In the end, I am moved by causes and ideas that I can actually choose to support because they conform to values and principles that I believe in. - Edward Said

I’ve always been interested in what gets left out. That’s why I’m interested in the figure from the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the “silent form” that “dost tease us out of thought.” That’s why I’m interested in Raymond Williams’s discussion of the country house poems, where the representation of the country house necessarily excludes the silence of the peasants who have been driven off the land; or the fields that have been manicured to produce the beautiful spaces that Jane Austen exploits in her novels, where livelihood is transformed into property. I’m interested in the tension between what is represented and what isn’t represented, between the articulate and the silent. For me, it has a very particular background in the questioning of the document. What does the document include? What doesn’t it include? That’s why I have been very interested in attempts of the Subaltern Studies Collective, and others, to talk about excluded voices.

The intellectual's spirit as an amateur can enter and transform the merely professional routine most of us go through into something much more lively and radical; instead of doing what one is supposed to do one can ask why one does it, who benefits from it, how can it reconnect with a personal project and original thoughts.

The intellectual origins of literary theory in Europe were, I think it is accurate to say, insurrectionary. The traditional university, the hegemony of determinism and positivism, the reification of ideological bourgeois “humanism,” the rigid barriers between academic specialties: it was powerful responses to all these that linked together such influential progenitors of today's literary theorist as Saussure, Lukács, Bataille, Lévi-Strauss, Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx. Theory proposed itself as a synthesis overriding the petty fiefdoms within the world of intellectual production, and it was manifestly to be hoped as a result that all the domains of human activity could be seen, and lived, as a unity. ... <p>Literary theory, whether of the Left or the Right, has turned its back on these things. This can be considered, I think, the triumph of the ethic of professionalism. But it is no accident that the emergence of so narrowly defined a philosophy of pure textuality and critical noninterference has coincided with the ascendancy of Reaganism.