A Meditation on Said’s Beginnings: Reconsidering Text and Career as Sites of Power and Resistance
Abstract
In this essay I use Said’s claim for a return to philology in Humanism and Democratic Criticism as a point of departure for reconsidering some aspects of his early book Beginnings. I linger upon the epistemological and ontological values of text and career considered as sites of power and resistance to highlight how writers’ texts and careers become ‘sites’ when Said engages the ‘Gramsci factor’ on the Foucauldian matrix. Said’s contrapuntal ‘inventory’ of the traces of the historical process is a human as well as an intellectual need: he entangles his philological assumptions of Vico, Auerbach and Gramsci with his traditional humanistic education and his exilic biography. The final result is a personal dimension which redefines the concept of career as such and which radically characterizes Said’s praxis as a secular intellectual attitude, a philological method of inquiry and a genuine vocation to criticism.
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Bibliografia
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