유랑과 저항, 그리고 해방과 공존: 사이드의 '지식인'

Abstract

How can we define our current world? What are the main characteristics of the so-called postcolonial age that we live in now? Confrontation or coexistence? To Edward Said, our world is so turbulent world, which is now brimming over with belligerency, actual wars, and all kinds of terrorism. Causes of this disturbance? ‘The political god,’ in Said’s own term: politics that becomes a religious dogmatism. Hence the overflow of a total Manichaean system in which one side is innocently good, the other irreducibly evil. Results? The death of the process, the give-and-take of vital interchange and the rise of the ethnic cleansing, mass slaughter and unending conflict that are horrible to contemplate. What shall we do? Especially, what shall the intellectuals do who are endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, and attitude to, as well as for, a public? Become a disciple or acolyte to speak for the authority? Or become an opponent to speak against the central power? The main purpose of this paper is to articulate Said’s representations of the intellectual whose essence is the characterizations of the intellectual as exile and marginal, as amateur, and as the author of a language that tries to speak the truth to power.