Writers As Public Intellectuals - Literature, Celebrity, Democracy

Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature
Published in association with the Centre for Modern European Literature,

University of Kent, UK
Series Editors: Thomas Baldwin, Ben Hutchinson and Shane Weller
Editorial Advisory Board: Brian Boyd, Michael Caesar, Claus Clüver, Patrick
ffrench, Alison Finch, Robert Gordon, Karen Leeder, Marjorie Perloff, Jean-
Michel Rabaté, Andrew Michael Roberts, Ritchie Robertson, Hubert van den Berg
Many of the most significant modern European writers and literary movements
have traversed national, linguistic and disciplinary borders. Palgrave Studies in
Modern European Literature is dedicated to publishing works that take account
of these various kinds of border crossing. Areas covered by the series include
European Romanticism, the avant-garde, modernism and postmodernism, literary
theory, the international reception of modern European writers, and the impact
of other discourses (philosophical, political, psychoanalytic and scientific) upon
modern European literature.
Titles include:
Thomas Baldwin, James Fowler and Ana de Medeiros (editors)

QUESTIONS OF INFLUENCE IN MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE
Larry Duffy
FLAUBERT, ZOLA, AND THE INCORPORATION OF DISCIPLINARY
KNOWLEDGE
Anne Fuchs and J. J. Long

TIME IN GERMAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE, 1900–2015
Between Acceleration and Slowness
Anna Katharina Schaffner and Shane Weller (editors)

MODERNIST EROTICISMS: European Literature After Sexology
Hanna Meretoja
THE NARRATIVE TURN IN FICTION AND THEORY
Ros Murray
ANTONIN ARTAUD: The Scum of the Soul
Maria Rubins
RUSSIAN MONTPARNASSE
Claire White
WORK AND LEISURE IN LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH LITERATURE
AND VISUAL CULTURE
David Williams
WRITING POSTCOMMUNISM
Towards a Literature of the East European Ruins
Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature

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Writers as Public
Intellectuals
Literature, Celebrity, Democracy
Odile Heynders
Tilburg University, The Netherlands
© Odile Heynders 2016
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Contents
Series Editors’ Preface vi

Preface ix
Acknowledgements xi
1 Transformations of the Public Intellectual 1

2 Conscientious Chronicler, H.M. Enzensberger (1929) 26
3 Eastern European Voices, Slavenka Drakulić (1949)
and Dubravka Ugresić (1949) 52
4 Public Man as Actor, Bernard-Henri Lévy (1948) 74
5 A Protean Public Figure, Ayaan Hirsi Ali (1969) 97
6 Public Intellectuals from Brussels, David van
Reybrouck (1971) and Geert van Istendael (1947) 121
7 Responsible Satire, Hamed Abdel-Samad (1972) 139
8 Popular Fiction, Elif Shafak (1971) 160
Notes 182
Bibliography 201
Index 211
v
Series Editors’ Preface
Many of the most significant European writers and literary movements

in the modern period have traversed national, linguistic and disciplinary
borders. The principal aim of the Palgrave Studies in Modern European
Literature series is to create a forum for work that takes account of these
border crossings, and that engages with individual writers, genres, topoi
and literary movements in a manner that does justice to their loca-
tion within European artistic, political and philosophical contexts. Of
course, the title of this series immediately raises a number of questions,
at once historical, geo-political and literary-philosophical: What are
the parameters of the modern? What is to be understood as European,
both politically and culturally? And what distinguishes literature within
these historical and geo-political limits from other forms of discourse?
These three questions are interrelated. Not only does the very idea
of the modern vary depending on the European national tradition
within which its definition is attempted, but the concept of literature
in the modern sense is also intimately connected to the emergence
and consolidation of the European nation-states, to increasing secu-
larization, urbanization, industrialization and bureaucratization, to
the Enlightenment project and its promise of emancipation from
nature through reason and science, to capitalism and imperialism, to
the liberal-democratic model of government, to the separation of the
private and public spheres, to the new form taken by the university,
and to changing conceptions of both space and time as a result of
technological innovations in the fields of travel and communication.
Taking first the question of when the modern may be said to commence
within a European context, if one looks to a certain Germanic tradition
shaped by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), then it might
be said to commence with the first ‘theoretical man’, namely Socrates.
According to this view, the modern would include everything that comes
after the pre-Socratics and the first two great Attic tragedians, Aeschylus
and Sophocles, with Euripides being the first modern writer. A rather
more limited sense of the modern, also derived from the Germanic world,
sees the Neuzeit as originating in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth
centuries. Jakob Burckhardt, Nietzsche’s colleague at the University of
Basel, identified the states of Renaissance Italy as prototypes for both
modern European politics and modern European cultural production.
vi
Series Editors’ Preface vii
However, Italian literary modernity might also be seen as having com-

menced two hundred years earlier, with the programmatic adoption of
the vernacular by its foremost representatives, Dante and Petrarch.
In France, the modern might either be seen as beginning at the turn of
the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, with the so-called ‘Querelle
des anciens et des modernes’ in the 1690s, or later still, with the French
Revolution of 1789, while the Romantic generation of the 1830s might
equally be identified as an origin, given that Chateaubriand is often cred-
ited with having coined the term modernité in 1833. Across the Channel,
meanwhile, the origins of literary modernity might seem different again.
With the Renaissance being seen as ‘Early Modern’, everything thereafter
might seem to fall within the category of the modern, although in fact
the term ‘modern’ within a literary context is generally reserved for the
literature that comes after mid-nineteenth-century European realism.
This latter sense of the modern is also present in the early work of Roland
Barthes, who in Writing Degree Zero (1953) asserts that modern literature
commences in the 1850s, when the literary becomes explicitly self-reflexive,
not only addressing its own status as literature but also concerning itself
with the nature of language and the possibilities of representation.
In adopting a view of the modern as it pertains to literature that is
more or less in line with Barthes’s periodization, while also acknowl-
edging that this periodization is liable to exceptions and limitations,
the present series does not wish to conflate the modern with, nor
to limit it to, modernism and postmodernism. Rather, the aim is to
encourage work that highlights differences in the conception of the
modern – differences that emerge out of distinct linguistic, national
and cultural spheres within Europe – and to prompt further reflec-
tion on why it should be that the concept of the modern has become
such a critical issue in ‘modern’ European culture, be it aligned with
Enlightenment progress, with the critique of Enlightenment thinking,
with decadence, with radical renewal, or with a sense of belatedness.
Turning to the question of the European, the very idea of modern
literature arises in conjunction with the establishment of the European
nation-states. When European literatures are studied at university, they
are generally taught within national and linguistic parameters: English,
French, German, Italian, Scandinavian, Slavic and Eastern European,
and Spanish literature. Even if such disciplinary distinctions have their
pedagogical justifications, they render more difficult an appreciation of
the ways in which modern European literature is shaped in no small
part by intellectual and artistic traffic across national and linguistic
borders: to grasp the nature of the European avant-gardes or of high
viii Series Editors’ Preface
modernism, for instance, one has to consider the relationship between

distinct national or linguistic traditions. While not limiting itself to
one methodological approach, the present series is designed precisely
to encourage the study of individual writers and literary movements
within their European context. Furthermore, it seeks to promote
research that engages with the very definition of the European in its
relation to literature, including changing conceptions of centre and
periphery, of Eastern and Western Europe, and how these might bear
upon questions of literary translation, dissemination and reception.
As for the third key term in the series title – literature – the formation of
this concept is intimately related both to the European and to the mod-
ern. While Sir Philip Sidney in the late sixteenth century, Martin Opitz
in the seventeenth, and Shelley in the early nineteenth produce their
apologies for, or defences of, ‘poetry’, it is within the general category of
‘literature’ that the genres of poetry, drama and prose fiction have come
to be contained in the modern period. Since the Humboldtian reconfigu-
ration of the university in the nineteenth century, the fate of literature
has been closely bound up with that particular institution, as well as
with emerging ideas of the canon and tradition. However one defines it,
modernity has both propagated and problematized the historical legacy
of the Western literary tradition. While, as Jacques Derrida argues, it may
be that in all European languages the history and theorization of the
literary necessarily emerges out of a common Latinate legacy – the very
word ‘literature’ deriving from the Latin littera (letter) – it is nonetheless
the case that within a modern European context the literary has taken on
an extraordinarily diverse range of forms. Traditional modes of represen-
tation have been subverted through parody and pastiche, or abandoned
altogether; genres have been mixed; the limits of language have been
tested; indeed, the concept of literature itself has been placed in question.
With all of the above in mind, the present series wishes to promote
work that engages with any aspect of modern European literature (be it
a literary movement, an individual writer, a genre, a particular topos)
within its European context, that addresses questions of translation,
dissemination and reception (both within Europe and beyond), that
considers the relations between modern European literature and the
other arts, that analyses the impact of other discourses (philosophical,
political, scientific) upon that literature, and, above all, that takes each
of those three terms – modern, European and literature – not as givens,
but as invitations, even provocations, to further reflection.
Thomas Baldwin
Ben Hutchinson
Shane Weller
Preface
This book is about writers as public intellectuals critiquing in their

work the state of affairs in Europe. As such, it is about how literature
is expanding and transforming today, due to the call on writers to
interfere in the public sphere, either by formulating an opinion on rel-
evant issues or the things going on, by creating stories and scenarios to
confront readers with critical ideas and new perspectives, or by writing
discursive essays and delivering public lectures to engage the ordinary
citizens. Since its new constellation in 1989, Europe has faced rapid
social transformation and political and economic struggles. The EU,
as constructed by the Maastricht treaty in 1992, has taken measures to
overcome the difficulties and to become more meaningful and respon-
sible. This book investigates critical ideas on Europe and the European
Union – two separate yet related entities – by studying the rhetorical
strategies and performances, and the visibility and cultural authority
of writers as public intellectuals across various national public spheres.
The theme of public intellectuals has become a familiar feature in
discussions on contemporary societies and the transformation of public
spheres. Questions about the cultural authority, social commitment,
responsibility and activism of particular figures (philosophers, artists,
novelists, academics) have been central in these debates. The first objec-
tive of this book is to reflect on the power of current public intellectuals
writing literature or using literary techniques and devices. The second
objective is to consider the work of a number of representative public
intellectuals from different public spheres within Europe. This book
examines the writings and the performances of public intellectuals in
their (trans)national contexts, and discusses their ideas and the persua-
siveness of their words, with a special focus on the ‘literary’ imagina-
tion used. Some of these intellectuals are considered canonical writers,
making use of the prestige of literature to get their ideas across, others
have taken on the role of media celebrity or are celebrated for writing
popular fiction. Yet, all of them are aware of the power of identification
and make believe – what Jürgen Habermas (2009) calls ‘the avantgardis-
tic instinct’ – needed in order to understand and critique the political,
social and cultural context of Europe. As such, these public intellectuals
are dedicated to democracy in their modest and careful engagement. Or,
in the words of Danish novelist Jens Christian Grøndahl,
ix
x Preface
In a democracy, writers are just citizens like everyone else; providers

of a slightly more sophisticated sort of entertainment. And I would
gladly resign myself to that, having seen the hopes of 1989 go up in
flames on 9/11, were it not for the restlessness taking hold of me;
a ridiculous but persisting defiance on behalf of this art of making
people real to themselves with words. Every time I meet with read-
ers, I am reminded that as writers, even as writers in postmodern
democracies, we still have a different perspective to offer (‘News and
the Writer’, 2014).
This book starts with discussing recent theoretical positions on pub-

lic intellectuals, and subsequently offers seven showcases, as detailed
analyses of the performances and writings of some typical public
intellectuals from various European countries, scrutinising established
conceptions of ‘intellectual thinking’, ‘civil responsibility’ and ‘cultural
authority’. It provides a critical evaluation of the aesthetic, social and
political repercussions of intellectual agency and thinking in various
European public spheres. The most poignant topics discussed by the
several authors studied in this book are migration and cosmopolitan-
ism on the one side, and nationalism, democracy and the history of
the present on the other, while the transforming public sphere due to
digitalisation and mediatisation is the umbrella of all discussions.
Acknowledgements
Seeds for this book were planted in a Liberal Arts course on Rhetoric,
Culture and Democracy, which I developed and co-taught for several
years (2008–12) at Tilburg University with my dear colleague Willem
Witteveen. He died on 17 July 2014 in the Ukraine; I hope to keep the
memory of his erudition alive with this book. With financial support
from the KNAW (Royal Dutch Academy of Research), a student research
group was formed in 2011, in which we started analysing the work
of some European intellectuals: thanks to Tom van Nuenen, Claudia
Egher, Anna Lohfink and Marjet van Loo for their participation. Many
thanks as well to post docs Piia Varis and Sanna Lehtonen for the very
inspiring discussions, and to the young PhD students from the TRAPS
(Transformations in the Public Sphere) first-edition group: Merijn
Oudenampsen, Caixa Du, Geertjan de Vugt, Fie Velghe, Mingyi Hou,
Paul Mutsaers, and their (co-)supervisor Jan Blommaert. From 2012 on, I
joined every April the Harvard Conference on Public Intellectuals organised
by Lawrence J. Friedman, during which I met many public intellectuals
and critical colleagues and discussed the first drafts and ideas of some of
the chapters of this book: special thanks to Larry himself and to Mark
I. West, Neil McLaughlin, Helen Fordham, John R. Lenz, Jim Clark,
Michael Brown, Damon Freeman, Michael Keren, Lisa Szefel, and all
the others, and a very warm thanks to Pilar Damiao de Medeiros, who
let us meet in Lisbon in the autumn of 2013 some Portuguese dissident
writers as public intellectuals with an amazing and inspiring European
track record. Parts of chapters from this book were presented as lectures
at international conferences in Antwerp, New York, Seattle and Ghent.
I found it inspiring to present European perspectives on American plat-
forms. The material is here appearing in print for the first time. The one
exception is Chapter 5, the greater part of which appeared in P. Thijssen
(et al.), New Public Spheres, Recontextualizing the Intellectual, 2013. I thank
my colleagues in the Department of Culture Studies at Tilburg University
for joining me in many discussions on who is (or not) an intellectual
and why: Ad Backus, Helma van Lierop, Leon Hanssen, Sjaak Kroon,
Ico Maly, Paul Scheffer, Jan Jaap de Ruiter, and in particular Sander Bax.
Finally, I would like to thank my family for letting me have a room of my
own; you know that writing a book is like preparing a slow food dish or train-
ing for the Fausto Coppi Classic; it is about making hours and enjoying it.
xi
1
Transformations of the Public
Intellectual
In order to provide a theoretical framework for the individual case stud-

ies presented in this book, this chapter offers a discussion of the concept
of public intellectual and the contexts in which it has been used.
I am speaking like an intellectual, but the intellectual,

to my mind, is more in touch with humanity than is
the confident scientist, who patronizes the past, over-
simplifies the present, and envisages a future where
his leadership will be accepted. (E.M. Forster, 1972
[1946], p. 58)1
Big thinker
On 27 April 2014 The New York Times published an article on Thomas

Piketty’s magnum opus Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) charac-
terising the author as a celebrity intellectual whose stardom reflects the
fashions and feelings of the moment.2 The French economist Piketty,
who graduated from the London School of Economics, worked at MIT
and later became director of the French National Centre of Scientific
Research in Paris, wrote in Capital an extensive study on the inequal-
ity of wealth and income. Clearly referring to Marx’s Das Kapital from
1867, Piketty brings together historical narratives and big data from 20
countries in a readable book, the main thesis of which concerns the
unequal accumulation and distribution of capital in our age, generating
discontent and undermining democratic culture. The economist writes
well, apart from being an academic, he also is a columnist for the news-
paper Liberation and occasionally for Le Monde.
1
2 Writers as Public Intellectuals
Piketty, according to The New York Times, is filling a void; he has writ-
ten his book at the right time, capturing the Zeitgeist and personifying
it in the right way. He is one of the two or three authors per decade
who are receiving the intellectual rock star status, not (only) because of
a grand idea or encouraging new argument, but rather because of their
thesis and style of writing as well as their publicly performing the role of
an intellectual. Piketty is fashionable, just like other public intellectuals
were at the time: the ‘curmudgeonly’ Christopher Lash or the ‘flamboy-
ant philosopher-king’ Allan Bloom.
Piketty’s fame in the Unites States was immediately noted in Europe.
Liberation published a piece with the headline ‘Piketty, Superstar aux
States’ and remarked that the book sold better than Game of Thrones,
although the author still preferred his modest Parisian bureau over an
American university chair.3 Die Welt4 wrote about his success overseas,
after which the article shifted to an in-depth analysis of the ideas on
capitalist structures and the differences in various European countries.
The prestigious Dutch publisher De Bezige Bij bought the rights for
the translation of Capital in the Twenty-First Century for an exceptional
amount of money,5 after which television programmes, newspapers and
weekly journals covered the book in critical articles.6
Big thinkers are intellectuals as superstars, triggering an audience that in
our media-overloaded era is not so easily seduced. As a big thinker, Piketty
knows how to achieve and maintain the attention of his readers, combin-
ing economy with cultural history, and theory with narrative. He brings
us back to the belle époque described in the novels of Honoré de Balzac and
Jane Austen in which the aristocracy, the bourgeois and the proletariat
had their own fixed positions, his message being that in the twenty-first
century we have not left behind this system of social inequality.
Piketty’s urgent and provocative study contradicts the observation of
The New York Times that the Internet and social media favour bite-size
thought over grand theses and sharp insights over the belles-lettristic
narratives, underlining that this is more the age of idea-savvy journalists
rather than of scholars and intellectuals. It is this contradiction that will
be investigated in this book, by exploring the hypothesis that the posi-
tion of intellectuals today has changed, and that strategies of celebrity
behaviour and the subsequent responses of the public are transforming
the traditions and modes of intellectual thinking and writing. There still
are intellectuals today, but as public speakers and writers they are oper-
ating on various platforms using multiple rhetorical strategies. Writing
and thinking have become part of a wide-ranging public performance,
often characterised by theatricality.
Transformations of the Public Intellectual 3
Piketty, ‘the new Marx’ and at the same time posing as the charming
Frenchman, had his big event in the sold out Amsterdam pop temple
Paradiso on Wednesday 5 November 2014, after having informed Dutch
parliamentarians of his book earlier that day, something that marks a
relevant activity of the public intellectual: to inform politicians who
have no time at all for a further reflection on all the complex subjects
they have to discuss and form a serious and persuasive opinion about.
One of Piketty’s statements that evening was that he believes in the
power of books, that books can contribute to a better future.7 Evidently,
the audience thought so too, since many of them could be observed
with the thick Capital in their hands.
Characterisations of the public intellectual
The public intellectual intervenes in the public debate and proclaims a

controversial and committed and sometimes compromised stance from
a sideline position. He8 has critical knowledge and ideas, stimulates
discussion and offers alternative scenarios in regard to topics of politi-
cal, social and ethical nature, thus addressing non-specialist audiences
on matters of general concern. Public intellectual intervention can take
many different forms ranging from speeches and lectures to books,
articles, manifestos, documentaries, television programmes and blogs
and tweets on the Internet. Today’s public intellectual operates in a
media-saturated society and has to be visible in order to communicate
to a broad public.
The terms ‘intellectual’ and ‘public intellectual’ have a long history,
fuelled by theorists from different disciplines. The specific term ‘intel-
lectual’ was coined after the Dreyfus affair in France at the end of the
nineteenth century, and was used to point at a collection of novelists,
artists, journalists, university professors and other cultural figures who
felt it their moral responsibility and collective right to interfere with the
political process. The Dreyfusards organised themselves in a group and
put their signatures to a petition to mark their independent critical posi-
tion underscoring the innocence of the Jewish military officer Alfred
Dreyfus, who was sentenced to life imprisonment because of alleged
treason. Although the term ‘intellectual’ as such was not used before
the nineteenth century, theorists have emphasised that many writers
since the Renaissance have been in the position of the intellectual,
expressing a similar independent and critical view on political, social
and ethical issues in the public sphere (Melzer et al., 2003; Lacroix and
Nicolaïdis, 2010).
As is argued in this book, the recent addition of the term ‘public’

to intellectual, interchanging with ‘celebrity’ or ‘media’, points to the
activities of translation, mediation and the popularisation of ideas,
aimed at a wider outreach and communication. Significantly, the public
intellectual sometimes makes compromises with regard to the intellec-
tual content of ideas in order to address a larger audience. The public
intellectual addresses an audience beyond intellectual peers, whereas the
intellectual mainly interacts with other intellectuals (Baert and Shipman,
2013). ‘Public’ originally was an American, instead of a European addi-
tion, as we can read in Posner’s Public Intellectuals, A Study of Decline
(2004 [2001]) analysing public intellectuals as they appeared in the
media in the United States in the period between 1995 and 2000. Posner
emphasises that the terms mark the fact that the intellectual makes a
serious contribution to the improvement of public communication.
There is a strong need for that since the universities in the twentieth
century have specialised too much and academics have become uni-
versity specialists only and have lost interest in a general audience and
public debate. Posner and others (Debray, 1981; Jacoby, 1987; Bauman,
1989 [1987]; Furedi, 2006) thus point to the decline of an academic
intellectual impact in late modern societies. It is the assumption of this
book, however, that public intellectuals today have a different position
since they address the public, or fragmented counter-publics, while at
the same time they have become part, and often consciously play to
be a part, of the audiences themselves. The position from which the
intellectual could present a general, independent, rational overview
has definitely changed in our media society into a position from within
the audience, which implies the managing of strategies of visibility,
participation, critiquing and the bringing in of new ideas. The alleged
decline of public intellectual intervention has more to do with a trans-
formation of rhetorical strategies rather than with a lack of insight,
courage or influence. Furthermore, we have to be aware of the ‘knowl-
edge transfer’ that is becoming more and more of a default strategy of
academics. European governments have made it an explicit agenda for
public funding that writers and academics bring their work out of the
academy and make it accessible and relevant to wider audiences. Before
further elaborating on this, I will briefly take a route along definitions
and characterisations in order to make clear in which sense the terms
public intellectual are used here.
From the outset, the thinking about intellectuals was based on
dichotomies. Almost all theorists place one type of intellectual in oppo-
sition to another. In 1927, the French critic Julien Benda was the first
to offer, in The Treason of the Intellectuals (2009 [1927]), quite a pessi-

mistic perspective on the intellectual as ‘clerk’ rather than a ‘traditional
thinker’. The clerk was reacting out of impulses and passion, while
the traditional thinker – the intellectual as such – was considered to be
capable of making a rational analysis based on universal Enlightenment
values.9 Benda argued that emotional response had become the ground
of politics and disturbed a more contemplative critique, the result of
which was nationalism and xenophobia.
We observe how in Benda’s exposé a dichotomy is constructed, which
is repeated in various discussions on public intellectuals at the end of
the twentieth century. Michel Foucault (1980 [1972]) discusses general
and specialist intellectuals, Antonio Gramsci (1971) introduces the tra-
ditional and organic intellectual, Zygmunt Bauman (1989 [1987]) cat-
egorises the legislator and interpreter. The change of accents in regard
to these dichotomies is related to the alternation of cultural paradigms.
Bauman for instance, distinguishes between intellectuals as ‘legislators’
representative for modernity, and as ‘interpreters’ representative for
the era of post-modernity. The legislator – akin to Benda’s traditional
thinker – makes authoritative statements, underlining moral power and
universal knowledge as the structural elements in a society, whereas the
interpreter emphasises the different positions and perspectives, thus
facilitating communication between diverse participants in a society.
No objective measurements can prove that someone is an intellectual,
since the intentional meaning of being an intellectual is ‘to rise above
the partial preoccupation of one’s own profession or artistic genre and
engage with global issues of truth, judgement and taste of the time’
(Bauman, 1989 [1987], p. 2). Yet, the intention of having something to
say to an audience, of teaching it something, is only part of the story
and does not instantaneously legitimise the intellectual position. As is
argued in this book, we also have to consider and qualify the medium
and style of writing, the visibility of the intellectual persona, the spe-
cific issue discussed, and the addressed public or the participants in the
debate accepting (or not) the intellectual’s authority. More than before,
the current public intellectual is functioning in a media context that
can amplify or devaluate his position. The intellectual can become a
‘collision point’, as Paul Berman (2010) correctly observed in his book
on Swiss intellectual Tariq Ramadan, implying that various audiences
could project their own ideas upon the intellectual. The public intellec-
tual thus becomes a sort of empty vessel for publics to inhabit with their
own ideas. Ideas lead to responses, and these again to other reactions,
while serious points can become more controversial once the discussion
is taking place and the media coverage on the Internet is getting faster
and wider, and in a way is spinning out of control. Rumours and insinu-
ations can turn polemics into nasty debates resulting in sceptical judge-
ments and spectacle, in which intellectual assumption and rational
arguments seem to have disappeared completely.
Rousseau, Diderot and Heinrich Heine can be considered as historical
forerunners of public intellectuals. Thomas and Heinrich Mann, George
Orwell, Czeslaw Milosz, Václav Havel, Simone de Beauvoir, and Hannah
Arendt are twentieth-century ones. And today’s public intellectuals
are for example Timothy Garton Ash, Martin Amis, Jens Christian
Grøndahl and Zadie Smith. But not only canonised writers, historians
and philosophers are intellectuals; filmmakers (Werner Herzog, Heddy
Honigmann, Bruno Ulmer), visual artists (Donald Rodney, Marlene
Dumas), and journalists or television makers (Henryk Broder, Sabrina
Guzzanti) can be considered public intellectuals as well, influencing the
public debate with critical statements and provocative ideas expressed
in cultural practices providing imaginary scenarios. And although pub-
lic intellectuals might earlier have had their roots in the humanities,
many of them today derive from the natural or technical sciences. An
evolutionary theorist such as Richard Dawkins is a public intellectual,
as is astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, just as are economist Milton
Friedman making television documentaries, and Dutch scientist Robert
Dijkgraaf doing ‘academic’ public lectures on television. Today’s public
intellectuals often appear on various platforms, accentuating that the
public sphere is a space of differentiated discourses. They have their
own circles and national habitat within Europe as well as elsewhere on
the globe; in the United States, in Latin America and India, and even in
China, where dissident writers as public intellectuals are making use of
the Internet or Weibo (the Chinese Facebook/Twitter hybrid), critiquing
the political authoritarian regime and pleading for an alternative social
order.10 Traditions of thinking and writing are rooted in local and cul-
tural contexts but often cross boundaries and attain global relevance.
Not everyone likes to identify as a public intellectual. Historian Stefan
Collini argues in his outstanding Absent Minds, Intellectuals in Britain
(2009 [2006]) that the denial of the existence of real intellectuals has
always been a prominent aspect of national self-definition in Britain.
The word intellectual evoked pretentiousness, arrogance and hubris.
By presenting a careful historical analysis of the main debates in the
past two centuries, however, Collini demonstrates that there definitely
does exist an intellectual tradition in Britain. He distinguishes three
senses of the noun intellectual as it is used in the United Kingdom: the
sociological sense, in which intellectuals are considered as those whose

occupations are involved with ideas and not with practical issues; the
subjective sense, having to do with an individual’s attitude towards
ideas, reflectiveness and truth-seeking; and the cultural sense, focusing
on those individuals regarded as having an acknowledged intellectual
position (Collini, 2009, pp. 46–7). Intellectuals with cultural authority
have acquired a certain standing that provides them with the oppor-
tunity to address a wider public than that at which their occupational
activity is aimed. A fourth, political sense, is not as clear in Britain as it
is in France. In France les intellectuels are recognised by their attempt to
constantly intervene in the political sphere. An example in this respect
is the appeal by the French ‘new philosopher’ Bernard-Henri Lévy to
free Libya from the Ghadaffi regime in the spring of 2011.
The cultural sense is the most relevant in the context of this book
(as it was in Collini’s), since the main focus will be on the public intel-
lectual with a certain artistic prestige and writing career, who tries to
convince an audience beyond his main readers or followers, and in
doing so deliberately uses various media platforms, styles and genres.
An example, to be discussed in the following chapter, is German liter-
ary author, H.M. Enzensberger, who has written poetry, novels and
documentaries as well as the critical essay Brussels, The Gentle Monster
or the Disenfranchisement of Europe (2011), and who is taken seriously
as an authority on issues regarding the European Union. Enzensberger
thus addresses people beyond his literary audience. His case confirms
that there is no intellectual without his ‘own’ public, but also that an
intellectual moulds himself on the basis of his idea or perception of the
public. The interaction between the audience and the intellectual is fun-
damental when discussing the transformation of the public intellectual
in the late modern public sphere.
We can draw a line of argument from Benda to Collini, based on the
configuration of the intellectual as someone having cultural authority.
The intellectual has knowledge and prestige, and addresses an audience
while cultivating a position of detachment, that increases his awareness
of the things going on. We have to go to Italy, again in the 1920s, to
see the development of another line of argument, starting (once more)
from the idea that there are two dichotomous categories of intellectuals,
the traditional and the organic. This idea was introduced by the philolo-
gist Antonio Gramsci, who, during the 11 years of his imprisonment
under Mussolini’s fascist regime, wrote in Prison Notebooks (1926–37)
that all men are intellectuals though not all of them have the function
of intellectuals in society (Gramsci, 1971). He distinguished between
the traditional intellectual (the teacher, priest or literary writer ‘inde-

pendent’ of a social class) and the organic intellectual (the organising
and reflective element in a particular social class or group.) The organic
intellectual criticises the claims of objectivity and performs the role of
the spokesperson for a specific social group formulating interpretations
of their identities, interests and needs. As such, Gramsci was the first to
emphasise that organic intellectuals have an essentially mediating func-
tion, and thus the capacity to be an organiser of a group of individuals
with effects on society in general.
Edward W. Said took up exactly this Gramscian idea in the Reith
Lectures delivered on the BBC radio in 1993, and connected the con-
cept of the organic intellectual to current practices of broadcasters,
consultants, experts and mass journalists in Western societies. Everyone
working in any media field associated with the production or the dis-
tribution of knowledge is, according to Said, an organic intellectual
in giving voice to certain ideas and groups. All these different media
participants have become members of a culture of critical discourse. As
such, they are part of the audience they address, and this makes their
authority self-evident but also more subjective. This organic or practical
performance of the intellectual is also pointed at by Arthur M. Melzer
(Melzer et al., 2003), defining the intellectual as a generalist, who has a
vital concern for the application of ideas. In contrast to Benda’s tradi-
tional clerk, the public intellectual – it is here that the ‘public’ element
is again significant – writes opinion pieces and magazine articles, his
‘practice’ being the deliberative balancing of opinions and analyses.
The public intellectual is committed and takes a stand, and is not ‘the
enlightened or intellectual statesman … for he holds resolutely to a
posture of detachment’ (Melzer et al., 2003, p. 4). Melzer’s ideas how-
ever, can be contrasted with the example of public intellectuals such
as Václav Havel, the dissident absurdist playwright who after years of
writing critical pieces, became the first president of post-communist
Czechoslovakia, or Mario Vargas Llosa, critical opinion maker, writer
and candidate for the presidency in Peru in 1990. As public intellectuals
they also accepted a role in the political arena.
Cultural authority and popularisation
At this point, we are confronted with what can be considered the fas-
cinating paradox in the discussion on public intellectual thinking and
writing, connected to what Patrick Baert and Josh Booth (2012) have
called the tensions within a set of contradictions when examining
intellectuals and their public engagement.11 While the unique and

defining characteristic of intellectuals is that they take a stand and
deliver critique from either a universal (Benda) or a more private (Said)
point of view, public intellectuals by the very fact of their having to
present their ideas to a broader public are also forced to popularise ideas
in order to make them accessible to the audience as well as attractive to
the media. Public intellectual is not a modish term as Collini suggested
(2009, p. 470) but it carries a specific connotation since public implies
the translation and mediation of knowledge to the audience(s) to which
the intellectual feels committed.
It was French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu,12 who defined the intel-
lectual as both ‘a paradoxical being’ and a ‘bi-dimensional being’. In
his view, the paradox involves the classical distinction between pure
culture and political engagement. The intellectual grounds his author-
ity and independence in the autonomous world of art or philosophy,
but on the basis of his prestige he can also interfere in political life.
The intellectual is a bi-dimensional being, because he has to fulfil two
conditions: to belong to an autonomous intellectual field, while at the
same time investing competence and authority in political action that
is carried out outside that field. He reinforces autonomy from temporal
powers and resists the temptation of withdrawing to the ivory tower for
too long by creating institutions or mechanisms to interfere in politics
in the name of a specific authority. The solution to the paradox lies in
what Bourdieu provocatively calls a collective intellectual, that is:
individuals, who, through research and participation on common sub-
jects constitute a sort of ad hoc collective.13 Intellectuals should work
together in defence of their specific interests and the protection of their
independence. The present time, according to Bourdieu, seems to be
calling for a conscious and organised mobilisation and cooperation of
intellectuals. Hence, the paradox of the intellectual is that he is in fact
sending a double message: leave me alone so that I can stay detached
and autonomous, and let me create opportunities to engage in politics
with other intellectuals.
Significantly, autonomy and independence, as Bourdieu argued, are
threatened by journalism and its mundane criteria: legibility, topicality
and novelty. The ability to come across well on television is considered
a criterion of intellectual effectiveness. To Bourdieu this was unac-
ceptable. In the third millennium, however, this situation has become
even more strong and complex, since social media have opened many
platforms for intellectual discussion and visibility, on which respond-
ing adequately and quickly is demanded. More requirements have to be
fulfilled by today’s public intellectual, due to the variety and speed of

the media debates. Detachment and autonomy do not seem adequate
qualifications anymore. In this book, Bourdieu’s pessimistic view on
the participation of intellectuals in various media is confronted with
a more optimistic perspective on the new opportunities and activities
that are performed by public intellectuals, in online as well as offline
environments. This concerns, as we will see, the philosopher using
radio and television programmes to ask attention for specific topics and
stances, as well as the literary author participating in a discussion on the
Internet to defend democracy, the sociologist participating in a televi-
sion satire, or the novelist promoting her popular fiction on Facebook
and Pinterest while at the same time writing intellectual pieces in blogs
on The Guardian website. No public intellectual today sticks to one
genre or just one platform.
The role of the intellectual in a mediatised public sphere was also
questioned by German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who in his
acceptance speech on receiving the Bruno Kreisky Preis14 spoke quite
negatively about the position of intellectuals in the age of the Internet
and television. In Habermas’s view, intellectuals on television are more
interested in self-promotion than in putting their knowledge to work
for a public goal. He argues, in line with his famous dissertation The
Structural Transformation of The Public Sphere (1991 [1962]), that intel-
lectuals in the modern liberal society are supposed to influence the for-
mation of opinions through rhetorically pungent arguments. In doing
this, they depend on a responsive, alert and informed liberal-minded
and well-educated audience. The ideal type of intellectual is supposed
to take normative stances and express them in novel perspectives, and it
is important that he resists the lures of power and remains an observer
from the sideline. The intellectual is supposed to speak out only
when current events are threatening to spin out of control – but then
promptly, as an early warning system. This constitutes the most inter-
esting characteristic that distinguishes intellectuals from other actors in
the public sphere: ‘an avant-gardistic instinct for relevances’ (Habermas,
2009, p. 55). It is this notion that could help us to further gauge the
paradox of the intellectual. The avant-gardistic instinct involves
• a mistrustful sensitivity to damage to the normative infrastructure

of the polity;
• the anxious anticipation of threats to the mental resources of the
shared political form of life;
• the sense for what is lacking and ‘could be otherwise’;
• the spark of imagination in conceiving of alternatives;

• a modicum of the courage required for polarising, provoking and
pamphleteering. (Ibid., p. 55)
Sensitivity, anticipation, the thinking through of alternatives, imagina-

tion and courage are thus the main conditions for taking up the role of
the public intellectual. The subsequent question then is, why Habermas
considers these intellectual virtues as not applicable to television. The
answer could be that his idea of the public sphere is still based on a
modern and liberal society with clearly separated venues for rational
discussion on the one hand, and pleasure on the other, while television
obviously belongs to the sphere of late modernity in combining infor-
mation and entertainment, seriousness and popularisation. Though
Habermas is sensitive to the current societal changes, his perspective −
at least in his Bruno Kreisky lecture from March 2006 − still is a mod-
ernist one, in particular when he points to the recalibration of commu-
nication from print and press to television and the Internet, resulting
in an expansion of the public sphere in which the exchanges between
the public and the intellectual become more intense and informal.
The price to be paid for the increase in technological egalitarianism,
Habermas argues, is a blurring of roles:
the horizontal and informal networking of communications dimin-

ishes the achievements of traditional public spheres. For the latter
pool the attention of an anonymous and dispersed public within
political communities for selected messages, so that the citizens can
address the same critically filtered issues and contributions at the
same time. (Ibid., p. 53)
Television and the Internet provide intellectuals with opportunities that

were unavailable earlier, including the ability to reach a huge (trans)
national audience, but the fact that these audiences can be reached does
not mean that the public will be receptive to intellectual ideas and will
accept the authority of intellectuals. Filters are lacking, and in conse-
quence, according to Habermas, it is more problematic for the audience
to decide upon the relevance of an opinion. Furthermore, the mixing of
the rational discourse and self-promotion of the intellectual leads to a
loss of differentiation and to the assimilation of public and private roles
that the intellectual in a modern society consciously kept apart.
Bourdieu’s and Habermas’s rather nostalgic perspectives, I argue in
this book, can be nuanced when taking a closer look at the various and
diverse strategies that are used in the media-saturated public sphere

with interactive radio and television formats and the emergence of
social media such as the Web 2.0 and the blogosphere. A new role of the
public intellectual is created in late modern society, one not only funded
on cultural authority and autonomy, or for that matter on rational argu-
mentation and independence, but also influenced by a ‘vertical engage-
ment with the public’ (Baert and Shipman, 2013, p. 44). This implies the
acceptance by and persuasion of the audience(s), as well as participation
in the sense that dialogues and responses emerge in two directions,
from speaker to addressee and vice versa. The Habermasian bourgeois
public sphere of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has changed
into several macro (transnational), meso (national) and micro (bottom
up, small scale) public spheres as discursive spaces in which individuals
and groups associate to discuss matters of mutual interest. These public
spheres coalesce around issues and self-images rather than around indi-
viduals gathering in a specific venue (McCallum, 2013, p. 170).
The celebritisation of the intellectual
The perspective on the self-promoting intellectual on television is a

biased one, not paying enough attention to the new opportunities
and complexities of the mediatised public sphere, and not applicable
to all contributions by television makers, talk-show guests and invited
‘experts’ in the televised public debate. Being on television and speak-
ing on behalf of different groups, values or ideas does not yet make one
a public intellectual, but staying in the ivory tower and never appearing
in public or on a screen certainly does not, while on the other hand, not
every self-promoting celebrity or media star is a pinhead. To really grasp
the diversity of the public sphere in regard to public intellectual roles,
voices and positions, we have to consider media and celebrity studies
with a focus on infotainment and the manufacturing of a persona, as
well as on participating publics in the position of consumer or fan.
What celebrity studies definitely also brings in, is a focus on the market
in which public intellectuals are operating.
The celebrity concept serves as a discursive bridge between the
social centre of the media and the everyday life of ordinary people, as
Graeme Turner (2014) has argued. The celebrity is someone who is vis-
ible through the media and whose private life will attract great public
interest. The celebrity is a person ‘well-known for his well-knownness’,
while the self-fabrication is an intriguing process of various discursive
regimes. Celebrities can be people from royal or aristocratic descent, but
also film stars, sports heroes, television personalities and even literary
authors, who
create their prominence through publicity campaigns, interviews

on talk shows, in-store book signings, personal appearances, feature
articles in newspapers, press coverage of their private lives, entries
in gossip columns, biographies, advertisements, and promotional
gimmicks, as well as that whole other dimension of publicity that
comes with their being taken up as serious writers within schools and
universities (Ibid., p. 21).
Additionally, the literary celebrity, such as novelist Salman Rushdie,

is at least partly produced by his own writing, Turner argues, and by
mentioning this specific author it is immediately clear that the dis-
tinction between a celebrity and a public intellectual is fluid. Rushdie,
after publishing The Satanic Verses (1988), became the symbol of the
creative author silenced by an authoritarian conservative Muslim leader
when Ayatollah Khomeini issued a Fatwa on him on 14 February 1989.
Immediately, the author was protected and hidden in the English coun-
tryside, becoming the icon of freedom of speech and the autonomy of
literary imagination, while opponents accused him of blasphemy. As
a ‘celebrity intellectual’ Rushdie undoubtedly reached a larger public
than just that of his readers, becoming a prominent personality, a
‘hunted author’ of a novel that ‘became more than literature’ as Vanity
Fair puts it.15
In contemporary culture the production of an identity as celebrity
intellectual is as much a performative practice as a mediated and
marketed one (Turner, 2014; Marshall, 2006; Redmond, 2014). Social
networks, microblogs and television formats confirm the presentation
of a self as construction, a performance in which private and public
phenomena are intermingled. The celebrity as well as the public intel-
lectual is aware of his visibility on specific media platforms. It would be
much too simplifying to state that the public intellectual offers knowl-
edge to the general audience, while the celebrity offers entertainment.
In today’s public sphere, public intellectuals such as Salman Rushdie or
French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy deliberately make use of celeb-
rity strategies by displaying their private life and even intimate relation-
ships in public, as such attracting more attention regarding the message
they want to bring over. Rushdie’s love affairs as well as Lévy’s marriage
to a famous French singer and television personality are decisive with
regard to their visibility and authorial persona. Without the cameras
registering ‘intimate’ moments, their voice would not reach that far.
In observing this, traditional claims to intellectual authority are obvi-
ously challenged; the celebrity-intellectual performance, indeed, is not
only about books and ideas, but includes an orchestrated performance
in interviews, clips, on blogs, and so on, prompting a response by the
audiences. We have to be aware, though, that many traditional fellow
intellectuals do not accept the celebrity’s self-exposure as a serious one.
Bourdieu openly turns away from Lévy’s shallowness on television, as
we will see in one of the coming chapters. This, of course, brings us back
to the arguments of the declinists, and to Habermas’s reproach that the
intellectual on television is more focused on self-promotion rather than
on keeping a critical distance.
In contrast, and to understand the zones and scales in which celeb-
rity and intellectual roles are performed, we might think of film star
Angelina Jolie, definitely a celebrity, playing out her private relationship
with Brad Pitt with whom she has six children – we can know all the
names and details from the tabloids − but who also postures herself as
an engaged director when making the movie In the Land of Blood and
Honey (2011) on mass rapes committed by Serbian forces during the war
in Bosnia. The Guardian concluded that the film project was not just a
vanity project, since Jolie has kept herself well in the background. The
Hollywood star seems to be interested in (a particular topic of) European
history and tries to make a serious movie about it while asking atten-
tion for the topic of violence and rape in times of conflict and war.
Jolie also is involved in humanitarian work with the UN and with PSVI
(Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative).16 In addition, another example
of her contribution to the societal debate, marking the celebrity as
hybrid figure, is the opinion piece Jolie published on 14 May 2013 in
The New York Times. In ‘My Medical Choice’,17 she explains that she
had a preventive double mastectomy. During three months of medical
treatment she was able to keep this private, but in this opinion piece
she wants to share her experience as an example to other women: ‘I
feel empowered that I made a strong choice that in no way diminishes
my femininity’. So, the Hollywood star, representative of the glamorous
entertainment industry, fashions herself as ‘real person’ in sending a
brave personal message on a very difficult decision, and in doing this
she tries to make women more aware of the risks and possibilities in
regard to breast and ovarian cancer, realising that having a gene test
done is for most of them too expensive.
The ‘celebrity intellectual’ is indeed a useful trope for examining the
current status of the public intellectual whose credentials are often
academic or based on a writing career, but whose performances occur

in an intellectual as well as a celebrity zone or configuration of the pub-
lic sphere. Celebrity here serves as ‘an allegory of the triumph of mass
commodity and mass consumption, readers, audiences, and fans’ (Jaffe
and Goldman, 2010, p. 9), and offers an interpretative paradigm focus-
ing on self-fashioning and theatricality as the negotiation of rational
thinking, attention and life style. The celebrity or media intellectual
thus becomes a blended construction, where status, appearance and
discursive meaning shift depending on context, issue, style, and media
specificity (Redmond, 2014). My point is that we have to nuance the
idea of the public intellectual as only an homme des lettres, and realise
that the persona of the intellectual never is a disembodied one, on the
contrary, it is connected to visible individual features and manners. A
shift towards the celebritisation of the public intellectual subsequently
involves the configuration of physical, verbal, visual and aural signs. As
Tania Lewis correctly observes in regard to the performances of art his-
torian Robert Hughes appearing in an Australian television series: ‘it is
the combination of his distinctive accent and voice, his large somewhat
cumbersome body and his lively use of language that come together
to produce the celebrity package that is Robert Hughes’ (Lewis, 2001,
pp. 240–1). The same can be said of the appearances of Salman Rushdie,
Bernard-Henri Lévy or Ayaan Hirsi Ali on television or YouTube clips;
stylisation is part of their performance, and aesthetic effects are pro-
duced by the interplay of words and physical appearance, by behaviour,
rhetoric and the very awareness of their visibility. Today’s public intel-
lectual gains access to the media-enhanced public sphere only if he is
capable of negotiating a visible outspokenness.
Literature in the late modern public sphere
The public intellectual in the cultural sense will be the main focus in
this book, implying an interest in intellectuals with a certain artistic
prestige and writing career, who by self-fashioning try to convince
an audience and in doing so intentionally appear on various media
platforms using a specific style and voice. Now that we have examined
various notions of the concept of the public intellectual, what is to be
discussed before going into several public intellectual case studies, is
the nature and function of ‘literature’ as it is tied in with intellectual
authorship. How important is it to consider texts as artistic, and is it
necessary to make a distinction between literary writers and political
authors or essayists? As I have argued elsewhere,18 the erosion of the
dominance of the autonomous writer as a consequence of the spread of

the mass market and the increased commodification of literary products
in the twentieth century (Marx, 2008 [2005]; Galow, 2011; Thompson,
2012) has become even more urgent because of the digitalisation and
mediatisation of the public sphere. Authorship and readership have
definitely changed in the past two decades and are more intertwined
than ever before. New infrastructures of reading have emerged on fan
sites and micro blogs, providing new discussion and encouraging the
author to vent his opinion. Furthermore, the literary work is opened
up by writers who depict and rethink social and political issues in their
texts, and in doing so are interweaving aesthetic culture more and more
with (items of) popular and politicised culture. The distinction of two
forms of authorship, as made by Czech/French author Milan Kundera
in The Art of the Novel (1986)19 is less convincing than three decades
ago. Kundera argued that authors can take various positions; some take
position as writers, others as novelists:
The writer has original ideas and a unique voice. He can employ any
form (including that of the novel) and because everything he writes
bears the mark of his thoughts, carried by his voice, it is part of his
work. Rousseau, Goethe, Chateaubriand, Gide, Camus, Malraux.
The novelist does not attach so much importance to his ideas. He
is an explorer, busy feeling his way to unveil an unknown aspect of
existence. He is not fascinated by his voice, but by a form he is after,
seeking to make it his own, and it is only the forms that can meet
the demands of his dreams that become part of his works. Fielding,
Sterne, Flaubert, Proust, Faulkner, Céline. (1986, pp. 146–7)
The division in political writers and autonomous novelists ties in with

the ideas of American philosopher Richard Rorty, who in Contingency,
Irony and Solidarity20 distinguishes between writers on autonomy and
writers on justice. The former, the ironists, are primarily interested in
the private goals of self-creation and re-description within the context of
an acute awareness of the contingency of their belief system. The latter,
the liberals, are primarily focused on the public goals of freedom, jus-
tice and solidarity. In the 1980s both Kundera and Rorty, thus, defined
positions that today cannot be as sharply distinguished. In the third
millennium we come across writers exploring moral dilemmas (such
as Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan or Juli Zeh), writers creating extreme
characters and scenes (Zadie Smith, Haruki Murakami), and writers
posturing themselves in detailed realism (Michel Houellebecq, Karl Ove
Knausgaard). Moreover, many authors in the current public sphere take

various positions on different platforms and move between the poles of
autonomy and politics, and in doing this they perform specific roles as
public intellectuals intending to have an impact in the public domain.
Most writers discussed in this book write memoirs and essays, and often
combine documentary and fiction within the same text. Because of
the prestige earned in writing, these writers are regarded as authorities
on topics beyond their written work. In addition, they clearly create a
public persona to deal with specific social, ethical or political issues in
the public sphere. As a consequence, the in- and outside of a literary
text become blurred.
Let us briefly take the work of Dutch novelist Leon de Winter as an
example here, later in this book we will see other illustrations of the
construction of a persona and the fictionalisation of the self. On the
one hand, De Winter is an outspoken neoconservative columnist and
blogger with clear and provoking ideas on the upcoming anti-Semitism
and anti-Israel tendencies. He is regularly invited to discuss these ideas
on Dutch public television. On the other hand, De Winter describes
himself, in a novel entitled VSV (2012), as the author-character Leon de
Winter who is less brave and convinced and is depicted from the point
of view of several characters as ‘a charlatan’ (De Winter, 2012, p. 23) and
as ‘meek’ and ‘innocent’ (Ibid., p. 49). Many characters in this novel are
based on real persons, more or less fictionalised, such as the character
of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was murdered in Amsterdam in
November 2004 by a Muslim fundamentalist. In the novel we follow
Van Gogh after his death on his way in the underworld. As if in a Greek
epic Van Gogh, a spirit after having left his mutilated body on the street
in the Dutch capital, has to earn a good position in the afterlife by ful-
filling ‘communication with the living’ (Ibid., pp. 22–3). Van Gogh has
to communicate with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Dutch politician with whom in
reality he had made the film Submission: Part 1 (to be discussed in one
of the following chapters) as well as with the character Leon de Winter –
who in real life was considered by Van Gogh as an opponent and arch-
enemy. Thus, what we read is a novel intermingling fiction and reality,
blurring real facts and made up things, and as such discussing ideas on
politics in Dutch society at the start of the new millennium. The fas-
cinating consequence of reading this novel is that we have to concern
ourselves with a political context, and to rethink the issues regarding
the Dutch multicultural society that the author in his novel brings to
the fore. To put it differently: the author places us in the position of
discussant rather than that of a reader of fiction.
In May 2011 a list of Britain’s top 300 intellectuals,21 ranking public

figures who were leading in the cultural discourse, was published by
The Guardian and The Observer. It shows 25 categories of intellectuals22
of whom the biggest are ‘Authors’ and ‘Journalist/editors’. This hit
parade demonstrates that the cultural public debate is still very much a
matter of text, in particular written text, though the written words are
published on various public online as well as offline platforms, and are
supported by images, performances, and responses on the particular
persona of the author. The 54 authors and 61 journalist/editors are
men and women of letters who establish, in one way or another, by
using words and writing texts an ‘active custodianship of cultural val-
ues’ (Small, 2002). They live through the battle of ideas, and they take
action by wording and (re)phrasing new ideas and perspectives. Most
of the authors on the list are novelists as well as essayists (for example
Umberto Eco, Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, Chinua Achebe, Zadie
Smith, Hilary Mantel, Dorris Lessing, Ian McEwan, V.S Naipaul, Tim
Parks, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis), often intermingling the genres, and
they have earned cultural authority as canonised and honoured writers
of literature. (Some of the categorised journalists have published popu-
lar novels or fictional documentaries as well, for example Ian Buruma
and Robert Harris.) Could we conclude from a list like this one, that
literature still is the main motor of public intellectual activity, and thus
that society still follows Jean-Paul Sartre in ‘placing the creative writer
at the heart of the category of the intellectual’ (Collini, 2009, p. 265)?
Before answering this question, I will briefly elaborate on the nature
and function of literature today.
Every few years or so, a study is published on what literature is and
how we should use it and guard it.23 One of the more readable ones,
Marjorie Garber’s The Use and Abuse of Literature (2011), can be taken as
representative. The book aims to explain the specificity of literature and
literary reading and underlines that literature asks questions instead of
presenting answers. Garber disagrees with the idea that literature needs
to be applied to the experiences of life, as well as with the idea (put
forward by for instance Matthew Arnold or Martha C. Nussbaum) that
it is a path to moral improvement. Garber sees two main threats leading
to the current devaluation of literature: on the one side, hard science,
technology and social science, on the other side, contemporary visual
and musical culture, framed by moving images, file swapping, and the
Internet. Literature is stuck between two poles, one defining literature as
a potentially useful social enhancement for success in practical life, and
the other leaving literature behind in favour of livelier, more supposedly
interactive cultural forms (Ibid., p. 14). Though her definition of litera-

ture is elastic, even Marx and Freud are considered literary authors, not
only because they write well, but because they set up an argument, offer
detours and counterexamples, and contradict and reverse themselves,
Garber’s neglect of the contemporary setting of literature in an infra-
structure of markets, new media and globalisation is disappointing. In
arguing that ‘literature is always contemporary’, she could have taken
the transformation of the public sphere as effective on the conditions
of literature as an assertive and interrogative text. Garber’s stress on the
‘impossibility of closure’, that is a final meaning or interpretation of a
text, needs recontextualisation; it is because literature is embedded in
a more dynamic (digital and global) media environment, that we have
to rethink the potential meaning of the literary text, and for that matter
the position of author and reader.
There are two arguments involved here. First, the literary text as book
(novel or volume of poetry but also many mixed genres) is part of a
literary world that is evolving from elite to popular culture – a process
that started already at the beginning of the twentieth century but that
is rapidly proceeding today, due to new technologies and globalisation.
A novel can become a bestseller, a film, or an item on a fan-fiction blog.
Jim Collins (2010) gives the fascinating example of Michael Ondaatje’s
The English Patient (1992), first
a Booker Prize-winning example of Canadian postmodern fiction,

(…) it also became a hugely successful film by Miramax, winning
nine Oscars, including Best Picture of the Year in 1996, at which
point it became the subject of an episode of Seinfeld and was later
voted “Most Romantic Film of the Decade” by the readers of Romance
Times magazine (the bible of the romance genre industry). (Collins,
2010, p. 3)
Collins underscores the redefinition of what literary reading means

within the context of massive infrastructural changes, introducing
new sets of players, locations, rituals and use values for reading literary
fiction. We could add that not only the reading has changed, but evi-
dently, also the writing, and thus the position of the author. Authors,
defending a reputation, are more visible than before and, while obey-
ing the market, have to present themselves consciously on stages, on
television, in newspaper interviews, and so on. In consequence, they
will be aware of the marketing effects of their performance, and most
of them will even create a persona or posture in order to maximise this
performance to its best. The self-fashioning of the author outside the

book is very much like the creation of a character in a book (Meizoz,
2007; Galow, 2011).
Second, since reading has become a more social and participatory
experience (texts can transform into a fan response), and since authors
play a recognisable role outside the text, we observe more levels in the
literary field than previously experienced. And this, it can be argued,
further complicates issues of genre and interpretation, and of style and
voice, bringing fiction and narrative sincerity as more encouraging
concepts to the forefront than ‘autonomy’ or the idea that literature
possesses an inherent and transcendent value.
To come back now to the Sartrian question if literature still is the
drive of public intellectual activity, we could answer affirmatively, while
underscoring that literature is a lively and complex negotiation of text,
author, reader and society. The main aim of this book is to show that
authors performing the role of public intellectual discuss ideas and
opinions regarding society, while using literary strategies and devices in
and beyond the text as such. This implies that intellectuals are visible,
that they create a persona (or different personas) – we will see in this
book some cases of self-fashioning in extremis − and that they read the
world as a book, interpreting it and offering alternative scenarios for
understanding it. Referring once more to Habermas, authors as public
intellectuals have an avant-gardistic instinct for relevances, as is shown
by their sensitivity, anticipation, and imaginative power. A major line
of argument in this book is that literature affords a set of strategies and
devices for the communication of rational ideas. Literature is more
than fiction or the volume of poetry, it is a broad and dynamic constel-
lation of texts and responses and of flexible and exchangeable roles,
performances and scenario’s. The intriguing topic, as we will see, is that
of authenticity related to integrity and responsibility. The public intel-
lectual negotiates between rational thinking, posture and audience, and
while his intention is to take responsibility in regard to certain issues,
the outcome can be the compromising of intellectual content in order
to persuade a broader public. Intellectual debates do have practical con-
sequences and not always are just abstract or subversive.
How to study public intellectual activities and roles?
For more than two decades many studies on public intellectuals based
on various methodological approaches have been published. Debray
(1981) and Posner (2001) combined qualitative and quantitative
research on French and American public intellectuals, McLaughlin and

