Status Updates From Orientalizmas

“The precise history of the "type" as it is to be found in early-twentieth-century thinkers like Weber, Durkheim, Lukacs, Mannheim, and the other sociologists of knowledge has been examined often enough: yet it has not been remarked, I think, that Weber's studies of Protestantism, Judaism, and Buddhism blew him (perhaps unwittingly) into the very territory originally charted and claimed by the Orientalists.”

"It is as if, having once settled on the Orient as a locale suitable for incarnating the infinite in a finite shape, Europe could not stop this practice; the Orient and the Oriental, Arab, Islamic, Indian, Chinese, or whatever, became repetitious pseudo-incarnations of some great original (Christ, Europe, the West) they were supposed to have been imitating" (pg 62).

Mr Said is going back on the shelf for a bit. This book is too dense for my brain rn