heptagrammaton’s Reviews > Orientalism > Status Update

. . . [D]evelopment and maintenence of every culture requires the existence of another different and competing alter ego. The construction of identity . . . involves establishing opposites and "others whose actuality is always subject to continuous interpretation and re-interpretation of their differences from "us". Each age and society re-creates its "Others".

. . . [W]e can better understand the persistence and the durability of saturating hegemonic systems like culture when we realize that their internal constraits upon writers and thinkers were productive, not unilaterally inhibiting.

pp. 123-148 (2.II. Rational Anthropology and Philological Laboratory) contain some delectable 🔥 remarks on the imperial(ist) culture of 19th century science. Interesting stuff on Saint-Hilaires' anatomy, for which:

No anomaly can be considered simply as a gratuitous exception; rather anomalies confirm the regular structure binding together all members of the same class.

To simply say that modern Orientalism has been an aspect of both imperialism and colonialism is not to day anything very disputable. ... [modern Orientalism] embodies a systematic discipline of accumulation. And far from this being exclusively an intellectual feature, it made Orientalism fatally tend toward the systematic accumulation of human beings and territories.

–2.i., p.123

[The Orientalist attitude] shares with magic and mythology the self-containting, self-reinforcing character of a closed system[:] objects are what they are because they are what they are, for once, for all time, for ontological reasons that no empirical material can dislodge or alter. (p.70)

Orientalists' "functional colonial use": Napoleon saw the Orient only as it had been encoded. (p.80)

... [W]hat the Orientialist does is to confirm the Orient in his readers' eyes; he neither wants nor tries to unsettle already firm convictions.

—p. 65, Ch. 1.ii