Edward Said has died of cancer. Here’s a short Guardian obit, and a longer New York Times obit.
(Via Jimmy Ho)
I don’t really have anything to say, but I recommend the Head Heeb’s post. And Moorishgirl has compiled many interesting Said-related links..
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Thank you for the credit, Amp. I just would like to clarify that I did not mention this event on my blog, but here in a comment to this post.
By the way, Kevin at Blargblog has a sensitive post about it, too.
PDM, I know you meant to be sarcastic, but I do not think that talking about “Zionazis” without giving any specific example, is the right way to approach the issue. Actually, I’d say that kind of absolute generalisation is totally counterproductive, and an insult to the Zionists who are sincerely willing to find a solution (I’m not saying this was your intention). I couldn’t help thinking instantly of these Likoud demonstrators holding photomontages representing an SS uniform-wearing Rabin. As a matter of fact, Said was much respected, among French lefties, than Chomsky, because it took a long time to forget or explain the preface the latter wrote for a book by infamous genocide negationist Robert Faurisson (which prompted a tense polemic with Pierre Vidal-Naquet).
(OFF TOPIC: just in case anyone is curious enough to check out my blog, be warned that you will have to switch the encoding to Unicode UTF-8, as I occasionally use Chinese and Greek characters. Also, I have yet to post the “serious stuff”; right now, I guess, the only potentially interesting feature is probably the blogroll).
I’ve never quite understood if people really thought that Chomsky was defending holocaust denial. Of course he wasn’t, but some people pretend to think so. It takes about five seconds of reading Chomsky to see that he isn’t a holocaust denier, despite his blunders in the way he defended Faurisson’s free speech rights.
So it’s kind of funny to hear that Said is respected and Chomsky isn’t, when they were friends who probably agreed 98 percent of the time.
Donald,
All I was saying is that many French lefty intellectuals (mostly historians like Madeleine Rebérioux, Maxime Rodinson, and of course Vidal-Naquet) who supported the Palestinian Liberation movement and more or less agreed with Said on that issue, that even those intellectuals were shocked by Chomsky’s writing a preface for a book he admittedly hadn’t read (Chomsky was never accused of being a negationist himself, at least not by these intellectuals).
Informed people do know that Said and Chomsky were friends, but the fact is that it was Chomsky who prefaced the book, not Said.
There is no such thing as the First Amendment in France, and free speech is a lot more limited than in the US of A, hence, e. g., the trial against Yahoo for auctioning Nazi memorabilia (I think I’ve mentioned it in an earlier comment). Actually, since 07/03/1990, there is even a law (“Loi Gayssot”, nb. 90-615) repressing (until one year’s imprisonment) explicitely the denial of “the existence of one or several crimes against humanity” (look for Art. 24 bis; sorry, I couldn’t find an English translation of the law). It has been used, for instance, to sue and condemn Bernard Lewis for having denied the reality of the Armenian Genocide in Le Monde (Said happens to mention the suits in a footnote to his 1995 “Afterword” to Orientalism).
However, most historians are critical or frankly against a law that seems to establish an “official History”, and is, obviously, highly questionable. Gayssot Law has been supported by antiracist activists and NGOs, but not by the intellectuals I mentioned.
It seems that Chomsky’s mistake was that he didn’t take this singular context in account, and wrote as if the whole thing had taken place in the US.
I used to follow closely those matters back in the years, but, alas, my documents are no more where I live. Still, I just found out there is an American edition of Vidal-Naquet’s excellent Assassins of Memory, a collection of his 80s essays on negationism which includes an account of the polemics with Chomsky.
I’d like to conclude with a paragraph from a “reply” Said wrote to Arab intellectuals who supported Roger Garaudy, a formerly influential (first in the Communist Party, then in the Islamist movements) French writer sued for denying the Jewish Genocide:
When I mentioned the holocaust in an article I wrote last November [Al Hayat, 5 November 1997], I received more stupid vilification than I ever thought possible; one famous intellectual even accused me of trying to gain a certificate of good behaviour from the Zionist lobby. Of course, I support Garaudy’s right to say what he pleases and I oppose the wretched loi Gayssot under which he was prosecuted and condemned. But I also think that what he says is trivial and irresponsible, and when we endorse it, it allies us necessarily with Le Pen and all the retrograde right-wing fascist elements in French society.
