Abstract
Since the Dreyfus Affair, we have seen the emergence of a figure that Zola summoned to the public scene: the intellectual, whose speech and action are rooted in the affirmation of their autonomy and in their two fundamental characteristics: the defense of universal causes, namely those separate from personal interests, and the transgression of the dominant order. Therefore, by definition, the intellectual is always someone socially and politically engaged. Today, intellectuals seem to be publically invisible and silent. Is the engaged intellectual a figure facing extinction?
Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption.
—Adorno, Minima Moralia
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “A Critique of Lazy Reason. Against the Waste Experience,” in The Modern World-system in the Longue durée (Colorado, BO: Paradigm, 2004).
Pierre Bourdieu, “The Corporatism of the Universal: The Role of Intellectuals in the Modern World,” TEWS 81 (1989): 99.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method (London: Vintage, 1968), 19
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The War has Taken Place,” in Sense and Nonsense (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 19.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 1962), 528.
Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air. The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1982), 113–114.
Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996), 31.
Jeremy Rifkin, The Age of Access (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2000).
José Joaquin Brunner, “Peligro e promesa: la educación superior en America Latina,” in F. Lopez Segura and Alma Maldonado (eds.), Educaciön superior latinoamericana y organismos internationales. Un análise critico (Cali: Unesco, Boston College, University of San Buenaventura, 2000).
See Michael Freitag, Le Naufrage de l’université (Paris: Editions de la Découverte, 1996).
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity. An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
Paul Virilio, “Critical Space,” in The Virilio Reader, trans. James Der Derian (Oxford: Whiley-Blackwell, 1998), 58–73.
Maria Rita Kehl and Eugênio Bucci’s Videologias (Sáo Paulo: Boitempo Editorial, 2005).
Ilya Prigogine, The End of Certainty. Time, Chaos and the New Laws of Nature (New York: Free Press, 1996), 7, 56, 183.
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition. A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
David Ford, “Epilogue: Postmodernism and postscript,” in David F. Ford (ed.), The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 291.
Copyright information
© 2011 Marilena Chauí
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Chauí, M. (2011). The Engaged Intellectual: A Figure Facing Extinction?. In: Between Conformity and Resistance. Theory in the World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118492_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118492_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-29192-2
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-11849-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)