If it is history we want, then it is a history of conflict. And the conflict begins with the abduction of a girl, or with the sacrifice of a girl. And the one is continually becoming the other. It was the ‘merchant wolves’, arriving by ship from Phoenicia, who carried off the tauropárthenos from Argos. Tauropárthenos means ‘the virgin dedicated to the bull’. Her name was Io. Like a beacon signalling from mountain to mountain, this rape lit the bonfire of hatred between the two continents. From that moment on, Europe and Asia never stopped fighting each other, blow answering blow. Thus the Cretans, ‘the boars of Ida’, carried off Europa from Asia… Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (1993) TROY, AN ORIENTALIST BATTLEFIELD? Is Orientalism an eternal given? Or was it a discourse that was formed in, say, the early fourteenth century, when the establishment of chairs of Arabic was decreed by the Council of Vienne? Or, say, in the late eighteenth century, when Bonaparte invaded Egypt and his team of savants catalogued the antiquarian and ethnographic details of the land?
What do You think about For Lust Of Knowing (2006)?
