Said’s critique unwittingly reinforced the very formation it attacked

Evidence

Said’s carefully buffered insulation of Orientalism as a target of massive critical conductivity was thus the function of his ideological commitment as a secular humanist and liberal, among much else that is modernist. He remained within the realm of “representation” as Orientalism’s spectacular problem and could never go beyond it precisely because these commitments would have been destroyed to the core had he pursued his critique to its logical conclusion. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 356 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Defining the world through binaries of the Self and Other, of enemy and friend, the political unconsciously subordinates all other discursive domains to its own imperatives—including pathologies that give it its own raison d’être. To begin and end with politics as a conventional category, as Said has done, is to overlook the premises through which the political itself can be critiqued, premises whose trajectory starts at the genealogical foundations that give rise to it but that finally harness for critique those intellectual positions that stand outside those foundations. Which is to say that a true political critique of Orientalism must begin with the foundations that gave rise to a particular conception of nature, liberalism, secularism, secular humanism, anthropocentrism, capitalism, the modern state, and much else that modernity developed as central to its project. Said’s critique remained political in the (conventional) sense that it questioned none of these categories of thought and action as fundamental and foundational to the construction of the problem that is Orientalism, and to much else that has been left intact. In other words, it continued to plow conventional, if not rudimentary, political terrains because his critical narrative assumed and wholly left in place the same political subject, the modern subject, as the undivided matrix and locus of these categories. To place the subject at the front and center of critique is to inquire, de novo, into the constitution of the subject as a phenomenon whose measure is ethical formation. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 16 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Said’s critique of Orientalism implicitly reinforced the very modernism it attacked; Said’s totalizing critique inadvertently immunized Orientalism against reform; Said’s critique of Orientalism mirrors the procedures of his adversaries. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 714 (+12 more)

Broader Connections

• Said’s critique of Orientalism implicitly reinforced the very modernism it attacked #expands (0.95)
• Said’s critique stayed at representation because going further would destroy his liberal commitments #complicates (0.73) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 356
• Said’s critique left the modern political subject unquestioned. #complicates (0.72) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 16