ritualistic attempts to ‘cover’ scholarly studies, etc.”52 A few years on, he would confide to a younger colleague that he had had doubts about ever being able to write a book conceived whole from beginning to end: “I think I’m good at essays, like Barthes’ fiches [index cards], assembled into a book.”53 Because he managed in this case a unified whole, however much the seams showed, the book always remained a project close to his heart.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“For many of his colleagues, humanism had long conjured images of slave owners lecturing colored people on the benefits of reason. If the term had been unpopular in the early days of his career, by the beginning of the twenty-first century it had become for almost everyone around him a slogan that evoked every crime of Western civilization. University administrators still solemnly invoked it, but that discredited it even more.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“Of all his modes of working, writing was the least fragmented. His essays typically took from two to three days to write and went through three drafts of minor corrections. With some exceptions, he does not seem to have toiled over phrasing or diction. His prose was never sculpted, driven more by ideas than by form, although alert to a mixture of high diction and informality, foreign phrases and colloquialisms. In any case, it flowed out of him in more or less the form it appeared in print, a valuable talent as he faced new challenges in the New York media of the 1980s.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“On the personal side, even before his mother died, women were his closest confidantes, a fact that established his deeply felt personal and professional indebtedness to the insights that only women brought to his life and the special ease he felt around them.117 When he sought counsel, it was to women, not men, that he turned.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“Literary politics was rather to be understood in terms of the role of human eloquence in the formation of polities as well as the textual record of their rise and decline.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“His investments, all the same, were personal, not only intellectual. Said began intense analysis as an undergraduate at Princeton and remained in therapy until the end of his life.87 The turmoil over a father he perceived as distant and unsympathetic, the steep sexual learning curve as he escaped his mother’s smothering embrace, a profound insecurity about his own identity, the violent oscillation between boastfulness and self-doubt—all played a part. But he also felt an irreconcilable tension between the movement politics of which he berated himself for not doing enough and the life of the mind he could not live without. His habits of writing were similarly tortured. Instead of letting his ideas unfold in a progression of steady drafts, he bottled them up, letting fragments out in conversation until he could no longer bear it, setting them down in a torrent of writing. Although he let few see it, he lived in agony.88”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“In much of the Middle East, its audience felt little other than rapture. “Here for the first time,” explained Tarif Khalidi, “was a book by one of ‘us’ telling the empire basically to go f——itself.” “We know your tricks,” Said seemed to be saying, and he brought to the table not just a critique of static, essentialized identities but a whole theory of knowledge in the service of power. It “opened up myriad doors, and a flood burst through.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“In a defensive posture, Shavit felt himself beaten in the interview, losing ground, and so resorted to ruses of insinuation and evasion. Annoyed, Said took stock of his interlocutor and thought to himself: “Look at you. You claim to be representing a people and a civilization, and you don’t get it at all. You’re not understanding what it means to be a Jewish intellectual, one committed to worldliness and universal justice. You may have the weapons and the resources, but intellectually and morally you’ve already lost, and it’s just a question of when others figure it out.”61”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“Orientalism’s fame certainly added to the physical strain. With redoubled media exposure, he found the joys of lingering over texts for the sheer love of reading harder to come by. Distractions”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“Even as he fit in, he was at the same time odd—tortured, affable, and capable of surprising depths. A roommate discovered that when he spoke in his sleep, it was in Arabic. When awake, he adjusted his language to the visitor—Arabic when given the chance, a “beautiful French” for those who knew the language, and two forms of English: one American, the other Oxonian, shifting abruptly between the two at a moment’s notice either to make a point or to match the accent of his interlocutor.14”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“The Nixon administration in 1972 launched Operation Boulder, which like the Patriot Act three decades later was intended to silence Arab Americans by threatening them with deportation, even as it turned a blind eye to anti-Arab discrimination on campus and institutional prejudice against critics of Israel.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“The organizers had wanted balance, he explained, so he and Williams were there apparently to represent the Left, David Caute the middle, and Kristeva (along with “the rather odd reactionary philosopher” Roger Scruton) “constituted the Right.”83 The Nation eventually cut the passages on Kristeva, ostensibly to improve the column’s focus, where he had complained that she constantly interrupted the discussion with “an insistent affectation that was intended to dignify her threadbare clichés.”84”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“We imagine ourselves conscious citizens, historical agents, and individuals when in fact the inherited rules of language force us into predictable patterns of behavior and make certain thoughts and topics of discussion impossible in advance.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“The Slavicist from Italy, Renato Poggioli, and the Anglicist from Czechoslovakia, Réné Wellek, arrived almost simultaneously at Harvard and Yale.”103 And then there was Said, a Palestinian from Jerusalem and Cairo writing about British modernists and America, who would soon arrive at Columbia.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“As Ashrawi observed, a fatal process had been set in motion. Because the PLO and Israel were officially at peace, the entire Arab world could now begin to normalize relations with Israel.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“Having single-handedly put an institution under a magnifying glass, Orientalism also gave safe haven to English department misfits, Latin American exchange students, and shipwrecked Arab activists in Middle East area studies.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“Interpretation, he was saying, is complex, fraught, and often ambiguous, but not mystical and never merely willful.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“Was it not betrayal then, some wondered, when he wrote that “exile seems to me a more liberated state,” or when he concluded that Palestine was “precisely irrecoverable . . . We are moving away from it. It is not to create the beautiful place with orchards and so on. I don’t believe in a final coming-home”?72”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said