Said’s psychoanalytic framing renders Orientalism a compulsive drive inherent in Europe’s unitary psyche

Evidence

But why must representation also inferiorize the Other? Said again offers greatly diverse ideas, so that in quite a few places this inferiorization is shown to be a result of imperialism and colonialism in the sense in which most of us would understand these words, but in another set of formulations, which draw their vocabulary from psychoanalysis, ‘the West’ seems to have suffered something resembling ego-anxiety, whereby the ego is able to constitute its own coherence only through aggres~ive objectification of the Other, so that what Said calls ‘Orientalism’ appears to be a compulsive drive inherent in Europe’s unitary psyche. When one comes upon statements like ‘Psychologically, Orientalism is a form of paranoia’ (p. 72), as one frequently does, there is reason enough to be disconcerted by the psychologizing impulse but, even more, one then shudders to recall that, for Said, this ‘paranoia’ is constitutive of all European thought. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 745

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘compulsive drive inherent in Europe’s unitary psyche’ framing parallels exactly the fixed-essence essentialism Ahmad elsewhere charges against discourse theory — a subject-position reified at civilizational scale. — connects to: Said conflates a historical account of inferiorization with a psychoanalytic compulsion inherent to Europe — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 334

Broader Connections

• Said conflates a historical account of inferiorization with a psychoanalytic compulsion inherent to Europe #corroborates (0.95) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 334