Mark Sanders

Department of English and American Literature
Brandeis University

Society for the Humanities
Cornell University
ms248@cornell.edu

 

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present.Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999.

 

Marx could hold The Science of Logic and the Blue Books together; but that was still only Europe; and in the doing it came undone.

 

—A Critique of Postcolonial Reason

 

“As I work at this at the end of a book that has run away from me, I am of course open to your view. You will judge my agenda in the process…. You work my agenda out” (357-358). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Critique of Postcolonial Reason addresses an “implied reader” several times toward its end, inviting a response (cf. 421). We are deep in the ultimate chapter, on Culture, where the “this” refers to questions of cultural politics. By analogy with Marx, who, envisioning a reader for Capital,¹ “attempted to make the factory workers rethink themselves as agents of production, not as victims of capitalism,” Spivak asks her implied readers–hyphenated Americans, economic and political migrants from the decolonized South–to “rethink themselves as possible agents of exploitation, not its victims” (357, cf. 402).² The persistent call, voiced in Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), for the migrant to the North to distinguish, in terms of victimage and agency, between him- or, especially, herself, and the citizen of the postcolonial nation, is reiterated in Critique. But by the time it includes its implied author and reader in the exhortation, “let us want a different agency, shift the position a bit” (358, cf. 402), Critique has given its reader to work out more than an agenda, an itinerary of agency in complicity. It has also blazed an intricate trajectory on reading. The latter is what my essay endeavors to work out.

 

The Preface to Critique begins:

 

My aim, to begin with, was to track the figure of the Native Informant through various practices: philosophy, literature, history, culture. Soon I found that the tracking showed up a colonial subject detaching itself from the Native Informant. After 1989, I began to sense that a certain postcolonial subject had, in turn, been recoding the colonial subject and appropriating the Native Informant's position. Today, with globalization in full swing, telecommunicative informatics taps the Native Informant directly in the name of indigenous knowledge and advances biopiracy. (ix)

 

To track the composite figure Spivak names the Native Informant is not simply to trace and analyze its outlines as it emerges in colonial or postcolonial discourse. Finding that the Native Informant reveals, in its trail, a dispropriable “position,” a borrowed one not strictly anyone’s own, the tracker herself performs the figure, and is, in turn, performed by it. Giving shape to the tracker, this mimetic tracking engages the trace of the other which sends this book on its way.³ The writer, in other words, conjures up a reader. The result of figuring, and taking up, the “(im)possible perspective of the Native Informant” is an interventionist writing that is quasi-advocative in its conduct. Amplifying and deepening Spivak’s thinking, Critique revises major published texts to go with considerable new ones by her. Cut into four long chapters–headed Philosophy, Literature, History, Culture–and a small appendix on The Setting to Work of Deconstruction, it reframes such well known essays as “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” “The Rani of Sirmur,” and “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” so that, in addition to being key interventions in colonial discourse studies and postcolonial studies, they add to the wider critical idiom by developing insights in ethics and reading gained from a thinking of postcoloniality. Among its surprises is the insistent, and at times cryptic, conversation with the later writings of Paul de Man (to whom Critique is jointly dedicated) on irony, allegory, and parabasis, which she deploys in terms of a disruptive speaking- and reading-otherwise. What emerges is an ethics of reading, of the making of a reader; and, from that, a way for writer and reader to acknowledge and negotiate discursive, and socio- and geopolitical situatedness as complicity. Herein resides the book’s particularity. Those whose passion lies in staking out a “position” in the field will be uneasy with its performance of positional dispropriability.⁴ No position is “proper” to one side, and all are appropriable by the other: the Native Informant leaves in its tracks a colonial subject turned postcolonial turned agent-instrument of global capital (cf. 223 n42). This is the larger itinerary of agency in complicity mapped by Critique, of which it repeatedly advises its declared implied reader. Of more than equal interest are the book’s less overt lineaments, the underlying implications, as it produces them for interception by a reader or reading less declaredly implied, of this postcolonial reading.

