Judith Butler and Cornel West, Honoring Edward Said

[Applause] well thank you I wanted to welcome you to this very special event both those in the room and those joining us virtually and watching from other spaces around the world but particularly I want to welcome the people who are in learner and comfortable seats so you're very much with us I'm Lila Abu LaHood and I teach anthropology and Gender Studies here at Columbia and direct the Middle East Institute among the many wonderful intellectual communities that I have the privilege of belonging to here I want to mention the most relevant one for today I'm a member of the faculty of the Center for Palestine Studies the only such Center based in an American University dedicated to the academic [Applause] he dedicated to the academic study of Palestine and the Center's mission is to foster sustained interchanges among scholars and students and to advance the production and circulation of knowledge about Palestinian history culture society politics now I don't want to take too much time away from our remarkable speakers today but I do want to first thank those who've helped make this event possible and I want to single out Miriam Zuni and Dalia of Zain thank you at the we have an enthusiastic crowd it's great at the Center for Palestine Studies and Miriam is hopefully watching us in Lebanon I also want to thank my colleagues Brinkley Messick and Rasheed Khalid especially for their special dedication to this event but we're also grateful to all the staff and volunteers that you've seen around here who generously offered their time and talents and it's a tribute to our speakers that so many units enthusiastically joined us as co-sponsors the institute for research in african-american studies the institute for research on women and gender the Middle East Institute the Center for the Study of ethnicity and race the Hyman Center for the Humanities the anthropology department the center for international history and the Institute for comparative literature and society thank you all now we've all done our parts because we want to add honor Edwards sides memory and his legacy and I want to acknowledge especially his daughter necklace.i who's here tonight representing the whole family this is not the first event in his honor nor will it be the last but we think it's quite special and I'm glad that you all thought so too Edward Saeed taught at Columbia for 40 years and we feel individually and as a community that we're part of his legacy at this university and in the world Cornel West is now teaching across the street at Union Theological Seminary and Judith Butler is teaching here in the Department of English and comparative literature and this is a university that showed great integrity when Edward was alive in upholding the principles of both academic freedom and free speech the university protected the right of this extraordinary figure to be both a deep and original scholar and a public intellectual and I want to share just one personal memory at Edwards funeral at Riverside Church ten years ago I felt sad as the large crowd hushed and deeply moved by Daniel Barenboim exquisite piano offering walked down the aisle to leave the church and I found myself walking near my dear colleague Mahmood Mamdani I told him that I felt this marked the passing of a generation who would now speak for us while Ahmed had passed away in 1999 at the Asia Society here in New York Edward and my father along with Dan Berrigan and many others had mourned and celebrated this most charismatic politically sharp and beloved figure two years later my father passed away in Palestine Edward walked alongside us in Jaffa with some other people in this room in May 2001 behind the coffin of his dear friend and now two years later Edward Saeed and I'll never forget what Mahmoud said it's now up to you but who among our generation could measure up I thought then and I think tonight on this platform two of the most remarkable people of this generation have stepped forward carrying the mantle but speaking in their own distinct voices and from their own standpoints their critiques of injustice are clear and principled their moral vision is exemplary and their intellectual brilliance is unquestioned like Edward Saeed they are teachers and scholars of huge distinction and like him they're the they're at the same time public figures who speak out courageously about the major political and issues of our time now when talking about his work on the question of Palestine Eduard explained the quote I've been unable to live an uncommitted or suspended life I've not hesitated to declare my affiliation with an extremely unpopular cause unquote now what I admire so much about Judith Judith Butler and Cornel West is they're the same they do not live uncommitted lives they're intellectuals and philosophers who have shaped how we think about power gender race and justice and the value of human life and they've not been afraid to think and talk about the situation of Palestinians the consequences of Zionism the violent policies of the Israeli state and the links between forms of domestic and international injustice they have affiliated with an unpopular cause they didn't have to but in doing what we New Yorkers are urged to do all the time now if you see something say something I think they've given many more people that ability to see and to speak and I'm talking about the next generation so for me these are two moral and intellectual Giants of our generation and I know they're not the same height but I've admired them since I first met them both coincidentally in Princeton around 25 years ago and I'm so grateful on behalf of the Center for Palestine Studies and everyone else for their generosity in accepting our invitation to come talk with us and to each other I know you're here because you want to know because you know who they are and you want to hear them so I won't go into their accomplishments you have a little flier with BIOS but to get help get the conversation started I will turn things over now to James Sheamus familiar to some as a brilliant film theorist and professor at Columbia some is a producer who's been keeping serious cinema alive and to others as a screenwriter and longtime collaborator in the good sense of Angley who's joined us tonight - he's also on the faculty of the Center for Palestine studies so please join me in welcoming Judith Butler Cornel West and James Shamus to talk about Palestine and the public intellectual in honor of Edward side good good evening and thanks Lila let me briefly lay out the format for tonight's event meditate a bit on some of the questions its title might suggest to our speakers and commence with the first question let's begin by acknowledging that this was a very hot ticket and more on that in a second and that tonight we are in to borrow a phrase both from Israeli jurisprudence and from Judith Butler's recent work a lot of absent presences so while we will solicit questions to supplement and continue tonight's conversation we're going to do so virtually in the hope that those of you not sitting with us in low library will feel the connection we hear certainly feel with you so if you'd like to join the conversation tweet your question to at capital C capital u lowercase Palestine that's Cu Palestine using hashtag Edward Sayid hashtag Edward cited all lowercase come on it's hip or post to our Facebook event page Judith Butler and Cornel West and conversation by the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University operators are standing by and in about 45 minutes to an hour or so one of them will discreetly hand me a stack of questions and comments and if and when the opportunity arises and the conversation finds a lull I will share them with you if however the conversation feels like it can continue uninterrupted I'll hold fire and ask all of your forgiveness if in advance if we entertain few if any questions so some preliminaries to an initial question prompted by the subtitle of tonight's event Palestine and the public intellectual honoring Edward Sayid I'll briefly break down some of those constituent parts and in preface to the conversation it announces first honoring Edward Sayid this evening takes place as one of a wonderful number of events commemorating Edward Sayid and as such at prompts if not begs the question as to the uses and reasons for those commemorations honorific ations and memorization zand celebrations a couple of weeks ago in Lerner Hall Edward side was remembered last week his memorial lecture was delivered tonight he is honored it is appropriate under such circumstances to ask whether and how his memory is working and how it should be working now how's it working for us for