Intellectual gossip was always more of a reality for me than the reified, impersonal, names you find in intellectual history. Of course, the gold standard of intellectual gossip is My Encounter With Sartre, where Edward Said transitions into a casual Victorian style anecdote that humanizes and humiliates figures he met on one infamous trip to France. He discusses Simone de Beauvoir's immense hair, Sartre's drool, and tells the story of Foucault escaping from Tunisia in drag. After his death, Said's colleague, bat-shit crazy Gayatri Spivak, wrote an equally amazing essay about her working relationship with Said. After reading it, I wrote to her that the essay had brought tears to my eyes. I didn't mention that half of them were tears of laughter. The essay detailed the way in which Said constantly made efforts to undermine her personally and institutionally, while it completely "forgot" about the many times Spivak intentionally topped him in her own work. A friend of mine was a student of them both, used as a weapon in the constant war between them. He mentioned to me once being present in the department hallway with Spivak when Said walked up to them. Addressing Spivak, who was half his size, Said patted her on the head -- "nice hat Gayatri." Furious, she turned to the department secretary as Edward walked away to loudly announce, "When Edward dies [at the time, he was receiving treatment for cancer], I want that office!" The office in question was the corner office that Said had won in an extensive campaign against Susan Sontag.
http://amagnificentbastard.blogspot.com/2009/01/blinded-by-light-part-i.html
"let's be civil and nice, but not to the point of obeying the rules of debate as defined by liberal blackmail (in which, discomfort caused by a challenge is seen as some vague form of harassment)."
-- Dwayne Monroe, 11/19/08
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws