Thus Spoke Said／薩依德如是說

Said
Originally uploaded by wychan.

在剛過去的星期日，讀了Edward Said的Representations of the Intellectual （《知識份子論》）(1996, New York: Vintage Books)一小部份。

我覺得很感動。感動不單是由於Edward Said對知識份子的社會責任和功能作出動人的描寫，更重要的是，他本身就是他所寫的、倡議的貫徹實踐者。

然後，我想起我經常身處的地方的所見所聞……

Extract /節錄 :

"Intellectual is an individual with a specific public role in society that cannot be reduced simply to being a faceless professional, a competent member of a class just going about her/his business. The central fact for me is, I think, that the intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public. And this role has an edge to it, and cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publically to raise embrarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison detre is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug. The intellectual does so on the basis of universal principle: that all human beings are entitled to expect decent standards of behaviour concerning freedom and justice from worldly powers or nations, and that deliberate or inadvertent violations of these standards need to be testified and fought against courageously." (p.9)

"There is no question in my mind that the intellectual belongs on the same side with the weak and unrepresented..... At bottom, the intellectual in my sense of the word, is neither a pacifier nor a consensus-builder, but someone whose whole being is staked on a critical sense, a sense of being unwilling to accept easy formulas, or ready-made cliches, or the smooth, ever-so-accommodating confirmations of what the powerful or conventional have to say, and what they do. Not just passively unwilling, but actively willing to say so in public." (p.17)

Thus spoke Said.　

薩依德如是說。