you one use of course arises for the simple conjunction of the name Edward Sayid with the word Palestine and here I feel the need to try to articulate a specific and particular sense of excitement about tonight's conversation let's face facts each of tonight's interlocutors alone is to use the language of celebrity which raises his own questions but also feels somewhat appropriate tonight a hot ticket but together in conversation present to each other this does feel like a moment an event and the territory occupied or otherwise where they come together tonight is well Palestine tonight it feels as though unlike perhaps and Edward Syed's day it is not the question of Palestine rather it is Palestine that is asking the questions indeed Palestine is demanding answers the feeling of that feels if I can put it that way significant and exciting then we have this word public what is a public or to ask the question another way what do publics do and what might they be doing here tonight well unlike let's say proletariat's or people's or communities or masses or plebs publics seem mainly to have opinions they or we could say have opinions ascribed to them but for Edward Sayid though the word public always held out the promise of his enlightenment origins as the site of public reason as a place where genuine truths can emerge that's why for Sayid there is no need for the category of public intellectual for the intellectual is by his definition always public someone who publishes who comes into being as such by making representations to a public as he writes in his wonderful volume representations of the intellectual there's no such thing as a private intellectual the intellectual he says quote is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing embodying articulating a message of view and attitude philosophy or opinion too as well as for a public to as well as for the intellectual represents paradoxically teaching her public something in a sense it already knows but just doesn't know that it knows teaching it in the Sayyidi inversion the unknown truth about what it really is it's a strange role that requires the intellectual to come it's being wholly in relation to the public but to not be the public or even part of the public to be a representing representation for Syed the intellectual stands outside and mainly again within a nod to his enlightenment heritage because as Syed writes the intellectual speech is always on behalf of universal principles the weight of that universal burden makes the intellectual anything other than the usual experts sent out to manage the public through his or her expertise Syed's intellectual paradoxically maintains the social prestige and authority of the intellectual class but is as he puts it someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations and whose raison d'etre is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug and here you see another paradoxical dialectical leap incites thinking the public that the intellectual is to represent to the public is actually the objected the forgotten the oppressed that is to say Outsiders who's outside earnest is mimicked by the intellectual but now from a position of authority if not of power heavy burdens to bear which is no doubt why Syed constantly references the intellectual as well crankiness least of all he writes quote should an intellectual be there to make his/her audiences feel good the whole point is to be embarrassing contrary even unpleasant it's as if for Syed the repulsion felt by the proper public for those habitually objected and excluded must if only is a moment of negative pleasure be felt also in the presence of the intellectual I think I speak on behalf of tonight's public when I say how excited I am to be here to listen in on what will I know will be in honor of Edward Saeed a truly embarrassing contrary and unpleasant conversation and let's start it by asking as we've asked about what memorialization z-- do what public's do what intellectuals do and what Palestine does a simple question you need entertain only by ignoring it what actually are we doing here tonight Thanks [Applause] how are we doing I'm just blessed to be here with you my dear sister and to keep the focus on the rich legacy and witness that Edwards I eat was able to bear trying to tell the truth the best of his fallible yet creative ability and yet at the same time to inspire so many of us it's true so many of us don't know what do you think we're doing hard to hear all the way oh you missed all of that I said we're here to bear witness and the town the truth the memory of my dear brother Edwards I Eve yeah it's interesting I was thinking about the fact that we are memorializing and we're honoring and yet it seems to me that for the most part when we talk about Edward Syed's work we speak in the present tense and and we have to because it's a work that was written more than a decade ago ceased ceased to be written a decade ago at the same time it it acts on us and we read it and it has informed it's it's not only in our present time but it's given us I think a new sense of what present time might be how we tell the story of this time how we understand ourselves in time and so to honor him is in part to memorialize him but perhaps there's a counter memorializing that happens not by dishonouring him but allowing the work to live in the present as we take it up and rethink it for our own time or for our various times one thought I have is that there was a point in his work where he he insisted that when we look at literature especially when we look at representations of Palestine or representations of dispossession or exile forcible exile that we we have to pay attention to the form and he said it must be fragmentary it must be partial there's no single narrative we can tell there's no single motif we can tell and that it must interrupt certain dominant narratives it must have the power to interrupt certain dominant narratives and and that's interesting because it it opens up the question if we think about the founding of Israel in 1948 or the incremental forms of settler colonialism that were already in place prior to 1948 that were in some sense the precondition of that founding how do we tell that story and how can that story be taught how is it taught and of course one crucial point he made is that the story of that founding rests upon the forcible dispossession and exile of nearly nine hundred thousand people the number of Palestinian exile zin his time was he gathered about four million and now it's estimated to be five and that includes of course subsequent expulsion Xand dis possessions but how is it that we tell the story of that founding and also tell the story of the Nakba can they be told at the same time can they be told together or are we yet ready to think about the lane between that founding and not only a radical dispossession of that time but a continuing dispossession and a continuing injustice that has has not been acknowledged internationally that has not been addressed adequately that continues as a traumatic feature of our present to questions of time how do we how do we tell the one story with the other how do we link them we grasp that link how do we understand that that's not just something that happened in history but that it pervades as the historical time work in which we live I think that if we begin with the notion of the catastrophic remember when Edward at the very end of his life he said I'm the last Jewish intellect and what he meant by that was that for him because he's part of a highbrow secular humanist tradition and which means the legacies of Athens and Jerusalem for him one must begin with the catastrophic he'd be the knock vow Palestinians it could be slavery in a new world with people of color it could be homophobic forms it could be the Holocaust sure and it's very rare in the Academy that the catastrophic is really dealt with in any rigorous way so Edward comes along and says well I am a secular humanist like Hayden white like Eric all Bach I am a student of Vico aha and Vito was about what robust volunteerism militant wheel in the face of what chaos which is very interesting on it and it was dissertation ADA wrote at Harvard under Harry Levin he actually the major influence of Schopenhauer people forget about that networked early work he and I he's talked about that all the time I was blessed in 1977 I first arrived here what straight there was lectures and his lecturing on lucasz goemon of Raymond Williams Merrill Marxist literature and so forth and and we would steal away and have drinks and think and up and talk about Schopenhauer because I'm very much open and you know donto telecourses children how we just lost belong yes now forget