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EDWARD SAID: Gramsci, in The Prison Notebooks, says something
that has always
tremendously appealed to me, that history deposits in us our own
history, our family's
history, our nation's history, our tradition's history, which has
left in us an infinity of
traces, all kinds of marks, you know, through heredity, through
collective experience,
through individual experience, through family experience, relations
between one
individual and another, a whole book, if you like, on a series of,
an infinity of traces, but
there is no inventory, there's no orderly guide to it.
So Gramsci says, “Therefore the task at the outset, is to try to
compile an inventory,” in
other words to try and make sense of it. And this seems to me to be
the most
interesting sort of human task. It's the task of interpretation.
It's a task of giving history
some shape and sense, for a particular reason, not just to show that
my history is better
than yours, or my history is worse than yours. I'm a victim and
you're somebody who's
oppressed people or so on, but rather, to understand my history in
terms of other
people's history, in other words to try to understand, to move
beyond, to generalize
one's own individual experience to the experience of others. And I
think the great goal is
in fact to become someone else. To transform itself from a unitary
identity to an identity
that includes the other without suppressing the difference. That, he
says is the great
goal. And for me I think that would be the case. That would be the
notion of writing an
inventory, historical inventory, which would try to understand not
only to understand
one's self but to understand one's self in relation to others and to
understand others as
if you would understand yourself.
Source: EDWARD SAID On ‘Orientalism'. Executive Producer &
Director: Sut Jhally. Producer & Editor: Sanjay Talreja. Assistant
Editor: Jeremy Smith. Featuring an interview with Edward Said,
Professor, Columbia University and author of Orientalism.
Introduced by Sut Jhally, University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Media Education Foundation, 1998.
Here. The above discourse starts at minute mark 33:18. |
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