Born in 1942, in
Calcutta,
West Bengal. Gayatri Chakravorty immigrated to the
United States in the early 1960's, to attend
Cornell University, which she chose primarily due to its international reputation. She gained her Ph.D. in
Comparative Literature (
because they were the only department that offered funding), her 1974 dissertation was on
W.B. Yeats, and written under the mentorship of
Paul de Man, who steered Spivak towards
Jacques Derrida, whose
On Grammatology Spivak translated into the
English language. Spivak now teaches at
Columbia.
Spivak's work is best known within the context of
postcolonial thought (see also
Slavoj Zizek,
Theodor Adorno, and
Edward Said) though she describes her own work in terms of
ethics,
interdisciplinarity,
deconstruction and even by reference to the rhetorical trope
catachresis. Of course, summarization is exactly what can't describe Spivak, at least not on her own terms.
In her famous essay
Can the Subaltern Speak?, Spivak challenged the inability of Western intellectuals to
mediate and
understand the forms of
culture and knowledge that were underprivileged according not only to the traditional boundaries of
legitimacy set forth by their various disciplines, but also the very sites of
power that their bodies represent. Spivak is particularly critical of the current
postmodern trend in academia to readily admit this fact, but thereby brush it under the table, keeping the
conscience of the
academy clean.
This position is not unlike that of Derrida (who is, of course, in a position of even greater privilege than Spivak herself (being not only
Western, but Western by birth (though a Jew), and male, and white)), and it is of no surprise, then, that we find both Spivak and Derrida struggling to use deconstruction as a tool for
addressing their own complicit contributions to the
social formations that they oppose, or think they oppose. Within the context of
post-colonialism we can read this as: Is postcolonial thought a specific product of the first-world guilty conscience? Of what value is a Western academic
discipline that seeks, in fact, to
discipline the suffering and misappropriation of third-world resources and bodies? Is such a
disciplining ever going to set these resources free, or is it, rather, a further imprisonment, or merely an empty admission of an
unconscious complicity?
The subject of the
essay takes its cue from the
suicide of a young Bengali woman. Spivak's conclusion is that the subaltern cannot speak, and that our normal economies of
language torment the
utterance of the
unutterable, if they do not, in some cases, prevent it altogether.
"I am not erudite enough to be interdisciplinary, but I can break rules."
Btw, I enjoyed the above writeup by Shapes, don't delete it please. It's in the spirit of Spivak.