his name in so many ways but it was very important because of Schopenhauer was dealing with human existence is catastrophic you see now what happens when you historicism contextualize a catastrophic structures of domination forms of oppression and following Vico agency will not just what you're going to do about it how do you understand about how do you understand it so it word was a rational humanist you'd always talk about the 1936 essay by a buckle art which is about surf rationalism he said I'm a sir rationalist what does the sir rationalist it's a rationalist who grounded in passion and your quest for rationality takes the form of turbulence of transgression of subversion so he's a rational humanist in that sense and therefore when it came to Palestine this is another the beginning of catastrophe with dispossession with dislocation with expatiated expatriation and then occupation then colonialization and then resistance even as all of those are rendered invisible in mainstream academic discourse not all a mainstream we had brother Rasheed right here and his wonderful work day and at recent exit brokers have deceived everybody got to read that now because that's telling the same kind of truth every was talking about how do you talk about the catastrophic and talk about the colonisation talk about the disposition talk about the the occupation in such a way that you remain a humanist which is to say you would talk critically about that bit of any occupation see if there were a Palestinian occupation of Jews but there was I II would be the first one in line critical of the Palestinian occupation that's kind of brother he was my cutter brother he has a moral consistency about it he has a concern or refuses the two distinctive features of this declining American Empire which is callousness ticket especially when it comes the poor and working people and indifference the criminality indifference the crimes against humanity he understood the Palestinian predicament starting in 1948 as a crime against humanity he's absolutely right about that and we don't want to come to terms with it and to a degree to which we don't come to terms with it it will haunt us in a serious way but of course he would never he would never focus solely on that catastrophe because he talked about different crimes against humanity the variety of different crimes it could be the new Jim Crow right now in the American Empire that's a crime against you man we've lost two generations of young black and brown youth almost across the board that's the crime against you meant it will come back and haunt America divided different ways but Edward said no I'm in the Academy Princeton undergrad Harvard grad Rp black nerd authors asked Mary at Princeton students go read his senior thesis on Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene then read the dissertation or Joseph Conrad in the fiction of autobiography his first book that he wrote on Harry Levine one of the founders of complet a Jewish brother from Nebraska then he comes to Columbia and hears Lionel Chilean the others waiting to greet him and treating him very nicely embracing empowering in that way and then he turns as an electric powerhouse that he was in his skills to the catastrophe beginning in 48 and we begin to tell that story so the question of who is at words ie America's leading public intellectual in a lot of part of the 20th century who is that was ie highbrow secular humanist who was that was IE courageous visionary what were the limitations of f-words IE oh we got a lot to talk about there to American popular culture not too sympathetic he's wrong religion matters religiously musical as he could have been wrong so let me it would be the first one because we talked about this all the time he loves that kind of critical engagement but he had his own blind spots and he understood following Paul Daman that you can't have broad scope of insight without having blindness and scribe within the framework that allows you to see that there's an interplay between blindness and insight that's true fall mostly you can imagine what they'll say about the most philosophically sophisticated sophisticated social theorist of our day Judith Butler what you're talking about the insights and whatever blindness assisted Judith had to yeah we're not here to talk about that but understand I'm different no I I'm sure I'm about to enact though Oh that'll be ok but so let's talk for a moment about secular humanists you know I didn't know I didn't know Edward and I thought back on why it is I did not know him you didn't wonderful conversation not what's interesting to me and we did email briefly when we were both angry at Lawrence Summers for his ridiculous claim that to criticize Israel is effectively to be anti-semitic and and and so we we had a little virtual solidarity at that moment but it was not not not very far before before he died but I was thinking that at the time say in the in the 90s especially you know there were people who are humanists and then they were post rupture lists or there were people who were secularists and then there the rest of us who didn't really know or maybe had some questions about that term and um and so it's so we didn't come into conversation for kind of petty literary critical reasons right which now seem rather petty to me because I I'm just not having those conversations in that way so I went back and I thought to myself one what worked a secular do for Saeed and what work does humanists do why those terms why did he feel he needed them what work did they do that no other term could do or and I and I found the following which was very interesting to me first of all when he when he talks about the secular he tends to oppose it to what he calls fundamentalisms or to religion understood as the demand for theocratic rule the theocratic rule okay well okay I understand that he posed secular nationalists interestingly so secular must have a critical relationship to nationalism right I'm starting to understand a little bit about what it does but what it seems to do more often than not is to name possibilities of connection or translation among exiled peoples right you want it to hold out for that and and he made the claim I think it was indirectly a claim about Jews in relation to Israel but it has a more general applicability that when we any of us represent our our oppression our dispossession our our forcible exile the slaughters committed against us that we have to not only make that representation clear but also turn it around and ask for who for whom else is that happening has that happened and also have I or have we this people who have suffered also caused a suffering for others and what responsibilities do we take for it and and you have to ask those two questions who who am i linked with in my oppression and have I myself become an oppressor inadvertently or deliberately thinking that my historical victim status makes it definitionally impossible for me to impress to oppress others okay so so those were kind of two obligations that he understood his obligations of the secular interestingly enough which suggested that there was a certain dislocation of the first-person perspective that has to happen within what he calls the secular now I there are all kinds of ways to bring religion into that picture we could we could all agree on that we could all agree that those are values the translation among exiled people's the the self reflective moment what have I myself done not only what have I suffered what have we suffered but what have we done how do I put those together how do I keep those two histories from being delinked systematically right which is part of the history of pre and post Zionism and you know there's a moment I believe it's in representations of the intellectual where he refers to Hanan Ashrawi x' dissertation which I didn't know about and there she claims that the Palestinian people are those whose national experience belongs with that of meaning alongside or juxtaposed with belongs alongside that of the Armenians the Jews the Irish the Cypriots the American blacks the poles the American Indians at those terrifying frontiers where the existence and disappearance of people's fade into each other where resistance is a necessity but where there is also sometimes a growing realization of the need for an unusual and to some degree an unprecedented knowledge and and and this was for for Sayid a moment to which he returned time and again so when he says I'm the last man Jewish intellectuals like yes but maybe he's the last of the Armenian intellectuals or maybe he's the last of the black intellectuals in other words it's not it's not just Palestinian and Jewish it's it's a way of thinking the