Townsley (2011) did an empirical sociological study on American and
Canadian public intellectuals, Charle (1986) and Sirinelli (1986) pub-
lished empirical research on French elites intellectuals, Collini (2009
[2006]) offered an extensive book on British intellectuals from the
perspective of cultural history, while other scholars have used more
impressionistic, narrative and journalistic approaches (Said, 1996;
Berman, 2010). In this book I will employ a flexible methodology for
the analysis and comprehension of the various activities and roles of
the public intellectual, thus making it possible to distinguish between
intellectual repertoires and ideas, the visibility of the intellectual, the
mediator function, and the responses of the publics. The model, so to
say, helps us to examine and organise various activities and negotiations
in the late modern public sphere, and points at the dynamic relation-
ship between the public intellectual as role, the writing and debating
as activities, and the audience(s) as responsive. By employing a four
component frame (Table 1.1), we can demonstrate which themes and
strategies are dominant in regard to certain cases of public intellectual
performance.
Some notions in the model in Table 1.1 need further amplification.
In the line of Stefan Collini, cultural authority or the intellectual profile
of a writer mostly stands for the prestige based on an (academic) educa-
tion or specialisation, but it can also refer to artistic achievements, to a
body of work. Not every intellectual is an academic, but all of them are
Table 1.1 Heuristic four-level scheme for researching public intellectuals
Public Intellectual
Cultural Authority The PI has ideas, cultural authority and creden-

tials, and the talent to give a broad, contestable,
popularising and new perspective on issues of
general concern.
Social and Cultural Context The PI operates in a specific (trans)national, soci-
etal and economic context, which provides a nar-
rative frame that is used as well as criticised.
Mediated Context of The PI introduces an issue, using the appropriate
Production and Reception media, and a particular rhetoric (style of arguing
and framing).
Aesthetic Performance and The PI implements aesthetic features in text and
Theatricality performance, and consciously creates a persona in
the media with an effect on audiences.
men of letters, meaning that they write and put their ideas into words
(a scientist as well as a novelist has to do this in order to function as a
public intellectual). Communicable knowledge is spread through differ-
ent genres of public intellectual work: translating one’s scholarly work
into an insight that the general public can understand, or into politi-
cally inflected literary criticism, satire, documentary, and so on (Posner,
2004, p. 7). Criticism here implies taking an analytical or comparative
perspective towards an issue, distancing oneself from the ongoing
debate and as such establishing a corrective view (Collini, 2009, p. 61).
The audience obviously has a role as well, in responding to and accept-
ing or rejecting the ideas offered by the public intellectual.
Social and cultural context points at a complicated intertwining of
private and public worlds, of the individual writing position and the
specific (trans)national context, in which people debate and make deci-
sions, and of the negotiation between writer and publisher or the ones
in charge of a platform. The aim of the public intellectual’s activity is to
enhance critical discussion within a public sphere with a specific public
or counter-public. This is a political aim, as Edward W. Said underscored:
‘the moment you publish essays in a society you have entered political
life; so if you want not to be political, do not write essays or speak out’
(Said, 1996, p. 110). The intellectual often is part of a collaborative cir-
cle, from which he gets support, critical responses and critique as well
as a certain visibility (Farrell, 2001; McLaughlin, 2008; Berman, 2010).
Mediated context of production and reception implies that the focus is on
the words used in their social embedding. Every intellectual is aware
of the rhetorical power of language, and knows that framing persua-
sive and effective speech, using or resisting doxa and stereotypes, and
emphasising the sincerity of voice are crucial in bringing the message
to the public. Thus, when examining the work and performances of a
public intellectual, we have to analyse and consider meticulously the
words, symbols, images and arguments used. There are different ways of
addressing a public, and each decision on form, style and procedure car-
ries effects with regard to the audiences reached and invited to respond.
Public is, as Michael Warner (2005) has observed, a social imaginary,
like ‘nation’ or ‘market’. To address a public or to think of oneself as
belonging to a public is to be or to create a certain kind of person, and
‘to inhabit a certain kind of social world, to have at one’s disposal cer-
tain media and genres, to be motivated by a certain normative horizon,
and to speak within a certain language ideology’ (Ibid., p. 10). The rela-
tion between intellectual and public always is one based on circulation;
without a perceptive audience willing to accept normative stances there
is no public intellectual, and without the intellectual taking a stance

there is no public debate.
The final level (without suggesting a hierarchy between them) that
needs elaboration is Aesthetics or stylisation that ties in with the tex-
tual work as well as with the performance or visibility of the public
intellectual. The way one presents oneself in words and images has
consequences regarding the credibility, persuasiveness and attractive-
ness of the public intellectual. In offline as well as online environments
the public intellectual has to be consciousness of what he represents,
when, where and how. He always constructs a posture, a public persona
connected to a particular social discourse (Meizoz, 2007, p. 15) but con-
nected to his own experiences as well. Posner introduced the idea of the
charismatic intellectual, and that is a concept of relevancy here. To be a
truly effective public intellectual is ‘a charismatic calling. It isn’t primar-
ily a matter of being intelligent and well informed and writing clearly,
but of being able through force of rhetoric of the example of one’s life
(…) to make fresh, arresting, or heterodox ideas credible’ (Posner, 2004,
p. 85). The point is that there are ‘aesthetic’ devices involved in fore-
grounding one’s life and making it representative for the lives of other
people, and subsequently convincing in an intellectual argument.
Using this flexible four-level model for describing various showcases
of public intellectual writing and performing, involves combining theo-
ries of life writing, literary criticism, general sociological perspectives,
rhetorical analysis and media studies. Although each case discussed
in this book is different from another − that is the work as such, the
persona, the medium and the message, the circle in which someone
operates, and the responses of the public − some elements and topics
evidently are similar. The model is thus used as heuristic instrument
and helps to focus on a dynamic public sphere in which several actors
are intervening.
The structure of the book
In this book various case studies of public intellectual writing will be

discussed. Each chapter can be treated as a self-contained textual analy-
sis, but all parts were designed to communicate with one another and
support a number of larger arguments that emerge over the course of
the book. The second chapter provides an analysis of the work of pres-
tigious German author H.M. Enzensberger, whom I consider the ‘pro-
totype’ of a contemporary literary writer who performs the role of the
European public intellectual. Enzensberger positions himself clearly in a
transnational context in which conflicting cultural, social and political

issues can be observed and have to be thought through. He is very much
aware of his role of criticaster and committed diplomat, his sharp ques-
tioning always provides answers, whether or not the audience accepts
them as such. His work is encouraging in that it intermingles facts and
ideas, representation and imagination, history and the present, and
always encourages a serious analysis of democratic culture.
The work of two female authors, Dubravka Ugresić and Slavenka
Drakulić, will be discussed in the third chapter. They were both
born in the former Yugoslavia, and have built up their careers in the
Netherlands and Sweden respectively. Their oeuvres consist of various
text genres in which critical ideas and opinions on current societal and
political issues are expressed. The main focus of this chapter is on how
different voices are encapsulated in the texts: there is the voice of the
author writing fiction, the voice of a citizen from a lost nation, the voice
of the European East-West traveller, the voices of witness and perpetra-
tor, and the personal voice criticising nationalist tendencies.
In the fourth chapter I will explore the public performances and
posture of Bernard-Henri Lévy, a French celebrity philosopher and
activist. He was politically active in Sarajevo in the 1990s, and in Libya
during the North-African spring revolutions. He has written essays and
pamphlets on this political occasion and is an ardent blogger on the
Huffington Post. Lévy’s texts and performances will be analysed and a
particular focus will be on his activities in Libya in 2011 as described
in his political memoir. Subsequently in Chapter 5, we will discuss the
work and performances of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born in Somalia, who devel-
oped from a Dutch single-issue politician to a global celebrity intellec-
tual and dissident. Hirsi Ali’s intellectual position is based on political
activism focusing on the issue of women in Islam. She has written two
autobiographies in which she combines detailed description of her per-
sonal life with opinion making and fictionalisation. Interestingly, the
two life narratives offer different portraits of a former asylum seeker,
who started out as a liberal Dutch politician, later to become a member
of a prestigious American conservative think tank.
Two intellectuals from Brussels, David van Reybrouck and Geert van
Istendael, are introduced in Chapter 6, in particular in the context of
the current status of democracy. Belgium affairs and solutions are taken
as example for Europe. Chapter 7, then, will consider the case of Hamad
Abdel-Samad in his role as German television maker. In a satirical televi-
sion programme Abdel-Samad goes ‘on safari’ in Germany and Europe
together with Jewish intellectual Henryk M. Broder, and discusses
provocative issues of integration. The final chapter zooms in on the

work of Elif Shafak, a female author born from Turkish parents. She
writes popular fiction, building on a post-feminist discourse and criti-
cising as well as playing with the issue of gender equality. She enjoys
international critical acclaim and media visibility, and she regularly
contributes to The Guardian as a columnist on Turkish politics and social
issues. Shafak typically is a transnational author, establishing the bridge
between cultures and national identities.
If we take H.M. Enzensberger in the first chapter as typical of the man
of letters in offline media and canonised literature, we can take Shafak
as exemplary of the contemporary author visible on social media and
the Internet and deliberately crossing borders of high-brow and low-
brow literature, and of online and offline forums, as such reaching for
a broader (and probably also younger) audience. The claim is that both
authors in their roles as public intellectual have an impact on the public
debate and contribute to a critical democratic public sphere.
2
Conscientious Chronicler
H.M. Enzensberger (1929)
The German Hans Magnus Enzensberger is an active and fêted writer

whose poetic and essayistic work and documentary novels are translated
into more than 40 languages. In particular in his essays he develops
critical arguments regarding political, social and media issues. Started
as an angry young poet, Enzensberger became a respected gatekeeper of
history and culture with admission into various circles. He has a ongo-
ing interest in the manipulation of the media and the functioning of
democracy on a (trans)national level. Enzensberger provides provoca-
tive ideas on German as well as European urgent questions. His serious
reflections on civil war and mechanisms of in- and exclusion offer an
impressive and visionary Zeitdiagnosis.
The rapid development of the mind industry, its rise

to a key position in modern society, has profoundly
changed the role of the intellectual. He finds himself
confronted with new threats and new opportunities.
Whether he knows it or not, whether he likes it or
not, he has become the accomplice of a huge indus-
trial complex which depends for its survival on him,
as he depends on it for his own. He must try, at any
cost, to use it for his own purposes, which are incom-
patible with the purposes of the mind machine.
What it upholds he must subvert. He may play it
crooked or straight. He may win or lose the game;
but he would do well to remember that there is more
at stake than his own fortune. (H.M. Enzensberger,
1974, p. 15)
26
Conscientious Chronicler, Enzensberger 27
The intellectual and his online audience
‘Preserve yourself from the dangers of the digital world regarding

democracy.’ With this headline the respectable German newspaper
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published in February 2014 a list of ten
thought-provoking rules for the digital world, inciting us to throw
away mobile phones, resist free samples, boycott online selling, and be
careful with sending e-mails. The commandments brought together by
the author Hans Magnus Enzensberger, were meant as a cheerful warn-
ing against the civic naïveté with regard to digitalisation; ‘most people
today have only recently become aware of the lack of privacy, the
overall power of big data companies and the economic drives behind
various “customer friendly” online systems promoting credit payments.
Exploitation and surveillance are the real dangers in digitalised demo-
cratic societies’, Enzensberger warns, ‘but the public does not mind at
all. And this is not only a German disinterest; Martin Schulz, the presi-
dent of the European Parliament, does not care about the issue either
and is not willing to take any action. Most of the people are asleep and
will open their eyes only when changes are not possible anymore.’1
Enzensberger’s entertaining and quasi obsolete but certainly also serious
intervention in the respectable German newspaper can be placed in the
context of the Edward Snowden affaire, as it was emerging in the course
of 2013. It was Snowden, the NSA whistleblower, who revealed how
online data were spread and archived and how millions of phones and
computers were tapped, including in Germany (and apparently even
Angela Merkel’s office). Services such as Google, Facebook or Skype are
compromised in archiving private information without the users know-
ing it. A new technical literacy is needed to make people attentive to the
consequences of the digital surveillance that is permanently going on.
The 62 online responses to Enzensberger’s commandments, as posted
on the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung website, were mostly negative
to even disrespectful. The responders denied Enzensberger’s expertise
and made fun of the aged writer suggesting that he still lives in previ-
ous times, and that writers as such – Thomas Mann as the example
par excellence – are never good at politics. Someone complained that
Enzensberger himself is wealthy enough to be able to do without digital
technologies, while ‘Otto Normalverbraucher’ (the equivalent of Joe
the plumber) is not. The one more supporting feedback on the other
hand, was posted by Axel Fachtan, introducing himself as ‘a liberal’, and
emphasising that the State should take care of its citizens with regard
to complex issues such as these, but at the same time warning that the
Stasi and Gestapo would have enjoyed such big data systems.2 Josef
Joffe, respectable publisher of Die Zeit, also wrote an online reaction
in which he characterised Enzensberger as Weltversteher and promoter
of a neo-Biedermeier culture bringing us back to the nineteenth century.
According to Joffe, the digital networks have to be global and accessible
to all and cannot be organised by the state or the European Union.3
Two observations can be made in the context of this case. First, after
reading the Lesermeinungen we could conclude that Enzensberger’s pub-
lic engagement is not really taken seriously by the newspaper readers –
yet, we should be aware that these interlocutors are not the readers in
general but just those who cared to give their opinion online. These
readers apparently are not willing to reflect on the societal changes due
to digitalisation, they accept it as a fact and use it for their convenience.
The interaction between the intellectual and this online audience thus
does not lead to a versatile dialogue. Second, Enzensberger at the age of
85, by publishing his provocative and ironic ten rules in the Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung – and also by appearing a few months earlier in
the television programme Beckmann (broadcasted by the ARD) in a
discussion on the same topic4 – shows how he is alarmed by the com-
mercialisation of the Internet, and how he still as éminence grise has an
interest in (new) media technologies and consequences. In his focus on
the economically driven powers on the Internet, he positions himself
in the frame of ‘the industrialisation of the mind’, as he had already
started doing in the 1960s. The plea for being conscious of the media
(newsprint, films, television and specific digital technologies) and its
exploitation of people’s intellectual, moral and political faculties can be
considered a permanent feature in his writing and thinking.
Enzensberger used the terms ‘consciousness industry’ or ‘mind indus-
try’ (and not the term ‘culture industry’5 as used by Frankfurter Schule
theorists Adorno and Horkheimer) to emphasise his interest in phe-
nomena of popular culture (such as journalism, tourism, educational
television programmes) which are all influenced and manipulated by
the media. The various media demonstrate that a dominant (conserva-
tive) ideology is disseminated without the general public interrogating
what they daily see and hear (King, 2007). As Enzensberger observes in
an essay in the 1960s, the mind industry’s main business and concern
is not to sell its product: it is to sell the existing order, to perpetuate the
prevailing pattern of man’s domination by man, no matter who runs
the society and by what means. Its main task is to expand and train
our consciousness – in order to exploit it (Enzensberger, 1974). The
industrialisation of the mind requires a new position of the intellectual

whose job it is to speak out and to seek innovation by participating in
the media. Enzensberger argues
Retreat from the media will not even save the intellectual’s precious
soul from corruption. It might be better to enter the dangerous game,
to take and calculate our risks … and resist the overt or subtle pres-
sures which are brought to bear on us (Ibid., p. 15).
This idea of media awareness and participation will become a thread

through his career, from the 1960s to his current intervention in the
Frankfurter Allgemeine. Enzensberger has always been alert with regard to
the consequences and possibilities of being public, of using the media
and being used by it. Hence, his role as public intellectual emphasises
the intellectual paradox that was discussed in the first chapter of this
book. The public intellectual has cultural authority on the basis of
his intellectual and artistic work, but his perspective and influence
depends on media technologies and outreach possibilities, as well as on
a regularly – detached – reflection on these. In addition, Enzensberger
is interested in the ordinary man (Kleinbürger) but refuses the position
of a moraliser or articulator of utopias. Most of all, he likes to be an
ethnographer of the German society working from within, taking, so to
say, an embedded position (Hanenberg, 1996).
In this chapter I will scrutinise some texts from Enzensberger’s oeuvre,
and discuss a few themes and typical features of the styles of thought
and writing, in particular the hybrid genre of his texts and the het-
eroglossia.6 The national and European context of his work will get
attention as well: the aftermath of the Second World War, the division
of Germany in the early 1960s, and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989
have left clear traces in the opinions and statements of this public intel-
lectual. My main argument will be that Enzensberger’s lifelong aware-
ness of historical, cultural and political transformations in relation to
the artistically opening up of the status, styles and formats of literary
writing, characterise him as one of the prominent literary authors as
public intellectuals in contemporary Europe. In some periods he has
focused on poetry, in others he was concentrated on writing intellec-
tual essays or documentaries, but in the course of his career practices
of popular culture have continuously prompted the author to create
new forms of literature, with a particular interest in dialogue, interview
and conversation. By underlining the dialogism (as the idea of writing and
reading as an ongoing conversation) in his work, it will be argued that
Enzensberger indeed invented a form of democratic literature representa-

tive of the complex changes in German and European history and culture.
An oeuvre in literature and politics
Born in 1929 in the south of Germany, Hans Magnus Enzensberger grew

up in the Third Reich. His was a childhood between Hitlerjugend and
Luftschutzkeller. This was moral luck, as he declared in a lecture at New
York University in 1997: ‘I had the good fortune to be born in 1929,
which means that I was sixteen at the end of World War II. … too young
to qualify as a full-grown Nazi’ (1997, p. 55). To The Guardian journalist
Philip Oltermann he further explained that this youth, although col-
oured by Nazi-ideology, death and destruction had led to an anarchistic
life-principle
You have a very cold-blooded attitude to these things when you are
young. To see dead people in the streets is just a fact of life. I wasn’t
particularly traumatised. The chaos of postwar times was quite enjoy-
able for a 15-year-old kid. There was an anarchy that appealed …
No government, no old authority figures who could shout at you …
wonderful!7
It is this anarchistic credo that comes immediately to the fore in

Enzensberger’s debut, verteidigung der wölfe gegen die lämmer (1957), a
volume of poetry in three parts: ‘friendly’, ‘sad’ and ‘nasty’ poems. The
poems are subversive, ambiguous and experimental. The 28-year-old
poet as angry young man tries to find his own path between the legacies
of predecessors Bertolt Brecht and Gottfried Benn, who both died in the
summer of 1956. Brecht, notorious for his provocative didactic poetry
using popular art forms, and Benn on the contrary celebrated for his
formalism and hermetic poems, are brought together in Enzensberger’s
poetry, which is ironic and moralistic, intentionally combining various
styles and tones, and expressing clear-cut observations on everyday life
in the rebuilt Federal Republic. The poems are political without being
too evidently engaged with one or the other ideological position. This
is Enzensberger’s own poetical explanation: ‘I think political poetry
misses its goal when it too directly aims at it. The political must shim-
mer through the cracks in the words, behind the back of the author’
(Schlösser, 2009, p. 22).8 It is not in the explicit intention of the author,
but in the words of the poems, in between the sentences so to say, that
political and social dimensions emerge.9
After the war, Enzensberger studied in Erlangen, Freiburg, Hamburg

and Paris. His dissertation on Brentano’s poetry was defended in 1955
and evidences the academic credential of this intellectual. He worked as
radio maker for some years and travelled in 1957 to the United States
and to Mexico. From 1965 to 1975, Enzensberger was the founding edi-
tor of the left-wing journal Kursbuch [Timetable], an important journal
with regard to intellectual debates in post-war and split up Germany,
as it published articles by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Claude
Lévi-Strauss. In these years Enzensberger also worked as a translator,
anthologist and publisher, and became known for essays on political
developments in the context of Germany’s contemporary history. The
different activities resulted in different audiences, which underscores
that ‘the public’ of the public intellectual is a symbolic notion. In 1964,
after the building of the Berlin wall, Enzensberger published the essay
‘Am I a German?’10 in which he declared that as a form of organisation
the nation has become obsolete,11 which established him as one of
the intellectual founding fathers of European integration (Oltermann,
2010). Enzensberger’s work in this early period of his career is influenced
by Adorno’s ideas regarding the ‘culture industries’ and in particular
also by his ideas on writing poetry in the post-Auschwitz-era. Where
Adorno emphasises the critical void of popular culture, Enzensberger
tries to get beyond Adorno’s thesis, in combining high and low culture
phenomena and mixing various styles and idioms, and as such in creat-
ing intentionally hybrid cultural forms with an emancipatory potential.
His work thus explores the place and function of literature in a cultural
landscape that is dominated by other media such as radio, cinema, tel-
evision and more recently the Internet. In contrast to other intellectuals
in Germany, Enzensberger has been interested throughout his career in
practices of popular culture and has encapsulated them in his writing.
In the 1970s Enzensberger experimented with the writing of docu-
mentaries ‘reducing the monologic nature of literature and allowing
the reader to become more active and engaged’ (King, 2007, p. 192),
and a three-volume Lesebuch, providing various texts on the history of
the class struggle in Germany. In the poetry in these years we observe
a similar combination of documentary techniques, reconstruction and
montage: the Mausoleum (1975) project consists of thirty-seven ballads
‘aus der Geschichte des Fortschritts’ focusing on scientists and inven-
tors who created new possibilities for civilisation, which as well opened
a practice of oppression and exploitation. The stories that can be told
about the development of the Western world and its Enlightenment
project are diverse, and it is up to the reader to draw conclusions.
TransAtlantik, was a project which started in 1980, one of the ‘Flops’ as

Enzensberger characterised it in Meine Lieblings-Flops (2012). The idea
was to make a well-designed magazine such as The New Yorker, with
literary reportage and essays on various political, cultural and human
interest topics, for instance a column on ‘Luxury and Fashion’, which
the audience unexpectedly considered as provocation.12 The journal
was not a success and Enzensberger left it after two years.
Enzensberger continued writing essays in the 1980s, in which he ana-
lysed the mediocrity of the German society, focusing on the Kleinbürger,
the ‘bourgeois like us’, that is, the ordinary people as the consumers
of popular culture. He observed that the dominant ideas in society no
longer were those of the ruling class, but those of the petit bourgeoisie,
living their private lives within circles with specific lifestyles, and as
such resisting the (supposed) supremacy of the politicians in Bonn.
Ordinary people are normal, although ‘normality is a terminological
pudding, a pulplike mass’ (‘In defense of normality’, 1997, p. 289).
Ordinary people, Enzensberger underlines, are not consumer idiots,
as the elites might think, but unique individuals, having organised
themselves in groups of their own interests: sportsmen, women, homo-
sexuals and so on, just like the bohemians, décadents and Dadaists
populating the boulevards had done. One of the consequences of this
argument, is that intellectual productivity can no longer be localised
solely in a subgroup of intellectuals. His own position indeed marks a
bi-dimensionality, as we observe in a defensive remark on populism:
‘I am not a populist, and do not tend to ingratiate myself with a
majority, but it must be allowed to ask the question: If society is often
actually smarter than the politicians, might it then also not be smarter
than the intellectuals are at any rate than the individual intellectual?’
(Enzensberger, cited and translated in King, 2007, p. 271). This idea of
a self-supporting and mature ordinary public also comes to the fore in
the essays on the European Union, in which Enzensberger critiques the
arrogance of the politicians in Brussels, and their disinterest in local
particularities, differences and normality.
Dialogism and collective fiction
In 1968 Enzensberger had a job as visiting professor in the United

States, but then suddenly decided to accept an invitation by a Cuban
university. Years later he confessed that he did not regret this episode,
the year spent in Cuba provided him with a sharper view on the reali-
ties of communism: ‘I found it worthwhile indeed to rid myself of any
illusions which may have been lingering in my mind’ (1997, p. 66). The
one year visit also resulted in the documentary theatre play Das Verhör
von Habana (1970), in which Enzensberger offers self-presentations of
contra-revolutionaries, based on interviews held in April 1961 with
Cuban exiles who had worked together with the CIA at the invasion
of the Bay of Pigs. The interviewees either bourgeois, idealist or patriot,
revealed their convictions and ideas and as such the text was an invita-
tion to an in-depth reflection on ideology and revolution.13
The very specific documentary style and composition were used again
two years later in a biography of Buenaventura Durruti, an anarchist
who had fought in the Spanish civil war. Although this text, Der kurze
Sommer der Anarchie (1977 [1972]), is categorised as Roman [novel],
the form and genre are puzzling: it is an amalgamation of interview,
fiction, naturalist description, sociological discourse, encyclopaedic
lemma and so forth. Some scholars characterise this style as eclectic
postmodernism and they describe the text as the ‘postmodern turn
towards a technical and scientific content of writing’ (Schlösser, 2009,
p. 9). In my perspective, however, the blurring of literary conventions
concerning authorship, text and genre is typical for the literary author
taking up a role as a public intellectual, whose intention it is to speak
to a broader audience on general issues regarding ordinary people living
in politically complicated times and places. This is not the work of an
author aiming to write high complex and autonomous literature, these
texts invite the reader to create his own perspective, influenced by more
or less contingent events and motives. Both in the work on the Cuban
anti-revolutionaries as in that on the Spanish anarchist, Enzensberger
reveals that there is not one evident and objective plot when history is
examined, there are several plots and numerous historical voices that
have to be reconstructed and brought together without suggesting a
closure. Hence, in the 1970s Enzensberger has developed a specific nar-
rative format for which he coined the term collective fiction. This is how
he describes it in the biography on Durruti,
The novel as a collage absorbs reports and speeches, interviews and

proclamations; finds nourishment in letters, itineraries, anecdotes,
pamphlets, polemics, newspaper notes, autobiographies, posters and
propaganda brochures. The contradictory nature of the forms only
announces the cracks tearing through the material itself. The recon-
struction is like a puzzle the pieces of which will not fit seamlessly. It
is precisely on the joints in the picture that our attention should be
focused. It is there perhaps that the truth is to be found, told by their
very presence, without the person doing the telling being aware of it.
(Enzensberger, 1977, p. 14)14
A collective fiction is constructed on the basis of real and imaginary sto-

ries, established by several texts and fragments, told by various voices,
and it is the reader who has to construct a ‘final’ narrative. Narrator and
reader are thus both in the position of sender and receiver. The people
of the anarchistic movement as portrayed here are common people, liv-
ing a conscious, normal life. The narrator as Nacherzähler (the one who
afterwards brings everything together) leaves out, translates, assembles
and finds an ‘ensemble of fictions’ in this normality in which he also
encapsulates his own story. In this context of intermingling both con-
structing and reconstructing activities, Enzensberger phrases the intel-
lectual paradox by commenting on his own role: ‘The rebuilder has
authority on the basis of his lack of knowledge’ (Unwissenheit). He did
not know Durruti, he was not there, he does not know it better’ (Ibid.,
p. 15). Enzensberger defines here, it can be argued, what his contem-
porary Habermas formulated as the avant-gardistic instinct of the intel-
lectual based on sensitivity, anticipation, imagination and courage. The
public intellectual makes a (re)construction, while interweaving fiction
and reality and bringing together various perspectives. His responsibil-
ity is to collect the voices of many in order to articulate various ideas
and ideologies in regard to historical events. The particular objective of
being ‘public’ implies using the voices of others (who in a way also are
‘public’) and communicating ideas to a broad audience, and as such
helping to interpret the meaning of historical occurrences. Articulation,
reconstruction and representation are crucial activities when an author
is performing the role of the public intellectual (Eyerman, 2011).
In the 1980s and 1990s Enzensberger published poetry as well as
political essays and became more and more outspoken on European
issues. In Politische Brosamen (1982) and in Mittelmasz und Wahn (1988)
he offered unconventional diagnoses on the political culture of the
Federal Republic, as well as on broad questions of reading, education and
the place of literature in a mediatised society. In addition, Ach Europa!
(1987) can be characterised as literary journalism in which the narrator
goes on a tour in six European nation states investigating differences
and stereotypes. Visiting Sweden, Italy, Hungary, Portugal, Poland and
Spain, Enzensberger describes how the various European nation states
establish their national identities. Again, this is a story told by many:
in repeating the words of politicians, common citizens, and real and
fictional inhabitants, in describing the histories and local phenomena,
and in striking up conversations with everyone from judges and bankers

to revolutionaries and apparatchniks, the author orchestrates numerous
voices and underlines that Europe’s strength lies in embracing diversity.
Enzensberger’s essays in the 1990s focus even more on politics and on
‘the end of the world’15 marked by events such as the impetuous reuni-
fication of Germany, the end of the Cold War, the first war in Iraq, the
disintegration of Yugoslavia and the subsequent migration currents. Die
Große Wanderung (1992) and Aussichten auf den Bürgerkrieg (1993) are
chronicles of the ‘history of the present’ (Garton Ash, 1998) and as such
in-depth reflections on nationalism, community and responsibility.
In 2008 Enzensberger once again published a documentary: the
life of the German military officer Kurt von Hammerstein (1878–
1943), entitled Hammerstein oder der Eigensinn, Eine deutsche Geschichte
(2008) (translated slightly differently as The Silences of Hammerstein).
Hammerstein lived through two wars and survived the difficult and
dangerous circumstances in Germany and Russia while keeping his
own track. The documentary shows the political conjuncture and eve-
ryday life in the inter bellum period, in which it was not easy to stay
uninvolved in either communism or fascism. Enzensberger provides a
collage of documents, letters, and photographs demonstrating how in
the Volksgemeinschaft of the Third Reich a small but persevering citizen
society with its own conventions and rules existed. In the Hammerstein
family all decisive motives and contradictions of the German catastro-
phe can be reconstructed. Enzensberger succeeds in bringing this world
to life and in evoking the social context of the 1930s.
One of the devices by which this impression of being there at the
time is achieved, is the creation of ‘posthumous conversations’16 evok-
ing characters who have died as still capable of voicing their version of
the truth. Enzensberger imagines various dialogues with persons from
Hammerstein’s inner circle, for instance the conversation with the son
Ludwig. He describes what happened on 20 July 1944, when some gen-
erals tried to bring Hitler down. Ludwig was there at the time, and in
the conversation with the writer, he explains what took place. We imag-
ine a witness talking about his experiences. What we read, of course, is
Enzensberger’s fantasy of such a testimony:
E: Who were you with?

L: There were four of us: Kleist, Fritsche, Oppen and myself.
We were taken to a room and there we met Schwerin, Jäger,
Berthold Stauffenberg, the brother of Claus, and Peter York von
Wartenburg.
E: What were your tasks?

L: First, we had to disarm two SS officers. Then, I was supposed
to wait in General Olbricht’s anteroom for further instructions.
There I was able to listen in on the telephone conversations
that were being conducted with Paris, where the readiness to
join in was quite considerable: ‘Hallo, c’est bon. It’s time. Take
immediate action!’ I was witness to the whole thing and saw
the officers of the General Staff going in and out.
(…) (Enzensberger, 2008, p. 350).
Bringing to life the voice of Ludwig von Hammerstein and his memo-
ries on the attack, while suggesting his own presence in the company
of Von Hammerstein, Enzensberger makes a construction of facts and
fiction with the effect of bringing history closer to the present. The
interview with the historical character is feigned oral history, as such
encouraging the reader to reflect on whose words are spoken, and how
they relate to reality.
The dialogue is a central mechanism to distinguish individual voices
from the collective voice of history. In doing this, Enzensberger prac-
tices an intriguing form of intertextuality as dialogism, which the
Russian philologist M.M. Bakhtin considered typical of the discourse
of the novel. The Bakhtinian concept of dialogism refers to spoken and
repeated words, as well as to a network of other possible words, voices
and connotations,
The living utterance, having taken meaning and shape at a particu-

lar historical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail
to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads, woven by
socio-ideological consciousness around the given object of an utter-
ance; it cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue.
(Bakhtin, 2008, p. 276)
Inventing dialogue as a social practice implies bringing in other texts

and the voices of others, to allow history in all its diversity to speak. In
(re)telling and (re)construction, the voices of real and imaginary char-
acters are brought together, without closing perspective on the truth
of what has happened. To cite Bakhtin again in regard to this specific
literary strategy: ‘Forming itself in an atmosphere of the already spoken,
the word is at the same time determined by that which has not yet been
said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word.
Such is the situation in any living dialogue’ (Ibid., p. 280). Enzensberger
writes himself in in the dialogue with the dead in order to create a more
lively description and understanding of the choices made and decisions
taken by historical figures.
Enzensberger’s oeuvre includes many genres and themes from his-
tory to politics and culture, from observations on war and violence
to biographies, from mathematics to a psychological interpretation of
the motives of the terrorist as Einzelgänger. In comparison with other
canonised European literary authors of his generation, such as Günter
Grass, Italo Calvino, Harry Mulisch or Milan Kundera, Enzenberger has
written more political essays and could be considered the writer, where
the others mentioned can be characterised in the first place as novel-
ists. But, as I have explained in Chapter 1, this has nothing to do with
using literary and narrative devices as such; in Enzensberger’s essays and
documentary work we observe an intriguing amalgamation of perspec-
tives of narration, polyphony and performative elements of popular
culture. Significantly, Paul Michael Lützeler considers Enzensberger
‘die personifizierte Avantgarde im Zwischenbereich von Politik und
Literatur’ (Lützeler, 2007, p. 37). The author indeed explores reality with
literary methods.
Understanding the history of the present
Enzensberger performs the specific role of the public intellectual when

he writes collective fiction, in which the voices and stances of different
people are brought together and thus a dynamic and fractal perspec-
tive on historical and political events is created. The literary author
acknowledges the specific technique of giving voice to characters in
order to document and imagine what has happened in societies in
regard to political and personal occurrences. In doing this, Enzensberger
should not be qualified as the engaged writer, because he does not
promote a specific ideological stance. On the contrary, it can be argued
that he constantly acts as the semi-detached writer who observes and
assembles his registrations, keeping himself at a distance, but every
once in a while taking the floor while mingling his voice with those
of others, thus constructing a collective fiction as alternative scenario.
Enzensberger imagines how things (could) have happened by fore-
grounding the private and public voices of other people.
The German author, however, also performs the role of public intel-
lectual in a more conventional way, when writing poetry and political
essays. The essays in particular, demonstrate his intellectual style of
thinking with regard to German and European political developments,
whereas the poems provide political statements as well. In the

1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when Germany was reunited,
Enzensberger published three volumes of poetry, Zukunfstsmusik (1991),
Kiosk (1995) and Leichter als Luft (1999), and as such (re)established his
cultural authority as a poet, and several controversial essays on politics
in which he discussed topics such as migration and xenophobia, the
notion of ‘molecular civil war’ and the disappearance of ideology. Some
political themes discussed in essays also appear in the poems, for exam-
ple in the poem ‘A Glossary of Countries’ in which the lyrical voice
pities the disappearance of names of nation states:
It’s a pity about the dragons’ domain Druk-Yul

(extremely few people know her location)
and about the Republic of Our Savior,
with her raiding squads now turned gray;
a great pity about the desperate Democratic
and Popular Algerian Republic;
a pity, too, albeit for different reasons,
about the Confederatio Helvetica,
covered with statements of bank accounts and syringes –
(…)
a pity, albeit to a lesser degree,
about the Federal Republics of Germany and Micronesia
(Enzensberger, 2000, p. 29)17
After the opening of the iron curtain the DDR evaporated and in
October 1990 the Federal Republic formally absorbed the citizens, terri-
tory, and assets of East Germany (Davies, 1997). Enzensberger, who in
‘Bin Ich ein Deutscher?’ had pointed at the obsoleteness of nationality,
in this ironical poem pities the disappearance of nation states while
underlining that this is a phenomena of all times and places. Poems as
well as essays written in the 1990s thus offer a reflection on the chaotic
time and place and in particular on the new constellation of Europe
after the demise of the East-West structure. The suggestion by Erk
Grimm that in the poems more than in the essays ‘Enzensberger feels
much more at ease in linking such [historic] moments to the unspec-
tacular events of the everyday’ and is more capable of using a skilful
rhetoric (Grimm, 2002, p. 8), seems unconvincing. In my perspective,
the essays and poems written in this decade are distinct genres, but both
convey the deeply felt concern as well as the curiosity of the author
with regard to the rapid societal and political transformations going
on. In particular the essays offer an intellectual reflection based on a

clear argumentation as well as on effective rhetorical devices. It is in the
essays that Enzensberger articulates and interprets political events and
consequences on a regional, national and transnational level. In the fol-
lowing section, I will focus on two essays to analyse how tone and argu-
ment establish the typical style of thinking of this public intellectual.
Aussichten auf den Bürgerkrieg [Civil War, translated by the author
himself] is an essay in 12 parts, in which Enzensberger considers civil
war as the primary form of collective conflict and even hysteria taking
place in contemporary societies. As a modern Thucydides the author
analyses civil war as the aggression against the rival on one’s own terri-
tory. Today’s wars however are not between the Peloponnesian and the
Athenian people, but are fought within the nation state and thus the
question asked is ‘which is stranger: killing people you know, or destroy-
ing an opponent you have absolutely no conception of, not even a false
one’ (Enzensberger, 1994, p. 12). The contemporary civil wars are, so
Enzensberger argues, ‘molecular’, that is, relatively regional and small
conflicts, but they can escalate at any time into epidemic proportions.
Molecular wars take place in Liberia, Cambodia, Berlin, the banlieues
in Paris or elsewhere, and the common denominators are ‘the autistic
nature of the perpetrators, and their inability to distinguish between
destruction and self-destruction’ (Ibid., p. 20). In today’s civil wars there
no longer is any need to legitimise your actions; violence has freed itself
from ideology. The combatants are hooligans, Serbian nationalists, radi-
cal right-wingers, neo-Nazis, or Islamic fundamentalists, who are not
interested in history and indifferent to their own future. What only
matters to these fighters is the present: ‘Consequences do not exist. The
instinct for self-preservation, with the restraining influence it brings
to bear, is knocked out of action’ (Ibid., p. 29). In fact, the combatants
make war about nothing at all.
Enzensberger sketches a confrontational picture, bringing together
various events and consequences and pointing at a general (anthro-
pological and psychological) pattern in contemporary conflicts. In the
pivotal fifth part of the essay, he analyses the explanations heard with
regard to particular events of molecular civil war. Conservative com-
mentators find a clarification in the lack of traditional authority due to
emancipation movements in the last 200 years. The Left blames the envi-
ronment: the consumer society and the media. Marxist theorists claim
that the general level of violence is no more than the desperate reaction
to a hopeless economic situation. Some analysts come up with con-
spiracy theories, and others find an answer in the idea that one culture
encounters another culture at a different stage of its development.

Underdevelopment, fundamentalism, tribal feuding are then put down
to backwardness, the consequence being that the less-developed socie-
ties need only follow the path of modernisation to catch up. Neither the
reference to the humiliation of colonialism, nor the explanation that the
growth in world population is the main cause of all the troubles, serves
as a final answer to the question where the unrest comes from. Does
Enzensberger have a convincing explanation then? Evidently, while
consciously performing the role of public intellectual, he does not want
to provide a definite explanation himself: again it becomes clear that the
author does not engage with practical politics. He emphasises the need
for an on-going reflection and for bringing in new perspectives regarding
the different reasons for specific political and ideological points of view.
We need this reflection and contemplation even more, since we all have
become permanent spectators in the age of mass media:
There is no doubt that we have all become spectators. That is what

differentiates us from earlier generations who, if they were not
themselves victims, attackers or eyewitness, would have had to rely
on rumors, on legends. You could only know by hearsay what was
happening elsewhere. As late as the middle of this century, the gen-
eral public knew little or nothing of the greatest crimes of the epoch.
Mass murder was a state secret. There were no television cameras
in the extermination camps. Today, in contrast, the murderers are
happy to give interviews and the media are proud to be where the
killing is. Civil war has become a TV soap. (Ibid., p. 58)
Here we observe Enzensberger paying attention again to media con-

sciousness and the exposure of information on television, turning us
into voyeurs, but evoking a response as well. As soon as we have seen
the cruelties, we have to act, to intervene, and to ask ourselves: what are
we going to do about it? Television, ‘the most corrupt of all media’ is
transformed into ‘a paragon of morality’ (Ibid., p. 59). The sheer weight
of information that we receive everyday on the television screen makes
any kind of intelligent analysis and reflection impossible. By watching
the news we are overloaded with moral demands and as a consequence
we get immune to every stirring of conscience. The denying of respon-
sibility is the result and there lies the seed ‘of brutalisation, which may
escalate to raging aggression’ (Ibid., p. 61).
If we try to think through some of the elements discussed in this
essay, we realise that what Enzensberger describes as what is happening
anno 1994, is even more pertinent two decades later, taking in mind
such diverse images recently broadcasted as the shot down Malaysian
aeroplane MH17 over the Ukraine displaying physical parts and per-
sonal belongings of the victims, or the published images and clips of
the cruel beheading of American journalists James Foley and Steven
Sotloff, as well as the television reports of the riots in Ferguson after the
shooting of a 18-year-old boy. Due to television and other media expo-
sure all these conflicts become bigger, endemic, and they spread over
to other conflicting issues, hence getting unmanageable. Enzensberger
in the early 1990s articulated and sketched a scenario that is still appli-
cable in today’s circumstances. In addition, it can be argued that again
in this essay a main focus lies on media practices and consequences.
Contemporary conflicts cannot be understood without a reflection
on where the information comes from, Enzensberger insists, on the
responsibility of journalists and television makers, on the specific media
technologies used, and thus also on the consciousness of the audience
in regard to what is seen, how it is framed and how to respond to it.
Enzensberger’s commitment as public intellectual lies in his reading of
European culture symptomatically, as a media culture in which images
are collected, constructed and disseminated. In contrast to the instan-
taneous analysis we daily get on television, Enzensberger in his public
intellectual role recontextualises events and interprets their symptoms
and significance in a broader context. His essay thus provides a show-
case of cultural analysis that ties in with Arjun Appadurai’s (2008 [1996])
important study on western societies in the context of late modernity
zooming in on interactions of a new order and intensity in which a
new role for the imagination in social life emerges. Appadurai observes
different dimensions of global flows such as ethnoscapes: the landscape
of people who are constantly shifting, technoscapes: the technologies
that link us across traditional borders, financescapes: the global land-
scape of capital transfer, mediascapes: the endless array of mediated
images, sounds and narratives and the ability to produce them, and
ideoscapes: the uncertain landscape of dominant and non-dominant
ideologies. The scapes (systems or zones) underscore the overlapping
dimensions and transformations in today’s world, in which there can-
not be assumed a transgenerational stability, and cultural reproduction
becomes politicized.
In comparison to the essay on civil war, ‘The Great Migration, Thirty-
three Signposts’, is more impressionistic and less argumentative, but
again offers an analysis of the indicative societal problems of the glo-
balising 1990s (which are still today’s urgent issues). The images and
metaphors presented in this text focus on the problem of migration, the

great migration even, since so many people are on the move for vari-
ous reasons. The figure of turbulence as pictured on a weather forecast
map is introduced in the first signpost as referring to this mobility. The
swarms of blue and red arrows spread over the globe, and smash into
each other in specific weather zones. To make a link again to Appadurai,
today’s world is one in which tourists, migrants, refugees, exiles, guest
workers and other moving groups and individuals have become an
essential feature of constant mobility. In the fourth signpost, then,
Enzensberger associates this mobility with the scene of a railway com-
partment in which two passengers have made themselves comfortable,
when two new travellers enter. As the first metaphor of the weather
forecast map refers to contesting movements of various groups, this
scene concretises the feeling of belonging, the idea that someone can
claim to have the right on a certain place.
The short textual form of ‘signposts’ (as an indicator or guide), and
the metaphors as well as the suggestive potential of the essay, establish
the more literary character of the essay in comparison with the piece
on civil war, which was more explicitly constructed as a discursive argu-
ment. The observations provided in ‘The Great Migration’ are indeed
subjective and less systematic, and therefore encourage the reader to be
responsive and to form an opinion with regard to this issue of migra-
tion and the consequential conflicts between settlers and nomads. The
literary and fragmented style of this essay, it can be argued, suits the
ethical dilemma discussed. This dilemma is introduced with the train
scene, depicting how more and more passengers are coming in (evoking
a reaction from others already there), and it is also brought to the fore
in the description of a third metaphor: that of a lifeboat with the survi-
vors from a shipwreck. This boat is concretised daily – as we speak – by
vessels heading from the North African coast to Lampedusa or Sicily on
the route to mainland Europe:
A lifeboat is packed with survivors from a shipwreck. In the stormy

sea around it there are other people in danger of going under. How
should the occupants of the boat behave? Should they push away or
hack off the hands of the next person who grabs the side of the boat?
That would be murder. Pull him on? Then the boat would sink taking
all the survivors with it. (Ibid., p. 113)
The parable of the lifeboat is casuistry: ethical philosophers can dis-

cuss the ‘what if … then’ questions, and politicians can take it up
and prove that ‘the boat is full’. Enzensberger’s focus, however, is not
on philosophical or political positions, and not even on the solution
to the problem, but on the awareness of the unimaginable number
of refugees. He points at the word and idea of ‘superfluousness’, the
reality that even in wealthy societies people are rendered needless or
unnecessary. Superfluousness is again a metaphor, now for something
that is beyond imagination. When the issue of migration is connected
to superfluousness the sign posts evidently get a cynical tone, not in
the least when market strategies are discussed. ‘Superfluous people are
cheap. Clandestine immigration reduces the price of labour’ (Ibid.,
p. 122), Enzensberger observes, and he subsequently scrutinises the
notion of asylum seeker, which in nineteenth-century Germany was
used for drunkards, prostitutes, released prisoners, poor nursing moth-
ers and homeless people, that is, for stigmatised locals needing custody.
Today, however, the meaning of the word has changed, asylum seeker
has become ‘a discriminatory, negatively loaded term, a political foot-
ball’ (Ibid., p. 127). The practice of deciding who is a ‘genuine’ asylum
seeker (victims) and who is not (economic refugees) is embarrassing
‘since it is increasingly difficult to deny that the impoverishment of
whole continents has political causes, and that internal and external
factors can no longer be clearly distinguished’ (Ibid., p. 127).
Again, in this essay, Enzensberger provides an analysis of political and
social transformations, and takes up his role as public intellectual not
to give an ultimate solution, but to contextualise events and to offer
some metaphors, symptoms and significances evoking response and
thoughts on responsibility. He demonstrates how the arguments used
are slippery, how scales between the regional and global have to be kept
in mind, and how embarrassing it often is to think that one perspec-
tive is better than another. In this regard, he pictures in signpost 28 his
German fellow intellectuals,
A fondness for principles is a traditional weakness of German intel-

lectuals. It leads to constant and excessive ethical demands on
oneself and to a recurring loss of credibility. There is, however, yet
another disagreeable aspect. It is difficult enough for Germans to
come to terms with themselves and their neighbours. Yet the same
self-righteous moralists who would welcome all the needy of the
earth are simultaneously demanding that the villains of yesterday
become a model of altruism for everyone else, so that the problems
of the Second and Third Worlds can be mended by the contrite
German soul. (Ibid., p. 132)
In this description of the German intellectual, Enzensberger also

inscribes his credo: as a German author based in the city of Munich, he
is encapsulated in prosperous Central Europe, but as much interested
in what is going on in the world. Germany provides a narrative, a his-
torical and cultural frame, yet other frames are relevant and necessary
as well if one is to understand the global complexity. Performing the
role of the public intellectual implies the articulation of ideas, patterns
and scenarios, but it should not result in offering a one model fits all
activism, in pretending to have an ultimate answer to all the problems.
Enzensberger is the opposite of Noam Chomsky as the activist intellec-
tual who declared that ‘It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak
the truth and to expose lies.’18 The German author resists the words
‘truth’ and ‘lie’ and is much more interested in how real life and fictions
are inevitably mixed up.
The centres and peripheries of Europe
Enzensberger’s most visionary and critical perspectives address Europe

and the European Union. Performing yet another aspect of the public
intellectual role, that of the committed critical citizen representing
other citizens, Enzensberger is interested in European inhabitants – in
the Other as European – but he is at the same time very critical about
the construction of the European Union as a money consuming admin-
istrative monster. There is a difference between Europe as an institution,
the Brussels’ Europe as organisation with commissioners, and the real
Europe that exists in millions of economical and personal relations,
mixed marriages and human mobility, the author declares in an inter-
view in May 1994.19 In the travelogue Ach Europa! (1987), Enzensberger
demonstrates his affinity with European diversity and in particular
with the nation states in the periphery – ‘on the edges Europe will rise
again’ he suggests. In the essay Brussels, the Gentle Monster (2011)20 he
breaks down all the pompous pretensions Brussels presents. In both
texts Enzensberger provides alternative intellectual frames without
being moralistic, or put more precisely, he escapes moralism with irony,
polyphony and multi-perspectivism.
Immediately at the beginning of Ach Europa!, the hybrid character of
the text as docu-fiction becomes clear. Enzensberger starts his story by
describing an election party in Stockholm to which he was personally
invited. Soon it turns out that this is more a political and philosophical
essay rather than a journalistic account or an autobiographical nar-
rative. The narrator sharply observes the Swedish Social Democratic
hegemony, and critiques institutions and the constitution of Sweden,

identifying himself as a ‘Central European’ for whom it is difficult to get
rid of ‘the residue of cynicism he needs to survive morally and intellec-
tually in his homeland’ (Ibid., p. 10). The perspective of narration thus
is that of the critical contemplator from the centre of the continent,
who is fascinated by the singularities of the Northern European democ-
racies. The most poignant observation Enzensberger offers in the first
chapter, is that Swedish Social Democrats have made the mistake of ‘the
liquidation of their own history’, of a ‘systematic forgetfulness’ (Ibid.,
p. 27). Linked to this disregard of historical consciousness is the neglect
of symbolic forms and rituals. The conclusion is that the ‘hegemonic
culture of Social Democrats has forgotten the symbolic dimension with-
out which politics cannot exist’ (Ibid., p. 29).
The core European nation states, Germany, France and the United
Kingdom, are not visited on this journey. After his trip to Sweden,
Enzensberger travels to Italy and depicts the Italian extravagances and
the typical role of ‘gli intelligenti’ a set of political scientists, novel-
ists, psychoanalysts, professors, editorial writers, who are self-declared
specialists in debate, but in fact just echo their French and American
colleagues. Nothing seems what it is in Italy. Enzensberger underscores
the indirectness of social agreements and the individual privileges
everyone enjoys, pointing at the fireman who has a ticket for sold out
performances at La Scala, and the Mafia boss who has a printer brought
into his cell. The underlying principle of this society is that ‘nobody
is a Nobody’. The result of which is that Italians are never a collective,
they’re just an accumulation of free individuals. No one feels responsi-
ble for the whole.
Once more this text is made up of conversations, observations and
critical analyses. Enzensberger is curious as to how various nation states
and the people are functioning, how they are different and similar, and
how nations are a part of a transnational Europe, while at the same time
some regions seem to have become independent entities. To categorise
Ach Europa! as a journalistic report on what are the main issues regard-
ing the European peripheries doesn’t do justice to the singularity of
this text. As Derek Attridge (2004) has explained, singularity functions
like a signature, and is imitable; it is that what makes Enzensberger’s
work inventive and strange. One of the reasons for the effectiveness of
Ach Europa lies in the fact that the author is a poet, that the intellec-
tual observations are succinctly phrased. In the description of details,
in the examination of national and local peculiarities, the narrative
foregrounds a specific style and voice. Enzensberger’s text is a political
analysis, but at the same time it is the biography of an era (after the
demise of the iron curtain) and a space (a differently balanced West and
East). It is poetic reportage, political pamphlet, as well as social history,
and it memorises inhabitants of cosmopolitan as well as of forgotten
places. Significantly, in the description of the forgotten margins of
Europe, the voice of the poet is most clear, as we can see in the descrip-
tion of a Hungarian village:
Leaning on two crutches, a seventy-eight-year-old woman with the

face of an American Indian opens the door for us. The house consists
of two rooms. No furniture, only dirty straw sacks in the corners.
There is not a trace of the Hungarian miracle here. We have arrived
in Bhopal, in Luanda, in La Paz.
Gradually the daughters and then the grandchildren crowd in
through the door. Not even the grandmother knows how many there
are. The first child comes when the girls are fourteen. Contraceptives
are unknown. Many children are born deaf and dumb. The old
woman was elected chieftain after her husband’s death, but she can’t
cope anymore. She points to the antiquated wheelchair in the yard,
in which she is pushed to the doctor’s, almost an hour away. She has
rheumatism of the joints. She speaks forcefully and confidently. She’s
not complaining, she’s stating facts. (Ibid., p. 120)
Enzensberger depicts the European gypsies in their miserable condi-

tions, without making explicit statements on what is wrong and who is
to blame for it. In the evocation of the details, and in the subtle but pre-
cise observations he notices ‘the suffering when it occurs’ (Rorty, 1989)
without becoming sentimental or insincere. This is literature on real
circumstances, this is happening in Europe (in the 1980s but undoubt-
edly still today). As mentioned before, the Habermasian ‘avant-gardistic
instinct’ emerges in Enzensberger’s intermingling of political, societal
and personal perspectives, and this works well because of the poetical
(precise, condense, evocative) style of writing. The effect of the text
is not only that the reader gets information on the various European
nations and public spheres, there is also the invitation to reflect on and
respond to the thoughts offered. The reader is invited in, and stimulated
to think about issues of identity, poverty, migration and democracy.
Ach Europa! orchestrates the voices of Europeans living in different
places their completely different lives, while sharing a cultural tradition.
The documentary is a search into what Europe means, and the outcome
is that its significance lies in many stories told by various voices in
different languages. The diversity of Europe is its essence, so to say. In

visiting the margins of Europe, Enzensberger resists the ‘provincialism
of the metropoles’ (Ibid., p. 131), the idea of the French that Paris is the
centre of Europe, while the English people believe that it is London,
and the Germans are equably self-focused. The core of Europe has lost
contact with the reality of what is going on in the peripheries.
Intriguingly, the documentary ends with an Epilogue entitled ‘The
seacoast of Bohemia’ which evidently is completely fictional; there is
no coast in Bohemia (the Czech Republic) as Shakespeare already articu-
lated in The Winter’s Tale (1623). This final chapter is apparently writ-
ten by a certain Timothy Taylor and published in ‘The New New Yorker,
on 21 February 2006’. This implies that the narrator gives us a future
perspective, since the book was published in 1987. The autobiographi-
cal narrator of the book, Enzensberger himself, is now replaced by an
American journalist who travels through Europe. Visiting Ramstein,
The Hague, Berlin, Helsinki, Bucharest and Prague, Taylor encounters
the new old Europe. The German village of Ramstein is deserted, peo-
ple have moved out after the American base was dismantled. In The
Hague Taylor visits an auction of Bordeaux wines, which are collected
as museum pieces and as souvenirs of a vanished culture since there has
been a meltdown in a nuclear reactor in the south of France. In Berlin
Taylor meets two professors protecting endangered species exactly on
the grounds of the former Berlin Wall. Taylor meets in Finland a former
European president, who is very sarcastic about the European project
controlled by Brussels. He complaints,
The unavoidable consequence was that Brussels became a giant

supranational hydrocephalus. In their glass boxes the commissions,
committees, and subcommittees played an absurd billion-dollar
bridge game. All entirely without democratic legitimation: those who
had power had not been elected, and those who had been elected
(…) had no power. (Ibid., p. 308)
Evidently, Enzensberger’s own opinion is written in these words. Taylor

finally has enough of Europe and feels that he has to return to real-
ity, that is, to the United States. But why is it that Enzensberger has
created this fictive journalist in the Epilogue of what seemed to be a
journalistic reportage? Obviously, he has created the American journal-
ist as alter ego, in order to take a distance and to switch positions from
a ‘central European’ (implying commitment) to an ‘outsiders’ perspec-
tive. The Taylor-character makes it possible to sharpen as well as ironise
arguments addressing the European state of the art. But on the last
pages of the book the irony evaporates, when Taylor gets a poem from
a taxi driver and reads it in the plane back home. It is a poem by the
German poetess Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–73) titled ‘If Bohemia still
lies by the sea’ and Taylor thinks it is nonsense. But Enzensberger here,
in between these sentences, ending the book about European nations
with this poem, conveys something seriously meant and marks his own
cultural authority as a poet: it is in poetry that we can sometimes find
answers to the madness and chaos. ‘You should learn it by heart, even
if you don’t understand a word!’ (Ibid., p. 323).
‘Literature after the death of literature’21
In this first case study I have highlighted the styles of writing and think-
ing of Hans Magnus Enzensberger and situated his performance of the
role(s) of public intellectual in the context of Germany and Europe.
My main argument was that this literary author, although his appear-
ance on television shows an elegantly dressed, modestly and cheerfully
speaking man of age, has had for more than half a century provocative
and outspoken opinions on various societal and political topics. Yet,
he never assumed the traditional role of the intellectual, pretending
to have a universal perspective. On the contrary, Enzensberger is at his
best when constructing multi-perspective political essays or collective
fiction, as a story made of several stories revoicing various personal
opinions, and assembling visions and memories by ordinary people as
well as by those in power. Hence, Enzensberger brings together three
different activities that the public intellectual can fulfil: he speaks
for others (as Edward Said and Antonio Gramsci considered the most
important); he speaks to others, showing the audience various ethical
dilemmas and stimulating them to be conscious and reflective; and
he creates alternative cultural and emancipatory political scenarios in
which the public can recognise the symptoms of the era. In particular
in regard to this latter activity Enzensberger’s writing is very successful,
as we have observed in the narratives as documentary, and in the crea-
tion of a novel that at the same time appears to be not a novel. But what
exactly does this mean? Let us go back to what Enzensberger explains at
the end of the Hammerstein biography:
And yet this book is not a novel. To make a bold comparison:

the approach is one that is more like photography than painting.
What I could substantiate from written and oral sources, I wanted
to separate from my own subjective opinions, which have been

included here in the form of short comments. To complete the pic-
ture I have taken recourse to the time-honored form of the conversa-
tion with the dead. Such posthumous exchanges enable a dialogue
between the people of today and those that went before them – an
exchange known to be troubled by all kinds of confusion, with sur-
vivors often thinking they know better than those who spent their
lives in a permanent state of emergency, risking their lives in the
process. (Enzensberger, 2008, p. 287)
The writer justifies that he feels more affinity with the photographer
rather than with the painter, and that he often disconnects from his
personal opinion, but occasionally brings in his own voice in imaginary
dialogues. Using sources, as one is supposed to do in a documentary,
is not enough to construct the complete picture. The reality has to be
invented with literary strategies, which implies the opportunity to cre-
ate conversations with the dead, to imagine their words and testimo-
nies. The literary author uses his fantasy to finish the stories of some,
in order to frame them as a cultural analysis or an alternative scenario.
Yet, by stressing that he avoids writing a novel, Enzensberger paradoxi-
cally marks his position as a literary author, and this, it can be argued,
typifies him in the particular role as public intellectual.
In discussing Enzensberger as a showcase of public intellectual agency,
we are thus immediately brought back to the question of the state of
the art of European literature today, the question asked and quite
pessimistically answered by the theorists and philosophers Tzvetan
Todorov in La littérature en péril (2006) and by Alain Finkielkraut in Un
coeur intelligent (2009). As early as the end of the 1960s Enzensberger
made some challenging and much more optimistic remarks on this
topic,22 pointing to the fact that literature has lost the elite position it
had in the nineteenth century when the bourgeoisie became the new
ruling class. Enzensberger emphasised that literature is spread over new
forms: poetry is everywhere, ‘in headlines, in pop music, in the adver-
tisements’ and unfamiliar feelings and new forms of perception are
invented in cinema, fashion, music, political action, subcultures and
‘in the crazy spectacle that the streets of our metropolises offer’ (1997,
p. 273). Literature is not passé; it is all around us, Enzensberger argued:
‘the socialisation of literature has brought with it the literarisation of
society’ (Ibid., p. 274). We cannot describe Enzensberger’s performance
as public intellectual apart from these statements, and his idea that the
book, individual authorship, the distribution limits of the market, and
the separation of theoretical and practical work are completely out of

date. The principle of mutuality, a principle that has become even more
urgent in the digital and globalised era, as also Appadurai underlined,
is inherent in the new broad idea of literature: ‘the writer who lets him-
self get involved in this suddenly feels critical reciprocity, a feedback
between reader and writer of which he could not have dreamed as a
belletrist’ (1974, p. 94). As we have seen, mutuality as dialogism in the
Bakhtinian sense, lies at the heart of Enzensberger’s poetics.
Three conclusive observations could be formulated to end this chap-
ter. The first observation is that many contemporary novels indeed
are numbing rather than sharpening, based as they are on worn-out
narrative templates. Enzensberger’s attempt to not write a novel, can
be placed in the context of this observation: the German writer would
like his text to have more urgency, expressiveness and immediate
communication with society and readers. By crossing the conven-
tional generic boundaries of autonomous fiction, he opens his work
to more audiences. The second observation is that, although many
contemporary European writers feel the need to participate in the
political and societal debate, they often keep hiding in their room and
do not like to appear in newspapers, on television or on microblogs.
Enzensberger, however suspicious in regard to television and digital
media, consciously takes a position in between publics by appearing
on these platforms and as such addressing audiences much wider than
that of the readers of his books. The third observation is that ‘Europe’
and the European Union are urgent topics from both a political and
cultural perspective even for a literary author. What is missing in most
of the discussions in today’s national newspapers and on the Internet,
is the broader view of European culture and history as a continuum,
a collective perspective that literary authors (and visual artists or film-
makers for that matter) could provide. Enzensberger cares about this
intellectual challenge, and consciously takes position in the debates,
while analysing various (trans)national tendencies and particularities.
The author, in performing the role of the critical liberal public intel-
lectual thus helps us out of the euro-centrist focus and brings more
balance in perspectives of in- and exclusion, centre and periphery.
Enzensberger provides an avant-gardistic experiment, not in the sense
of a post-modernist project of subjectivity and eclecticism, but in the
reconnection between literature and reality, between artistic practice
and social responsibility. He evidently is an authentic public intellec-
tual, due to the consciously positioning of himself as a critical thinker
in a contemporary European context in which conflicting cultural and

political issues have to be interpreted and commented upon. Essential
as well is that he is being taken seriously and given the requisite pub-
lic platforms. It is in his consciously constructed hybrid works, in the
polyphony of the various voices encouraging the communication with
real readers, that we see the power of literature as intervention in the
debate on democracy.
3
Eastern European Voices
Slavenka Drakulić (1949) and
Dubravka Ugresić (1949)
Two female public intellectuals, born in the former Yugoslavia and

since the early 1990s living in the North of Europe, respectively in
Stockholm and Amsterdam, have built oeuvres combining fiction and
essays, semi-autobiographical imagination and culture critique, testi-
mony and journalism. Both authors are regularly invited by various
national newspapers to write commentaries on what happened after
the split up of Yugoslavia, and they have provided poignant analyses
of the East–West dichotomy in contemporary Europe. By reading parts
of their work, the European dissemination is brought to the fore, and
issues of trans-nationalism and cultural identity are reflected upon.
In this chapter, the focus will in particular be on the concept of the
public private voice, in which various experiences are conveyed as
exemplary for individuals in particular circumstances. Different per-
spectives are encapsulated in the public private voice: the perspective
of the citizen from a country not existing anymore, the perspectives of
the exile, the victim and the perpetrator, of a woman from a specific
generation and that of the European East-West migrant. This multi-
perspectiveness makes up the specific performance of these public
intellectuals using their own history to stimulate others to think about
their responsibility.
The problem of orientation in Europe comes from

the fantasies of its inhabitants about themselves and
others. Tourist guides of dusty rhetoric have tried
to convince us that their countries, regions or cities
have served through their whole history as a bulwark
against the Other, the Other invariably, of course, com-
ing from the East. It turns out that all the inhabitants
52
Eastern European Voices, Drakulić and Ugresić 53
of Europe would rather see themselves as part of its