 

A Critique of Postcolonial Reason begins by shadowing Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement and its foreclosure of the Native Informant. The import of such foreclosure is ethical, and affectively tagged in ways that psychoanalysis allows us to think when it opens the ethical in the dynamics of transference and counter-transference (107, 207). Turning to the psychoanalytic lexicon–Critique “sometimes conjure[s] up a lexicon-consulting reader for the new cultural studies” (x)–Spivak finds foreclosure set out by Freud and Lacan as a rejection (Verwerfung) by the ego of an idea, and, along with that idea, the affect connected to it (4). To imagine the (im)possible perspective of the Native Informant in Kant, and in the other “source texts of European ethico-political selfrepresentation” (9), is thus to respond not only to a failure of representation as a lack of, or limit to, knowledge, but also to a disavowal that is ethical in character.⁵ The main point of using the psychoanalytic concept-metaphor of foreclosure is to register an unacknowledged failure of relation, one amounting to a denial of access to humanity: “I shall docket the encrypting of the name of the ‘native informant’ as the name of Man–a name that carries the inaugurating affect of being human…. I think of the ‘native informant’ as a name for that mark of expulsion from the name of Man–a mark crossing out the impossibility of the ethical relation” (5-6). To be a native informant is to speak, after a fashion. The native informant’s role in ethnography, Spivak’s source for the term, is to provide information, to act as a source and an object of knowledge. When this is the function of the native informant, an ethical relation is impossible, for, strictly speaking, the investigator has no responsibility for the informant. Yet a ruse is perpetrated that he or she does. In this sense, the ethnographic designation “native informant” crosses out this impossibility but does not cancel it. The mode of reading proposed and performed in Critique strives to preserve this impossibility-under-erasure.

 

As an alternative to foreclosure, Spivak proposes a “commitment not only to narrative and counternarrative, but also to the rendering (im)possible of (another) narrative” (6). How are we to explicate this typographic matrix? In order to do so, we have to enter (more briefly than can do it justice) Spivak’s reading of the placement of the Native Informant in the Critique of Judgement, in which “he is needed as the example for the heteronomy of the determinant, to set off the autonomy of the reflexive judgement, which allows freedom for the rational will” (6). In the “Analytic of the Sublime,” in the first part of the Critique, the terror of a certain “raw man” stands in, metaleptically, as a precursor to rational subjectivity. That “raw man” is as yet unnamed. In the “Critique of Teleological Judgement,” the second part of the Critique, Kant names him. There the New Hollander (Neuholländer, or Australian Aborigine) and the inhabitant of Tierra del Fuego (Feuerländer) illustrate how, without making reference to something supersensible–such as the concept “Man”–one cannot easily decide “why it is necessary that men should exist.” This, Kant writes in parentheses, is “a question that is not so easy to answer if we cast our thoughts by chance on the New Hollanders or the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego” (qtd. in Spivak 26). Kant’s Fuegan, according to Spivak, “is not only not the subject as such; he also does not quite make it as an example of the thing or its species as natural product” (26). Calling her reading of Kant “mistaken” (9), Spivak deliberately breaks with conventions of philosophy–for which Kant’s “raw man” would be an “unimportant rhetorical detail” (26)–by figuring, on a minimal empirical basis (little more than the fact they existed), the perspective of the New Hollander or Fuegan.⁶ This perspective is (im)possible–bracketing the “im” puts impossibility under erasure without submitting to the ruse of canceling it–in that it answers to a call as one would reply, having not actually been asked for an answer, to a rhetorical question.⁷ The Kantian text appears to summon a native informant and his perspective only to guard against their arrival as anything but that which confirms, through ideational and affective–and hence ethico-political–foreclosure, the European as human norm. The Native Informant enjoys “limited access to being-human” (30). Spivak bets on the name “native informant” as what encrypts the “name of Man” and which continues, “[a]s the historical narrative moves from colony to postcolony to globality… [to] inhabit… us so that we cannot claim the credit of our proper name” (111). With this self-implicating history of the present, the double task of the reader is at once to bind herself to the possibility of the Native Informant’s perspective as a “narrative perspective” (9), and to dramatize its foreclosure by resisting the ruse of simply canceling its impossibility. Here that double task is taken up typographically by bracketing the “im.” Elsewhere the reader employs other strategies.

