Said’s secular liberal commitments blinded him to how subjects are formed by habitus

Evidence

Guénon diagnosed what amounts to the effects of habitus to explain the “unintentional” prejudices of Westerners in general and Orientalists in particular toward the subjects they have come, directly or indirectly, to rule. Here progress, as a justificatory and legitimizing materialistic doctrine, is tied directly to the lazy, passive, and even supine “Oriental” whose invention by Orientalism Said rightly condemned. Yet, importantly, Said does not recognize, much less hint at, any element of this inner/outer formation of the subject, a formation without which no sociology of knowledge can ever be possible, or any credible evaluation of what constitutes the Orientalists as socioepistemically conditioned beings. Said’s secular humanism and liberalism, two qualities that presuppose in every important way an Enlightenment conception of materialism, could not allow for any variety of positive liberty or for any form of ethical formation of the self. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 300

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Bourdieu’s habitus concept and Isaiah Berlin’s negative/positive liberty distinction, which the author invokes via “Berlinian.”
• DEFINE: Clarifies habitus as inner/outer formation of the subject and reformulates Said’s blind spot in terms of negative vs. positive liberty.