Sultan's Court

by Alain Grosrichard, Liz Heron (Translator), Mladen Dolar (Contributor)

Edward Said’s Orientalism has been much praised for its account of Western perceptions of the Orient. But the English-speaking world has for too long been unaware of another classic in the same field which appeared in France only a year later. Alain Grosrichard’s The Sultan’s Court is a fascinating survey of Western accounts of “Oriental despotism” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It focuses particularly on portrayals of the Ottoman Empire and the supposedly enigmatic structure of the despot’s court—the seraglio—with its viziers, janissaries, mutes, dwarfs, eunuchs and countless wives.

Drawing on the writings of travellers and philosophers such as Montesquieu, Rousseau and Voltaire, Grosrichard goes further than merely cataloguing their intense fascination with the vortex of capriciousness, violence, cruelty, lust, sexual perversion and slavery which they perceived in the seraglio. Deftly and subtly using a Lacanian psychoanalytical framework, he describes the process as one in which these leading Enlightenment figures were constructing a fantastic Other to counterpose their project of a rationally based society. The Sultan’s Court seeks not to refute the misconceptions but rather explore the nature of the fantasy and what it can reveal about modern political thought and power relations more generally.”

Genres: History, Philosophy, Middle East

258 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

Reviews

[Shulamith Farhi · Rating 4 out of 5]

When people talk about Orientalism, they usually read Edward Said and say "Gramsci and Foucault, simple enough." Grosrichard went considerably further.

His insight was to focus on the libidinal kernel of European fantasies of the East, producing a psychoanalysis of the so-called Asiatic mode of production. Europeans love the idea of being an absolute ruler served by docile minions. These fantasies have real effects: they are not delusions, they are illusions. I will quote at length from the conclusion:

"This is an awesome masquerade, for which the eunuch is the stage director (the one who allocates the parts) as well as the leading actor (once in costume, is he not able to play all the parts, from the wretched slave to the ingenu seducer?). But
this living incarnation of otherness, without whom neither the
One nor the others would exist, this caster of human lots, this guarantor of hierarchies, this educator of the sexual relation, this tireless go-between, can set up his new harmony only by immediately bringing about, as a consequence, the conditions for its failure."

In less jargon-filled English: the unlimited enjoyment of the seraglio construction are designed precisely to mask the castration of the European subject. Politics is conditioned by fantasy; to be truly radical, we must be unafraid of confronting its root in real encounters between bodies.

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This work is often compared to Saïd's Orientalism, as a Lacanian alternative to the Foucauldian approach taken there, but while there is some overlap in the topics discussed, its emphasis is much different: Grosrichard is interested in despotism as a political category, and turns to Montesquieu's Persian Letters to elucidate how European notions of political despotism rely on its specifically "Asian" character, the despot as a figure with an accumulative drive for jouissance, with the seraglio as the phantasized site of this accumulation.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

The pages reek of old white academic male who "knows" stuff. In 1942 this would have been a very moderate text, but in the 2000s the implied racism and entitled assumptions are just unpleasant.