Said conflates a historical account of inferiorization with a psychoanalytic compulsion inherent to Europe

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 aggressive 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. These ways of dismissing entire civilizations as diseased formations are unfortunately far too familiar to us, who live on the other side of the colonial divide, from the history of imperialism itself. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 334

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does Said ever resolve the tension between the historical and the psychoanalytic accounts of inferiorization? Ahmad implies he does not.
• DEFINE: Clarifies the two competing senses of ‘Othering’ running through Orientalism — historical product vs. transhistorical psychodynamic drive.
• XREF: connects to: Said’s psychoanalytic framing renders Orientalism a compulsive drive inherent in Europe’s unitary psyche

Related

• Said’s psychoanalytic framing renders Orientalism a compulsive drive inherent in Europe’s unitary psyche (similarity 0.98)
• Othering and essentialism predate and exceed Europe; colonial capitalism gave them world-historical force (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalism rests on a fixed distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalism reflects the producing culture rather than its putative object (similarity 0.81)
• Rebutting Orientalism with reverse essentialism would reproduce the same intellectual failure. (similarity 0.81)
• Said traces imperial conquest back to centuries-old Western habits of representing the Orient (similarity 0.81)
• Said’s critique of Orientalism mirrors the procedures of his adversaries. (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalism functioned as a Western self-projection requiring an invented East as its antithesis (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalism’s essentialism hides both historical change and the Orientalist’s interests (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalism is a differentiated analysis, not a blanket attack on the West (similarity 0.80)
• Said’s Orientalism denies colonized agency while criticizing the West for silencing it. (similarity 0.80)
• All Orientalist writing, even purportedly neutral science, centers a European ego (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalism’s error is essentializing both Orient and West from above (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalist scholarship framed Islam as an antihuman civilization lacking self-knowledge (similarity 0.80)
• Said’s Orientalism deploys incompatible Foucauldian and humanist origin-stories simultaneously. (similarity 0.80)