 

In Spivak’s reading of Kant, and in her reading of Hegel which follows it, typographics give way to prosopopoeia–“[a] rhetorical figure by which an imaginary or absent person is represented as speaking or acting” (OED). Weaving her text from loose ends of the empirical and the philosophical, Spivak fancies, from the trace of the unacknowledged foreclosure of their perspective, the New Hollander and the Fuegan as “subject[s] of speech.” In order to operate them as perspectives of narrative, a rhetoric of prosopopoeia, which necessarily involves a counterfactual “if,” is the minimally requisite strategy for entering an affective vein, and hence for opening the possibility of an ethical relation:

 

But if in Kant's world the New Hollander... or the man from Tierra del Fuego could have been endowed with speech (turned into the subject of speech), he might well have maintained that, this innocent but unavoidable and, indeed, crucial example--of the antinomy that reason will supplement--uses a peculiar thinking of what man is to put him out of it. The point is, however, that the New Hollander or the man from Tierra del Fuego cannot be the subject of speech or judgement in the world of the Critique. (26)

 

Spivak’s Critique mimes that of Kant, trying to figure the foreclosed perspective. If, in terms of a logical matrix, the ethical would have been broached by a non-foreclosure of affect, with that foreclosure already in place, the restoration of affect can only be figured counterfactually. That is why Spivak insists that the New Hollander or Fuegan, as she has him assume a narrative perspective, figures not a coming to speech but rather the Native Informant’s foreclosure. Like some works Spivak analyzes in the chapter on Literature (112-197), such counterfactual quasi-advocacy must stage as “mute” the projected voice of the other. The performance must be of a failed ventriloquism. The one, momentary, deviation from this counterfactual rhetoric in Spivak’s reading of Kant, and the most moving moment in her explication, takes place in a long footnote: “[Kant’s] construction of the noumenal subject is generally dependent on the rejection [Verwerfung] of the Aboriginal. In German the two words are Neuholländer and Feuerländer…. I took these for real names and started reading about them…. One tiny detail may give Kant’s dismissal the lie: ‘…. [the] name [the Fuegans] gave themselves: Kaweskar, the People'” (26n-29n). Roughly legible as a claim to the “name of Man,” this trace of self-naming, taken from one writer quoting another, a sign of the makings of a narrative perspective to be reconstructed by a reader, indicates a limit of this book, and the threshold of another: “I cannot write that other book which bubbles up in the cauldron of Kant’s contempt” (28n). But could anybody write such a book? The footnote cites linguistic competence and disciplinary and institutional obstacles, but other formulations appear to preclude “that other book” entirely. The reasons for this take us to the heart of the practice of reading that animates Critique, its principal contribution to a critical idiom–like Marxism, a “globalized local tradition” (70)–in ethics and reading.

 