western than its eastern end. (D. Ugresić, 2007, p. 111)
The personal route
‘My father was a nobody. He was one of the poor devils who fought
with Tito’s partisan army during the Second World War; later on, he
joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and became an army officer,
retiring in 1966. His life is not much of a story, and he is dead now. He
died in November 1989, just before his world and the ideas he fought
for fell apart, which, perhaps, would have ended his life anyway. He
may not have been an important figure in the communist nomenklatura,
but in my eyes my father was guilty of opportunism, of a tacit collabora-
tion with a repressive regime, and above all of silence’ (Drakulić, 2014,
p. 143). We hear the voice of Slavenka Drakulić, a journalist and writer
who in Café Europa, Life after Communism (originally 1996) investigates
the legacy of communism in the divided continent that Europe still
is today. Although after the opening of the iron curtain many former
communist states have entered the European Union, Eastern Europeans
(or Central or East-Central Europeans for that matter) even today have
a different perspective on what Europe is. The name ‘Europe’ just
describes one part of the continent, the part, according to Drakulić,
that implies ‘plenitude: food, cars, light, everything – a kind of festival
of colours, diversity, opulence, beauty’, in sum: a ‘Europe too bright too
be real’ (Ibid., p. 12). Europe has different meanings, but in particular by
the people from the Balkan, it is imagined as something that could save
them from complexes, insecurities and fears. The biggest fear indeed
is not to belong to Europe at all and to be ‘left alone with each other’
(Ibid., p. 212).
In her writing Drakulić explores what Europe is about, starting from
her personal experiences such as the unsatisfactory relation with her
father, while at the same time representing the ideas and beliefs of a
generation grown up under communism in the mid twentieth century.
With an eye for the peculiarities of both West and East, the author
investigates ideologies, history and social discourses in order to under-
stand in what way these topics relate to her own ideas and memories
regarding the past. In doing this, she explores the interrelationships
between West and East and provides an insight to former personal and
political realities. It is with sensitiveness and precision with regard to
specific details that she is able to sketch scenes of a life under commu-
nism, as such offering a mirror to the audiences of Western European
and American citizens, and current politicians lacking memory and an

antenna for cultural diversity.
This chapter will discuss Drakulić’s texts in comparison with the
work of her contemporary, Dubravka Ugresić, who was also born in the
former Yugoslavia in 1949, and who can be characterised as well as a
public intellectual creating archival work and confronting contemporary
readers with the European history of the present. Ugresić could be con-
sidered the ironical cultural critic of the two, whereas Drakulić is more
the responsible literary journalist. Moreover, both authors have written
novels. Ugresić wrote The Ministry of Pain (2005) and The Museum of
Unconditional Surrender (1999) in which she fictionalised her own experi-
ences as a migrant in Amsterdam and Berlin; Drakulić published psycho-
logical novels such as The Taste of a Man (1997), investigating somatic
obsession, death-drift and hysteria. She also wrote S., a Novel about the
Balkans (also translated as: As if I am not there) (1999), in which she tells
the story of a young female teacher during the war in Bosnia, taken
prison and raped by Serbian soldiers. By creating characters based on real
life testimonies both authors depict the recent tragic European history.
Drakulić and Ugresić can be characterised as European exilic intel-
lectuals and female intellectuals. Both characterisations put accent
on a somewhat different role that the public intellectual can perform.
Exilic intellectuals have been of all ages, but the twentieth century
in particular has seen many examples: intellectuals such as Hannah
Arendt, Theodor Adorno or Thomas Mann, on the move from Europe
to the United States during the Nazi regime in Germany can be taken
as representative. But we could focus as well on Armenian intellectuals,
spreading over Europe and the Middle East after the genocidal attacks
by the Turks, such as female author Zabel Yesayan who escaped to
Bulgaria and later the Soviet Union, or we could point at intellectuals
such as the novelist M. Kundera who went from Prague to Paris because
of the communist suppressive regime in his native country (when
someone like the playwright Vaclav Havel stayed and openly criticised
the governors, accepting the consequences of imprisonment). Typical
for the exilic intellectual, as Edward W. Said has argued, is that he finds
himself in a median state, neither completely at one with the new set-
ting nor fully disencumbered of the old, beset with half-involvements
and half-detachments, nostalgic and sentimental on one level, an adept
mimic or a secret outcast on another. Said evidently also described his
own experience as a Palestinian-American intellectual in exile, when
he added: ‘the intellectual as exile tends to be happy with the idea of
unhappiness, so that dissatisfaction bordering on dyspepsia, a kind
of curmudgeonly disagreeableness, can become not only a style of

thought, but also a new, if temporary, habitation’ (Said, 1996, p. 53).
Although Ugresić in particular emphasises that exile for the writer is an
exceptional life circumstance, and that neither émigré, asylum-seeker nor
refugee is the adequate characterisation for this state of being,1 it could
be argued that in the twenty-first century the exilic intellectual cannot
really be distinguished from the migrant intellectual, the difference
being that exile implies the state of being barred from one’s native coun-
try for political or punitive reasons, whereas the migrant moves from one
place to another in order to find work or better and more humane living
conditions. There indeed is only a fluid border between being explicitly
banned by a dictatorial regime and being threatened and obstructed in
one’s freedom by nationalist fellow citizens, or fleeing for economic rea-
sons from a place in which one cannot establish a comfortable, healthy
or happy life. Both Drakulić and Ugresić left Croatia because of nation-
alist restrictions and threats. In an article in Globus, which appeared in
1992 under the headline ‘Croatia’s Feminists Rape Croatia’, both authors
were considered to belong to a group of ‘Five witches’ who were present-
ing themselves as political dissidents and revealed the rapes of Bosnian
women, while underlining press censorship in Croatia to international
human rights monitors.2 They were not explicitly banned, but put in a
box of unwelcome people daring to critique in public their country and
government. Either exile or migrant intellectual, the idea behind both
concepts is that one’s intellectual authority is always connected to pri-
vate experiences and knowledge in regard to what it means to live in a
specific nation under intimidating circumstances. The exilic or migrant
intellectual is striving to critique various national and cultural codes and
repertoires, and she adapts, as we will see in what follows, to a transna-
tional discourse pretending that ultimately she does not fit in a specific
nation anymore, that she indeed no longer has a ‘Yugoslav’ identity.
The female intellectual is time and again neglected and even con-
sidered as non-existent. Two explanations at least can be given for this
disinterest. First, the gender bias in society has overlooked the activities
and output of female intellectuals, focusing on the dominance of the
male public lecturers, commentators and writers. Second, there seems to
be a certain unwillingness of women to participate in the conversation
about intellectuals, and to perform the role of the intellectual appear-
ing in the media as a convinced, provocative and encouraging speaker.
This, it is argued by some theorists, has mainly to do with an aversion to
universality – the Julien Benda position as discussed in chapter 1 – and
to the role of the intellectual as educator or as someone fighting down
opponents, while being hard, outspoken and radical (McKee, 2005,

p. 36). Feminist activist values are often considered as anti-elitist, com-
municative and compromising, while rational discussions are dismissed
as sterile, dispassionate and disembodied (Showalter, 2000, Haydari,
2013). Drakulić and Ugresić, then, can be considered female intellectu-
als in their foregrounding of personal voices while criticising political
comfort positions, stereotypes and intellectual parochialism. They
frequently use the viewpoints of women to characterise the transforma-
tion in Europe, either that of the aging fairy tale figure Baba Yaga, that
of a young female student, of the spouse of Milosevic (the former presi-
dent of Serbia), or that of women raped in the Bosnian war. In explor-
ing these viewpoints, both authors make the personal political and vice
versa, and thus emphasise changing historical perspectives.
In order to understand the motivation of becoming a public intel-
lectual, we first have to recapitulate the main facts of the biographies of
the two authors. Dubravka Ugresić was born in the former Yugoslavia
in 1949, earned her degrees in Comparative Literature and Russian
Language and Literature, and worked at Zagreb University pursuing
parallel careers as a writer and a literary scholar. As stated on her web-
site: in 1991, when the war broke out in Yugoslavia, she took a firm
anti-nationalistic stand. She started to write critically about nationalism
(both Croatian and Serbian), the stupidity and criminality of war, and
soon became a target of nationalistically charged journalists, officials,
politicians, fellow writers and anonymous citizens. She was exposed
to harsh and persistent media harassment and chose to leave Croatia
in 1993. Ugresić moved to Amsterdam and is still based there, though
she accepted over the years several teaching jobs in the United States
(Cambridge) and Europe (Berlin and Budapest).3 After her departure
to Amsterdam, Ugresić published several articles in European quality
newspapers such as Die Zeit, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Die Weltwoche and
the Dutch NRC Handelsblad, discussing and explaining the wars and the
political movements in the former Yugoslavia, and severely criticising
the politics of ethnic cleansing. Her role at the time was that of the self-
critical Yugoslav, representing a Yugoslavia that did not exist anymore.
The biography of Slavenka Drakulić shows remarkable parallels; she
too was born in Croatia in 1949 and studied Comparative Literature and
Sociology. After graduating, she worked as a journalist and published
a non-fiction book on feminist issues, and moved to Sweden after she
was also characterised as one of the five ‘feminist witches’. Drakulić
published five novels: Holograms of Fear (1992), Marble Skin (1993), The
Taste of a Man (1997), S., A Novel about the Balkans (1999) and Frida’s
Bed (2008), and wrote several volumes of essays mainly focusing on

the experiences and consequences of life under communism: How we
survived Communism and even Laughed (1991), Balkan Express, Fragments
from the other side of War (1993), Café Europa, Life after Communism
(1996), They would never hurt a Fly (2004) and A Guided Tour Through the
Museum of Communism (2011). She is a regular contributor to The Nation
and The Guardian as well as to several continental newspapers, and a
public speaker on academic and public conferences.4
Sociologist Barbara A. Misztal underlines in Intellectuals and the Public
Good, Creativity and Civil Courage (2007), that if democracy is to serve
people by protecting them and developing a sustained commitment to
transparency and justice, it requires the active public participation of pub-
lic intellectuals in expanding the democratic imagination and civic sensi-
tivity of citizens. Misztal considers creativity and courage as the essential
conditions for the public prominence of intellectuals. Civic creativity
provides ideas on how to democratise and humanise late modern society.
It has to be understood as the ability to think freshly, originally and inno-
vatively. Courage is based on taking a moral stand and is linked to taking a
risk in being non-confirmative. Both Ugresić and Drakulić are examples of
courageous and creative intellectuals who have opposed the nationalist,
silencing forces and who also after their migration to the north of Europe,
have kept an interest in the democratisation of the former Yugoslavia. In
this chapter I will focus on the ‘public private voice’ in contrast to the
‘private public voice’, that we will discuss in the next chapter on French
media public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, which has to be understood
as a public intellectual voice using diary or personal notes to emphasise
and often exaggerate a stance in the public sphere. The public private
voice as discussed here, entails the critical representation and encapsula-
tion (as in ventriloquism) by the public intellectual of several voices, that is:
of ideas, expressions and personal feelings of several individuals worded in
specific discourses and idioms. The public intellectual can speak, so to say,
with a double tongue: she uses the words of others (sometimes sharing
similar experiences of exile, homelessness and trans-nationality) and thus
speaks for them, and she addresses a public (of readers) with which she
can identify as well. Speaking for and speaking to, are not always clearly
distinguished, depending on the topics discussed, on identification and
on styles of writing and thinking. Moreover irony, as we will observe,
often confuses the intent of the message sent to the addressee.5
These public intellectuals evidently share the same background, from
which they introduce similar issues of political, historical and ethi-
cal concern, but they respond to these issues in significantly different
styles of writing: Drakulić as the reporter trying to understand what

happened and providing in essays or the novel a reflection and imagi-
nary response on individual positions, Ugresić by using a fragmentary
style in which the consequences of the post-communist and neo-liberal
transformations are explored and ridiculed. In what follows, I will first
focus on Drakulić’s account on the war criminal trials in The Hague; her
aim is to represent the voices of perpetrator and victim. Subsequently,
I will scrutinise Ugresić’s fragmentary writing on discourses and rep-
ertoires used in the former Yugoslavia, as well as in today’s Western
Europe. In the texts discussed an intriguing mixture of imaginary, real
and feigned voices can be observed. In the conclusion, it will be argued
that these public intellectuals while representing the voices of others
and underscoring polyphony, create contesting perspectives on the
history of the present, as such inviting audiences to critically reflect on
their own responsibility and historical knowledge.
In the footsteps of Hannah Arendt
In 2002 Slavenka Drakulić was a fellow, or more precisely the ‘writer in

residence’ at the NIAS (Netherlands Institute for the Advanced Study
in the Humanities) near The Hague, writing a report on the ICTY, the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Just like phi-
losopher Hannah Arendt who in 1961 wrote articles for The New Yorker
on the Eichmann process in Israel, resulting in the book publication
Eichmann in Jerusalem, A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963),6 Drakulić
described what she observed in the courtroom and tried to oversee the
bigger picture of the conflicts in the Balkan area. In They Would Never
Hurt a Fly, War Criminals on Trial in The Hague (2004), she is a critical
and empathic observer at the same time, with, in line with Arendt, an
emphasis on the ordinariness of the war criminals and victims.
Drakulić’s motivation for telling the stories of victims and perpetrators,
is to find out which people committed the war crimes and under what
circumstances they came to their cruel activities. The main question she
addresses is: were the perpetrators ‘ordinary people like you or me – or
monsters’? Apart from being interested in this question, she is puzzled
as well by the phenomenon that the ‘war for the Homeland’ in Croatia
still is considered a defensive war and not an aggressive one. In finding
answers and building an understanding, Drakulić not just focuses on the
commonness of the people, but also on the poverty of the regions, the
small closed communities in the villages and the fear of the inhabitants.
People were infected with what she almost cynically calls the ‘TV-set
syndrome’, that is: the fear that they would be accused of having taken
the possessions from other people’s homes, since the ‘majority of them
used the war to “help” themselves to TV sets and similar goods from
deserted houses’ (Ibid., p. 25). Stealing stuff from neighbours is not a
spectacular delinquency, but evidently causes suspicion and potential
blackmailing in a small community. Everyone has something to hide or
to get from others. In addition, Drakulić underlines the historical obliv-
ion and the general resistance against bringing the criminals to justice.
Just like the Second World War was not talked about afterwards, people
in Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia today prefer not to think and talk about
the war(s) in the 1990s. That is the reason why the criminal tribunal is
in The Netherlands and not in the former Yugoslavia. As she explains,
In this respect Serbia and Croatia share a consensus about the lies of
the past ten years. The reason is simple, one that goes beyond the
Tudjman-Milosevic ideology. Too many people were in some way
involved in the war, and too many of them profited from it. It is
easier, and much more comfortable, to live with lies than to confront
the truth, and with that truth the possibility of individual guilt – and
collective responsibility. (Ibid., p. 17)
Drakulić, in her role of public intellectual, strives to make people aware

of this ‘point zero’ in history that is marked by silence, an absence of a
desire for truth, and the manipulation of facts after 1995. The ‘collective
responsibility’ she refers to in this passage, is a pivotal philosophical
and political concept implying that war is more than the consequence
of the (mis)behaviour of individual human beings. The concept is dis-
cussed by many philosophers,7 and the examples relied upon are mainly
about groups made up of living members. In recent years, however,
some studies have been written in which collectives were held morally
responsible for actions performed by earlier generations.
Drakulić, as we will see, elaborates on this position and considers
collective responsibility as something that goes beyond the singular
members of a specific group and that can also be applied to earlier gen-
erations responsible for actions performed by later ones. The concept is,
of course, also used by Hannah Arendt, who argued that one is respon-
sible not only because one acts under a predetermined law, but because
one belongs to a group that acts, or has acted, independently of him/
herself (Herzog, 2004). Arendt argued: ‘I must be held responsible for
something I have not done, and the reason for my responsibility must
be my membership in a group (a collective) which no voluntary act
of mine can dissolve’ (Arendt, 1987, p. 45). Such responsibility, called

collective or political, is distinguished from individual guilt, which cor-
responds to morally or legally reprehensible individual acts, that is, acts
disobeying laws. Arendt underscored the sharp dividing line ‘between
political (collective) responsibility, on the one side, and moral and/or
legal (personal) guilt, on the other’ (Ibid., p. 46). Guilt is moral and/or
legal, whereas responsibility is political. Collective responsibility has no
moral connotation, but is tied to historical developments with several
consequences for particular individuals.
In the courtroom Drakulić observes as a reporter some of the wit-
nesses and perpetrators, taking them as representative for others. In
showing the broader political and social situatedness of the conflict,
in underlining the differences between her own relative wealthy city
life in Zagreb at the time, and living in a remote village, the book gives
a convincing overview on the ethnic and historical complexity of the
Balkan region. Furthermore, Drakulić reveals the motivation and argu-
ments of the international legal system. For instance in the Foca case,
regarding the rape of many (very young) Muslim women by three men
from the village of Foca in Republika Srpska (the Serbian part of Bosnia),
the punishment is based on the idea of universal human rights that
have to be respected by all human beings, even in the smallest places
on the globe. The three men from Foca were the first in European legal
history to be sentenced for torture, slavery, outrages upon human dig-
nity and the mass rape of Bosnian Muslim women and crimes against
humanity. They got 28, 20 and 12 years in prison. Drakulić describes
their appearances and behaviour in court and depicts their background,
but first zooms in on a female witness whose 12-year old daughter was
imprisoned, raped and finally sold for about 200 German mark by one
of these men. The woman is asked to speak and to answer questions, but
she is not capable to pronounce the words, she just cries and makes ‘a
deep, whining sound’ by which Kovac, the perpetrator is not moved at
all; he just smiles as if feeling superior to the court (Ibid., p. 48).
Drakulić dares to identify with the mother, when thinking about her
own daughter at the age of 12: when she ‘barely got her period, wore
glasses and sneakers, and was not allowed to go to the cinema on her
own. She was only a child’ (Ibid., p. 47). But the intellectual courage
emerges in particular when Drakulić also imagines the perspective of
the defendants,
The trial must have seemed surreal to the three accused men: the
courtroom with the glass wall between the court and the public; the
lawyers dressed in long black robes; the judges also in black robes,
but with purple-red collars; the aseptic, formal atmosphere; the for-
eign languages all the participants spoke. From their small town in
the mountains they could not have imagined that the world would
be interested in what they had done, that it would create a special
court and accuse them of rape as a crime against humanity, and
that a woman – a black woman! they’d hardly seen before except on
television – would preside over the court. (Ibid., pp. 50–1)
The three Bosnian Serbs are placed in a completely different environ-

ment compared to where they come from. But at least they have a name
in this court, Dragoljub Kunarac, Radomir Kovac and Zoran Vukovic,
whereas the witnesses are nameless. The women, likewise dislocated, are
referred to as FWS-47 or FWS-191, and they are obscured to the public
while visible for the defendants, of whom no one shows any remorse.
These men, so Drakulić makes us understand, do not consider rape such
a big deal, they just wanted to have a little fun with the girls. Sometimes
they were drunk, and tested their power over the girls, but ‘they did not
mean harm to them’ (Ibid., p. 53). Drakulić uses free indirect style8 here
in a very subtle way, so that we can see things through the eyes of the
three defendants. Evidently, we are not entirely sure who ‘owns’ these
words9: is she repeating words spoken in the court, or is she imagining
what they could have thought, and in doing so identifying with these
men coming from the mountains, who refuse to accept a critical per-
spective on the things they have done? Using free indirect style is the
strategy of a novelist, but in particular, it can be argued, also that of
the public intellectual who tries to bring events closer and to emphasise
the lack of morality that is involved in ethnic tragedies such as the Balkan
war. Free indirect style helps the public intellectual to imagine situations
and to bring different perspectives to the fore. And in this case, this is a
courageous act, because it needs an element of identification with these
men who have done such cruel things without compassion.
The point I would like to underscore here, is that in order to under-
stand why and how they have done what they did, and to prevent
others from doing the same, the public intellectual has to move very
close to the perpetrator. In this identifying act, Drakulić is aware that
in the Yugoslavian context in which Serbs and Muslims were enemies,
dishonouring Muslim women was by many considered legitimate. That
is why the defendants in the court do not grasp at all why they should
be punished: ‘Everyone was doing it. In their own country, Republika
Srpska, they were treated like heroes’ (Ibid., p. 55). If they would,
instead of being in the courtroom, be sitting in a café in Foca’s main

street they would be given the respect ‘that veterans get there. And if
by accident one of the women they raped happened to pass by, they
would point at her – and laugh’ (Ibid., p. 55). In her account, by using
the indirect free speech while imagining their thoughts, Drakulić eluci-
dates how these men argue, and she puts this in contrast with the grief
of the witness as mother and with the severe punishments assigned by
the international court. Judge Florence Mumba steps beyond the local
Balkan context and the individual characters and motivations and turns
upside down the idea that rape is a common crime in times of war and
that ordinary soldiers cannot be held responsible. Drakulić repeats the
words of the judge: ‘Political leaders and war generals are powerless if
the ordinary people refuse to carry out criminal activities in the course
of war. Lawless opportunists should expect no mercy, no matter how
low their position in the chain of command may be’ (Ibid., p. 56). The
defendants who are visibly devastated by the ‘injustice’ done to them,
however, do not accept these words.
The strategy of identifying with victims and perpetrators in They
Would Never Hurt a Fly is very powerful, and Drakulić provides many
stories about the cruelties executed in the Yugoslav war(s). In every
case she endeavours to analyse the likely local, social and psychological
complexities involved. Such as in the story of Jelisic, who, in the court-
room, looks like a man you can trust. He really is an ordinary person,
grown up in a working-class family in a small town with a 40 per cent
Muslim population, and who loved to go out fishing. Yet, he turned
into a monster during 18 days in May 1992, and probably has executed
more than a hundred prisoners. Drakulić tries to picture and understand
what happened,
For the first time in his short life, Goran Jelisic was in a position
of power. A little man from Bijeljina, a farm mechanic and petty
criminal just out of prison, a fisherman, a nobody – he suddenly had
absolute power. He was given a pistol and the freedom to use it, and
he became intoxicated by the new possibilities. (Ibid., p. 73)
The executer behaved like a god, and apparently his pathological side
came to the surface when the conditions permitted it. He killed old
men as well as young ones, while sometimes his girlfriend was watch-
ing him beating the prisoners. The more fear a victim showed, the more
pleasure Jelisic took in shooting him. The 23-year-old man became a
god for 18 days, before and after that period he did not kill anyone. The
international court sentenced him to 40 years in prison. Drakulić, in

trying to find an explanation for his performed cruel action, returns to
the argument of collective responsibility, although without mentioning
the concept as such. She argues,
In a deeper sense he was a victim himself. Goran Jelisic and his

entire generation were cheated. Many of his parents’ generation – my
generation – embraced the nationalist ideology and did nothing to
prevent the war that grew out of it. They were too opportunistic and
too frightened not to follow the leaders they had learned to follow.
And many of their children paid for their parents’ stupidity, some-
times with their own lives. (Ibid., p. 73)
Significantly, the guilt of the individual perpetrator is situated in the

context of a nation state with a communist and a subsequent nationalist
ideology, and put in the perspective of the alternation of generations. Just
like her father did not talk about his partisan and communist past, and
just like her own generation grew up with the ruling ideology of ‘brother-
hood and unity’ (Ibid., p. 78) in a Yugoslavia that seemed safe and real,
the next generation had to find its way to deal with the consequences
of nationalism and ethnic differences. And in that context being born in
the city or in the countryside made a huge difference. Drakulić identifies
herself as one of the ‘city kids, studying fancy subjects like philosophy,
art, history or psychology at the Philosophical Faculty’ (Ibid., p. 77), in
contrast with others growing up in remote villages and not having many
opportunities and future prospects. Her main point though is, that not
only these others are responsible for the committed crimes. Not doing
something implies the denial of a Yugoslav identity, and the acceptance
of war. This brings us back to Hannah Arendt, who, in her 1964 interview
with Günter Gaus10 positioned herself in contrast to other emigrants, that
is, she herself had opinions as early as 1931, and particularly felt shocked
in February 1933, when the Reichstag burning took place and she sud-
denly ‘felt responsibility’. As a result, she ‘was no longer of the opinion
that one can simply be a bystander’, and she ‘tried to help in many ways’
which ‘gives me a certain satisfaction. I was arrested … I thought at least I
had done something! At least I am not innocent’. The terms ‘responsible’
and ‘innocent’ refer to action and inertia. Not doing something, being
just a bystander, does not mean that one is not a criminal or perpetrator;
it means that one is giving way to collaboration and final destruction.11
To conclude this section, it is important to underline the particular
role of the public intellectual that Drakulić performs here. It can be
argued that her motivation for writing on the ICTY is based on answer-
ing the question ‘how were such crimes possible’, while realising that
one answer is certainly not sufficient: that the perpetrators were monsters
and that there is a great distance between ‘them’ and ‘us’. The binary
between monsters and innocent citizens is just as simplifying as the divi-
sion between ‘East’ and ‘West’ or between civilisation and barbarism. The
more she occupies herself with the individual cases of war criminals, the
less she believes the criminals to be inhuman. On the contrary, Drakulić
underscores the national myths, the societal context, the poverty, and
the system of ethnic stereotyping in which common people felt enclosed
and reacted upon with violence and cruelties. In her writing she gives the
perpetrators a voice, by imagining their thoughts and arguments, and
by taking her own history and perspectives as a sounding board, such
as when she realises that general Krstic, one of the commanders in the
siege of Srebrenica, and her contemporary, must have been influenced by
the same ‘brotherhood and unity’ ideology as she herself was saturated
with at school. In doing this, often by implementing the device of free
indirect speech, Drakulić intermingles private voices with her own public
author’s voice, that is: she speaks in a public voice by reporting on the
court in an official publication, but she also brings in the private voices
of others, by representing them, by imagining them, and by speaking for
them from the perspective of their own local world and circumstances.
Dissent and debate depend on the inclusion of various perspectives, even
the one of the perpetrator. As Judith Butler showcases in Precarious Life
(2004), the public sphere is constituted in part by what cannot be said
and what cannot be shown. Drakulić, however, tries to speak and show
the questionable positions of the violators, and as such demonstrates
that she believes in a humanising imaginary of dehumanised actions.
Escaping identity labels
Slavenka Drakulić strives to understand and represent several individu-

als and their agency and perspectives in the context of the Yugoslavian
war(s), she uses a specific narrative strategy to give them the floor,
while insisting on identification in order to explore violence and grief.
Her essay invites a serious public discussion on what happened in a
not so far away part of Europe in the 1990s. Dubravka Ugresić’s writing
brings together several voices as well, and in doing so also constructs a
multifarious perspective on the former Yugoslavian context and con-
temporary Europe. In contrast to Drakulić, however, she creates voices
and identities as part of herself, which results in the dissemination and
fragmentation of the speaking subject. In this section, by taking exam-

ples from different texts, I will pursue the critical dimensions opened up
by this author’s critical voice in which various other voices are encapsu-
lated. It will be argued that in Ugresić’s hybrid writing, several genres are
intermingled: autobiography, personal essay, cultural criticism, travel
writing, autoethnography, epistolarity and diary, in which she cultivates
‘the heterogeneity of life, contests boundaries, and presents the self as
an unfinished work in progress’ (Karpinski, 2013, pp. 44–5). In contrast
to Drakulić, Ugresić does not opt for linearity or identification in her
writing, but chooses a loose, fragmented form that enables various
constructions of subjectivity and thus opens a polyphony of voices. The
autobiographical fragment activates a strategic negotiation of the public
intellectual voice and the voice of the eyewitness to history and to cur-
rent consequences of that history. This negotiation evidently also takes
place in Drakulić’s writing, albeit in the more coherent structure of a
report on the ICTY, or in the novel on rape in Bosnia. Drakulić anchors
herself in a responsible generation committed to a (lost) nation and his-
tory, whereas Ugresić is chameleonic and as such not rooted (anymore)
in one place and time. She is at her best in short essays exploring various
topics and deliberately celebrating disorientation and confusion.
Based on this observation, the question addressed in this section
is: how does this public intellectual speak in order to express feelings
such as Heimweh and nostalgia, the rational equivalent of these: trans-
nationalism, and a serious culture critique in particular in regard to
Western phenomena of consumerism, hedonism and digitalisation?
Answering the question, we can point at Ugresić speaking in at least
three intermingled and imaginary voices: the voice of an author plan-
ning to write fiction (but being disturbed by reality, and concomitantly
taking reality as a fictionary); the voice of a citizen from a land that does
not exist anymore as well as that of the migrant in a new nation that
she never really accepts as home; and the critical voice of the Eastern-
European annoyed by Western consumer culture and having a strong
opinion about the (non)place of literature in times of neo-liberalism
and digitalisation. To further explore these voices of author, citizen
and critic within Ugresić’s public intellectual voice, I will read passages
taken from a novel and from essays, and build my argument while criss-
crossing the work.
Let us start with the issue of reality and fiction, and in examining this,
we could focus on the ‘Note’ preceding the novel The Ministry of Pain
(2005). This is a novel about professor of literature Tanja Lucic, who
teaches at Amsterdam university after having left Croatia, and struggles
to feel at home in an new life and a new city. The ‘Note’, signed by
‘D.U.’, the initials of the author, is placed at the beginning of the novel
and underscores that the book is meant to be fiction: ‘The narrator, her
story, the characters and their situation in the novel you are about to
read are all fictional. Not even the city of Amsterdam is wholly real’.
Prior to the ‘Note’ is a photograph of children playing in the ruins of
a building,12 a typical after-the-war scene, followed by a poem by the
Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva, in which the line ‘My country has so
let me down’ springs out. Hence, the author’s voice we hear here in the
paratexte – the story has not yet begun – is emphasising that the novel
is fictional, but as such is also foregrounding the fact that it depicts situ-
ations and scenes in the city of Amsterdam that can be synchronised
with Ugresić’s life. The author preparing to tell a fictional story, in fact
suggests that (parts of) reality will automatically break in, although
not completely. This strategy of underlining the fictional character of
a realist novel could be considered a regular strategy of a novelist (in
particular of writers of popular fiction), but in Ugresić’s case, the novel
being published after she had written essays such as The Culture of Lies
(1998) and Thank You For Not Reading (2001), the ‘Note’ makes one sus-
picious. This author has repeatedly claimed that reality is not real, it is
at the least chaos, homelessness and involves a continuing process of
(re)construction. Reality is not the story of Yugoslavia, neither the cur-
rent life in Amsterdam, but a complicated blurring of stories, perspec-
tives, moments and histories. At the end of the novel, this idea is also
made clear by the I-narrator, who, when watching Philip Kaufman’s
film Unbearable Lightness of Being (1987), has a shock and realises that
the typical Yugoslav story is intermingled with other stories:
Even though I felt the only story I had a proper copyright on was
the ‘Yugoslav story’, at that moment all stories were mine. I wept
in my innermost being over the imaginary tangled web that bore
the arbitrary label of Eastern, Central, East-Central, South-eastern
Europe, the other Europe. I couldn’t keep them straight: the millions
of Russians who had disappeared into Stalin’s camps, the millions
who had perished in the Second World War, but also the ones who
had occupied the Czechs and the Czechs who were occupied by the
Russians and the Hungarians (they too occupied by the Russians) and
the Bulgarians who fed the Russians and the Poles and the Romanians
and the former Yugoslavs, who basically occupied themselves. (…) I
grieved for the Zagreb, Sarajevo, Belgrade, Budapest, Sofia, Bucharest,
and Skopje facades that were coming down’. (2005, p. 233)
Every personal narrative in the East-European reality and history is

connected to the narrative of someone else, told from someone else’s
perspective, and every once in a while signs and left over stories from
others suddenly come to the surface. It is not clear if these words of
protagonist Tanja are representing the thoughts of Ugresić herself.
Evidently, the novel is based on lived through experiences, but there is
no sign whatsoever – on the contrary if we take the ‘Note’ seriously –
that this novel could or should be read as an autobiography of the
author. But we do recognise similar motives in Ugresić’s essays, as well
as a similar ironic and often even absurdist tone to underline a perma-
nent doubt with regard to the experienced reality.
This brings us to other examples of voice, respectively the voice of a
citizen from a land that does not exist anymore, and that of the migrant
in a new nation that is never accepted as home. These ideas and feelings
are represented in The Ministry of Pain as well, since the protagonist,
who has got a teaching job in Servo-kroatisch, discusses with her students
their experiences as refugees, coming from Serbia and Croatia to avoid
military service, to escape war zones, or just to enjoy the generosity of
the Dutch authorities with welfare and accommodations for Yugoslav
refugees. If one didn’t have a refugee visa, one could prolong one’s stay
legally by enrolling in a university programme, according to the narra-
tor revoicing ironically the ideas of the author. Yet, all the students in
their own language variants have stories to tell; stories of Serbian gre-
nades splitting a Sarajevo flat down the middle, stories of getting tem-
porarily shelter in a tourist hotel on the Adriatic coast, in short: stories
of inhabitants from a devastated country. The student voices address
violence, loss, and (be)longing. They live in Holland now, but do not
feel at home. Amsterdam indeed, can be considered a melancholy
Disney land on a child’s scale, shop-windows in the red-light district
displaying live dolls for grown-ups and kindergarten-like coffee shops.
Amsterdam could never be home, and could be changed for another
city. Coming from a land that does not exist anymore, disturbs one’s
self-image and the capacity of belonging. The positive consequence is
a rational trans-nationalism, the negative one is a perpetual feeling of
homesickness. This is told in the novel, but the point of course is, that
these ideas and opinions are representative for Ugresić as citizen and
culture critic as well. In the novel and the essays similar opinions are
presented, representing the author as traveller, as exilic writer, as cos-
mopolitan, and as long time ‘temporary’ citizen of Amsterdam. Every
identity that has been accepted is transformed some time later, when
circumstances appear to have slightly changed. As Ugresić writes in an
essay from 1999: ‘I myself am neither an émigré nor a refugee nor an

asylum-seeker. I am a writer who at one point decided not to live in
her own country anymore because her country was no longer hers. (…)
Exile is that dream of transformation’ (Ugresić, 2003, pp. 130–1).
‘How to find a new identity?’ can be considered the fundamental
question of Ugresić’s oeuvre as a whole. In the essay ‘Priests and Parrots’
from The Culture of Lies (1998) an imagined writer is portrayed, Petar
Petrović, who is representative of the author without a national iden-
tity. Since the Yugoslav identity has been destroyed, he does not know
how to behave, what to do. This alter-ego of Ugresić experiences ‘bullets
whistling over his head, towns destroyed before his eyes, people being
killed’ and realises this ‘couldn’t possibly be me, that’s not my country,
that can’t be my life, I’ve translated Rilke and Proust, I write hermetic
poetry’ (Ugresić, 1998, p. 36). Thus, here again, we hear the voice of
an uprooted person, who does not know who he is anymore, because
his country, his youth, his references are lost. Even culture, even being
encapsulated in a language, being an intellectual and academic, does
not guarantee a lasting identity. After having introduced this writer
Petrović, Ugresić emphasises her ‘own’ dislocation and uncertainty:
Was it really like that before? And who is speaking? I. Who am I? No

one. I come from Atlantis. Atlantis does not exist. Therefore, I do
not exist. If I do not exist, then how can what I am saying be taken
as true? The truth has shattered into pieces like a mirror. Every piece
reflects its own truth. At this moment the peoples of the former
Yugoslavia are zealously assuring themselves and others that every-
thing before was a lie. Nothing like that ever existed, they say. Because
if it had really existed, how could what happened afterwards have
happened?’ (Ibid., p. 39)
Referring to Homerus’s Odysseus, to the man who feigned the name

‘Nobody’ – as Odysseus introduced himself to the one-eyed giant
Polyphemos – Ugresić underlines that identity is based on accepting a
name, a language and the participation in a community. But all these
things can get lost, once the truth is turned upside down by war, and
subsequently the manipulators start explaining that the regime is evil,
that a new dictionary of ideological formulae and new symbols is
needed. In Ugresić experience, the red, commie period was suddenly
replaced: ‘communists transformed into nationalists, nationalists trans-
formed into liberals, liberals transformed into conservatives’ (Ibid.,
p. 39). In addition, memories of a youth, a nation, and a landscape got
disseminated, and Ugresić herself ended feeling split up by ‘all kinds of

voices’ (Ugresić 1994, p. 239). Yet, having arrived in another nation,
adapting to different circumstances and accepting new conditions, does
not either transform one into a new person. This is what we read, when
turning back to The Ministry of Pain, in Tanja’s words:
I’ve learned to leave my curtains open. I’m even trying to consider it

a virtue. I’ve enrolled in a Dutch course. Like my classmates, I over-
use the personal pronoun ik. For beginnings the world begins with
ik: Ik ben Tanja, Ik kom uit vormalige Joegoslavie. Ik loop. Ik zie, ik leef,
ik praat, ik adem, ik hoor, ik schreeuw ... For the time being ik doesn’t
commit me to anything: ik is like a children’s game, it’s like hide-
and-seek. People say it’s easiest to hide out in the open. In the Dutch
mountains. Behind that tough little i and k. (2005, p. 247)
Typical Dutch manners, such as living literally visible to the passers by

on the street, being open and phrasing things very directly from an ego-
centred perspective, are taken over. But this does not mean that the new
home is found. Identity crisis extends to all places.
Ugresić’s public intellectual voice switches registers and sometimes
reveals personal feelings of nostalgia and of loss and homelessness. In
other passages though, it sounds like a political voice, sharply criticis-
ing the nationalist context in which people were forced to take a new
identity. Even celebrated Yugoslav writers were given new positions:
Danilo Kis and Ivo Andric are indeed now considered as Serbian writ-
ers. In many passages the author’s voice is grumpily ironical, even
cynical, because after the war and after having travelled to new places,
circumstances have not substantially improved, and identity still is not
something that is fixed and durable (even though she would not even
like it to be that way). In the digital era, identity definitely is replaced by
reference: ‘When I catapult myself into cyberspace, they [the references
in a book about the war in the Balkans] will all be references on my web
page too. (…) we are references. (…) Google me, baby, and I’ll Google
you back’ (Ugresić 2003, p. 49).
This, finally, brings us to the voice of the East-European culture critic
who is quite annoyed by Western consumer culture, and who has a
strong opinion about literature in times of neo-liberalism and digi-
talisation. In Thank You For Not Reading, Essays on Literary Trivia (2001,
English 2003) Ugresić emphasises her inner struggle between two crea-
tive impulses; she is ironical and ephemeral, but at the same time a mor-
alist and seriously concerned with the perversion of the mass market.
The essays are written ‘under the mask of an East European grumbler
confused by the dynamics of the global bookmarket’ (2003, p. vii), and
they are accurately criticizing Western market-oriented literary culture,
that is, the world of agents, scouts, book-proposals and low-income
writers. Significantly, in its market focus, and in being realistic, opti-
mistic, joyful, sexy, didactic and intended for the broad reading masses,
today’s literature, so Ugresić argues, is becoming more and more socialist
realist. Most contemporary books, indeed, infect the reading public with
the virus of the belief in a bright personal future, which is at the same
time a bright collective future. So, the irony is that 70 years after the
birth of socialist realism, East European writers have lost out because
they ‘lacked the self-confidence to stand up for their own art, and
threw the old, hard-working socialist realist writers in the trash without
learning from them the skills they need in the literary marketplace’
(Ibid., p. 27). The current world is turned upside down.
It is the combination of voices that makes Ugresić’s public intellectual
performance singular, this is marked by the amalgamation of irony and
moralism, culture critique and an interest in new online phenomena
(as showcased in Karaoke Culture (2011)), and the negotiation between
the self as a historical identity and transforming identity positions.
Literature is the place where all these different voices and identities can
come together, but it is exactly the place of literature that is becom-
ing invisible and irrelevant, as Ugresić argues, since the market and
consumerism have become dominant. The market indeed wants to sell
books promoted by powerful arbiters such as Oprah Winfrey or Amazon.
com, while the traditionalist defenders of literature are silenced. Today
the literary writer is buried in the field of the trivial, Ugresić laments.
Thus, the only privilege Ugresić wants to keep, the only identity she
cares for, being a writer, seems to be not really relevant anymore. Just
as the characterisation ‘intellectual’ does not any longer suit her, now
that intellectuals are becoming influenced by the market as well, as
‘stars’ and ‘fast thinkers’ producing banality. Ugresić underscores the
argument of intellectual decline, by stressing that ‘simplification has
become a kind of unwritten rule of public discourse, the lingua franca of
public opinion’ (2003, p. 165), and that intellectuals have become enter-
tainers, now that the Homo sapiens has evolved into Homo scaenicus.
Yet, again when discussing contemporary intellectuals in the public
sphere, an ironical undertone resulting in ambiguity, can be heard,
A media intellectual will be paid for promoting the illusion that we,
ordinary people think about this or that issue the same way he, the
clever one, thinks. Or for promoting the equally satisfying illusion

that we think the opposite. The media intellectual will have to accept
the consequences of media engagement, namely that it is not the
message that matters, but the messenger. The intellectual will settle
for life in the media orbit with his equals, fellow messengers, ‘celebs’.
(Ibid., p. 159)
Whereas Ugresić elsewhere qualifies herself ‘as a member of an elite

intellectual crew’ (Ibid., p. 161), in this passage she identifies with the
ordinary people in opposition to the self-celebrating media intellec-
tual, but in fact speaking in the double voice of the ironic writer who
observes that the only role left to intellectuals is that of entertainer forc-
ing the audience to have fun. At the same time, Ugresić is sending out
the message that literature should not be fun at all.
Reading Ugresić’s work implies listening to a polyphony of voices
within the writer’s voice. With self-reflection, sarcasm, critique and
humour Ugresić shows that her position as an author in a westernised
consumerist society is the position of the stranger who does not under-
stand the codes and attitudes. This position is influenced by biographi-
cal experiences, having left a socialist country and entered neo-liberalist
society in the early 1990s, but it also is a conscious construction of facts
and circumstances, the fabrication of an acted self, and the conscious
use of a disruptive style. Deliberately, the publicness of the voice is
ambiguous: what is expressed about the author as self is not imme-
diately the ‘truth’. The writing self is caught in a tragicomic trap: in
Croatia she no longer exists as a Croatian writer, elsewhere she is con-
sidered a Croatian writer, and not a Dutch or transnational one, so in
fact she does not exist either. The only conclusion left is: ‘I have become
what I am not’ (Ibid., p. 140). But again we have to remind ourselves
that the voice of the public-speaking intellectual and the voice of the
‘I’ as citizen and traveller, are never to be wholly synchronous. Ugresić
is aware of the fact that her techniques of disruption have themselves
long ago entered the marketplace. And that is what is behind the irony
and the ambivalent embrace of the Internet.
The responsibility of a writer
Slavenka Drakulić and Dubravka Ugresić share a social and cultural

background in the former Yugoslavia, which can be recognised by a
repeated addressing of topics such as the aftermath of the Yugoslavian
wars, European history, culture and decline, and the heritage of socialist
realism (or communism). In the early 1990s they both were considered
to be member of an imaginary ‘collaborative circle’ (Farrell 2001) of
five female authors criticising the Croatian nationalist government,
today they appear every now and then on platforms on which Eastern-
European public intellectuals discuss European and Balkan features.13
They differ however, in rhetorical strategy, that is: in styles of writ-
ing, arguing, framing and addressing an audience, the consequence of
which is a different posture or self-fabrication. The self-image Ugresić
creates in her work is that of the sulky public intellectual, a moraliser
as well as an ironic observer, complaining about the commercialisation
of contemporary culture and the demise of high literature.14 The public
intellectual as moraliser is supposed to point at good and bad tastes,
values and ideologies. Ugresić’s ironic counter-voice, however, keeps
the moraliser from becoming intolerant and too convinced of one par-
ticular perspective. On the other hand, it can be argued that even the
ironic tone does not completely resist the chagrin and a certain amount
of ego-focus that drives the moraliser. Drakulić is a moraliser as well,
but uses a completely different rhetorical strategy. She fulfils a literary
journalism type of writing, posturing herself as the engaged observer
and eye-witness representing the experiences, lives, particularities and
ordinary obscenities of others. Both public intellectual performances,
that of ironical culture critic as well as that of earnest journalist using
imagination to give people a face and to humanise them, involve a
certain theatricality. The public intellectuals create a persona and antici-
pate the audiences expecting the performance of the ‘typical’ role of the
Eastern European writer as the conscience of her people.
As mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, the public private
voice as a working concept implies that the public intellectual speaks
for and to others, and as such emphasises how identity, tradition, com-
munity and the nation are imaginary: constructed phenomena. This is
not only the case in ethnic conflicts, when Muslim women are opposed
to Serbian men for instance, but the constructedness as the deliberate
act of accepting or denying an identity, can also be recognised when the
white European middle class writer takes part in an exile story, or when
the migrant chooses to not adapt to the new nation. The public intel-
lectual, in regard to issues of identity construction, provides alternative
scenarios and critical perspectives in order to show that the one story
of a specific human individual in history is never complete, transparent
or transcendable. In representing the voices of others, in identification
and disruption, public intellectuals create contesting perspectives on
the history of the present, in order to invite the audience to a critical
reflection and to consider responsibility (Butler, 2004, p. 129). Both

authors, it can be argued, do not support either one group or nation,
but rather use their style and imagination to understand, to critique and
to resist identity as carved in stone.
In conclusion, I would like to underscore the potential of literary
imagination in regard to the resistance to the official narratives of his-
tory.15 One of the most intriguing scenes in Drakulić’s report on the
ICTY is the final chapter on the ‘Orange Hotel’ in Scheveningen, as the
name of a specific part of the The Hague prison in which the Yugoslav
men, Serbs and Croats and Bosnians who for years fought each other,
currently live together. The author imagines how they get on with each
other, playing cards, reading, painting and cooking typical Yugoslav
dishes: roasted meat, pitta with cheese, thinly cut noodles. But the
comfort, she underlines, makes us think and wonder about what hap-
pened and how it happened. Drakulić again builds identification by
imagination,
It is almost touching to see how much togetherness these men are

capable of, how much solidarity there is among them, as if the air
in Scheveningen can produce miracles not only for their physical
wellbeing, but also for their souls. It is as if, once the electronic door
of the prison closed behind them, they turned into different men.
Suddenly there is no more of the nationalism that destroyed a whole
country and took a quarter of a million lives. (2004, p. 180)
This imaginary scene makes the Yugoslav war even more senseless
and ridiculous. We picture ordinary men consoling and helping each
other, enjoying their meals together and respecting Slobodan Milosevic,
the ‘model prisoner’ among them. The fictional scenario created by the
literary writer in her role as public intellectual, is distorting. And that
is exactly what Drakulić aims at: ‘if the “brotherhood and unity”
among the sworn enemies of yesterday is indeed the epilogue of this
war, one wonders: what was it all for? Looking at the merry boys in
the Scheveningen detention unit the answer seems clear: for noth-
ing’ (2004, p. 182). The representation of their ordinary comfort, their
humaneness, makes it even harder to comprehend their cruel actions.
The public intellectual confronts us with a scenario that conveys the full
horror of what happened in a recent war taking place on European soil.
4
Public Man as Actor
Bernard-Henri Lévy (1948)
This chapter analyses the work of French writer and philosopher

Bernard-Henri Lévy. Some consider him a celebrity figure because of
his regular and identifiable – fashionable white shirt and black suit –
appearances in the media (television, radio, tabloids, newspapers,
blogs); others look upon him as an intellectual, taking him seriously
because of his books and his critical and committed stances on current
social and political issues. Lévy not only writes and thinks, he also acts.
This comes out very clearly in the publication of his personal writer’s
diary, La Guerre sans l’aimer (2011). It is a diary kept while he was per-
forming the role of activist and organiser in the Libyan revolution in
the first half of 2011. The text offers us insight into political strategies
and contingencies and shows how political, ethical and literary dis-
courses get intermingled.
I don’t like nihilism. I loathe the resentment and mel-

ancholy that go with it. I believe that the sole value
of literature is to take up arms against this depression-
ism, which, more than ever is the password of our era.
(Bernard-Henri Lévy, 27 January 2008)
Political union or barbarism
Paris, 28 January 2013. At the Theatre du Rond-Point, a cultural event

has been organised on the topic ‘Europe or Chaos’. On behalf of the
French-German broadcasting company Arte,1 and in collaboration
with respected European newspapers (Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, Corrière della Sera and El País), the renowned writers Umberto
Eco, Julia Kristéva, Juan Luis Cebrián, Hans Christoph Buch, Peter
74
Public Man as Actor: Lévy 75
Schneider and György Konrád discuss the state of affairs in Europe. Host
of the evening is Bernard-Henri Lévy, who has written a manifest for
the occasion, signed by other famous writers: Portuguese António Lobo
Antunes, Italian Claudio Magris and Indian-British Salman Rushdie. By
bringing all these authors together, Lévy evidently celebrates his posi-
tion in the context of a collaborative circle of peers. The main point of
the event is that Europe needs to achieve cultural and political unity.
The manifest can be read as a plea for a European federation, warn-
ing that without a political organisation of nation states there will be
chaos: ‘union politique ou barbarie’. This idea is talked over by the authors
mentioned, and, taking their ages and their profession into considera-
tion, it is no surprise that the debate concentrates on European cultural
heritage – ‘the noblest of all cultures in the world’ – that is: on Goethe,
Shakespeare, Voltaire, Pushkin and on the intellectual basics from
Athens (democracy) and Rome (citizenship), as well as on the diversity
of West and East, North and South. Although the debaters try to come
up with ideas, citing the old masters does not really make them con-
vincing and they fail to provide really challenging prospective politi-
cal solutions.2 As Ullrich Fichtner from the German Der Spiegel wrote
afterwards, the debate mainly proved that Europe is in need of new
intellectuals.3 The rescue of Europe will not come from the intellectual
old guard focusing on tradition and not on the transforming society.
Bernard-Henri Lévy, the ‘quintessential intellectual-as-media-pin-up’
as Stefan Collini called him not without venom (2009, p. 256), got the
people together, attracted media attention, and wrote the manifest. His
concern for the future of Europe was the driving force behind the organ-
isation of the discussion in the Parisian theatre. The event strengthened
his role as a powerful media player, stressing the self-image of the com-
mitted writer, and affirming his cultural authority by bringing together
an intellectual network and addressing a broad audience. As Collini
rightly observed, in regard to cultural authority ‘there is an element of
circularity, or at least of definitional parasitism, in that the “qualifying
activity” has to be recognized as one that is “intellectual” in some sense
in the first place. A businessman or sports personality who offers a gen-
eral view on some moral, social, or political issue does not thereby tend
to attract the label “an intellectual”’ (Ibid,. p. 47). In the case of Lévy,
the intellectual proficiency is established through written texts; it is his
activity as a writer and philosopher that lies at the heart of his speak-
ing out in public. The reverse effect, however, is certainly there as well:
because Lévy has collected fame by exploiting a certain lifestyle and is
constantly in the spotlight, it is easier for him to publish books (and to
get people to read them) and to even become the ‘house-intellectual’ of

publishing house Grasset − again Collini’s words − as well as to make
documentaries and to be able to actively intervene in the public sphere.
Lévy’s fascinating role and performance as celebrity intellectual will
be the focus of this chapter, and I will scrutinise (some of) his texts and
speeches. I am interested in what this man of letters publishes, in the
style and reasoning typical of his public voice, and in the effectiveness
of his presence in the media. This chapter unfolds as follows: first I will
discuss the concept of the ‘public man as actor’ bringing in a relevant
idea discussed by Richard Sennett (1986 [1974]). Subsequently, I will
analyse texts written by Lévy, exploring rhetorical strategies and dif-
ferences and similarities in voice. The last part of the chapter goes into
more general ideas regarding public intellectual authority, activism and
performance. Returning to the idea of the man as actor, I will discuss
the intellectual as persona playing the philosopher-activist in confront-
ing his ideas and performances with those of French novelist Michel
Houellebecq. It will be argued that if the celebrity intellectual is to bring
about change, this will have to be achieved in his capacity as an actor
in public.
BHL as public man
Bernard-Henri Lévy (known by the acronym BHL) started his intellectual

career in the 1970s in the company of les nouveaux philosophes, a group
formed to negotiate a common vision in opposition to established philo-
sophical authorities. Together with Maurice Clavel, André Glucksmann,
Alain Finkielkraut, Pascal Bruckner and others, partners in this ‘collabo-
rative circle’ (Farrell, 2001; McLaughlin, 2008),4 a critique of Marxism
as the dominant ideology of French philosophical thinking was articu-
lated, rejecting it as ‘a machine for crushing and oppressing people, for
creating an ironclad order, for making revolts even rarer, for shutting
off insurrections, for helping dictatorships endure, for robotizing econo-
mies, for treating people like cannon fodder’ (Lévy, 2009, p. 69). As
might be expected, the young anti-Marxist philosophers were seriously
attacked by respected ‘old’ philosophers, such as Gilles Deleuze, Pierre
Bourdieu and Jean-Francois Lyotard, who reproached their new col-
leagues for infecting the nation with their reprehensible ideas, notably
through their media appearances. Bourdieu still expressed his aversion
as late as 1998 by calling Lévy the ‘negative intellectual’, as evidenced
by two Le Monde articles on Algeria being full of platitudes and errors
and presenting a simplistic conclusion ‘calculated to give satisfaction
to superficial pity and racist hatred, masked as humanist indignation’

(Bourdieu, 1998, p. 92). The new philosophers, nevertheless, found their
own platforms and occupations, and wrote well received, translated
and broadly discussed books such as The New Love Disorder (1977) by
Finkielkraut and Bruckner, The Discourse of Hate (2004) by Glucksmann,
and Perpetual Euphoria, On the Duty to Be Happy (2009) by Bruckner.
Lévy has been a successful author as well and published over 30
books since the 1970s, becoming well-known with works such as the
fictionalised biography Les derniers jours de Charles Baudelaire (1988), an
intellectual biography of Jean-Paul Sartre, Le siècle de Sartre (2000), and
a correspondence with the novelist Michel Houellebecq, Public Enemies
(2008). His cultural commentary and journalism have over the years
continued to stir up strong reactions, ranging from positive excitement
to downright repugnance. The Guardian notes that Lévy is ‘accorded the
kind of adulation in France that most countries reserve for their rock
stars’,5 but also points out that it is difficult to put Lévy in a box, in
particular since he has repeatedly been accused of ‘over-simplifying com-
plex issues for mass consumption’.6 What has definitely contributed to
his fame, however, is the fact that Lévy not only is a writer, but also has
undertaken diplomatic, political missions for the French government.
He was appointed by President Jacques Chirac to head a fact-finding mis-
sion to Afghanistan in 2002 in the wake of the war against the Taliban.
He went to Libya in the spring of 2011, and collaborated with President
Nicolas Sarkozy to find a solution to the political conflicts raging there
at the time. But Lévy started his activist trips much earlier: in 1977 he
travelled to Bangladesh, and in the 1990s he was involved in the Bosnian
war, reporting from Sarajevo and other places about the ethnic conflicts.
He made the film documentary Bosna, showing the world what happened
in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In 2002, he followed the trail of American jour-
nalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan to do research for his investigative novel
Who Killed Daniel Pearl? (2003). His book War, Evil, and the End of History
(2001) took him to sites of what he calls the world’s forgotten wars, from
Colombia to Sri Lanka. His reports from Israel during the 2006 Lebanon
war and his commentary on the situation there appearing in the New
York Times Magazine (among others) met with wide acclaim. In February
2014, he went to Kiev to address the people on Maidan square, and to
support their call for Europe with the slogan ‘I am also a Ukrainian’.7
In the footsteps of Jean-Paul Sartre, Lévy performs the roles of phi-
losopher, writer, journalist and activist, and on top of that also that
of media celebrity,8 not least of all because of his marriage in 1993 to
actress and singer Arielle Dombasle which was covered in a six-page
article in Paris Match. She regularly appears on French television, chat-

ting about all sorts of frivolous topics.9 The connection between the
grey-haired intellectual and the blonde petite femme and Monroe-like
society figure is a fascinating and apparently typically French one.10
This also becomes clear in the description of Lévy’s Parisian habitat as
given by serious German journalists from Der Spiegel: ‘The philosopher
receives his guests in his apartment in the Parisian hotel Raphael, sur-
rounded by gold-framed mirrors and green wall hangings. On the floor
are Dior shopping bags and piles of books. A butler dressed in livery
serves tea’.11 The public intellectual leads a Parisian glamour life and has
perfected his lifestyle. The apartment is the stage: Lévy is aware of the
visibility of the traces of his stylised everyday activities. He opens the
private space to an audience, and acts his public role, which, obviously,
is premeditated. At the same time, this celebrity behaviour reported on
in a respectable magazine as Der Spiegel as well as in tabloids, undoes the
stereotype of the serious and independent intellectual.
Tyranny of intimacy
To get a firmer grip on the diverse characterisations and evaluations

of Lévy’s public performances, Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man
(1974) is used in this chapter as a theoretical frame. In his intriguing
book Sennett discusses the cult of personality of politicians and public
figures. Sennett’s main idea is that modern man is encapsulated in a
specific community or family, and is no longer interested in the pub-
lic sphere as such and in the moral commitment and formality that
once belonged to that sphere. Sennett argues that we live in an era
characterised by the tyranny of intimacy, in which there is an imbalance
between private and public experiences and consequently personality
has become more important than intellectual responsibility. Sennet’s
perspective is pessimistic and critical, and already in the 1970s he
provided a scenario on what would change in the following decades;
technological developments and enhanced (digital and global) media
have made intimacy and private issues more important, and have
put focus on the self-image as commodity. Institutions and events are
experienced in terms of personality, we have come to care about them
only when we ‘can discern personalities at work in them or embodying
them’ (Sennett, 1986 [1974], p. 338).
It is challenging to look at Lévy’s performances using Sennett’s
observations, and to ask if this case confirms the claim that the cult of
the individual deconstructs a real societal commitment. Or is it rather
so that Lévy can be considered the exception to the rule, due to his
being actively engaged in political activism and intervention. Is Lévy’s
speech on the Maidan square in Kiev in February 2014 activism or self-
promotion, or does it demonstrate that activism only works when the
activist is a well-known media star? Before answering these interrelated
questions, let us first see how Sennett builds up his main argument.
Sennett describes the transformation of the public sphere and the
changes taking place in the private and public realms from the Roman
period up to the eighteenth century and the present. In the Roman
Empire engaging in public life was considered a duty, a formal obliga-
tion. In the private sphere, the Roman sought ‘a principle based on reli-
gious transcendence of the world’ (Ibid., p. 4). Sennett’s theory ties in
with the ideas of Habermas as discussed in the first chapter of this book,
regarding the observation that in the eighteenth century in European
urban society, it was the non-aristocratic and mercantile bourgeoisie
that constituted the critical class and developed a vibrant public life,
as well as a public urban space with parks, promenades, theatres, cof-
feehouses and markets. In these venues diverse social groups met and
performed ritualised, conventionalised interchanges; codes of dress,
gesture and language governed the transactions between strangers in
public. Subsequently, the public man was considered an actor, a per-
former and as such a specific identity. The public man inhabited the
theatrum mundi and presented acted emotions (Ibid., pp. 107–8). By
referring to French writer Denis Diderot, Sennett explains that the pub-
lic man as actor plays, performs, and never is natural, keeping a distance
between his own personality and the speech in which he addresses the
audience. In late modern society, however, this idea of play has disap-
peared completely; the private realm is considered as a space in which
one is authentic. The person’s self has become his principal burden: to
know oneself has become an end, instead of a means through which
one knows the world. Accordingly, relations between impersonal and
intimate experience have become unclear. People in current western
societies are very anxious about their single life histories and particular
emotions, and this intimacy has taken on an aspect of tyranny:
Western societies are moving from something like an other-directed

condition to an inner-directed condition − except that in the midst
of self-absorption no one can say what is inside. As a result, confu-
sion has arisen between public and intimate life: people are working
out in terms of personal feelings public matters which properly can
be dealt with only through codes of impersonal meaning. (Ibid., p. 5)
The erosion of the boundary between the private and the public domain
became visible in the nineteenth century, when personality became a
social category and the audience gradually transformed from a partici-
pating audience into an observing one. With the audience coming to
consist of silent spectators, it was their very passivity that led to more
personality being expected from the public man.12
Sennett’s main point thus is that people today use intimate relations
as a basis for social networks and public performances, and as such
his book published in the 1970s fits perfectly into the celebrity theory
frames that were developed two decades later. The obsession with self-
disclosure, intimacy, authenticity and personality, has led to the decline
of public life in society (Linke, 2011). Intimacy is related to the market
as well as to narcissism: I will share my intimate feelings if you will do
the same. Intimacy has become negotiation rather than communica-
tion, being really interested in what someone else thinks and drives.
The reigning belief today, as Sennett argues, is that closeness between
persons is a moral good; the reigning myth is that the evils of society
can all be understood as evils of impersonality, alienation and coldness.
The outcome is an ideology of intimacy: social relationships of all kinds
are real, believable and authentic the closer they approach the inner
psychological concerns of each person. This ideology transmutes politi-
cal categories into psychological ones (Sennett, 1986 [1974], p. 259).
Hence, what is left today is an intimate society encouraging ‘uncivilized
behaviour between people’ and discouraging ‘a sense of play in the indi-
vidual’ (Ibid., p. 268). Intimate publics are only focused on themselves
and have no political agency anymore.13
Left in dark times
How can Sennett help to frame and understand the diverse charac-
terisations of Lévy’s work? Is it possible to make a distinction between
media celebrity and public intellectual in regard to his performances,
outspokenness and activism? Is the tyranny of intimacy dominating in
his writing, or is Lévy capable of balancing private and public affairs?
In what follows, I will scrutinise some of his texts and public lectures in
order to answer these questions.
At first sight Lévy does seem to perfectly fit Sennett’s description of
the contemporary culture of intimacy, exposing as he does his person-
ality and all kinds of private details in his essays and diaries. In the
introduction to his political credo Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the
New Barbarism (2009), for example, he recalls a phone call he got from
Nicolas Sarkozy in January 2007, asking Lévy if he was willing to write

an article in support of him: ‘When are you going to join up with me?
When are you going to do it for me, write a nice little article?’ (Lévy,
2009, pp. XIII–XV). What follows is a description of the relationship
between the future president of the Republic and the philosopher. These
notes are personal and private, at least to the extent that the text reveals
that the two men called each other every now and then, that they know
each other quite well (also the family circle of wife and children), and
that the presidential candidate feels free to ask for the philosopher’s
public support.
In line with Sennett, we are to understand intimacy as a psychological
category, as a call for openness and authenticity in the sense of being
sincere about one’s intentions and drives. And indeed in the essay the
intimacy, coming out in the apparent closeness of the two men, can
be understood as being consciously employed for reasons of media
effectivity, as a political strategy therefore, since we might interpret the
details of the men’s private lives given here as being used as elements for
reputation-building. The well-known philosopher is using the prestige
of the future president to show how he himself is involved in politics,
how near he is to the man in power – and vice versa, the future president
is actively seeking the intellectual support of the popular philosopher.14
There is a strong element of showing off, parading one’s connections
with the other group of major influence in society. The philosopher
hobnobbing with those in power, the politician with the cultural elite.
At the same time, however, the essay could also be read as a serious con-
tribution to the debate on political changes in Western multicultural
societies. Lévy critiques the left for not being able to respond adequately
to the upcoming anti-Semitism. In doing this, he in particular shows
how interconnected left and right have become, and how some current
issues cannot be dealt with without popularising and thus downsizing
ideas and concepts. Let us zoom in on his main argument.
Though Left in Dark Times is a critical of the left in France, it is aimed
at the American market.15 In the preface, Lévy suggests that his French
reflections can shed light on American dilemmas. The book indeed men-
tions the names of French thinkers, writers and politicians, Lévy’s main
point being that the left in France, or the leftovers of the Parti Socialiste,
is underestimating the upcoming anti-Semitism and Fascislamism, and
is not willing to strive for universal values. Exploring his own loyalty
to the left, the philosopher analyses the problems politicians have in
comprehending their own multicultural society. Tolerance, Lévy argues,
is not the answer to Islamism or to the doublespeak of someone like
Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan claiming that the Muslims are in

the same position as Jews in the early twentieth century: only a secular
society can ultimately be an effective solution. The discourse Lévy uses
in this book is a very rhetorical one, with much repetition and emphasis
on the same arguments over and over again. Pathos and rational argu-
ments are interwoven and the tricolon16 is frequently brought up as a
device for arguing his case, for instance when Lévy explains that being
on the left means ‘three things to me’ (Lévy, 2009, p. 9): images, events
and reflexes. Images refer to pictures from the Spanish Civil War, the
revolution in Portugal in the 1970s, or the war in Bosnia. The idea is
that these images show engagement and activism based on inspiration
as the opposite of cynicism. ‘Those are my images. They made me who
I am and will never leave me’, Lévy emphasises, ‘this is what first comes
to mind when I say that I am loyal to the Left’ (Ibid., p. 18). Events are
something else: these are ‘anti-historic or non-historic’ moments, resist-
ing and opposing the laws of ‘normal history’: the Dreyfus affair, Vichy
France, the Algerian war and May 1968. Though none of these events
can completely justify the clear division of right and left, they explain
why Lévy does not vote for Sarkozy, thus for the right. The main issue
here seems to be that Sarkozy in discussions regarding these particular
events has not clearly enough condemned anti-Semitism.17
Reflexes, subsequently, seem to be more personal. They come from
‘my family’s history, of Jews, Moroccan fusiliers, people of every colour,
fighting in the same battalions of the Armée Afrique during the Second
World War’ (Ibid., p. 29). Coming from this background, there is this
‘almost physical incapacity to separate the fight against anti-Semitism
from the fight against racism’ (Ibid., p. 30). Freedom and equality are
connected and never should either be sacrificed. Significantly, the
argument against anti-Semitism is interwoven with other arguments:
anti-totalitarianism, anti-militant Islamism, pro-Europeanism and pro-
Israelism, and they culminate in the argument against what Lévy calls
Fascislamism. With this concept he underlines that several fundamen-
talist organisations, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah and
Hamas, find each other in a mythology of pure blood, suicide missions,
hatred of the West, and phobia of a Jewish plot aiming at world domi-
nation. The only solution in order to keep a democratic society func-
tioning lies in banning every religion from the public sphere. Atheism
is the condition of democracy, and the only antidote to all kinds of
totalitarian ideologies. But the left, Lévy argues, still speaks its anti-
American discourse, not picking up that anti-Semitism is justified by a
competition between victims. This is the barbarism of French comedian
Dieudonné M'bala M'bala (notorious for using the words ‘commemora-

tion pornography’ for the Holocaust)18 with his theory that the Jews
‘promoted the African slave trade’ (Ibid., p. 156). The point here is clear:
anti-Semitist immigrants living in the outskirts of French cities deny
that the Jewish tragedy is worse than the suffering of Palestinians in the
Middle-East. Lévy, however, marks the uniqueness of the Shoah, on the
basis of the industrialisation of the gas chambers, the absolute irrational-
ity of the project, and the aim of the extermination to wipe out all Jews
and leave no survivors (Ibid., p. 159). He does not deny, though, that in
the Parisian banlieues, the social-economic situation of young Muslims is
without future prospects, and that the left should be ashamed of having
allowed ‘a situation of banishment to develop over the years’ (Ibid., p. 46).
One might wonder whether Lévy taking stances like these, is still part
of the left-wing family. He may identify himself as such, but do his audi-
ences and circles agree? Has he not moved himself to the conservative
side by promoting interventionist policy, and hammering on the argu-
ment that the left has no eye at all for the fascist tendencies in society?
Levy indeed evokes strong opposition, as becomes clear when reading
the review of the French original of Left in Dark Times19 by journalist
and president of Le Monde Diplomatique Serge Halimi. He characterises
Lévy a pro-US socialite, an astute manager of an immense fortune and
the established star of intellectual show business, and considers him to
be exemplary for ‘our current malaise’.20
Lévy’s manifesto for the left is not leftist at all, Halimi argues, but a
spuriously socialist manifesto dowsed ‘with Dom Perignon champagne’.
Halimi mocks Lévy’s stardom attitude of writing in hotel rooms and
ridicules the intellectual who lives in such an enchanted world. Halimi
is the representative of a certain French intellectual audience resistant
to bringing together the various media performances, celebrity strate-
gies and political ideas that Lévy consciously combines. Yet, there
apparently is also another audience in the French public sphere that is
interested in the tabloidization of politics and in the celebrity aesthetics
of this intellectual. Lévy in this context is considered the good looking
wealthy celebrity, visible on television and known in the traditional
and social media as the spouse of a singer/actress. While he is giving his
political lessons, she is chatting about her private life and her career.
Watching her media performances, we realize – again from the per-
spective of Sennett’s theory – that the intimacy of their relationship is
highly marketed: the message she is sending is ‘see how successful and
passionate we are’, confirming the French myth of free love affairs and
at the same time being as complacent and self-congratulatory in the
relational sphere as her husband is in creating his personal political and

intellectual profile. Interestingly, it is not only the French non-elitist
public who seemingly love this. Even a respectable newspaper like the
British The Guardian reports on the couple’s intimate details:
France has long been enthralled by the inner workings of the

