The Exasperation With the Polemical

Adam Shatz joins PTO to talk about his new book, 'Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination'. We talked about why Adam, though a huge admirer of Edward Said and his classic work Orientalism, feels that some of the work subsequently inspired by Said has failed to give a well rounded picture of middle eastern societies in all their complexity. We also talked about why Adam thinks that there can be value in reading reactionary writers whose politics we might abhor, and why nuance and complexity are not the enemies of radical political commitment. Finally, we discussed the ways in which early experiences of trauma can be the starting point for creativity.