An Interview with Professor Wael Hallaq - THE FLETCHER FORUM OF WORLD AFFAIRS - 0 views
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There was no Orientalism before modernity
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“No matter how ethnocentric and how dominating pre-modern empires all were, none could wed knowledge to power and redefine ethics as our modern empires did and continue to do.”
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I see engineering, economics, business schools, journalism, law schools, mainstream philosophy, science, medicine, and a host of others as being epistemologically structured in the same manner in which Orientalism was fashioned
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showing and practicing sovereignty over a Hindu or a Muslim in Asia is not very different from showing and exercising sovereignty over a tree or a river in the forests of Peru or Ecuador. I call each instance an epistemological “genetic slice” where the totality of such instances amounts to a unique but structured modern attitude toward the world
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To critique Orientalism is to critique secular humanism, liberalism, anthropocentrism, materialism, capitalism -- all of which, and more, Said took for granted.
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Even if we were to concede—however objectionable and repugnant this may be— that modernity’s violent tools were adopted by necessity with a view to improving the human condition, we find ourselves facing the bitter reality of a world in which we have destroyed almost everything around us, from communal and social structures to ecology and environment.
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My argument is that modernity’s structure of thought created a novel relationship between man and nature, one that produced a pathological sense of domination over nature, including our own.
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Colonialism did not start in the colonies, but in Europe itself, and this is because early modern Europe embarked on a quest in which knowledge was systematically harnessed to subjugate nature, including our own selves. Orientalism is nothing more than a strand of discourse by which this bleak result was achieved, but every branch of knowledge – philosophy, science, law, etc.– is equally involved in the same project
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I think that the position which argues that one cannot critique modernity from within modernity—necessarily the only place in which we find ourselves— is a nihilistic one
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in modernity, the state, capitalism, bureaucracy, and a particular form of reason have become central domains that govern all other domains. These central domains have formed our subjectivities, and made us who we are. My argument is that we can capitalize on the peripheral domains, through an act of heuristic retrieval, in order to displace the central domains. And ethics is one peripheral domain from which we can begin to rethink who we are.
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the urgent call for us to be self-conscious about what we are doing at large and what we are “saying” and writing in learning institutions, higher academia being a main concern. This is so because this academia manufactures much of what we know, and this manufactured knowledge has substantial power in deciding what we should or should not do in our lives. Essential to this self-consciousness is the need for us to understand and develop a deep sense of responsibility and accountability, [and] not in the narrow sense of being “conscientious citizens” or socially responsible individuals. What I mean is that responsibility and accountability must run deep into an awareness of everything we do, from the seemingly innocuous act of buying a soft drink from a convenience store to what we think of what, say, business and public policy mean to less powerful others around the world.
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to make the change and to build a sense of ethical responsibility, academia must deploy what I call external critique of everything we teach and write about. External critique is to refuse the established premises and assumptions that have so far foregrounded our thoughts and actions; it is to refuse the very foundations of their logic. The critique must question who and what we are