14 - 20 February 2002
Issue No.573
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 14 - 20 February 2002 Issue No.573 |
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Committed scholar:
Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002):
As a thinker, teacher, citizen, and activist Pierre Bourdieu towered over our time with extraordinary luminosity. He had a prodigious capacity for work and a seemingly unbounded energy for waging struggles on behalf of the truth -- the truth not only of usually unrecorded social suffering, but also the truth about the institutional obduracy that lurks insidiously beneath the surface of things, and (a persistent theme of his last years) the callous posturing of so- called realistic, or pragmatic intellectuals. Power never fazed or impressed Pierre: he took on its many contemporary forms with undaunted courage. His loss to us his friends, students, and colleagues is as grievous as it is cruel, and were it not for the vast legacy of thought and research that he has left for us as sustenance and example, we would be truly abandoned.
Pierre Bourdieu
At a considerable distance from Paris, he seemed to me during the past few years to be in full flower as a combatant in the struggle against the injustices and overlooked damage done in modern Western societies to the poor and the seemingly unentitled in the name of neoliberalism and globalisation. Thank heavens for his merciless wit and biting insights, I used to say to myself, but thank heavens also for the compassion and self-reflective wisdom that moved him in book after book, sally after sally, cause after cause. Struck down as he was in the prime of his brilliance, he has nevertheless laid on every intellectual the obligation to remain at the very line that he, Pierre Bourdieu, drew against orthodoxy and the impervious market, a particular front which more than anyone in the last three decades he discerned, explained, and creatively opposed.
From the first moment that I met him in New York -- he had come to my office to discuss both the Parliament of Writers and the horrific situation unfolding in Algeria -- I was struck by his unassuming manner, and the cordiality of his regard for a potential friend and ally. Always serious, he was never solemn, and quite charmingly he rarely resisted the chance to say something witty or deflating. He never posed or took on airs. Directness and sincerity of approach were the hallmarks of his intellectual presence, even though he could be scathingly ironic in his attacks on imposture and fraud. He had an encyclopaedic grasp of social movements whose currents and transformations he chronicled, but what I marveled at is how complexity and detail never defeated or incapacitated him. On the contrary, in objectifying them both with unequalled mastery he was also able from there to rise to a theoretical vision that was incomparably elegant and stirring. This, I think, is what made him a greatly inspiring teacher, that and the total absence of personal pomposity.
None of the friends, colleagues, and family members gathered here to honour his memory needs to be reminded that his immense intellectual achievement has resulted in an oeuvre of unique richness and unparalleled scope. Two aspects of it were especially attractive to me as a humanist and engaged intellectual. Pierre Bourdieu's restless energies did not interfere with a capacity for calm, even bemused gift for self-reflection of the kind that issued forth in his wonderful Pascalian Meditations. I vividly recall that I was lecturing at the College de France (at his invitation) when he told me in passing that he had begun work on the book. I also recall how much I envied his self-possession, and how rare it was for so productive and involved a public figure to retreat from the fray in order to search for clarity in his own work and positions. That is something of course that too few of us have either the discipline or the ongoing commitment to scholarship even to attempt, much less pull off. Amazingly enough, he had both.
Second was his gift for collaborative work of the sort that is so much in evidence, for instance in Free Exchange, the book of dialogues that he wrote with Hans Haacke, and of course in The Weight of the World. But let me give an example closer to hand. A couple of years ago I had invited him to participate in a panel entitled "Scholarship and Commitment" that was being convened in Chicago. It seemed to me when I invited him that no one in our time has better described the density of academic life, its self-perpetuating logic as well as its often stifling capacity for maiming and silencing the individual. He graciously accepted my invitation but then discovered a little later that the trip would be too taxing for him to undertake. He had warned me about this earlier, mischievously adding that one of the hazards of travel for him was the inevitable (and usually too long) academic dinner that he would also have to endure! Rather than canceling his participation, however, we jointly agreed that he would be there in person via a television hookup, so that the audience would be able to see and hear him at the same time. The appointed hour happened to be 7pm in Chicago, and an ungodly 2am in Paris, but rather chivalrously there was Pierre for all to see in Chicago, even though fatigue was written all over his face. His intervention was exceptionally well-received by the 3000 people who attended; they admired its description of collective intellectual work, as well as its caustic analysis of "multi-culturalism" as a passing academic fad. I was impressed also that he was able to enter into a vigorous give-and-take with his distant audience, a sure sign that his words had registered immediately with everyone.
I wish I could have been with you in Paris today. Pierre's death is too poignant to experience alone in America at such a distance, so keenly felt is it by me and many others for whom his work and example were both inspiring and warm, particularly at a time when humanity has a shortage of champions, while the orthodoxy of virtue and power seem so unchallenged and, alas, so ascendant. It is Pierre Bourdieu's magnificently critical and oppositional spirit that we must hold on to and try, unceasingly, to perpetuate.
Edward Said
Text of Edward Said's contribution to a memorial held by Pierre Bourdieu's friends and family in Vincennes, Paris on 2 February 2002.
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