A critique of silencing can itself reproduce the silence it indicts
Evidence
But what is remarkable is that with the exception of Said’s own voice, the only voices we encounter in the book are precisely those of the very Western canonicity which, Said complains, has always silenced the Orient. Who is silencing whom, who is refusing to permit a historicized encounter between the voice of the so-called ‘Orientalist’ and the many voices that ‘Orientalism’ is said so utterly to suppress, is a question that is very hard to determine as we read this book. It sometimes appears that one is transfixed by the power of the very voice that one debunks. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 308
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: A dense, sharp self-implicating paradox about critique: the debunker can be transfixed by — and reproduce — the single voice they denounce. Genuinely paradigm-disturbing for how we read any canonical critique.
- BMF: Echoes the doomed-irony trap in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, where Changez’s counter-narrative can’t escape America’s terms — a non-European voice that speaks entirely in, and to, the power it indicts.
- XREF: connects to: Deconstruction paradoxically requires political resistance to stay silent and unprogrammatic — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 321; Masses’ silence functions as counterstrategy against power — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 288; Material plenty legitimately silences meaningful political opposition — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 107 (+2 more)