You're listening to the Politics Theory of the podcast. My name is Alex Doherty and my guest

today is Adam Schatz. We spoke about Adam's 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 Saeed has failed to give a well-rounded

picture of Middle Eastern societies in all of their complexity. We also talked about why Adam

thinks that there can be value in reading reactionary writers whose politics we might

uphold, 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.

Adam Schatz is the US editor of the London Review of Books and a contributor to the New York Times magazine,

the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker, amongst other publications.

His next book, publishing in 2024, is The Rebels Clinic, The Revolutionary Lives of France Fanon.

So, Adam, the title of the book comes from the Trinidad-born British novelist, V.S. Naipaul,

who once remarked to you during an interview you did with him that you could be a writer or you could be a missionary, but you couldn't be both. And although that's not a statement

that you

straightforwardly agree with, and Nypol is not someone you have a great deal of sympathy for

when it comes to his politics, you nonetheless describe in the book how that comment spoke to

your growing exasperation with a certain style of polemical writing that we might associate

with certain campaigning journalists.

You mentioned Robert Fiske in the book. John Pilger was another name that sprang to my mind.

Can you talk a bit about where this exasperation with the polemical came from, how your own writing

diverge from that kind of idiom over time, and why you've been increasingly drawn to

...