Nationalism constitutes a totalizing epistemology no modern subject can escape

Evidence

Nationalism is not just a political formation; it is both an ontological and an epistemological formation in the first order. True, it creates the national subject, but it does so only after creating the subject as a particular identity, and creating it as a knowing, thinking entity, with a particular mode of rationality. There is no citizen, student, scholar—Orientalist or not—who can entirely escape this ontological and epistemological formation and, importantly for our concerns later, the occasional loosening of the grip and shaking off of the dogmas of this formation cannot occur except post eventum, which is to say that the freeing, or partial freeing, of the subject from this status happens within the givens of this status. There is no modern subject who can exist in a state originally free of this ontological and epistemological status; and when one frees oneself from it, it is, ipso facto, against this very status that one must struggle. This is precisely what central paradigms mean: to be against or outside of them is to resist them; it is not to be able to conceive or operate in the world, whether in harmony or contrariety, without first presupposing them. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 201

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that liberation from nationalist epistemology can only occur from within its own givens — that to resist a paradigm is already to presuppose it — is a dense, paradigm-shifting formulation worth sitting with.
• XREF: Connects to Kuhn’s incommensurable paradigms and to Said’s Orientalism; also echoes the structure of tragic resistance in Butler’s Parable of the Sower. — connects to: Cultural nationalism can smuggle in obscurantism merely by inverting the traditionmodernity binary — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 49; Externalizing socialist practice leaves nationalism as the only conceptual frame available — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 364; Epistemic divides prevent any translation between political worlds — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 294