Dombasle-Lévy duo: what brought them together and what keeps
the passion alive. She is the pouting coquette who once said her
favourite quality in a man was ‘penetration’. He is the living acro-
nym, BHL, who describes himself as a feminist and a libertine. …
They use the formal ‘vous’ to address each other, like the somewhat
less sexy Jacques and Bernadette Chirac, and the last kings of France.
‘All theoreticians of eroticism know when there’s no distance, there’s
no border, when there’s no border, there’s no taboo, when there’s
no taboo, there’s no transgression, and when there’s no transgres-
sion, there’s no desire,’ BHL has explained. Dombasle, for her part,
doesn’t show her moody or sad side at home and tries at all times to
be light and joyous. Childless by choice, she strives to be the ‘eter-
nal mistress’. They move between their left bank Paris apartment,
with Sri-Lankan staff, their mansion in Marrakech and several other
houses across the world.21
Politics and philosophy in late modern France have become entertain-

ment and spectacle, and a substantial part of the audience is interested
not (only) in the serious topics but in the private relationships and
behaviour of the celebrities. The worlds of politics, philosophy and pop-
ular culture indeed have become inseparable (cf. Street, 2010; Redmond,
2014; Sennett, 2010).22 Lévy’s case shows that the current media celeb-
rity intellectual is becoming a more hybrid public figure. This has to
do with the visibility of the intellectual, with his awareness of acting as
a media figure in order to interest the audience in a political case, and
with a strong conviction in regard to certain topics, resulting in a one-
issue focus and rhetorical emphasis. Lévy is acting out his private con-
cerns for one political purpose: warning for the danger of anti-Semitism
and pursuing a democratic European project. My argument is that we
could rethink Sennett’s ideas with regard to actorship and intimacy in
the context of cultural transformations: a new consciousness of acting
and performing is necessary in order to get attention for the political
and social cases that seem at stake. I will elaborate further on this in
the following paragraphs, analysing two other texts by Lévy, his diary
and the correspondence with novelist M. Houellebecq. What does the
intimacy in these discourses contribute to Lévy’s merites as public intel-

lectual? How can we get a firmer grip on the actor, activist and author?
Political diary on Libya
Today, history starts again.23 Lévy’s most visible and successful political
action took place in Libya in the spring of 2011, when revolutionaries
brought down the Gadhafi regime. On this occasion, Lévy wrote a diary,
La Guerre sans l’aimer: Journal d’un ecrivain au coeur du printemps libyen,24
based on notes he made from 23 February to 15 September.25 The book
reveals how the public intellectual supported and actively took part in
the revolution, and as such offers information on political strategies
and decisions taken by the several international politicians involved.
It was Lévy who, in March 2011, persuaded president Sarkozy to recog-
nise the leaders of the emerging Libyan opposition. And it was in turn
Sarkozy, who rallied support in the international community to organ-
ise a military intervention in Libya. In the diary, Lévy’s self-presentation
and self-fabrication (as the constructing of a persona or character) are
as important as providing information on the political transformations
going on in the North-African country. The philosopher positions
himself as engaged in the conflict and committed to the Libyan people
and their democratic ideal. In this role as activist Lévy again fits into
Sennett’s concept of the man as actor, playing the negotiator between
local and international political leaders. The camera registers, photo-
graphs are taken to be sent to newspapers all over the world. This is not
the case of the detached intellectual, but here the activist philosopher
performs a role in the heat of the events. What is particularly fascinat-
ing, then, is that in his journal Lévy describes his actions, his motivation
and drive, and the effects and evaluation afterwards. We are confronted
with a triple perspective on what he intended, how he acted, and what
the consequences were. The diary invites the reader to come very close
to the intellectual ‘practice’ and to enter his private sphere, or at least
his representation of it. One might ask whether Lévy already had a
wider audience in mind while writing these diaries in the first place,
rather than just writing them as notes to himself.
The diary26 was kept from February to September 2011, and the notes
made in this period are not changed in retrospect, because, as Lévy
states in the Prologue, the law of the genre is that nothing is rewritten.
This is probably why many passages seem to be written as conversation
pieces rather than as reflective or deliberative texts. In the introduction,
Lévy mentions Sarkozy as a figure who will frequently appear in his
journal, and subsequently emphasises the opposition between the intel-

lectual (homme de plume) and the prince (homme de pouvoir). The prince,
an obvious reference to Machiavelli, has to act, while the specific capac-
ity of the intellectual is that he will not judge, but only observe: ‘Je
ne juge pas, j’observe’ – thus clearly underscoring the position of the
intellectual as detached and reflective. Yet, in the course of the diary we
tend to find him acting rather than observing. On 28 February 2011,
Lévy leaves for Benghazi, having seen images of planes bombing Libyan
civilians. The decision to go to the devastated areas is spontaneous
and rather intuitive. He does not know much about the country and
unlike most Western journalists he does not have a fixer to take care of
routes and contacts. On 3 March, he meets his only friend in Benghazi,
Mohammed Abdulmalik, called Tournesol, a former teacher of French
literature. Tournesol is his contact with the revolutionaries. He explains
why the Libyan rebels accept the presence and intervention of the
French intellectual: ‘Vos habits, personne ici, n’est sapé comme ça’ (It
is the way you look, no one here is dressed like that) (2011, p. 54). An
interesting reflection follows in which Lévy explains that when he is on
a trip, he refuses to dress differently. He feels it is a matter of elementary
respect, although he knows that people consider it dandyish behaviour:
Elementary respect. Consideration of the other, or more precisely, of

his world, which I refuse to consider as another world and even less
so as a theatre where you need a costume to get in. … To be here in
Bengazi as I would be in Paris. I know this may sound like Cocteau
1914 (who was wearing a fashionable griffé Poiret uniform going into
the trenches).27
Significantly, in the context of Sennet’s description of the public sphere

as theatrum mundum, where the public man had to play a role, Lévy
turns around the argument here: in public I dress like myself (like I am
in Paris) and I don’t consider the world of the other as another world in
which I have to appear differently. So the double twist here is, that Lévy
underlines that the world is not a theatre in which you have to dress
up like the others.
In the diary every day is described meticulously. On Friday 4 March
Lévy visits the front line with the rebels, and on Saturday the Conseil
national de transition is suddenly born as an idea in his mind: Lévy
realises that a former minister, Mustafa Abdeljalil, could be the pivot
in a group of people (the ‘Libyan Massoud’) taking responsibility for
the transition after dictator Gadhafi’s foreseeable fall from power.
Later on Saturday, 5 March, the philosopher makes a phone call to

the president of France – as if the opening scene of Left in Dark Times
is being rewritten – and asks whether Sarkozy is interested in meeting
these people, which the president indeed turns out to be. These notes
of ‘Saturday 5 March (call to Nicolas Sarkozy)’ are representative for the
diary as a whole, mixing private information and intimate details (the
extensive repetition of the dialogue of the two men speaking on the
phone, and the fact that Lévy is having a migraine attack) with infor-
mation about the political steps being taken. That same afternoon, the
Elysée publishes a press release announcing that France welcomes and
supports the construction of a national Libyan counsel taking respon-
sibility for a political solution and the establishment of a democratic
government (Lévy, 2011, pp. 87–8).
On Monday 7 March, back in Paris, Lévy is received at the Elysée to
discuss the political strategy with the president. La France cannot do it
on its own, and has to work together with allies. ‘On va faire un con-
sensus Européen’ Sarkozy declares (Ibid., p. 100). Two days later, Lévy
is interviewed on the French news radio Europe 1, explaining what has
happened and resisting cynicism and the debunking of his actions:
In front of the Bristol Hotel there’s Didier François who invites me

to come to Europe 1 at 6 that afternoon. And in this interview …
confronted with the angry outburst in the media, I try to calm things
down by saying there’s no point in exaggerating and that France has
no intention of bombing Tripoli. We’re nowhere near the image,
echoed on all the channels, of Bernard-Henry-Lévy-speaking-for-the-
state-on-the-front-steps-of-the-Elysée-declaring-war-on-Lybia. But if
that amuses them … Those sneers mean nothing at all … All that
matters is that the President has kept his word. The national Board
of Transition has been recognized. I am happy.28
Tellingly, Lévy refers to himself as to a figure at a distance, repeating the

words of others who don’t understand what is really going on. If they
think of him as striving for the role of protagonist, so be it, as long as
the president is taking action on the basis of his (Lévy’s) information
and efforts. The suspicious journalists apparently, do not make out what
is play, what is imagined, and what is really going on. The political
ballet goes on for months and ends in September 2011 when French
president Sarkozy, British Prime Minister Cameron, and other officials
meet in Tripoli with officials of the National Transitional Counsel led by
Mustafa Abdeljalil. They are the ‘actors of history’ and the ‘heroes of the
event’, and Lévy as flamboyant mediator is with them and observing

them. The photographs of the event are published in many media and
on the Internet. Then Lévy leaves Libya, thinking about other damnés
de la terre et de la guerre, who probably can put some hope out of the
Libyan story.
What is the principal aim of a diary like this? What is the position
of the philosopher as public intellectual, as celebrity, or even media
addict? Three characteristics can be identified. First, the diary offers a
‘history of the present’ (Garton Ash, 1998), based on notes, sketches
and dispatches on big and small events, talks and official interviews
that shape political events and thus contemporary history. The diary
takes us behind the scenes of the Elysée, and shows how politics is busi-
ness as well as theatre. Lévy is both the protagonist and the director of
this theatre-play, organising the acts, the dialogues, the scenes and the
players (Korteweg, 2011) while emphasising that small faits divers can
lead to big historical transformations. What is missing from an intellec-
tual perspective, it could be argued, is an in-depth contextual analysis of
the geographical, historical and political circumstances, developments
and conflicts. What is provided in the journal, is a lot of small and
ordinary details with regard to political strategy and the life of politi-
cians. A second aim of this diary is to put the writer in the spotlight,
showing him in the centre of a web of politicians and revolutionaries,
being responsible and committed, taking himself seriously, not plagued
by any doubt what so ever, and reporting on his activism without irony
or reflective distance. Lévy, in his black and white outfit, takes over the
role of Alain Juppé, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, and affirms
his place in the company of the president. Modesty is not one of his
talents, reflection does need more time (which he obviously didn’t take,
writing and publishing the book in 2011), and self-promotion often
conceals the intellectual capacities.
Thirdly, Lévy uses the language of the groups to which he longs
to belong. He positions himself between the powerful ones, as evi-
denced by the description of a dinner with American news website
owner Arianna Huffington or the lunch with American journalist
Bob Woodward, while he also emphasises the imaginary company of
great engaged European writers. The context of these writers obviously
endorses his own engaged authorship. His peers are George Orwell,
who wrote his Homage to Catalonia (1938) from the front line in Spain;
Jorge Semprun, Spanish novelist and Minister of Cultural Affairs, in par-
ticular known because of his book on his experiences in Buchenwald;
and of course, French author André Malraux, who was an activist in
Indochina in the 1920s and in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, and
who became the Minister of Information (1945–6) and Cultural Affairs
(1959–69). They are the real sparring partners Lévy brings in, and it is
their company that he likes the most, although their work, it can be
argued, underscores the particularity of Levy’s diary. Malraux’s famous
novel La condition humaine (1934) indeed is an invitation to imagine
the experiences of an activist in the Chinese revolution, Semprun’s Le
grand voyage (1963) treats the journey to Buchenwald and is a fictional
documentary. In both texts the story told is representative for more
than one individual life. In Lévy’s text, however, there seems to be not
much room left for imagination in regard to what it feels like to be an
activist; we are encapsulated in his private sphere with all the minor
banalities of his activities and performances.
The diary on Libya reveals many personal details, and definitely is
a project of intimacy in which a public persona is constructed. Details
such as the reference to a migraine attack or taking a shower before
going to the Elysée are intimate in the sense described by Sennett. Phone
calls, conversations and interviews are revealing information from
inside. The diary, a genre that typically describes private thoughts and
deliberations, offers intriguing perspectives on Lévy’s self-fabrication.
He writes the story he wants to participate in: he is the activist in a
North-African political context that is only described from his point of
view, he is the author, narrator and protagonist all at the same time. La
Guerre sans l’aimer, then, fits Sennet’s concept of incivility as ‘burdening
others with oneself’ (Sennett, 1986, p. 265). The charismatic intellectual
‘destroys any distance between his own sentiments and impulses and
that of the audience’ (Ibid., p. 265). He dramatises his own motivation
and ideals. The demonstration of an intense life is the construction of a
play, a fiction and as such situates the engaged celebrity intellectual in a
textual and contextual environment. The roles of an intellectual writer
and media celebrity are complementary, which does not mean however,
that the audiences are the same.
The role of public enemy
While the diary appears to be a project of intimacy and confession,

depicting the life of the activist-philosopher, the political essay on the
decline of the left illustrated another articulation in the same process of
constructing and fabricating a persona in positioning Lévy as an intel-
lectual committed to French politics and worried about anti-Semitism
and democracy in Europe. Both texts demonstrate how the personality
of a media figure is an amalgam of private, public, feigned and con-

fidential disclosures. The shaping and objectifying of opinions and
emotions sometimes seems authentic, yet in other moments appears
just an effective construction of a narcissist self-advertisement. Relating
this once more to Sennett’s theory, we could ask at what exact point in
time Lévy is the public man as actor and when he is ‘real’. The answer
to this question comes from a third text illustrating how the intellectual
writer and the media celebrity are different roles consciously played and
negotiated by the same man.
Public Enemies, Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World
(Lévy & Houellebecq, 2011 [2008]) is a collection of 28 letters exchanged
in the first half of 2008 between Lévy and French novelist Michel
Houellebecq, two self-identified post-Marxist authors, men of pro-
vocative standpoints and controversial public interventions critiquing
French society. Most of the letters Lévy wrote can be characterised as
personal, revealing private information on his childhood, his family, his
authorship, his appearance in the media and the self-control required.
As such these letters are in a different way informative about the man
and his motivations than the diary discussed above. Houellebecq, evi-
dently, is a correspondent who is adroit in switching roles, just as in his
novels, he poses as character, he plays the role of M. Houellebecq, and
he escapes his own self as concrete identity.
The correspondence opens with a short letter written by Houellebecq
stating that they have nothing in common; Lévy is the philosopher
without any original idea but with excellent contacts, while Houellebecq
is the ‘unremarkable author with no style’ (Ibid., p. 3). Together they
exemplify the ‘shocking dumbing-down of French culture and intellect’
(Ibid., p. 4). Houellebecq would win the prestigious Prix Goncourt in
2010,29 and obviously is not at all – and for that matter was not at the
time – unremarkable or dumb, so these opening lines have to be read
as ironical statement. As Houellebecq declares, the criticasters of their
work worded these hostile characterisations, thus influencing the mass
being afraid, weak and stupid. ‘Nothing in common?’, Lévy in turn asks,
pinpointing that they both have a taste for playacting, and they both
fit in the tradition of Sartre, Cocteau, Camus and Baudelaire, as writers
who desire very much to displease. Thus, from the beginning of the cor-
respondence the tone is clear: the two authors find each other in their
aversion to the outright humiliation and ridiculing of their work and
personae, and in the pleasure of being provocative, critical and elusive.
Yet, their desire to displease masks an insane desire to please, explains
Houellebecq, and behind this is the suffering ‘from a form of perverse
sincerity’ (Ibid., p. 9). The difference, then, is that Lévy, at least in the
eyes of his correspondent, also has a desire to vanquish. ‘You appear on
television … when you have something to say’, Houellebecq observes, and
then ‘your innermost self is not kept on a leash’ but comes ‘through at
times almost violently’ (Ibid., p. 26). Lévy subsequently answers in a let-
ter from 27 May, that there indeed is more at stake than the problems of
a writer worrying about his own position. The Burundians, the Darfuris
and the Bosnians have benefitted from his action in the media and his
commitment to their cases on television. Lévy objects, however, to the
idea that his innermost self is shown when he appears in the context of
these political issues full of anger on television. Even angriness is acted or
at least kept under control, he explains. Houellebecq on the other hand,
states that he is never really interested in or angry about any conflicting
issue beyond the field of literature. More precisely, he only is interested
in an issue, once he can use it in his literary work. As the Flaubert of the
late twentieth century, he indeed is effective in his efficient depiction of
the consumerist society through the eyes of ordinary and disappointed
characters. Having a fascination for popular genres such as soap opera,
science fiction and pornography, Houellebecq balances on the edge of
empathy and disinclination to engage with the marketed world he cre-
ates, and as such he certainly criticises current Western-European socie-
ties more sharply and effectively than many other writers do.
Comparing the work of the two correspondents, we could draw atten-
tion to an interesting juxtaposition. Houellebecq, publishing novels
and depicting society’s post-heroic phase of consumerism and neo-
liberalism, and Lévy in producing political and philosophical essays
and diaries, both seem to be personally motivated in their writing. The
drive to write comes from the belief in literature as well as from lived
experiences, that is: a particular background that has encouraged their
ideas and performances. At first sight, Lévy seems to be the more con-
fessional author than Houellebecq who in his fiction stays at a distance
even as he introduces himself as a character, as can be read in The Map
and the Territory (2010). In this correspondence, however, it becomes
clear that the opposite is the case: Lévy clearly rejects every ‘illusion
of transparency’ and considers confession ‘something for which I feel
an almost phobic aversion’ (Lévy & Houellebecq, 2011 [2008], p. 30).
Houellebecq, on the contrary, pretends to be honest – ‘there is some-
thing in an exchange of letters that fosters truth’ (Ibid., p. 28), although
he develops in his ironic style a potential escape. We are confronted
with two writers who are effectively changing masks and postures, cov-
ering up their tracks, and disguising themselves ‘lying as they breathe’
(Ibid., p. 261). Both authors are actors using literary strategies to chal-
lenge the other.
The point is that it is in the duelling, in answering the matter-of-fact
questions of Houellebecq, that Lévy comes closest to exposing his ‘real’
motives. It is in the interchanging and emphasising of differences and
similarities between the activist-philosopher and the novelist that the
most interesting details come out. On 12 March 2008, Lévy declares
that his longing for adventure has to do with his taste for performance
and his desire ‘to live beyond myself’ (Ibid., p. 75). For each person
there is a possibility ‘of being a little greater than yourself’ (Ibid., p. 76).
Here, the self-promotion is decoded as altruism, although the activ-
ist also is considered as a tourist of disaster. We have to keep in mind,
however, that correspondence is a literary genre that is also a social act,
it is a feigning of openness and directness, and it therefore inherently
presents a paradox – a ritual expression of reality marked by a date and
a signature. Taking a substantial passage from a letter written by Lévy
on 16 February, demonstrates this:
As for the television and the way you think you should behave there,
(…) I concur with your analysis of the need to perfect an “act” that
allows us to hide and protect our “deep self”. I also agree about the
risk that, in doing so, like the “man who lost his shadow”, you can
lose the trace of the “deep self”, let it lie fallow, forget it. Where
you’re wrong, or where I fear you rate me too highly, is when you
attribute to me a capacity for indignation that shields me from that
risk so that, fired up in a polemic, a political battle or rage, I suppos-
edly let the “real” me rise up to the surface. Sadly, indignation has no
role in this. You can be indignant and yet take a strategic tack. You
can be scandalized or enraged, but precisely because you’re at war
you manage to keep control of the impression you make. In my case,
that’s a fact. It’s even, if I dare say so, an obligation. Even in extreme
situations, when I return from Darfur or Sarajevo, when I rail against
the indifference of the well-off toward this or that forgotten war,
which I’ve taken the trouble to go and see and from where I bring
back my distressed accounts, my phobia for these confessional stories
is such that even there – I almost wrote especially there – I do whatever
I can to stay in control of my emotions, reflexes, language and facial
expressions. (Ibid., p. 31)
What Lévy describes here is pivotal from the dual perspective of

intimate self-exposure and actorship. Especially when he appears on
television, Lévy is aware of the unnaturalness, the act he has to put on,
the camera on his face. In this situation, he does not allow emotions or
resentment to take over, to get the better of him, because when he is on
television he is ‘at war’. One has to be in control of the effects made.
The real identity, the innermost self, is not shown in anger, but has to
be kept strategically at bay. And even when people are bringing up lies
about his family or himself, he will never react, not out of indifference
or contempt or because he has an armour-plated ego, but:
because part of me (…) prefers even disinformation and the supreme,

Gidian art of the counterfeiter, an expert on false clues and ruses, to
the obscenity of giving in to the universal exhortation, be yourself (i.e.
love yourself), which is the commandment of our age. (Ibid., p. 32)
We can hardly get closer to Sennett’s analysis of the tyranny of inti-

macy, than in this conveyed intention of telling as little as possible,
and not confessing anything personal when acting in public. Probably,
Lévy continues, there is a literary and philosophical fundament while
being constantly in public view. From his early writings on, he has tried
to keep the ‘I’ out of his work, because what is at stake in a book is not
‘finding yourself, coinciding with your truth’ but viewing the human
subject ‘as an empty form, with no real content, almost abstract’ (Ibid.,
p. 34). So, in his letters to Houellebecq, who is the novelist playing the
role of a writer without political influence and interest (while con-
stantly critiquing consumerism and the neo-liberal dominance), Lévy
writes that everything he expresses as an author, that is his political
ideas, his words on social conflicts and so on, comes from a literary
strategy: from an ‘I’-figure resisting any definite explanation. It seems
that the public enemies not only have ‘the animosity we inspire’ in
common, but also their keeping up a literary posture. They live ‘because
of literature’ (Ibid., p. 239).
The public man as actor
I propose two arguments in this chapter. First, I contend that Bernard-

Henri Lévy is a hybrid public figure, at once an intellectual writer,
political activist, and a media celebrity playing the role of a philosopher-
activist wearing a distinctive costume and employing a particular rhe-
torical style. According to Sennett, the public man was aware of his
status as actor, and could only function as public man by means of this
actorship. Lévy fits this description of an eighteenth-century-like public
man as we saw in his letters to Houellebecq. Second, I argue that the

intimacy Sennett mentioned as a negative feature of our contemporary
age, because intimacy puts an end to the conscious acting of the public
man, is a fiction exploited by Lévy to draw attention to specific political
cases. It is in his literary letters to Houellebecq that Lévy is most com-
municative about this exploitation and reveals his awareness of his role
as actor hiding his real empathies. The Lévy case, then, both confirms
and nuances Sennett’s conception of the tyranny of intimacy, demon-
strating that 40 years after the publication of The Fall of Public Man, the
public realm has become more diffuse. Lévy indeed is a specific type
of the public intellectual using the cultural authority derived from his
philosophical and literary oeuvre and his education at elite schools, as
an instrument in claiming a visible position and orchestrating political
interventions in and outside Europe. He is the well-known philosopher,
the celebrity cultivating his physical appearance and emphasising his
commitment in public, by advocating a personal mission in a media-
dominated context. It is because of his play and visibility, however,
as well as because of his overacted activist role, that he also loses the
esteem of many of his intellectual peers.
If we accept his double identity as a public figure, a final question
that arises is: should we consider the voice of this public intellectual
as authentic? What would authenticity in the context of acting in
public amount to? Is Lévy credible in fighting for his political ideal:
democracy? Significantly, there is a distinction between the notions
of authenticity and credibility. The correspondence with Houellebecq
illustrated that the author believes that he can be credible in his
‘inauthenticity’ and can be authentic in a premeditated performance.
Authenticity and inauthenticity, then, are two sides of the same coin:
they are the consequences of the effort to attract a sustainable media
attention from which a wider public commitment to endorse democra-
tisation of forgotten people can start. Most celebrity studies, incorrectly,
identify the media celebrity or star figure as inauthentic, narcissistic and
self-fabricative (Marshall, 2010). Lévy’s case, it can be argued, reveals a
more complicated and fascinating pattern. The alleged (in)authenticity
needs to be qualified. Lévy is and acts (as) a serious political analyst in
Left in Dark Times, he is and acts (as) a philosopher-activist writing inti-
mate notes in La Guerre sans l’aimer, and he creates the image of a self-
conscious authority in his correspondence. Authenticity is not a fact,
but a negotiation between voice, posture and audience(s). Authenticity
is not about the truthfulness in relation to one’s ‘real’ identity, but it is
truthfulness in relation to one’s intention. But we have to keep in mind
that Lévy’s public voice is always the voice of an actor, calculating that
what he says will have certain effects and consequences.
Furthermore, in the self-ironisation exposed in his letters to
Houellebecq, Lévy can be taken as credible, while in contrast, in his
revelation of the ‘exact’ facts and details of his diary he seems mystify-
ingly insincere. In the diary he orchestrates the voices of politicians
and revolutionaries in order to endorse his plan of an acceptable
military intervention, underscoring that a similar idea was defended
by Orwell, Byron and Malraux in regard to their just wars. Thus, we see
that political intervention positions him in the context and company
of the political writers he admirers, and establishes his recognition as
a writer and intellectual. Lévy strives to be participant in an entourage
of politicians, intellectuals, (dead) writers and celebrity figures, and as
such ‘authenticity’ becomes a ‘travelling concept’ (Bal, 2002) between
the poles of integrity and truth, sincerity and credibility.
The case of Lévy evidences the growing complexity of the role of the
public intellectual in the late modern public sphere. In the intersection
between stardom and intellectualism, between self-parody and com-
mitment, Lévy articulates his awareness of the power of visibility. His
ambivalence with regard to his own cultural authority is fascinating,
and marks the paradox of the public intellectual. On the one side there
is his Bohemianism and decadence, on the other side his intellectual-
ism, which is also often conspicuous in his using philosophical and lit-
erary classics in his arguments. On the one side, there is his suggestion
that he has never been interested in holding any political office, prefer-
ring to work through his powerful contacts and considerable inherited
wealth. At the same time, it is obvious that he needs the public to
recognise and endorse his actions and their impact: the self wants to be
celebrated because only then can it turn the spotlight on those who are
not seen and are in need of optical visibility.
The final scene of this chapter brings us back to a theatre, in June
2014 in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Celebrating the centenary of the start of the
Great War in 1914, many activities are organised, and one of these is
the performance of a two hour monologue, entitled ‘Hotel Europe’ by
French actor Jacques Weber. The audience can read the subtitles on a
screen. The play is written by Bernard-Henri Lévy and brings to the
fore an intellectual in crisis thinking about the échec of Europe, not
capable of dealing with all the complicated issues, not really believ-
ing in democracy anymore. The monologue rephrases the words Lévy
spoke on the Maidan Square in early March of the same year, words
which were also published on his blog on the American Huffington Post.
These words point at the European dream, signifying ‘freedom, civic

values, and good government’, they point at the long history of ‘people
affirming their sovereign rights by occupying the squares and places of
their cities: Place de la Bastille in Paris, the Wenceslas Square in Prague,
the Agora in Athens, and they point at a federalist, responsible Europe
opposing itself to the power of the oligarchs and president Putin.30
French newspaper Libération reviewing the theatre play quite positively –
‘The intellectual on the stage is definitely BHL himself’ − evidently
makes the mistake of confirming too easily a similarity between actor
and philosopher, but also underlines the vertigo effected by the various
celebrity strategies used. Jacques Weber is playing an activist intellectual,
Lévy was the writer creating a self on stage, but he is not performing
himself as self in the National Theatre in Sarajevo. But then again the
question can be asked, when is the advocate of Europe playing or not?
Is he the activist dressed up to perform his public lecture in Kiev, in
very carefully pronounced words in French, which are immediately
translated by a native speaker (we can see this on a YouTube clip)?31
Somehow, the image of the elderly public intellectual doing so much
his best to speak loud and clearly, reminds me of the old Jean-Paul
Sartre, who at the end of his life, as Lévy has written in his biography,
was the first ‘new type of intellectual’ who went to the people, took to
the streets, without ever returning to the ivory tower. Philosophy and
literature were worthless in the context of becoming a populist among
the masses (Lévy, 2004a, pp. 471–3).
5
A Protean Public Figure
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (1969)
Former asylum seeker Ayaan Hirsi Ali, described as the ‘Dutch Salman
Rushdie’ and the ‘Voltaire of our times’, is taken as an example of the
migrant intellectual using the story of her life as input for interventions
in the debate on multiculturalism and Islam in Western society. In two
autobiographical works she demonstrates how the personal narrative
fuels the political ideas and strategies. Hirsi Ali developed from an expert
into a single-issue politician, into a celebrity intellectual, and a dissident
with neo-conservative stances. When analysing her ideas and public
performances, we observe a circularity: she speaks for and addresses
a public whose only reality lies in being addressed. In her words and
performances she identifies with but at the same time separates herself
from women oppressed by religion, in particular by the Islam.
‘Sad and relieved, I will pack my bags again.’ (Hirsi Ali,

May 2006, Press Conference)
Freed from the hell of ignorance
‘The whole point of my memoir … is that I have been extraordinarily

lucky. I managed to make it out of the world of dogma and oppression
and into the sunlight of independence and free ideas. I did escape, and
at every stage of that process of escape I was assisted by the good-will of
ordinary non-Muslims … In my books and talks I want to inspire read-
ers to think of the others, those who are still locked in the world I have
left behind’ (Hirsi Ali, 2010, p. 129). It is in the second part of Nomad,
From Islam to America (2010), where she describes her discussions with
American students who do not understand her fierce rejection of Islam,
that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is most explicit in explaining her motivation for
97
writing and debating. Born and brought up in the Third World, in

countries such as Somalia, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya,
and feeling imprisoned in a tribal culture with few opportunities for
the self-development of women, she realises that her story voices the
concerns of others still living there, others who have not made it to the
West and who are dependent on a father, a brother or a husband treat-
ing them well. It is at this point in the memoir that it becomes clear
that the public intellectual is prompted by very personal motives, that
everything she says about general issues with regard to society, religion
and politics, is rooted in particular and contingent experiences. Thanks
to education, to the proud and relatively wealthy clan into which she
was born, to the stubbornness of her character and the cleverness of
her mind, Hirsi Ali managed to break away and to start an individual
life and career, first in Europe and later in the United States. It is the
rhetoric of wandering and escape, based in the belief of freeing oneself
from imprisoning circumstances, from the ‘hell of ignorance’, that is at
the core of Hirsi Ali’s thinking and debating.
Politicians write autobiographies (memoir, testimony, life story) to
explain their motives and attitudes, to build or repair their images
and to firmly establish their position as a political actor. Texts such as
Barack Obama’s Dreams from my Father, A Story of Race and Inheritance
(1995, reissued 2004), Tony Blair’s A Journey, My Political Life (2010),
Nelson Mandela’s Conversations with Myself (2010) or Ségolène Royal’s
Ma plus belle Histoire c’est Vous (2007) are fascinating examples in which
politicians intermingle private troubles and public issues and thus
deconstruct the public space (Bauman, 1999, pp. 1–8). Private experi-
ences lead to public ideas, and personal stories shape political decisions.
Hirsi Ali’s life narratives fit in a tradition of political personification and
justification. This amounts to the question if her confessional writing
can also be considered the work of a public intellectual. Should we char-
acterise her as the ‘charismatic public intellectual’? It was Richard A.
Posner, referred to in the first chapter of this book, who pointed at these
specific intellectual qualities,
to be a really effective public intellectual is a charismatic calling. It

isn’t primarily a matter of being intelligent and well informed and
writing clearly, but of being able through force of rhetoric of the
example of one’s life (related points – an exemplary life being a par-
ticularly effective form of the ethical appeal) to make fresh, arresting,
or heterodox ideas credible to the general, or at least the educated,
public. (2004, p. 85)
A Protean Public Figure: Hirsi Ali 99
Hirsi Ali certainly is charismatic and attractive, and she has made use
of these qualities during many performances in the public sphere in
particular on television. On the other hand, Hirsi Ali is repeatedly
characterised as a (too) glamorous celebrity intellectual, trivialising
complicated political issues, and not really capable of intellectual dis-
tance and analysis. What becomes clear, then, when studying her work
and performances as well as her opinionated articles and responses on
these, is that Hirsi Ali represents a hybridised version of the public intel-
lectual and the celebrity, presenting herself as woken up by Western
modernity and as the successful female immigrant capable of gauging
the oppressive power of Islam. She challenges and plays with the vari-
ous characterisations and roles of the public intellectual and it evidently
is not easy to put her in a box. In this chapter her intellectual position
and argumentation will be examined. After having given background
information, her two autobiographical discourses and some television
interviews will be scrutinised, and a special focus will be on the public
she addresses when performing different roles.
Global odyssee
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born in Somalia as the daughter of linguist and politi-
cal activist Hirsi Magan Isse, came to The Netherlands as a refugee in
1992. After earning a degree in Political Science from Leiden University,
she worked for the scientific bureau of the Dutch Labour Party (PvdA),
and in 2002 switched to the liberal-right party (VVD), for which she
became a Member of Parliament in January 2003 with the portfolio
for Emancipation issues.1 In the summer of 2004, Hirsi Ali made the
controversial film Submission: Part 1 with the filmmaker and media
personality Theo van Gogh, who was murdered a few months later by
a Dutch-Moroccan Muslim fundamentalist. A letter stabbed into Van
Gogh’s body announced that Hirsi Ali would be the next victim. The
brutal murder caused a wave of anti-Islamic resentment in the Dutch
society. In May 2006, Hirsi Ali was declared to no longer be a Dutch
citizen by the then Minister of Immigration Rita Verdonk, because she
appeared to have changed her name (Hirsi Ali instead of Hirsi Magan)
and the year of her birth (1967 instead of 1969) when she entered the
refugee-procedure. Hirsi Ali had to give up her chair in Parliament.
Some weeks later, the Balkenende government collapsed over the issue.
Hirsi Ali subsequently went to the United States, where she started
working as a researcher for the respectable American Enterprise Institute
(AEI) in Washington. In February 2008, Hirsi Ali, still receiving death
threats for her outspoken criticism of Islam, urged politicians in Brussels

to create an EU fund to pay for round-the-clock security for individuals
facing threats by fundamentalists. She mentioned Orhan Pamuk and
Salman Rushdie as examples and was supported by French new philoso-
phers Bernard-Henri Lévy and Pascal Bruckner.
In 2007 and 2010, Hirsi Ali published autobiographical narratives in
which she described her life and ideas. The first one, Infidel: My Life, pre-
sents a very detailed, chronological story. The second book, Nomad: From
Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations, pro-
vides a more thematic description of her life and thoughts. The books
are evidently written for different, European and American audiences,
the first zooming in on human interest themes and personal details, the
latter putting more emphasis on intellectual ideas and arguments. I will
scrutinise both texts by using devices from classical rhetoric, focusing
on the question ‘what is she saying and how is it persuasive (or not)’.
The Aristotelian notions of ethos, pathos and logos are relevant in
answering this question, and the concepts voice and authenticity will
help us to understand the texts in the context of the Dutch political
conjuncture. My main aim in this chapter is to examine the various
arguments and identification strategies used to defend the switches in
role and self-image. The African asylum seeker changed into a student,
a Dutch activist politician, a television celebrity, a protected victim, a
lying intrigante, a tragic Antigone, and an American intellectual. ‘People
adapt’, Hirsi Ali wrote at the end of Infidel. We could consider this her
motto, but although her persona changed, the conviction that the Islam
means submission and has to be rejected remained a constant.
Public intellectual, politician, pundit
The public intellectual is a generalist and a person of ideas, whose opin-

ions contribute to framing public attitudes. Public intellectuals write
opinion pieces on a wide array of issues, they are committed and take a
stand. But for all his empathic practical concern, the public intellectual
is not, as we have read in Chapter 1,
the enlightened or intellectual statesman … for he holds resolutely

to a posture of detachment … and regards direct political involve-
ment as something that would compromise his very being as an
intellectual. He is not part of the establishment. Being an outsider
and a misfit is somehow an essential part of his identity and self-
understanding. (Melzer et al., 2003, p. 4)
If we take direct political involvement as something a-typical for a

public intellectual, we could simply conclude that Hirsi Ali was not a
public intellectual during the three and a half years in which she was an
MP in the Netherlands. But the distinction between public intellectual,
intellectual politician, and celebrity activist is not so easy to make. Hirsi
Ali definitely was an outsider and got media attention because of her
particular background and position as a newcomer in Dutch society. She
never really was part of the political establishment, by reason of her pro-
vocative performances under the media spotlight with more attention
for her own ideas and arguments than for party policies. As we have seen
earlier in this book, the paradox that can be distinguished in discussions
concerning public intellectuals is that of an inner tension between the
emphasis on generalism and specialism, theory and practice, contem-
plation and action, commitment and detachment regarding the various
activities executed in the public sphere. Taking up a position some-
where between the ‘great minds’ and the ordinary people, and serving
the function of transmitting and popularising knowledge, does not
clearly identify the true intellectual from the ‘opinion maker’ or ‘pun-
dit’, especially as the last two are intimately bound up with the world
of television (Hitchens, 2008). Hirsi Ali certainly would not have been
a famous public figure without Dutch television. As a politician, she
was interviewed and appeared in talk shows and on the news in order
to speak as an expert or explain the ideas of the party she represented.
Her visibility in the media, as well as on glamorous photographs –
even in serious newspapers – did stimulate the creation of a celebrity
persona. We can also observe, however, the negative effects of appear-
ing on television, as we will see in regard to the television documentary
‘The Holy Ayaan’ from 2006; it was this documentary that marked her
as a liar and infected her credibility as a politician and an intellectual.
Even though the public intellectual originally was a typically
European invention, the decline in Europe appears to be as alarming
as in the US. This at least is what historian Tony Judt emphasised in
Reappraisals (2008), in which he studied forgotten twentieth-century
European public intellectuals, such as Arthur Koestler, Albert Camus
and Manès Sperber. Judt’s main concern was that we have not only
forgotten who Europe’s most important intellectuals were, but we have
also reduced the intellectual to the stereotype of the left-wing progres-
sive, who dominated the stage from the 1950s to the 1980s (examples
he mentions are Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault and Günter Grass).
Our current idea of the intellectual, according to Judt, blurs the fact that
historically many intellectuals were right-wing thinkers and pessimistic
liberals (most of them Jewish) forming a ‘Republic of Letters’, a com-

munity of conversation and argument. Today, according to Judt, most
intellectuals do not participate in a community but work individually.
This has to do with the media context in which they have emerged as
‘self-promoting media intellectuals, vacantly preening before the admir-
ing mirror of their electronic audience’ (Judt, 2009, p. 104). We hear
the resonance of Habermas and Bourdieu as discussed in Chapter 1,
speaking negatively about the position of intellectuals in the age of the
Internet and television. But as I have already underlined, these theo-
rists underestimate the critical potential of social media and television;
self-promotion is one side, self-critique is another, which likely is also
stimulated by blogs and responses on television performances.
In contrast to Judt’s narrative, then, underlining that left-wing intel-
lectuals are the more dominant today, Hirsi Ali’s case confirms a ten-
dency of the intermingling of left- and right-wing arguments, which
as such seems to be representative for many debates in contemporary
Western societies. This ties in with what Christopher Hitchens observed
when he discussed a ranking list of 20 intellectuals in 2008,
A notable change in the past few years, though, has been the dis-
junction of the term [public intellectual] from its old association
with the left, and with the secular. Eric Hobsbawm was ranked 18th
out of 100 in 2005 – he was then 88 years old – but this year, with
the exception of Slavoj Žižek, I don’t think there is a single person
on the list who still self-identifies as a Marxist. … A further blow to
secularism must be felt in the inclusion not just of Tariq Ramadan,
but of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Egyptian-born cleric who issues
micro-fatwas and other guides to the Muslim perplexed glued to
Al-Jazeera. It’s heartening to see the absence this time of the grand
ayatollah of Shia Iraq, Ali al-Sistani, who made the 2005 list in
baffling fashion.2
Two remarks are relevant: first, the observation that Hitchens points at
a shift to right-wing positions, and second, that Islamism and funda-
mentalism are in 2008 the dominant intellectual themes, partly because
of the dominance of Muslim voters participating in the poll.3 Hitchens
observes that intellectuals in late modern Western societies are often
right-wing and conservative, addressing topics related to religion and
cultural values. This, indeed, is the context in which we can situate
Hirsi Ali, who was fifteenth on the list and characterised as ‘activist/
politician’. She was one of the two female intellectuals mentioned, the
other was Shirin Ebadi, a human rights activist and lawyer from Iran.
Due to multiculturalism and Muslim immigrants at the one side, and
the European welfare state system being at-its-end at the other side,
left- and right-wing positions have become increasingly intertwined
and mixed up.4
Confessions of a politician
The genre of autobiography is usually considered as representing the

unique character and experience of one particular individual. Political
autobiographies, however, are often more than portraits of one indi-
vidual, and consequently have to be read as contributing to a composite
picture of a life in relation to particular groups or subcultures (in this
case: female citizens, immigrants, Muslim women). The two life narra-
tives5 written by Hirsi Ali evidently reveal how being brought up and
educated as a Muslim woman in a tribal society can lead to a public
intellectual stand in later life. Both texts, furthermore, show how mech-
anisms of personal development, ambition and resistance coincide and
clash with general concerns. In this section I concentrate on Infidel, My
Life (2007).
The memoir was written with the help of a ghostwriter6 and is a
confessional autobiography based on the idea of Bildung, that is, the
youthful development of a protagonist, achieving maturity through
various ups and downs of life. In two parts (My Childhood and My
Freedom) the text narrates the life of a woman born in Somalia in 1969,
growing up in Saudi-Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya, and in 1992 finding
future prospects in the Netherlands. The book opens, however, with
a short introduction describing the cruel murder of Theo van Gogh
in Amsterdam on 2 November 2004. The controversial film director
made the film Submission: Part 1 based on a script by Hirsi Ali. The 11
minutes film shows veiled women with phrases from the Koran painted
on their naked bodies, talking to Allah and asking him to explain why
they have to live in submission. Hirsi Ali goes into her motives for mak-
ing this film and argues that both Van Gogh and herself realised the
danger they were putting themselves in by releasing a film like this,
but that this did not stop them from going ahead with it: ‘some things
must be said, and … there are times when silence becomes an accom-
plice to injustice’ (Hirsi Ali, 2007, p. xx). The introduction of the first
autobiography, then, focuses on the central theme of Hirsi Ali’s life and
thoughts, namely the subordinate position of women in Islam and the
risks she is prepared to take to change this.
The first part of the story, full of intimate facts and private details,
describes a traditional childhood in a tribal culture. Brought up by her
grandmother and her ill-tempered mother, both rooted in restrictive
Somali traditions, Hirsi Ali survived genital mutilation at the age of five,
lived in relative poverty with a brother and sister, while the father was
taking care of his other families, She did get, however, a decent educa-
tion mainly in English, at a Kenyan Muslim Girls school, where Hirsi Ali
for the first time experienced that ‘deep submission is the meaning of
Islam’ (Ibid,. p. 81). In admiration of a teacher, she started to wear the
hidjab: ‘I wanted to be pure, and good, and serve Allah. I began to pray
five times a day’ (Ibid., p. 85). As youngster at school she realised that a
new kind of Islam was emerging,
much deeper, much clearer and stronger – much closer to the source
of the religion – than the old kind of Islam my grandmother believed
in, along with her spirit ancestors and djinns. … It was a huge evan-
gelical sect backed massively by Saudi Arabian oil wealth and Iranian
martyr propaganda. It was militant and it was growing. And I was
becoming a very small part of it. (Ibid., p. 88)
In the course of the book Hirsi Ali will repeat this idea that the literal
meaning of Islam is submission, although she also explains what made
her transform into a rebel: ‘it was the novels that saved me from submis-
sion. I was young, but the first tiny, meek beginnings of my rebellion
had already clicked into place’ (Ibid., p. 94). The I-narrator, then, is
looking back on a previous self and is obviously constructing a self-
image that has to be convincing and believable. The teenager deciding
to start wearing a hidjab was probably at the time not really capable of
gauging the consequences of the new Islam. It is the voice of the older
Hirsi Ali, the Westernised politician, that has to explain the motives of
her younger self.
The father of the family was away most of the time, being active in
fighting the Somali dictatorial regime of Mohamed Siad Barre. Hirsi Ali’s
brother tyrannised his sisters. In January 1992, the father announced to
his daughter that he had accepted a proposal of marriage by her cousin,
a Somali man from the same clan, brought up in Canada. Without any
deliberation the deal was settled, and Hirsi Ali realised that she had to
escape. When the marriage ceremony took place, she was not present.
After a few days, the husband went back to Canada, and Hirsi Ali was
supposed to follow him a few weeks later. The second part of the book
starts off with Hirsi Ali travelling to Germany in order to get a plane
from Frankfurt to Canada. She stayed with Somali acquaintances for a

few days and then decided not to continue her journey to Canada. It
turned out to be easy to get into Holland. On Friday, 24 July 1992, Hirsi
Ali got on the train to Amsterdam. She would live, love and make a
political career in Holland and stay there for 14 years.
We might read the first part of the autobiography as Bildungsroman or
as an ethnography written down by an individual from a tribal culture
explaining the idiosyncrasies of her background and reflecting on her
Islamic education. It is difficult to decide upon the truth of the story,
since no speaker in an autobiography really has the final representation
of the personal, historical and cultural facts at his disposal. The narrator
has her own perspective, certainly when the book is written in hind-
sight with the aim of (re)establishing cultural authority. The intention
to tell the truth as far as possible is regarded as a guarantee of autobio-
graphical veracity and sincerity (Marcus, 1998, p. 3), but fictionalisation
often is part of telling the story of one’s life. To become who you are
is to identify what really mattered in the historical situation and social
community in which you found yourself living (Guignon, 2004, p. 134).
The second part of the book offers a critical analysis of the Dutch
welfare state, and prepares the specific point of view of the right-wing
politician. Hirsi Ali meticulously describes the procedures asylum
seekers have to go through in order to get a residence permit. In her
case, the procedure was a rapid one, starting in the Refugee centre at
Zeewolde, and followed by a stay in a centre in Lunteren, where on
1 September 1992 she gets the ‘recognised’ refugee status (receiving a
pink card instead of a green one). This status is granted on the basis of
the story she relayed to the Dutch lawyers of the Immigration Service.
This is what she claims afterwards,
I started drafting a story based on my experience leaving Mogadishu

in 1991, and the experiences in our house in Park Road [Kenya].
This story was detailed, consistent, but it was an invention. With
hindsight I’m not proud of this fact, but yes, it is true that I did not
tell my full story to get into Holland. In addition, I didn’t say my
name was Ayaan Hirsi Ali Magan; that would make it too easy for
my family to track me down. I hit on my grandfather’s birth name.
(…) I would be Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born November 13, 1967. (Hirsi Ali,
2007, p. 193)
For fear that her family and Canadian husband might find out where she
was, Hirsi Ali hid under a (slightly) different name and adapted the story
of her life. She could not foresee then that because of the change of names
she would be forced to abandon her political career many years later.
Hirsi Ali modified to the foreign culture with an amazing prompt-
ness. In the summer of 1993 she began living in her own apartment.
Two years later she became an official Somali-Dutch interpreter and
was paid by the Immigration Services. In September 1995, she took up
a course of study in Political Science at Leiden University. When she
graduated in September 2000, she was almost 30 years old. The second
part of Infidel then can be read as the story of the successful asylum
seeker settling in the West. It can also be read as the making of a very
outspoken intellectual. In only a few years, Hirsi Ali had availed herself
of all the opportunities Dutch society had to offer her. However, com-
ing from a tribal, patriarchal background, she did not simply accept the
equality she was confronted with in this Western society, and instead
posed questions about the organisation of the welfare state: ‘I had
no idea why complete strangers were giving me so much. Where did
they get the money from? Why didn’t it run out?’ (Ibid., p. 192). Real
political awareness only came when she started working for the Wiardi
Beckmann Institute, the Dutch labour Party’s think tank, in September
2001, ominously coinciding with the attacks on the Twin Towers. Until
that moment, Hirsi Ali explains, she had never looked at Islam as being
an issue. But seeing the impact the attacks had, she suddenly realised:
‘This is based in belief. This is Islam. … I have to wake these people up’
(Ibid., pp. 268–9). From that moment on, she never stopped stressing
her conviction that Islamic fundamentalism has nothing to do with
poverty, colonialism or frustration, but everything with religious belief.
From September 2001 Hirsi Ali’s started manifesting herself as a
public intellectual, and became very active in the public sphere, attend-
ing debates and conferences on democracy in Europe, writing articles,
and speaking on television about women in Islam. The Dutch politi-
cal constellation became very tense and explosive when in May 2002,
politician Pim Fortuyn, gay, conservative and an outspoken populist,
particularly in matters relating to cultural relativism and Islam,7 was
murdered by an animal-rights activist. ‘Dutch politics was becoming a
mess’, Hirsi Ali remarks, citizens ‘generally felt that established politi-
cians weren’t listening to what they really wanted’ (Ibid., p. 284). No
politician had answers to the social problems of immigrants, and no
responsible politician resigned over the Srebrenica affair,8 which took
place in 1995 but which had only then been thoroughly investigated
by a parliamentary commission that had just published its findings in
a very critical report.
Almost immediately after her first appearances on television in

2002, where she declared that Islam was a backward religion, Hirsi Ali
received death threats and her everyday life became extremely difficult.
Nevertheless, many well-known societal figures, liberal writers, academ-
ics, and journalists profiling themselves as ‘Friends of Ayaan’ supported
her and formed a ‘collaborative circle’ (Farell, 2001; McLaughlin, 2008).
In October 2002, on a visit to the United States of America, Hirsi Ali
was personally invited by VVD member and EU politician Neelie Kroes
to become a member of the Dutch Conservative Liberal party. Hirsi Ali
describes her considerations and objectives in a telling passage in her
memoir,
What was I trying to achieve? Three things: first, I wanted Holland to

wake up and stop tolerating the oppression of Muslim women in its
midst; the government must take action to protect them and punish
their oppressors. Second, I wanted to spark a debate among Muslims
about reforming aspects of Islam so that people could begin to ques-
tion, and criticize, their own beliefs. This could happen only in the
West, where Muslims may speak out; in no Muslim country can there
be free discussion on such a subject. Third, I wanted Muslim women
to become more aware of just how bad, and how unacceptable, their
suffering was. I wanted to help them to develop the vocabulary of
resistance. I was inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneering
feminist thinker who told women they had the same ability to rea-
son as men did and deserved the same rights. (Hirsi Ali, 2007, p. 295)
Significantly, Hirsi Ali reflects on her motives for, and strategies

employed in, becoming a politician rather than an intellectual or
scholar. She provides herself a clear feminist link, identifying as liberal
feminist rather than a radical one, and she explains that she needed
the power of parliament in order to achieve something. In becoming
a member of the Dutch Parliament, then, she could immediately act
on her beliefs. Hirsi Ali concludes: ‘I was a one-issue politician … I am
still’ (Ibid., p. 296). On 30 January 2003, she took her seat in Parliament
for the liberal conservatives, while already being solidly protected by
bodyguards. In the summer of 2004, the film Submission: Part 1 was
first shown to the public in a TV talk show in which Hirsi Ali appeared
as a guest. Van Gogh was murdered two months later. After his assas-
sination, Hirsi Ali, aided by security people, immediately went into
hiding in the United States, where she stayed for 75 days. She did not
appear in parliament again until January 2005. Sixteen months later, a
VVD colleague and rival, Minister of Integration Rita Verdonk, having

found out about Ayaan giving a false name and birth date in the refugee
procedure, decided to nullify Hirsi Ali’s Dutch citizenship. Hirsi Ali was
flabbergasted, as she writes, by the political farce that followed,
How could this be happening, when I had so repeatedly told the

truth about my real past? Yes, I should have told the whole truth
in 1992 when I arrived in Holland, even though I was frightened of
being sent home. In time, I learned not to be afraid, I learned that it
was wrong not to tell the truth. (Ibid., p. 342)
The outcome of the affair was that she resigned from parliament, and
accepted a job in the United States. She left Holland behind. It was a
‘melancholy end to an extraordinary odyssey that started with a white
lie to escape an arranged marriage’ (Buruma, 2007, p. 264).
As stated above, Infidel: My Life, is, on the one hand, an ethnography,
a story of migration and diaspora, representing experiences of people in
comparable circumstances and using ‘the sociolinguistics of mobility’
(Blommaert, 2010, p. 5). As such, the narrative demonstrates the process
of identification as referred to by Stuart Hall,
identification as construction, a process never completed − always

