What Is a Public Intervention?: Speaking Truth to the Oppressed

Ghassan Hage recounts the tensions he experienced as he was preparing to deliver a lecture at a Palestinian university. Whereas he perceived that the role of the intellectual in such circumstances is less to affirm new ideas than to confirm what his audience already knows, thus manifesting his support for their cause, he nevertheless took the opportunity of this public presence to challenge the conventional topic of resistance and assert that empowerment is not an end but a means. To the heroic discourse, which masks games of power and reproduces the attitude of the oppressor, he opposed the everyday practices of resilience.