In a frequently quoted essay, to which we now return in a revised and diagnostic methodological context, Edward Said asks how it is that the fatal condition of exile has turned “so easily into a potent, even enriching, motif of modern culture.” Said quickly rejects the idea that exile somehow serves humanism, as some sort of school for virtue along the lines, perhaps, of the consolatory philosophizing conventionalized in the Roman literature of exile. “Is it not true,” he objects, “that the views of exile in literature and, moreover, in religion obscure what is truly horrendous: that exile is irremediably secular and unbearably historical; that it is produced by human beings for other human beings; and that, like death but without death's ultimate mercy, it has torn millions of people from the nourishment of tradition, family and geography?” He shrugs past “the modest refuge provided by subjectivity” to the literary exiles of Paris and New York, and he assimilates exile rather to the condition of the hopeless refugee in Cairo, Beirut, or Mexico City. After developing numerous insights into the tortured condition of exile, however, Said returns to his initial question: “How is it that the literature of exile has taken its place as a topos of human experience alongside the literature of adventure, education, or discovery?” His answer, following Simone Weil and Theodore Adorno on the atrocious costs of alternatives to exile in their age, circles back to exile as an emblem of subjectivity.