The Scope of Orientalism 97 a) On the level of the position of the problem, and the problematic . . . the Orient and Orientals [are considered by Orientalism] as an “‘object” of study, stamped with an otherness —-as all that is different, whether it be “subject” or “object”—but of a constitutive otherness, of an essentialist character. . . . This “object” of study will be, asis customary, passive, non-participating, endowed with a “historical” subjectivity, above all, non-active, non-autonomous, non-sovereign with regard to itself: the only Orient or Oriental or “subject” which could be admitted, at the extreme limit, is the alienated being, philosophically, that is, other than itself in relationship to itself, posed, understood, defined— and acted—by others. b) On the level of the thematic, {the Orientalists] adopt an essentialist conception of the countries, nations and peoples of the Orient under study, a conception which expresses itself through a characterized ethnist typology . . . and will soon proceed with it towards racism. According to the traditional orientalists, an essence should exist -—sometimes even clearly described in metaphysical terms—which constitutes the inalienable and common basis of all the beings considered; this essence is both “historical,” since it goes back to the dawn of history, and fundamentally a-historical, since it transfixes the being, “the object” of study, within its inalienable and nonevolutive specificity, instead of defining it as all other beings, states, nations, peoples, and cultures—as a product, a resultant of the vection of the forces operating in the field of historical evolution. Thus one ends with a typology—based on a real specificity, but detached from history, and, consequently, conceived as being intangible, essential—which makes of the studied “object” another being with regard to whom the studying subject is transcendent; we will have a homo Sinicus, a homo Arabicus (and why not a homo Aegypticus, etc.), a homo Africanus, the man—the “normal man,” it is understood—being the European man of the historicai period, that is, since Greek antiquity. One sees how much, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the hegemonism of possessing minorities, unveiled by Marx and Engels, and the anthropocentrism dismantled by Freud are accompanied by europocentrism in the area of human and social sciences, and more particularly in those in direct relationship with non-European peoples.®* Abdel Malek sees Orientalism as having a history which, according to the “Oriental” of the late twentieth century, led it to the impasse described above. Let us now briefly outline that history as

98 ORIENTALISM it proceeded through the nineteenth century to accumulate weight and power, “the hegemonism of possessing minorities,” and anthropocentrism in alliance with Europocentrism. From the last decades of the eighteenth century and for at least a century and a half, Britain and France dominated Orientalism as a discipline. The great philological discoveries in comparative grammar made by Jones, Franz Bopp, Jakob Grimm, and others were originally indebted to manuscripts brought from the East to Paris and London. Almost without exception, every Orientalist began his career as a philologist, and the revolution in philology that produced Bopp, Sacy, Burnouf, and their students was a comparative science based on the premise that languages belong to families, of which the IndoEuropean and the Semitic are two great instances. From the outset, then, Orientalism carried forward two traits: (1) a newly found scientific self-consciousness based on the linguistic importance of the Orient to Europe, and (2) a proclivity to divide, subdivide, and redivide its subject matter without ever changing its mind about the Orient as being always the same, unchanging, uniform, and radically peculiar object. Friedrich Schlegel, who learned his Sanskrit in Paris, illustrates these traits together. Although by the time he published his Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier in 1808 Schlegel had practically renounced his Orientalism, he still held that Sanskrit and Persian on the one hand and Greek and Gennan on the other had more affinities with each other than with the Semitic, Chinese, American, or African languages. Moreover, the Indo-European family was artistically simple and satisfactory in a way the Semitic, for one, was not. Such abstractions as this did not trouble Schlegel, for whom nations, races, minds, and peoples as things one could talk about passionately—in the ever-narrowing perspective of populism first adumbrated by Herder—heid a lifelong fascination. Yet nowhere does Schlegel talk about the living, contemporary Orient. When he said in 1800, “It is in the Orient that we must ’ search for the highest Romanticism,” he meant the Orient of the Sakuntala, the Zend-Avesta, and the Upanishads. As for the Semites, whose language was -agglutinative, unaesthetic, and mechanical, they were different, inferior, backward. Schlegel’s lectures on language and on life. history, and literature are full of these discriminations, which he made without the slightest qualification. Hebrew, he said, was made for prophetic utterance and divination;