Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Scattered speculations on the subaltern and the popular

Subaltern is to popular as gender is to sex, class to poverty, state to nation. One word inclines to reasonableness, the other to cathexis – occupation through desire. ‘Popular’ divides between des...

Terror: A Speech After 9-11

1 These ruminations arose in response to America’s war on terrorism. I started from the conviction that there is no response to war. War is a cruel caricature of what in us can respond. You cannot be answerable to war. Yet one cannot remain silent. Out of the imperative or compulsion to speak, then, two questions: What are some already existing responses? And, how respond in the face of the impossibility of response? When I thus assigned myself the agency of response, my institutionally validated agency kicked in. I am a teacher of the humanities. In the humanities classroom begins a training for what may produce a criticism that can possibly engage a public sphere deeply hostile to the mission of the humanities when they are understood as a persistent attempt at an uncoercive rearrangement of desires, through teaching reading. Before

Translation as Culture

In every possible sense, translation is necessary but impossible. Melanie Klein, the Viennese psychoanalyst whom the Bloomsbury Group killed with kindness, suggested that the work of translation is an incessant shuttle that is a ‘life’. The human infant grabs on to some one thing and then things. This grabbing (begreifen) of an outside indistinguishable from an inside constitutes an inside, going back and forth and coding everything into a sign-system by the thing(s) grasped. One can call this crude coding a ‘translation’. In this never-ending weaving, violence translates into conscience and vice versa. From birth to death this ‘natural’ machine, programming the mind perhaps as genetic instructions program the body (where does body stop and mind begin?), is partly metapsychological and therefore outside the grasp of the mind. Thus ‘nature’ passes and repasses into ‘culture’, in a work or shuttling site of violence (deprivation – evil – shocks the infant system-in-the-making more than satisfaction, some say Paradiso is the dullest of The Divine Comedy): the violent production of the precarious subject of reparation and responsibility. To plot this weave, the reader – in my estimation, Klein was more a reader than an analyst in the strict Freudian sense –, translating the incessant translating shuttle into that which is read, must have the most intimate knowledge of the rules of representation and permissible narratives which make up the substance of a culture, and must also become responsible and accountable to the writing/translating presupposed original.

Feminism and critical theory

Synopsis This is a taped transcript of a talk given from notes. I have edited lightly. I wanted to preserve the informality and the bravado. The detail of my present research concerns itself with what I propose here in tentative and broad outline.

Questioned on Translation: Adrift

I believe becoming a cultural broker has been an unintended consequence of my translating Mahasweta Devi, but surely not Jacques Derrida? And what “culture” does Mahasweta represent? “Describe some of your own experiences as a translator,” you tell me. Now I feel as I did when I took my first written exam for my driver’s license in 1967. How can these questions be answered as they are posed, I worried. I provided philosophically unassailable answers. I failed the exam. In other words, I had failed in the task of (low-level) epistemic translation, from the subject of the Iowa Department of Motor Vehicles to a young academic reading Derrida. I am failing again to translate from the subject of a colleague interested in me as a translator and my stereotype of myself, unavailable to me as “translator.” Do I have “experiences” specifically as a translator? “Describe the importance of this work to your theoretical reflections,” you say. Do you know I never reflect theoretically; unless you count my “timed backups” from time to time, asking myself precisely what it is that I’ve been up to.

Postcolonial theory and the specter of capital

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The Politics of Interpretations

It is difficult to speak of a politics of interpretation without a working notion of ideology as larger than the concepts of individual consciousness and will. At its broadest implications this notion of ideology would undo the oppositions between determinism and free will and between conscious choice and unconscious reflex. Ideology in action is what a group takes to be natural and self-evident, that of which the group, as a group, must deny any historical sedimentation. It is both the condition and the effect of the constitution of the subject (of ideology) as freely willing and consciously choosing in a world that is seen as background. In turn, the subject(s) of ideology are the conditions and effects of the self-identity of the group as a group. It is impossible, of course, to mark off a group as an entity without sharing complicity with its ideological definition. A persistent critique of ideology is thus forever incomplete. In the shifting spectrum between subject-constitution and groupconstitution are the ideological apparatuses that share the condition/ effect oscillation.

A Note on the New International

The Communist Internationals assumed an abstract collectivity of interest determined by the founding inequity of wage-labour. Good or bad, revolution or state capitalism, their interest was in the political as calculus. In Specters Derrida keeps his eye on the messianic, which is a mode – if one can call it that – that is discontinuous with the calculus (although it may entail one). Yet the New International in the Specters of Marx must necessarily withstand comparison with past Internationals. 1 In that context, it risks being assimilated, in Specters, to that self-styled ‘international civil society’, custodian of rights for the entire world by a species of manifest destiny, the political arm of international or global capitalism, that has been the object of a good deal of careful criticism. In Specters Derrida is as critical of the nation-state form as any supporter of globalization (which he curiously does not see as ‘a . . . normative phase of development’). But what does it look like from the point of view of the new or developing states, the newly decolonizing or the old decolonized nations – South Africa, say, or India? That it is impossible for these states to escape the orthodox constraints of a ‘neo-liberal’ world economic system which, in the name of Development, and now, ‘sustainable development’, removes all barriers between itself and fragile national economies, so that any possibility of social redistribution is severely damaged.

Position without Identity: An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is university professor and director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. She specializes in nineteenthand twentieth-century literature, Marxism, feminism, deconstruction, poststructuralism, and globalization and has been a member of the Subaltern Studies Collective. Professor Spivak is active in rural literacy teacher training on the grassroots level in Aboriginal West Bengal. Among her publications are Of Grammatology (a translation with critical introduction of Jacques Derrida’s De la grammmatologie), Imaginary Maps, Breast Stories, Old Women (translations with critical material of the fiction of Mahasweta Devi), In Other Worlds, The Post-Colonial Critic, Outside in the Teaching Machine, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, and Death of a Discipline. Her book Other Asias is forthcoming.

Not Really a Properly Intellectual Response: An Interview with Gayatri Spivak

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, teaches English and the politics of culture. She was educated at the University of Calcutta and came to Cornell University in 1961 to finish doctoral work. Her books areMyself Must I Remake (1974), In Other Worlds (1987), The Post-Colonial Critic (1988), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), and Death of a Discipline (2003).Red Thread is in press. She has translated Jacques Derrida’sOf Grammatology (1976) and Mahasweta Devi’s Imaginary Maps (1994), Breast Stories (1997),OldWomen (1999), andChottiMunda andHisArrow (2002). She is active in the international women’s movement, the struggle for ecological