‘in process’. It is not determined in the sense that it can always be
‘won’ or ‘lost’, sustained or abandoned. Though not without its
determinate conditions of existence, including the material and
symbolic resources required to sustain it, identification is in the end
conditional, lodged in contingency. (Hall, 2010, p. 3)
Identification is a process of articulation. The immigrating subject is

developing, acting and moving into a new cultural identity. Identity
is fragmented and fractured, and as Hall emphasises, it is ‘never sin-
gular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and
antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions’ (Ibid., p. 4). Hirsi Ali
negotiates between various roles, expectations and possibilities in dif-
ferent circumstances.
On the other hand, Infidel: My Life is the success story of one very
specific, identifiable and sophisticated female asylum seeker becoming
a liberal conservative politician, and adapting to a modernist discourse
by focusing on precision in details, narrative coherence and rational
clarity in subjective stance. Hirsi Ali describes personal experiences as
well as general processes and phenomena. She provides commentaries
from a subjective perspective on the opportunities and constraints of

the welfare state. It can be argued that there are two different voices in
this narrative, addressing issues of difference and inequality. One is the
voice of the migrant, experiencing and contingently deciding which
cultural patterns to pick up; the other is the voice of the politician (re)
constructing a personality, and realising that her story needs a convinc-
ing message to address a broad audience. Moreover, the narrative is
meant to repair her image after the debacle of May 2006. Hirsi Ali needs
to put her individual case in a larger context: how was it possible that
Van Gogh was murdered, that a tolerant society got so explosive, and
that the politician believing in freedom was forced to leave a democratic
parliament?
In addition, the two merging voices can be analysed further by using
classical notions from Aristotelian rhetoric. Aristotle defined rhetoric
as an art, pursuing general knowledge. Three sources of persuasion
define the public speech: ethos, the character of the speaker as it comes
across in the speech; pathos, the disposition of the audience toward
the speaker and the matter at hand; and logos, the truth demonstrated
by means of persuasive argumentation (Conley, 1990). Infidel: My Life
makes use of all three persuasive mechanisms. Ethos has strong input
in part one, in which Hirsi Ali describes the oppressive situation for a
girl growing up in a tribal and Muslim environment. Pathos is used to
make the argumentation in this part more convincing, in particular
with regard to the description of the difficult mother–daughter relation
and the religious influence of sister Aziza. In the second part of the
memoir, there is more of an emphasis on logos, in the description of
the emergence of critical ideas and the development of her argument
against Islam from September 2001 onward.
Media personality
In her years as a MP, Hirsi Ali was a remarkable, stylish figure on Dutch
TV. She knew how to use the camera, she wore fashionable clothes and
jewellery, spoke clearly in perfect Dutch and gave the impression of
having things under control, of acting critically and authentically. She
appeared regularly in talk shows, interviews, and on the news, in order
to share the political opinions of the VVD party, though mostly sticking
to statements on the backwardness of Islam and the abuse of women
by Muslim men. She acted as a representative of these women, and in
doing that marked her own achievements as a westernised, cosmopoli-
tan, and liberated intellectual.
In August 2004, Hirsi Ali was invited to appear in the television pro-
gramme Zomergasten (Summer Guests), a three-hour live interview setting,
hosted that year by the well-known Dutch writer Joost Zwagerman. The
programme produced by the intellectual and leftist network VPRO, is
aimed at an educated audience, who are interested in listening for a few
hours to someone well-known in the fields of civic life, politics, arts or
academia. The programme usually focuses on the development and career
of people, combining personal experiences with professional perspec-
tives and ideas.9 That evening more than 750,000 households watched
the Summer Guests10 show, at the end of which Hirsi Ali showed the film
Submission: Part 1. It was the first and only time the film was shown on
Dutch television.11 The film portrays four Muslim women, who are vic-
tims of domestic violence, rape and abuse. Koran verses are painted on
their partly naked bodies, suggesting that in the religious context of Islam
violence is accepted and legitimated. The women tell their stories to Allah,
and ask how their punishment can be accepted, why pure love is disap-
proved, why women have to submit to men. The dramatised testimony
develops into a crisis of faith; in the words written by Hirsi Ali: ‘Faith in
You, submission to You, feels like self-betrayal. … You remain silent, like
the grave I long for’.12 Mixing prayer, dialogue, confession and lament,
the female voice represent other voices from ‘nowhere and everywhere’
(De Leeuw and Van Wichelen, 2005, p. 328). But it is evidently Hirsi Ali’s
own voice that underlines that Islam implies submission, just as she did
in Infidel: My Life. When the host Zwagerman suggested that the form and
the style of this film were probably too provocative, Hirsi Ali answered,
If you want to stir up a discussion, you have to stimulate people

to start thinking. You have to do things that present them with
a dilemma. And not by means of violence or something like that
but by means of words and images and that’s what I do. There is of
course a possibility people will say: ‘the way she has done it, doesn’t
make it interesting for me anymore’. But I am also certain that there
are women who cannot turn their heads, who do not look merely at
the style. … But it is very important that Muslims, men and women,
in the Muslim world are confronted with what is written in the holy
texts. The Koran says: ‘beat your wife if she does not obey you, the
man is superior to the woman’. These are very important elements
that I think should be looked at.13
The beautiful, elegant figure in the white fashionable blouse seemed

very confident of herself, although the film, certainly from an artistic
point of view, was much more propaganda than art, more concerned
with emphasising a Western, 1970s liberal feminist perspective –
women should enjoy their own bodies and sexuality – than with invit-
ing Muslim women to open up to a discussion of belief, oppression and
freedom. The audience watching the programme late that Sunday night
was an undoubtedly well educated, Western audience, not competent in
reading the Koran verses in Arabic, but able to pick up the stereotypical,
not very nuanced stories of victimised women in a Muslim context. The
responses on the film, then, were quite reticent. Most Muslim organisa-
tions regretted that the film was made, but did not take action to get it
banned. Many viewers agreed that the topic, violence against women,
was relevant, but the way it was presented was counterproductive.
When Amnesty International interviewed professional women in Muslim
communities abroad, about what they thought of the film, most of
them were negative. But it was not until after the murder on Van Gogh,
that the film became the topic of debate (Moors, 2005).
The Dutch television made Hirsi Ali famous, but also caused her down-
fall in politics. On 11 May 2006, the documentary programme Zembla
aired a show under the suspicious title ‘The Holy Ayaan’, retracing Hirsi
Ali’s past and putting Rita Verdonk, the Minister of Immigration, under
pressure to review Hirsi Ali’s asylum procedure. Zembla came up with
information that was already known: about Hirsi Ali having used the
name of her ancestors (Ali) instead of the name of her father (Magan)
when she was asking for asylum in the Netherlands. The left-wing ide-
ology of the programme makers resulting in journalist activism14 was
perhaps not very objective, but indeed effective. The repeated message
was that Hirsi Ali had consciously been manipulating the truth, not only
about her name, but also about having been present at her wedding.
The populist reportage constructed an image of a Hirsi Ali as continually
making things up and rearranging the facts. A few days after the airing of
the documentary, Hirsi Ali, her Dutch passport taken away by Verdonk,
had to resign from the parliament. Tuesday 16 May 2006, again in front
of the cameras, Hirsi Ali, dressed in innocent white like a tragic Greek
heroine, opened a press conference to announce her resignation from
parliament by extensively using the various names of her ancestors,
What is my name?
I am Ayaan, daughter of Hirsi, who is the son of Magan, the son of
Isse, the son of Guleid, who was the son of Ali, son of Wai’ays, who
was the son of Muhammad, of Ali, of Umar, of the family Osman,
the son of Mahamud.
I am from this clan. (…) I am a Darod, a Macherten, an Osman

Mahamud, and a Magan.
Last week there was some discussion about my name. Now you
know my name.15
Visibility attracts adoration as well as hatred, sometimes fatefully

combined. Visibility can be empowering as well as disempowering
(Brighenti, 2007, pp. 334–5). Hirsi Ali acted as a heroine in the tragic
context of the political scandal she could not stop from emerging. In
the summer of 2006 she left the VVD party, politics, and the Dutch
nation behind. Three months later she started her job at the AEI in
Washington. In 2007 she received her US Permanent Resident Card.
Today, she regularly appears on American television as an expert on
Islamist issues. Interestingly, her American looks are less diva-like and
more seriously academic.
The metamorphoses of an intellectual
After working in the United States for three years, Hirsi Ali published
Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of
Civilizations (2010). This is a completely different book from Infidel:
My Life, because of the thematic composition of the text. Personal
anecdotes are interwoven in a more intellectual and critical discourse.
Hirsi Ali proposes challenging, neo-conservative ideas and takes explicit
moral stands. She does this in a clear, accessible language mainly
putting forward arguments for the American system and against the
outgrowths of the European (in particular Dutch) welfare state and
multicultural society.
The first part, ‘A Problem Family’, again presents the story of Hirsi
Ali’s childhood and adolescence in Africa, now introduced by the
scene of her father dying in a London hospital, and concentrates on
the partial stories of her father, half-sister, mother, and other relatives.
The main message of this first segment is that no family member in the
tribal, Muslim context of East Africa could grow up happily and with
hope of ever getting a decent education or enjoying any kind of pros-
perity. Compared to Infidel: My Life, the focus is less on Hirsi Ali’s valiant
life, and more on the general circumstances of growing up in a religious
context without perspectives on a respectable education. The next
part, ‘Nomad again’, is the story of Hirsi Ali’s time in the United States
since September 2006. She relates how she got into giving public pres-
entations at conferences and universities: ‘My job was a cross between
academic work and activism’ (Hirsi Ali, 2010, p. 114). She tries to spread
her ideas on the reforms needed in Islam to get rid of the oppression of
women, and she continues underlining the differences between Europe
and the United States in liberal and conservative politics and in treating
immigrants,
Today most Muslims in America are unquestionably different from

most Muslims who live in Europe. Because they come mainly
through airports, and thus have visas, they have undergone a kind
of preselection process based on their educational level, their pros-
perity, and their language skills. In America this process is far more
critical, more attentive to an immigrant’s skills and the benefits he
will bring to the host country, than in Europe, where the focus is on
the benefits the immigrant will gain. (Ibid., p. 137).
Significantly, Hirsi Ali believes it would be a great mistake to be compla-

cent about Islam in America, since the weekly attendance at Mosques is
growing rapidly. The threat posed by radical Islam is already present in
the United States although not yet recognised as such. In addition, Hirsi
Ali warns again, that radical Islam is a religion that rejects ‘not only
those core principles of the Enlightenment … but also the very notion
that the diverse many should become one united people’ (Ibid., p. 145).
In part III, Hirsi Ali concentrates on the three main problems that
Islam immigrants find themselves confronted with: sex, money and
violence. She emphasises that many immigrants coming from tribal
communities recognise the typical problems involved in becoming a
citizen in a Western culture. Not being educated on sex issues, immi-
grants in the West cannot deal with the freedom and the possibilities
regarding this topic. Women living under Islamic law cannot travel,
work, study, marry, sign legal documents, or even leave home without
their father’s permission. They are not allowed to participate in public
life. Most immigrants, then, do not have any experience being a citizen,
which implies feeling a ‘participatory loyalty to any government’ (Ibid.,
p. 178), and therefore most of them are not motivated at all to adopt the
values and customs of the countries they flee to. Money is the second
problem, because none of the newcomers are familiar with the disci-
pline required in earning, saving or budgeting money. The third prob-
lem is violence. Hirsi Ali underscores that violence in Islamic education
is connected to anti-Semitism. Islam encourages violence: ‘Muslim
children all over the world are taught the way I was: taught with vio-
lence, taught to perpetrate violence, taught to wish for violence against
the infidel, the Jew, the American Satan’ (Ibid., p. 201). The permanent
closure of Muslim minds has to be opened up by education in order
to learn the rules of a free society and to replace the old sets of values.
Part IV of Nomad, then, offers remedies to the questions discussed.
The ultimate solution to the problems with Muslim immigrants in
Western societies should be brought about by mounting a ‘campaign
of Enlightenment’, in which five elements play a vital role: the encour-
agement of and reward for asking questions; the idea that learning is a
lifelong experience and is for everyone; the value of individual freedom;
the idea that the legal state has the monopoly on violence in society;
and the idea of property rights as the foundation of both civil society
and the political system. Not surprisingly, Hirsi Ali fiercely opposes
cultural relativism and underlines that the culture of the Western
Enlightenment is better than Muslim culture. An Enlightenment cam-
paign, however, is not the only remedy Hirsi Ali proposes. At the end of
her book, she comes up with the idea that the Catholic Church should
take an active role in converting Muslims. Christian churches could play
a role in reversing Islamisation. Referring to her own experiences in the
1990s in the Netherlands, Hirsi Ali points at the power of the church
congregations, which took care of refugees by offering them practical
help. From within Christian communities, the refugees really learned
how to assimilate into Dutch culture. This, obviously, is a statement that
suits the American religious society more than the current European
context in which secularism is much more dominant (and the Catholic
Church has only played a modest role since the sex scandals came out).
In Nomad, we observe Hirsi Ali developing into a neo-conservative
critic with outspoken ideas concerning the Islamisation of the Western
world. Although her strident tone put people off, as Ian Buruma wrote,
and many critics considered her too straight in her Enlightenment
crusade – ‘Nomad is a morality play about the evils of Islam’, Tim
Winter wrote in the TLS (21 Jan 2011) – it seems that she has been get-
ting more intellectual response since she has cultivated the voice of a
neo-conservative American instead of the one of a Dutch politician. The
Nomad-voice makes use of logos (argumentation, examples) in order
to convince the audience, though underneath there is the pathos of
anger and resistance. Despite the fact that the book is very subjective,
it is clear that Hirsi Ali uses her private experiences and ideas (ethos) in
order to clarify the troubles other Muslim immigrants have. So, Nomad
creates the impression of being built on intellectual argumentation, yet,
the tone is definitely more polemic than that of Infidel: My Life. The
narrator has a message in stressing the American dream, the opportuni-

ties, the freedom of an open, critical society.
However, this is, again, not the only voice we hear. The critical dis-
course of Nomad is interrupted twice by an intriguing letter. In the first
one, Hirsi Ali addresses her grandmother on issues of modernity and
tradition, explaining that she does not bewail the life her grandmother
led, or the passing of her traditional world, and clarifying that life in the
West is easier, much more comfortable and enjoyable,
Grandma, fevers and diseases are not caused by jinn and forefathers
rising from dead to torment us, or by an angry God, but by invisible
creatures with names like parasites and bacteria and virus. The infidel’s
medicine works better than ours, because it is based on facts, inquiry,
and real knowledge. (2010, p. 91)
The letter can be read as an imaginary Wiedergutmachung with someone

who was near. The grandmother would probably not have approved of
Hirsi Ali’s modern life, but there is one theme she would have recog-
nised: both of them have voyaged in a time machine, from a traditional
religious world (grandmother was the nomad from the desert who set-
tled in a house in a city) to the granddaughter’s life in a globalised con-
text, she is a nomad in a world of airplanes, cities and rental apartments.
The second letter is even more striking than the first. At the end of
her book, Hirsi Ali addresses ‘My Unborn Daughter’. Inspired by a meet-
ing with Italian writer Oriana Fallaci at the end of the latter’s life – she
died of cancer in September 2006 – Hirsi Ali writes to her unborn child
and repeats all the issues she has discussed in her book, but this time
dealing with them from a very subjective perspective. She writes about
Enlightenment values, about her past, about the risks of life, and about
the excesses of the Dutch welfare state,
My dear child, I do not worry about the bleakness of life. I worry

about the bleakness of having no challenges in life. In Holland, for
example, I lived in a laboratory of a society, where almost all the
challenges in life had been erased. We were taken care of from the
cradle to the grave. We debated on euthanasia, a movement that
started by defending the right of terminal patients to end their lives
and then morphed into a movement that defended the right of any-
one to be helped by a doctor if he was tired of life. And this demand
of a right … had to be subsidized by the state.16 (Ibid., p. 271)
It is here, when writing a letter to her unborn daughter, at the risk of

getting sentimental, that Hirsi Ali reveals another personality, exposing
the very private, intimate wish to become a mother. In addressing a
daughter and her grandmother, Hirsi Ali stresses the gender topic that
she takes up in this book, the message of course being that Western
liberal societies are more gender sensitive than non-Western ones. Hirsi
Ali makes politics personal just as the liberal feminists did in the last
decades of the twentieth century. Interestingly, these issues of personal
politics and feminism are now established in the discourse of a right-
wing scholar.
Intellectual in context: various circles and

multiple audiences
Every intellectual participates in a collaborative circle, a network of

peers, reacting on and responding to the words of the other and pro-
moting the visibility of the intellectual (Farrell, 2001; McLaughlin,
2008; Berman, 2010). In the Netherlands the ‘Friends of Ayaan’, all
academic men,17 supported her by openly sharing their prestige and
emphasising their collaborative goals with regard to the freedom of
speech and ideals of Enlightenment. There were some female publicists
accepting (some of) her ideas as reasonable as well: the Egyptian born
Nahed Salim, Steffie Kouters, Vrij Nederland journalist Elma Drayer and
sociologist Jolande Withuis (see Van Tilborgh, 2006). And, of course,
there were many opponents to her ideas and the way she was presenting
them. Historian Geert Mak was furious about the film Submission: Part 1
and compared it to the anti-Jewish propaganda by Joseph Goebbels in
his notorious movie Der ewige Jude, showing images of Jews connected
to feigned citations from the Talmud (Mak, 2005, p. 69). Mak also
pointed at the heated climate in the Netherlands in which everything
was put in religious terms, in which it is naively suggested that Islam is
the reason for all the wars in the world.
In an international context, Hirsi Ali’s messages have been taken up
critically by many intellectuals, who as such performed another circle
in which her ideas kept provoking discussion. In The New York Review of
Books of 5 October 2006, British historian Timothy Garton Ash described
Hirsi Ali as a ‘brave, outspoken, slightly simplistic Enlightenment fun-
damentalist’ who seems to be more interested in the effectiveness of the
issue of Enlightenment in sociopolitical Western culture, than in under-
standing its philosophical complexity. To Hirsi Ali the rule of law, the
rights of the individual, and freedom of expression are basic principles
that should not be compromised in the name of cultural diversity. Her

audience is made up largely of white liberal males – such as Garton
Ash himself by the way – rather than the Muslim women she wishes to
liberate. Hirsi Ali is a typical example of a convert, Garton Ash argues,
in a pattern familiar to historians of political intellectuals, she has gone
from one extreme to the other. Fanaticism for the prophet is exchanged
for fanatacism of reason. Garton Ash plays the macho-chauvinist card
when he states that Hirsi Ali is an
irresistible copy for journalists, being a tall, strikingly beautiful,

exotic, brave, outspoken woman with a remarkable life story, now
living under permanent threat of being slaughtered like Van Gogh. …
It’s no disrespect to Ms. Ali to suggest that if she had been short,
squat, and squinting, her story and views might not be so closely
attended to.18
The point is, obviously, not phrased in the right way, that it is relevant
to underline the strategies of visibility that Hirsi Ali has consciously
used in a very clever and effective way. She was able to make her
statements through the media while creating a persona, a posture or
self-image of the attractive, exotic, liberated lady. It is naïve to sug-
gest, though, that this is the only reason for getting public attention.
In Murder in Amsterdam (2006), Ian Buruma being more empathic than
Garton Ash, points out that Hirsi Ali was traumatised by her upbring-
ing in Eastern Africa and her subsequent adoption of a Western life-
style. Buruma compares her to iron lady Margaret Thatcher: ‘the same
unyielding intelligence, the same impatience with those from a similar
background who lack the wherewithal to “make it”, and the same fasci-
nation with America.’ (p. 169).
Pascal Bruckner in an article in the online journal Signandsight, then,
contrasts the critical judgements by Ash and Buruma. Bruckner defends
Hirsi Ali by praising the concept of liberty founded on emancipation
from tradition, and criticising the Anglo-Saxon multiculturalist public,
reasoning from the anthropological concept of equality. It seems that
under the guise of respecting the other’s specificity, Bruckner argues,
individuals are imprisoned in an ethnic or racial definition. The French
philosopher stresses the link between Hirsi Ali and the East-European
tradition of dissidents,
It is time to extend our solidarity to all the rebels of the Islamic

world, non-believers, atheist libertines, dissenters, sentinels of
liberty, as we supported Eastern European dissidents in former

times. Europe should encourage these diverse voices and give them
financial, moral and political support. Today there is no cause more
sacred, more serious, or more pressing for the harmony of future
generations. … 16 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, an impor-
tant segment of Europe’s intelligentsia is engaged in slandering the
friends of democracy.19
In the debate that followed on the Signandsight website, conflicting

points of view were elaborated on by many other critics and writers.20 A
substantial contribution was written by German social scientist Ulrike
Ackermann referring to a lecture Hirsi Ali delivered in Berlin in the
spring of 2006, in which she mentioned the tradition of the Eastern
European dissidents who turned away from communism in favour
of Western freedom. ‘Our opponents want to use violence to silence
us’, Hirsi Ali had said, ‘they claim that we are spiritually and mentally
unreliable and shouldn’t be taken seriously. Communism’s defenders
used the same methods’ (Hirsi Ali cited by Ackermann, Signandsight,
2007). A sympathetic reading of Islam recalls that of communism before
1989, Ackermann writes. The West’s self-hatred and invalidation of
the accomplishments of free democracy were expressed in a too gener-
ous interpretation of communism. And this happens also with regard
to Islam today, thanks to its anti-capitalism and anti-Americanism.
Many Western intellectuals had reservations about Eastern European
dissidents because they were only fighting for the so-called ‘bourgeois
liberties’.
Significantly, many intellectuals dreamed at the time of a ‘third way’
between capitalism and communism, in much the same way as Garton
Ash calls for a ‘third way’ between the politics of multiculturalism and
Enlightenment. The discussion, which started in 2006, has developed
from statements for and against Hirsi Ali, into a wider, effectively pub-
lic, debate on Islam in Europe in which other Muslim intellectuals, such
as Necla Kelek, Hamed Abdel-Samad, Tariq Ramadan, and historians
(Oliver Roy) and sociologists (Christopher Caldwell, Paul Scheffer) have
been participating. It could be argued, that Hirsi Ali has initiated and
fuelled this discussion with the two narratives on her personal experi-
ences and the development of her outspoken political ideas and perfor-
mances. Her position as a critical thinker, as a right-wing conservative
intellectual thus has been an effective one.
However, a question that should be asked concerns the public. What
about the consequence for the people Hirsi Ali seem to address in first
instance? What about the female Muslim audience that she spoke to
and spoke for when she started her political project in 2003? In her
fieldwork research on Muslim women in the Netherlands, Jolanda van
Tilborgh pointed at an interesting but complicated ambivalence: many
Muslim women consider Hirsi Ali’s Islam critique as negative, because
of the backlash of her ideas on themselves. Next to her they are indeed
regarded as traditional, anti-emancipated and not westernised. By
opposing Hirsi Ali fiercely, however, they also affirm her power and cul-
tural authority. It is difficult for these women to argue that Hirsi Ali is
wrong in her opinions, and to convince the public of their own ongoing
respect in regard to Islam conventions and values. It is not easy to have
a public voice, since the male dominancy in the Muslim subculture is
still so strong. Furthermore, when women in the Muslim subculture are
educated and freethinking, they are patronised by Westerners question-
ing their conviction and views. The agency of Muslim women is denied
from them by Hirsi Ali, who puts them in a victim’s position without
really listening to their voices.
The final question to be answered then is, does Ayaan Hirsi Ali
emerge from these narratives and descriptions as a public intellectual?
First, an affirmative answer could be provided. If we look at the char-
acteristic features of the public intellectual – participating in the public
debate, combining theoretical and practical knowledge, developing new
arguments, taking a normative stand, and functioning as a warning
system – we can confirm that Hirsi Ali is indeed a public intellectual.
By concentrating on her personal story and stressing the negative influ-
ences of Islam and the position of women and girls, she acts as a neo-
conservative public intellectual focusing on multiculturalist issues. On
closer inspection, however, the answer might also be a partly negative
one. There are certain characteristics typical of the public intellectual,
which are not applicable to her work: there is the element of offering
various perspectives, and of claiming a position of detachment. During
the second half of her time in Holland, Hirsi Ali was living the life of a
public celebrity, often appearing on television, while at the same time
performing the role of exotic dandy, someone who could not walk the
streets safely on her own in Amsterdam or The Hague. She was any-
thing but detached at the time. Paradoxically, the more famous and
well-known she became, the more she appeared to be the outsider and
stranger again, protected and locked up, not able to live a normal life,
and therefore losing grip with common society.
Another ambiguity, of course, is that Hirsi Ali positioned herself
as the icon of the freed, enlightened Muslim woman, surviving
genital mutilation and oppression, and being able to get an education

in English, to flee to the West and to establish an authoritative position.
The focus of her work in the West has been the defence of the rights of
women against abuses rooted in religion and traditional practices. But
fighting for Muslim women to ‘help them to develop the vocabulary of
resistance’ somehow has made her drift apart from just that public – or
counter public –, who did not recognise themselves in the provocative
statements and the images of the Submission: Part 1 movie. This is a more
general problem of spokespersonship, as Dick Pels (2000) has described;
intellectuals identifying with larger interests have often silenced other
voices and appropriated their subjects’ interest and desires.21 As said,
most of the arguments Hirsi Ali developed are based on the familiar
Enlightenment discourse, stressing freedom, individuality, responsibil-
ity, modernity, and so on. But this is exactly not the discourse of the
women and girls she speaks for. Interestingly though, since her migra-
tion to the United States, she has created a more nuanced persona of
the female and well-educated Muslim immigrant who can bridge the
gap between religions, cultures, discourses and people. It seems that
in the United States, being hired by the American Enterprise Institute,
one of the first and most influential neo-conservative think tanks, she
has found an intellectual voice beyond politics. That she was longing for
something new, could at least be concluded from the farewell interview
she gave to Dutch television in August 2006 in which she reveals: ‘I was
not really in place in politics’.22 It is not sure if she at the time really
regretted her political actions, or if she was already adapting to a new
context and strategically positioning herself as the more independent
thinker that fitted the ideology of the AEI. Surely, Washington is a more
dynamic place to live than The Hague, and the United States undoubt-
edly is a better context for the cross over between academic work, and
public activism.23
6
Public Intellectuals from Brussels
David van Reybrouck (1971) and
Geert van Istendael (1947)
This chapter considers the work of two Belgian public intellectuals,

who actively and seriously participate in the debate on European
integration, taking their position in a small federal nation state as
starting point. Van Reybrouck was educated as archaeologist, wrote a
travelogue, fiction and pamphlets on populism and democracy, and
is in particularly known for his awarded bestseller Congo. A History
(2010). Van Istendael worked as a journalist at the BRT1 (from 1978 to
1993) and is the writer of poetry, fiction and essays on typical national
(Belgian, German and Dutch) idiosyncracies. His understanding of the
multiple local identities of regions influences his stances on European
diversity. Both authors are ‘practical’ in the sense that their ideas are
developed as contribution to a debate with the public to stimulate them
to politicise; Van Reybrouck was one of the initiators of the G1000
Citizens’ Collective.
Most of all I like to sit and write. Why then should I put
so much energy and time in a project as the G1000?
While it is difficult to write, when the roof leaks. Well,
the roof of our democracy leaks. Since I observed in
Congo that ordinary people have something to tell
about the history of their country, I do believe that
citizens here as well have something relevant to say
on the future of the community. That is why I strive
with the G1000 for more public participation in our
democracy. (Van Reybrouck, personal website)2
121
Poets as legislators
On 29 October 2004 representatives of the (then) 25 member states of

the EU signed a treaty that was considered to become the first consti-
tution of Europe. By a referendum planned in the member states in
2005 this European constitution3 was supposed to be accepted by the
European citizens. 18 EU members voted for, but on 29 May and 1 June
2005 the Netherlands as well as France – both core members of the
European community – voted against, and the ratification process was
immediately brought to an end.4 This could be considered a victory of
the EU sceptics, and a grass roots act of resistance against the elite of
European civil servants building a system of treaties without commu-
nication with the public. It was a proof that ‘we, the people of Europe’
did not think of itself as a polis, a community of citizens in need of a
vision for the future (Balibar 2004; Witteveen, 2008). However, after the
demise some public intellectuals took a leading role in an alternative
project of a European constitution. The writers David van Reybrouck,
Geert van Istendael, Peter Vermeersch, Xavier Queipo, Manza, and
Laurence Vielle wrote a blueprint of a new, artistic European constitu-
tion, and invited more than 40 poets from all the European countries
to contribute to the text. Van Reybrouck and Vermeersch finalised this
text in 2008 as The European Constitution in Verse.
In the introduction to The European Constitution in Verse the organisers
reveal their ambitions; this is not the restoration of a political failure,
but a dialogue between committed citizens. Assembled are 52 voices
from all angles of Europe contributing together to one poem in order
to critique ‘Fortress Europe’ from within. The composition of the poem
is based on the structure of the format of the official constitution docu-
ment: a preamble is followed by the ‘constitution’ as such, and then
by six parts on ‘definitions’, ‘rights’, ‘statements’, ‘policies and prac-
tices’, a ‘European hymne’ and a ‘conclusion’. The constitution part as
such emphasises that all beginning is chaos, but out of chaos appears
structure. Chaos is positive in that it implies no boundaries, strategies
and false biases, and it is out of this disorder and confusion and in the
manoeuvre of a collective authorship that the new constitution is cre-
ated. This is a participatory work without one dominant voice, the con-
sequence of which is a heteroglossia of European voices and discourses.
The evident strength of the project is in the cooperative enterprise that,
with a reference to Percy Bysshe Shelley, positions the poets as ‘the
unacknowledged legislators of the world’ (Witteveen 2009). Poets are
not only authors of language, as Shelley wrote, but also ‘the institutors
PIs from Brussels, van Reybrouck and van Istendael 123
of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts
of life’ (Shelley 1966, p. 418). They are teachers with moral, political
and historical wisdom.
The power of the European Constitution in Verse lies in the cultural
diversity, as can be illustrated with the seventh part of the poem, the
European hymne based on Beethoven’s ‘Ode an die Freude’, which enu-
merates the word for ‘bread’ in various European languages and dialects:
Pane, pano, pain, pan, pa, pao

Psomi, ogi, ekmek, khobz
Lehem, xumel, kenyér, maize
Paîne, duona, kruh, büke, hatz.
(2008, p. 91)
Bread is what people eat and share, what is ordinary and consecrated (in
the celebration of the Eucharist), it is the food that one needs in order
to live, what keeps the mass of the people happy, and it is a typical
product of Europe.
Just as Hans Magnus Enzensberger in chapter 2 of this book, used
the concept ‘collective fiction’ to indicate an ensemble of voices, facts,
fiction, translation and the cultural ‘untranslatability’ (Apter, 2013), it
is here in the verses that we hear various people sing, speak and think,
without being able to completely understand them or to discover a
final meaning for their words. The idea, indeed, is that the European
constitution draws on an ongoing dialogue, and constantly needs input
from the people, with new perspectives expressed in different words and
phrases. The constitution is based on a ‘being together without touch-
ing, like leaves in the wood’.5
This project by the Brussels Poet’s collective, instigated by Van
Reybrouck, certainly makes clear what the specific agency of the public
intellectual in the twenty-first century encapsulates. He takes up a role
as organiser and discussant, stimulating others to contribute, making a
political, moral and artistic debate possible, and levelling the bounda-
ries between elite and ordinary citizens, by listening to the latter and
taking them seriously as conversation partners. Constructing a real
dialogue instead of an illusionary one, such as is done by the politi-
cians and EU civil servants, the public intellectual becomes part of the
public. To a certain extent the public intellectual, thus, functions as
the Gramscian ‘organic’ intellectual, that is as the poet in between the
company of other poets, but he also has the role of the Habermasian
intellectual, capable of constructing rational argument and imagining
new future perspectives. In the neoliberal global context the European

public intellectual has to operate on the edge of intellectual activism
and new political inspiration.
In this chapter, two essays by Van Reybrouck will be scrutinised in
order to analyse this position and to dig into his ideas regarding new
societal cohesion. We will also focus on the initiative of the G1000,
a democratic participatory project of ordinary citizens from Belgium.
Subsequently, another public intellectual from Brussels will be intro-
duced, because of his particular critique on the EU and his analysis
of European regions. In the conclusion, I will discuss the issue of the
European public intellectual as mediator and translator.
An intellectual inquiry into colonialism,

populism and democracy
After graduating as an archaeologist, David van Reybrouck established

his position as writer with The Plague (2001), a debut that was imme-
diately recognised as a highly original text, mixing elements of fiction,
personal observation, detection, and journalism of science. The book is
a travelogue on a journey to South Africa to study alleged plagiarism of
renowned author Maurice Maeterlinck, Nobel Prize winner of Literature
in 1911, who wrote La vie de termites copying Eugene Marais’ Die siel van
die mier. Maeterlinck is known as the symbolist Flemish playwright and
poet, who wrote in French, and the discovery of this study on ants in
South Africa puts the once celebrated and now mostly forgotten author
in a completely new context. Van Reybrouck’s journey to South Africa
emerges from a biography of Maeterlinck into an account on Belgian
history, the South African Anglo-Boer war and apartheid politics, as well
as a study of ants as ‘human’ networkers. More than that, the book tells
about travelling in order to write, and can be considered the start of a
critical authorship beyond academic writing – which he had done in his
dissertation From Primitives to Primates (2000). Furthermore, the book
is the proof of an interest in Africa as the continent that will ‘be the
challenge for the coming 50 years’,6 and of the idea that literature and
politics are inextricably interwoven.
Van Reybrouck’s magnum opus published almost ten years later, was
on Africa as well, more particular it was a history of Congo, the former
Belgian colony, based on memoirs and interviews. For this book Van
Reybrouck interviewed 500 people during 10 trips to the country, and
has drawn on thousands of written sources. Just like The Plague, Congo,
A History is an amalgam of genres, it reads like a novel while being as
rigorous as an academic history.7 Although some Belgian historians cri-

tiqued the academic status, the book became a bestseller, with more than
500,000 copies sold. This, evidently, has to do with Van Reybrouck’s
engaging and imaginative style, by which he brings the multifaceted
history vividly to life, drawing on living memories, and re-voicing the
unheard voices of many. In particular fascinating is that he describes
his meetings with the probably 126-year old Congolese, papa Nkasi: ‘Je
suis né en mille-huit cent quatre-vingt-deux.’ (Van Reybrouck 2010, p. 17).
This old man, whether a real or a fictional character, personifies the
living history of Congo, which became the personal property of King
Leopold II in 1885, and was handed over to the Belgian state in 1908,
until in 1960 it became the free Congo State. Nkasi, as Van Reybrouck
writes, lived in five different nation states while being all the time in
the same place in Africa. The story of the man’s life frames the story
of the country, as a narrative of catastrophes, wars, fragile democracy,
poverty, rich sources and unsteady independence. A transforming
nation in which one can live long enough to become a very old man.
Our European perspective on this nation today, as an unhealthy, and an
economic and morally corrupt country, is not the image reflected in the
personal narratives and ideas of the ordinary Congolese people, who are
represented by Van Reybrouck with empathy and respect.
This idea of giving a platform to the common people who are the
country, became a drive for the writer. After finishing his Congo book,
Van Reybrouck participated in other projects as well, stimulating people
to voice their ideas and engage in democracy and building up a political
and social community. As he explains in the epigraph to this chapter,
he could not work solitary at his desk, when realising that democracy
was failing and the members of the community lacked a mutual under-
standing. Two essays, one on populism and the other on an alternative
to democratic elections, were the result of this activism and engage-
ment, while next to this he participated in the Belgian G1000 project,
bringing together ordinary citizens as the criticasters and transformers
of the democratic system. In the following sections we will first scruti-
nise both essays, and then focus on the citizens’ endeavour.
In Defence of Populism (2008) entails a critique on the current ‘diploma
democracy’ or educational gap, with the effect that the parliaments in
the Netherlands and Belgium – and elsewhere in the Western world as
well (Hobsbawm, 2013, p. 200) – are dominated by highly educated
representatives, with a consequential disinterest and resentment in
regard to politics by lesser-educated people. The essay starts with the
disturbing memory of a group of university friends making fun of
ordinary people walking on the boulevard of a Belgian coast town; they

are obese, tattooed, over consuming, too blond, and everything but
elegant. These people are the ridiculous examples of the homo margin-
alis. The educational gap has become a class division.
This scene immediately illustrates that populism is based on antago-
nism: the plebs, el vulgo, the populace, il popolo minuto versus the elites,
the regents, the ones in power, the ones who consider themselves
smarter and better. Although the idea of democracy is that all people are
citizens, and that equality is the fundament of society, the paradox of
current democracies is that equal opportunities, values and ambitions
do not exist for everyone.8 Many people do distinguish themselves from
as many others using the discourse of ‘we’ versus ‘them’. As Francisco
Panizza notes, ‘the “other” of populist identities is as diverse as the
identity of the people of which it is the outside (Panizza, 2005, p. 17).
Van Reybrouck in his essay aims at analysing the antagonism and con-
troversy, and focuses on an understanding of the fear and resentment
of the populist voters. The main plea in this pamphlet is for ‘more low
educated people in parliament and for more interfaces between the elite
and the mass’ (Van Reybrouck 2008, p. 16). In addition, Van Reybrouck
underscores that a ‘more enlightened populism’ is needed.
Evidently, the diploma democracy based on the educational gap is a
relative new phenomenon, and has developed after the 1960s when the
pillarisation was coming to an end. From the late nineteenth century
on pillarisation was a typical social structure of the low countries organ-
ising public and private life in four separated segments: a Protestant,
Catholic, Socialist and liberal pillar. Within one pillar the societal life
was organised with schools, youth groups, sports clubs, trade unions,
insurance, banking, newspapers and so on. Even marriage was arranged
within the same pillar. The idea was to keep ordinary people separated
from each other in order to run public and private life smoothly. People
participated in their own pillar and had contacts with low and high edu-
cated others within the same group. Consequently, the lower educated
were raised by the better educated: Bildung or Volksverheffing [education
of the people] was the ideal. Van Reybrouck, who is aware of the fact
that his grandparents were low educated as well, observes that the low
educated today miss the encouragement of the structured context, and
are not stimulated at all to raise themselves, to think or reflect, and
develop as a person. What is left are ‘the commercial media’ on the one
hand and the ‘mocking high educated people’ on the other (Ibid., p. 19).
The problem of current democracy in the Netherlands and Belgium
is that representativeness is at the heart of it, but as the low educated
do not feel that they are represented, the system fails. Democracy then
leads to irritation instead of satisfaction – equality is supposed to be the
basis, but low educated people realise that for them it does not exist at
all. A side effect of this feeling of un-representativeness is that the low
educated citizen develops fear and aggression in regard to yet another
‘other’: the migrant. And in this context European issues and conse-
quences of globalisation go adrift. To illustrate this, Van Reybrouck
depicts ‘Kevin and Kelly’ as ordinary, low educated citizens, opposite
of ‘Thomas and Charlotte’ – everything is in the name – as the high
educated ones; each has its own preferences regarding media, music,
fashion and appearance, summer holidays, and so on. The homogenous
subcultures in which people are born, decide who one is and what one
thinks and thus votes: ‘The raw pattern of one’s electoral behavior,
right-wing populist or not, is decided even before one is entitled to vote’
(Ibid., p. 45). This, it could be argued, looks a bit like the former pillars,
but then one could get better educated and stimulated, while now one
is doomed to stay ignorant, isolated and uninterested.
Van Reybrouck’s main claim, then, is that this inequality is not
understood as a collective one, but is experienced as an individual
failure. The remedy is better education, more contact between the low
and high educated, and a particular appeal to the public intellectual
as well: do write an opinion piece in the Telegraaf (the sensationalist
Dutch newspaper comparable to The Daily Mail in the UK) and try to
really reach the low educated. Populism today, Van Reybrouck argues,
can be considered a reaction to the post-democratic state we are in;
that is a state with the features of a democracy, but which does not
function as a real democracy (elections, debate, constitutional state)
anymore. Populism, subsequently, is the only, faulty response the
sovereign people are capable of. Van Reybrouck’s final suggestion is
to stimulate an enlightened populism, in order to keep diversity alive.
‘Populism may be anti-elitist and anti-establishment, as long as it is not
anti-parliament and anti-democratic’ (Ibid., p. 64). Conflict is in the
heart of democracy, and populism will certainly evoke conflict, but as
such that is preferable over disinterest and drenching oneself in a sense
of not fitting in.
In Defence of Populism is a thought provoking and challenging essay,
but at the same time it is the more or less emblematic talk of a public
intellectual addressing a well-educated audience and thus affirming
his university educated identity. By analysing the culture and educa-
tion gap, Van Reybrouck makes his own intellectual peers aware of the
problems going on, but does not immediately succeed in addressing a
broader audience, even when his essay won the Jan Hanlo essay Prize in
the Netherlands and was discussed in several newspapers.
Interestingly, the subsequent step taken by Van Reybrouck, was start-
ing an initiative to bring citizens from all over Belgium together, in
order to discuss democratic issues and alternatives to the mechanisms
of social division and in- and exclusion. Three years after his essay on
populism Van Reybrouck became the co-founder of the G1000 project
of Democratic Innovation in Practice.9 The G1000 confirmed that ordi-
nary citizens are willing to and interested in discussing political issues,
and come up with new constructive ideas for complex and emotionally
charged topics, such as migration, social security and the redistribution
of wealth. Van Reybrouck explains that in bringing together this people’s
assembly, he was inspired by a citizen’s collective which took place in
Kinshasa in the early 1990s, providing a new public space in the fragile
young democracy. Since Belgium, after the elections of 2007 and 2010,
did not succeed at all in getting a stable government, Van Reybrouck
suggested to start this citizens project in order to replace the representa-
tive, stacking democracy by a deliberative one. The first step was that he
wrote an opinion article, which was published in De Standaard and Le
Soir newspapers, in which he dreamt about the new initiative,
Dream along for a bit. I see one thousand Belgians convene. … Half
of them men, half women, from all regions and communities, every-
thing nicely balanced. I see people from civil society: trade unions,
youth groups, women’s associations, different religions, those who
believe and who emphatically don’t, those born here and those who
came here. … We will listen to one another before defending our-
selves. Empathy precedes any compromise. … There will be reports
and recommendations. … The citizenry, that’s us. Let’s get started!10
Others picked up the dream. Within a few months some 27 people

came together: scientists, journalists, intellectuals, people from com-
munication and logistics industries and from the cultural sector.11 In
June 2011 a Manifesto was published in five Dutch and French speaking
Belgian newspapers,12 which was signed by more than 10,000 people
within a few days. The project was then adopted by the Foundation for
Future Generations, which took care of the practical organisation. Three
phases of deliberation followed: first, there was an online consulta-
tion of the people; second, a one-day citizen’s summit was organised
on 11 November 2011; and third, a citizen’s panel took place on three
weekends in September–November 2012. These phases made use of the
several techniques and methods considered relevant in the literature

about deliberative democracy, and best practices in countries such as
Canada, Australia and Iceland. In the three phases many people came
in contact with others, and discussed new ideas, different perspectives
and solutions. Van Reybrouck participated in all three phases.
The most interesting question of course, is, who were the 1,000 citi-
zens who participated in the project? The organisation chose to recruit
them at random over the telephone, and to reserve 10 per cent of the
seats for socially vulnerable citizens who were hard to reach: homeless
and illiterate persons. Finally the group consisted of 52 per cent female,
48 per cent male, 61 per cent Dutch speaking, 39 per cent French speak-
ing Belgian citizens between 19 and 85 years of age.13 They had debates,
constructed a list of crucial topics, discussed solutions and alternatives,
and they finally came up with recommendations to various governmen-
tal levels in the Belgian society: parliamentary commissions, local and
provincial governments, regional and federal parliaments and govern-
ments, political parties, social partners, citizens, the European Union,
and the Council of Europe. Responses by various authorities are col-
lected in the final report on the G1000, and illustrate the engagement
of the authorities with the people. One response on a recommendation
is in particular intriguing, because it brings us back to the issue of pop-
ulism. It is the response by Guy Verhofstadt, former Prime minister of
Belgium, and currently the party chairperson of the European Liberal
Democrats, ALDE. This was his answer to the G1000 recommendations
on the levels of the EU and the council of Europe,
I believe that this exercise is socially relevant, especially in times

in which ideological differences between parties are fading. On the
other hand there is the danger of populism. A project like the G1000
should not tempt politicians into not taking their responsibility any-
more and simply echoing what the people want to hear. On the con-
trary, the G1000 has to result in stimulating politicians to develop
new visions for tomorrow’s society.14
Listening to the people could lead to populist speak by politicians,

Verhofstadt warns, and it is evident that here he points at too simple
an identification with ‘the people’, and draws on a too stereotypical
idea of populism. What he has not picked up, it could be argued, is that
the distinction between the people on the one side, and the politicians
on the other, as their representatives and solicitors, is exactly what is
most fundamentally critiqued in this whole G1000 enterprise. Its main
idea is about debate, listening, reflection on political strategies and

consequences. Representation is thus transformed into participation.
When ordinary citizens participate in the deliberative process, this
could be seen as a form of ‘enlightened populism’ which Van Reybrouck
already brought to the fore in his pamphlet. That does not include
populism as a simplifying antagonist discourse, but as encouraging,
food for thought, conflict leading to debate, and dilemmas that have
to be gauged. Populism implies that the well-educated politician finally
engages with the less-educated, but even so well informed citizens.
It is most fascinating to observe how public intellectual Van
Reybrouck strives at reaching a broader audience, and is willing to
leave his desk and to postpone his writer’s activities for that. Or, it
could be argued, he defines himself as a public intellectual by con-
sciously reflecting on explicit and intertwining political and social
issues, resulting in discursive essays and practical performances such
as public meetings and lectures. Tellingly, he also accepted the prestig-
ious academic ‘Cleveringa chair in 2011/12’, as a typical intellectual’s
position, which underlines his cultural authority.15 It was this chair at
Leiden University that gave input to a second pamphlet, published in
2013, entitled Against Elections. The essay, again, is a reflection on the
failures of the democratic system – what Van Reybrouck this time refers
to as the ‘democratic tiredness syndrome’ – and of powerlessness: of
the citizen in regard to the government, of the national government in
regard to Europe, and of Europe in the context of global mechanisms. In
comparison with the pamphlet on populism, Van Reybrouck’s analysis
has developed into a more in-depth political study, or into a more clas-
sical intellectual work. It is about a topic that concerns all citizens in
Western democracy, but the discourse mainly is an intellectual one, and
undoubtedly it is too technical and complex for most common people
to read. Which brings us back to the issue of the education gap: who
is addressed by the Cleveringa-professor, and does the acceptance of an
academic chair compromise the public intellectual role? Before answer-
ing these questions, let’s first see what the essay is about.
The essay is divided into four parts: symptoms, diagnoses, pathogene-
ses and remedies, followed by a conclusion. The first part focuses on the
decline of the democratic legitimacy: fewer people vote; when they vote
they are less loyal to the parties they voted for before: and fewer people
are members of a political party. In addition, Van Reybrouck observes a
decline of the democratic efficiency: the formation of governments takes
more and more time; parties who have taken the responsibility in gov-
ernments are afterwards unpopular and often punished by the voters;
and government, in particular in regard to huge infrastructural projects,

takes more and more time.
In the diagnoses Van Reybrouck discusses four explanations for the
democratic demise: first to blame are the populist politicians such
as Berlusconi, Wilders, Haider, Le Pen, Farage and Grillo pretending
that they are speaking for the people, and that they are the ones with
‘common sense’, while in fact they are ‘entrepreneurs striving for the
biggest market share by using romantic kitsch’ (Van Reybrouck, 2013,
p. 24.) Then there are the technocrats, such as Loukas Papadimos in
Greece 2011–12, or Mario Monti in Italy 2011–12. Their financial-
economic expertise was relevant to fight the economic crisis, but from
a democratic perspective their being in power was a failure. The third
observation is on the feeling of citizens of not being represented, which
was the start of the Occupy movements, the Indignados in Spain, the
Wutbürger in Germany, or the G1000 in Belgium – all forms of subterra-
nean politics. And the fourth diagnoses is that the system of elections at
the basis of representative democracy is passé, in particular in a context
in which commercial and social media are more and more dominating.
The bourgeois public sphere as it developed in Europe, cannot stand
the cacophony of voices. The free press is not really free anymore but
bound by commercialisation. And politicians are just actors in a play.
Van Reybrouck notes ‘On radio and television the national politics has
become a daily soap opera, a play for free actors. The editorial boards
decide upon the frame, the script and the typecasting, and the politi-
cians just try to put their own accents’ (Ibid., p. 54).
After the symptoms and diagnoses, Van Reybrouck comes up with the
pathogenesis – the development of the disease, and the remedy as well.
Instead of elections, democracy should be based again, just as in the
classic Greek polis or the renaissance Italian city state, on sortition, on
drawing by lots, whereby citizens could appeal for positions in boards,
review commissions, citizens’ assemblies, town hall meetings and so on.
Experiments have been done in Canada, the Netherlands (activated by
the D66 party) and Iceland. The real transformation of democracy as a
bi-representative system with election and sortition should start now, and
in particular in Europe and in Belgium. Although others, such as histo-
rian Tony Judt in his essay ‘The Stateless State: Why Belgium matters’,
have critiqued Belgium as a weak state and an uneven quilt of overlap-
ping and duplicating authorities’ (2009, p. 242), Van Reybrouck sees
in this tiny state within the EU the opportunities for practising with a
new system. Since 2014, Belgium’s Senate has been transformed into a
Chamber to control the Federal government, and can be considered ‘a
Chamber of reflection as a meeting place for various regional powers’

(Ibid., p. 147). In order to counter the frustration of citizens, and to
fight populism, technocracy and anti-parliamentarism, Belgian politics
have to be opened up, and democracy has to be democratised. Belgium
does matter in this context.
A Belgian format for Europe?
Typical for Van Reybrouck’s role as public intellectual is his direct

commitment with the citizens, his interest in the transformation of
democracy, and his willingness to have a rendezvous with common peo-
ple as well as with intellectual peers. After the defence of his academic
dissertation, he became an independent writer publishing the bestseller
on Congo, a novel and a controversial pamphlet,16 and in this autono-
mous position, he accepted the Cleveringa chair at Leiden University in
honour of human right, freedom and responsibility. Although this was
an official academic position, the three pillars of the chair match with
Van Reybrouck’s motivations as public intellectual. Here, then, we can
answer the questions on the possible conflicting roles of the academic
and the public intellectual. In particular the claim of responsibility
seems relevant in regard to Van Reybrouck’s public intellectual perfor-
mance: he does seem to be very much aware of the critical conscious-
ness that the public intellectual has to negotiate with various audiences.
The voices of others, ordinary citizens as well as intellectual peers, lower
as well as high educated people, have to be represented and assembled
by the responsible public intellectual, who is more capable of speaking,
of reflecting, and getting attention. The aim is to enhance critical dis-
cussion with specific publics and counter-publics. The relation between
the intellectual and his audiences, is one based on circulation; without
a perceptive audience willing to accept normative stances there is no
public intellectual, and without the intellectual listening and taking a
stance, there is no public debate.
The visibility, cultural authority and serious commitment of the pub-
lic intellectual have got more urgency in the era of mediatisation and
digitalisation, on the one hand dominated by sensation and human-
scale experiences, and on the other by a technology impervious to emo-
tion and by meaningless magnitudes. As Eric Hobsbawm noted,
But thinking intellectuals alone are in no position to change the

world even though no such change is possible without their con-
tribution. That requires a united front of ordinary people and
intellectuals. With the exception of a few isolated instances, this

is probably harder to achieve today than in the past. That is the
dilemma of the twenty-first century. (Hobsbawm, 2013, p. 203)
The awareness of having an in-between position from which various

opinions and points of view can be brought together, is, it could be
argued, what makes Van Reybrouck’s performance as a public intel-
lectual so persuasive. His engaging performance, and the critical and
recognisable ideas about democratic conditions, challenge his audiences
to identify, respond and ‘form a united front’. The claim in this chapter
is, that this is a typical Belgian perspective, in the sense that the small
federal tri-lingual state in the heart of the EU makes its citizens very
much aware of what it means to live in Europe, in a democracy based on
cultural diversity, and in relative prosperity and peace. To examine this
claim further, I will turn to another Brussels intellectual, who counters
some perspectives on this European nation, and who throws new light
on the position of the Brussels’ public intellectual.
One of Van Reybrouck’s co-authors of the European Constitution in
Verse was Geert van Istendael, a Belgian writer who since the 1990s
has taken a sharp position in debates on European issues. Working as
a journalist for the BRT, Van Istendael wrote two volumes of essays on
Belgium, The Belgian Labyrinth (2011 [1989]) and Poor Brussels (1992),
after which he decided to quit as a journalist and to become a fulltime
writer and public intellectual. His motivation was down-to-earth: he did
not want to be ‘reasonable’ anymore, but strived to be a ‘reactionary
person’, someone who is engaged and can express his opinions with
more forcefulness.17 As a reactionary person, he claims to oppose the
market, because ‘economic growth implies decline, economic poverty
enriches, and less communication devices will improve communica-
tion’ (Van Istendael, 1994, p. 17). The main drive of the reactionary
person is to escape the market.
This was something he could not do as a journalist, but he is capable
of as a free independent public intellectual. Evidently, this is a paradoxi-
cal situation: he first had to become a (financially) independent public
intellectual and had to sell books, in order to make the freedom of writ-
ing possible. Interestingly, indeed, there has to be a market for ideas and
opinions, and once the public intellectual has a position in this market,
and thus has a recognised status and cultural authority, he is able to
ventilate his provocative views.
In the 1990s Van Istendael got a platform for his ideas in Belgian and
Dutch newspapers, such as De Morgen, De Volkskrant and the NRC, and
he published the novel The Black Stone (2003) and essays on the low
countries such as My Netherlands (2005) and My Germany (2007). In both
the novel and the essays similar themes are underlined: a critique on
‘ultra-liberal capitalism’ and globalisation, an interest in the political
identity and diversity of regions, and sharp observations on Europe and
the European Union.18 In particular the European Union is critiqued
by Van Istendael, because of its economic focus and neoliberal strategy
pressing the ‘economy of Bayern farmers’ on all European nations, and
sacrificing social security, pensions, the national railway systems and so
on, which used to make Europe social and reliable.19 More important
even is that the EU is an undemocratic institution, because it doesn’t
take the people seriously.20 The EU denies everything that makes Europe
precious: cultural diversity, humanism, small-scale structures and
democracy, it undermines the differences, and moulds everything into
one economic and English blur.
Significantly, the attention for the small scale and regional singulari-
ties, is what marks Van Istendael’s most relevant observations. In My
Germany (2007) he examines the various monuments in Kyffhäuser,
the Stolpersteine21 as memorial stones for victims of National Socialism
in various German cities, memorials in Berlin, and statues along the
Rhine river. He describes such diverse topics as a specific German
knife, a stanza from Hölderlin’s verse ‘Andenken’, or a health resort
(Bad Ems Kurort) which was visited in 1870 by the Prussian Wilhelm I,
who initiated the Franco-Prussian War. And he sketches the multiplic-
ity of German sausages: from Eichsfelder Stracke to Gelbwurst. These
small observations, faits divers, and anecdotes told at random, just
suggest bigger consequences and cohesion on the continental level.
The same procedure was followed in My Netherlands (2005), although
in these impressions more irony is involved. Van Istendael writes
‘mini-reports’ on cliché topics such as Dutch cheese, the Frisian
Beerenburger drink, the bike as typical Dutch phenomenon because
it ‘puts a Mozartian lightness’ on moving through the flat landscape
(2005, p. 104), tulips – which he considers ugly – and hemp – which
he considers sustainable. In these essays on Holland he is more or less
sarcastic, but again he is the observer of the typical identities of peo-
ple and regions. The tone of these essays as feuilletons is light, but as
said, the ideas and statements are serious and cautionary: Europe, and
the low countries in particular, are made up by a diversity of cultures,
languages, conflicts and opinions, and only by the observation of real-
ity and the remembering of past events, can we cope with the present
configurations.
Critical opinions on Belgium, the low countries, Europe, and the EU

underscore Van Istendael’s role as a public intellectual, with conserva-
tive as well as progressive ideas. His statements pro and contra the EU,
his ideas on the arrogance of the Eurocrats, his position pro a ban on
headscarfs22 and his critique on segregation and processes of integra-
tion and Islam,23 affirm that he still considers himself as a bourgeois
reactionary person, who has outspoken ideas and aversions, and enjoys
ventilating them and turning them upside down. As he writes in The
Belgian Labyrinth,
I hate Belgium because it tried with that arrogant French to devastate

my Dutch, it pushed my Dutch away, it kept my Dutch from going
to school. …. I love Belgium because it has nothing to do with the
Dutch self-esteem, tactlessness, and lack of understanding for what
is outside the borders. (2011, p. 11)
Belgium is an amalgam of languages, dialects and discourses: there is

the Flemish nouveau riche provincialism, and the sophisticated French
in Flanders, there is German in Eupen and French in Malmedy. One
out of ten people in Brussels speaks ‘a sort Arabic’, thousands talk in
Turkish, and now ‘all Belgians become aboriginal in their own city, but
the Brussels’s Flemish people the most’ (Van Istendael, 1992, p. 127).
The Eurocrats do not like the Dutch language, the children of immi-
grants prefer the French, and associate everything that is Dutch with
racism, fascism and the ‘Vlaams Blok’ [now the Vlaams belang]. In
consequence: ‘the old Belgium disappears. Europe is now in the heart
of Belgium’ (Ibid., p. 127). Van Istendael, evidently, enjoys a change
of mind and diversity, although sometimes pessimism permeates his
statements. He is optimistic in regard to the Babylonian position of
Brussels, but he observes that throughout this diversity, the problems of
immigration and integration are becoming more and more biting. Van
Istandael notes: ‘Young migrants reject the strict, partly Islamic, partly
village-based rules and codes. They are isolated from the normal, Belgian
life by small, ordinary racism. … Education, as the utmost stimulator
of integration, has failed in particular because French schools did not
accept the problems’ (1992, pp. 80–1).24 Already in the early 1990s, Van
Istendael thus put a finger on the phenomena of radicalisation, which
became excessive in Belgium and Western Europe, only some years later.
Van Istendael likes to put his pen in abundantly coloured ink, mix-
ing dialect with analysis, official language with new speak, and serious
analysis with a whimsical sense of humour. In line with the exuberant
style of his essays, he wrote the novel The Black Stone (2003) in which he
evocates Europe in the year 2092. The novel provides a future scenario
for Europe, and underlines, I would say, the typical Belgian identity of
the author. The story depicts the division of Europe in 50 years time.
The EU has imposed that the continent is divided in different zones: the
‘free economic zone’ (the non-land) and the ‘zone of targets’. The latter
is the financial centre of the EU, the first is considered the periphery in
which a libertarian laissez faire is the basic attitude. The zones are closed
off by boundaries and barbed wire, and once an individual arrives in
the free zone, it is difficult to come back to the organised target zone.
The protagonist of the novel is Nicolaas Hemers, a radio journalist
who travels to the free zone to make a report on life behind the border.
There, on the other side, he discovers poverty, rural nature, and some
obscure characters. After experiencing a severe storm he is received as
a guest in a big house, inhabited by ‘the great commissioner’ and two
servants. In this house spectacular dinners are cooked, with all sorts
of exclusive ingredients. During the meals the protagonist plays his
radio documentaries, and as such narratives within the narrative are
told. The novel develops as a postmodern unmasking of Europe, but
it also is a spectacular tribute on food and cooking, on Burgundian or
Belgium tastes and pleasures. Part of the novel thematises the history
of Europe, in telling stories of cruelness, Greek mythology, and biblical
stories, another part depicts the managerial language of the target zone
as illusionary and fake. But, as said, much room is created for the spec-
tacle of European heritage in regard to food and literature; the novel
tells about the enchantment of taste, of drinking wines and celebrating
culinary and artistic highlights. The civilisation of pleasures is tied in
with European culture and tradition, and the message of the absurd nar-
rative evidently is, that Europe should cope more carefully with these
high-spirited traditions and cultures.
European public intellectuals
Van Reybrouck and Van Istendael characterise themselves as writers

from Brussels, the capital of a small federal nation state that celebrates
the diversity in languages and cultures, but also is marked by the tragic
histories of the former colony and of the Great War, by populism and
language policies, by bureaucracy and Europhilia. The current Belgium
is kept together by prosperity and peace, and is, as Tony Judt observes,
a post-national model for the twenty-first century: a virtually stateless
society, with a self-governing, bilingual capital city whose multinational
workforce services a host of transnational agencies and companies

