Abstract
Edward Said the refugee could not easily allow himself to join in the celebration of demythologizing nationalism. His Palestinianism had to coexist, uncomfortably, with his universalism. Time made this necessary coexistence an asset, not a liability, and this in fact was his political legacy for the future: Jews and Palestinians would have to reconcile to a similar existence as does the national intellectual in exile. Like Said himself, future society in Palestine would have to live on the border between two and more cultures (including national ones), a society that would represent alternative narratives to reality – instead of or next to the master national narratives – as part of a process of restitution. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari defined these as ‘deterrritorialized’ societies built on the collapse of master narratives. Said would probably have lived more comfortably with a less postmodernist approach to deterritorialization, such as the one offered by Henry Giroux in his pedagogic attempt to reconcile modernist and postmodernist critique as part of what he termed the pedagogy of ‘Border Crossing’: one could chart in post-conflictual Palestine a society in which identity is fragile, dynamic and moves easily between origins, spheres and languages.