Spivak on Coetzee & Tagore

In 'Ethics & Politics in Tagore, Coetzee & certain scenes of teaching' Spivak claims- 

It is practically persuasive that the eruption of the ethical interrupts and postpones the epistemological—the undertaking to construct the other as object of knowledge, an undertaking never to be given up.

Epistemology has to do with knowledge. One may wish to gain knowledge for an ethical reason or one may seek to constrain ways of getting knowledge for ethical reasons. However, if an ethical concerns 'erupts' and is not immediately dismissed, then there is no further 'epistemological' undertaking. Why? It would be unethical to pursue knowledge in that connection. Let us suppose we are discussing ways in which we can gather valid information about the color of underwear worn by a girl. It occurs to us that there is an ethical objection to seeking this type of knowledge. We don't postpone the undertaking. We give it up entirely. Similarly, once we realize it is unethical to carry out medical experiments on human beings, we don't postpone doing so. We give up any such research program. 

Lévinas is the generic name associated with such a position.

Even Levinas wasn't so stupid and evil. It was wrong for Nazi Doctors to experiment on Jews in concentration camps. That type of research was not postponed. It was given up entirely and those doing it were prosecuted if they could be found.  

A beautiful passage from Otherwise than Being lays it out, although neither interruption nor postponement is mentioned.

Because Levinas hadn't said anything so fucking evil and stupid.  

That connection is made by Derrida [Adieu 51–59].

No it isn't. Derrida wasn't saying 'lets re-start Mengele's experiments'.  

Here, then, is Lévinas, for whom Kant’s critical perspectivization of the subject and the rigorous limits of pure theoretical reason seem to have been displaced by the structuralist hermeneutics of suspicion.

There is no 'structuralist hermeneutic of suspicion'. The very concept is post-structuralist. It is associated with Gadamer, Ricoeur and Leo Strauss. Kant didn't think there were any 'rigorous limits of pure theoretical reason' though there may be natural or divine limits. But those would be arbitrary or dependent on the Divine Will.  We may say 'Levinas holds that the law is an artifact of a normatively prior ethical relation based on alterity- precisely what we can never have in common. Kant supposes the morally legitimate law must be self-imposed.' Put more simply, the law relates to what is justiciable and is defeasible. That is why, in any legal matter, there may be more than one way of being in the right or in the wrong. Kant, of course, was talking about a 'categorical imperative' which all rational beings would recognize to be univocal. Kant was wrong. He thought 'naturality' abounded whereas mathematical category theory shows it is far to seek. Arbitrariness is usual. Categoricity- i.e. uniqueness of model- isn't. Indeed, for sufficiently complex, i.e. informative or useful, types of reasoning it may not exist or does so only at the price of glaring 'incompleteness'.

For Lévinas, structuralism did not attend to what in Kant was the mechanism that interrupted the constrained and rigorous workings of pure reason:

No. Levinas had no quarrel with structuralism in mathematics or physics. He was merely pointing to 'defeasibility' as at the heart of jurisprudence in the manner of H.A.L Hart.  

“The interests that Kant discovered in theoretical reason itself, he subordinated to practical reason,

e.g. the Law 

become mere reason. It is just these interests that are contested by structuralism, which is perhaps to be defined by the primacy of theoretical reason” [Otherwise than Being 58; trans. modified].

Structuralism affirms the existence of a 'Structural Causal Model'. It may be wholly deterministic and its laws or regularities may be indefeasible, or admit no exception. However, in the realm of human interaction, there are too many degrees of freedom for Structuralism to impose a solution. Thus Ethics gains autonomy. Indeed it may be 'First Philosophy'.  

The relationship between the postponement of the epistemological in Lévinas and the subordination of pure reason in Kant is a rich theme,

It is nonsense. There is no 'postponement' of evil medical experiments in Levinas nor is pure reason 'subordinated' to lust in Kant.  

beyond the scope of this essay. Let us return to what Lévinas will perceive as a general contemporary hermeneutics of suspicion, related to the primacy of theoretical reason: “The suspicions engendered by psychoanalysis, sociology and politics weigh on human identity such that we never know to whom we are speaking and what we are dealing with when we build our ideas on the basis of the human fact.”

Also we can't be sure the other guy is only pretending to think we are smart. He may be laughing his head off at the stupid Professor talking gobbledygook.  

The political calculus thematizes this suspicion into an entire code of strategy defined as varieties of game theory and rational choice.

