Said’s own critique reproduces the fixed Occident-Orient essentialism it attacks
Evidence
It is rather remarkable how constantly and comfortably Said speaksnot only in this particular sentence but throughout the bookof a Europe, or the West, as a self-identical, fixed being which has always had an essence and a project, an imagination and a will; and of the ‘Orient’ as its object - textually, militarily, and so on. He speaks of the ‘west, or Europe, as the one which produces the knowledge, the East as the object of that knowledge. In other words, he seems to posit, stable subject-object identities, as well as ontological and epistemological distinctions between the two. In what sense, then, is Said himself not an Orientalist - or at least, as Sadek el-Azm puts it, an ‘Orientalist-in- reverse’? — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 747
Categorization
- XREF: Directly relevant: Ahmad shows even the anti-essentialist critic cannot escape positing a self-identical subject (the West) — the very bind Spivak’s strategic essentialism tries to manage. — connects to: Said’s anti-positivism secretly depends on positivist truth criteria — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 629; Dissenting critique corrects method but spares the system’s epistemic foundations — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 339; Said’s totalizing critique inadvertently immunized Orientalism against reform (+5 more)
- QUESTION: Is this inescapable positing of an ‘essential project’ the structural reason strategic essentialism collapses into residence-in essentialism, as the reader hypothesizes?
Broader Connections
- Said’s anti-positivism secretly depends on positivist truth criteria
#expands(0.85) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 629 - Said’s totalizing critique inadvertently immunized Orientalism against reform
#corroborates(0.85) - Said’s stated belief in individual imprint contradicts his actual method
#corroborates(0.85) - Dissenting critique corrects method but spares the system’s epistemic foundations
#expands(0.80) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 339 - Said’s critique reified Orientalism as a category masking deeper structures
#complicates(0.80) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 523 - Critique from within a colonial power system is entangled with the critic’s own interests
#expands(0.80) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1434 - Refuting an ideology requires attacking its best exponents, not its weakest
#corroborates(0.72) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1562