328 ORIENTALISM human history and experience, not on donnish abstractions, or on obscure laws or arbitrary systems. The problem then is to make the study fit and in some way be shaped by the experience, which would be illuminated and perhaps changed by the study. At all costs, the goal of Orientalizing the Orient again and again is to be avoided, with consequences that cannot help but refine knowledge and reduce the scholar’s conceit. Without “the Orient” there would be scholars, critics, intellectuals, human beings, for whom the racial, ethnic, and national distinctions were less important than the common enterprise of promoting human community. Positively, 1 do believe—and in my other work have tried to show — that enough is being done today in the human sciences to provide the contemporary scholar with insights, methods, and ideas that could dispense with racial, ideological, and imperialist stereotypes of the sort provided during its historical ascendancy by Orientalism. I consider Orientalism’s failure to have been a human as much as an esa one; for in hayj take up a sition to its own, ” Offentalism failed to identify with human experience, failed < also. to see it as human experience. The worldwide hegemony of Orientalism and all it stands for can now be challenged, if we can benefit properly from the general twentieth-century rise to political and historical awareness of so many of the earth’s peoples. If this book has any future use, it will be as a modest contribution to that challenge, and as a warning: that systems of thought like Orientalism, discourses of power, ideological fictions—mind-forg’d manacles—are all too easily made, applied, and guarded. Above all, 1 hope to have shown my reader that the answer to Orientalism is not Occidentalism. No former “Oriental” will be comforted by the thought that having been an Oriental himself he is likely—too likely—to study new “Orientals”—or “Occidentals”—of his own making. If the knowledge of Orientalism has any meaning, it is in being a reminder of the seductive degradation of knowledge, of any knowledge, anywhere, at any time. Now perhaps more than before.

Notes Introduction 1. Thierty Desjardins, Le Martyre du Liban (Paris: Plon, 1976), p. 14. 2. K. M. Panikkar, Asia-and Western Dominance (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1959). 3. Denys Hay, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1968). 4. Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth Century England (1966; reprint ed., New York: Bantam Books, 1967), pp. 200-19. S. See my Criticism Between Culture and System (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, forthcoming). 6. Principally in his American Power and the New Mandarins: Historical and Political Essays (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969) and For Reasons of State (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973). 7. Waiter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans, Harry Zohn (London: New Left Books: 1973), p. 74. 8. Harry Bracken, “Essence, Accident and Race," Hermathena 116 (Winter 1973): 81-96. 9. In an interview published in Diacritics 6, no. 3 (Fall 1976): 38. 10, Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), pp. 66-7. 41. In my Beginnings; Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975). 12. Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969), pp. 65-7, 13. Raymond Schwab, La Renaissance orientale (Paris: Payot, 1950); Johann W. Fiick, Die Arabischen Studien in Europa bis in den Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1955); Dorotbee Metlitzki, r he Matter of Araby in Medieval England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977). 14. E. S. Shaffer, “Kubla Khan” and The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature, 1770-188@ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 1S. George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1872; reprint ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1956), p. 164. 16. Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks: Selections, trans. and_ ed. uintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Pub329