REITH LECTURES 1993: Representations of an Intellectual
Edward Said
Lecture 3: Intellectual Exiles
TRANSMISSION: 7 July 1993 - BBC Radio 4

Edward Said. "Intellectual Exiles".

«Exile is one of the saddest fates. In pre-modern times banishment was a particularly dreadful punishment, since it not only meant years of aimless wandering away from family and familiar places, but also meant being a sort of permanent outcast, someone who never felt at home and was always at odds with the environment, inconsolable about the past, bitter about present and future».

«Finally, as any real exile will confirm, once you leave your home, wherever you end up you cannot simply take up life and become just another citizen of the new place. Or if you do, there is a good deal of awkwardness to the effort, which scarcely seems worth it. You can spend a lot of time regretting what you lost, envying those around you who have always been at home, near their loved ones, living in the place where they were born and grew up without ever having to experience not only the loss of what was once theirs but, above all, the torturing memory of that which they cannot go back to ever again. On the other hand, as Rilke once said, “you can become a beginner in your circumstances, and this allows you an unconventional style of life and, above all, a different, often very eccentric career”.
For the intellectual, an exilic displacement means being liberated from the usual career, in which “doing well” and following in time-honoured footsteps are the main milestones. Exile means that you are always going to be marginal, and that what you do as an intellectual has to be made up because you cannot follow a prescribed path. If you can experience that fate not as a deprivation and as something to be bewailed, but as a sort of freedom, a process of discovery and doing things according to your own pattern as various interests seize your attention and as the particular goal you set yourself dictates, that is a unique pleasure».