The intuition which guides Spivak is that, since the reader takes up, quasi-advocatively, the position of Native Informant in responding to Kant and the other philosophers, she cannot help but figure him as a reader. This tendency is, however, “mistaken”: “there can be no correct scholarly model for this type of reading. It is, strictly speaking, ‘mistaken,’ for it attempts to transform into a reading-position the site of the ‘native informant’ in anthropology, a site that can only be read, by definition, for the production of definitive descriptions” (49). In other words, in a necessary but fractured reversal of foreclosure, the reader can projectively broach affect, but cannot restore the foreclosed perspective. This is different from noting that, reading Hegel’s reading of the Srimadbhagavadgita, “an implied reader ‘contemporary’ with the Gita” (though not a Hindu reader contemporary with Hegel) can be reconstituted from the text’s structure of address: “[s]uch a reader or listener acts out the structure of the hortatory ancient narrative as the recipient of its exhortation. The method is structural rather than historical or psychological” (49-50). Whereas “strategic complicities” (46) obtain between Hegel’s argument and the structure of the Gita in how each positions a reader, Kant’s text in no way addressed, or let itself be addressed by, the Native Informant. Kant’s text does nothing to open the possibility of affective or ethical relation. To imagine the Native Informant as reader, in Kant’s case at least, is “mistaken,” and all that a reader can be taught is to mime his moves of foreclosure. In the case of Hegel, and the implied reader of the Gita, however, “I am calling,” writes Spivak, “for a critic or teacher who has taken the trouble to do enough homework in language and history (not necessarily the same as specialist training) to be able to produce such a ‘contemporary reader’ in the interest of active interception and reconstellation” (50). This is not the same as asking, and answering empirically, such questions as: For whom was he writing? Who is the audience? If “history” can assist with “active interception and reconstellation,” it is clear from Spivak’s proviso that “the method is structural” that any history must be answerable to an analysis of the address-structure of the text, with its own openings and foreclosures. Anything else can lead to wishful thinking. Spivak provides an alternative to the banal and potentially harmful empiricism of “information-retrieval” (114, 168-171), and to unproblematized advocacy on behalf of the “silenced.” Her method at once acts as a corrective to such contemporary tendencies in criticism, and makes it possible for us to see them as one-dimensional articulations of an original critical impulse, one for which she, by contrast, emerges as one of today’s most profound interpreters. To read is to figure a reader; to go out of one’s self, perhaps to make out a “contemporary reader,” more often than not to figure a “lost” perspective that cannot be made out (65). This account of reading, scrupulously drawn from engaging the text of postcoloniality and its philosophical precursors, adds both to an older notion of reading as a process of imaginative projection, and to a more recent idiom which attends to a process of dispropriative “invention,” as instantiation of the ethical, in writing and reading.⁸

 

Closing her section on Kant, Spivak associates the perspective of the Native Informant, as reader, with thematics of parabasis, irony and allegory: “To read a few pages of master discourse allowing for the parabasis operated by the native informant’s impossible eye makes appear a shadowy counterscene” (37). In another of her splendid long footnotes, Spivak “recommend[s] de Man’s deconstructive definition of allegory as it overflows into ‘irony’… which takes the activism of ‘speaking otherwise’ into account; and suggest[s] that the point now is to change distance into persistent interruption, where the agency of allegorein–located in an unlocatable alterity presupposed by a responsible and minimal identitarianism–is seen thus to be sited in the other of otherwise” (156n, cf. 430). These remarks direct us to some of the most difficult passages in Paul de Man’s Allegories of Reading. Concluding his reading of Rousseau’s Confessions, at the end of the final chapter in Allegories, de Man borrows from Schlegel to recast allegory in terms of parabasis and irony: “the disruption of the figural chain…. becomes the permanent parabasis of an allegory (of figure), that is to say, irony. Irony is no longer a trope but the undoing of the deconstructive allegory of all tropological cognitions, the systematic undoing, in other words, of understanding. As such, far from closing off the tropological system, irony enforces the repetition of its aberration” (300-301). Parabasis, literally a stepping-aside, refers to the intervention of the chorus in Greek drama, and to the intervention of the author in theatre contemporary with Schlegel. Glossed as “aus der Rolle fallen,” parabasis is thus (in one sense) an interruption of the figure in performance, of an assumption of a role. It is, in other words, what fractured prosopopoeia does, stepping aside when a voice or reading-position is attributed to the Native Informant. Allegory, in one of de Man’s formulations, is what disrupts continuity between cognitive and performative rhetorics. In Rousseau’s Confessions, confession produces truth (cognitive) by disclosing the deeds of the one confessing, but undermines itself as confession when this cognitive truth functions as excuse (performative) (280). De Man’s remarks on allegory, irony, and parabasis can be linked to his coinage and explication of “ethicity,” where the disruption of rhetorical modes appears as a disruption of two value systems.⁹ The disruption in confession turned excuse between the systems of truth and falsehood, and good and evil, is an instance of the disruption leading de Man to a rhetorical redescription of the moral. In rhetorical terms, the disruption generates an imperative referential in its bearing:

 

Allegories are always ethical, the term ethical designating the structural interference of two distinct value systems.... The ethical category is imperative (i.e., a category rather than a value) to the extent that it is linguistic and not subjective.... The passage to an ethical tonality does not result from a transcendental imperative but is the referential (and therefore unreliable) version of a linguistic confusion. Ethics (or, one should say, ethicity) is a discursive mode among others. (206)

