a kind of metaphoric exile in order to be at one with the processes and intricacies by
which intellectual articulations are made manifest. Thus:
For the intellectual an exilic displacement means being liberated from the usual career,
in which ‘doing well’ and following in time-honored footsteps are the main milestones.
Exile means that you are always going to be marginal, and that what you do as an
intellectual has to be made up because you cannot follow a prescribed path. If you can
experience that fate not as a deprivation and something to be bewailed, but as a sort of
freedom, a process of discovery in which you do things according to your own pattern, as
various interests seize your attention, and as the particular goal you set dictates: that is a
unique pleasure. (Edward Said 1994:46)In other words, exile within the intellectual realm becomes the freedom to live in a
hermetic/exclusive world other than the generally accessible. In this case, in following
their own hearts, intellectuals are seen as operating within the realm of the patently anti-
social and constituting at the same time the marginal other. Yet the inspiration for
intellection ironically produces modes of expression which ultimately confront the
existing social order on matters of the culturally popular; they must however be projected
and packaged to be consistent with the present age. The radicalism that inheres in the
vocation of the intellectual also touches on the other spheres of the social order: the
political, economic, etc.
The attempt at categorization, however, flies in the face of Breytenbach’s view of exile
which presents the antinomy of home and exile as illusionary. Put another way, humanity
has always exclusively been a product of exile and never that of home, which is why
“through expansion, skirmishing, coupling, mixing, separation, regrouping of peoples and
cultures... everywhere is [now] exile” (Leon de Kock 2004:1). If everywhere is exile
then there has never been home, there may never be home. While we may be fascinated
by the exceptionality of Breytenbach’s argument, it is important perhaps to observe that
the value of such contention lies in the manner in which it problematizes and explodes
the popularly held opinion about the antinomy, and in some cases the complementarity of
home and exile. Do we then say that exile, especially physical exile, with which this
study is generally, but not exclusively concerned, be subsequently read without any
reference to the idea of home?