The socially peripheral becomes symbolically central through the top’s dependence on the low-Other

Evidence

A recurrent pattern emerges: the “top” attempts to reject and eliminate the “bottom” for reasons of prestige and status, only to discover, not only that it is in some way frequently dependent upon the low-Other … but also that the top includes that low symbolically, as a primary eroticized constituent of its own fantasy life. The result is a mobile, conflictual fusion of power, fear, and desire in the construction of subjectivity: a psychological dependence upon precisely those others which are being rigorously opposed and excluded at the social level. It is for this reason that what is socially peripheral is so frequently symbolically central. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 297

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the construction-of-the-Other toolkit that downstream Islamophobia readings rest on; the ‘psychological dependence on the excluded Other’ mechanism parallels Orientalism’s account of Western identity being constructed against the East. — connects to: Being beneath the man maps onto cultural top-bottom hierarchies of superiority.
• QUESTION: How does Stallybrass and White’s ‘top includes the low symbolically as an eroticized constituent of fantasy’ get operationalized in concrete Islamophobia discourse analysis? Is the eroticized low-Other mechanism evidence in orientalist representations?
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that the dominating class is psychically dependent on precisely the other it socially excludes is a dense, paradigm-shifting inversion — the excluded is constitutive of the excluder’s subjectivity, not merely its negation.