 

Spivak takes up the referential moment as response to an imperative. By imagining the Fuegan, her reading of Kant performs the empirical, or “ideological,” transgression that de Man diagnoses in Schiller’s reading of The Critique of Judgement (16). In so doing, Spivak takes from de Man the opening provided by ethicity, which, at the end of Allegories, is set out in the vocabulary of allegory, irony and parabasis. The word “allegory” comes from the Greek: allegorein, from allos, other + agoreuein, to speak publicly. “Speaking otherwise” is Spivak’s activist rendering. To speak–or read–otherwise in the name of the referential (not necessarily the empirical, since the figure is, strictly speaking, “unverifiable”), projected as the (im)possible perspective of the Native Informant, is to perform the parabasis necessary to disrupt the inscription, in Kant onwards, of the Native Informant.¹⁰Interrupting informatics (cognitive, epistemic), by exposing the ideational and affective foreclosure of humanity (performative, ethical), the reader brings to light an “ethicity” which gets ethics going by bringing the agent before an imperative. Animating the reader with alterity, this imperative comes from elsewhere, from an other. This is how allegory is produced and staged as postcolonial reading.

 

In the most traditional of terms, works of narrative fiction and lyric poetry are understood to involve the reader in a process of imaginative projection and identification. Attention to this process underlies the emphasis placed in Critique on the teaching of literature, and its ethical implications (an issue not taken up much by commentators, but always apparent to her students at Columbia, where Spivak directed my doctoral work). Set down in an idiom of their own, Spivak’s intuitions as a critic resonate with an impulse that has animated criticism for a long time in its formulations of the relation between beauty and goodness; between the imagination, exercised by poetry, and ethical conduct. To invoke Percy Bysshe Shelley, “[a] man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others…. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause” (488). The turn toward a de Manian thematics of allegory coded in terms of irony as permanent parabasis gives Spivak and her readers a set of concepts for making sense of what, if one kept to the idiom and concerns of a Percy Shelley (whom Spivak briefly invokes [355n]), would amount to an interference of two systems or codes of value: beauty and goodness. In this instance, the interference would be operated by an ironic interruption of the “main system of meaning” by the Native Informant’s perspective. If putting oneself imaginatively in the place of another is indispensable to ethics, it is inevitable for a reader; if there is an opening for the ethical in reading, and for the ethical to open from reading, it is this. Spivak’s point of intervention is to teach the reader to experience that place as (im)possible, as in the case of the figure she calls the Native Informant, and, in so doing, to acknowledge complicity in actuating the texts and systemic geopolitical textuality that make it so. Goodness-coding disrupts beauty-coding (cf. 146). The critical reader steps aside, introducing the bracketed “im” or figuring a more or less muted prosopopoeia, and passes through, as she must, the aporia of this impossibility. Spivak’s setting to work of this project in the teaching of literature is well enough known not to rehearse her readings of Brontë, Rhys, Mary Shelley, and Coetzee in the chapter on Literature. In order to anticipate the book’s reframing of “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” I will, however, note how, although never absent, the emphasis appears to fall with added gravity on the ethical rather than on the epistemological dimension of literary figuration. This can be observed in passages added on Mahasweta Devi’s novella, “Pterodactyl,” in which an advocacy-journalist in search of a story joins with Indian “tribals” in their work of mourning the passing of the creature. There the rhetoric of thwarted prosopopoeia is framed ethically as well as affectively: “The aboriginal is not museumized in this text…. This mourning [of the pterodactyl] is not anthropological but ethico-political” (145). To gloss this in terms of Shelley altered by way of de Man, Spivak’s attention to the affective plotting of goodness-coding is, in the more recent analysis, at least as strong as truth-coding in disrupting beauty-coding.

