Ever since the noun “intellectual” originated during the Dreyfus Affair, intellectu- als have been adept at creating historical narratives, invented and real, to justify different causes and collectivities: the nation, the race, the proletariat, liberty, God. ey have also been adept at narrating their own histories, representing their self-images, and therefore, necessarily, creating their own fables. Exile—the state of being forcedly removed from one’s native country or of self-imposed absence from one’s country—has become one of the key words to identify the intellectual, as well as a harsh reality to some. What are (some of) the relations between exile and the intellectual’s self-representation? I am not interested so much in how intellectuals represent exile per se, but in how they link the state of being in exile to their own self-images—personal, political, and intellectual. I have chosen to focus on two intellectuals who view exile as the source of their creativity, but with very different consequences: Edward Said and George Steiner.