Difference does not necessarily imply hostility or fixed oppositional essences

Evidence

What has been of special interest for me has been the extension of post-colonial concerns to the problems of geography. After all, Orientalism is a study based on the re-thinking of what had for centuries been believed to be an unbridgeable chasm separating East from West. My aim, as I said earlier, was not so much to dissipate difference itself—for who can deny the constitutive role of national as well as cultural differences in the relations between human beings—but to challenge the notion that difference implies hostility, a frozen reified set of opposed essences, and a whole adversarial knowledge built out of those things. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 879

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies Said’s core aim: not erasing difference, but rejecting the reified, adversarial framing of East-West difference.
• XREF: The ‘master-slave binary dialectic’ phrasing connects to Hegel, Marx, and Fanon’s colonial psychology — a building block for the Islamophobia field’s accounts of colonial selfhood. — connects to: Derrida’s différance is an unknowable absolute in the German idealist tradition — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 312; A non-dialectical contradiction stays unresolved and without solution — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 98; Sinhalese enmity is reactive to rebel acts, not primordial — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist…, 231 (+1 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 879