 

This shift in emphasis comes through powerfully in the chapter on History. The version of “The Rani of Sirmur” included there opens, in another partaking in the work of mourning, with a quasi-transferential “pray[er]… to be haunted by [the Rani’s] slight ghost,” and a “miming [of] the route of an unknowing” becomes a “mim[ing of] responsibility to the other” (207, 241). Pointing to an ethico-affective supplementation of the epistemic, these additions to “The Rani of Sirmur” lead us to an altered reading of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In the latter, we get a disruption, in the semantics of “representation,” of the codes of truth and goodness, or broken down more specifically, in the German of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, of the epistemic, the aesthetic (as darstellen), and the ethico-political (as vertreten) (256ff, 260, 263). Portrayal can amount to a self-delegating “‘speaking for'” (Arnott 83). To separate these senses, and to expose their interested conflation, as Marx did when he wrote about tragedy being repeated as farce, is to operate an ironic parabasis. Critique presents these involved theatrics, along with the rest of the essay’s intervening matter (on Foucault and Derrida, Subaltern Studies, sati) as a “digression” on the way to the “unspeaking” of the anti-colonial activist Bhubaneswari Bhaduri, after her suicide, by other women of her social class (273, 309). A coda to earlier versions of the essay,¹¹ this unspeaking is now a portent for the (middle-class) woman of the South becoming, along with the postcolonial migrant, the agent-instrument of transnational capital (310, cf. 200-201), manager in a neo-colonial system which, enlisting feminist help (252, 255f, 259, 269, 277, 282, 287, 361, 370n), employs credit-baiting to conscript into capitalist globality the poorest woman of the South (6, 220n, 223n42, 237, 243n70). This is how the book tracks the itinerary of the Native Informant, and how the implied reader–also the “newly-born… woman as reader as model” in “a new politics of reading” (98-98n137)–is concatenated by it in a position of complicity. When Critique adds Bhubaneswari Bhaduri’s corporate-employed great-grandniece to the chain, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is resituated in a history of the present written on her unspeaking. Yet the “digression” remains indispensable to discerning the deeper current on reading underneath the Native Informant’s itinerary structuring the book. Although, as Spivak observes, Bhubaneswari Bhaduri was “a figure who intended to be retrieved” (246), and the survivors interpret her suicide, we are not dealing, in isolation, with epistemic coding, or with ethico-political coding alone, but with the permanent disruption of these and other codes in the writing Bhubaneswari left on her body. The reader does not know, or have to know, but rather stands aside when others, ignoring the disruptive noise of other codings, claim to know.

 

We can, on the one hand, as it has always invited us (247), read “Can the Subaltern Speak?” as irony in the classical mode, as eironeia, a Socratic questioning in feigned ignorance, provoking the law to speak¹²–as it inevitably has, ruling that of course the subaltern can speak and in the same breath contradicting its statement with vivid acts of foreclosure (see 309; Outside 60-61). On the other hand, Socratic irony can itself be thought in a de Manian vocabulary of “permanent parabasis,” as a disrupting of the script of informatics through a performance of the (im)possible perspective that mimes its foreclosure of that perspective. If this disruption produces an imperative, Spivak’s injunction in response appears to be: find the disruption of value systems and work at it; intervene there. Such an ethics or politics of reading may thus be another gloss on what, from her readings of Marx, and Deleuze and Guattari, Spivak refers to in other essays as the coding, recoding, and transcoding of value, a topic which continues to puzzle her ablest interpreters.¹³ Involving economic, cultural, and affective codes implicated in gendering (103ff, cf. Outside 281-282), and thus entering territory not explored by de Man, this is where, by analogy with the factory worker, whom Marx taught to think of himself not in terms of identity (see Outside 61ff), but as an agent, the implied reader-agent can acknowledge and negotiate complicity. Although not working out the details, Critique provides clues, in the form of concrete suggestions, that help its reader to find such links in intuitions about reading and the ethical. One, from the chapter on Culture, is the proposal that “a different standard of literary evaluation, necessarily provisional, can emerge if we work at the (im)possible perspective of the native informant as a reminder of alterity, rather than remain caught in some identity forever” (351-352). Another, from History, in response to UN efforts to “rationalize ‘woman,'” concerns “women outside of the mode of production narrative”: “We pay the price of epistemically fractured transcoding when we explain them as general exemplars of anthropological descriptions…. They must exceed the system to come to us, in the mode of the literary” (245-245n). Postcoloniality urges a training of the agent as reader in the literary–where the literary is that which, while it inevitably performs a referential function, is “singular and unverifiable” (175) in the way it evokes and invokes an elsewhere and an other, and constantly performs disruption between aesthetico-epistemic and ethico-affective codings of representation. A paradox thus appears to emerge for a reader of Critique: in order to read the book, the reader has to stand aside from the reading-position allocated her as declared implied reader; exceed her systemic placing when it risks gelling into yet another identity; and assume, where–unlocatably–she is, the (im)possible task of taking up what has been denied: the writing of an other life-script, which is not necessarily the same as one’s own autobiography. The larger project carried forward in Critique remains, as I read it, a work in progress, placed in the hands of its readers. Tracking the trajectory at a tangent, this has been my contribution toward its working out.

