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The Oriental Rebel in Western History
Abstract
Edward Said's Orientalism through deconstructing colonial discourses of power-knowledge postulates that colonization for the colonized has a particular ontological finality, reification. I contend here that the process of subjection has a far more profound effect than merely reifying the colonized, to borrow from Anouar Abdel-Malek, as customary, passive, non-participating, and non-autonomous. Rather, Western imperial narratives and what Said calls its “evaluative judgments” and “program of actions” also come to interpellate the reified subject's cosmovision, agency, and its forms of resistance. Focusing on the Middle East, this study is a genealogy that exposes how techniques and technologies of imperial power have symbolically and materially produced the Oriental rebel in Western history. Through re-reading institutionalized knowledges and resurrecting a counter-history, this article reveals a hidden and buried discursive formation, one which I call counter-revolutionary discourse. I argue that this system of thought is built through dispersed and heterogeneous but power-laden statements from Aymeric and Comte de Volney to Napoleon Bonaparte, Ernest Renan, Gustave Le Bon, and Thomas Friedman.
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Here, I am drawing from Said's definition of the Orientalist as anyone who is “dealing with it [Orient] by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it.” E. Said, Orientalism: Western Concepts of the Orient (Harmondsworth: Penguin), 69.
E. Said, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination (New York: Pantheon, 1994), 338.
Translated as the philosophy of origins, Ursprungsphilosophie is the philosophy of looking for the origins or the essentials of an element.
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M. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in P. Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), 77.
Here, I use the term “Eurocentric-Orientalist” to denote the long list of Renaissance, Enlightenment, and contemporary systems of knowledges (notions of culture and civilization, capitalist-economicism, modernity, progress and development, eugenics, racial doctrines, and liberalism) that collectively function as ideological mystifiers. Exuding symbolic violence, this system of thought functions to present the Western-self to itself through the negation of the epistemologically and ontologically inferior Orient-Other.
I adopt Foucault's definition of subjection here: as both a process whereby power, through political techniques (science of policing) and technologies of the self (normalization), turns the soul into a subject by imposing a set of attributes and characteristics to it. Second, subjection as in the thingified subject subjected to authority and power.
In this article, I am leaning toward a rather loose conceptualization of subjectivity, which refers somewhat to the incipient stages of agency—that moment before action where the subject's conscious experience of an event, its perspective and cognitive approach to it, is freer from the influences of diverse modes of power.
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