Modern epistemological systems contain internal fissures enabling regenerative critique

Evidence

Although my point of departure is Said’s Orientalism, I continue to expand my circle of inquiry around it, adding historical and philosophical texture, and culminating in obviating his narrative and its conventionally political underpinnings. In other words, although my book starts with politics as a site of critique, it ends up in an entirely different domain of thought, which is precisely the point. This, therefore, is an essay on foundational moral principles and ethical structures that stand in a complex set of relationships with modernity, mostly as a matrix of denials and negations, but also as the loci of regenerative critique. In an epistemological system whose very existence has been grounded in an ab initio exclusion of certain views and modes of thought, it might seem that any such advocacy would be doomed from the start. Yet, as this book will argue energetically, performativity, discursive formations, knowledge, and structures of power are dynamic things that always leave—by virtue of their very dynamism—openings, cracks, fissures, and fractures antithetical to the paradigmatic structures. The modern project is replete with such fissures, precisely because it denies them, and to believe that they cannot provide for what I call regenerative critique is not only a paradoxical proposition, but one that merely perpetuates the metaphorical deadness of Foucault’s dead author. To think through openings and fissures, to give exclusions and silences an active presence, to resuscitate what the central domains have rendered marginal and irrelevant—these are ultimately the only true meanings of critique. Most obviously, a critique that sanctions the death of the author is no less dead than the author herself. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 52

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces ‘regenerative critique’ as the book’s key method: thinking through the openings, cracks, and silenced positions that dominant paradigms deny.
• XREF: Resonates with the saver’s ongoing curation of silence-as-positive and marginal knowledge themes across recent sources.
• DEEPTHINKING: The core methodological thesis — that critique through fissures and silences is the only true critique, and that critique endorsing the death of the author is itself dead — is dense and paradigm-shifting, resisting summary.