No it doesn't. Game theory has no purchase if the payoff matrix is unknown. Rational choice is defeated by 'regret minimization' if there is Knightian Uncertainty. Spivak was fifty years out of date.  

This can be verified across cultural difference, backwards through history, and in today’s global academic discourse.

Global academic discourse in non STEM subjects is retarded shite.  

Over against this Lévinas posits the ethical with astonishing humility: “but we do not need this knowledge in the relationship in which the other is the one next to me [le prochain]” [Otherwise 59].

Nor do we need Levinas to point out the bleeding obvious. Anyway, once we discovered the cunt didn't think Palestinians represented Israel's alterity, we stopped paying attention to him. Also, how come he didn't go around giving blowjobs to hobos? Surely, the other's material needs were his own spiritual need to swallow hobo jizz?  Ethics Professors are easily chased away by the demand they walk the talk they indulge in. Why has Peter Singer consistently refused to let pigs eat him? 

Kant thought that the ethical commonality of being (gemeines Wesen—repeatedly mistranslated as “the ethical state”) cannot form the basis of a state.

Gemeines Wesen means 'body politic' or community. It does form the basis of a Republic. Kant lived in a monarchy. Thus what he said was 'an ethical common being only exists as a people under divine commandments'. This was because Kant thought each worshipper is willing the same commandments as a matter of 'natural' reason. This was silly. It is obvious that some commandments don't apply to us but do to certain other people. Still, his account is of a religion within the bounds of reason wholly independent of the coercive power of the state and only thus does involve "ethischen gemeinen Wesens"- 'ethical common being'. But this could just be an 'overlapping consensus'. It isn't necessary that everybody wills each and every article of Faith. 

Can an 'ethischen gemeinen Wesens' form a State? Sure. They just need to gain control over territory, appoint judges and declare themselves sovereign. True, Kings might succeed Judges- as happens in the Bible- but that's a different matter. 

Surprisingly, there is a clear line from the face-to-face of the ethical to the state in Lévinas.

Why is that surprising? People have faces. Candidates for election take care to make their faces look nice and sweet.  

It has long been my habit to scavenge and tinker in the field of practical philosophy.

Why not also admit to eating your own shit?  

I will conserve from Kant the discontinuity between the ethical and the political, from Lévinas the discontinuity between the ethical and the epistemological.

Why? No one thinks there is a continuity between such things. In politics you may have to lie and cheat. You can be ethical without knowing or wanting to know anything at all.  

I will suggest that the discontinuities between the ethical and the epistemological and political fields are tamed in the nestling of logic and rhetoric in fiction.

Only in the sense that telling lies about the lion which is eating you can tame that lion and turn it into an actuary living in Hendon with a Lesbian aunt who retired from the Civil Service in 1979.  

Enabled by such a suggestion, I can move to another bit of prose on that page in Lévinas: “for reasons not at all transcendental but purely logical, the object-man must figure at the beginning of all knowing.”

There is no such 'logical' reason. All knowing may be wholly beyond every 'object-man'. The best we can do may be to form hypotheses which are sure to falsified at some future date. Popper actually knew some logic.  

The figure of the “I” as object: this representation of the holy man in Lévinas does not match our colloquial and literal expectations.

Unless we expect a guy who taught stupid shit would say stupid shit.  

My general suggestion, that the protocol of fiction

i.e. telling lies 

gives us a practical simulacrum of the graver discontinuities inhabiting (and operating?) the ethico-epistemic and the ethico-political, can, however, take such a figure on board.

Because the lion which is eating you may be an actuary living in Hendon.  

I will continue to want to say that fiction offers us an experience of the discontinuities that remain in place “in real life.”

Why continue to want to say what you have just said?  

That would be a description of fiction as an event—an indeterminate “sharing” between writer and reader, where the effort of reading is to taste the impossible status of being figured as object in the web of the other.

That isn't impossible at all. We do it every time we read a letter or an email. The novelist may address us directly and ask us to take off all our clothes. Sadly, this can cause us to be arrested for public indecency.  

Reading, in this special sense, is sacred.

Nope. It is what happens when you read a letter addressed to you.  

In this essay I consider not only fiction as event but also fiction as task.

It is neither. The thing is meant to entertain or instruct or just pass the time.  

I locate in Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) and J. M. Coetzee (1940– ) representations of what may be read as versions of the “I” figured as object and weave the representations together as a warning text for postcolonial political ambitions.

