Places of Mind by Timothy Brennan

Author:Timothy Brennan [Brennan, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2021-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

As a teacher’s book, The World, the Text, and the Critic built itself out of the assembled data of massive lecture notes. It was not only Said’s strange couplings of unlike figures but his obsessive discipline in accumulating biographical details and quotations that leap out in these notes, where he would often copy out extended passages longhand, pasting them onto pages filled with line diagrams, interlarded commentary, and insertions of marginalia. At times, they appear as drafts of an essay, the paper plain white, then ruled yellow, then ruled white torn out of a spiral binder combined with scribblings on hotel stationery. Friends doubted him when he claimed that his best ideas came from teaching, but anyone who has read his class notes between 1964 and 1984 would find it persuasive.67

He wrote a piece titled “History of Critical Theories” in 1971, for instance, that never saw publication. Dozens of pages typed or scribbled on Shelley, Plato, and medieval laws of interpretation give way to an extended study of Plato’s Phaedrus, where he is excited by the philosopher’s model of philosophical virtue. Rather than writing “by way of pastime,” it is better, Said thought, to be involved in “the art of dialectic. [For] the dialectician selects a soul of the right type.” A few pages after these quotations, he pens a note to himself: Phaedrus is about a language that, “because rational, invites the play of the intellect, takes time, is polysemous. Not directly one.”68

This was no random quotation. In the early 1970s, he explained the rationale for his seminar reading list to students as being made up of writers who are “anti-dialectical in the sense that dialectics as Hegel used it provided for a final transcendence and/or resolution.”69 Hegel, it turns out, did not actually believe that thought could be stopped in its tracks this way, or that it arrived dutifully at its destination, at which point the world suddenly ends, being freed from all antagonisms between self and other, consciousness and things. But it is certainly true that France’s Nietzschean philosophers ascribed this view to Hegel and that Said, who read very little Hegel, subscribed to the view as well.70 Once in conversation with the novelist and political activist Tariq Ali, he jokingly asked, “Have you actually read any Hegel, and don’t lie,” as though no one but a masochist would bother.71

This conflict between resolution and the “play of the intellect” lay behind his original plan to make the chapter on Gramsci and Lukács the centerpiece of The World, the Text, and the Critic. He pitted the emphasis on history and time in Lukács against Gramsci’s interest in geography, although, as he posed it, the difference was hardly an either-or.72 He asked a friend, “Have you ever read Perry Anderson’s ‘Components of the National Culture’? I was trying to develop some themes out of that.” Anderson, a British Marxist historian, had charted there the deadening effects on British culture of the wave of conservative intellectual immigrants to the U.K. after World War II (among them, Karl Popper, Lewis Namier, and Ludwig Wittgenstein).

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