ABSTRACT
Edward Said was often photographed. He had a knack for organizing the image, typically appearing as a richly upholstered six-footer, his bold stripes and patterns from a Savile Row tailor, hair like black whipped cream. Hearts throbbed for him. But the best-known image is very different. In it, he is throwing a stone at an Israeli guardhouse. Instantly published around the world, this photo instigated calls for Said’s dismissal from Columbia University with a corresponding passionate rush to his defense. No other photo captures so economically Said’s ability to make your head snap back and wonder, Can he really get away with that? Said’s career blended erudition, pride, audacity, eloquence, magic, power, and a good location. A prominent, self-declared Western humanist, presenting himself as a raging Jeremiah or a
Romantic outsider-the Manfred of Lord Byron, stalking the Higher Alps and spitting poison at Europe; or a Jonathan Swift, gnashing imprecations at Western civilization. To put it like that announces the self-division that cleaves Said’s whole enterprise. He was Western to the bone. His chosen doubles were Western heroes, riven and tormented figures such as Lawrence of Arabia, whose self-description as “a standing civil war” fascinated Said because it named his own condition. His interest in bisected eccentrics, the Genets, Vicos, and Conrads, lay in his quest to avoid the
fateful stalemating of the contradictory gifts he saw in Lawrence, a civil war fought to a standstill. Said’s intractable contradictions produced a kind of restless energy-and no end of academic tuttutting from his more cautious colleagues-but nothing held him back. He was, of course, an intellectual rake, a fundamentally unpredictable character whose ultimate professional and cultural centrality never extinguished his charming eccentricity. Friends admired Said’s charisma and enemies feared it. Charisma means different things to different people. Max Weber’s description, which is fundamental to ensuing definitions and debate, was grounded in religion. In Weber’s famous paradigm, the supreme charismatic figure, Jesus, blazes briefly only to have his brightness dimmed as the Christian church reduces his oneof-a-kind example into offices, sinecures, rituals, repetition, rote formulas, and gray bureaucracy. Charisma turns into routine.1
