soula avramidis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
when maxim rodinson was asked what he thought of edward said in a very recent interview on aljazeera he said.
I never liked from the beginning. he does not know the arab world and pretends he does.his thought is bourgeois and he is an idealist. up until this moment he has no sound theoretical or practical positions I think. his ideas about islam are shallow yet he makes use of these in his literary work, he is a bourgeois. he belongs to a field that i do not like the field of literary philosophy. in my opinion these people do not know one thing very well.
by the by, there is a lot of truth in this.
* * *
Truth in what, that people in "literary philosophy: do not know one thing very well? It's true that there's an immense amount of ignorance and foolishness in literary theory. But it's dumb to diss someone because of his field in general. Rodinson's field of area studies is largely composed of ideological hacks, guns for hire. And Said is way out of the norm. His scholarship is not merely unquestionable, it sets the standard for the field. As whether he's "bourgrois," I assume that R says this because S is not a Marxist. Well, that's the cross we non-Marxist rads have to bear. We're bourgeois. There are worse things to be. I don't know enough about Islam to say whether S's grasp of Islam is shallow. I'd be surprised it that were true, though. jks
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