Why bother? Tagore warned his Bengali Hindu readers that if the Brits fucked off, they would lose their lives and property in the Muslim majority East. In 1947, that was exactly what happened. Coetzee had the sense to get the fuck out of South Africa though, sadly, his attempt to gain American citizenship failed and he had to go back. Still, after retirement, he was able to move to Australia- whose rulers remain White- and got citizenship there in 2006. Smart South Africans- Black or otherwise are running away from the place which is bound to turn into a Zimbabwe-like shithole sooner or later. 

I am obviously using “text” as “web,” coming from Latin texere—“to weave.”

No you are not. You are using 'text' as 'boring book one should claim to have read if one happens to be a Professor of Literature.'  

In the second part of the essay I move into the field of education as a nation-building calculus.

It isn't a calculus. It is an exercise which may or may not be nation-building. Spivak's own education in India was the means by which she got the fuck away from the place.  

I examine planning as its logic and teaching as its rhetoric

America isn't a nation because it never had a Planning Commission. Rhetoric was a subject taught in skools at one point. But not in India. Gandhi's 'Basic Education' scheme failed immediately on implementation in 1937. After that, there was little talk of 'nation building' through education because the Muslim League cited the Wardha scheme as an example of the suffering and injustice inflicted on them by the Hindu majority.  

—in the strong sense of figuration.

Both were wholly absent from India and America. There was no 'figuration'. There is just a stupid woman talking bollocks.  

On the cover of the first Pratichi Education Report, there is an artwork by Rabindranath Tagore containing a poem, in English and Bengali, nestled in a tinted sketch, written and painted in Baghdad in 1932. Here is the poem, in Tagore’s own translation: The night has ended. Put out the light of the lamp of thine own narrow corner smudged with smoke. The great morning which is for all appears in the East. Let its light reveal us to each other Who walk on the same path of pilgrimage.

What was revealed to Hindu Bengalis in Dacca at the dawn of Freedom, was that they had better run the fuck away from Muslims. Also, the best 'path of pilgrimage' is one which ends with your getting a Green Card. Coetzee, poor fellow, couldn't get US citizenship because he had participated in anti-Vietnam War protests.  

The Bengali is slightly more active: Nikhiler alo purba akashe jolilo punyodine / Ekshathe jara cholibe tahara shokolere nik chine. The universe’s light burns in the eastern sky on this blessed day / Let those who’ll walk together recognize each other.

The Bible says 'can two walk together save they are agreed?' Obviously, if one of them is Muslim, and you are a Bengali Hindu and the year is 1947, one of you is going in the wrong direction. In any case, you'd better run away.  

These lines resonate with what might be the mission statement of the moral entrepreneurship of the international civil society today,

Fuck off! International Civil Society thought it should be killing Afghans so Afghan Lesbians could create their own 'Pussy Riot' and invade mosques.  

which, however laudable, is put together not by democratic procedure, but largely by self-selection and networking. I am aware of course, of the same forces at work in “democracies.”

Only democracies gassed on about 'civil society'.  

But the presence of mechanisms of redress— electoral or constitutional—however remote, produces a faith in electoral education, which is useless if our faith is put entirely in self-selected international helpers.

Also, if a guy says he has lost his phone and could he please have a little poke around your vagina with his dick, just in case it got lodged up there, don't put your faith in him. He wants to have sex with you. He hasn't really lost his phone.  

I first learned to notice this from Derrida’s article “White Mythology,” whose subtitle is “Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy.”

Previously, Spivak would let all sorts of people poke around in her orifices.  

. In the second lecture of the series presented at the Centre for Studies in Sciences in Kolkata, India, I offered a reading of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, as a President Schreber-style critique of postcolonial political ambitions. 

Schreber was a Judge who went mad and thought the Sun was trying to fuck him in the ass so he would become father to a new Messiah. There is a crazy film star in Satanic Verses but no such thing in 'Midnight'.  

“Apoman,” the poem Tagore wrote more than twenty years before this, after reading Kshitimohan Sen’s translations of Kabir, is much darker.

Tagore could understand Kabir- even the esoteric parts. He had travelled widely with his father and stayed in Amritsar where some of Kabir's poetry was included in gurbani.  

