Orientalism’s purpose should be retraining Western selves, not understanding the Orient.

Evidence

Orientalism will thus be required to shift the focus of its interests by inverting the subject for the object, amounting in effect to a new philology centered on what may be called heuristic historicism; the Oriental traditions will cease to be the locus of revaluation and reengineering, and will instead stand as the repertoire of thought that will instruct in refashioning a new Orientalist self. This is another way of saying that Orientalism’s philological work will constitute the constructive medium through which the sovereign subject, the homo modernus, can embark on a project of retraining the soul and spirit, in the process cultivating a new ethical technology of the self that will provide a model, an exemplarity, for the rest of the Orientalist’s society to emulate. Amounting to a reversal of function, this operation would no longer be about the Orient, about understanding it so “that we can deal with it”; it would rather represent an ethically self-centered process of what Foucault called “taking care of the self,” recovering what has “faded.” There is no reason for Orientalism and the Orientalist to exist other than to fulfill this purpose. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 506

Categorization

• XREF: Recalls Foucault’s care-of-the-self ethics and the author’s earlier argument that modernity’s crises are interior to the sovereign subject, homo modernus.