Introduction

Orientalism is premised upon exteriority, that is, on the fact that the Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West. He is never concerned with the Orient except as the first cause of what he says. 
Yet unlike Michel Foucault, to whose work I am greatly in debted, I do believe in the determining imprint of individual writers upon the otherwise anonymous collective body of texts constituting a discursive formation like Orientalism.
Perhaps the most important task of all would be to undertake studies in contemporary: alternatives to OrientaHsm, to ask how one can study other cultures and peoples from a libertarian, or a nonrepressive and nonmanipulative, perspective.
The personal dimension. In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci says: "The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is 'knowing thyself' as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory." The only available English translation inexplicably leaves Gramsci's comment at that, whereas in fact Gramsci's Italian text concludes by adding, "therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory."