새날이 밝아온다 ♫

"There is no such things as a private intellectual, since the moments you set down words and then publish them you have entered the public world... My argument is that intellectuals are individuals with a vocation for the art of representing...."   

"This is till true, I believe, despite the often repeated charge that 'grand narratives of emancipation and enlightment' as the contemporary French philosopher Lyotards calls such heroic ambitions associated with the previous 'modern' age, are pronounced as no longer having any currency in the era of postmodernism....... For in fact (!!!) governments still manifestly oppress people, grave miscarriages of justice still occur, the co-optation and inclusion of intellectuals by power can still effectively quieten their voices, and the deviation of intellectuals from their vocation is still very often the case...."

"Knowing how to use language well and knowing when to intervene in language are two essential features of intellectual activity"

"Yet it's not that simple a role, and therefore cannot be easily dismissed as just so much romantic idealism. 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-accomodating confirmation of what the powerful or conventional have to say, and what they do....This is not always a matter of being a critic of government policy, but rather of thinking of the intellectual vocation as maintaining a state of constant alertness, of a perpetual willingness not to let half-truths or recieved ideas steer one along...."  

"To this terribly important task of representing the collective suffering of your own people, testifying to its travails, reasserting its enduring presence, reinforcing its memory, there must be added something else, which only an intellectual, I believe, has the obligation to fulfull..... For the intellectual the task, i believe, is explicitly to universalize the crisis, to give greater human scope to what a particular race or nation suffered, to associate that experience with the suffering of others."

"Because the exile sees things both interms of what has been left behind and what is actual here and now, there is a double perspective that never sees things in isolate....

A second advantage to what in efect is the exile standpoint for an intellectual is that you tend to see things not simply as they are, but as they have come to e that way. Look at situation as contingent, nor as inevitable, look at them as the result of a series of historical choices made by men and women, as facts of society made by human beings and not as natural or god-given, therefore unchangeable, permanent, irreversible."

"The exilic intellectual does not respond to the logic of the conventional but to the audacity of daring, and to representing change, to moving on, not standing still."

"These I shall collect under the name of amateurism, literally, an activity that is fueled by care and affection rather than by profit and selfish, narrow specialization"

"Every intellect5ual has an audience and a constituency. The issue is whether that audience is there to be satisfied, and hence a client to be kept happy, or whether it is there to be challenged, and hence stirred into outright opposition or mobilized into greater democratic participation in the society..."

"One of the shabbiest of all intellectual gambits is to pontificate about abuses in someone else's society and to excuse exactly the same practicies in one own."

"What we must be able to say instead is that intellectuals are not professionals denatured by their fawning service to an extremely flawed power, but - to repeat - are intellectuals with an alternative and more principled stand that enables them in effect to speak the truth to power."

"Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning awya from a difficult and principled position which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take. You do not want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming controversial; you need the approval of a boss or an authority figure; you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate..."

"Yes, the intellectual's voice is lonely, but it has resonance only because it associates itself freely with the reality of a movement, the aspiration of a people, the common pursuit of a shared ideal."

"The morality an principles of an intellectual should not constitute a sort of sealed gearbox that drives thought and action in one direction and is powered by an engine with only one fuel source. The intellectual has to walk around, has to have the space in which to stand and talk back authority, since unquestioning subservience to authority in today's world is one of the greatest threats to an active, and moral, intellectual life."

"The hardest aspect of being an intellectual is to represent what you profess through your work and interventions, without hardening into an institution or a kind of automaton acting at the behest of a system or method.... But the only way of ever achieving it is to keep reminding yourself that as an intellectual you are the one who can choose between actively representing the truth to the best of your ability and passively allowing a patron or an authority to direct you. For the secular intellectual, those gods always fail."