(Judt, 2009, p. 247). Both Belgian writers praise the cosmopolitanism of
Brussels, often in comparison to more provincial Dutch cities. As Van
Istendael writes, ‘This is the city in which I want to live and stroll, drink
and smell and eat, as greedy as possible, in this city I will sing in all my
languages and I will hear how she sings in all her other languages. And
most of all, in this city, in my dear, broken, familiar Brussels, I will feel
myself again and again not at home’ (1992, p. 248).25
My claim is, that this being at home, while resisting to feel oneself
at home, is a very intellectual construction, at the same time implying
commitment and distance, being political as having a visible posi-
tion in the public sphere, and escaping politics in the sense of not
involving in emaciated party politics and EU constructions. This typical
public intellectual position is Brussels and Belgian, but also a European
one. It was French philosopher Etienne Balibar who, in a lecture deliv-
ered at Berlin’s Humboldt University in November 2002, described
this specific intellectual position as ‘mediator’. His argument was that
intellectuals in the twenty-first century have to address ‘urgent politi-
cal questions with their own instruments, calling on them to reject
any “non-political” temptation’ (Balibar, 2004, p. 205). The reasons for
this temptation could be the uneasiness with a static cultural identity,
and the difficulty of giving a geographical, cultural or institutional
definition of the place and the position where intellectuals work, meet,
write and talk from. It could be argued, that Balibar here moves away
from the specific Habermasian European public sphere of coffee houses
and city squares as the typical venues for debate, and moves to a more
abstract European space. He argues that the ‘place has become, more
than ever, intermediary, transitory and dialogic’ (Ibid., p. 205).
After having observed that European intellectuals do not sufficiently
exercise their capacity to cross the political and cultural borders, Balibar
notes,
They are not sufficiently acting as citizens of Europe, dare I say

thinking European citizens … the universality that we associate with
the very idea of politics and the vocation of the intellectual has to
be constructed practically and empirically; it has to be approached
through confrontation and conflict. (Ibid., p. 206)
Just like Van Reybrouck, Balibar underlines the idea of a conflictual

democracy, combining different heterogeneous constitutional princi-
ples, including a development of legal democracy, making sure that
the individuals who vindicate them are recognised as the true bearers
of rights. And it includes a social democracy addressing inequalities, so
that politics remains open to the integration of new elements into the
‘common part’ of mankind (Ibidem., p. 224). His main claim in regard
to European intellectuals is, that their assertion of a specific identity
goes hand in hand with its (seeming) opposite: the inclusion of the
Other within itself (Ibid., p. 231). Subsequently, he comes up with the
essential function of the intellectual as translator, intermediary and
traveller. In particular the practice of translation is what the European
intellectual should define; translation from the merely linguistic to the
broader cultural level, in search for difference and equivalences. This is
what he considers the political function of intellectuals: they have to
continuously broaden the horizon of their translating capacities.
Balibar considers Europe a continent with specific centres: Brussels,
Strasbourg, the City of London, or the Frankfurt stock exchange, but
without one ‘European people’. The project of active European citizen-
ship, however, can be incited by intellectuals, who reconsider the role
of nations, democratise the borders and margins of Europe, and try to
overcome interior divisions. And this exactly is, what Van Reybrouck
and Van Istendael do in their analyses of social divisions, democracy,
cultural diversity and regional singularity. Belonging to Brussels, their
mind is on Europe.
7
Responsible Satire
Hamed Abdel-Samad (1972)
The Egyptian-German author Hamed Abdel-Samad is a remarkable

spokesman in the current debate on multicultural society in Europe.
In his contributions to various media (journalistic pieces, interviews,
essays) he uses – just like Hirsi Ali did – his autobiography to explain
the controversies about Islam and Muslims in European societies. Abdel-
Samad is a serious and respected discussant, well informed on the his-
tory and cultures of the Middle East, who also makes use of humour to
stimulate discussion and reflection. In the satirical television programme
Entweder Broder Abdel-Samad went ‘on safari’ in Germany and Europe
together with Jewish public intellectual Henryk M. Broder, and they
discussed issues of integration, religion and governance. This chapter
examines in particular the rhetorical power of irony and satire, and the
rationale behind the theatricality of stereotypes and the construction of
a counter-public sphere. Because of his outsider position Abdel-Samad
can be regarded as a mediator between Muslims and Non-Muslims, as
well as between Germany and Egypt, Europe and the Middle East. Acting
this role makes him a convincing and responsible public intellectual.
Within four weeks the Tunisians succeeded in getting

rid of the dictator who had ruled for years. It took the
Egyptians only 18 days to do this. A global euphoria
could be heard. Everywhere in the Arabic world a
domino-effect was foreseen. I myself was among the
biggest optimists and declared even before the fall
of Mubarak, on 1 February, that all Arabic dictator-
ships would die. A snowball had started rolling and
it became bigger and bigger; there was no way back.1
(H. Abdel-Samad, 2011, p. 191)
139
Another fatwa
After having delivered a lecture in Cairo in June 2013, the German-

Egyptian writer and academic Hamed Abdel-Samad was confronted
with a fatwa, a death-threat.2 In his speech he had argued that Islamism
is a new form of Fascism, something that we also heard from philoso-
pher Bernard-Henry Lévy in Chapter 4, but that evidently was more
dangerous to convey in the fragile democratic context of Egypt after
the fall of Mubarak. Salafist-Sheikh Assem Abdel-Maged deemed that
Abdel-Samad had to die. ‘Er darf nicht leben’, repeated the Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung the words of Muslim Brothers.3 The writer disap-
peared for a few weeks,4 but continued his work in Germany in the
course of the summer, and till today phrases his critique on Islam while
accepting the consequence of permanent police protection. The reason
for doing this can be considered typical for the public intellectual, as
can be illustrated with an interview Abdel-Samad gave to Die Zeit online.
Asked about his motivation for speaking out in public, he declared:
‘I suppress the fear, while otherwise I would keep my mouth shut. 200
years after Voltaire, 70 years after the end of fascism, and 25 years after
the fall of the Wall, it is not acceptable that I have to hide in Europe
because of my opinions’.5 Freedom is based on not believing in absolute
truths, and that is why he came to Europe. But Europe is neglecting this
freedom, and Abdel-Samad considers moving away again.
In experiencing a ban Abdel-Samad joins the company of writers
such as Salman Rushdie in Britain, and Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak
in Turkey, who expressed ideas about Islam that were not accepted by
religious rulers. The fatwa, evidently, marks the opposite of democracy
and freedom of speech and is used by autocratic leaders to suppress
critique. In today’s Western public sphere, however, the fatwa could be
compared with the ban on whistle-blowers, such as Edward Snowden,
Julian Assange or Chelsea Manning, hunted and sentenced for their
openness and critical claims in regard to issues of mass surveillance and
abuses of power by governments.6 Silencing the criticaster is not only
a phenomenon in Muslim regimes, which makes the relevance of the
public intellectual in societies even more urgent.
Hamed Abdel-Samad (1972) was born as the son of an Imam. He
graduated from Cairo University and migrated to Germany in 1995 to
study political sciences in Augsburg. One of his first contributions to
the German public debate was the publication of his autobiography,
Mein Abschied vom Himmel (2010a).7 In his second book, Der Untergang
der Islamischen Welt, Eine Prognose (2010b), Abdel-Samad predicts the
Responsible Satire, Abdel-Samad 141
decline of the Islamic world; fear of innovation, a continuing lack of

prosperity and a fast growing young population longing for idols and
freedom, confirm an explosive potential. In 2011 Krieg oder Frieden was
published, providing insight into the revolution in Egypt that meant
the end of the Mubarak regime, and the first steps on a path toward
democratisation. Three years later Der Islamische Faschismus (2014)
appeared. All these books are built on critical observations motivated
by personal experiences and political reflection. Abdel-Samad’s presence
in the public sphere in Germany, however, was not only marked by
books and newspaper articles, but as well by his appearance on televi-
sion in talk shows, where he commented on the political changes in
North Africa. In performing the role of commentator, Abdel-Samad’s
background is crucial; his public commitment is evidently rooted in his
experiences as a child, adolescent and student in Egypt. Abdel-Samad
mediates between Arabic and Islamic ideas and conventions and the
principles of Western modernity. It is exactly in the roles of commenta-
tor and mediator, interconnecting different perspectives and ideologies,
that the contemporary public intellectual can make a point. In compari-
son to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Abdel-Samad takes a similar position as criticiser
of Islam, but he is less focused on just one topic – the oppression of
women – and less approving of the current conditions in Western socie-
ties as such.
In addition to performing the roles of a man of letters, commentator
and mediator, Abdel-Samad took the challenge of participating in the
satirical television programme Entweder Broder, Die Deutschland-Safari
in 2010 and 2011 and Die Europa-Safari in 2012. In this programme he
acts as the participant in a ‘comic duo’. He visits venues in Germany
and Europe, invited and accompanied by the Jewish writer Henryk M.
Broder, while the two men discuss various controversial topics and
interview common people. The programme, constructed as a collection
of feuilletons, a combination of diverse short and at first sight seem-
ingly light items, evokes an ethical reflection by disputing the opinions
of a Jew and a Muslim in regard to various issues of integration. The
outcome is an infotainment programme exploring the sore points in
German society and the European Union, and establishing a counter-
public sphere, that is: a critical space on a popular medium in which
reflection and discussion are stimulated. Hence, the paradox discussed
in Chapter 1 of this book, that of an inner tension with regard to the
issues of theory and practice, specialism and generalism, contemplation
and action, or engagement and detachment, is here supplemented with
the tension between a serious and ironic discourse. This leads to the
question: what is the effect of humour on intellectual reflection encour-

aged on television?
When focusing on the public performances of Abdel-Samad and
Broder, we observe that they operate as an investigative team or com-
edy duo, and as such they examine the contemporary Western public
sphere in which left and right are not dichotomies anymore, neither
are progressive and conservative for that matter or rationality versus
irrationality, due to the fact that many intellectuals and politicians
share and mix the same types of argument, as well as moral appeal and
political persuasiveness.8 This is caused not only by the expansion of
communication and the fragmentation of information since the digital
era, but rather by the complex cultural conjuncture in multicultural and
neo-liberal Europe, in which populist and nationalist statements blur
the discussion of politics and social reform. Democracy in this context
is interpreted as the dominant voice of the people in a nation state
(sharing one culture and one language), and not as an in essence plural
and cosmopolitan weighing of opinions and ideas. In Europe after 1989
democracy is often taken as the practice of elections, in which the vox
populi has the last word.
Public intellectual Abdel-Samad thus, takes up the role of serious
discussant and observer (in a news talk show, newspaper column or
essay), the role of correspondent reporting on a particular event, as
well as that of the political satirist making jokes and asking serious
questions in an entertaining but at the same time critical documentary.
It is the combination of roles that is explored in this chapter. After an
analysis of Abdel-Samad’s autobiography demonstrating where his ideas
on multicultural issues come from, some of his essays are scrutinised.
Subsequently, the television programme Entweder Broder is analysed and
put in context. In the conclusive part it is argued that humour is tied
to criticism in late modern societies such as Germany, but is also cultur-
ally restrictive and not understood by everyone in the same way. Some
jokes made by the Jewish Broder are completely the opposite of ironic
statements made by Abdel-Samad, but it is exactly the ambivalence and
double-voiced message of the comic programme that fits in the public
intellectual frame.
Conversion from religion to cognition
In order to understand his motivation and his decision to become a

critical intellectual, we have to recapitulate briefly some facts of Abdel-
Samad’s autobiography. He described these extensively in Mein Abschied
vom Himmel, Aus dem Leben eines Muslims in Deutschland [My Departure
from heaven] (2010a), which is again the narrative of the immigrant
from a Muslim country, moving to the West and endorsing enlight-
enment values such as freedom of speech, education and rationality.
The autobiographies by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, discussed in Chapter 5 were
similar, in the sense that these narratives are confessional stories, full
of intimate details, describing childhood in a poor culture dominated
by patriarchal religion. The idea underneath narratives such as these
is, that once freed from the yoke of religious tradition, the successful
migrant embraces enlightenment and establishes the bridge between
Christianity and Islam, the West and the East. Abdel-Samad describes
his journey from an Egyptian village to a German city, from being the
son of an imam to becoming a lecturer at the university in Munich
doing research on Jewish and Muslim History, and as such his trans-
formation from a religious subaltern to an enlightened intellectual. His
story is exemplary.
Abdel-Samad’s autobiography certainly is a noteworthy public con-
fession. He was born the third of five children of an imam, and his
destiny was to follow in his father’s footsteps. But life in the village
was harsh due to strict hierarchical religious and social conventions
and poverty, and at the age of 16, Abdel-Samad left for Cairo, to study
English and French at the University. In the capital he experienced
a culture shock. He joined the Marxists, but after less than a year he
had had enough of the ‘godless revolutionaries’ and became part of
the Muslim Brotherhood offering him spirituality and companionship.
His father had already taught him how to read the Koran, but with the
Brotherhood he learned how to translate its teachings into practice,
aiming at the victory of Islam over the infidels. In the 1990s Abdel-
Samad took a job at the airport and, by coincidence, met a German
tourist who invited him to visit her in Augsburg. This opened the pos-
sibility to continue his studies in Germany. The two married; for her the
marriage meant qualifying for tax benefits for married couples, and for
him it meant acquiring a German passport. The relationship did not last
long, nevertheless Abdel-Samad’s study of political science at the uni-
versity of Augsburg was successful. His master’s thesis was about young
Muslims in Germany emerging from unconditional religiosity into
isolation, taking every opportunity to feel resentful and humiliated.
After one year of studies in Japan, Abdel-Samad wrote a doctoral dis-
sertation at the University of Erfurt on the portrayal of Jews in Egyptian
Schoolbooks. Later he accepted a job at Munich University researching
Jewish and Muslim history.
Evidently, his story is that of a tried and tested migrant, coming to

Europe to get a university education and to build up a more prosper-
ous and intellectually encouraging life. On another level, however, it
is a most personal story of sexual violence and serious psychological
disorder. Abdel-Samad provides private details about sexual abuse, the
beating up of his second German wife, his attempts to commit suicide.
The explanation for his out-of-control behaviour after having settled
in Germany lies in his youth and in the losing of his religious roots.
When he was four, Abdel-Samad was abused by a 15-year-old boy, and
had no one to confide in. He was raped again at the age of 11, this time
by a gang of older students. Again, he could not speak to anyone about
it, so as not to bring disgrace on himself and his family. His life was
shaped by a single thought: not to lose one’s honour.9 Later, in Cairo, he
himself almost abused his six-year-old cousin. Germany meant ‘cursed
freedom’, not knowing at all where the moral boundaries are. The con-
sequence was that he lost his grip on life. The diagnosis borderline or
post-traumatic stress syndrome was made, and Abdel-Samad got psy-
chiatric treatment. Eventually, the solution came from a year in Japan,
from living and working in a completely different, non-Western culture.
He married a Danish-Japanese woman, but after a while suffered from
depression and angst disorders again. Another psychiatric treatment
resulted in the writing down of his life story, which helped to grasp
what had happened and to overcome the fear. The book was published
both in Egypt and Germany and received with positive as well as very
negative reviews and discussion.
Edward W. Said, in the Reith lecture ‘Gods that always fail’, asks the
question, how far the intellectual should get involved, and what ‘gives
him the right to imagine that … early belief and later disenchantment
were so important?’ (Said, 1996, p. 113). This certainly is a relevant ques-
tion in the context of Abdel-Samad’s autobiography. His voice is sincere,
but the overload of private details also conveys that the autobiography
is more a therapeutic confession to understand a previous self, than
the writing of a public intellectual, who is supposed to show involve-
ment as well as detachment and general insight. Although intellectual
thinking has to be placed in the continuing history, as Said argues, and
thus in a specific situatedness, here the evidently courageous effort to
analyse one’s previous self, does not yet result in the understanding of
cultural conjunctures and schisms. There is so much personal frustra-
tion and grief in this autobiography that no escape is possible and not
much room is left for a distancing reflection. However, in the same year
in which the autobiography was published, Abdel-Samad also wrote an
intellectual analysis on the demise of the Islamic world. It is clear that

the two books have strong connections, and that the one could not
have been written without the other. The public intellectual has chosen
to put his private observations apart from a more general account on
the Islamic world. In the analysis of the decline of the Islamic world,
Abdel-Samad evidently transforms his personal experience in an author-
itative perspective on religious and political issues in North-Africa and
the Middle-East.
What, then, are Abdel-Samad’s main ideas in regard to this decline?
In Der Untergang der Islamischen Welt (2010b) Abdel-Samad claims that
the demise of Islamic culture is caused by the rigidness of religious
thinking, as well as by the fact that this petrified Islam has no defence
against consumerism, but just denies the phenomenon as such, while
in the West the cultural repertoires of Enlightenment and Humanism
provide a counter-statement. The consequence is a condition of schizo-
phrenia; while on the one hand the majority of people in the Islamic
state are fond of the instruments and products of modernity, they reject
the thoughts and ideas underneath. Another outcome is that what the
West interprets as an ongoing re-Islamisation in fact is the opposite, it is
the ‘curtain that has to hide the disappearance of religion’ (Ibid., p. 15).
The aggressive flaunting with Islamic symbols is nothing else than the
decline of religion and culture. The West only notices the fundamen-
talist excesses, but does not observe how the Islamic world is perma-
nently in defence, while many ordinary Muslims consider themselves
sacrificed in a huge Western master plan focused on a total control of
resources and holy places. On the other hand, Abdel-Samad claims, we
should realise that there is not one Islamic perspective, or one Islamic
world, since millions of people from Indonesia to Morocco consider
themselves Muslim with various and different accents, while Islam as
‘political idea has lost substance and offers no answers whatsoever to
the anger and violence in the world’ (Ibib., p. 24).
Abdel-Samad tries to find explanations for the current situation in
history. Following the logic of history, one would have expected that
the Islamic culture would have disappeared after the devastation of the
Ottoman Empire in the 1920s, when the idea of a ‘God state’ was swept
away by the construction of nationalist states. But the establishment of
the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, and the discovery of oil at the same
time prevented Islam from disappearing. Money, the politicisation
of Jihad (in first instance meant as the correction of personal failures
and passivity) and the flourishing of Wahabism pushed political Islam
forward again. Crucial in this respect is that from the perspective of
culture, science or architecture, nothing spectacular was established

anymore.
Abdel-Samad’s analysis is evidently based on the experiences of grow-
ing up in a village on the river Nile and in Cairo. He argues that Egypt
can be taken as a microcosmos and trendsetter of the Islamic world,
and he points out how the country responds to modernisation and
radicalisation. One of the striking examples on the situation in the cur-
rent Egypt, then, is about the pressure of the collective in regard to the
behaviour of female individuals:
I remember my aunt from Cairo visiting our village at the Nile thirty
years ago, wearing miniskirts and smoking on the street, which I
found cool. This upset nobody at the time. Today, her daughter is
completely veiled. My aunt, in the meantime also uniformed, looks
back at this period, while she prays God to excuse her for her big sin.
If a woman today dares to go through my village without a headscarf,
she has to prepare for molestation. In particular women take care of
not attracting too much attention (Ibid., pp. 82–3).10
The point is that neither Egypt nor other Islamic countries are able to
get along with modernisation processes, and that part of the resistance
against Western modernity has to do with the aversion towards their
colonial history as well as with a chronic feeling of resentment. Muslims
considering themselves part of a High Culture are disappointed to real-
ise that this culture does not establish a leading position in the world
anymore.
In the context of the argument on modernisation, an intriguing part
of the essay is about the consequences of the cartoon affaire in the
Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September 2005, when 12 cartoons
of Mohamed were published, causing rage in the Islamic world. One
hundred and fifty people were killed in the riots and protests all over
the globe. Abdel-Samad investigates the various reactions from pious
Muslims to unreligious Danish people shocked about the burning of the
Danish flag, and declares his own aversion of the cartoons, though at the
time he was not a devout Muslim anymore. He did travel to Denmark,
however, to interview Flemming Rose, the editor of the newspaper,
and the one responsible for publishing the cartoons. Abdel-Samad was
interested in his motivation. Fleming Rose appeared to be a young guy,
ready to talk and discuss, and not at all the ‘fundamentalist of Freedom
of Press’ as the German Minister Joschka Fisher characterised him.
Crucial to him is that the freedom of speech and press is defended in a
European context in which more and more taboos and red lines emerge,
leading to a climate of self-censorship. Rose argues that there are only
three boundaries in regard to this freedom: one should not incite to
murder, one should not scoff others by telling lies, and one should not
physically hurt a person. The idea of the cartoons was to test the public
sphere in Denmark, to explore if people were afraid to make fun of the
prophet − such as Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands had done − or if
they indeed were censoring themselves. Flemming Rose thus consid-
ers the publishing of the cartoons an act of investigative journalism,
the result being that indeed self-censorship is performed out of fear of
Islamism. And that this fear had a ground was proved by the enormous
outrageous violence of the responses. Abdel-Samad when looking back
at the interview, declares that he was impressed by the arguments of
Rose. He strived to get the interview published in an Egyptian newspa-
per, but it only appeared for one hour on an online site, and was then
taken off without any convincing explanation. Significantly, by inter-
viewing Femming Rose, and by trying to get the interview published
in Egypt, Abdel-Samad mediates between various public spheres and
bridges the gap of mutual respect and understanding in Europe and the
Middle East. He is a critical analyst of the one and the other society and
makes comparisons in order to understand the ideas and frustrations of
the common people.
The points made in The Decline of the Islamic World are further elabo-
rated in Krieg oder Frieden (2011) in which Abdel-Samad describes his
experiences on the Tahrir square in Cairo in January and February
2011, and discusses the role of Europe in regard to the democratisation
of the Middle East. He proposes a ‘Marshall plan’ for the Arabic coun-
tries stimulating economic development, safety and sustainability, and
in particular education, insisting that Europe should take up a role in
establishing fair trade with Egypt and Tunisia, while getting rid of its
weak policy regarding energy sources (oil) and dictatorship. The aging
Europe, Abdel-Samad argues, can make use of the energy and talents
of the young people in these countries, who are willing to participate
in democracy. A healthy middle class is crucial, since it would imply
an extension of the European market and could also open the gates
to Africa, the continent currently taken over by active Chinese people
developing infra-structures, but not taking care of the education of
young people.
Just like Enzensberger in Chapter 2 of this book, Abdel-Samad is
interested in the interconnection between media and democratisa-
tion. He considers digitalisation as the main drive regarding the new
transformations in Egypt. Although there is more prosperity in his

native country than in earlier times, mass consumption does not make
people more satisfied, on the contrary with the use of computer and
mobile phone, people get more information and become more politi-
cised. The media consumption of the mass has increased dramatically:
Internet, Facebook and Twitter, and transnational media like Al Jazeera
and Al Arabiya, have fuelled the revolution, although it was the com-
mon people who formed the majority of the demonstrators in the streets
of Cairo. In particular Al Jazeera was important in regard to the resist-
ance to the dictators in Egypt and Tunisia, its credo being that ‘there are
always two opinions’ (Abdel-Samad, 2011, p. 80). Al Jazeera, established
in 1996 by the emir of Qatar and financially supported by him with
30 million dollars a year, can be compared with CNN, and was the first
to recognise and to speak of ‘revolution’ in regard to the protests on the
Tahrir square. Al Jazeera and Al Arabya have shown the possibilities of a
new mediascape (Appadurai, 2008 [1996]) in the Middle East, yet, they
are still encapsulated in between money (oil dollars) and politics and are
not really free to report on what they consider important.
The most pivotal ideas in this book are on militant Islamism, the
explanation being that young individualised and dislocated people feel
estranged from the country they live in and do not see many personal
or political future perspectives. In this context, the new imaginary
Muslim identity that is advocated on the Internet is attractive, espe-
cially so because of its global reach and the crossing of borders. Where
the national state became weaker, such as in Afghanistan, Somalia or
Yemen, or where ethnic tensions were strong, such as in Nigeria, Sudan
and Iraq, the religious warriors became more powerful and attractive for
young Muslims. Abdel-Samad argues
Islamism provides clear answers, and a simple division of the world

in believers and non-believers. That offers orientation. Young
Muslims feel themselves in the protection of the Islamists as the
soldiers of God, and the vanguard of the revolution. (Ibid., p. 157)11
In most western analyses, however, the religious background of ter-

rorism is underestimated, while social and psychological motives are
emphasized. Yet, it is religion and belief that give the calculated political
action a mystic dimension and creates a wall between perpetrator and
dehumanised victim. To Samad it is clear that in the freed nation states,
the authorities have to stimulate a discussion on Holy texts. There is no
use in banning the Koran, the point is to discuss the creation of it, and
the historical context of the various parts. Only the relativisation of the
Koran as the word of God can make room for the enlightenment of the
Arabic world. This contextualising of the Koran is exactly what Abdel-
Samad himself has done in The Decline of the Islamic World (2010b) in
which he depicted how Mohamed was influenced by the monk Waraqa
and how Christendom and Islam were interconnected in the first period
in Mecca. When Mohamed moved to Medina, he became influenced
by Jewish religion, and Muslims from then on started to keep the fast
and to choose Jerusalem as direction of their prayers. Later Mohamed
banned alcohol and usury, mainly to devastate the shops of the Jews
(Abdel-Samad, 2010b, pp. 116–21). The Koran, Abdel-Samad empha-
sises, became the book that prohibited asking questions.
Ramadan and Yom Kippur put together
In 2010 Abdel-Samad accepted the invitation to participate in a satiri-

cal documentary television programme entitled Entweder Broder − Die
Deutschland-Safari, broadcast on the German television channel ARD.
The host of the programme12 was Henryk M. Broder (born 1946), a
writer and journalist for Der Spiegel and Die Welt, and the son of Polish
survivors of the Shoah. Broder came to Germany when he was 11 years
of age. In the programme he takes up the role of the analytical and
sometimes also cynical Jew, always looking for how phenomena have
become what they are and how counter perspectives are possible. He is
critical about Islamism and conscious of the anti-Semitism in today’s
Germany, but he is also allergic to institutionalised solutions and
rules.13 Abdel-Samad’s performance next to Broder’s emphasises their
differences and the shared aim: the programme is an endeavour to grasp
what Germany and Europe are today, and how the history and future
perspectives of the continent are related. Their appearance is dichoto-
mous: young versus old, black versus grey, thin versus fat, Muslim
versus Jew, Egyptian versus Polish background, seriousness versus self-
mockery. But at the end of their 30,000 kilometre journey, they have
become closer and more similar to each other; at least, as Abdel-Samad
observes, both of them have a weight of about 80 kilos.
In the programme consisting of 30-minute episodes broadcast late on
Sunday evenings in November and December (2010–12), Abdel-Samad
and Broder visit places all over Germany, from Aachen to Kassel, from
Wuppertal to Berlin. In driving criss-cross through the country, in hav-
ing interviews with ordinary citizens and politicians, and in discussing
their observations, they investigate the state of the art in Germany,
they do, so to say, ethnographic fieldwork and address many current

problems in a western multicultural society. The satirical frame of the
programme becomes clear when watching the vehicle they use: a Volvo
760 overloaded with religious, political and cultural symbols and ste-
reotypes. Next to a picture of Osama Bin Laden, for instance, there is a
garden gnome, the symbol of German Bürgerlichkeit, along with the Star
of David flag on Broder’s seat, plastic pigs and flowers, the image of a
catholic priest next to a curry Wurst and on top of the car a cartoon of
the prophet Mohamed by Kurt Westergaard. At the rear window of the
car is the slogan ‘Nette Onkels’ [Decent guys]. Furthermore, the men are
in the good company of Broder’s cute fox terrier, Wilma, who has some
lines at the opening of each episode, saying that ‘dogs are second rank
human beings anyway’ and that these two men think they are on the
road to serve Enlightenment while one of them aims to be the president
of Germany one day. Since dogs are considered impure by Muslims, this
encourages the question whether it is worse for Abdel-Samad to travel
with a Jew or with a dog in one car. In one scene Abdel-Samad even
cleans the dog, after she has relieved herself. Playing with stereotypes,
evidently, challenges as well as symbolises the political and religious
controversies in German society, and establishes the comical input of
the programme. Humour indeed is, as philosopher Simon Critchley
underscored, ‘what returns us to our locale, to a specific ethos which is
often identified with a particular people possessing a shared set of cus-
toms and characteristics’ (Critchley, 2002, p. 73).
Abdel-Samad and Broder illustrate and ridicule their own cultural and
religious background and localness, and celebrate their common experi-
ence as migrants in Germany, as well as their shared ‘Mediterranean ori-
gin’. Due to the cultural authority they both have, as credential writers,
journalist and historian, the two are allowed to crack jokes where others
no doubt would face a dismissal. Criticising the five-year-anniversary of
the Holocaust memorial while walking in a tombstone outfit, such as
Broder does, evidently is provocative and meant to rethink the circum-
stances of freedom and prosperity taken for granted by most German
people. The dirty jokes, ‘Eine Jude kommt selten allein’ or ‘Die toten
Juden sind gut integriert, bei den Lebenden hapert es’, are funny and
confusing at the same time.
As mentioned, the diversity of the topics discussed illustrates issues of
integration in late modern society. The first season of the programme14
focuses on freedom and religion and brings to the fore topics such as the
celebration of five years Berlin Holocaust memorial – ‘there are countries
in Europe envying us for such a monument’15 one of the speakers says,
and Broder obviously makes fun of such a statement −, the quasi-oriental

design of the Merkez Mosque in Duisburg, an interview with fully inte-
grated Turkish men who do not consider women free to make their own
choices on who to have sex with, an interview with the Danish Mohamed
cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, a visit to the monument of the First World
War in Verdun, an interview with the Iranian film maker Daryush
Shokof16 who directed the documentary movie ‘Iran Prison’ in which
images from the mass protests of the Iranian Presidential election of 2009
were interwoven with prison scenes showing the abuse of some of the
protesters, a meeting with a Berlin lady who occupies herself with cleaning
Nazi symbols and graffiti from buildings. The second season17 is, broadly
spoken, focused more on German institutions than on issues of integra-
tion, and discusses topics such as conspiracy theories on 9/11 and the anti-
Americanism of a Jewish playboy star, an interview with Islam scholar Udo
Steinbach on a terrace at the Wannsee, the welfare system and e-mobility,
energy houses in Freiburg (not affordable to migrants), the ‘poverty indus-
try’ in Berlin-Neuköln, the dictatorship of sustainability movements, and
the huge amount of work distribution by deacon and charity organisations
in Germany (as an unofficial and badly paid work system).
The topics discussed are most of all quite serious and complicated and
evoke opinion making. The protagonists, like Don Quixote and Sancho
Panza in their ongoing conversations, share pro and contra arguments
while driving in their pimped car from west to east Germany and vice
versa. In is in the punning dialogues that the humour and self-mockery
of the programme becomes explicit. Most of the time, Broder opens the
discussion by asking a question, and Abdel-Samad starts giving a serious
or silly answer, such as in the opening of the second season,
B: And how was it in Cairo without me?
A: Without you? Quiet and no annoyance.
B: Is that all? And have you done anything else?

A: A bit of strolling…
Pictures and images are shown of the Tahrir square in Cairo with the pro-
testers and Abdel-Samad in their midst, and observing them.
A: And what has Wilma [the dog] done all the time?18
So, the men drive through Germany, and in their simple conversation
a link is made to the revolution that took place in Egypt. Abdel-Samad
reported on the revolution officially in various German media, but here

he pretends to have just been playing the role of the flaneur. Many of
their conversations are like this one, bizarre but with a more serious
undertone at the same time, or to be more precise: pointing at serious
and complicated matters. To give another example, when Broder hides
himself in a papier-maché stela (gravestone) visiting the festivities for
the fifth anniversary of the Berlin Holocaust memorial,19 Abdel-Samad
thinks that this is too provocative, Broder on the contrary, asks why
it is not provocative that the name of Ahmadinejad (president of Iran
2005–13) is not mentioned, although he has recently declared the
‘destruction of the Jews’ a political aim. Abdel-Samad confronts Broder:
‘You have a problem, you are imprisoned in your own role, you must
somehow escape’20 and he tells him that when he does not accept the
role of the Jewish victim, he should also not bring the stele in.21 The
issue here, evidently, is: what gives one the right to ironize and mock
about the ideas and experiences of others, and when is, on the other
hand, self-mockery offensive to others. But the question addressed also
is: how can humour be therapeutic and critical at the same time.
To get an idea of the intrigues, the incongruities and layeredness of
the programme, let’s zoom in on one episode from the first series, in
which the specific problem addressed is the building of a huge mosque,
the ‘Miracle of Marxloh’, considered to be an indication for the integra-
tion of Muslims in German society and built with a 3.2 million euro
subsidy. Abdel-Samad and Broder plan to visit the Merkez mosque,
because they would like to understand why in Germany living Muslims
prefer to build mosques inspired by fairy-tale architecture. Why not
construct one using a typical Western architectural style? On their way
to Duisburg-Marxloh, we hear an up tempo recording of the music of
the German national anthem, Abdel-Samad observes that the suburb
is characterised by a high unemployment rate (20 per cent) and that
‘the social coldness’ jumps out of the windows. The Merkez mosque is
one of the biggest mosques in Germany and was opened in 2008 with
widespread media and political attention, since it was considered a ‘flag-
ship of integration’. The board of the mosque promised transparency
and declared that the building should function as a community centre
where people could meet and language courses could be offered. After
the opening, however, all courses for women, integration work and sup-
portive activities were stopped.
Abdel-Samad and Broder drive to the mosque to interview visitors and
practitioners. But shortly before they arrive, the interview is cancelled,
since the board has heard about the biography of Abdel-Samad and is
afraid of getting bad publicity. Abdel-Samad and Broder decide to take a

walk around the mosque anyway, but they are immediately approached
by a mosque representative, insinuating that they are just looking for
‘serious trouble’. In broken German he threatens to call the police if they
do not stop filming. Although the German law allows the film crew to
film in public space, they leave the property, while Abdel-Samad wishes
them ‘a happy integration!’. Abdel-Samad, evidently, has his doubts
whether this pompous mosque contributes anything at all to integration.
An ‘Ottoman palace’ does not stimulate integration as education would
do. He refers to the high unemployment rate in Marxloh and argues
that many people are not participating in the community at all. Broder
then brings into the discussion the role of the ‘indigenous people’, who
confirm that this kind of mosque is an indication of integration, while
they do not really care about the social problems of the migrants in this
area. German tolerance means sheer indifference. As mentioned, the pro-
gramme is funny and serious, mocking and critical, and is courageous in
stances made. Broder and Abdel-Samad performing the intellectual and
comic duo let us ‘see the familiar defamiliarised, the ordinary made extra-
ordinary and the real rendered surreal’ (Critchley, 2002, p. 10).
Most reviewers of Entweder Broder, Die Deutschland-Safari were quite
positive and considered it a ‘key to integration’. Michael Hanfeld
declares in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that the programme,
assembled of many short documentaries, shows a Germany that one
would not like to watch. But with humour it is acceptable, and in
particular so because humour provides a perspective into the abyss: it
affirms the civilizing power of modernity, everyone can distance him-
self from his background, and one culture should not eat the other.22
Clemens Haustein in the Frankfurter Rundschau praises the format of the
programme: an image of life in Germany is presented, due to the fact
that the participants in the conversation do not hide from the camera,
and when they talk to each other at a distance of ten metres, this goes
against all the laws of television, but it enhances the normality of the
conversations.23 Die Welt writes ‘the particular road-movie is a mix of
investigative journalism, black humour and entertaining occurrences,
in which Henryk and Samed fight over ordinary life. So intelligent was
German television never before’.24
To serve Enlightenment with humour
Abdel-Samad takes a particular position in the German public sphere

by participating in a satirical documentary and performing the role
of the Muslim counterpart of the Jewish ironist. As he declared about

his motives for participating: both his Muslim and left-leaning friends
had warned him, but that just convinced him to accept the invita-
tion.25 Evidently, Abdel-Samad does not like to be placed in a particular
group or class. His arguments, indeed, are neither typically right- nor
left-wing, neither conservative nor progressive, anti-religion or pro-
modernity. He cherishes the independent voice in debates on multicul-
turality and integration, without taking a static position. And just this,
it can be argued, reveals his message; having experienced himself what
the positive and negative consequences and opportunities of migra-
tion can be, Abdel-Samad underscores that one should be interested
in the complexity and interconnectedness of social and ethical issues.
Demagoguery is simplifying things, and can be observed both in funda-
mentalist Islamist arguments as in the words and phrases of people in
the West, such as those of the Türkish-German author Necla Kelek, who
considers the Islam guilty of all societal abuses.26 What is a constant
in Abdel-Samad’s argument is that people should accept every chance
to become educated, to speak the German language, in order to avoid
independence, unemployment and criminality. He observes that inte-
gration is not only a problem for those coming from the Third World,
but also for people coming from the East of Europe:
The East has showed me one thing: resistance to Integration is not in

the first place a cultural, but a structural problem. Not the religion,
but the social reality is decisive. In the East I met many East-Germans
and expatriates, who had to deal with the same problems as the
Turkish immigrants: language, unemployment, domestic violence
and distrust of democratic structures. A Syrian doctor is in many
ways better integrated in German society than many East-Germans.27
(2010a, p. 273)
Abdel-Samed is the evidence that the public intellectual in Europe today

is more than a man of letters, and that his participation in other media
underscores a performance and persona. ‘Public’ implies contributing to
the debate, challenging the general audience to think and reflect, and
bridging the gap between elite and popular culture. The television series
shows that the typecasting of the Jew versus the Muslim works well,
and certainly has a comic effect due to the play with stereotypes; Broder
the grumpy and cynical one, Abdel-Samad more modest and positive.
In their dialogues, they bring up multifaceted subjects and points of
view to underline that cultures are not watertight packages, they are
complex, changing, and inconsistent at times. The programme dem-

onstrates how German and European cultures transform, how migrants
bring in new cultures, and how natives have to respond to that.
This amounts to the question: what are the effects of the use of
humour in the programme in regard to Abdel-Samad’s intellectual
propositions? How to interconnect his serious essays and his role in
the satirical television programme? Or, to phrase it differently: how to
understand the programme as theatrical, that is: staged, constructed,
and at the same time how to understand the theatricality of Abdel-
Samad’s performances? Theatricality here implies ‘a communicative
effect that results from perceiving something as being theatre, stage,
make believe. Theatricality as communicative effect therefore does not
necessarily mean that what we see is staged, but that it is perceived as if
it were’ (Bleeker, 2009, p. 255). It is the effect of an address that makes
a viewer aware of his being implicated in what is seen. The related
concepts of theatre and theatricality, I argue, are relevant to grasp the
layeredness of the Entweder Broder programme: part of it definitely is
theatre, such as the Volvo they are driving, part is reality, such as when
ordinary people are interviewed. But theatricality, as a communicative
consequence, pops up many times: it is because of the seriousness of
the interviewees that the programme becomes satirical as well as comi-
cal. Theatre is the exaggeration, the play and feigning, theatricality is
the implication of the performance of others addressing us. We cannot
just distance ourselves because this is just a satire; the effect of the
television programme is that is makes us think, even when we realise
that in it things are often overdone. Taking the last episode of Entweder
Broder, die Europa-Safari as an example, will make my point hopefully
more clear.
In the autumn/winter 2012, the programme subject was altered; not
integration in Germany, but integration in Europe, and ‘the European
soul’ were explored. In four episodes28 the two protagonists drove
to Brussels, to parts of Eastern Europe, such as Broder’s city of birth
Katowice, and to Calabria in the south of Italy. Broder acts as the con-
sequent EU-sceptic, asking politicians if they know that the EU has
subsidised the tomb for Yasser Arafat, Abdel-Samad takes up the more
positive approach: he has risked much to come to Europe and settle
down there, and he pursues believing in Europe. Europe to him and
other refugees who escaped the rigid and dominant structures of fun-
damentalism, stands for ‘safety’ and ‘freedom’. But, obviously, there are
many practical and simple questions quite difficult to answer: ‘What are
the 25,000 EU-civil servants doing every day?’ and ‘Where does all the
subsidiary money go to?’ or ‘Why is the parliament moved every week

from Strasburg to Brussels’.
In the fourth, pivotal episode of this series, entitled ‘Europe extreme’,
Broder and Abdel-Samad travel to Iceland (the Volvo is left on the con-
tinent) and to Riace in the South of Italy. The introductory item is a
visit to a former ‘Jugend Werkhof’ in Saxony, in which youngsters and
children were imprisoned under the regime of the German Democratic
Republic (1949–90), while, as Broder explains, ‘we were protesting in
the West against imperialism’, not knowing that children were abused
in the East of Germany. The GDR was a dictatorship, although most of
the German people today do not agree on this and make it more pleas-
ant and innocent than it was. Abdel-Samad concludes that Europe has
too much history, which makes their journey overcomplicated. Broder
answers, that they will now travel to a country ‘without Jews, Muslims,
and Germans’.
So, the trip to Saxony is followed by a visit to Iceland, the only NATO
member without an army, as Broder says, and the eldest bourgeois
democracy in Europe. While discussing this, Broder wears a Viking-
helmet, and Abdel-Samad is covered in woollen shawl and beret – coming
from Africa he cannot stand the cold. This, evidently, is the theatre
frame again: they are playing with stereotypes and absurd details. But
the point is, that democracy is a serious European achievement, and
that Iceland since 930 AD has never experienced fascism or has been a
colonial power. 320,000 inhabitants are living there, just as much as in
Berlin-Neuköln. Back on the continent, and driving in the Volvo again,
Abdel-Samad tells about a young Egyptian couple he met in Krakau,
who told him what Europe means to them: freedom and safety. The
woman was threatened after she had put pictures of her naked breasts
on the Internet, the man got four years in prison because he was sen-
tenced for having offended Mohamed. They found shelter in Sweden
and Poland. They know what the soul of Europe is. Then, Abdel-Samad
tells Broder about Riace, a small village in Italy, that can be considered
the future model to Europe. They decide to visit the place. Broder first
complains that driving 2,000 kilometres is too much, Abdel-Samad
reminds him of the Jews travelling through the Sinai for 40 years, so
this trip is nothing compared to that. This punning dialogue, again, is
theatre, making fun of predictabilities.
Riace, then, is a small village of 1,800 inhabitants receiving yearly
about 300 refugees, who are allowed to stay there and get financial sup-
port from Brussels for one year. Life in this village, the Citta Futura as
it is called, seems wonderful: elderly people meet young families again,
schools can stay open, shops can deliver goods, the community flour-
ishes, and so on and so forth. Broder and Abdel-Samad walk through
the city, and interview the mayor, who is proud of the fantastic example
his city establishes. Abdel-Samad, who speaks Italian as well as Arabic
and thus is able to talk with natives and migrants − in fact he affirms
the role of the well-educated intellectual speaking many languages −
discovers the depressive counterpart of the mayor’s branding story; the
refugees do not know what to do each day and where to go after one
year, many of them have gone through traumatic experiences having
lost loved ones and family on the journey to Europe; one family trav-
elled for seven months from Somalia to the coast of Libya losing two
children; another woman with small children has lost her husband
and does not know where he is. The Italian natives are indeed toler-
ant but uninterested as well, and do not communicate at all with their
temporary villagers. The city looks agreeable, but the bitter reality of
this part of Europe – final station Europe − is that these people having
made the long and dangerous journey from Africa are offered no real
future perspectives. On the way back home, Abdel-Samad disappointed
from what they have seen, emphasises that one still ‘has to believe in
a narrative, even if it is unrealistic’. Broder, even more displeased with
what they have seen, affirms this grumpily; his parents kept on believ-
ing in life when they were in the concentration camps. With Broder’s
‘L’Chaim, Auf das Leben!’ the episode on Europe ends.
Significantly, the item on Riace is not comical or for that matter pro-
vocative at all, in fact it is confronting and moving journalism, bringing
both the Italian natives and asylum seekers nearby, and underscoring
the lack of perspective offered to the migrants, and the lack of power
regarding the policy makers in Brussels. Migrants are redeemed for one
year and left on their own afterwards. This razor sharp analysis in this
episode of the Europa-Safari brings us back to the question how Abdel-
Samad interconnects rational ideas and satirical act, and shows how
he fluently combines the different roles. In the frame of theatre and
funny attributes, serious subjects are brought forward, but the tone of
the programme is never tiresome or pedantic. Theatricality is the con-
sequence, implying that the viewer notices responsibility or solidarity.
The programme demonstrates that the consolation of humour comes
from acknowledging that this is the only Europe, and, imperfect as it
is and we are, it is only here that we can make a difference (Critchley,
2002, p. 17). The programme showcases that comic rationality exists,
that humour is a form of sensus communis (common sense) and pos-
sesses reasonableness, because it is shared. Abdel-Samad and Broder, in
using the old time format of the comic duo, develop ideas on Europe
and share arguments, as diverse as the venues they visit. Broder’s raillery
is a posture, just as is Abdel-Samad’s modest matter-of-factness, but the
idea underneath these played positions is that Europe is worth thinking
about and needs intellectual input.
Every episode starts with the dog introducing the protagonists as
men being on the road to serve Enlightenment. The final question
of this chapter, then, is what Enlightenment means. In first instance,
the humorous perspective of the television programme is dominant:
Broder and Abdel-Samad use the icons of three religions to underline
similarities and differences, to entertain by exaggeration, and to stimu-
late people to think about the society they live in. Humour, so to say,
is the counterstrategy to critique German culture and European politi-
cal disillusionment. Humour is what enlightened men use to engage
people in conflicting societal issues. So, humour and enlightenment are
interconnected here. Enlightenment is the idea of rational power and
individualism, and in that sense very European, but as Abdel-Samad
noticed in his autobiography: ‘I was surprised how many people in the
seemingly enlightened Germany were searching for one or the other
form of God’ (2010a, p. 230).29 Here enlightened means the opposite of
spirituality. In Abdel-Samad’s autobiography, becoming unreligious was
the biggest difficulty in his life. Analysing his work, it can be argued,
that Enlightenment is considered a typical European achievement, but
is also something that leads to a bias, and that fails to address a more
spiritual part of the human nature. And that brings us to an intriguing
quote by Michel Foucault explaining what Enlightenment is about:
When in 1784 Kant asked, Was heisst Aufklärung?, he meant, What’s

going on right now? What’s happening to us? What is this world,
this period, this precise moment in which we are living? Or in other
words: What are we? As Aufklärer, as part of the Enlightenment?
Compare this with the Cartesian question: Who am I? I, as a unique
but universal and unhistorical subject? I, for Descartes, is everyone,
anywhere at any moment? But Kant asks something else: What are
we? in a very precise moment of history. Kant’s question appears as an
analysis of both us and our present. (cited from Sloterdijk, 2012, p. XI)
The typical German Enlightenment, in the Kantian sense, that is,

implies that one rethinks his position in the world. It means knowing
where one comes from and realising that perspectives are bound to cir-
cumstances, and thus can change. Freedom is based on not believing in
absolute truths, is Abdel-Samad’s credo, as I mentioned in the beginning

of this chapter. Turning the truth upside down, can be clarifying. The
public intellectual, thus, has a huge responsibility in not only sharing
arguments, but also in demonstrating the backside of these, the coun-
terarguments, the false statements wiped under the carpet. The public
intellectual can be the gadfly annoying the systematic thinker. This
finally brings us back to one of the first episodes of the Deutschland-
Safari in which Broder and Abdel-Samad pay a visit to Dachau. Broders’s
mother was in a concentration camp, and Abdel-Samad is impressed by
‘diesen Ort des Grauens’. The men discuss the slogan ‘Arbeit macht frei’
and Broder claims that it is a sound statement, were it not invented by
the Nazi’s. Abdel-Samad mocks that not working would really mean
freedom, as such establishing his Mediterranean character (laziness).
Then they go to the restaurant to have lunch, and afterwards in the
Volvo again, Broder remarks ‘Ich habe wieder zo viel gegessen. Das mag
nie wieder passieren’ [I have eaten too much again. That should never
happen again] and shocks Abdel-Samad. It is this turning upside down
of a gruesome truth, this Nietzschean transvaluation of values, which
again marks the theatricality: it is the public that has to response to
the words spoken by the intellectuals. Dachau, the Horst Wessel Lied,
the NPD (National Democratic Party Germany) are still the reality in
Europe today.
8
Popular Fiction
Elif Shafak (1971)
In this final chapter the work and public performances of internationally

celebrated Turkish author Elif Shafak are discussed. In her novels
she addresses historically and culturally charged issues such as the
Armenian genocide, the ideology of honour, the roles women have
to fulfil, and the spiritual tradition of Sufi. Shafak, currently living in
Istanbul and London, has a celebrity status on Twitter with 1.7 million
followers. Moreover, she writes blogs on The Guardian in which she
explains Turkish politics to a European public. She performs public
lectures and interviews; her TED talk was viewed 1.5 million times.
Shafak is considered to speak particularly on behalf of women, though
she has brought together various publics in the interconnection of
popular fiction and complicated societal issues. This chapter discusses
the specific role of the public intellectual as the writer of immensely
popular novels building bridges between elite intellectual perspectives
and the opinions of ordinary readers.
I believe it’s possible to have multiple, flowing belong-

ings, instead of a singular, solid identity. I am an
Istanbulite, for instance, and I am also a Londoner.
I am from the Mediterranean, the Middle East, the
Balkans, Asia Minor, and from Europe. Inside my soul
reside stories from the East and stories from the West,
and I don’t know exactly where the boundary lies.
I feel attached to cultures, cities, peoples, always plural.
There is a strong local element in my novels, and
at the same time, a strong global element. To me these
things are not mutually exclusive. They can co-exist.
(Elif Shafak)1
160
Popular Fiction: Shafak 161
The public lecture of a novelist
A beautiful woman with long blondish hair, dressed in a simple black

outfit speaks before an audience for almost 20 minutes in a soft but
clear voice without looking at an autocue or reading from a tablet or
paper. She impresses by the plainness of her story – of a girl growing
up between a rational westernised mother and spiritual oriental grand-
mother – and the clearness of the argument that fiction is a transcen-
dental journey into the lives of others. It is July 2010, and Elif Shafak,
‘Turkey’s most famous female writer’2 delivers a TED talk in Oxford
entitled ‘The politics of fiction’. Shafak, born in Strasbourg, and raised
in several countries as the daughter of a diplomat, explains that having
grown up in between the West and the East motivated her to write about
themes of identity, cosmopolitanism, migration and trans-nationalism.
She rejects the label ‘multicultural literature’ as a melting pot of all these
themes, and argues that writers are too easily categorised: ‘if you’re a
woman writer from the Muslim world, like me, then you are expected
to write the stories of Muslim women and, preferably, the unhappy sto-
ries of unhappy Muslim women’.3 A Turkish female author is expected
to write informative, poignant and characteristic stories and to leave
the experimental and avant-garde writing to her Western colleagues.
Shafak objects to this determination and emphasises that she does not
feel comfortable in a box, or circle for that matter, closed off and dried
up. She explains that elusive space and changeability is what writers
and artists need most.
Shafak’s challenging TED talk underscores the potential of literature
as a journey into other lives and cultures, and this is what her idea on
‘the politics of fiction’ is about. Fiction is the provider of alternative
stories and points of view. Fiction demonstrates how mental walls can
be torn down. The Turkish author, however, is not only bound to the
politics of fiction, that is, the potential and power of imaginary litera-
ture, but also to ‘real’ politics. This is what Shafak herself experienced
when she was prosecuted under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal code.
In her TED talk she explains,
I was put on trial in 2005 for the words my fictional characters uttered
in a novel. I had intended to write a constructive, multi-layered
novel about an Armenian and a Turkish family through the eyes
of women. My micro story became a macro issue when I was pros-
ecuted. Some people criticised, others praised me for writing about
the Turkish-Armenian conflict. But there were times when I wanted
to remind both sides that this was fiction. It was just a story. And
when I say, ‘just a story,’ I’m not trying to belittle my work. I want
to love and celebrate fiction for what it is, not as a means to an end.4
Shafak was tried in court for insulting Turkishness through her novel
The Bastard of Istanbul (2006), in which one of the main protagonists
characterises the Armenian issue as ‘genocide’ and the Turkish soldiers
as ‘butchers’. The court, then, took the words of an imaginary character
as if they were spoken in reality. According to Georg F. Simet (2012),
intellectuals are seen by the Turkish state in principle as suspicious,
left wing and natural enemies. Not only Shafak, but many other writ-
ers as well, such as the Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink and
novelist and Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, were around the same
time accused of having insulted the Turkish identity. Dink had written
columns on the topic of Turkish nationalism in the bilingual newspa-
per Agos and was tried several times, lastly on 12 July 2006, when he
was given a half year suspended prison sentence. Pamuk was accused
because he had said in an interview in the Swiss Das Magazin from
February 2005 that the Turks are responsible for the death of 30,000
Kurds and a million Armenians (Simet, 2012, p. 89).5
Significantly, the case against Shafak was a case against fiction. She
was prosecuted for words uttered in a novel by an imaginary spokes-
person. Due to the international condemnation of her prosecution,
however, the charges were dropped. Those against Pamuk were dropped
as well, seemingly because of the pressure of members of the European
Parliament and the International PEN, an international association
of writers campaigning for freedom of expression worldwide. Pamuk
received the Nobel Prize in 2006, and the decision of the Nobel Prize
Committee to honour him with the prize undoubtedly was politically
motivated, in that they were not only honouring his novels but also his
taking a stand as a public intellectual against the government line and
official Turkish historiography.6 Hrant Dink was not so lucky. In January
2007 a 17-year-old boy, who might have been manipulated by members
of an ultranationalist group, murdered him. The pro-government media
published photos and a video of the young murderer, who shortly after
the assassination posed with security officials. At the same time people
gathered at Taksim square in Istanbul to condemn the death, shouting
‘We are all Armenians!’ (Ibid., 2012). Shafak declared in an interview
in February 2007 that she considered Dink’s funeral a poignant, mov-
ing experience for hundreds of thousands of people in Turkey. In some
ways, she claimed, the funeral was ‘a healing that united people of all
walks of life, ideologies and ethnicities, and showed the whole society
and the world that we can mourn together’ (Skafidas, 2007).7
Hence, pointing at the politics of fiction the TED lecture makes a
double statement: fiction stands on its own in building an alternative
world – or a world of alternatives – and in bringing closer other people
and cultures, and the author of fiction is responsible for her writing
and for the words spoken in the novel, and takes the risk to be charged
for these in a nationalist political context. The politics of fiction leads
inevitably to the political conjuncture outside fiction, and that means
that politics and literature are inextricably linked. That this situation
has not changed today is illustrated by a headline in The Guardian
from December 2014 stating ‘Turkish novelists Orhan Pamuk and Elif
Shafak accused of being Western stooges by pro-government press’.8
Pro-Erdogan newspapers have written that high-profile novelists are
part of an ‘international literature lobby’ recruited by western powers
to criticise Turkey’s government, the bizarre claim being that a literature
lobby selects a few authors from each country and uses them to attack
the government. Jo Glanville, director of English Pen, commented: ‘It’s
very obviously a desperate attempt to undermine their [Pamuk’s and
Shafak’s] credibility and their influence, by saying they are just mouth-
pieces, not independent intellectuals’.
The possibilities and consequences of performing the role of the
writer of fiction and that of the independent public intellectual are
considered in this chapter, in particular in the context of Turkey as it is
situated on the edge of Europe, and, so it seems, on the edge of freedom
of speech. As Shafak stated in the interview from 2007, writers are not
always intellectuals, but they have to be in Turkey where the literary
world is so politicised and polarised that one always ends up talking
politics. She argues that Turkish writers have to face a new challenge:
Are you going to withdraw into a safe space of your imagination and
produce your work from there, or are you going to train yourself to
become a public intellectual? The general setting pushes you in the
latter direction. A writer who wants to live the life of a hermit and
solely write novels cannot cope with this challenge. (Ibid, p. 30)9
To Shafak the roles of literary writer and public intellectual are intri-
cately connected, since politics permeates the novel, and literary char-
acters can influence the audience with regard to certain political issues.
Shafak focuses on issues of female identity, history, politics and spir-
ituality in her popular fiction, that is, a form of fiction that is accessible
and open to a wide readership often considered as a middle- or low-

brow audience. Popular fiction, however, should not be equalised with
sub-literature, or with the opposite of ‘high Literature’ – with a capital
L – and as such as less ambiguous, ironic and complex. I take sides with
Michael Butter (2010), who has argued that popular fictional texts are
complex in their own way and caught between cultural and literary
studies. Cultural studies are interested more in the textuality of con-
temporary phenomena such as film, television and magazines than in
the close reading of actual texts, while literary studies are blinded by
the ‘modernist or New Critical bias’, stressing that literature ‘should be
both subversive in terms of content and innovative in terms of form; it
should be anti-mimetic, ambivalent, and complex – and therefore dif-
ficult to understand’ (Butter, 2010, p. 207). Butter proposes to get rid of
the term ‘popular’ since it could regard texts that ‘are commercially suc-
cessful, texts that are written in order to be commercially successful but
aren’t necessarily, texts produced and consumed in a specific fashion,
or a combination of all this, or something else entirely’ (Ibid., p. 212).
I agree that we should get rid of the binaries of high vs. low, subversive
vs. affirmative, conservative vs. progressive, influential vs. negligible
and so on, but the terms ‘popular fiction’ as such could also be taken
as sobriquet, something that in fact encapsulates new opportunities
regarding the interrelationship of readers, text and author.
It could be argued, then, that Shafak in her popular novels both
adapts to and counters the dominant discourses in Turkey as well as
in the western world, and offers changeable perspectives to confront
on the one side the hedonist and consumer reality in which many
Western European readers are living today, and on the other side the
polarised, patriarchal and nationalist reality in Turkey. The public
intellectual as popular fiction author demonstrates alternative ideas
and stances without pursuing the (post)modern position of subversion
(Žižek 2013).10 This could also be connected to the fact that Shafak,
evidently, apart from implementing artistic strategies, also deals in a
very clever way with marketing and communication strategies. As a
best-seller author she encourages feedback from readers, and exposes
faits divers regarding her work and persona on social media such as
Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. This chapter discusses these diverse
activities and strategies, by focusing first on her autobiographical essay,
Black Milk, and then on two novels, Honour (2012) and The Architect’s
Apprentice (2014), Furthermore, blogs Shafak wrote for The Guardian,
and tweets from her Twitter account will be examined. In the conclu-
sive segment it is argued that being apolitical as a Turkish author of
popular fiction is a non-position from the perspective of public intel-

lectual responsibility.
Contesting identities
Before scrutinising her essay, let me briefly recapitulate some bio-

graphical facts. Elif Shafak was born in Strasbourg, France, in 1971. Her
divorced mother became a diplomat and they moved to Madrid, Jordan
and Ankara. Shafak holds a Masters degree in Gender and Women
Studies and graduated in International Relations at the Middle East
Technical University in Ankara with a thesis on Islamic mysticism and
the circular understanding of time. She held several teaching positions
in the United States in political science and women studies, she has
been writer in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin,
and has published popular novels such as: The Saint of Incipient Identities
(2004), The Bastard of Istanbul (2006), The Gaze (2006), The Forty Rules
of Love (2010), Honour (2012) and The Architect’s Apprentice (2014).
Shafak writes both in Turkish and English, interconnecting Western and
Eastern traditions of storytelling, and themes of multiculturalism and
cosmopolitan identity. Her books have been published in more than
40 countries and she has been awarded with many prizes including the
French honorary distinction of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.11
Today Shafak lives alternately in London and Istanbul.
Her academic credentials as well as the nomadic life she has led, have
automatically acquainted Shafak with different perspectives, stances
and ideologies, and established as a matter of course her position as a
public intellectual, who is detached and informed, contemplative and
curious. The public intellectual is concerned with conducts of cultural
translation and mediation, and the popularisation of ideas, aimed at
a wide outreach. As mentioned in Chapter 1 of this book, the public
intellectual, and Shafak in particular, addresses an audience beyond the
intellectual peers (Baert and Shipman, 2013). Interestingly, Shafak’s per-
formance as an author of popular fiction is aimed at reaching a broad
public, in particular a young and female one, while on the other hand
her columns and blogs address an audience with an interest in political
issues. Typically, women as well as political topics subsequently become
interconnected and blurred, making Shafak’s performances ambivalent
and singular, as we can observe in the intriguing essay Black Milk, On
Writing, Motherhood, and the Harem Within (2007b).
Shafak wrote this personal essay on authorship and identity after
giving birth to a daughter in September 2006 – during her pregnancy
she was tried in court for having offended Turkish identity. The writer
experienced a strong post-partum depression for a period of eight
months, and in the essay tries to find out what the reasons and con-
sequences were of this breakdown. The essay at a first level, tells the
story of a strong, independent internationally oriented woman, a writer
and scholar teaching at the American Mount Holyoke College, who in
her mid-thirties gets stuck when she is confronted with the birth of
her child and the subsequent settlement. On another level, the essay
is an investigation into the ideas on motherhood and authorship of
well-known women writers such as Anaïs Nin, Virginia Woolf, Simone
de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Zelda Fitzgerald, Ayn Rand, Sandra Cisneros,
Doris Lessing, Marguerite Duras. And on yet another level, the essay
opens to a conversation with the inner voices of Shafak imagined as
six tiny finger-women, each of whom represents a different version
of the author. These six Thumbelinas have specific names and conse-
quently identities: Miss Highbrowed Cynic, Dame Dervish, Little Miss
Practice, Milady Ambitious Chekhovian, Blue Belle Bovary and Mama
Rice Pudding. Together they form a ‘Choir of Discordant Voices’, each
of them claiming to be the real Shafak. As she explains,
They make my life miserable and yet I don’t know how to live
without them. They can come out or stay put as they like. Each has
declared a different corner of my soul her residence. I cannot men-
tion them to anyone. If I did they would have me institutionalized
for schizophrenia. But isn’t the personality schizophrenic by defini-
tion? (2007b, p. 29).
The little dolls as the imagination and personification of inner voices –

