The imagined unity of the West depends on creating an opposite called the Orient

Evidence

What Orientalism offered was not just a technical knowledge of Oriental languages, religious beliefs and methods of government, but a series of absolute differences according to which the Oriental could be understood as the negative of the European. These differences were not the differences within a self, which would be understood as an always-divided identity; they were the differences between a self and its opposite, the opposite that makes possible such an imaginary, undivided self. The Orient was backward, irrational, and disordered, and therefore in need of European order and authority: the domination of the West over the non-Western world depended on this manner of creating a ‘West’, a singular Western self-identity. Like the ‘Arab town’, the Orient was created as the apparent exterior of the West; as with the colonial city, what is outside is paradoxically what makes the West what it is, the excluded yet integral part of its identity and power. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 519

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The argument that what is ‘outside’ is paradoxically constitutive of identity — the excluded yet integral part — is a dense inversion of outside/inside that repays slow rereading.
• XREF: Extends the chapter’s earlier point about the ‘Arab town’ and colonial city as constructed exteriors (details of the exotic town and courtyard that split inside from out).