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Dionysos and Apollo: Remediating Said’s Orientalism with Metacritical Perspective



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Wanyoung Kim

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DOI:10.17265/2159-5313/2017.07.003

Geography is a kind of differential calculus in the sense that the three-dimensional, that is, the act of tangentially accessing things, is mapped on to the two-dimensional or the concrete. It is why we can say that the East-West or Occidental versus Oriental dichotomy is so limited in its binary dualism. We could easily criticize not only Said’s Orientalism, but also in turn, a critical self-defense by turning itself upon its own head. It can indeed be said that the cross or cardinal directions run four different ways and not two. “The East” is not just Far Eastern, that is, the so-called “Asian,” but extends to the Far West or to California. Parts of Europe and the Dionysian are not simply limited to Central Europe and Southeastern Asia. We can see in Asia, that is, Eurasia and in North Africa, that 1-2% of non-Sub-saharan human DNA is genotypically Neanderthal in addition to being Homo Sapiens in DNA. The task, it might be said, is to continually remediate binary directions and to reweave Apollo and Dionysos in Friedrich Nietzsche. We can see the limitations of Continentalism in categorizing the human.

philosophical anthropology, political geography, Friedrich Nietzsche, Orientalism, Edward Said, metaphysical cartography