"The liberal subject, as this book argues, is never the locus or focus of a restructuring critique, however much this subject has been culpable and complicit in contributing to modernity's crises. The problems are always seen to lie elsewhere, threatening and endangering that subject. but are never inextricably and structurally linked to that subject's constitution.' (5)
"I argue that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gradually produced particular and unprecedented kinds of knowledge that indeed made themselves substantively and inherently amenable to the manipulation of power, giving the latter its distinctive and complex meaning. [29] Once it constituted itself as sovereign and above nature, this form of knowledge opened the flood gates for the state to embark on the colossal nineteenth-century project of forming its subjects as citizens, and this by means of creating a number of 'engineering' institutions that brought out their potential. Of all these institutions, juridicality and the modern educational apparatus acquire immediate relevance to my narrative, for they were the means through which a new human subject, the object of modern forms of power, was constituted." (16)
"Indeed, my real argument is that Said did not grasp the true nature of modernity as a project, as a phenomenon, or as a unique occurrence in human history." (110)
"New European courts, new European schools, and new European-style adminisitrative and other institutions came to displace almost every sphere that the Shari'a and its related institutions had occupied. [154] The effect of these 'reforms' was not merely to displace the Shari'a and the 'traditional' institutions of Islam or just to secularize them, but to create a new subject, the citizen, who sees the world through the eyes of the modern state." (116)
"Through these and similar displacements, the subject was given a new formation, a new epistemology for living and for dealing with social others. The Muslim subject was being steadily transplanted out of a technology of care of the self and its inner psychological operations into an internally disciplined but externally formed citizen. The new state state technologies of training, discipline, and control came to seize the body and to create for it a new identity, a new human, a new way of being in the world. This was the colonized subject, a replica of his European forerunner I discussed earlier." (118)
"The project heavily invested in the production of cultural and academic discourse, in the creation of new subjectivities and European-like subjects. When the intellectually unremarkable Thomas Babington Macaulay famous said that the British in India need to create a 'class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.' [160] he was not speaking on behalf of the British alone. His statement captured Europe's colonial project in its entirety and, in light of my discussion earlier, Europe's own internal history over the two preceding centuries. Algeria, like India and everything else, including Europe itself, had to be refashioned." (120)
"The performativity of materialism's psychological and corporeal power amounts to the full weight of transformative processes that culminate in depriving the human faculties of the abilities to see beyond the immediate senses. Trapped in the sensible world of the here and now, modern Western 'man' has become self-enclosed in a locked system beyond which no other form of reality can be comprehensible. Accordingly, with its capitalism and attendant cultural value system, materialism ab initio precludes the possibility of understanding, much less appreciating, the manner in which other civilizations and cultures articulate, and live in, the world." (146)
"Western science has not just lost this continuity, but also exacerbated the discontinuity to a degree of exclusion; it has, in effect, taken the place of metaphysics and God himself, thereby dethroning religion and sitting in its place." (148)
Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).
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