The intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty to for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for a public. An this role has an edge to it, and cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d’être is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug. The intellectual does so on the basis of universal principles: that all human beings are entitled to expect decent standards of behavior concerning freedom and justice from worldly powers or nations and that deliberate or inadvertent violations of these standards need to be testified and fought against courageously.
Edward Said’s “Representation of the Intellectual”, kiriman dari Sita di milis chevindo-2000