Palestinian historical experience in some kind of conjunction not to say that they're structurally the same or deposit an equivalence but to say that there's some kind of affiliation solidarity demand for translation that emerges in and through that kind of juxtaposition no I will sign on that I will say yes I will sign on that I don't know if that makes me a secularist to say that but for him it does oh yeah I mean he put much much weight on the secular in that regard but it was fascinating is that the only one hand one could argue that there was a certain knob religious tone deafness and a narrow sense in brother Edward on the other hand he wrote some of the most beautiful insightful reflections on Kierkegaard yeah and on on Gerard Manley Hopkins in beginnings and those are Christian thinkers there was a Christian thinkers at the same time you think for example who some of his heroes were when it comes to intellectual models Jonathan Swift yes Tory well what is it about Jonathan Swift remember his definition of intention and beginnings is the link between idiosyncratic view and communal concern that's the definition of in that 1975 text and what is it about Jonathan Swift he's wrestling with the catastrophic especially the Irish question as what Edmund Burke and others he's unbelievably magnificently this is where Harold Bloom and it was there you come together because with Jonathan Swift both of them are the towering satirical writers in ears language tell it to tubs and so forth who's the other hero of it words ie Glenn Gould that's in the late the late style essay right death with the introduction by sister Miriam herself which is wonderful in Michael Wood now what is it about what does it mean for a secular humanist intellectual to view a classical pianist as the model of what it is to be an intellectual but what does he say in that essay he says Glenn Gould was able to bring together a idiosyncratic and profound subjectivity same theme and this book was written after he was published after he died this was a text he was writing on when he died and of course the text on what humanism and secular secular humanism and yeah you know the text what's the name like sector criticism as democratic humanism and democratic criticism humanism and democratic criticism that's the last book he finished but he was working on late style and when you get the Glenn booties and well been good as able to bring together a form of rational pleasure or bringing together the rational and the pleasurable in a radically transgressive way that links idiosyncratic view with communal concern so he has a consistency in his corpus now so now what would be exilic about Glenn Gould everything but he's not Palestinian he's not black it's a food so what is it what what what is exhilarated by Jonathan Swift nearly everything but he's our right wing Tory too and it was very critical to that but there's other elements in his literary practice in his belt in China into the worldview that Edward embraces full heartedly and of course the other hero was adored oh yeah and Adorno was half Jewish in terms of you know lineage but in terms of his practice if Jew or Armenian or black or gay or lesbian or working class or whatever is a metaphor for those who have critical distance from a mainstream and a streamlined deodorized set of discourses that don't want to come to terms with the catastrophic the underside of that mainstream then you are Jewish intellectual or many intellectual whatever whatever you want to call it for head but it was it was Jewish intellectual because he's looking at the history of Western civilization I mean look at the history of Western civilization - persistence of that catastrophe hunting Jews down and then the irony of those Jewish brothers and sisters of a conservative bent and centrist bent when I told my Jewish radicals when I talk about Jewish communist not so much Jewish left-wingers Jewish conservatives and centrist in 1948 who engage in a discourse that hides and conceals suffering of precious Palestinians as they undergo dispossession as are undergoing speciation as they undergo occupation of the 67 to this very day at this very moment a level of very very vicious form of colonization and and for Edward for him it's a kind of seamless web with all of the dissonance and all of the contradictions shot through in terms of his own self understanding in this regard he talks about C CLR James he talks about James ball when you talk about Malcolm X's yes set and he puts CLR James and Adorno together absolutely yes he does yes he does but I guess I would just add that it's also the liberal Zionist Jewish community which keeps that hold up that that keeps that narrative in place so it's not just conservative rightfully liberals a centrist these days okay it was a centrist but but also interestingly enough some of the some of the writings that that that supported the kibbutz movement also wear them solidly within settler colonialism no that's true you know Gabriel Peterburg I think lays that out in in a pretty convincing way so we have to wonder about what it is to think about Zionism perhaps even in its in in some of its left-wing modes as being complicit with with settler settler colonialism even on the left even with all the left and one of the discursive problems we've got right is what do we call the left who's left that's right who's left under those yeah butts left of the left but also what gets to be called the left which is still may be part of a colonial project and and that's and that's where I think he'd thought intellectual should come to the fore he called it marshalling a certain kind of realism alertness he was especially enraged by inconsistency and uncaring 'king so that we we don't simply take you know some of these political designations as as Givens we have to ask what work they do what if face mints they perform absolutely um but you know I think part of it at least from my dialogues with brother Edward is that in the 1980s I mean we witnessed of course the increasing bureaucratize ation and corporatization of the university because that word was in love with the university he lectured right here I'll never forget I was sitting right on the front row he lectured oh what a title home of the name of the lecture home he talked about Columbia University as home and I told Evan said oh you got to be kidding really but he says that in this text too as you know the university is the most utopian space in our society now I don't agree with that I think the Apollo on Wednesday night actually but up but it work was invested in the university even as exilic as he was in his thinking he loved the university context and he saw the university undergoing commodification bureaucratization where critical engagement was pushed to the margins as big money more and more shaped the destiny and the agenda and the paradigms of the universities absolutely right about that 20 years later and and therefore liberalism more and more was not captive but it was disproportionately shaped by a career ISM in which hypocrisy and cowardly mess because a lot of the liberal Zionist brother/sister would call Edward and say oh you know we agree what you talking about we just can't say that in public I know why because they were scared because their careers were at speak because I didn't want to go against their friends because it made that Thanksgiving dinner is uncomfortable if they told the truth Tony George went through the same thing at a much lower level than everyone's I eat I eat of course had you know you know the military procured his office I mean the security at his office we remember that sister Nasser right meantime you go see the brothers you got to go through security check because death threats and so forth and we know about the 285 FBI file on his keeping track of him ever minute going back to 1971 with Ibrahim the Grady Brandon one of the greatest Palestinian towering figures he's falling bigger sister Jaya to you beloved mother so that so that the Liberals I did one undergrad can now risk either it was just too much oh my god we're going to tell the truth we have to really pay a cost you don't say you have to bear a burden you don't say I mean I recall in 1982 Everett and I went down in front of the New York Times just to get the numbers of how many focal kill in Lebanon they wouldn't print the numbers then we had to March again just to use the word occupation in the newspaper then they then won't call it a wall they call it divide deodorize discourse they're afraid they're intimidated that was I eat follow-up our Asia at at line 24 a and lentils apology is free it's on its Frankie speech it's that what is what is a cause defamation fearless fearless sheet unintimidated