the some who are me – stand for the different aspects of Shafak’s ‘per-
sonality under construction’ (Ibid., p. 94): one is the real academic, the
other is spiritual, one is practical and another is the realist writer. The
most complicated and relatively new versions of Shafak’s identity are
evidently Mama Rice Pudding (a dominant mother figure) and Blue Bell
Bovary, the hedonist criticising the ‘contemplative-writer pose’ (Ibid.,
p. 159). The six voices quarrel about how to keep the balance between
heart and brain and how to establish a democracy in which all voices
are equally represented. The allegory of the six tiny women is disturb-
ing, because of the fact that the women figures are stereotypes convey-
ing cultural information in a condensed form. The effect of their sudden
silence, due to the post-partum depression Shafak is suffering from, is a
very effective image. The depression is depicted as being closed off and
losing grip on one’s life, once the inner struggle and thus the creativity
is silenced,
I didn’t know anymore how much of my depression was due to hor-

mones or outside forces, how much of it was self-imposed or cultur-
ally imposed. Depressions happen to us against our will and without
our knowledge, but then, slowly and furtively, they may turn into
a river in which we willingly paddle. … I couldn’t write for eight
months. (Ibid., pp. 249–50)
The novelist needs a room of her own, as Virginia Woolf claimed, while
the mother has to leave open all doors and windows and does not even
have a secret corner for herself. Shafak examines all clichés about moth-
erhood, as well as about artistic talent and intellectualism in order to
understand and gauge her situation. When scrutinising the biographies
of other writers, she underlines the various typical aspects of female
life, but the conclusive statement at the end of all the research and self-
observation is, that her generation has lost some valuable information
that still was available for the generation of her grandmother, ‘that at
different stages in her life a woman could need, would need, the help
of her sisters, blood or not’ (Ibid., p. 252).
Disturbingly, the two dominant ideas women believe in today, are
first that motherhood is sacred, this belief being dominant in patri-
archal Turkey, and second that the modern woman has to be a super-
woman fluently combining a career and children, this idea being typical
of western societies. The message of Shafak’s self-analysis, then, is that
these codes and stereotypes have to be transformed into new ways of
living, some voices should not be favoured at the expense of others.
The writer affirms that the experience of motherhood is different for
each generation, and that the adjustment to it is harder for women with
intellectual and professional aspirations. In an interview she explains,
Women like my grandmother were, perhaps, better prepared for

motherhood in some ways. Her generation would protect new moth-
ers from jinn [a spirit in Muslim belief who could assume animal or
human form] by not leaving them alone for a moment in the first
month. For my mother’s generation, it was harder. There was no
room in their mental framework for the ups and downs. For my gen-
eration, too, motherhood has to be perfect.12
Black Milk is an analysis of motherhood and female authorship, and of

the differences between identities and the poses expected from women
in specific situations. The essay fits seamlessly into the context of an
oeuvre built on popular fiction, while it is serious and funny, light and
ironical, affirmative and thought provoking at the same time. It is a
witty self-portrait and an analysis of contemporary stereotypes and
roles. By bringing in the cartoon figures as inner voices, the author chal-
lenges the expectations in regard to the rational argument, the logos, as
such indeed popularising the essay-genre, and providing a new perspec-
tive on styles and strategies of public intellectual writing.
Significantly, the idea of ‘several voices in me’ and of a multiple
identity, is discussed by other (male) writers as well, from the extreme
and most canonised form of the great modernist Portuguese writer
Fernando Pessoa’s poetic heteronyms, inventing the voices of the classi-
cist Ricardo Reis, the shepherd Alberto Caeiro, the world traveller Alvaro
de Campos, or the assistant bookkeeper Bernardo Soares,13 to the less
well-known imagination of ‘the men in me’ from Dutch writer Alfred
Kossmann.14 In The Book of Disquiet Pessoa wrote:
Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves. So that the

self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who
suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are
many species of people who think and feel in different ways. At this
very moment, jotting down these impressions during a break that’s
excusable because today there’s not much work, I’m the one who is
attentively writing them (Pessoa, 2001, pp. 327–8).
In absence of a stable, centred ego, as the rational subjectivity of western

modernity, Pessoa just like Shafak, points at a remake of the Descartian
‘Cogito ergo sum’ into ‘We think, therefore we are’, and sometimes,
in a depression, even ‘They think, therefore they are’ (Zenith, 2001).
Disconnection and estrangement, or even schizophrenia, as Shafak
argues, are the conditions and consequences of being a writer in the
modern age and creating an imaginary world. Pessoa invented complete
biographies for his heteronyms, while Shafak has very detailed fantasies
in regard to how her others behave, how they are dressed, and how
they live and talk. This can be illustrated with the detailed description
of Little Miss Practical,
She is the side of me who has great common sense and even greater
pragmatism. … She is four and a half inches tall and weighs barely
thirteen ounces. She wears casual, comfortable clothing: a breezy

beige shirt, red bone-framed glasses and a pair of brown linen pants
with lots of pockets to keep everything at hand. On her feet are
leather sandals; her dark blond hair is cut short so that it doesn’t
need extra styling. Washing (shampoo and conditioner all in one) is
good enough. Drying her hair would be one step too many. (Shafak,
2007b, p. 47)
What makes this passage worth quoting, is not only the details of
clothing and lifestyle which are meticulous and perhaps overdone in
the context of an essay, but the illustration of the fact that Shafak plays
with fantasy in plain language in order to construct a precise image and
to invite her readers to imagine this little character. There is a strong
identification between author, characters and readers. Shafak has estab-
lished a large and devoted readership. ‘If people like your novels in
Turkey, they take you into their hearts’ she explains in The Guardian,
‘My readers write to me about their personal lives: they invite me to
their weddings; to share their most intimate joys and sorrows. I have
a very strong connection with my readers. It is rewarding and very
humbling.15
Evidently, the double twist in regard to Shafak’s Black Milk is that
intellectual and popular culture features overlap and counter each
other. It could be argued, that the charming cartoonist figures as alter
egos are superficial, but they are also akin to Pessoa’s modernist het-
eronyms; that the statements on motherhood have a emancipatory
aim and bridge women issues in the West and East as well, but are also
stereotypical and thus ineffective. The point I would like to underscore
is, that Shafak in this essay encapsulates post-feminist discourses. The
text challenges the readers to not immediately accept what they think
they read. It was Angela McRobbie (2008) who described post-feminism
as a process by which the feminist gains of the 1970s and 1980s were
undermined. McRobbie discussed the very popular Bridget Jones figure,
The infectious girlishness of Bridget Jones produces a generational

logic which is distinctly post-feminist. Despite feminism, Bridget
wants to pursue dreams of romance, find a suitable husband, get
married and have children. What she fears most is ending up as a
‘spinster’. … The film celebrates a kind of scatterbrain and endear-
ing femininity, as though it is something that has been lost. Thank
goodness, the film seems to be saying, that old-fashioned femininity
can be retrieved. Post-feminism in this context seems to mean gently
chiding the feminist past, while also retrieving and reinstating some
palatable elements, in this case sexual freedom, the right to drink,
smoke, have fun in the city, and be economically independent.
(McRobbie, 2009, p. 12)
Shafak’s essay shows a similar disturbing image of femininity, self-

development and cosmopolitan freedom. But where the girlish Bridget
Jones figure fears the loneliness, and the stigma of remaining single,
Shafak in her intellectual autonomy is overwhelmed by the fact that
she suddenly has a partner and becomes a mother, and subsequently is
afraid to lose the creativity of authorship. Realising that the generation
of her grandmother provided a more supportive community, she feels
unsure about how to cope with all the different roles, identities and
spaces. To envisage this feeling of uncertainty she creates the imaginary
community of Thumbelinas who represent her inner voices, relativising
as such the burden of modern self-management and contrasting desires
and endeavours. The result is that Shafak in revealing her inner doubts
and strengths is self-mocking and self-disparaging, that is, positions her-
self as an ironist intellectual. And at the same time, she negotiates the
established conventions of contemporary motherhood and intellectual
independence, showing that beyond feminism, some issues still are not
straightened out. It is not clear whether in the metaphor of black milk
she underlines an intellectual link to the tragic ‘schwarze Milch’ meta-
phor that the Jewish poet Paul Celan created in his ‘Todes fuge’. But the
metaphor of milk as ink certainly has traumatic resonances.
Michel de Montaigne coined the notion essai, positioning his writ-
ing against the systematic philosophical text. Three typical features of
Montaigne’s essay can be stressed: the distrust of final judgements and
the resistance towards closure of the text; the attention to physical influ-
ences on thinking and writing (Montaigne’s suffering of kidney stones
reappears in his work again and again); and the self-presence in the text,
which can be considered ‘recordings of the thoughts of a particular man
living a particular life’.16 The essay is a project of self-portraiture (Conley
1990). What we see in Montaigne, writes philosopher Simon Critchley, ‘is
something utterly modern: an attempt to write in such a way that cap-
tures and evokes the wanderings of the mind, its digressions, its assertions
and its hesitations’.17 Montaigne strives to formulate a logical response to
the inconsistent world surrounding him. This response is constructed in
the writing: writing implies the examination of a certain phenomenon
and the self.
Black Milk can be considered the late-modern version of the

Montaignean essay. Shafak investigates the construction and trans-
formation of identity and affirms her double role as an author of
popular fiction and a female public intellectual. She focuses on issues
concerning women and uses images and stereotypes that would not be
misplaced in an entertaining culture genre, but the drive is to tackle
serious issues concerning well-educated women today. This is not
a rational discourse, but in the combination of the straightforward
language and recognisable characters, the essay does make an interest-
ing point about how the public intellectual as a woman writer has to
address a female readership that is less-well educated than she herself.
In the discussion of the stereotypical women roles the multiple self-
identity is negotiated, and in a sense the essay then also moves toward
the genre of self-help-book. In the introduction to the essay, indeed,
Shafak promises to take the readers on a journey into ‘the Valley of
Babies’ and ‘the Valley of Books’. And she is clear about the public
she addresses,
This book was written not only for women who may have shared, or
will share, a similar depression but also for anyone – man or woman,
single or married, parent or childless, writer or reader – who finds it
difficult, at times, to balance the multiplicity of roles and responsi-
bilities in their lives. (2007b, p. xii)
Inspired by Sufism, the esoteric dimension of Islam, Shafak believes that

being human means ‘to live with an orchestra of conflicting voices and
mixed emotions’ (Ibid., p. xii) and that is the motivation for writing this
hybrid essay, as the amalgamation of an argument on motherhood, a
self-analysis, a therapeutic ‘help-book’ and an entertaining story. It can
be argued, that in regard to this essay the border between intellectual
commentary and popular non-fiction has become fluid.18 The essay
brings into mind the statement ‘Du musst dein Leben ändern’ (You
must change your life) made by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke in the 1907
poem ‘Archaïscher Torso Apollos’, and used by the German philosopher
Peter Sloterdijk (2013 [2009]) in an intellectual analysis of our time and
culture. Shafak is certainly not a philosopher like Sloterdijk, but her
ideas about (re)making and changing the self are just as typical of the
human being in late-modern society. The point is, that the ‘helpers’ of
the help-books, take up a role as educator, a role that in particular also
is performed by this public intellectual.
The public intellectual on social media
In her essay Shafak popularises thoughts and stances, and discusses

social and personal dilemmas while writing in a plain style and con-
sciously (re)creating an authorial personality. The analytic as well as
affective persona constructed in Black Milk is supported by Shafak’s
presence on online media, her blogs in The Guardian can be considered
intellectual whereas her presence on social media mixes the intellectual
and emphatical. Her well-updated official website – in an English and
Turkish version19 – offers information on her biography, books, reviews,
articles and interviews. In addition, there are links to her Pinterest,
Twitter and Facebook accounts confirming the self-branding of the
author, and to blogs and articles in several international media, con-
firming her cultural authority. Facebook (her account reports almost
2 million likes) and in particular Pinterest are used by Shafak to create
a context to her novels, accentuating her image as novelist, Twitter
on the contrary is more supportive with regard to her role as public
intellectual, since there she communicates more political and social
statements. Shafak, then, is aware of the utility of social media regard-
ing information exchange, debating, promotion and support purposes
(Gunter, 2009).
If we have a look at Pinterest20 for instance, a website for sharing
images and videos used for the promotion of one’s activities and arte-
facts, we observe that Shafak created 31 so called ‘mood-boards’ bring-
ing together images taken from the Internet or made by herself. The
boards focus on various themes, such as ‘My books in Turkish’, ‘People
I work with’, ‘Visuals from my books’, ‘My photos’ (official writer por-
traits taken on various occasions), ‘Women who inspire me’, ‘Meeting
the readers’ and so on, all boards giving information on Shafak’s author-
ship. On the mood-board ‘Philosophers and poets who inspire me’
there are 27 ‘pins’ (uploaded pictures) of (male) philosophers such as
Bakhtin, Cioran, Foucault, Habermas, Sennett, Gramsci, Benjamin and
two Eastern ones: Rumi and Omer Hayyam. The mood-board ‘Books I
wish I had written’ provides an insight in Shafak’s poetics, as she shows
the covers of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s, One Hundred Years of Solitude,
Michael Cunningham’s, The Hours, Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s, The Shadow
of the Wind, Rohinton Mistry’s, A Fine Balance, and so on. All these
bestsellers can be considered page-turners in which spectacular – and
more than once mystical – events are narrated, producing colourful
characters, strange and local details, and shocking plots. Next to these
work-related mood-boards there are more lifestyle-like ones such as
‘Cities dear to my heart’, ‘Life is full of magic’, ‘My terrible handwriting’

or ‘Irrational loves’ on which there is an image of ‘black dresses’ that
could fit as well in Vogue magazine. Reading and watching the Pinterest
account, it is understandable that 80 per cent of the users of Pinterest
are women,21 as obviously Shafak’s readership is also more female than
male.
Shafak’s Pinterest account has a modest amount of followers, almost
5,000. Her Twitter account on the other hand, has many more: 1.66
million. In comparison, the top ten of most prolific authors on Twitter
2013, according to the British Telegraph,22 mentions Paulo Coelho (more
than 7 million followers), Margaret Atwood (387,745), Stephen Fry
(5.6 million) and Salman Rushdie (552,615). Shafak, thus, is relatively
popular on Twitter and she uses the medium frequently – almost every
day with often more than one post per day, with a total of tweets of
10.6 k in almost five years (she joined in February 2010). Significantly,
Twitter, first based on self-promotion, also provides the possibility of
sharing statements and opinions with others, and of stimulating others
to participate in a debate. As Shafak argues,
I prefer Twitter to Facebook. I find Twitter more suitable for intro-

verts. I tweet in two languages, Turkish and English. I don’t gossip. I
write about books, ideas, culture, art, politics, and women. It makes
me happy to see a follower from a remote town in Anatolia respond
to another follower from Quebec or Delhi or Edinburgh.23
Part of Shafak’s communication on Twitter24 is self-promotion, but

there evidently also is an intellectual and even activist input. Messages
are alternately written in Turkish and English, and as such she naturally
connects different publics. Many tweets are on topics regarding the
emancipation of women in Turkey, as in a tweet from 1 January 2015 in
which she responds to the Turkish Minister of Health who had declared
that ‘mothers’ only career should be motherhood’. Shafak reacts:
‘Motherhood is not a career. Turkish women should decide their own
paths in life (not male politicians from above)’.25 The tweet referred to
an article in the Hürriyet daily,26 an English liberal newspaper in Turkey,
as such proving that there is a broad and fast conduit for feedback to
flow from user to producer (Baert and Booth, 2012, p. 120). Indeed,
many tweets by Shafak spread over a broad network of communication
via tweets and retweets, by links to official sites and responses on these.
The role of Shafak as public intellectual, then, consists of mediating and
facilitating messages of others, and as such she gauges the state of affairs
in the Turkish, English or even European public spheres. This new form
of public engagement encourages the intellectual to invent a more dia-
logical style of intervention and production (Ibid., p. 118).
Many tweets sent by Shafak are retweets from readers praising her
work, such as ‘Last year @Elif_Shafak made me cry over the fate of a
murderer, this year over an elephant. Thanks!’,27 so Twitter evidently
is used for the promotion of her work, and functions as a way to
find out who and where these readers are, and to communicate with
them. Twitter provides, then, the ability to assess who the public is,
while debate can be stimulated through questions and posting links or
retweeting the messages of others (Ibid., p. 120). On 25 November 2014,
Shafak posted ‘On the international day for the elimination of violence
against women, some sad truths we have to face in Turkey’ and illus-
trated this message with a photo of a memo on the same topic stating
that violence against women has doubled in Turkey between 2008 and
2012, and that only a third of the women has a job, ‘less than half the
EU average’. The photo of the message is posted on a display with covers
of Shafak’s novels in different languages, as to underline that this topic
has a link to her work. If we consider the protagonists of her novels,
such as The Bastard of Istanbul as well as The Forty Rules of Love or Honour,
we can imagine that the female characters would identify themselves
with Shafak’s tweet, some of them being westernised and having a job,
some of them finding themselves in more traditional circumstances,
trying to find out new possibilities for self-employment.
Significantly, Shafak as the author of popular fiction and public
intellectual approves of the new technologies of communication, and
she underlines that she does not agree with the widely held criticism
among literary authors, that the Internet is a fake world which novelists
and poets should refrain from if they want to preserve their intellectual
depth, focus and integrity. In an article in World Literature Today, linked
to from her official website and Twitter account, she claims that it is
much easier for an American author, such as Jonathan Franzen, to criti-
cise social media and to demand that the Internet be strictly controlled
and regulated. Coming from Turkey, she has to take a very different
position,
Writers from those parts of the world where democracy has for too
long remained an unfulfilled dream cannot be apolitical. A novelist
from Turkey, Pakistan, Nigeria, Egypt, or Mexico cannot completely
steer clear of political questions. We might not have the answers
to these questions. We don’t have to. But raising the questions is
intrinsic to being a writer. In countries where the conventional

media is strictly controlled, social media is bound to become politi-
cized. In Turkey, 92 percent of the online community is using social
media, constituting the highest ratio in the world, according to a
recent survey by Foreign Policy. Over the years, as media freedom and
diversity visibly shrank in my motherland, social media turned into
a political and ideological terrain. Facebook, Twitter and even the
visually dominant Instagram and Pinterest are not solely, or even
mainly, about exchanging daily trivialities. Social media is also a
political platform. Our leaders understand this better than anyone
else. That’s why they shut down YouTube; that’s why they shut down
Twitter for as long as they could and are still openly suspicious of the
digital world.28
Political consciousness is inevitable for the writer of fiction or the writer

on social media. Being unpolitical is a luxury, a Turkish writer cannot
afford. Furthermore, Shafak once again underlines the specific posi-
tion of women, and the new opportunities they might get from using
Twitter and other social media. In cultures where women are shunned
from the public space, the Internet offers a ‘new zone of existence’. All
throughout the Middle East, women are confined to private spaces, by
using the Internet, however, they are finding a way to enter into the
public space. Just like Abdel-Samad in Chapter 7, Shafak considers the
importance of the Internet as a relatively egalitarian web of connec-
tions: ‘Hybrid by nature, the digital world harbors an odd combina-
tion of unlikely elements. The literary and the popular, the sacred and
the blasphemous, the philosophical and the quotidian are constantly
blended in this ever-changing world of meanings and symbols’.29
In addition to her activities on Twitter, Shafak also is a regular con-
tributor to opinion articles on The Guardian website, where she gives
information on various political and social topics in regard to Turkey,
while readers can comment on her statements. Since March 2011 Shafak
has written 20 pieces, evidently with the aim to give the English and
international audience a perspective on the shrinking democracy in
Turkey. Topics she discussed were for instance, honour, abortion and
democracy, as becomes clear when reading the headlines: ‘Turkey:
Looking for honour in all the wrong places’, published online on March
2011, leading to 145 comments; ‘The Turkish gender gap is already wide.
Now abortion rights are under threat, published on 14 June 2011, 325
comments; ‘Rape, abortion and the fight for women’s rights in Turkey,
published on 9 September 2011, 291 comments; ‘The view from Taksim
Square: why is Turkey now in turmoil?, published on 3 June 2013, 226

comments; or ‘Erdogan’s slap in the face of all Turks, published on 20
May 2014, 100 comments. The comments mainly are positive (or nega-
tive) responses to the article, while some comments react on others and
develop sideline debates. The Guardian’s moderator has removed some
comments when they did not conform to the ‘community standards’.
Analysing Shafak’s activities on online media, we can conclude that,
the Internet and in particular Twitter and blogs on online newspaper
websites, have provided this public intellectual with an additional
instrument to reach and communicate with the audience(s), by writing
a blog or tweet and linking it to other on- or offline editions of articles
and messages, and by providing a platform for debate and responses.
Due to its public nature, Twitter in particular transcends the limitations
regarding accessibility compared to more traditional media. ‘Like many
social network sites, Twitter flattens multiple audiences into one – a
phenomenon known as “context collapse”’ (Marwick and boyd, 2011,
p. 122). Evidently, this can make it harder to target a message at a spe-
cific audience, but a benefit of this phenomenon is, that the public intel-
lectual is no longer bound to one particular public, that is, the readers of
popular fiction, in one type of medium (Van Loo and Heynders, 2014).
Popular fiction as moral message
All activities on social media performed by Shafak are also interconnected

with her novels, and with topics she brings to the fore in interviews. In
fact, her fiction articulates ideas relevant to current public discourses on
cosmopolitanism and cultural translation, and hints at how some rulers,
policy-makers, subgroups or individuals perceive the world. Her latest
novel, The Architect’s Apprentice (2014) is a good example, telling the
story of the Indian boy Jahan, who becomes an apprentice of the famous
Chief Royal Architect and historical figure Mimar Sinan (1489–1588),
and who also has a role as elephant tamer in the Istanbul palace of the
successive sultans Suleiman, Selim II and Murad III. Jahan and three
other apprentices work on the (re)building of mosques, aquaducts, parts
of the palace, and other constructions, and Jahan also becomes involved
in several war activities and official presentations for which the white
elephant, Chota, is used. As such, the novel provides a very lively tableau
of Istanbul as a multicultural melting pot in the sixteenth century.
Evidently, the historical representation of a huge city on the edge of
Europe and Asia and entered by many newcomers, has a clear link to
social and political situations and issues in today’s global era: topics of
migration, gentrification, religious intolerance and the politics of fear

and conspiracy. In fact, Shafak provides an almost Dickensian world
crowded with strange, high-esteemed, and common people, organised
by a more or less omniscient narrator with an eye for details.30 A strik-
ing example is when Sinan has to reconstruct the Hagia Sophia around
which many settlers have built up houses and small shops,
All the people living around the mosque had recently moved to
Istanbul. Leaving their villages behind, they had migrated to the
seat of the throne without a shelter awaiting them, kinsfolk to trust or
land to till. Having heard from others that the area around the Hagia
Sophia was unoccupied and within easy reach, they had put down
roots there. It wasn’t only sheds of all sizes that encroached on the
ancient building. There were ateliers, stables, sheep pens, milking
parlours, chicken coops, latrines. Together, they leaned against the
mosque, pushing into it from four sides. Such had been the pressure
that the western walls of the Hagia Sophia, where the settlement was
the most dense, had begun to tilt inwards. (Shafak, 2014, p. 283)
The description of the overcrowded city is manifestly recognisable in

contemporary images of either the Turkish capital, to which many
refugees from Syria have fled, or of big European cities such as Paris,
or Barcelona with growing banlieues. Shafak’s narrator, then, provides a
serious message regarding the development of global cities, the presence
of numerous ethnic groups and the consequences for individuals. In
this context we observe architect Sinan, as one of the main characters in
the novel, writing in a letter to his apprentices that they have to accept
their work as the protection of the city from its inhabitants, and the
protection of the past from the future,
Only remember that cities, too, are like human beings. They are not
made of stones and wood, solely. They are of flesh and bone. They
bleed when they are hurt. Every unlawful construction is a nail ham-
mered into the heart of Istanbul. Remember to pity a wounded city
the way you pity a wounded person. (Ibid., p. 291)
It could be argued, that this idea of protection of the city also refers to
the big reconstruction plans – such as Gezi park as the new venue for a
huge mosque, or the plan for a bridge over the Bosporus – the Erdogan
government has currently developed for Istanbul, causing huge protests
by the common people.
The Ottoman architect, a man of inspiration and wisdom, is the

opposite of another character in the novel, the gypsy leader Balaban,
who protects Jahan on a more raw and down-to-earth level of life. In
fact, the orphan Jahan is caught between these two father figures, and
somehow stays immature, not becoming a master of architecture nor a
rough and proud nomad. Jahan is more of an observer in the narrative,
rather than a man of flesh and blood. Unrealistically, he is in love with
the daughter of the Sultan. He registers the heterogeneity and vividness
in the city: Georgian and Armenian coves, dervishes and prophets, a
Greek baker and a Jewish shop owner, Toralks and Janissaries, Muslims
wearing turbans, Christians with black hats, and Arabs, Kurds, Kazakhs,
Albenians, Bulgarians and Abkhazs, all walking ‘separate paths while
their shadows met and mingled in knots’ (Ibid., p. 33). Hence, what
this popular novel stresses, is what Shafak underlined in many inter-
views: ‘I’m connected to different cultures, and that’s, I think, part of
the reason why I believe it’s possible to be multicultural, multilingual
and multifaith … I’m very much attached to many things in Turkey, the
women’s culture, the Folk Islam and so on, but I’m in no way attached
to the national identity. Sometimes I feel like a misfit when I’m there’
(Shafak, 2005, p. 19).
Two observations can be emphasised here. The first point is that there
is much continuity between what Shafak writes as a novelist, what she
states as a respected informant on The Guardian, and what she shares
with her female audiences on Pinterest and Twitter. This is the idea
of the multiplicity of cultures and identities and the celebration of
Ottoman multiculturalism as a model for contemporary societies. This
continuity of one message communicated on several platforms under-
lines the seriousness, and sincerity for that matter, of this public intel-
lectual. There is a critical idea behind the various activities. The second
point is that, due to the fact that there are several audiences, which
only partly overlap, her reach and thus effectiveness and visibility are
strong. In this case the ‘public’ addressed by the public intellectual,
really involves and interconnects many different people and audiences,
in Turkey as well as in the Western world. This public intellectual in the
particular role as educator bridges the gap between cultures and per-
spectives, explains and criticises ideas and traditions from the one (sub)
culture to the other, on one platform and on others as well.
To elaborate on this, we could refer to the novel, Honour, published in
2012 (in Turkey with the title Iskender). This narrative is mainly situated
in London, describing the Turkish family Toprak, falling apart in the
Western cosmopolis; the mother senses very carefully a new opportunity
for real love and equality with a man, the father loses his dignity and
self-esteem and ends up on a construction site in Dubai, the daughter
survives, and the eldest son is imprisoned and sentenced for murder. In
a way, this is a representative story of what could happen to immigrants
in the 1970s, experiencing the clashes between modernity and the tra-
ditional environment they came from. ‘Honour’ is a particular concept
regarding pride, and dominance of men over women, of sons over
mothers and sisters. Due to the obsession with honour, families and
lives were and still are destructed. Shafak writes a fictional novel about
the topic to make her readers more aware of honour-killings taking
place today, and in April 2012 she writes an article as well, published on
The Guardian website, stating that honour-killing still is a huge problem
in Turkey and in Britain,
Violence on the basis of ‘honour’ is spreading at a disturbing rate.

The problem is not unique to Turkey or the Middle East. It is happen-
ing here, too, in the heart of Britain. According to the Iranian and
Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation (IKWRO), more than 2,800
honour-related cases were reported in the UK in 2010. Evidence from
police forces reporting suggest an increase of 47% since 2009. Attacks
are concentrated in London, the West Midlands and West Yorkshire.
Women’s organisations argue the real numbers could be four times
higher because of the stigma of reporting.31
This illustrates again how Shafak, embedded in two different national

public spheres, claims a topic as relevant and discusses it in fiction and
in an article, addressing a network of audiences and as such prompting
social and intercultural consciousness. Narrative articulation and repre-
sentation help to imagine and understand social ‘events’, and the public
intellectual merges naturally the roles of fiction author, expert, critical
discussant, educator and moralist.
The moralist dimension, evidently is of importance in regard to
Shafak’s work and public performances, and implies a judgement about
ethical principles, about what is right and wrong. Moralism, ultimately,
is interconnected with spiritualism taken as a connection between reli-
gions. Frequently, Shafak refers to Sufism as a source of inspiration, and
a solution to many controversies and deadlocks in debates on cultural
differences. The novel The Forty Rules of Love (2010) thematises Sufism
as an escape out of an uninspiring life. The novel is built on two parallel
stories. The contemporary one is about the unhappily married Ella, living
in Massachusetts, working for a literary agency and receiving a book
entitled Sweet Blasphemy, written by Aziz Zahara. The second story is an

historical narrative of a Persian dervish, named Shams of Tabriz. He is a
fictional character, a mystic Sufi traveling to Konya, where he meets the
historical figure Jalaluddin Rumi, a famous Koran scholar. Ella becomes
acquainted with the writer Zahara and gets affected by the Sufi rules and
poems. Sharing emails with Zahara, she finds out that she is ready to
give up her marriage and to start a new life. Throughout the narrative,
many Sufi rules are discussed, such as,
Try not to resist the changes that come your way. Instead let life live
through you. And do not worry that your life is turning upside down.
How do you know that the side you are used to is better than the one
to come? (2010, p. 101)
or
The universe is one being. Everything and everyone is intercon-

nected through an invisible web of stories. Whether we are aware of
it or not, we are all in a silent conversation. Do no harm. Practice
compassion. (Ibid., p. 207)
The theme of the narrative is supported by the composition of the

book, alternately the reader is confronted with the contemporary and
the historical story, and every chapter begins with the letter ‘B’. For Sufi
mystics the secret of the Koran lies in the verse Al-Fatiha, the essence of
which is contained in the word bismilahirahmanirahim (in the name of
God, most Gracious, most Compassionate). The belief is that the love
for God and the universe finally leads to the acceptance of the self. Not
surprisingly, the book was a bestseller in the western world as well as
in Turkey. As The Independent wrote: ‘both the observant head-scarfed
daughters of AKP, the Islamic party in government in Turkey, and the
secular offspring of past Kemalist regimes, are ardent fans of Shafak’s
novel’.32 Elena Furlanetto (2013), however, argues that Shafak offers in
this novel an Orientalist perspective on Sufism internalising a Western
point of view on the Islamic tradition, and that she too easily claims an
analogy between post 9/11 America and thirteenth-century Anatolia.
I do not take sides with this interpretation, since from the broader con-
text in which the public intellectual is studied in this book, it becomes
clear that Shafak’s interest in Sufism is not simplifying Westernised.
The point is that as an author of popular fiction, the novelist has to
offer explicit messages and imaginary scenarios or representations, so
as to engage the readers with certain topics and to bring some political
implications to the fore. It could be argued then, that, Shafak’s work is
permeated with Sufi statements, and this goes from her novels to tweets
or citations in interviews and vice versa, to underline her position as a
moralist, daring to take stances and to teach her readers that there are
inevitably various good and bad positions the individual human being
can choose in regard to social and political conflicts and circumstances.
The public intellectual in her moralist role can take outspoken stances.
Such as when she argues in an interview:
I want Turkey to become a more civil society-based country rather

than a state-centered country. … Turkey’s inclusion in the EU would
be a good bridge and we all need to struggle to make it possible
to find a way to coexist. … Turkish history is a good case to study
because we were once a multiethnic empire and then in the name
of creating a supposedly monolithic nation state all those ethnic
religious minorities have been discarded and their voices have been
silenced. Part of my job is to bring back these voices. (Shafak, 2005).
What Shafak contributes to the intellectual debate, both in Turkey and

in Europe – writing for The Guardian – and for the American readers of
The Forty Rules of Love for that matter, is that neither Islamic traditional-
ism, nor Kemalist secularism, or other forms of anti-religion are accept-
able, because silencing the voices of others is by definition wrong. What
is good, on the other hand, is a more spiritual state of being in which
several religious beliefs come together. This is the explicit and outspo-
ken message of the public intellectual moralist.
Notes
1 Transformations of the Public Intellectual

1. E.M. Forster (1972 [1946]) ‘The challenge of our time’ in E.M. Forster (ed.)
Two Cheers for Democracy (London: Edward Arnold), p. 58.
2. See ‘Hey, Big Thinker’ http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/27/fashion/
Thomas-Piketty-the-Economist-Behind-Capital-in-the-Twenty-First-
Century-sensation.html?_r=3, date accessed 4 January 2015.
3. ‘A 42 ans, celui qui fut pendant trois ans outre-Atlantique l’un des plus jeunes
profs du MIT de Cambridge, mais préfère son petit bureau blindé de livres de
l’Ecole d’économie de Paris au faste des grandes chaires universitaire made
in USA, se dit ‘ravi’. See http://www.liberation.fr/economie/2014/04/25/
piketty-superstar-aux-states_1004593, date accessed 4 January 2015.
4. Die Welt: ‘Franzosen werden selten zu Rockstars in Amerika. Schon gar
nicht, wenn sie ein Wirtschaftsbuch schreiben. Aber der bislang unbe-
kannte Pariser Ökonom Thomas Piketty hat es in Übersee zu schnellem
Ruhm geschafft. Innerhalb weniger Tage ist er zum Gesprächsthema einer
ganzen Nation geworden’. See http://www.welt.de/print/die_welt/finanzen/
article127204933/Darum-werden-die-Reichen-immer-reicher.html, date
accessed 4 January 2015.
5. The publisher De Bezige Bij paid 125,000 euro to Editions du Seuil, which
is exceptional for a book that has already been published. See http://www.
nrc.nl/handelsblad/van/2014/mei/07/kapitaal-de-bezige-bij-wint-strijd-om-
vertaling-p-1376326, date accessed 4 January 2015.
6. See De Groene Amsterdammer, Special 29 Mei, 2014, and ‘Het ongelijk van
Piketty’, 31 mei 2014.
7. ‘Pykettymania in de polder: ik ben boos’. De Volkskrant 6 November 2014.
8. I write about a ‘he’ in the ‘neutral’ form, as this book makes clear there are
many female public intellectuals as well.
9. As Stefan Collini (2009, p. 256) has explained, the stress on ‘the universal’
is more French than British meaning ‘an amalgam of the metaphysical and
the moral; truth and justice are instances of the universal’.
10. See Heynders and Hou, Transformations of the Public Intellectual in China,
forthcoming.
11. These tensions centre around axes: hierarchy versus equality, generality
versus expertise, passion versus distance and the individual versus the col-
lective. In: Patrick Baert and Josh Booth (2012) ‘Tensions Within the Public
Intellectual: Political Interventions from Dreyfus to the New Social Media’,
International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 25, pp. 111–26.
12. Pierre Bourdieu (1991) ‘Universal Corporatism: The Role of Intellectuals in
the Modern World’, Poetics Today, 12, vol.4, pp. 655–69.
13. The description is Said’s in Helen Small, 2002, p. 36.
14. In Habermas, Europe, The Faltering Project, pp. 49–59.
182
Notes 183
15. See ‘How Salman Rushdie Survived the Satanic Verses Fatwa’: http://www.
vanityfair.com/online/daily/2014/04/salman-rushdie-fatwa-satanic-verses,
date accessed 4 January 2015.
16. In this context, we should also think of the discussions of authenticity that
pop up when celebrities donate money for good causes (the ALS bucket chal-
lenge, Serious Request etc.). The public cynicism toward philanthropist stars
shows just how much self-branding and honest engagement are interwoven.
17. See http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/opinion/my-medical-choice.
html?_r=0, date accessed 4 January 2015.
18. See Heynders, 2009. My inaugural lecture was the starting point of the pro-
ject on public intellectuals in Europe, from which this book is the outcome.
19. Milan Kundera (2002) De kunst van de roman, Essay, 2nd edition (Amsterdam).
20. Richard Rorty (1989) Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge). In the
introduction of this stimulating study Rorty explains his position: ‘This book
tries to show how things look if we drop the demand for a theory which
unifies the public and the private, and are content to treat the demands
of self-creation and of human solidarity as equally valid, yet forever
incommensurable’(p. XV). Most interesting are his analyses in part 3 of the
works of Nabokov and Orwell.
21. See http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2011/may/08/top-300-british-
intellectuals, date accessed 4 January 2015.
22. Among these categories are: Academics, Activists, Critics, Historians,
Philosophers, Policy Advisers, and Political Scientists.
23. See among others J. Hillis Miller, On Literature, 2002; Marc Roche, Why
Literature Matters in the 21st Century, 2004; Rita Felski, Uses of Literature, 2008.
2 Conscientious Chronicler, H.M. Enzensberger

1. Enzensberger: ‘Der Schlaf der Vernunft wird bis zu dem Tag anhalten, an
dem eine Mehrheit der Einwohner unseres Landes am eigenen Leib erfährt,
was ihnen widerfahren ist. Vielleicht werden sie sich dann die Augen reiben
und fragen, warum sie die Zeit, zu der Gegenwehr noch möglich gewesen
wäre, verschlafen haben’. See http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/
enzensbergers-regeln-fuer-die-digitale-welt-wehrt-euch-12826195.html, date
2. ‘In der “modernen” digitalen Welt machen sich viele Menschen den Wert
des Privaten und der Vertraulichkeit nicht mehr genügend klar. Mit den
heutigen technischen Möglichkeiten hätten Gestapo wie Stasi gigantische
Möglichkeit zur Bekämpfung des Einzelnen. Und es ist eben nicht so, dass in
“demokratischen” Gesellschaften Informationen zum Besten der Menschen
eingesetzt werden. Sie werden zum Schaden des Einzelnen und zum Schaden
der freiheitlich verfassten Gesellschaft eingesetzt. Deshalb gehen die Hinweise
von Enzensberger durchaus in die richtige Richtung. Sie genügen allerd-
ings nicht. Der Einzelne kann einem komplexen technischen System nicht
die Spielregeln der Freiheit aufzwingen. Nur der Staat, wenn überhaupt,
kann milliardenschwere global tätigen Konzerne zum Schutz der Rechte des
Einzelnen anhalten.’
184 Notes
3. Josef Josse, Germano-Google, Das Netzt ist entweder global oder gar nichts.
See http://www.zeit.de/2014/11/internet-global-nsa, date accessed 4 January
2015.
4. See http://www.daserste.de/unterhaltung/talk/beckmann/sendung/1209
2013-das-digitale-ich-100.html, date accessed 21 August 2014.
5. Enzensberger’s ideas can be understood in the context of Adorno’s and
Horkheimer’s thesis on ‘Kulturindustrie’, drawing on the idea that all cul-
tural production is situated in the parameters of the culture industry; popu-
lar culture production is standard and manipulates mass society See Dialectic
of Enlightenment, 1944. Enzensberger is more optimistic about the critical
potential of popular culture.
6. Heteroglossia, as Russian philologist M.M. Bakhtin has stated, is the result
of several stylistic interventions: ‘Authorial speech, the speeches of the
narrators, inserted genres, the speech of the characters are merely those
fundamental compositional unities with whose help heteroglossia can enter
the novel; each of them permits a multiplicity of social voices and a wide
variety of their links and interrelationships (always more or less dialogized)’
(Bakhtin, 2008, p. 263).
7. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/may/15/hans-magnus-enzens
berger-interview/, date accessed 13 August 2014.
8. ‘Ich glaube (…) dass die politische Poesie ihr Ziel verfehlt, wenn sie es
direkt ansteuert. Die Politik muss gleichsam durch die Ritzen zwischen den
Wörtern eindringen, hinter dem Rücken des Autors’. (My Translation, O.H.)
9. A similar point of view was defended by philosopher Jacques Rancière:
‘Literature does a kind of side-politics or meta-politics. The principle of that
“politics” is to leave the common stage of the conflict of wills in order to
investigate in the underground of society and read the symptoms of history.
It takes social situations and characters away from their everyday, earth-
bound reality and displays what they truly are, a phantasmagoric fabric of
poetic signs, which are historical symptoms as well’ (Rancière, 2010, p. 163).
It is in the indirectness of literature that writers can be effective by exposing
what is emerging from under the surface, while at the same time throwing
light on what is so obvious in the world around us that most of us do not
notice it anymore.
10. See http://www.zeit.de/1964/23/bin-ich-ein-deutscher/seite-2, date accessed
4 January 2015.
11. Für einen Bürger von Frankfurt am Main liegt New York vor der Tür, dagegen
ist die Reise nach Frankfurt an der Oder psychologisch, politisch und geog-
raphisch zur Expedition geworden. Der Fall beweist, daß sich Nationen rein
administrativ und von außen, von einem Jahr aufs andere, zunichte machen
lassen; er beweist damit die Hinfälligkeit des Prinzips der Nationalität. See
Bin ich ein Deutscher?, http://www.zeit.de/1964/23/bin-ich-ein-deutscher/
seite-4, date accessed 4 January 2015.
12. See Enzensberger (2012, p. 129): ‘Ferner schien es uns an der Zeit, die
Geschmacksbildung des Publikums mit einer Rubrik zu fördern, die wir
“Journal des Luxus und der Moden” nannten; den meisten entging, daß
wir damit auf einen ehrwürdigen Titel der Goethezeit Bezug nahmen. Wie
sich bald zeigte, faßten die verblüfften Leser eine solche Ankündigung als
Provokation auf’.
Notes 185
13. See Fritz van Rumler (1970) ‘Cuba Si, Piggies No’, Der Spiegel 25. http://www.
spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-44931197.html, date accessed 4 January 2015.
14. ‘Der Roman als Collage nimmt in sich Reportagen und Reden, Interviews
und Proklamationen auf; er speist sich aus Briefen, Reisebeschreibungen,
Anekdoten, Flugblättern, Polemiken, Zeitungsnotizen, Autobiografien,
Plakaten und Propagandabroschüren. Die Widersprüchlichkeit der Formen
kündigt aber nur die Risse an, die sich durch das Material selber ziehen. Die
Rekonstruction gleicht einem Puzzle, dessen Stücke nicht nahtlos ineinander
sich fügen lassen. Gerade auf den Fugen des Bildes ist zu beharren. Vielleicht
steckts in ihnen die Wahrheit, um derentwillen, ohne daß die Erzähler es
wüßten, erzählt wird’ My Translation, O.H.
15. See ‘Two Notes on the end of the world’ in Zig Zag: ‘our theorists, chained
to the philosophical traditions of German Idealism, refuse to admit even
today what every bystander has long since grasped: that there is no world
spirit; that we do not know the laws of history, that even class struggle is
an ‘indigenous’ process, which no vanguard can consciously plan and lead’
(Enzensberger, 1997, p. 30).
16. Enzensberger: ‘To complete the picture I have taken recourse to the time-
honored form of the conversation with the dead. Such posthumous
exchanges enable a dialogue between the people of today and those that
went before them – an exchange known to be troubled by all kinds of
confusion, with survivors often thinking they know better than those who
spent their lives in a permanent state of emergency, risking their lives in the
process’ (Enzensberger, 2008, p. 287).
17. In an author’s note at the end of the poem it is explained that Druk-Yul is
Bhutan, and the Republic of our Savior is the República de El Salvador. The
irony of the poem is that names of states get lost (what’s in a name?) and
that historical and geographical transformations disappear from memory.
These are light (funny) and moral poems, as the title underlines, the morality
focusing on the consequences for the inhabitants of the decline of nation
states.
18. See http://www.chomsky.info/articles/19670223.htm, date accessed 4
January 2015. Chomsky: ‘it is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak
the truth and to expose lies. This, at least, may seem enough of a truism to
pass over without comment. Not so, however. For the modern intellectual,
it is not at all obvious. Thus we have Martin Heidegger writing, in a pro-
Hitler declaration of 1933, that “truth is the revelation of that which makes
a people certain, clear, and strong in its action and knowledge”; it is only
this kind of “truth” that one has a responsibility to speak. Americans tend
to be more forthright. When Arthur Schlesinger was asked by The New York
Times in November, 1965, to explain the contradiction between his pub-
lished account of the Bay of Pigs incident and the story he had given the
press at the time of the attack, he simply remarked that he had lied; and a
few days later, he went on to compliment the Times for also having sup-
pressed information on the planned invasion, in “the national interest”, as
this term was defined by the group of arrogant and deluded men of whom
Schlesinger gives such a flattering portrait in his recent account of the
Kennedy Administration’.
19. ‘Maastricht wird von innen gesprengt’ in Zu Große Fragen (2007, p. 137).
186 Notes
20. See also the interview on German television 2012 https://www.youtube.

com/watch?v=Dp27ADTuENY, date accessed 4 January 2015.
21. See ‘Die Literatur nach dem Tod der Literatur’ in Zu Große Fragen,
pp. 302–22.
22. See for instance: ‘Literature as Institution, or The Aspirin Effect’ and ‘In
Praise of the Illiterate’ in Zig Zag (1997).
3 Eastern European Voices, Slavenka Drakulić and

Dubravka Ugresić
1. She writes: ‘I myself am neither an émigré nor a refugee nor an asylum-
seeker. I am a writer who at one point decided not to live in her own country
anymore because her country was no longer hers’ (2003, p. 130)
2. See http://www.meredithtax.org/gender-and-censorship/five-women-
who-wont-be-silenced and http://womenineuropeanhistory.org/index.
php?title=The_Five_Witches, date accessed 4 January 2015.
3. See for more biographical information her website http://www.dubravkau
gresic.com/, date accessed 4 January 2015.
4. See for more biographical information her website http://slavenkadrakulic.
com/, date accessed 4 January 2015.
5. This we can observe when focusing on the attention they pay to a variety
of voices – voice understood as the ‘speaking personality, the speaking con-
sciousness’ (Bakhtin, 2008, p. 434) – making up the ideological discourses
of communism (or socialist realism), nationalism and democracy. Multiple
voiced discourse is the typical feature of the novel, as Bakhtin described, but
it is typical for the public intellectual essay as well. An author can create an
autonomous voice by manipulating the words of ‘neutral’ authorial speech,
as Bakhtin showed, but he can also use and manipulate voice by using free
indirect speech, or ventriloquism as imitating idioms, delving into dialects,
and echoing the tics and mannerisms of styles of speech (Felski, 2008, p.93).
6. Philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) definitely was an exilic intel-
lectual, who had to flee from Germany to Paris, after having been arrested
in January 1933 in the Prussian State Library when collecting material on
violence against the Jews, and moving again from Paris to New York in 1941.
After having published The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and The Human
Condition (1958), her book on Eichmann characterized her as a sharp, criti-
cal and above all provocative and demanding thinker. The book not only
describes Eichmann as an ordinary man who was not willing to reflect on
what he was actually doing, it also criticizes the position of the Jews in the
European Jewish councils [Judenräte] not capable of resistance. Arendt’s book
was more than all other books she wrote easily misread, and her biographer
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl thinks this has to do not only with what she is
discussing, but how, the style of the book is sometimes ironical and even
insensitive (2004, p. 464).
7. See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/collective-responsibility/, date accessed
4 January 2015. The discussion on ‘collective responsibility’ is often linked
to specific political cases, ranging from the extermination of Jews during
the Second World War to the atrocities of the Vietnam War to the racist
Notes 187
treatment of American blacks. The question is whether particular groups in

history can legitimately be considered morally responsible for the suffering
that group members have brought about through their faulty actions.
8. Free indirect style: the presentation of thoughts or speech of (fictional) char-
acters which seems by various devices to combine the characters feelings
with those of the narrator.
9. See James Wood, How Fiction works, p. 11: ‘Thanks to free indirect style, we see
things through the character’s eyes and language but also through the author’s
eyes and language, too. We inhabit omniscience and partiality at once’.
10. Zur Person, Hannah Arendt im Gesprach mit Gunter Gaus. See http://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=dsoImQfVsO4, date accessed 4 January 2015.
11. Annabel Herzog, Hannah Arendt’s Concept of Responsibility. In: Studies in
Social and Political Thought, 2004. See https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/
gateway/file.php?name=10-3.pdf&site=412, date accessed 4 January 2015.
12. The photograph was taken by Peter Tumley /CORBIS.
13. Drakulić for instance was invited by the Norwegian newspaper Dagsavisen to
comment on the fact that Peter Handke received a prize: ‘Recently Austrian
writer Peter Handke was awarded Ibsen Price of 300.00 euro, which caused
big controversies in Norway because of his pro-Serbian writing some years
ago.’ Slavenka Drakulić, who wrote about Handke’s political statements
before, in her interview for Norwegian Dagsavisen expresses her sorrow
that Handke, a good writer, in her view remains morally compromised.
See http://slavenkadrakulic.com/interview-about-handke-in-norwegian-
dagsavisen/, date accessed 4 January 2015.
14. She probably considers Drakulić as an author who is adapting to the mar-
ket too much. This at least, could be read between the lines when Ugresić
discusses writers sharing in themes of human perversion, in particular a
woman writer telling the story of a man-eating female protagonist. There is
no explicit reference to The Taste of a Man, Drakulić’s novel about a female
Polish student in New York murdering and eating her lover, published in
1997, but the point is clear: shocking books excite the market, while at the
same time no one is interested in real victims and criminals, an ‘imaginary
crime is more convincing; reality is too real’ (Ugresić, 2003, p. 57). The
explicit reference is in the description of the scene from Drakulić’s book, the
tone is here typical Ugresić ironic: ‘The modern man-eater will consume her
lover like Japanese sushi. That is why she devours not what any “normal”
reader would first think of, but something quite different. And if we follow
the logic of the lover’s cannibalism which has been imposed on us, then, for
that little piece of fresh, sexually indifferent meat – a mere piece from the
palm of his hand – it was hardly worth killing a whole man’ (2003, p. 56)
15. See also Heynders (2014a) on literature and photographs on Srebrenica.
4 Public Man as Actor: Bernard-Henri Lévy

1. ARTE = Association Relative à la Télévision Européenne, a Franco-German TV
network.
2. See http://www.arte.tv/fr/europe-ou-chaos-une-rencontre-debat-filmee/
7276002.html, date accessed 4 January 2015.
188 Notes
3. See http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/paris-summit-proves-
europe-needs-new-thinkers-a-881872.html, date accessed 4 January 2015.
4. Collaborative circles are essentially circles of intellectuals, scholars, artists,
activists or various cultural, political, scientific innovators who create a new
vision for work in the particular field they operate in. They usually consist
of three to seven individuals in the inner core of the circle. Farrell points at
the creative aspects and dynamics of intellectual rebellion away from power-
ful mentors. He distinguishes various stages of development of collaborative
friendship circles: formation, rebellion against authority, negotiation of a
new vision, collective action, separation and reunion (Farrell, 2001, pp.
17–26).
5. Jon Henley, ‘I think, therefore I am off to Afghanistan’, The Guardian, 9
February 2002. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/feb/09/afghani-
stan.books, date accessed 4 January 2015.
6. Jason Burke, ‘Has le philosophe been undone?’, The Guardian, 9 April
2006. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/apr/09/books.france, date
7. See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bernardhenri-levy/kievs-independence-
square_b_4808629.html, date accessed 4 January 2015.
8. As discussed in Chapter 1, a useful definition is one by Graeme Turner:
‘The contemporary celebrity will usually have emerged from the sports or
entertainment industries, they will be highly visible through the media, and
their private life will attract greater public interest than their professional
life’ (Turner, 2014, p. 3). Another definition comes from P. David Marshall:
‘Celebrities are part of a very elaborate media economy which is connected
to audience and value (…) Celebrities serve as the lingua franca of identity,
and, in some cases, identity politics in the contemporary scene’ (Marshall,
2010, pp. 2–3).
9. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/jan/11/france.theatre, date
10. Think of the marriage of former president Nicolas Sarkozy and singer Carla
Bruni, the marriage (and divorce) of Dominique Strauss Kahn and journalist
Anne Sinclair, the affair (and breakup) of president Francois Hollande and
Paris Match journalist Valérie Trierweiler replaced by actress Julie Gayet,
all openly discussed in the French media. However, Lévy’s marriage with
Dombasle, seems to be over, since recently BHL was spotted by celebrity
watchers (of the British Telegraph) with a new ‘mistress’: British style icon
Daphne Guiness.
11. See http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/spiegel-interview-with-ber-
nard-henri-levy-we-lost-a-great-deal-of-time-in-libya-because-of-the-ger-
mans-a-753797.html, date accessed 4 January 2015.
12. This observation by Sennett, can be visualised by taking a Thomas Mann
novel as illustration. In the sociable community of the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries people shared acts of disguise and mask: Mann’s
debut Buddenbrooks Verfall einer Familie (1901) offers a magnificent example
of the public man encapsulated in his bourgeois family, playing his public
role as head of a firm in a provincial Hanse town, and fulfilling all the social
and political formalities that belong to his role and position. The family, the
firm and an awareness of social ranks and differences within a small city
Notes 189
network lead to responsibility fuelled by a Protestant ethic. In the course

of time, however, the men of the Buddenbrook family, fathers and sons,
are not able to keep up the standard. The last son, Hanno, hides himself in
art and turns into an individualist not willing or able to keep up the strict
formal codes and dignity. This is precisely what Sennett discusses: bourgeois
life collapsed when at the end of the nineteenth century people increasingly
disclosed themselves to one other and the social bond became based on
psychological openness and intimacy, which connotes artistic expression of
feeling, and as such implies the opposite of rigid formal social structures. In
this context, the political credibility of the public man became the super-
imposition of the private upon the public image. And this development
became stronger in the twentieth century.
13. Critique on Sennett, who wrote his book in the 1970s, is that he did not
take up the feminist new ideology and strategy claiming that the ‘personal
is political’. (See Linke, 2011) Interestingly, he wrote about this ‘tyranny of
intimacy’ before the social media opened a space, in which one can be more
intimate than ever.
14. It is a game of give and take, as we can read in another passage: ‘He [Sarkozy,
O.H] had in fact called me ten days before, early in the morning, a few hours
before he was about to give a major speech: he wanted to make sure that
I would be “all ears” because he was going to say things that would make
people like me feel “authorized” to vote for him’ (Lévy, 2009, p. XVI).
15. In some places in the text the American public is directly addressed: ‘Are you
yourself, my American friends, resigned to breaking the pact that united, in
a single cause, your own Jewish and black minorities?’ (2009, p. 30).
16. Tri-colon: the three-unit pattern in many prose styles (possibly also related
also to the Tricolore, the French Flag, as embodying central values). See
Richard A. Lanham (1991) A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms.
17. This is what Lévy writes: ‘I am thinking of Sarkozy’s strange declarations,
strange and strangely pervasive, which effectively state that France “didn’t
invent the Final Solution” (which, put this way, obviously is not wrong):
that it didn’t “give in to the totalitarian temptation” (which, on the other
hand, is wrong, and means nothing more and nothing less than exculpat-
ing those French policemen who, on the morning of July 17, 1942, went to
arrest the Jews in their neighbourhoods taking care “not to forget the little
ones”); and that it did not commit crimes against humanity of genocide
(wrong again, since arresting and deporting French citizens whose only mis-
take was having been born Jewish meets, in and of itself, the definition of
genocide as defined not only in the Penal Code but also in the Nuremberg
trials)’. (Ibid., p. 27) Sarkozy, the then future president, helps to negate the
memory of the Shoah, and this is what kept and keeps Lévy from politically
supporting him. This is why he stays on the (new) left, though even there
the peril of anti-Semitism is not acknowledged enough either. Moreover,
on the left anti-Americanism is equalled with progressivism (Ibid., p. 112), and
the market is considered ‘a terrifying biopolitical experiment’ (Ibid., p. 86).
18. In January 2014, the French Interior Minister Manuel Valls tried successfully
to persuade the comic to drop off his show ‘Le Mur’ stating that it spread a
mechanics of hate. Dieudonné, who openly mocks the commemoration of
the Nazi extermination of the Jews, stopped the performance.
190 Notes
19. In French the book is entitled Ce grand cadaver a la renverse (2007) (Paris:
Grasset). Halimi published his review in Le Monde Diplomatique, Februari
2008. See http://www.mondediplo.com/2008/02/12bhl#nb3, date accessed
4 January 2015.
20. He writes: ‘The excesses of Lévy’s prose and its repetition on TV and radio no
longer prompt any response. His habitual targets – the ‘left of the left’ and
the writers least in thrall to the media – must have given up the struggle.
Meanwhile his pro-US, free-market ideas are in tune with those of a growing
number of socialist leaders. Diminishing resistance goes hand in hand with
greater impact. Any cultural scene, and by extension public debate, that can
allow a writer to accuse Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Etienne Balibar,
Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Žižek of being anti-semitic is in trouble. (…)
When the left starts taking its inspiration from Lévy, it further proves that
it is dead on its feet.’ See Serge Halimi, The Dom Pérignon socialist manifesto,
http://www.mondediplo.com/2008/02/12bhl, date accessed 4 January 2015.
21. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/jan/11/france.theatre, date
22. ‘We are living in a culture focusing predominantly on what is easy to under-
stand’, Sennett explains in an interview in 2010, ‘everything has to be simple
and preferably readily consumable. We have no time for issues that require a
little more intellectual effort. In our culture, there is no room left for subtle-
ties or controversies. Politics mirror this: concentrating one’s attention on
people rather than ideas is a simplifying strategy’. See Sennett (2010).
23. ‘Aujourd’hui, l’Histoire recommence’ (2011, p. 15).
24. War without loving it, A writer’s diary from the heart of the Libyan spring.
25. He also made a documentary on this activity: ‘Serment de Tobrouck’ (2012).
26. Diaries or journals can be roughly divided into two categories: the intimate
(Mary Godwin; André Gide; L. Tolstoy) and the anecdotal (travel diaries). See
Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, pp. 220–1.
27. ‘Respect élémentaire. Considération de l’autre ou, plus exactement, de son
monde que je me refuse à considérer comme autre monde et, encore moins,
comme un théâtre où il faudrait un costume de scène pour entrer. (…) Etre
ici, à Benghazi, comme je serais à Paris. Je sais que cela peut sonner Cocteau
1914 (uniforme griffé Poiret pour aller dans les tranchées)’ (Lévy, 2011,
p. 55). (My translation, O.H.)
28. ‘Devant le Bristol, Didier François qui m’invite à venir, à 18 heures, sur Europe
1. Et cette interview, donc, sur Europe 1, où j’essaie, face à l’emballement
médiatique, de calmer le jeu, de dire qu’il ne faut pas exagérer et que la
France n’a pas l’intention d’aller bombarder Tripoli. On est loin de l’image,
répercutée sur toutes les chaînes, de Bernard-Henri-Lévy-qui-s’exprime-au-
nom-de-l’Etat-sur-le-perron-de-l’Elysée-pour-annoncer-la-guerre-à-la-Libye.
Mais si ça les amuse … Ces piques n’ont aucune importance … La seule chose
qui compte c’est que le Président a tenu parole. Le Conseil national de transi-
tion est reconnu. Je suis heureux’ (Lévy, 2011, p. 109, my translation, O.H.).
29. For his intriguing critique on the art market in The Map and the Territory.
30. See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bernardhenri-levy/kievs-independence-
square_b_4808629.html, date accessed 4 January 2015.
31. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_K71FRJgmE, date accessed 4
January 2015.
Notes 191
5 A Protean Public Figure: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

