The intellectuals representations, his or her articulations of a cause or idea to society, are not meant primarily to fortify ego

or celebrate status.... Intellectual representations are the activity itself, dependent on a kind of consciousness that is skeptical, engaged, unremittingly devoted to rational investigation and moral judgement. (20) If the thinker does not relate himself to the value of truth in political struggle, he cannot responsibly cope with the whole of live experience (21) At bottom, the intellectual, in my sense of the word, is netiher a pacifier nor a consensusbuilder, but someone whose whole being is staked on a critical sense, a sense of being unwilling to accept easy formulas, or ready-made cliches, or the smooth, ever-soaccommodating confirmations of what the powerful or conventional have to say, and what they do. Not just passively unwillingly, but actively willing to say so in public. (23) In dark times an intellectual is very often looked to by members of his or her nationality to represent, speak out for, and testify to the sufferings of that nationality. (43) To this terribly important task of representing the collective suffering of your own people, testifying to its travails, reasserting its enduring presence, reinforcing its memory, there must be added something else, which only an intellectual, I believe, has the obligation to fulfil... For the intellectual the task, I believe, is explicitly to universalise the crisis, to give greater human scope to what a particular race or nation suffered, to associate that experience with the sufferings of others. (44) The exilic intellectual does not respond to the logic of the conventional but to the audacity of daring, and to representing change, to moving on, not standing still. (64) Therefore, the problem for the intellectual is to try to deal with the impingements of modern professionalisation as I have been discussing them, not by pretending that they are not there, or denying their influence, but by representing a different set of values and prerogatives. These I shall collect under the name of amateurism, literally, an activity that is fueled by care and affection rather than by profit and selfish, narrow specialisation. (82) ...One of the main intellectual activities of our century has been the questioning, not to say undermining, of authority. (91) The intellectual over time naturally turns towards the political world partly because, unlike the academy or the laboratory, that world is animated by considerations of power and interest writ large that drive a whole society or nation, that, as Marx so fatefully said, take the intellectual from relatively discrete questions of interpretation to much more significant ones of social change and transformation. (109-110) Every intellectual whose metier is articulating and representing specific views, ideas, ideologies, logically aspires to making them work in a sociey. (110) ...The true intellectual is a secular being. However much intellectuals pretend that their representations are of higher things or ultimate values, morality begins with their activity in this secular world of ours. (120) What strikes me as much more interesting is how to keep a space in the mind open for doubt and for the part of an alert, skeptial irony (preferably also self-irony). Yes, you have convictions and you make judgements, but they are arrived at by work, and by a sense of

association with others, other intellectuals, a grassroots movement, a continuing history, a set of lived lives.(120) The hardest aspect of being an intellectual is to represent what you profess through your work and interventions, without hardening into an institution or a kind of automaton acting at the behest of a system or method... But the only way of ever achieving it is to keep reminding yourself that as an intellectual you are the one who can choose between actively representing the truth to the best of your ability and passively allowing a patron or an authority to direct you. (121)