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When he published Out of Place in 1999, Said was not the first scholar to supply the public with his memoirs, but he revealed very intimate and unexpected information. This is one of the main interests of this book, which tells of his life between 1935—the year of his birth—and 1962, the year he received his PhD. The aim of this paper is not to reduce Said’s thought processes to the way he lived his life, but to show the range of possibilities he had available to choose from. Nothing was decided yet: it was possible to provide other solutions to the suffering of the identity crisis, much more aggressive and dangerous than the deconstruction of the alienating identities transformed into tools of domination. This paper aims to show the tremendous process of sublimation contained within Said’s work.