(Le Monde diplomatique, Sept. 1998; original text in English).
Addendum to the above Said quote: this is a perfect illustration of what I call “taking the particular context in account”.
Said: when he spoke at IU on Palestine, I was one of the early risers in what became a standing ovation. It was an impressive and passionate speech. OTOH, I read a Guardian piece by him recently that crossed the line IMO between spin and propaganda, and you can’t do that simply by being passionate about something, you have to be willing to distort the record to strengthen your case. The Palestinian case doesn’t need to be distorted. I’ve used his book “Orientalism”, a great, foundational book with a bit of spin to it too. That’s my Edward Said obit.
Chomsky didn’t exactly write a preface for Faurisson. He wrote a review of Faurisson, agreed to them using it, got a letter from a French Jewish intellectual, asked the publisher to pull his text, and the publisher either refused or said it was too late. But what he didn’t do is sit down and write that text in order to open Faurisson’s book. Since there’s always a chance someone doesn’t know Chomsky is Jewish, I repeat it when this issue arises. I feel the text has one or two very misguided lines, born I suspect largely of Chomsky’s constant insistence on challenging conventional wisdom. He has some line about “alleged facts.”
The Likudnik photos of Rabin are contemptible. I hadn’t heard of that.
This is a concise and balanced obit, John (better, anyway, than the NYT’s piece).
To repeat something I wrote at Kevin’s blog, “as a future (current?) Chinese Studies scholar (I hope the term doesn’t sound too pretentious), I am well enough conscious of what I owe to Orientalism“.
Thanks for the clarifications about that sad “revisionist” story (so 80s to me; back when I didn’t know how to use a computer). I am pretty sure that the “French Jewish intellectual” you are talking about is Pierre Vidal-Naquet himself (he later accused Chomsky of misleadingly quoting their correspondance without asking for an authorization), while the revisionist writer who asked him to write something in support of Faurisson was Serge Thion (by that time, Chomsky had already signed a petition for the revisionist “school”‘s leader). This text was not intended to be published as a preface to the book, nor was it a review of the book, since Chomsky recognized explicitely that he didn’t know anything about Faurisson’s “research”, but that it shouldn’t matter, as he was only concerned by the man’s freedom of speech. But I don’t want to go any further for the reasons I already exposed: my memory is not that good, and I do not have the books and articles that would help me to state the facts clearly anymore (nor can I retrieve them all on the Web, let alone in English).
The fact that Chomsky is Jewish was widely publicized by the revisionists themselves as a definitive proof that they are not antisemites. Once again, what made people angry against Chomsky was mainly that he didn’t admit he made a mistake (and made rather gratuitous attacks against French intellectuals). That’s what made him a persona non grata for some time (while Said was still welcome), a situation that changed only after the Manufacturing Consent documentary was released in France. Now, the same people enjoy reading him in Le Monde diplomatique, Politis and other “alterglobalist” publications.
“Live and direct from Absurdistan”, to paraphrase the Asian Dub Foundation. Back to thesis writing.
P. S.: You can see some pictures of the signs I referred to (1995 Netanyahu meeting) at the bottom of this page of the Itzhak Rabin Memorial (in French, désolé again).
Kevin’s blog: that is, Kevin Moore’s Blargblog (not CalPundit nor Leanleft).
Thanks for that Chomsky update, Jimmy.
Thanks from me as well.
I have seen people in the US try to portray Chomsky as a Holocaust denier, so I tend to jump to his defense when I think there’s any question of that arising.
I think Chomsky’s stubbornness, which is usually a good trait in him (because he’s usually right), served him badly in the Faurisson case and a few others. He should have admitted he mishandled the way he defended Faurisson’s free speech rights, or that’s how I see it anyway.
“Don’t mention it”, but I made a most unpleasant discovery while checking back the links I provided. Please consider the following as a
WARNING:
the translation of the report on Prof. Lewis’ condemnation is quite accurate, and that’s the only thing I paid attention to when searching for an English version of the original Le Monde article.
However, I was misled by the URL and assumed that it belonged to a decent Human Rights Organisation. In fact, going back to the homepage (I had only stopped to the “Armenian Genocide” Index earlier), it appears that the entire site (a Greek emanation, which makes me feel less than proud) is dedicated to expose the alleged “war crimes” of Turkey, Israel, and the Western Coalition, with highly offensive language and, overall, traumatizing pictures of bombing victims. The question here is not if it is right or not to condemn thoses acts, I simply cannot condone the disgusting way it has been done.
