Radical Philosophy Review

Volume 8, Issue 1, 2005

Edward Said’s Conception of the Public Intellectual as “Outsider”

Edward Said's mode of intellectual thinking cannot be categorized in terms of concepts such as liberal, socialist or anarchist. In this sense, Said remained all his life, through his work and his action, an "outsider. " This "outsiderhood" created in him an acute awareness of the world and a critical sense of resistance to all forms of political and intellectual domination. In consequence, Said detects a particularly revealing relationship between a deep-seated commitment to the secular principles of humanism and outsiderhood as the ideal ontological position for the intellectual.