Said’s Orientalism deploys incompatible Foucauldian and humanist origin-stories simultaneously.

Evidence

Said uses Foucauldian terms as discrete elements of an apparatus, but refuses to accept the consequences of Foucault’s own mapping of history. If Foucauldian pressures force him to trace the beginnings of ‘Orientalist Discourse’ from the eighteenth century or so, the equally irresistible pressures of Auerbachean High Humanism force him to trace the origins of this very ‘discourse’, in the conventional form of a continuous European literary textuality, all the way back to Ancient Greece. In a characteristic move, Said refuses to choose and, as we shall demonstrate below, he offers mutually incompatible definitions of ‘Orientalism’ so as to deploy both these stances, the Foucauldian and the Auerbachean, simultaneously. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 293

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that a single founding text of postcolonial theory is internally stitched from two contradictory theoretical systems is a dense, revisitable structural diagnosis.
• XREF: connects to: Said’s Foucauldian ‘will to power’ discourse operates without imperialist agency or design. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 759; Said’s humanism cannot be reconciled with the anti-humanist Foucault he invokes.; Said holds incompatible Foucauldian and humanist periodizations of Orientalism at once.

Related

• Said’s humanism cannot be reconciled with the anti-humanist Foucault he invokes. (similarity 0.96)
• Said holds incompatible Foucauldian and humanist periodizations of Orientalism at once. (similarity 0.94)
• Said’s Foucauldian ‘will to power’ discourse operates without imperialist agency or design. (similarity 0.89)
• Said’s account makes colonialism an effect of discourse, not material power. (similarity 0.88)
• Said’s Orientalism shaped a field mainly through emotive impact (similarity 0.86)
• Totalizing condemnation of Orientalism contradicts Said’s own Foucauldian framework (similarity 0.86)
• Said’s Orientalism replaced Marxism with Foucauldian Discourse Theory (similarity 0.86)
• Said’s critique of Orientalism relies on the same modernist assumptions that produced it (similarity 0.85)
• Said’s twin claims about Orientalism rest on an unresolved tension. (similarity 0.85)
• Said’s critique of Orientalism never explained how discourse connects to colonial power (similarity 0.85)
• Said presents colonial figures as products of Orientalist discourse rather than material interests (similarity 0.85)
• Said held contradictory claims about authorial agency to evade Foucault’s theory (similarity 0.84)
• Said’s era-spanning generalizations misuse Foucault’s historically bounded concept of discourse (similarity 0.84)
• Said’s critique of Orientalism mirrors the procedures of his adversaries. (similarity 0.84)
• Said borrowed only Foucault’s schematic features, losing his subversive critique (similarity 0.84)