 

Notes

 

1. On the reader of Capital, see also Keenan 99-133.

 

2. Given not only the agenda of Critique, but also the considerable Marxist reach of “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” the work by Spivak taken up most widely in postcolonial studies, one can only find bewildering Neil Lazarus’s statement that: “And in the case of Spivak, I shall risk saying that she seems to me ‘more of a Marxist’ in the wider field of critical theory than she is in the narrower field of postcolonial studies: I mean that her pointedly Marxist writings seem to me to situate themselves, for the most part, as interventions into the ‘theory’ field; within the field of postcolonial studies, by contrast, it is as a feminist exponent of deconstruction that she is most visible” (12-13). Lazarus frames his book as remedying a lack, as he perceives it, of “any credible or legitimated Marxist position within the field of postcolonial studies” (12). As disturbing as the desire for legitimation, and thus for “legitimate” intellectual filiation and affiliation, is, one could, in the context of contemporary academic politics, not easily object to such a project. Yet, when establishing the presence of the (highly contestable) lack perceived by Lazarus involves an assessment of another Marxist scholar’s work in terms of visibility in an academic field instead of her substantive contribution, one cannot help asking whether the meager gains to be had from the multiplied qualifications (“more of a”; “pointedly”; “for the most part”; “most”) justify his exertions.

 

3. Spivak had considered the title Return of the Native Informant (“Ghostwriting” 84). Another title in play was An Unfashionable Grammatology (Spivak Reader 287).

 

4. In White Mythologies, Robert Young describes Spivak’s relation to conventions of positioning and oppositionality: “Instead of staking out a single recognizable position, gradually refined and developed over the years, she has produced a series of essays that move restlessly across the spectrum of contemporary theoretical and political concerns, rejecting none of them according to the protocols of an oppositional mode, but rather questioning, reworking and reinflecting them in a particularly productive and disturbing way…. Spivak’s work offers no position as such that can be quickly summarized…. To read her work is not so much to confront a system as to encounter a series of events” (157). Young contrasts Spivak’s attendant “taking ‘the investigator’s complicity into account'” with Edward Said’s “oppositional criticism,” his “very limited model of a detached, oppositional critical consciousness” (169, 173; the embedded quotation is in Critique 244).

 

5. In his introduction to the recent issue of PMLA on “Ethics and Literary Study,” Lawrence Buell, who puts Spivak under the heading of those addressing “the issue of whether discourse can yield truthful or reliable representation,” merely allegorizes his own incomprehension that Spivak’s concern with ethics and reading amounts to more than a problematization of knowing when he paraphrases her “paradoxical assertion that ‘ethics is the experience of the impossible’: an ethical representation of subalternity must proceed in the awareness that (mutual) understanding will be limited'” (10). Like Buell, Neil Lazarus fixes on ideas of truth and knowing when, in a curious miming of his accusation of “one-sided[ness],” he ignores the link Spivak explores between reading and the ethical: “The central problem with Spivak’s theorization of subalternity is that in its relentless and one-sided focus on the problematics of representation as reading, it contrives to displace or endlessly defer the epistemological question–that concerning truth” (114).

