The Aff’s discourse is defined by its relation to the Orient nation. It’s projection of power, ethics, and scholarship is carefully conceived and meticulously executed to perpetuate the hegemonic order that implicitly but materially and libidinally invests in a violent world order.

As a transit passenger waiting out an hour or so at the Beirut inter- national airport, I was blissfully oblivious to the torment the city was going through and the turmoil that engulfed it. For Said, however, the French journalist’s remark leads to the observation that, paradoxically, what was not there in Beirut in 1975–76 was never there anyway, at least not in Chateaubriand’s and Nerval’s time, that the European represen- tation of the city had merely replaced one absence with another. The absurdity of this willful replenishment of nothing with nothing, this historical substitution of one vacuum with another, carefully orches- trated and progressively layered with fabricated ‘realities’, forms the 06 rath  12/8/04 1:14 pm Page 344 344Comparative American Studies 2(3) platform of Said’s critique of the west’s hegemonic malformation of the Orient, seemingly benign on the surface, but dehumanizing and even self- destructive in its essence. Without a doubt, Said’s psychoanalytic expose of the west’s skewed self-projection upon the east has had enormous impactin the last quarter century, at least in academic circles, if not in practical politics and diplo- macy, to the extent that it has made the idea real to the global conscious- ness. In America, the internment of people of Japanese origin during World War II and the ‘registration’ required for people (Muslim men) of middle-eastern origin in the post-9/11 months have revived the specter of the old Orientalism, yet the new east–west encounter has new shapes and colors. Said explains Orientalism as ‘a way of coming to terms with the Orientthat is based onthe Orient’s special place inEuropean Western experience’(p. 1), as a final product of a process one might call Oriental- ization. In the modern sense of an old fashioned word,it is an image of the east forged in the western mind over an extended period of time. Said holds that the west’s synoptic mythography of the east is carefully conceived and meticulously executed through long stretches of history in order to sustain and perpetuate a power-relationship beneficial toand privileging the west at the expense of the east.His goal is to take us away from that idea/abstraction of the Orient to a concrete reality of the place, from a fuzzy conception of the east to a clearer perception of it. Hence his opening assertion, the major premise of his syllogistic hypothesis: ‘The Orient is an integral part of Europeanmaterial civilization and culture. Orientalism expressesand represents that part culturally andeven ideologicallyas amode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucraciesand colonial styles’ (p. 2). Said elaborates three major aspects of Orientalism.It is, he says, an academic field of study about the Orient: ‘as much as the west itself, the Orientis an idea that has a historyand a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the west’(p. 5);a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and(most of the time) ‘the Occident’(p. 2): ‘ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied’. ‘The relationship between Occident and Orient isa relationship of power, of domination, ofvarying degrees of a complexhegemony. . .’ (p. 5).Orientalism is a political construct, a ‘corporate institutionfor dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, author- izing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it; in short, Orientalism as a western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’ (p. 3). Orientalism is ‘not an airy European fantasy about the Orient, buta created body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been a considerable material investment. Continued investment made Orientalism, as a system of knowledge about the Orient, an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into western consciousness, just as that same investment multiplied– indeed, made truly productive– the statements proliferating out from Orientalism into the general culture’(p. 6).