I feel very bad about my lack of rigor in this case, and sincerely hope nobody tried to look for that homepage before reading this. If so, I apologize for the shock. Actually, if I didn’t know Ampersand was busy right now, I would have ask him to delete the link. The other links are safe, but that is no excuse.
A bitter irony I let this one pass while criticizing Chomsky for something similar.
One reason I’m not a Chomsky fan is that I dunno if he has it in him to “admit he made a mistake” about anything. I find that “stubbornness” more aggravating than admirable, although I try not to comment upon my ambivalence when I’m defending NC against right-wing slanders, including the “self-hating Jew” meme.
Okay, I guess I did say something about my grievance to a rightnik once –one of my neoconservative English professors was talking about his affection for Bill O’Reilly and said, “I admire the fact that he’s so sure of himself,” to which I replied, “Like Sharpton and Chomsky?”
I don’t think I’m disagreeing with DJ here –he too is usually right.
In my previous comment/Warning, I wrote: A bitter irony I let this one pass while criticizing Chomsky for something similar.
Obviously, I was still under the shock of those disturbing pictures displayed in sensationalistic manner. Of course, it is not that similar, but I would feel responsible if anyone had the understable curiosity to look for the homepage of the site I linked to. Hence the necessary warning (I still wish the hyperlink could be pulled out, and even better, replaced with a safer one). Let me add that this practice is actually quite common in Greek newspapers (mainstream included) and has disastrous results on people’s faculty of thinking rationally.
Meanwhile, I found an article that confirms my memories and more or less sums up what has been said here. Unfortunately, it is in French, but is worth mentioning, even if only a few Alas readers might be able to read it:
It is “Noam Chomsky’s Bad Reputation”, by Belgian physicist (and Alan Sokal co-author) Jean Bricmont. This short version of a preface to the French edition of one of Chomsky’s latest political essays aims to explain the tradition of free speech in American radicalism to the French readers, offering such marking examples as the ACLU defense of the right for Neo-Nazis to rally in Skokie, Ill., in 1978. This is something largely ignored even by French leftist intellectuals, for whom this attitude seems unconceivable.
As for the Faurisson case, Bricmont argues that Chomsky’s “only mistake” was to give his text to his -then- friend Serge Thion, allowing him to use it as it pleased. The text, a version of which is available on zmag.org (link in sidenote 5), had been written as a response to the heavy criticism Chomsky faced in France after he signed a petition for Faurisson. The nastiest comment is directed against Vidal-Naquet. My English is far from perfect, but Chomsky’s translation of one of Vidal-Naquet’s sentences seems totally incorrect to me, a point argued in Assassins of Memory. It is a pity that Vidal-Naquet’s response is not available online (as far as I can say). This would be the only way for English-language readers to get a balanced view of the controversy.
Anyway, I can only second Bricmont when he writes that “this distinction [between defending someone’s free speech rights and supporting his views], while elementary in the United States, appeared hardly understandable in France” (the reactions of my fellow commentators seem to demonstrate it). Bricmont interprets the misunderstanding as reflecting the opposition between “two different political traditions, one predominant in France and the other in the United States, and not a Noam Chomsky, representing a radical Left gone astray, in front of Republican France“.
Now, I often find myself to agree with Chomsky’s analyses on international politics, although I do not think that his worship in some circles is a positive contribution to the effort for a better society. Which is why i’ve always liked Tom Tomorrow’s strip about the “Talking Chomsky Doll” (How alternative!).
Hmm. I think the world needs a Noam Chomsky, even if it doesn’t need Chomsky devotees in the same way. A position I guess Chomsky would sympathize with.
It’s odd that the French have difficulty with this ACLU concept, since folks so often quote Voltaire to express it: “I disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.”
Shorter Noam Chomsky: “Whatever anyone just said about anything is pretty rich, considering East Timor.” My brother did his Ph.D. with Chomsky, and Chomsky disappeared for a few months when the defense came round. Other than that, my brother thought he was fine (and he’s a pretty fanatical supporter of Israel).
Hi,
In my blog I am writing in Said’s memory. Would you mind visiting me and leaving your comments?http://oddamongbrians.blogsky.com
sorry the URL was incorrect visit http://oddamongbrains.blogsky.com