Radical Thinkers: Shahidha Bari Presents Freud and the Non-European by Edward Said

Shahidha Bari is a writer, academic and critic, based in London. She is Lecturer in Romanticism at Queen Mary University of London. Her academic work explores Islam and the idea of the East in nineteenth-century European literature and art. Bari has previously written on contemporary philosophy, music, modern art and architecture. Her first book, Keats and Philosophy: The Life of Sensations was published in 2012. She sits on the editorial board of New Formations: A journal of culture/theory/politics. 

Freud and the Non-European was banned by the Freud Institute in Vienna, and the controversial lecture eventually became Edward Said’s final book. It builds on Said’s abiding interest in the psychoanalyst’s work to examine Freud’s assumption that Moses was an Egyptian and from there explores the limits of identity. Such an unresolved, nuanced sense of identity, Said argues, might one day form the basis for a new understanding between Israelis and Palestinians.

Edward W. Said (1935-2003) was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Literature and of Kings College Cambridge, his celebrated works include Orientalism, The End of the Peace Process, Power, Politics and Culture, and the memoir Out of Place. He is also the editor, with Christopher Hitchens, of Blaming the Victims, published by Verso.