In this poem, Tagore uses the exact phrase “human rights”—manusher adhikar—

rights of man. The phrase was in common use at the time of the poet's grandfather. 

already at the beginning of the last century. What is to me more striking is that, instead of urging that human rights be immediately restored to the descendants of India’s historical unfortunates, he makes a mysterious prediction, looking toward the historical future: apomane hote hobe tahader shobar shoman—my unfortunate country, you will have to be equal in disgrace to each and every one of those you have disgraced millennially—a disgrace to which Kabir had responded. How can this enigmatic sentence be understood?

Easily. Tagore, like most Bengalis, thought Bengal was a shithole populated by loathsome insects. Sadly, he did not live to see Bose offering his asshole to Hitler and Tojo. It was unspeakably vile of Churchill and Roosevelt to prevent Japan conquering and enslaving Bengal.  

The idea of intertextuality, loosely defined, can be used to confront this question.

No. That is an idea which can produce loose motion or verbal diarrhea.  

I will offer an anecdotal account of intertextuality. It will help us coast through Tagore’s India, Coetzee’s South Africa, and the space of a tiny group of adivasis.

i.e. places which are or will become shitholes.  

In November 2002, Roald Hoffman, a Nobel Laureate chemist, gave a popular mini-lecture with slides in the basement of the Cornelia Street Café in New York. The topic was “Movement in Constrained Spaces,”

the Woodford-Hoffmann rules for stereochemistry won him the Nobel.  

by which Hoffman meant the incessant microscopic movement that goes on inside the human body to make it function.

Hoffmann's work shows that tiny symmetries and asymmetries in electron orbitals can explain or predict chemical reactions. 

To prepare for his talk, he had asked a choreographer from neighboring Princeton to choreograph a dance for the space of the stage, which is very small. This is already intertextuality, where one text, Hoffman’s, would make its point by weaving itself with another, the dance.

No. That is not intertextuality. It is a mixing of mediums. Multi-media was once considered cool.  

A shot silk, as it were. Again, that venerable sense of text as in textile, and texere as weave.

Or weave as in wig.  

The choreographer managed a pattern of exquisite and minute movements for two dancers, male and female, in that tiny space. But, at the back of the long and narrow bar, two singers, female and male, sang La ci darem a mano in full-throated ease. That wonderful aria from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, sung with such force and skill, bought our choreographer the deep space of the bar, but also historical space—the space of an opera that has been heard and loved by millions for a few centuries. Yet her dancers gave something to Mozart as well. Full of lyric grace as a love song if heard by itself— a man telling his beloved of the exquisite beauty of the place to which they will escape—La ci darem is, in context, a brutal seduction song of the most vicious class-fixed gendering, a gentleman seducing a confused farmgirl only to fuck, and the audience sharing the joke.

What makes it worse is the aristocrat has a dick. Zerlina does not. She has to pee sitting down. How is that fair? You peepul in West talking all the time of yuman rites, why you are not banning dick? Has Biden had gender reassignment surgery? No! Fuck you Whitey! Fuck you very much! 

The two impish and acrobatic dancers on the diminutive stage, wittily partnering, gave the lie to the possibility of any such interpretation. This is intertextuality, working both ways.

Nope. It is multi-media.  

Just as the chemist gave the dancer the lie, somewhat, for the movements he spoke of made the dance possible, so did the dancers give Mozart the lie by taking away his plot.

His plot had to do with with vengeance from beyond the grave.  

Yet each gained something as well. But in this case it did not work completely. Mozart is too elite for a radical New York audience. They did not catch the allusion.

Nor did Spivak. The allusion was to E.T.A Hoffmann's story 'Don Juan' from 1812. Roald Hoffmann's poetry has that spooky quality. Eros and Thanatos dance even beyond the grave. Who knows what is the after-life of chemistry? There may be a higher consilience than any mortals can dream of. 

When the boring literary academic

Spivak means herself 

referred to it in a timid question, the choreographer melted in gratitude.

Referred to what? Perhaps the choreographer melted in gratitude because the crazy woman didn't demand that all dicks be banned.  

This is sometimes the task of the literary academic. To restore reference in order that intertextuality may function; and to create intertextuality as well.

But you have to be able to understand what you read to do so. This stupid woman didn't get that a guy named Hoffmann who writes poetry is likely to know E.T.A Hoffmann's 'Don Juan'. So are at least some of the people attending his event.  

In order to do a good job with the Tagore poem, I have to read Kabir carefully.

Kabir is difficult for us NRIs because the esoteric psychology to which he refers has faded from our consciousness.   

