Summary
Said’s term in Chapter One, II of Orientalism for the universal practice of designating a familiar space as “ours” and an unfamiliar space beyond it as “theirs” — a way of making geographical distinctions that can be entirely arbitrary, which needs no acknowledgment from the “barbarians” it designates, and through which the Orient was drawn as Europe’s complementary opposite (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.63-66 / printed p.54-57).
Details
- Mind requires order, in Lévi-Strauss’s science of the concrete: discriminating and taking note of everything, placing everything in a secure, refindable place; but the rules of such classification, and the values that go with the distinctions, carry a measure of the purely arbitrary (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.62-63 / printed p.53-54).
- Gaston Bachelard’s poetics of space is Said’s parallel for how space acquires emotional and rational sense by a poetic process; imaginative geography and history likewise help the mind intensify its own sense of itself by dramatizing the distance and difference between what is close and what is far away (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.64-65 / printed p.55-56).
- Two essential motifs persist from Aeschylus’s The Persians and Euripides’s The Bacchae: Europe is powerful and articulate, Asia defeated and distant, with Europe articulating the otherwise silent Orient; and the Orient as insinuating danger, its mysteries taken seriously because they challenge the rational Western mind (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.65-66 / printed p.56-57).
- The idea of representation here is theatrical: the Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined, a closed field affixed to Europe, stocked with a cultural repertoire — the Sphinx, Cleopatra, Eden, Troy, Sodom and Gomorrah, Prester John, Mahomet — from which the European imagination was nourished (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.72 / printed p.63).
- Imaginative geography legitimates a universe of representative discourse whose figures are declarative and self-evident, in the timeless eternal tense — “Mohammed is an imposter” — symmetrical to, and diametrically inferior to, a European equivalent; philosophically Orientalism on this account is a form of radical realism, rhetorically anatomical and enumerative, psychologically a form of paranoia (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.80-82 / printed p.71-73).
Related pages
Orientalism (1978), Orientalism, Representation, Exteriority, Textual attitude