The Orientalist–Orient relation is hermeneutical yet keeps the Orient permanently remote.

Evidence

The second method by which Orientalism delivered the Orient to the West was the result of an important convergence. For decades the Orientalists had spoken about the Orient, they had translated texts, they had explained civilizations, religions, dynasties, cultures, mentalities—as academic objects, screened off from Europe by virtue of their inimitable foreignness. The Orientalist was an expert, like Renan or Lane, whose job in society was to interpret the Orient for his compatriots. The relation between Orientalist and Orient was essentially hermeneutical: standing before a distant, barely intelligible civilization or cultural monument, the Orientalist scholar reduced the obscurity by translating, sympathetically portraying, inwardly grasping the hard-to-reach object. Yet the Orientalist remained outside the Orient, which, however much it was made to appear intelligible, remained beyond the Occident. This cultural, temporal, and geographical distance was expressed in metaphors of depth, secrecy, and sexual promise: phrases like “the veils of an Eastern bride” or “the inscrutable Orient” passed into the common language. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 558

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Defines the hermeneutical posture of the Orientalist and the metaphors (depth, secrecy, sexual promise) that encode the Orient’s irreducible distance.
• QUESTION: The ‘veils of an Eastern bride’ / ‘inscrutable Orient’ metaphors — connection to the later Islamophobia literature on the invisibility/veiling of Muslim women worth following.

Related

• The Orientalist’s scholarly work is essentially an act of interpretation from outside, not participation (similarity 0.94)
• Orientalism’s scientific pretense requires positing a permanent, unchanging Orient (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalism fixes the Oriental as passive object while the Orientalist holds interpretive power (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalism legitimizes Muslim monsters rather than creating them (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalist scholarship is inseparable from imperial power and its orthodox attitudes (similarity 0.82)
• The definition of the Orient is inseparable from the Western scholar’s identity (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalism functions as a self-enclosed Western text rather than knowledge of an actual Orient. (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalism’s error is essentializing both Orient and West from above (similarity 0.82)
• The Orient studied by scholars is a political system of representations, not raw reality (similarity 0.81)
• The Orientalist’s claim to expertise depends on the Orient’s presumed incapacity for self-interpretation (similarity 0.81)
• Latent Orientalism produced a gendered, patriarchal framing of the Orient (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalism generated a free-floating mythology detached from actual Orientals (similarity 0.81)
• The Orient is a constituted entity, not a real geographic essence (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalist texts were designed for Western readers, not Oriental ones. (similarity 0.80)
• Western expert style displaces the Orient’s own voice into one history (similarity 0.80)