speech that's the cause of my unpopularity that's what Socrates said there were suggest that's part of my tradition too I got some plain speech about this catastrophe of Palestinians luck linked to the not just the US Empire but linked to the cowardliness of autocratic Arab countries who would type a big oil interests it's not just the pro-israeli Lobby lobbying a conservative since it's the big oil dictation that allows for the Arab complacency and and and and and and subservience even as they talk about their concern with the Palestine Mother Russia she lays this out in problem you just lays it out clearly it's the truth I tried to lay it out in democracy where in 2004 they called me an anti-semite all the time I said you know what doesn't bother me i tells you get marginalized tell the truth are you professor of tear that's what the commentary magazine said right he's a professor of care for throwing one Rock but Israeli Defense Forces never call terroristic ever by the mainstream newspapers right you can kill 434 Palestinian children within weeks what's happened in January 2009 kill 1,400 ragueneau Obama was coming into office what he had to say mr. Obama no comment after what do you mean no comment those children are just as precious as those precious Jewish children in tel-aviv who are being killed what are you talking about no comment Zions legacy makes all of us uncomfortable deeply so even as we come back exercising our agency because I mean again as I said we have our criticisms of brother Edward we wouldn't ever want to highlight him in such a way that he becomes somehow some grand deity at the death at the head of a Pantheon that's not the brother Edward I knew no no not not at all he was wrong on jazz and a lot of other things but I mean in terms of what worked the secular what worked the human I mean our human word of course Verizon or Latin who mondo which means burying and every word begins with v co begins not with a conception of death abstract death like high degree begins with corpses qualitatively different discourse you begin with corpses as opposed to abstract possibilities of death and so at the very beginning of even his his text beginning just a sense of loss as hell as Iook he's always concerned about what is lost and what's left out he's always concerned about forms of death did psychic be it social psychological even spiritual he would like their language spiritual but I'm injecting that a spiritual death and that is what a great humanist thinker does even you know the critics of of humanism in that way know they have to come to terms with death and loss and catastrophe and oppression and domination in some way but let me ask you this so since what what would be your critique though of Edwards secular humanism well it's just that when I finally understand what he wants the terms to do I tend to agree with him I'm just like agency and well the agent the Vico I think is really quite amazing I think I would have a little bit of struggle with it do we just create ourselves or do we just produce ourselves I think not I think we are produced very often by forces we don't really have a lot of control over and I think there's a kind of tragic structure to subject formation that that needs to be thought we are formed in history were formed in language and culture and power were formed in traditions we don't get to choose our parents we don't get to very often choose many things about the circumstances not just the circumstances of our birth but the very sense of who we are in the sense of the world and then you struggle within it we struggle within it to find your place and to make of yourself what you can but there's you know how do we think about that struggle you know he was in a different position he was worried explicitly and always about the fading of the history of Palestine the fading of Palestinian culture the pushing of Palestine into oblivion that it would become it would be something that no one would remember or that there would be no way to install the memory to archive it to insist on it and so oblivion was what he was fighting against right and being able to remake that history was also a way of giving himself a ground being able to make sure that history remained alive and I think that's that's really really important but I think sometimes were born into traditions that are overwhelm us or encumber us or against which we have to struggle and I think probably my own struggle with my own scientists and and Jewish formation has been one of those I mean the question of Palestine actually made me have to think very reflectively but what I was born into and what I was taught and how the world was told to me what story of the world I was given and I had to think twice about who are those people who told me that story and why were they doing that and what story do I now want to tell her how do I want to interrupt that one which is right at the heart of the liberal Jewish political world but so let me just say this though what I like and what I need for me is so funny that we were on different sides of a certain kind of intellectual spectrum but now I don't think I can think without him sorry I didn't get to tell you yesterday but what I get from him especially reading about his own experiences being attacked or being called anti-semitic or people saying vile and hideous things against this elegant brilliant erudite reasonable person it really reasonable person is that he says that the intellectual who is yes always a public intellectual in the sense that when we publish were in the world and we put our stuff out there we are exposed who knows what's coming back or not coming back it's a risk he says you have to reconcile the demands of your own self with the public demands upon you hmm and that was helpful to me and he talks about alertness as a kind of virtue of the of the of the public intellectual or the intellectual who is trying to respond to a certain kind of public demand or public situation um he uses the word vulnerability he doesn't use the word courage so much but he was courageous and whenever that struggle was to continue to speak out and to say what he had to say even though he was being viciously attacked and people were trying to demean him just as as we know Palestinian professors here at Columbia who tried to do scholarship on Palestine have also been shamelessly attacked I just want to emerge from the attack how does one fend it off I mean you said that people called you anti-semitic well I don't know I bet you cared a little long as the bullets didn't flow long as the bullets didn't fly but don't you kind of feel like the bullets are just right behind that I mean are they that far behind I've been called worse though Andy I hear what I do hear what you're saying it's not that I celebrated it or anything but I knew given the discursive terrain by saying these kinds of things it was predictable that you would get that kind of nonsense coming at you but you just have to make sure that you in no way are degrading Jewish brothers and sisters as a whole when you're engaging in a critique of a vicious Israeli occupation and you make that severance very clear in your work and your speeches and so forth and you just move on because you don't want it to pay Elijah I mean you know I'd restate it I said you know there's nothing particularly anti-semitic by also taking issue with Zionism as opposed to the to the occupation which is really I felt like the history to which he was really returning to like telling that history again and again in in the 40s and and in the 50s and and what that meant for displacement and for the stealing of land but but you know what I what I loved about the fact that he got so viciously attacked I mean I hate the fact that he got viciously attacked and that these vicious attacks continue still but what I appreciate is that he seemed to get calmer and more rational right he just went back he said okay let's take the argument apart let's move carefully it's good let's be more careful let's be more precise let's let's talk about it historically let's talk about it conceptually let's use some counter examples let's let's write with absolute persuasive lucidity I don't know I think I don't I don't know how to fathom it but it's it's a it's a great thing and it is it is it is perhaps a kind of virtue I don't know I don't think we can mime it or follow it I mean it was his but we have to kind of ask that question of ourselves how do we take those risks and not become not become a purveyor of aura of deodorized discourse not become a kind of pure professional who cares only about professional standing or who won't risk one's reputation by speaking what one knows to be true and unjust right with