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Acknowledgments
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Acknowledgments As the last chapter, “Edward Said’s Mount Hermon and Mine,” will make amply clear, this book on Said’s legacy had, in some complex and indefinable way, its origins long ago, in 1951, when, after a year at Columbia University, I came to Mount Hermon, a prep school in Bernardston, Massachusetts, to begin my errant teaching career. It was also the year when the fifteen-year-old Edward Said left Egypt and came, reluctantly, as he tells us in his memoir Out of Place, to this Protestant work ethic–driven school. He did not take a course with me during our two years there—alas, since I was teaching the prescribed texts against the grain, from a Kierkegaardian existentialist perspective—so I didn’t come to know him at that time. But many years later, in the early 1970s, after Said had established a substantial reputation as a Conrad scholar, and I had founded boundary 2, he told me that he was aware of my presence at Mount Hermon because, as he put it, I and my friend Bill Burney had the reputation of being something like mysterious outsiders in that WASP environment. This was during a telephone call responding to my request for an essay for the first issue of the journal (on postmodernism); it turned out to be “Foucault as an Intellectual Imagination,” which was incorporated in the penultimate chapter of Beginnings (1975), “Abecedarium Culturae: Absence, Writing, Statement, Discourse, Archeology, Structuralism.” That conversation long ago, in which Edward spoke of his being “out of place” at Mount Hermon, had a great impact on me. It established a long-standing, if spatially distant, friendship and instigated in me a sense of kinship with him, not simply with his revolutionary criticism, but also, and above all, with his extraordinary humanity. This is not to say that I became a disciple. In the years that followed, he was x Acknowledgments never sympathetic with my obsession with Heidegger’s destructive ontology, nor was I entirely sympathetic with his overdetermination of politics at the expense of theory. Indeed, this difference became a constant of our all too infrequent encounters. When they did occur, he would invariably tell me jokingly , “Dear Bill, you’re a good critic, but why do you weaken your originative criticism by Heideggerianizing it?” And I would respond, antiphonally, “Edward , I think you’re a good critic, too, but why do you limit possibilities by not attending to Heidegger’s destructive ontology?” I am not sure how seriously he took my response. What I can say about these conversations is that they instigated my career-long Auseinandersetzung—a critical yet collaborative dialogue—or in his own vocabulary, a “contrapuntal” relationship, with his work. It is in this spirit that I offer my book to his abiding memory. In the process of writing it, I have, as usual, accumulated many debts to my students who have taken various courses I have given on Said and related topics over the years and to colleagues at Binghamton with whom I have discussed my work (or perhaps I should say on whom I inflicted it). With respect to the first group, I want to express my gratitude to R. Radhakrishnan, David Randall, Giovanna Covi, Jeanette McVicker, Robert Marzec, Assimina Karavanta, Michael Logan, Orac Firat, Evi Haggipavlu, Racheal Forlow, Amy Dowd, Tara Sak, and Christina Battista, who, each in his or her own way, contributed to my understanding of Said’s enormously complex and finally unnameable global “vision.” With respect to the second group, I want to acknowledge my debts to David Bartine, Joseph Keith, Dale Tomich, Louisa Morrera, and especially Susan Strehle, all of whom have been patient and productive collocutors in the process of my relentless, patience-exhausting obsession with Said’s legacy. A third group of people to whom I am deeply indebted is, as usual, my colleagues in the boundary 2 editorial collective. I am particularly referring, on the one hand, to Dan O’Hara, Joseph Buttigieg, R. Radhakrishnan, and Donald Pease, who have acknowledged the viability of my perspective on Said’s work, and, on the other hand, to Paul Bové, Ronald Judy, Michael Hays, Marcia Landy, and Karl Kroeber, all of whom have expressed serious reservations, especially about my poststructuralist (though not essentially antihumanist) interrogation of Said’s renewed commitment to humanism, particularly at a time when the antihumanist Straussian neoconservatives who now occupy the White House are mounting an antihistorical and antidemocratic agenda that threatens the...