 

6. We can compare this move to that of Kwame Nkrumah, who transgresses Kant’s proscription of “anthropology” to make “the traditional African standpoint” the starting point for ethics rather than beginning with a “philosophical idea of the nature of man” (97). The difference would be that, by preserving the moment of foreclosure in Kant–one that is indeed “anthropological”–Spivak takes precautions to avoid the mere substitution of perspective that characterizes and sets the limits of nativism.

 

7. On the “im,” Spivak directs us to “A Literary Representation of the Subaltern,” where it relates to a rhetorical question (Other Worlds 263).

 

8. See Keenan, Attridge. The principal source texts would be Derrida, “Psyche,” and Levinas 99-129.

 

9. On ethicity in de Man, see Miller 41-59, Hamacher 184ff.

 

10. In “Finding Feminist Readings: Dante-Yeats,” thinking the feminist reader and her position is Spivak’s occasion for distinguishing between deconstruction in a narrow and general sense: “Within a shifting and abyssal frame, these [minimal] idealizations [of a work being ‘about something’] are the ‘material’ to which we as readers, with our own elusive historico-politico-economico-sexual determinations, bring the machinery of our reading and, yes, judgement” (Other Worlds 15).

 

11. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?: Speculations on Widow-Sacrifice”; “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

 

12. Like Socrates in Plato’s Apology (414), Spivak refers to herself as a “gadfly” (244). On eironeia, see Derrida, Gift (76), and, on irony and the question, Derrida and Dufourmantelle (11-19). I offer these notes toward an account of Spivak’s trajectory of irony as a hopeful corrective to Terry Eagleton’s trivializing remark, in his review of Critique, that “[Spivak’s] work’s rather tiresome habit of self-theatricalising and self-alluding is the colonial’s ironic self-performance, a satirical stab at scholarly impersonality, and a familiar American cult of personality” (6).

 

13. See Young, Review 235ff.

 

Works Cited

 

• Arnott, Jill. “French Feminism in a South African Frame?: Gayatri Spivak and the Problem of Representation in South African Feminism.” South African Feminisms: Writing, Theory, and Criticism, 1990-1994. Ed. M.J. Daymond. New York: Garland, 1996. 77-89.
• Attridge, Derek. “Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the Other.” PMLA 114.1 (1999): 20-31.
• Buell, Lawrence. “Introduction: In Pursuit of Ethics.” PMLA 114.1 (1999): 7-19.
• De Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.
• Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.
• —. “Psyche: Inventions of the Other.” Trans. Catherine Porter. Waters and Godzich 25-65.
• Derrida, Jacques and Anne Dufourmantelle. De l’hospitalité. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1997.
• Eagleton, Terry. “In the Gaudy Supermarket.” London Review of Books. 13 May 1999: 3, 5-6.
• Hamacher, Werner. “LECTIO: de Man’s Imperative.” Trans. Susan Bernstein. Waters and Godzich 171-201.
• Keenan, Thomas. Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.
• Lazarus, Neil. Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.
• Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1998.
• Miller, J. Hillis. The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin. New York: Columbia UP, 1987.
• Nkrumah, Kwame. Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for De-Colonization. Revised ed. New York: Monthly Review P, 1970.
• Plato. Apology. The Dialogues of Plato. Trans. B. Jowett. 2 Vols. New York: Random House, 1937. Vol.1. 401-423.
• Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “A Defence of Poetry; or Remarks Suggested by an Essay Entitled ‘The Four Ages of Poetry.'” Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald Reiman and Sharon B. Powers. New York: Norton, 1977. 480-508.
• Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988. 271-313.
• —. “Can the Subaltern Speak?: Speculations on Widow-Sacrifice.” Wedge 7/8 (1985): 120-130.
• —. “Ghostwriting.” diacritics 25.2 (1995): 65-84.
• —. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. London: Methuen, 1987.
• —. Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York: Routledge, 1993.
• —. The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Ed. Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean. New York: Routledge, 1996.
• Waters, Lindsay and Wlad Godzich, eds. Reading de Man Reading. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989.
• Young, Robert. Review of Outside in the Teaching Machine by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Textual Practice 10.1 (1996): 228-238.
• —. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London: Routledge, 1990.