Said’s transhistorical framing made all European knowledge of non-Europe inherently contaminated.

Evidence

Alongside these large theoretical and political shifts was the matter of a certain transhistoricity which, in claiming that Europe establishes its own Identity by establishing the Difference of the Orient, and that Europe has possessed, since the days of Athenian drama, a unitary will to inferiorize and vanquish non-Europe, made it possible for Said to assert that all European knowledges of non-Europe are bad know ledges because they are already contaminated with this aggressive Identity-formation. This, indeed, was a novel idea. Numerous writers had previously demonstrated the complicity of European cultural productions in the colonial enterprise, but only the most obscurantist indigenists and cultural nationalists had previously argued - surely, no writer with any sense of intellectual responsibility had ever acceptedthat Europeans were ontologicalfy incapable of producing any true knowledge about non-Europe. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 724

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s Foucault-to-Spivak lineage: this is where discourse-first transhistoricity enables an essentialist-epistemological move Ahmad will link to strategic essentialism’s own bind.
• DEFINE: Flags the specific ‘transhistoricity’ move that converts contingent colonial discourse into a unitary European will, the precursor of epistemic essentialism.
• QUESTION: Worth pursuing: does Ahmad imply the transhistorical ‘unitary will’ framing is structurally the same essentialism strategic essentialists later weaponize irony against?