1. She defended her swing from left-wing to right-wing politics by calling herself
a single issue politician focusing on the oppression of women by Islam; her
affiliations lay wherever these interests could be served best. She explained
that the PvdA was paralyzed by the followers of multiculturalism on the one
side, and muslim conservatives on the other, both disregarding the individual
and ignoring women oppressive atttitudes. See Ayaan Hirsi Ali, ‘Waarom ik de
VVD verkies boven de PvdA’, NRC Handelsblad, 31 October 2002.
2. See http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/what-is-a-public-intellec
tual/#.U5gSOf0b5ua, date accessed 4 January 2015. These were the criteria
anno 2005: ‘The irony of this thinkers list is that it does not bear thinking
about too closely. The problems of definition and judgment that it involves
would discourage more rigorous souls. But some criteria must be spelled out.
What is a public intellectual? Someone who has shown distinction in their
own field along with the ability to communicate ideas and influence debate
outside of it. Candidates must have been alive, and still active in public life
(though many on this list are past their prime). Such criteria ruled out the
likes of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Milton Friedman, who would have been
automatic inclusions 20 or so years ago. This list is about public influence,
not intrinsic achievement. And that is where things get really tricky. Judging
influence is hard enough inside one’s own culture, but when you are peering
across cultures and languages, the problem becomes far harder. Obviously
our list of 100 has been influenced by where most of us sit, in the English-
speaking West.’
3. This obviously also has to do with the voting procedure, as we read in the
comments on the 2008 list: ‘Rankings are an inherently dangerous business.
Whether offering a hierarchy of countries, cities, or colleges, any such list …
is likely to generate a fair amount of debate. In the last issue, when we asked
readers to vote for their picks of the world’s top public intellectuals, we
imagined many people would want to make their opinions known. But no
one expected the avalanche of voters who came forward. During nearly four
weeks of voting, more than 500,000 people came to ForeignPolicy.com to cast
ballots. No one spread the word as effectively as the man who tops the list.
In early May, the Top 100 list was mentioned on the front page of Zaman, a
Turkish daily newspaper closely aligned with Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen.
Within hours, votes in his favour began to pour in. His supporters – typically
educated, upwardly mobile Muslims – were eager to cast ballots not only
for their champion but for other Muslims in the Top 100. Thanks to this
groundswell, the top 10 public intellectuals in this year’s reader poll are all
Muslim. The ideas for which they are known, particularly concerning Islam,
differ significantly. It’s clear that, in this case, identity politics carried the day.
See http://www.infoplease.com/spot/topintellectuals2.html#ixzz3AYJd4HGr,
4. It could be argued that there are two different axes: left-right (concerning
economic issues) and liberal-conservative (concerning ethical issues). These
don’t necessarily correspond to each other.
5. Life narrative is the umbrella term for personal stories (written, digital, filmed)
that represent a life. The concept includes autobiography as a retrospective
192 Notes
narrative and is also used to cover more heterogeneous self-referential and

self-reflective practices or to refer to representative narratives of indigenous
people or cultures (Smith and Watson, 2010, p. 4).
6. See NOVA special television programme on Hirsi Ali, broadcasted on 26
August 2006. In the ‘Acknowledgements’, a person ‘Ruth’ is thanked ‘for all
your help in writing this book’.
7. See for instance the book he published a few weeks before his death, De
verweesde samenleving (The orphaned society) in which he describes Dutch
society from the golden age to the beginning of the twenty-first century,
underlining that a new messianistic leader had to take the Dutch people to
the Promised Land.
8. About the Dutch peacekeeping forces standing by while Muslim men were
deported from the village of Srebrenica and later killed by Serbian forces.
9. That summer, the other guests were Felix Rottenberg (politician), Heleen van
Royen (author of popular novels), Morris Tabaksblatt (captain of industry,
CEO of Unilever), Tijs Goldschmidt (biologist, author) and Theo Maassen
(cabaret artist).
10. Annelies Moors, ‘Submission’, ISIM Review, 15, 9. See https://openaccess.
leidenuniv.nl/bitstream/handle/1887/16986/ISIM_15_Submission.
pdf?sequence=1, date accessed 4 January 2015.
11. It is available on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGtQvGGY4S4,
12. Cited from the YouTube clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGtQvG
GY4S4, date accessed 4 January 2015.
13. See http://programma.vpro.nl/zomergasten/archief/2004/Ayaan-Hirsi-Ali.
html, date accessed 4 January 2015. (My Translation, O.H.)
14. David Carr (2013) ‘Journalism, Even When It’s Tilted’, The New York Times.
See http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/business/media/journalism-is-
still-at-work-even-when-its-practitioner-has-a-slant.html?pagewanted=all,
15. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGgAAKBAndY, date accessed 4
January 2015. (My Translation, O.H.)
16. In December 2011, Hirsi Ali gave birth to a son.
17. Philosopher Herman Philipse, arabist scholar Hans Jansen, author Leon de
Winter, newspaper editor Jaffe Vink and others.
18. Garton Ash (2006). See http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2006/
oct/05/islam-in-Europe, date accessed 4 January 2015.
19. See http://www.signandsight.com/features/1146.html, date accessed 4
January 2015.
20. See also Paul Berman, The Flight of the Intellectuals.
21. Dick Pels (2013) The Intellectual as Stranger, Studies in Spokespersonship
(London and New York: Routledge).
22. Interview NOVA television (26 August 2006): ‘Ik was toch niet op mijn plek
in de politiek’ [I was not in the right place in politics].
23. Today Hirsi Ali works as a fellow of the Belfer Center at Harvard’s Kennedy
School of Government. Her most recent intervention in the public sphere
is on the Boko Haram movement in Nigeria. Again, she pleads for a wake-
up call: ‘it is time for Western liberals to wake up. If they choose to regard
Boko Haram as an aberration, they do so at their peril. The kidnapping of
Notes 193
these schoolgirls is not an isolated tragedy: their fate reflects a new wave of
jihadism that extends far beyond Nigeria and poses a mortal threat to the
rights of women and girls’ (May 2014). See ‘Boko Haram and the kidnapped
schoolgirls’. See http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303
701304579549603782621352, date accessed 4 January 2015.
6 Public Intellectuals from Brussels, David van Reybrouck

and Geert van Istendael
1. Belgian Radio & television Company.
2. See: http://www.davidvanreybrouck.be/en/content/european-constitution-
verse, date accessed 20 April 2015. ‘Het liefst van al zit ik alleen te schrijven.
Waarom dan zoveel tijd en energie pompen in een project als de G1000?
Omdat het lastig schrijven is terwijl het dak lekt. Welnu, het dak van onze
democratie lekt. Doordat ik in Congo zag dat gewone mensen iets te vertel-
len hebben over de geschiedenis van hun land geloof ik dat ook bij ons
gewone burgers iets zinvols te zeggen hebben over de toekomst van hun
samenleving. Daarom ijver ik met de G1000 voor meer burgerinspraak in
onze democratie’. (My translation O.H.)
3. The constitution was a 400-plus pages document merging the existing trea-
ties into one single text as the EU’s rule book. But is was too much of a
formal contract and too less of an inspiring contract between nation states.
As The Guardian wrote: ‘The lack of an overriding principle or grand idea to
the constitution – which, like all EU treaties, is a contract between nations –
is, however, the principal weakness of the yes campaign. Regardless of the
merits or otherwise of its contents, it is a difficult text to argue for. A product
of summit compromises as much as the convention, it is complex, legalistic
and self-referential. One sentence reads: “The European Union established
by this treaty shall be the successor to the European Union established by
the Treaty on European Union and to the European Community”.’ See:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jun/02/eu.france2, date accessed
20 April 2015.
4. The Netherlands voted no by 61.6 per cent, in France 55 per cent voted no.
5. The first stanza of the final part reads: ‘Ik was blind als een cryptesteen
tot ik op een dag de ware handen in de wereld zag. / Het waren geen
handen maar die vorm van samenzijn zonder aan te raken, als / bladeren in
het bos.’ (94).
6. Interview with Margot Dijkgraaf, ‘Ik mag alles denken’. In NRC, 21 April
2006. See http://www.nrc.nl, date accessed 20 April 2015.
7. Stephen W. Smith in The Guardian. See http://www.theguardian.com/
books/2014/aug/08/congo-epic-history-stringer-review, date accessed 20
April 2015.
8. In ‘The Other of Democracy’, Jacques Derrida refers to equality according
to number, and equality according to value or worth. That seems a relevant
analysis of the paradox. See Jacques Derrida, Rogues, Two Essays on Reason,
2005, p. 30.
9. See the final report: http://www.g1000.org/documents/G1000_EN_Website.
pdf, date accessed 20 April 2015.
194 Notes
10. See http://www.g1000.org/documents/G1000_EN_Website.pdf, date accessed

20 April 2015.
11. See http://www.g1000.org/documents/G1000_EN_Website.pdf, date accessed
20 April 2015.
12. De Standaard, De Morgen, De Tijd, Le Soir, and La Libre Belgique.
13. See for interesting information on the composition of the citizen panel the
short biographies of the people on pp. 81–4 of the final report.
14. See: http://www.g1000.org/documents/G1000_EN_Website.pdf, p. 92, date
accessed 20 April 2015.
15. The Cleveringa chair was established in 1970 by Leiden University in com-
memoration of the liberation of the Netherlands in 1945, and in memory of
Cleveringa’s action. The Cleveringa Chair is a rotating professorship, which
has since 1975 been held every academic year by a different Dutch or inter-
national scholar. It has in the past been held by Ian Buruma, Nasr Abu Zayd,
Louise Fresco and Job Cohen. The Cleveringa professor focuses on matters in
the area of justice, freedom and responsibility, as stated in the official teach-
ing remit. Van Reybrouck held the chair in 2011–12.
16. In Defence of Populism was awarded the Jan Hanlo Essay Prize and the
Flemish Culture Prize for Critic and Essay. For his history of the former
Belgian colony, Congo. A History, he was awarded three prestigious prizes: the
Libris History Prize, the Jan Greshoff Prize and the AKO Literature Prize. He
donated part of his prize money to the human rights organisation Human
Rights Watch.
17. ‘Ik wil niet meer redelijk zijn en ik kan bijgevolg ook niet meer op zo’n redac-
tie werken. Ik deel de elementaire redelijkheid niet meer waarop redactie
werk berust, móet berusten’ (Geert van Istendael, Bekentenissen van een reac-
tionair, 1994, p. 15; my translation O.H.). This paragraph on Van Istendael is
partly based on an excellent BA thesis written under my supervision by Tijs
Brinkman 2014–15.
18. See Van Istendael, Huizinga-lecture 2012: De Parochie van Sint-Precarius
(2012) and Alfabet van de globalisering (2006).
19. See Van Istendael, Anders is niet beter, 1996, p. 48.
20. See Van Istandael, ‘Liefde voor Europa komt Unie niet toe’ in De Volkskrant,
26 March 1997. See, http://www.volkskrant.nl/binnenland/liefde-voor-
europa-komt-unie-niet-toe~a496065, date accessed 20 April 2015.
21. The Stolpersteine are created by artist Gunter Demnig and placed in over 150
German cities. Van Istendael refers to one of them indicating ‘Hier wohnte
Abraham Rosenfeld JG 1883 deportiert 1943 ermordet in Auschwitz’. See
also http://www.stolpersteine-berlin.de/en, date accessed 15 April 2015.
22. See Benno Barnard and Geert van Istendael, ‘Bericht aan weldenkend links,
Waarom wij het hoofddoekenverbod verdedigen’ in De Standaard 3 January
2008: http://www.cie.ugent.be/CIE2/deley_catherine.htm, date accessed 20
April 2015.
23. See Van Istendael, ‘haviken met een sociaal hart’ in Christen Democratische
Verkenningen 2001: http://www.tijdschriftcdv.nl/inhoud/tijdschrift_artikel/
CD-32-1-171/Haviken-met-een-sociaal-hart, date accessed 15 April 2015.
24. ‘In Brussel broeit écht een gigantisch integratieprobleem. Jonge migranten
verwerpen de strenge, gedeeltelijk islamitische, gedeeltelijk uit eeuwenoude
dorpsgewoonten afkomstige leefregels. Jonge migranten worden uit het
Notes 195
normale, Belgische leven gestoten door klein, alledaags racisme (1992,

pp. 80–1, my translation O.H.).
25. ‘In deze stad wil ik wonen en zwerven, wil ik drinken en eten, zo gulzig als
ik maar kan; in deze stad wil ik zingen in al mijn talen en wil ik toehoren
hoe zij zingt in al haar andere talen. En bovenal, bovenal, in deze stad, in
mijn lieve, kapotte, vertrouwde Brussel wil ik me steeds opnieuw niet thuis
voelen’ (1992, p. 248, my translation O.H.).
7 Responsible Satire, Hamed Abdel-Samad

1. ‘Binnen vier weken slaagden de Tunesiërs erin om van hun jarenlang
heersende dictator af te komen. De Egyptenaren hadden daar maar 18 dagen
voor nodig. Wereldwijd barstte euforie los. Overal in de Arabische wereld was
een domino-effect te verwachten. Ik zelf behoorde tot de grootste optimisten
en sprak al voor de val van Moebarak, op 1 februari, van een overlijdensakte
van alle Arabische dictaturen. Er was een sneeuwbal aan het rollen geraakt
en die werd groter en groter; er was geen weg terug’. (My translation, O.H.)
2. Abdel-Samad himself described fatwa in its original meaning as ‘ein
religiöses Gutachten und nicht ein Mordurteil, wie viele sie übersetzen’
(2010a, p. 129).
3. ‘Nach einem islamkritischen Vortrag in Kairo Anfang Juni hatten Assem
Abdel Maged, ein führendes Mitglied der radikalen ägyptischen Gruppe
Al-Gamaa Al-Islamija, und der Salafist Mahmud Schaaban den Autor in einer
Sendung des TV-Senders Al-Hafes zum “Ungläubigen“ erklärt. Zahlreiche
Internetseiten der Salafisten und Muslimbrüder zeigten nach Verlagsangaben
das Bild des Autors mit der Überschrift “Wanted Dead!“. See: Berliner Zeitung,
26 June 2013, http://www.berliner-zeitung.de/politik/todesdrohung-gegen-
hamed-abdel-samad-vortragsreise-trotz-fatwa,10808018,23517984.html,
date accessed 4 January 2015. See also an interview 25 June 2013: http://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=_V3UD316K_Q, date accessed 4 January 2015.
4. His father was forced to distance himself from his son on Egyptian television.
5. ‘Ich verdränge die Angst, weil ich sonst verstummen muss. 200 Jahre nach
Voltaire, 70 Jahre nach dem Ende des Faschismus und 25 Jahre nach dem
Fall der Mauer kann es nicht sein, dass ich mich in Europa mit meiner
Meinung verstecken muss. Ich will nicht, dass die Leute sagen, Abdel-Samad
hat recht. Aber ich habe die Freiheit so verstanden, dass es im Denken keine
absoluten Wahrheiten gibt. Ich will nur meine Meinung sagen. Deshalb bin
ich nach Europa gekommen. Jetzt erwäge ich, wegzugehen’. See http://www.
zeit.de/2014/28/hamed-abdel-samad-islamismus/seite-2, date accessed 4
January 2015.
6. See http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/10/celebrities-whistle-
blower-protections-snowden-wikileaks-actors, date accessed 4 January 2015.
7. My Departure from Heaven, Notes on the Life of a Muslim in Germany. In Egypt
the book was published as novel to avoid confrontation with authorities.
8. See for instance the discourse used by the murdered Dutch politician Pim
Fortuyn, who mixed left- and right-wing positions, but mainly uses a roman-
tic, anti-Enlightenment discourse. In his most important work, the treatise
De Verweesde Samenleving (The Orphaned Society) he makes a passionate plea
196 Notes
for more attention, love and respect for the basic norms and values of our
own culture. See Geertjan de Vugt (2015).
9. ‘This cursed freedom’: In Memoir, Egyptian Recalls Shift from Radicalism to
Mainstream in Germany. See http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/
this-cursed-freedom-in-memoir-egyptian-recalls-shift-from-radicalism-to-
mainstream-in-germany-a-646589.html, date accessed 4 January 2015.
10. ‘Ich erinnere mich, dass meine Tante aus Kairo uns in unserem Dorf am Nil
vor dreissig Jahren im Minirock besuchte und auf der Strasse rauchte, was
ich cool fand. Damals störte das kaum jemandem. Heute ist ihre Tochter voll
verschleiert. Meine Tante, die mittlerweile auch uniformiert ist, blickt auf
diese Zeit zurück und bittet Gott um Verzeihung für ihre grosse Sünde. Sollte
eine Frau es heute wagen, ohne Kopftuch durch mein Dorf zu gehen, muss
sie damit rechnen, bestenfalls angepöbelt zu werden. Gerade Frauen sorgen
dafür, dass keine ihresgleichen aus der Reihe tanzt (2010a, pp. 82–3).
11. ‘Het islamisme biedt heldere antwoorden, een vereenvoudigde indeling
van de wereld in gelovigen en ongelovigen. Dat biedt oriëntatie. De Jonge
Moslims voelen zich in de schoot van de islamisten als soldaten van God, als
een voorhoede van de revolutie’ (p. 157).
12. The programme was produced and written by Joachim Schroeder icw. Tobias
Streck and Claudio Schmid. See http://www.amazon.com/Entweder-Broder-
Hamed-Abdel-Samad-Henryk/dp/3813504212, date accessed 4 January 2015.
13. In this opinion he is related to the Dutch author and columnist Leon de
Winter, who often links his blogs to those written by Broder. Do we observe
a network of blogging neo-conservative intellectuals?
14. The episodes are entitled: 1. Von Adolf bis Allah, 2. Von Allah bis Osama, 3.
Krieg und Frieden, 4. Frieden oder Freiheit, and 5. Fromm oder Frei.
15. ‘Es gibt Länder in Europa, die uns um dieses Denkmal beneiden’.
16. Shokof was kidnapped in May 2010 in Köln, since then he has been under
police protection. He has made his film ‘Iran Zendan’ available on the
Internet. See http://vimeo.com/12707973, date accessed 4 January 2015.
17. Episodes are entitled: 1. Guck mal, wer sich da verschwört, 2. Guck mal, wer
die Welt durchschaut, 3. Guck mal, wer die Erde rettet, 4. Guck mal, wer wie
überleben!, and 5. Guck mal, wie sich Armut lohnt.
18. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvp12KXdqRE, date accessed 4
January 2015.
19. The Holocaust Memorial was built by architect Peter Eisenman and consists
of 2,711 concrete slabs or stelae arranged in a grid pattern.
20. ‘Du hast ein Problem, du bist gefangen in der eigenen Rolle, da musst
du irgendwann raus’ See http://www.stern.de/kultur/tv/henryk-m-broder-
in-der-ard-die-suche-nach-dem-verlorenen-deutschen-1620737.html, date
accesssed 4 January 2015.
21. ‘Wenn du nicht in die jüdische Opferrolle schlüpfen würdest, dann würd-
est du auch nicht in diese Stele hinein schlüpfen’. See http://www.stern.
de/kultur/tv/henryk-m-broder-in-der-ard-die-suche-nach-dem-verlorenen-
deutschen-1620737.html, date accessed 4 January 2015.
22. Michael Hanfeld in FAZ: ‘Sie setzen uns ein Licht nach dem anderen auf und
zeigen uns ein Deutschland, dessen Bild man vielleicht aus tausendundeiner
“Spiegel TV” – Reportage zusammensetzen, es dann aber anzuschauen nicht
aushalten könnte. Mit Humor gebrochen aber geht das, der Blick in die
Notes 197
Abgründe gleich nebenan; mit einem Humor, der die zivilisatorische Leistung
der Moderne hochhält wie eine Monstranz: Dass ein jeder sich von seiner
Herkunft distanzieren kann und eben nicht eine Kultur die andere über-
wältigt und frisst’. See http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/medien/2.1756/
entweder-broder-die-deutschlandsafari-unentbehrlich-unbezahlbar-nicht-
zu-schlagen-11069280.html, date accessed 4 January 2015.
23. ‘So entsteht ein Bild vom Leben in Deutschland, wie man es so bisher im
Fernsehen nicht gesehen hat. Sämtliche Gesprächspartner äußern sich
erstaunlich offen vor der Kamera, und schon allein diese Tatsache spricht
für das Konzept der Sendung. Dass der Verkäufer in einer türkischen
Bäckerei nicht hinter dem Ladentisch hervorkommt und die Interviewer
etwa zehn Meter entfernt in ihrer Kaffeetasse rühren: diese Interviewtechnik
widerspricht sämtlichen Fernseh-Regeln. Allerdings kommt so ein phänom-
enal lebendiges Gespräch zustande’. See http://www.fr-online.de/medien/-
entweder-broder--beutedeutsche-auf-safari,1473342,4805776.html, date
24. Das ungewöhnliche Doku-Roadmovie ist eine Mischung aus investigativem
Journalismus, schwarzem Humor und amüsanten Einlagen, in denen sich
Henryk und Hamed über Deutschland und das Leben im Allgemeinen stre-
iten. So intelligent wurde im deutschen Fernsehen schon lange nicht mehr
gelästert! See http://www.welt.de/print/wams/vermischtes/article10779026/
Entweder-Broder-Die-Deutschland-Safari.html, date accessed 4 January
2015.
25. See http://www.amazon.com/Entweder-Broder-Hamed-Abdel-Samad-
Henryk/dp/3813504212, date accessed 4 January 2015.
26. Abdel-Samad refers to a public discussion he had with the author of Die
fremde Braut in Erfurt. She had noticed alarming occurrences, but her conclu-
sion that Islam is the only explanation for all abuses is demagogic (2010a,
p. 273).
27. ‘Der Osten hat mir eines gezeigt: Integrationsverweigerung ist nicht in erster
Linie ein kulturelles, sondern ein strukturelles Problem. Nicht die Religion,
sondern die soziale Realität ist dabei entscheidend. Im Osten traf ich viele
Ostdeutsche und Spätaussiedler, die mit den gleichen Problemen wie viele
türkische Immigranten zu kämpfen hatten: Sprache, Arbeitslosigkeit, Gewalt
in der Familie und Misstrauen gegenüber den demokratischen Strukturen.
Ein syrischer Arzt muslimischen Glaubens war in vielerlei Hinsicht besser
in die deutsche Gesellschaft integriert als viele Ostdeutsche’ (Abdel-Samad,
2010a, pp. 272–3).
28. Episodes are entitled: 1. Auf nach Europa, 2. Im Herzen Europas, 3. Im Osten
viel Neues and 4. Europa extrem.
29. ‘Mich erstaunte, wie viele Menschen im vermeintlich aufgeklärten
Deutschland auf der Suche nach einen oder anderen Form von Gott waren’
(Abdel-Samad, 2010a, p. 230).
8 Popular Fiction: Elif Shafak

1. See http://www.britishcouncil.org/blog/elif-shafak-writing-english-brings-
me-closer-turkey, date accessed 4 January 2015.
198 Notes
2. See http://blogs.eliamep.gr/en/oikonoleon/freedom-of-expression-in-
contemporary-turkey-beyond-article-301/, date accessed 4 January 2015.
3. See http://www.ted.com/talks/elif_shafak_the_politics_of_fiction/, date
4. See the lecture’s transcript on http://www.ted.com/talks/elif_shafak_the_
politics_of_fiction/transcript?language=en date accessed 4 January 2015.
5. Dozens of writers in Turkey have been charged under 301 of Turkey’s penal
code with insulting Turkish identity, often for articles dealing with the kill-
ing of Kurds and Ottoman Armenians. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians
died in 1915 at the hands of Ottoman Turks. Armenians have campaigned
for the killings to be recognized internationally as genocide. More than a
dozen countries, various international bodies and many Western histori-
ans have done so. Turkey admits that many Armenians were killed but it
denies any genocide, saying the deaths were a part of World War I. Turkey
and neighbouring Armenia still have no official relations. See BBC, Turkish-
Armenian writer shot dead, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6279241.
stm, date accessed 4 January 2015.
6. See also Heynders 2009.
7. Michael Skafidas, Turks Look Forward with Amnesia, New Perspectives
Quarterly, vol. 31, issue 2. See: http://www.digitalnpq.org/articles/
global/153/02-08-2007/elif_shafak, date accessed 4 August 2015.
8. See http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/12/pamuk-shafak-
turkish-press-campaign, date accessed 4 January 2015.
9. See Interview with Michael Skafidas, ‘Turks look forward with Amnesia’ in:
New Perspectives Quarterly, vol.32, issue 2, pp. 29–32.
10. Žižek: ‘the left should get rid of this idea of saying that we must be subversive
and go beyond good and evil. No! We have to take over some motives of the
so called moral majority’ (2013, p. 78).
11. See for biographical information her official website: http://www.elifshafak.
com/biography.php, date accessed 4 January 2015.
12. See http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/jun/19/elif-shafak-
turkey-40-rules-of-love, date of access 4 January 2015.
13. See http://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/crossroads/tributes/fernando_
pessoa_his_heteronyms/, date accessed 4 January 2015.
14. See Alfred Kossmann, De mannen waaruit ik besta, Amsterdam 1999. ‘De oude
man die ik ben, drinkt graag een borrel met de andere oude mannen die ik
ben. We schenken in, we steken op. Gewone kamer, gewone jenever, gewone
sigaretten. Ach, waarom zou het geen herenkamer zijn in een landhuis,
Courvoisier, havanna’s. We zitten hartelijk bijeen, ons gesprek is traag en
spits. We noemen elkaar bij de achternaam en zeggen soms ‘jongen’. Pikant
taalgebruik van ouden van dagen. Wij kijken elkaar nooit aan. Dat zou te
persoonlijk zijn. En gênant, want we zijn ijdel en lelijk.’ (p. 25). [‘The old
man who I am, likes to have a drink with the other old men I am. We fill,
we smoke. Ordinary room, ordinary Dutch gin, ordinary cigarettes. Ah, why
not a gentlemen’s room in a country house, Courvoisier, Havanas. We are
comfortable together, our conversation is slow and poignant. We call each
other by surname and sometimes say ‘chap’. Piquant parole of the elderly.
We never look at each other. That would be too personal. And embarrassing,
since we are vain and ugly’ (my translation, O.H.).]
Notes 199
15. See http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/jun/19/elif-shafak-

turkey-40-rules-of-love, date accessed 4 January 2015.
16. Ulrich Langer, The Cambridge Companion to Montaigne, 2005, pp. 1–2.
17. S. Critchley, The Book of Dead Philosophers, 2008, p. 132.
18. Self-Help books often are often categorised as ‘Mind & Spirit’ books, and
offer stories of people who gone through transforming experiences in their
lives and who would like to set an example for others. The point is that the
‘helpers’ having written these books, take up a role as educator, a role that
can also be performed by public intellectuals. See the Top 100 Self-help Books
that changed our Lives, http://www.stellarlearning.co.uk/cms/images/down-
loads/life_changers_100_books.pdf, date accessed 4 January 2015.
19. See http://www.elifshafak.com/articles.php, date accessed 4 January 2015.
20. Harry McCracken: ‘The basic idea behind Pinterest – which lets you create
and share collections of stuff you like in any category you choose – has been
tried before by start-ups that didn’t make much of a mark. This time it might
take off. Pinterest makes the process painless by offering a Pin It button that
lets you grab pictures of your favorite things as you browse the Web. The
site then collects the images on “boards” that other users can follow and
comment on. Perusing other folks’ boards, featuring everything from pic-
turesque travel scenes to oddly beautiful bacteria, is as enjoyable as building
your own’. See 50 websites that make the Web great: http://content.time.
com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,2087815,00.html, date
21. See Kevin Roose in the New York Magazine: http://nymag.com/daily/intel-
ligencer/2014/05/pinterest-is-sneaking-up-on-twitter-and-facebook.html,
date accessed 4 Janauary 2015.
22. See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/9957341/Top-ten-most-
prolific-authors-on-Twitter.html, date accessed 4 January 2015.
23. See Elif Shafak, ‘Storytelling, Fake Worlds, and the Internet’ http://
www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2015/january/storytelling-fake-worlds-and-
internet-elif-shafak, date accessed 4 January 2015.
24. Twitter is an online communication medium distinguished by its brevity
and simplicity, where each message or ‘tweet’ contains a maximum of 140
characters (Tumbridge, 2010). The tweets are automatically sent to ‘follow-
ers’, the people who have subscribed to someone’s account. But other people
can read the messages on the Internet as well. Twitter users can give each
other instant updates about events such as breaking news, emergencies and
gossip. Users can copy tweets of others to their own account to spread the
original message, which is called ‘retweeting’, and by including shortened
hyperlinks, messages can easily be illustrated with pictures or videos. In a
tweet, one can use a hashtag which functions as a keyword in search strings.
The more people use the same hashtag, the more popular or important a par-
ticular topic can become. The popularity of Twitter, since the start in 2006,
and its acceptance as a noteworthy communication network can also be
demonstrated by its drawbacks. Several tweets have resulted in scandals and
negative exposure, when for instance public officials or politicians disclosed
compromising or confidential information. Difficulties are caused when the
identity of the author of the tweet is anonymous, or when a false name or
non-official account is used, as seems for instance the case in the Twitter
200 Notes
account of Hamed Abdel- Samad. In several European countries Twitter users

who deliberately post under an anonymous name may be unmasked legally
(Tumbridge, 2010).
25. See https://twitter.com/Elif_Safak, date accessed 4 Janaury 2015.
26. See http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/mothers-only-career-should-be-
motherhood-turkish-health-minister-says.aspx?pageID=517&nID=76360&N
ewsCatID=341, date accessed 4 January 2015.
27. See Mattias Svensson on https://twitter.com/Elif_Safak, date accessed 4
January 2015.
28. See http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2015/january/storytelling-fake-
worlds-and-internet-elif-shafak, date accessed 4 January 2015.
29. See http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2015/january/storytelling-fake-
worlds-and-internet-elif-shafak, date accessed 4 January 2015.
30. As James Wood has explained ‘so-called omniscience is almost impossible.
As soon as someone tells a story about a character, narrative seems to want to
bend itself around that character, wants to merge with that character, to take
on his or her way of thinking and speaking. A novelist’s omniscience soon
enough becomes a kind of secret sharing, this is called free indirect style, a
term novelists have lots of different nicknames for – ‘close third person’, or
‘going into character’ (Wood, 2009, pp. 8–9).
31. See http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/apr/30/honour-killings-
spreading-alarming-rate, date accessed 4 January 2015.
32. See http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-
forty-rules-of-love-by-elif-shafak-2021678.html, again this link can be found
on Shafak’s official website.
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Index
Abdel-Samad, Hamed, v, 24, 118, Bachmann, Ingeborg, 48

139–59, 175, 195–97, 201 Baert, Patrick, 4, 8, 12, 165, 173,
Abdeljalil, Mustafa, 86–7 182, 201
Abdulmalik, Mohammed, 86 Bakhtin, M.M., 36, 172, 184, 186, 201
Achebe, Chinua, 18 Bal, Mieke, 95, 201–2
Ackermann, Ulrike, 118, 201 Balibar, E., 122, 137–8, 190, 201
activism, ix, 24, 44, 79–80, 82, 88, Balkenende, Jan Peter, 99
113, 120, 124–25 Balzac, Honoré de, 2
actor, v, 74–7, 79, 81, 83, 85, 87, Barnes, Julian, 16, 18
89–91, 93–6, 98, 187 Barthes, Roland, vii, 31, 201
Adil, Alev, 201 Baudelaire, Charles, 77, 90, 206
Adorno, Theodor, 28, 31, 54, 184 Bauman, Zygmunt, 4–5, 98, 201
American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Beauvoir, Simone de, 6, 166
99, 112, 120 Benda, Julien, 4–5, 7–9, 55, 202
agency, iv, x, 49, 64, 80, 119, 123, 179 Benjamin, Walter, 172, 206
Amazon.com, 70, 196–7 Benn, Gottfried, 30
Amis, Martin, 6, 18 Berlin Wall, 29, 31, 38, 47, 118
Andric, Ivo, 69 Berlusconi, Sylvio, 131
anti-Semitism, 17, 81–2, 84, 89, 113, Berman, Paul, 5, 21–2, 116, 192, 202
149, 189 Bildung, 103, 126
Antunes, Antonio Lobo, 75 Blair, Tony, 98
Appadurai, Arjun, 41–2, 50, 148, 201 Bleeker, Maaike, 155, 202
Apter, Emily, 123, 201 blog, 19, 95, 176, 197
Arafat, Yasser, 155 Blommaert, Jan, xi, 108, 202
Arendt, Hannah, 6, 54, 58–60, 63, Bloom, Allan, 2
186–87, 201, 205, 210 Booth, Josh, 8, 173, 182, 201
Arnold, Matthew, 18, 182, 204 Bourdieu, Pierre, 9–11, 14, 76–7, 102,
Arte, 74, 187 182, 190, 202
Assange, Julian, 140 bourgeoisie, 32, 49, 79
asylum-seeker, 55, 68 Bowditch, Alissa, 204
Athens, 75, 96 boyd, d., i, 176, 206
Attridge, Derek, 45, 201 Brecht, Bertolt, 30
Atwood, Margaret, 173 Brighenti, Andrea, 112, 202
Austen, Jane, 2 Broder, Henryk M, .6, 24, 139,
authenticity, 20, 80–1, 94–5, 100, 141–2, 149–59, 196–7, 202
178, 183 Bruckner, Pascal, 76–7, 100, 117, 202
autobiography, 65, 67, 103, Bruni, Carla, 188
105, 139–140, 142–4, 158, Brussels, v, 7, 24, 32, 44, 47, 100, 121,
191, 208 123–5, 127, 129, 131, 133, 135–8,
autonomy, 9–10, 12–3, 16–7, 155–7, 193, 203
20, 170 Buch, Hans Christoph, 74
avant-garde, i, 161 Burke, Jason, 188
211
212 Index
Buruma, Ian, 18, 108, 114, 117, De Vugt, Geertjan, xi, 196, 203
194, 202 De Winter, Leon, 17, 203
Butler, Judith, 64, 73, 78, 202 Debray, Regis, 4, 20, 203
Butter, Michael, 164, 202 decline, 4, 70–1, 80, 89, 101, 130,
Byron, George Gordon, 95 133, 141, 145, 147, 149, 185, 207
Deleuze, Gilles, 76
Caldwell, Christopher, 118 democracy, iii, ix–xi, 10, 24, 26–7, 46,
Calvino, Italo, 37 51, 57, 75, 82, 89, 94–5, 106, 118,
Cameron, David, 87 121, 124–34, 137–8, 140, 142,
Camus, Albert, 16, 90, 101 147, 156, 166, 174–5, 182, 186,
Carr, David, 192, 202 193, 204–5, 207
Cebrián, Juan Luis, 74 Derrida, Jacques, viii, 190, 193, 203
Celan, Paul, 170 detachment, 7–8, 10, 100–1, 119,
celebrity, iii, ix, 1–2, 4, 12–5, 24, 141, 144
74, 76–8, 80, 83, 88–90, 93–7, dialogism, 29, 32, 36, 50
99–101, 119, 160, 188, 204–8 diary, 57, 65, 74, 84–90, 95, 190
Charle, Christophe, 21, 202 Diderot, Denis, 6, 79
Chirac, Jacques, 77, 84 Dieudonné, 82, 189
Chomsky, Noam, 44, 185, 190 digitalisation, x, 16, 27–8, 65,
Christianity, 143 132, 147
Cioran, Emil, 172 Dijkgraaf, Robert, 6, 193
Cisneros, Sandra, 166 Dink, Hrant, 162, 208
civil war, 26, 33, 38–42, 82, 89 discussant, 17, 123, 139, 142, 179
Clavel, Maurice, 76 dissident, xi, 6, 8, 24, 97
Cocteau, 90 diversity, 12, 35–6, 44, 47, 53–4, 75,
Coelho, Paulo, 173 117, 121, 123, 127, 133–6, 138,
Collini, Stefan, 6–7, 9, 18, 21–2, 75–6, 150, 175
182, 202 documentary, 17, 22, 26, 31, 33, 35,
Collins, Jim, 19, 202 37, 46–9, 77, 89, 101, 111, 142,
communism, 32, 35, 53, 57, 72, 118, 149, 151, 153, 190
186, 203 Dombasle, Arielle, 77, 84, 188
Conley, Thomas M., 109, 170, 202 Don Quixote, 151
counter-public, 22, 139 Drakulic, Slavenka, 24, 53–4, 56,
credibility, 23, 43, 94–5, 101, 58–63, 71, 73
163, 189 Drayer, Elma, 116
credo, 30, 44, 80, 148, 159 Dreyfus, Alfred, 3, 82, 182, 201
Critchley, Simon, 150, 153, 157, 170, Dumas, Marlene, 6
199, 202 Duras, Marguerite, 166
Croatia, 55–6, 58–9, 65, 67, 71
Cuba, 32, 185, 210 Eco, Umberto, 18, 74
Cuddon, J.A., 202, 207 educator, 55, 171, 178–9, 199
cultural authority, ix, 7–8, 12, 18, 21, Eichmann, Adolf, 58, 186, 201
29, 38, 48, 75, 94–5, 105, 130, elite, 19, 49, 71, 81, 94, 122–3, 126,
132–3, 150, 172 154, 160
Cunningham, Michael, 172 engagement, ix, 9, 28, 71, 82, 129,
141, 174, 183, 201
Davies, Norman, 38, 202 Enlightenment, vi–vii, 5, 31, 113–6,
Dawkins, Richard, 6 118, 120, 143, 145, 149–50, 153,
De Leeuw, M., 110, 202 158, 184, 195, 202
Index 213
entertainment, x, 11, 13–4, 188, 200 Foucault, Michel, 5, 31, 101, 158,
Enzensberger, H.M., v, 7, 23, 25–51, 172, 204
123, 147, 183–5, 203–5, 207–8 Franzen, Jonathan, 174
essay, 7, 28, 31, 39–44, 64–5, 68, 81, Freud, Sigmund, 19
89, 125–8, 130–1, 142, 146, Friedman, Milton, xi, 6, 191
164–6, 168–172, 183, 186, 194 Fry, Stephen, 173
ethnographer, 29 Furedi, Frank, 4, 204
Etzioni, Amitai, 204 Furlanetto, Elena, 180, 204
EU, ix, 100, 107, 122–4, 129, 131,
133–7, 155, 174, 181, 193 G1000, 121, 124–5, 128–9, 131,
Europe, iv, vii–ix, 2, 6–7, 24, 29, 35, 193–4
38, 42, 44–8, 50, 52–4, 56–8, 64, Galow, Timothy W., 16, 20, 204
66, 74–5, 77, 87, 89, 94–6, 98, 101, Garber, Majorie, 18–19, 204
106, 113, 118, 122–3, 129–142, Garton Ash, Timothy, 6, 35, 88,
144, 147, 149–50, 154–60, 163, 116–8, 192, 204
176, 181–3, 187–8, 190, 192, 198, Ghadaffi, Muamar, 7
201–6, 209–10 Glanville, Jo, 163
Eyerman, Ron, 34, 204 globalisation, 19, 127, 134
Glucksmann, André, 76–7
Facebook, 6, 10, 27, 148, 164, Goethe, J.W. von, 16, 75
172–3, 175, 199, 208 Goldman, Jonathan, 15, 205
Fachtan, Axel, 27 Gramsci, Antonio, 5, 7–8, 48,
Fallaci, Oriana, 115 172, 204
Farage, Nigel, 131 Grass, Günter, 37, 101, 122
Farrell, Michael, 22, 72, 76, 116, Grillo, Beppe, 131
188, 204 Grimm, Erk, 38, 203–4
fascism, 35, 135, 140, 156 Grøndahl, Jens Christian, ix, 6, 204
Fascislamism, 81–2 Guignon, Charles B., 105, 204
Fatwa, 13, 140, 183, 195 Gunter, Barrie, 172, 187, 194, 204
Felski, Rita, 183, 186, 204 Guzzanti, Sabrina, 6
feuilleton, 183, 197
Fichtner, Ullrich, 75 Habermas, Jürgen, ix, 10–1, 14, 20,
fiction, i, v, viii–ix, 10, 17, 19–20, 34, 79, 102, 172, 182, 204
24–5, 32–4, 36–7, 44, 48, 50, 52, Haider, Jörg, 131
56, 65–6, 89, 91, 94, 121, 123–4, Halimi, Serge, 83, 190
160–5, 167–9, 171, 173–7, Hall, Stuart, 108, 131, 204
179–81, 187, 197, 202, 210 Hammerstein, Kurt von, 35–6, 48, 203
collective, 32–34, 37, 123 Handke, Peter, 187
docu-, 44 Hanenberg, Peter, 29, 204
popular, v, ix, 10, 25, 66, 160–1, Hanfeld, Michael, 153, 196
163–5, 167–9, 171, 173–7, Harris, Robert, 18
179–81, 197 Haustein, Clemens, 153
Finkielkraut, Alain, 49, 76–7, 204 Havel, Václav, 6, 8, 54
Fisher, Joschka, 146 Hawking, Stephen, 6
Fitzgerald, Zelda, 166, 204 Haydari, Nazan, 56, 205
Flaubert, Gustave, i, 16, 91 Heine, Heinrich, 6
Foley, James, 41 Henley, Jon, 188
Forster, E.M., 1, 182, 204 Herzog, Annabel, 59, 187, 205
Fortuyn, Pim, 106, 195 Herzog, Werner, 6
214 Index
heteroglossia, 122, 184 167–74, 176, 178–82, 185–6,

Heynders, Odile, iii–iv, 176, 182–3, 188, 190–2, 201, 205–9
187, 198, 205, 209 celebrity, 1, 13–4, 76, 89, 97, 99, 206
Hillis Miller, J., 183, 205 charismatic, 23, 89
Hirsi Ali, Ayaan, v, 15, 17, 24, 97–120, collective, 9
139, 141, 143, 191–2, 202, exile, 52, 54–5, 57, 68, 72
205, 210 media, 15, 70–71
history of the present, 35, 37, 54, 58, negative, 76
72, 88, 204 organic, 5, 8
Hitchens, Christopher, 101–2, 205 public, v, 1, 3–15, 17–23, 25, 29, 31,
Hobsbawm, Eric, 102, 125, 132–3, 33–4, 37, 39–41, 43–4, 48–9, 54,
205 57, 59, 61, 63, 65, 69–70, 72–3,
Holocaust, 83, 150, 152, 196 76, 78, 80, 85, 88, 94–6, 98–102,
Homerus, 68 106, 119, 123–4, 127, 130, 132–3,
Honigmann, Heddy, 6 135, 137, 139–42, 144–5, 154,
Horkheimer, Max, 28, 184 159–60, 162–3, 165, 168, 171–3,
Houellebecq, Michel, 16, 76–7, 84, 176, 178, 180–2, 186, 191, 201,
90–5, 205–6 205, 207–8
Huffington, Ariana, 24, 88, 95 traditional, 8
humanities, 6, 58, 201 Internet, 2–3, 6, 10–1, 18, 25, 28, 31,
50, 71, 88, 102, 148, 156, 172,
idea, vi–vii, 2, 7–8, 11, 15, 18, 20, 174–6, 184, 196, 199–200
23, 29, 32, 39, 42–3, 47, 49–50, interpreter, 5, 106
54–5, 60, 62, 66, 75–6, 78–9, 82, intimacy, 78–81, 83–5, 89, 94, 189
86, 90–1, 95, 101, 103–4, 106, irony, 16, 44, 48, 57, 70–1, 88, 134,
114, 123–6, 129–30, 137, 143, 139, 183, 185, 191, 207
145, 147, 152, 158, 161, 167–8, Islam, 24, 97, 99–100, 103–4, 106–7,
177–178, 184, 193, 198–9 109–10, 112–4, 116, 118–9, 135,
identity, 13, 46, 52, 55, 63–4, 67–70, 139–41, 143, 145, 149, 151, 154,
72–3, 79, 90, 93–4, 100, 108, 171, 178, 191–2, 197, 204–5
126–7, 134, 136–8, 148, 160–3, Islamism, 81–82, 102, 140, 147–9
165–6, 168, 171, 178, 188, 191,
198–9, 204–5 Jacoby, R., 4, 205
ideology, 22, 28, 30, 33, 38–9, 59, Jaffe, Aaron, 15, 192, 205
63–4, 76, 80, 120, 160, 189 Joffe, Josef, 28
Ignatieff, M., 205 Jolie, Angelina, 14, 205
imagination, 11, 13, 24, 34, 41, 43, Jones, Bridget, 169–70, 207
52, 57, 72–3, 89, 163, 166, 168, journalism, 9, 28, 34, 52, 77, 124,
201, 207 147, 153, 157, 192, 202
independence, 9, 12, 97, 125, 154, 170 Judt, Tony, 101–2, 131, 136–7, 205
inequality, 2, 109, 127 Juppé, Alain, 88
infotainment, 12, 141 Karpinski, Eva C., 65, 205
intellectual, v, vii, x–xi, 1–15, 17–29, Kaufman, Philip, 66
31–4, 37, 39–41, 43–4, 48–50, Keane, John, 205
54–7, 59–61, 63, 65, 68–78, 80–6, Kelek, Necla, 118, 154, 205
88–90, 93–103, 106–7, 109–110, King, Alasdair, 2, 28, 31–2, 125, 205
112, 114, 116, 118–20, 123–4, Kis, Danilo, 69
127, 130, 132–3, 135, 137–145, Knausgaard, Karl Ove, 17
153–55, 157–60, 162–5, Koestler, Arthur, 101
Index 215
Konrád, Gyorgy, 75 market, 12, 16, 19, 22, 43, 49,

Koran, 103, 110–1, 143, 148–9, 180 69–70, 80–1, 131, 133, 147,
Korteweg, Ariejan, 88, 205 187, 189–90, 202
Kossmann, Alfred, 168, 198, 205 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, 172
Kouters, Steffie, 116 Marshall, P. David, 13, 94, 147, 188,
Kreisky, Bruno, 10–1 206, 208
Kristéva, Julia, 74 Marwick, A.E., 176, 206
Kroes, Neelie, 107 Marx, Karl, 1, 3, 19
Kruk, Marijn, 206 Marx, William, 16, 206
Kundera, Milan, 16, 37, 54, 183, 206 McCallum, Richard, 12, 206
McEwan, Ian, 16, 18
Lacroix, Justine, 3, 206 McKee, Alan, 56, 207
Langer, U., 199, 206 McLaughlin, Neil, xi, 21–2, 76, 107,
Lanham, Richard A., 189, 206–7 116, 207
Lash, Christopher, 2 McRobbie, Angela, 169–170, 207
legislator, 5 media, ix, 2–10, 12–3, 15, 19, 21–3,
Lessing, Doris, 18, 166 25–6, 28–9, 31, 39–41, 50, 55–7,
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 31 70–1, 74–81, 83–4, 87–91, 93–4,
Lévy, Bernard-Henri, v, 7, 13–5, 24, 99, 101–2, 109, 117, 126–7, 131,
57, 74–96, 100, 140, 187–90, 139, 147–8, 152, 154, 162, 164,
206 172, 174–6, 182, 188–90, 192,
Lewis, Tania, 15, 206 201–3, 205–7
liberalism, 65, 69, 91 mediatisation, x, 16, 132
Libya, 7, 24, 77, 85, 88–9, 157, 188 mediator, 21, 88, 124, 137, 139, 141
Linke, Gabriele, 80, 189, 206 Meizoz, Jerome, 20, 23, 207
literature, i–iii, vi–ix, 13, 15, 18–20, Mels, Sara, 201, 205–6, 208
25, 29–31, 33–4, 46, 48–51, 56, Melzer, Arthur M., 3, 8, 100, 207
65, 69–72, 74, 86, 91, 93, 96, 124, memoir, 24, 97–8, 103, 107, 109, 196
129, 136, 161, 163–4, 174, 183–4, migration, x, 35, 38, 41–3, 46, 57,
186–7, 194, 201, 203–5, 207 108, 128, 161, 177
Llosa, Mario Vargas, 8 Milosevic, Slobodan, 56, 59, 73
Lützeler, Paul Michael, 37, 206 Milosz, Czeslaw, 6
Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 76 mind industry, 26, 28
Mistry, Rohinton, 172
Machiavelli, 86 Misztal, Barbara A., 57, 207
Maeterlinck, Maurice, 124 modernity, vii–viii, 5, 11, 41, 99, 115,
Magris, Claudio, 75 120, 141, 145–6, 153–4, 168, 179,
Maidan square, 77, 79, 95 201, 205
Mak, Geert, 116, 206 late, 11, 41
Malraux, André, 16, 88–9, 95 post-, 5
Mandela, Nelson, 98 Montaigne, Michel de, 170, 199, 206
manifesto, 83, 128, 190 Monti, Mario, 131
Mann, Heinrich, 6 Moors, Annelies, 111, 192, 207
Mann, Thomas, 6, 27, 54, 188 moralist, 179, 181
Manning, Chelsea, 140 Mubarak, Hosni, 139–41
Mantel, Hilary, 18 Mulisch, Harry, 37
Manza, 122 multiculturalism, 97, 103, 118, 165,
Marais, Eugene, 124 178, 191
Marcus, Laura, 105, 206 Murakami, Haruki, 16
216 Index
Muslim, 13, 17, 60–2, 72, 82, 99, 160–1, 163, 173, 177, 182, 184,
102–4, 107, 109–114, 117–20, 188, 190–2, 201, 203, 205, 207
140–1, 143, 145–6, 148–9, 154, polyphony, 37, 44, 51, 58, 65, 71
161, 167, 191–2, 195 popularisation, 4, 8, 11, 165
Brotherhood, 64, 73, 82, 143, 145 Posner, Richard A., 4, 20, 22–3,
Mussolini, 7 98, 207
post-feminist, 25, 169
Naipaul, V.S., 18 posture, 8, 19–20, 23–4, 72, 93–4,
nationalism, x, 5, 35, 52, 56, 63, 65, 100, 117, 158
67, 73, 161–2, 186 Proust, M., 16, 68
neo-liberalism, 65, 69 public, iii, v–vi, ix–xi, 1–25, 27–34,
Nicolaïdis, Kalypso, 3, 206 36–44, 46, 48–50, 52, 54–66,
Nietzsche, Friedrich, vi, 207 68–124, 126–8, 130–148, 150,
Nin, Anais, 166 152–4, 156, 158–166, 168, 170–6,
novel, 10, 13, 16–7, 19, 33, 36, 48–50, 178–83, 186–193, 197, 199, 201,
54, 56, 58, 65–7, 77, 89, 124, 132, 204–8, 210
134, 136, 161–3, 176–80, 184, opinion, 70
186–8, 195, 203, 209 sphere, ix–xi, 3, 6–7, 10–3, 15–7,
Nussbaum, Martha C., 18, 207 19, 21–3, 25, 57, 64, 76, 79, 82–3,
86, 95, 99, 101, 106, 131, 137,
Obama, Barack, 98 139–41, 153, 192, 204, 207–8
Oltermann, Philip, 30–1, 207 Pushkin, Alexander, 75
Ondaatje, Michael, 19 Putin, Vladimir, 96
Orwell, George, 6, 88, 95, 183
Queipo, Xavier, 122
pamphlet, 46, 126, 130, 132
Pamuk, Orhan, 18, 100, 140, Ramadan, Tariq, 5, 82, 102, 118, 149
162–3, 198 Rancière, Jacques, 184, 207
Panizza, Francisco, 126, 207 Rand, Ayn, 166
Papadimos, Loukas, 131 Redmond, Sean, 13, 15, 84, 207
Parks, Tim, 18, 79 responsibility, ix–x, 3, 20, 35, 41,
Pels, Dick, 120, 192, 207 43–4, 50, 52, 58–60, 63, 71, 73,
performance, 2, 8, 13–5, 19–21, 23, 78, 86, 129–30, 132, 157, 159,
48–9, 52, 70, 72, 76, 92, 94–5, 165, 185–7, 189, 194, 201, 205
133, 149, 154–55, 189 revolution, vii, 33, 74, 82, 85, 89, 141,
persona, 5, 12, 15, 17–21, 23, 72, 148, 151–2
76, 85, 89, 100–1, 117, 120, 154, Riace, 156–7
164, 172 Richards, Jennifer, 207
Pessoa, Fernando, 168–169, 207, 210 Ricoeur, Paul, 207
Piketty, Thomas, 1–3, 182, 207 Rilke, R.M., 68, 171
Pinterest, 10, 164, 172–3, 175, Roche, Mark, 183, 207
178, 199 Rodney, David, 6
Pitt, Brad, 14 Rome, 75
Plath, Sylvia, 166 Rorty, Richard, 16, 46, 183, 207
politics, vi, 5, 9, 17, 25, 27, 30, 35, Rose, Flemming, 146–7
37–8, 40, 45, 56, 81, 83–4, 88–9, Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 6, 16
98, 106, 110–3, 116, 118, 120, Roy, Oliver, 118
124–5, 131–2, 137–8, 142, 148, Royal, Ségolene, xi, 12, 98, 176
Index 217
Rushdie, Salman, 13, 15, 18, 75, 97, Snowden, Edward, 27, 140, 195
100, 140, 173, 183, 207 Sotloff, Steven, 41
spectacle, 6, 49, 84
Said, Edward W., vi, 8–9, 15, 21–2, 36, speech, 10, 13, 22, 62, 64, 79, 109,
48, 54–5, 64, 84, 103, 118, 120, 116, 140, 143, 146, 163, 184,
134, 136, 144, 162, 182, 208 186–7, 189
Salim, Nahed, 116 Sperber, Manes, 101
Sancho Panza, 151 stereotype, 78, 101
Sarajevo, 24, 66–7, 77, 92, 95–6 Street, John, iv, 17, 62, 69, 84, 146, 208
Sarkozy, Nicolas, 77, 81–2, 85, 87, Sufi, 160, 180–1
188–9 surveillance, 27, 140
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 18, 77, 90, 96,
101, 206 Tahrir square, 147–8, 151
satire, v, 10, 22, 139, 141, 143, 145, Taksim square, 162, 175
147, 149, 151, 153, 155, 157, Taliban, 77
159, 195 Talmud, 116
scenario, 20, 37, 41, 49, 73, 78, 136 television, 2–3, 6, 9–15, 17, 19, 24,
Scheffer, Paul, xi, 118 28, 40–1, 48, 50, 61, 74, 78, 83,
Schlösser, Christian, 30, 33, 208 91–3, 99–102, 106–7, 110–2,
Schneider, Peter, 75 119–20, 131, 139, 141–2, 149,
self-censorship, 147 153–5, 158, 164, 186, 192–3, 195
– fabrication, 12, 72, 85, 89 Thatcher, Margaret, 117
– fashioning, 15, 20, 204 theatre, 33, 74–5, 86, 88, 95–6, 155–7,
– promotion, 10–11, 14, 88, 92, 188, 190
102, 173 theatricality, 2, 15, 21, 72, 139, 155,
Semprun, Jorge, 88–89 157, 159
Sennett, Richard, 76, 78–81, 83–5, Thijssen, Peter, 201, 205–6, 208
89–90, 93–4, 172, 188–190, think tank, 24, 106
206, 208 Thompson, John B., 16, 208
Serbia, 56, 59, 67 Timmerman, Christiane, 201, 205–6,
Shafak, Elif, v, 25, 140, 160–181, 208
197–201, 204, 208 Tito, Josip Broz, 53
Shakespeare, William, 47, 75 Townsley, Eleanor, 21, 207
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, viii, 122–3, transformation, ix, 7, 10, 19, 68, 79,
208, 210 131–2, 204
Shoah, 83, 149, 189 translation, viii, 2, 4, 9, 123, 138,
Shokof, Daryush, 196 165, 176, 184–5, 190, 192–5,
Showalter, Elaine, 56, 208 198, 209
Siad Barre, Mohamed, 104 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 66
Simet, Georg F., 162, 208 Tumbidge, James, 208
Sinan, Mimar, 176–7 Turner, Graeme, 12–3, 188, 208
sincerity, 20, 22, 91, 95, 105, 202 tweet, 173–4, 176, 199, 206
Sirinelli, Jean-Francois, 21, 208 Twitter, 6, 148, 160, 164, 172–6, 178,
Skafidas, Michael, 163, 198, 208 199–200, 206, 208–9
Sloterdijk, Peter, 158, 171, 208
Small, Helen, 18, 182, 208 Ugresić, Dubravka, 24, 52–8, 64–72,
Smith, Sidonie, 192, 208 186–7, 205, 209
Smith, Zadie, 6, 16, 18 Ulmer, Bruno, 6
218 Index
Van Gogh, Theo, 17, 99, 103, 107, Westergaard, Kurt, 150–1
109, 111, 117, 147, 202 Weyns, Walter, 201, 205–6, 208
Van Istendeal, Geert, 209 Wiardi Beckmann Institute, 106
Van Loo, Marjet, xi, 176, 209 Wilders, Geert, 131
Van Reybrouck, David, v, 24, 121–33, Winfrey, Oprah, 70
135–8, 193–4, 209 Winter, Tim, 17, 47, 114, 155, 192,
Van Rumler, Fritz, 185, 210 196, 202–3, 206, 210
Van Tilborgh, Jolanda, 116, 119, 210 Withuis, Jolande, 116
Van Wichelen, Sonja, 110, 202 Witteveen, W.J., xi, 122, 210
Velickovic, Vedrane, 210 Wood, James, 123, 177, 187, 200, 210
ventriloquism, 57, 186 Woodward, Bob, 88
Verdonk, Rita, 99, 108, 111 Woolf, Virginia, 166–7
Verhofstadt, Guy, 129
Vermeersch, Peter, 122, 209 xenophobia, 5, 38
Vielle, Laurence, 122
visibility, ix, 4–5, 9, 13, 15, 21–3, 25, Yesayan, Zabel, 54
78, 84, 94–5, 101, 112, 116–7, Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth, 186, 210
132, 178, 202 YouTube, 15, 96, 175, 186–7, 190,
voice, 8, 14–16, 20, 22, 24, 36–8, 192, 195–6
45–6, 49, 52–3, 57, 64–9, 71–2, Yugoslavia, 24, 35, 52–4, 56–9, 63, 66,
76, 94–5, 100, 104, 109–10, 68, 71
114–5, 119–20, 122, 125, 142,
144, 154, 161, 186 Z
private, 52, 57 Zafón, Carlos Ruiz, 172
public, 57, 64, 76, 95, 119 Zagreb, 56, 60, 66
Voltaire, 75, 97, 140, 195 Zeh, Juli, 16
Warner, Michael, 22, 210 Zembla, 111
Watson, Julia, 192, 208 Zenith, Richard, 168, 207, 210
Weibo, 6 Žižek, Slavoi, 102, 164, 190, 198,
welfare state, 103, 105–6, 109, 112, 210
115 Zwagerman, Joost, 110

Writers As Public Intellectuals - Literature, Celebrity, Democracy

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Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature

Published in association with the Centre for Modern European Literature,

Series Editors: Thomas Baldwin, Ben Hutchinson and Shane Weller

Thomas Baldwin, James Fowler and Ana de Medeiros (editors)

Anne Fuchs and J. J. Long

Anna Katharina Schaffner and Shane Weller (editors)

Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature

Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.

Series Editors’ Preface vi

1 Transformations of the Public Intellectual 1

Many of the most significant European writers and literary movements

However, Italian literary modernity might also be seen as having com-

modernism, for instance, one has to consider the relationship between

This book is about writers as public intellectuals critiquing in their

In a democracy, writers are just citizens like everyone else; providers

This book starts with discussing recent theoretical positions on pub-

In order to provide a theoretical framework for the individual case stud-

I am speaking like an intellectual, but the intellectual,

On 27 April 2014 The New York Times published an article on Thomas

Characterisations of the public intellectual

The public intellectual intervenes in the public debate and proclaims a

As is argued in this book, the recent addition of the term ‘public’

to offer, in The Treason of the Intellectuals (2009 [1927]), quite a pessi-

sociological sense, in which intellectuals are considered as those whose

the traditional intellectual (the teacher, priest or literary writer ‘inde-

Cultural authority and popularisation

intellectuals and their public engagement.11 While the unique and

fulfilled by today’s public intellectual, due to the variety and speed of

• a mistrustful sensitivity to damage to the normative infrastructure

• the spark of imagination in conceiving of alternatives;

Sensitivity, anticipation, the thinking through of alternatives, imagina-

the horizontal and informal networking of communications dimin-

Television and the Internet provide intellectuals with opportunities that

diverse strategies that are used in the media-saturated public sphere

The celebritisation of the intellectual

The perspective on the self-promoting intellectual on television is a

create their prominence through publicity campaigns, interviews

Additionally, the literary celebrity, such as novelist Salman Rushdie,

academic or based on a writing career, but whose performances occur

Literature in the late modern public sphere

dominance of the autonomous writer as a consequence of the spread of

The division in political writers and autonomous novelists ties in with

Knausgaard). Moreover, many authors in the current public sphere take

In May 2011 a list of Britain’s top 300 intellectuals,21 ranking public

interactive cultural forms (Ibid., p. 14). Though her definition of litera-

a Booker Prize-winning example of Canadian postmodern fiction,

Collins underscores the redefinition of what literary reading means

performance to its best. The self-fashioning of the author outside the

How to study public intellectual activities and roles?

research on French and American public intellectuals, McLaughlin and

Table 1.1 Heuristic four-level scheme for researching public intellectuals

Cultural Authority The PI has ideas, cultural authority and creden-

is no public intellectual, and without the intellectual taking a stance

The structure of the book

In this book various case studies of public intellectual writing will be

transnational context in which conflicting cultural, social and political

provocative issues of integration. The final chapter zooms in on the

The German Hans Magnus Enzensberger is an active and fêted writer

The rapid development of the mind industry, its rise

The intellectual and his online audience

‘Preserve yourself from the dangers of the digital world regarding

industrialisation of the mind requires a new position of the intellectual

This idea of media awareness and participation will become a thread