Orientalism is a symptom, not the cause, of modernity’s epistemic disorder.

Evidence

The arguments of this book have been in the making for more than a decade, particularly since 2009, when they became an almost permanent staple in my course offerings at Columbia University. Throughout these intellectual exercises, I have come to learn that there is no single important aspect of modernity that is not touched, to one degree or another, by the issues that the problem of Orientalism raises. This, then, is a book that is as much about modernity as it is about Orientalism, just as the concerns of my The Impossible State were as much about this condition as they were about the state. More importantly, and as this book intends to show, I have learned that Orientalism euphemizes a series of theoretical and substantive inquires that pertain to the constitution of the modern self as much as they are about a supposed “Other,” historical or otherwise. … Although I am largely unconcerned with the modalities of Europe’s self-formation against an Orient, the constitution of the modern self—whose sources certainly transcend the Orient—remains for me a prime concern. In all the colonialisms and genocides that it contributed to, Orientalism emerges as a symptom, rather than the cause or chief culprit, of a psychoepistemic disorder plaguing modern forms of knowledge to the core. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 3

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses the standard Said-inflected framing found in discussions of Orientalism as a primary driver of colonial discourse; connects to the reader’s interest in how knowledge systems perpetuate power.
• SEED: An essay angle: reframing Orientalism not as the villain of colonial epistemology but as one corridor of a deeper ‘psychoepistemic disorder’ rooted in modernity itself.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 3