the scholarly apparatus that will be bringing yes to it I mean I think for example of the exchange between brother Edward and brother Michael Walzer and that famous essay it would wrote Exodus a Canaanite perspective that Canaanite view what the Exodus looked like from the vantage point of the full court in the land of milk and honey they're already there like indigenous peoples when Europeans arrived here and then they were wonderful exchanging is right down here in New York at The New Yorker Hotel right near Madison Square Garden by solo blue magic that night before and you got Walzer and Zahid going at it and zayeed laying bare door critique of an exodus narrative about liberation for particular peoples and the subjugation that followed therefrom and then walls are saying well no Edward you are enchanted by a romance weird the isolated intellectual who valorizes transgression that ends up with the attention more on the isolated intellectual van on the collective insurgency of the people you're speaking on behalf of now that was fascinating because in one sense it's about what is the role of tradition see Edward had a modernist sensibility so he was very suspicious of tradition in a certain sense but then when you turn to after the after the last sky which is one of the great texts yeah on Palestinian traditions of resistance traditions of poetic expression traditions of collective insurgency you say lo and behold you're actually a little closer to Edmund Burke than you think the Burke who talks about tradition as inescapable not a traditionalist understanding of tradition but a transgressive subvert if understanding of tradition that generates traditions of resistance and it was honest about that because when he started talking about the Palestinian question he had to dig deeper I remember right across the street when he when he published what he sent me to copy of Orientalism before was published we talked for two and a half hours and I said brother Edward you have written a text that will create a fissure in the public discourse but my one criticism is I don't hear the voices of those who have been oriental eyes at the level that I want you're so concerned about the structure of the dominant discourse they don't talk back enough they don't respond enough and what is the tradition people even in catastrophic situations with melancholic spiritual conditions oftentimes they steal right back they resist politically spiritually collectively and so for these things spiritual that they create hip-hop is a genre in a declining American Empire of economic inequality political paralysis cultural decay they still fight back and he said mmm think you got a point point brother with think he got a point and he would listen and he respond right back subsequent tech Chomsky actually said the same thing to him hmm because he showed me Chomsky's letter but we can't do everything in one text and he knew that he said but in saying that back to your point about the the kind of a certain kind of secular humanism tied to an individual intellectual so that in that in the in the the lectures there in London representations of the intellectual there it looks like he was going back to a certain kind of isolating until after he was talking very personally a very person and then he come right back in subsequent text and talk about traditions resistance again so it's back and for very complicated sometimes contradictory never fully confused but always created and challenging maybe it's also important to remember that there were those important editorials that he was writing in the Haram Arabic weekly and and abdomen and that those tended to be really very concrete about political initiatives what was happening on the ground what political parties were doing who the brokers were what the stakes were and that seemed to be a different kind of writing right he was very very very obviously attuned to to the concrete political terms of the struggle at that point I think maybe that would have been the more effective rejoinder to Mister will you call him brother Walter but I can't quite do that no I understand I don't know Uncle Michael anyway but but in it and in those pieces you know you get these devastating critiques at PLO leadership yes it was three weeks away he's at the distance himself yeah dominant elements yeah in the Palestinian now but you know there's something about Exile maybe I'll just say this and we can we can open it up and but but um something about exile you know at one point he says exile is a concrete condition it's also a metaphor okay in other words it is this particular people dispossessed but first of all we have to ask the question does exile does it talk about does it adequately were equally embrace Palestinians with damaged rights within the Israeli state currently does it equally does it describe well Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank or Gaza or in Gaza which I consider to be a kind of you know under siege may be a continuation of occupation by other means does it do those communities or those in and then those who are intellectuals in New Yorkers that the same as being in a refugee camp in the south of Lebanon or and and I just think maybe I'm not sure exile can do all that work and I'm not sure I can do all that work well and when it's when it's both a condition and a metaphor it's also not just the condition of Palestinians let's remember but the link between the Palestinians and the native peoples and the Jews and the Cypriots and the African Americans and all the others he's willing to list there at which point it's doing a whole lot of work and and then you know the other question so so where's belonging where's belonging there's always a longing to belong but what about communities in which belonging is being reproduced all the time right and he does say that in after the last sky I mean especially some of those photographs of of people in their domestic spaces continuing to lay the table and continuing to go through the rituals of everyday life that consolidate a certain kind of tradition and and history instead of connections but but at the political level what are what kind of forms of belonging are they and and if he's against certain kinds of nationalism how do we think about belonging to the Palestinian nation across these various scattered zones if it's not a nationalism is there another language for it would have been interesting to push push push those those questions about prolonging and solidarity crucial push and then the micro social institutions family everyday and families assisted is written this wonderful reflection on our own life and so forth played a very important role as I mentioned universities very important I was blessed to give a lecture in Northfield Mount Hermon where he went to prep school they still talking about him there Williams Panos and others who taught him me because he was the brother was a genius he's no doubt about early on you can see it Blackmer told him that write down that saw Street and Princeton that's 1950 what you come out of Princeton 57 50 something like that two years after Ralph Nader my fanatical which one but I mean in the mid-50s so that he did have certain desire for long and he didn't theorize that was micro micro social innocence what nationhood but family certainly friends my god his loyalty to me and the revolutionary could come with a calm his christian revolutionary christian unbelievable and anytime you mentioned christianity edward you got it turn away you know he came out of a christian context from his grandparents and so forth is it but he had his own critiques and so forth but the loyalty was so real it was genuine why we had human connections we found out he had leukemia I said brother I'm getting down on my knees in your living room I brought Reverend James Forbes and Reverend James Washington three of us we pray for him right there in September 1991 I'll never forget as long as I live all of us had tears in our eyes he let you he let you but he was circular he was second he said you can fight this one on your knees but I'm glad you're down there but I'm circular not y'all but he knew the love was being expressed that's the important thing in that Nets Michael social too as opposed to a nation state or or a political party it's a yeah so we got about 15 minutes and we have I hold in my hand some questions and just reminder to those of you out there who might want to drop one in in a couple minutes at CU palestine hashtag edward saeed a question maybe to shift into the present it's been a remarkable journey and time set as you said we speak of him in the present tense but we've it's inevitable that we've been looking backwards too there's a question that says