Voting negative is a rejection of the affirmative’s mode of scholarship and an endorsement of a disciplinary deconstruction of the Orient.

My suggestion here is that what we are witnessing today in the course of the U.S. war on so-called "terrorism," predicated on a mono-polar imperial imaginary that produces disposable knowledge at the rate of one military adventurism after another, is the sign of a complete paradigmatic meltdown of disciplinary formalism in knowledge production, which amounts to the normative dissolution of disciplines, and above all an epistemic endosmosis in which the public is mobilized as a weapon of mass deception for one military project or another. From Alexis de Tocqueville's assessment of the fate of knowledge in American democratic populism early in the nineteenth century, down to Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer's conception of the "culture industry," to our own time and Jean Baudrillard's notion of "the automatic writing of the world" ("the resolution of the world ahead of time by the cloning of reality and the extermination of the real by its double"),10 to Lyotard's notion of "legitimation by paralogy,"1l all might be cited as the visionary prophecies of what has now come to pass. And yet: From the ashes of disciplinary death of the scholar as author, one might take one's lead from Lyotard's playful paralogy and suggest the birth of the critical thinker as auteur. In cinematic lingo, we refer to a filmmaker with a sustained record of a rich visual and performative idiomaticity as being an auteur. In that vein, we might here point to a constellation of contemporary thinkers ranging from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to Luce Irigaray, Avital Ronell, or Assia Djebar in whose work matters of Islam and "the Middle East" is beginning to sip through a similar act of endosmosis, and yet paramount in whose writings is a certain theoretical performativity, at once political and meta-political. Precisely in their formal destruction of disciplinary formalities, these auteurs point to the way in which from the epistemic dissolution of our disciplinary scholarship new modes of inquiry beyond Orientalism or Occidentosis, beyond the fake and falsifying binary of the East and the West, might in fact be emerging. The formal destructions and paralogical performativity in the theoretical idiomaticity of auteurs such as Gayatri Spivak or Avital Ronell are predicated on the epistemic breakthrough of scholars like Judith Butler, Zillah Eisenstein, Susan Willis, and Susan Buck-Morss who have successfully crossed the psychological barrier and begun valiantly to write about matters Islamic and "Middle Eastern" without being Islamist in their disciplinary training. The fact that all these thinkers as authors or auteurs in one way or another address the questions of women's rights within the shifting epistemics of critical thinking in pre- and post- 9/11 wars of terror and terrorism at once roots them in the immediate materiality of their time and yet points to manners of emancipatory thinking yet beyond our horizons.