Edward Said: que é preciso saber

e também sobre Arafat (que é preciso saber): carta aberta de alguns escritores ligados ao PEN a Arafat:

Letter to Yasser Arafat
It has been widely reported that security services responsible to you have seized books written by Edward W. Said and carried them off from all bookstores in the Palestinian Autonomous Zones in Gaza and the West Bank. Furthermore, that the sale of his books has been forbidden in these same areas and in Palestinian bookstores in East Jerusalem.

This news is especially alarming at a time when those around the world who support the aspirations of the Palestinian people are looking to your Administration for evidence that any emerging Palestinian entity will try to found itself on basic democratic principles and most specifically on the principle of freedom of expression and dissent. This freedom necessarily includes Edward Said’s expressions of difference with some of your current policies.

Edward Said is one of the most prominent, influential and admired of cultural critics. In particular, his writings about the Palestinian experience have been an essential instrument in shaping opinions in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and the Middle East that are favourably informed about the Palestinian cause. We therefore urge you in your own interests as well as in the interests of people everywhere to reaffirm his right to be heard in the areas where an effort has been made to silence him.

Ronald Harwood, President of International PEN
Anne Hollander, President of PEN American Center
Karen Kennerly, Exectutive Director of PEN American Center

Adonis
K. Anthony Appiah
Paul Auster
Niels Barfoed
Mahmoud Darwish
Jacques Derrida
Gamal al-Ghitani
Allen Ginsberg
Gunter Grass
David Grossman
Naguib Mahfouz
Kenzaburo Oe
Orhan Pamuk
Richard Poirier
Anton Shammas
Susan Sontag
Jean Stein
William Styron
Gore Vidal
Torsten Wiesel
Saadi Youssef

Ronald Harwood and 23 others

'intimate impasse of the speculative mind'

"One response to the collapse of philosophical system building in the nineteenth century was the rise of ideologies— aggressively anti-philosophical systems of thought,taking the form of various "positive" or descriptive sciences of man. Comte, Marx, Freud, and the pioneer figures of anthopology, sociology, and linguistics immediately come to mind.

Another response to the debacle was a new kind of philosophizing: personal (even autobiographical), aphoristic, lyrical, anti-systematic. Its foremost examples: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein.
Cioran is the most distinguished figure in this tradition writing today.

The starting point for this modern post-philosophic tradition of philosophizing is the awareness that the traditional forms of philosophical discourse have been broken. What remain as leading possibilities are mutilated, incomplete discourse (the aphorism, the note or jotting) or discourse that has risked metamorphosis into other forms (the parable, the poem, the philosophical tale, the critical exegesis).

Cioran has, apparently, chosen the essay form. (...) But these are curious essays, by ordinary standards - meditative, disjunctive in argument, essencially aphoristic in style. One recognizes, in this Rumanian-born writer who studied philosophy at the University of Bucarest and who has lived in France since 1937 and writes in French, the convulsive manner of German neo-philosophical thinking, whose motto is: aphorism or eternity. (Cf. the philisophical aphorisms of Lichtenberg, Novalis, Nietzsche, passages in Rilke's Duino Elegies, and Kafka's Reflections on Sin, Pain, Hope, and the True Way.)

Cioran's broken arguments are not the "objective" kind of aphoristic writing of a La Rochefoucauld or a Gracián, whose stopping and starting movement mirrors the disjunctive aspects of "the world". Rather, it bears witness to the most intimate impasse of the speculative mind, moving outward only to be checked and broken off by the complexity of its own stance. Not so much a principle of reality as a principle of knowing: namely, that it's the destiny of every profound idea to be chackmated by another idea which it implicitly generated."


na introdução a Temptation to Exist, de Cioran, por Susan Sontag.