can you address how to translate this debate into action should we be concerned or how should we be concerned with activism mmm-hmm well there's one point in in edwards writings when he says that he gives lecture sometimes and then people stand up and at the end and they say what should we do and he he writes i refuse to answer that question because he didn't think it was the proper purview of that of the intellectual he understood the intellectual to be causing discomfort trying to point out inconsistencies trying to produce different different frameworks checking the facts making the arguments elucidating it so I think that what he didn't like was the idea that an intellectual should be in the place of the ruler and he says this and he worries about how the discourse of rule has saturated the intellectual right so if we sit up here and go okay everybody here are the five things we need you to do right and then send you on your way what kind of position are we in at that moment I mean I have obviously several you know we both have clear political commitments that one contract but I think I think one has to sort of you know um respectfully resist the question I'm going to get in trouble for that honor though yeah I can see it now yes not even I'm feeling impatient to get that job under what let me just say this guys there is a very important footnote brother rush sheets text we talks about on page 620 of the second volume of Henry Kissinger's memoir he says America has function as Israel's lawyer Israel's lawyer that means that as American citizens in our name the American government has function in such a way that it is not just hidden and concealed as suffering but helped reproduce it in more intense ways and as American citizens who are concerned about truth and the door'll are used to say what the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak everybody's suffering anybody's suffering we have a fundamental role to tell the truth about the role of America as the kind of broker of deceit that it has been that's contrary to what happened in March 1945 when the Franklin Delano Roosevelt told the head of Saudi Arabia Empire we will not proceed unless we check with you and will do-nothing hostile the Arab says March 1945 on the way from y'all topic and every president has violated that statement in a letter to the repressive autocratic regimented Saudi Arabian regime everyone so it's a matter of trying to get that truth out honestly in organized ways supporting the young people that a lot of this will be a crucial role will be played by the young Jewish brothers and sisters who are willing to tell the truth visa via your mama's and your daddy's that you refuse to live in an empire in a democratic experiment that does not treat other human beings with dignity and decency in our name that's true for the Philippines a true for Guatemala it's true for the West but it's true for Ethiopia too it's also true but we talk about Palestine tonight so in that sense it was saying I'm not going to tell you one thing to do I agree I'm not gonna tell you two things to do I agree understand what is happening and what is being done in your name and your refusal to allow it to happen to the best of your ability whatever form it takes the filmmaker as a poet as an artist as a professor as a chauffeur Janet ation work or whatever it is whatever form I guess I guess I would just add one thing here which is that I mean it's it's interesting that we are two non Palestinians up here who are addressing the issue of the public intellectual but we have to make sure that the absence of the Palestinian is not a condition of legitimacy right so the real question for me is what are we hearing from Palestine what are what are people in Palestine asking us to do is there a call to us as there are requests is there are there are there ways of making solidarity with say the prisoners solidarity movement I mean I noticed that there was a solidarity between prisoners in in Palestine and Pelican Bay eight that was important that was a moving very interesting solidary actually one that was initiated by the Palestinian prisoner organizations what's the boycott divestment and sanctions movement asking us to do what are they telling us about how our institutions are complicit with the reproduction of the occupation or the sanitization of Zionism more generally how do we respond to that call those are two huge widespread civil movements in Palestine and they they do they do ask for certain kinds of solidarity and and they do they do help help us orient ourselves since we don't want to be over here deciding what's the best thing to do for Palestine right then we're technocratic in intellectuals who are divorced from a democratic struggle from a struggle for self-determination right from the outside if you're going to decide what Palestine should do then you're undercutting self-determination and Palestine hasn't yet had self-determination you know that's that's the the least we can do is is is here read what it is that is being asked of us and make judgments about it surely you know we don't just like whoa okay anything no we make judgments about what we can do how we can respond what's what's that what's the ethical and political call and how does it resonate with me and what can I do from within my position or from within my institution within my religious institution within my my family and although I'm extremely pleased and honored to be with James part of Jewish Voice for Peace which I think has effectively made extraordinary solid eristic with Palestinian grassroots organizations especially the boycott divestment and sanctions movement I think we have to make sure it doesn't just stay Jews and Palestinians yes because the Solidarity is that the edward envisioned were solidarities among colonized people and an among the forcibly exiled and so it's a it's a broader kind of coalition right can't just stay in that in that die attic in that die attic frame absolutely very good I must say and it was the most elegant honoring of Edward Said's injunction against talking about activism by breaching it than I could have imagined all right thank you we we have two other questions that are somewhat linked and they refer I think at least for me back to that astonishing quotation of Amish Robbie's dissertation the last word of which was very surprising to me when she talks about this collective socio side and in both bio and cultural death of all of these various folks over over history and ends with that this leads her to an unprecedented and the word she is was knowledge yeah because I was waiting for unprecedented something and knowledge was a surprise actually and a great one two questions one's pretty depressing hasn't Palestinian culture already gone into oblivion the other connected to it though how should Palestinians connect their suffering to the suffering of others what is the role of allies I think we've already addressed some of that mystery Sorensen of allies it's funny I have to overcome my temptation to be slightly rude in relation to the to the question and I feel like maybe you could take it I think I think rudeness has a rule I know it does okay I'll get there no look I mean first of all what we mean by Palestinian culture I mean it certainly is if you go to Palestine you is not it is not a place of oblivion it is an active interesting place where people arguing with each other law and making excellent food and doing many other things in life so you know are we talking about inmates in the mainstream media has it perhaps become a lost or has it has it gone the way of oblivion maybe but then we have to shift the frame right I mean and that's one of the things he Edward was asking us to do shift the frame like something is radically absent in the dominant media but where is it present and what are the alternate media's that are making it present and which are which are producing a kind of counter hegemonic resistance and he actually had some real interest in the internet as a site that could disrupt say the dominant media non representation or reductive representation either terrorist or absent end and I think um so I guess that's one thing I'm the other point is that I think there are different forms of global solidarity some of them are focused on international law and it's its abrogation and others are about resistance movements or allies among colonized people I've noted as well that there's some really interesting connections between first world peoples and and Palestinians on the question of indigeneity how to think about self-rule how to make the claim for self-rule how not to replicate certain forms of state sovereignty people don't seem to like but still honor ideas of