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"Politics in dark times such as those in which we live, cannot proceed without a counter imaginary: a passionate vision that rivals and defeats the moralized sadism of fascist passions and their phantasmatic landscape." — Judith Butler
Many of us are in a state of paralysis and disbelief as we watch the world fall apart. This is not helped by the fact that everywhere we look, there seems to only be one way of reading the world, one single worldview.
We are in a war of narratives where the line between propaganda and news has been blurred, where history is rewritten by the oppressors, a world that celebrates force and domination. Yet these vulgar warmongers and tech billionaires do not offer us any vision whatsoever, only war, chaos, cruelty, sadism, and fear.
So how can we free ourselves from this worldview?
Naomi Klein says we need to understand that these people don’t actually believe in a future, only an apocalyptic one. What we should do, she suggests, is build a broad coalition of people who believe in this realm, this world, and each other.
This requires creative courage: the courage to reject conformity and imagine alternatives. Sadly many of us have lost our abilities to do this. On the one hand, we have not prioritised spaces for imagining, for sensing new realities. On the other, it can feel like a distraction or a futility to imagine alternatives while men, women and children are being slaughtered before our eyes.
But we must do more than just respond. Too often, our actions and opinions precede thinking. Even trying to understand things deeply is seen as a cop-out. The work of building alternatives is not about cosmetic changes, good news or utopian futures. It’s about listening to the voices too often ignored when they really matter. If we don’t do this work, our revolutions, whatever form they take, will fail, like so many before, because the fallen rulers will be replaced by something much worse.
Who can we turn to? Those voices are usually the ignored, the marginalised, those under fire. Artists are of course the obvious ones, so are intellectuals.
In today’s world where everyone and anyone can claim to be an intellectual, an expert, a thought leader, a scholar, how do we discern those worth listening to from the cacophony of opinions?
For Edward Said, the true intellectual was someone who worked to advance human freedom and knowledge and who was not easily co-opted by governments or corporations, but rather always sided with the forgotten, the weak, the unrepresented. Their role is always to assert the alternative.
“The intellectual does so on the basis of universal principles,” he said, “that all human beings are entitled to expect decent standards of behavior concerning freedom and justice from worldly powers or nations, and that deliberate or inadvertent violations of these standards need to be testified and fought against courageously.”
This dissenting intellectual, he foresaw, was at risk of disappearing because of the pressures on them to commodify their skills or expertise, to join communities of experts where the goal is no longer to tell the truth, but to maintain the status quo. But they always have a choice to side with power or not.
For Said, they are neither a pacifier nor a consensus-builder, but someone who is critical and refuses easy formulas or cliches. This is not about criticism for the sake of criticism, but about asking questions, making connections that might be denied, smashing the stereotypes of vision and intellect, and not rushing to collective judgement or action.
In dark times, he said, the intellectual is often looked to by his or her people to represent, speak out for, and testify to their sufferings, and this is an important task, even an obligation. But their task must also go beyond just fighting for survival.
The intellectual must also contribute to what Aimé Césaire calls the invention of new souls, Said suggests, where their loyalty is not drawn in so far as to abandon his or her critical sense or reduce its imperatives which must always go beyond survival to political liberation, critiquing leadership, and presenting alternatives, which are too often pushed aside in times of crisis.
This also means explicitly universalising the crisis, connecting it with other people’s suffering, giving it greater human scope. “This does not at all mean a loss in historical specificity,” he argues, “but rather it guards against the possibility that a lesson learned about oppression in one place will be forgotten or violated in another place or time.”
Words, Veronica Yates and illustration, Miriam Sugranyes
References
Representations of the Intellectual, The 1993 Reith Lectures, Edward W. Said.
‘Naomi Klein on Trump, Musk, Far Right & "End Times Fascism."’ Democracy Now, 5 May 2025. Watch here.
Global Empire - A Conversation With Edward Said, Interview by Tariq Ali, TeleSUR English, 1994. Watch here.
Further Reading
The rise of end times fascism, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, The Guardian, 13 April 2025. Read here.
‘Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,’ Hannah Arendt.
Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire.
The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon.
“You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.” — Pablo Neruda
“From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, … but nothing I did before the age of 70 was worthy of attention. At 73, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am 86, so that by 90 I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At 100, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at 130, 140, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive.”— Katsushika Hokusai, also known as Gakyō Rōjin Manji (The Old Man Mad About Art)