political self-determination or self-rule those are those are live questions those are those are intense important questions and one can't think them alone one can't think them alone in this one moment where he's talking about a door no he says it's it's not possible he's citing a don't Adorno to the effect that no one can have a cogent thought without that thought being thought elsewhere in other words it has to be thought somewhere else in order for it to be cogent here it can't just be my private thought it has to be something someone else can think or has thought or something I can think with others which means not just within this framework but you know it you know in a comparative framework and he was a comparative literature professor right and and and he made the case for comparative diasporas and I think we could on the basis of his work also make a case for comparative genocide which doesn't mean all genocides are the same but it does mean that we have to develop those kinds of frameworks that are not just about thinking how these catastrophes happen in different times and spaces but what kinds of alliances they foster and and even eventually or implicitly what kind of political solidarity that might lead to let me just say a quick word about this question though because it the question for me is about memory it's about visibility we live in a neoliberal capitalist society that's obsessed with three processes financial izing privatizing and militarizing highly financial of financialized economy 42% of the profits go to big banks thirty years ago they went to corporations privatizing education prisons right across the board militarizing Imperial tentacles drones US drones dropped on innocent people AFRICOM we can go on and on and on you see in such a context there's relatively ratio of memory and a marginalizing of certain kind of visibility so you take the Palestinian catastrophe and the memory of it within an American regime of financial izing privatizing and militarizing you're hardly hearing they talk about the head of the American Empire can go to United Nations and give a whole speech and not say one mumbling word about Palestinian brothers and he's got the world looking at him billions and billions he goes to the White House doesn't say a mumbling word about it visa beating head of the Israeli regime and that's what you get on Fox News MSNBC the right-wing version and the neoliberal wing version so narrow so truncated so often vacuous that memory drops out visibility drops of people when are the Palestinians are they still there in Gaza you don't say what are they doing God what do you got a lot of creativity going on as you rightly say but how would people get access to it other than social media which is also privatized in its own way but privatization can be used against privatization we know that we could be dialectical about it in that way but the other but the dominant orientation the dominant gaze to you that language is within a neoliberal capitalist regime that makes it difficult for that's why we don't hear any talk about memory of the million Filipinos who were killed by US imperial forces in the 1890s anybody made a film about that anybody got discourse about that now it's probably half that's right I'm gonna try you do it brother do what if they don't get me a new one but but all I'm saying is that it was so selective given the ideological criterias in light of the larger structure even though the choices that we make still make a difference I mean I'm whatever it on this agency still makes a difference all right so I'm just going to add to that one thing which is that deal liberalism has certainly arrived in Palestine in the sense that all those all those neoliberal metrics have entered into the non-governmental organizations who are helping to keep universities alive who are who are helping to establish irrigation who are working throughout the infrastructure right so one of the things that happens is that the infrastructure of course gets bombed or destroyed and then the NGOs come in with their neoliberal metrics and rebuild it and it's a it's a cycle right and one of the problems with it is that you don't actually think about well what is it is actually undermining the infrastructural conditions of Palestine systematically what are those policies and how is that how has the Israeli state in imposed them and then the if but if we're only trying to ameliorate the effects through a certain cut and we can we can measure them according to neoliberal metrics like people are functioning better or they're able to get to whatever their worksite is if they have a worksite or whatever that is we're actually producing a kind of rationality that is complicit with the occupation even though it's trying to ameliorate its effect so neoliberalism has definitely arrived and it seems to me also to undercut these basic questions of self-determination which I keep coming back to what would it be to build those institutions in ways that the Palestinian people would like and to have them sustainable on the basis of that of that populations desires so we're wrapping up okay so this is your last chance to be embarrassing contrary you're rude oh yeah but if there's any one minute really it's 8:30 if there's a final thought you'd like to share with us tonight before we leave I just want to say I'm really thrilled to be here with with Cornel West he's one of my favorite interlocutors and I have when I say one of them I mean actually that the conversation with him is like no other in the world and I treasure it every time treasured every time and I'm just I'm just as happy as I could possibly be no right back at my dear sister one last word don't that when you think of the towering public in elections the term I don't like I like the term Democratic intellectual but the empowering public intellectuals in the American Empire the twentieth century John Dewey Columbia WB Dubois for his part twentieth century you see Edward Wilson and then we can have some others then here comes Edward he is committed to a notion of the public there are some contenders James Baldwin is Susan Sontag and some others but Edward is committed to the pub but he arrives at a time when the neoliberal regime which is in the early 70s is becoming more popular and becomes hegemonic by the late 80s by by the mid mid late 80s even under conservative auspices of Reagan is still neoliberal in terms of being capitalist tied to those three tendencies so he has to cut even more radically against the grain when the voice invokes public and Dewey invokes public people have a memory in the sensitive public the New Deal was real the Roosevelt did commit class suicide against his well-to-do Hyde Park friends but by the time you get to the 80s the notions of the public become more and more elusive father removed from memory so he has to be even more heroic and then he's Palestinian oh my god I mean the notion that the greatest public intellectual in American everybody let afford to innocence would be a Palestinian just think about that but it's true is true but as a Palestinian he's just not every Palestinian he's somebody who is as highbrow sophisticated refined creative also has his limitations but he's courageous open-minded self-critical and willing to bear witness in such a way that ten years later we could come to the same spot that even Lexington Russell would for forty years and still be on fire like he was because he was always on fire love that about mother but love that about it brings tears to my eyes and you thinking about all this energy that he but dispenser how can he do so much in so little time he didn't have computers in the same the flights took more hours think of the level of sacrifice that took when he found out he had leukemia in September 1991 he didn't stop his brother mezack was telling me that he saw Edward give a lecture in the afternoon after having chemotherapy that the chemotherapy that morning and he had more energy he had ever seen of any intellectual behind the lectern that's the kind of commitment that brother had Edwards I we love you brother Edward we'll never forget you okay well I think any worse I ever say I remember that

Channel: Columbia University

Views: 90,685

Rating: 4.8095236 out of 5

Keywords: Palestine, Public Intellectual, Judith Butler, Cornel West (Author), Edward Said (Author), Center for Palestine Studies, Lila Abu-Lughod, James Schamus

Id: jF5mYvjDp3U

Length: 81min 48sec (4908 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 07 2013

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[u/minby7]

I was extremely happy to see this event, and top it off with a "come here, brother [minby7]!" hug from Cornel West. A highlight of my year!