And that will be another session with the fictive simulacrum of the helpless strength of the ethical.

not to mention the helpful weakness of Spivak's brain.  

J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace may be put in an intertextual relationship with Tagore’s poem.

Because in Tagore's poem, his daughter is raped and impregnated by Muslim dalits- right?  

In representing jare tumi niche felo she tomare bandhibe je niche—the one you fling down will bind you down there—in rural South Africa, Coetzee offers an illustration of what that enigmatic prediction might mean: apomane hote hobe tahader .

Nope. The guy was saying South Africa has turned into a shithole. Run the fuck away before some nice black lads rape and impregnate your daughter and set you on fire.  Some years later, the British press reported the case of a fraudster- Sean Smith- who claimed to have been gangraped in a South African jail eight times a day for several months with the result that he got AIDS. On that basis, he got bail and said the British High Commission had smuggled him out of the country. In England, he became romantically involved with Gareth Thomas, a gay Rugby star, and went into business with him. But that company was soon liquidated. It appears that Smith had got bail for being HIV positive and then conned the British Consulate into giving him a replacement passport. The gang-rape story was probably fictitious. Still, Black British Feminists like me felt very angry and betrayed that Coetzee had depicted our brothers in South Africa as so blind to issues of Gender and Development that they neglected to gang=rape an elderly man. Also, they should have shat on the tits of all concerned as is required by protocols relating to Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity not to mention Environmental sustainability and telling Neo-Liberalism to fuck off.

Adivasi is the name used commonly for so-called Indian “tribals,” by general account the inhabitants of India at the time of the arrival of Indo-European speakers in the second millennium BC.  shobar shoman—you will have to be equal in disgrace to all of them.

Spivak doesn't understand that tribals look down on non-tribals. During a famine, they refused food cooked by Brahmins.  Sadly, Bengal now has a Brahmin woman as Chief Minister. 

Here too, intertextuality works two ways. Where Tagore alters his refrain in the last line: mrityumajhe hobe tobe chitabhashshe shobar shoman—you will then be equal to all of them in the ashes of death—thus predicting the death of a nation, Coetzee, writing an unsentimentally gendered narrative, makes his protagonist choose life. (I should add that Tagore’s last stanza is somewhat more programmatic and asks for a call to all.)

Tagore and Coetzee understood they would lose property or even life under majority rule. Tagore died before Independence. Coetzee emigrated to Australia.  

Here is a plot summary of Coetzee’s novel: David Lurie, a middle-aged male professor, sentimental consumer of metropolitan sex-work, seduces a student, and is charged with sexual harassment by the appropriate committee. He refuses to utter the formulas that will get him off. He leaves the university and goes to his possibly lesbian daughter Lucy’s flower farm. The daughter is raped and beaten, and he is himself beaten and badly burnt.

But, inexcusably, he is not gangraped nor are his tits shat upon. Details of this sort matter.  

The daughter is pregnant and decides to carry the child to term. One of the rapists turns up at the neighboring farm and is apparently a relative of the owner. This farmer Petrus, already married, proposes a concubinage-style marriage to Lucy. She accepts. The English professor starts working for an outfit that puts unwanted dogs to sleep.

Why South African subaltern is not gang-raping bow-wows to death? Is it due to Neo-Liberalism and soi disant 'Washington Consensus'?  

He has a short liaison with the unattractive married woman who runs the outfit. He writes an operetta in a desultory way. He learns to love dogs and finally learns to give up the dog that he loves to the stipulated death.

Why it was not gangraped by Peter Singer in Australia? Is it because Obama was actually born in Kenya? These are the sort of questions post-Spivakian subaltern literary theory must learn to grapple with.  

These are some of the daughter Lucy’s last words in the novel. Her father is ready to send his violated daughter back to her Dutch mother. Holland is the remote metropole for the Afrikaner: It is as if she has not heard him. “Go back to Petrus,” she says. “Propose the following. Say I accept his protection. Say he can put out whatever story he likes about our relationship and I won’t contradict him. If he wants me to be known as his third wife, so be it. As his concubine, ditto. But then the child becomes his too. The child becomes part of his family. As for the land, say I will sign the land over to him as long as the house remains mine. I will become a tenant on his land.” . . . “How humiliating,” he says finally. . . . “yes, [she says] I agree, it is humiliating. But perhaps that is a good point to start from again. . . . To start at ground level. With nothing. Not with nothing but. With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity. 

In my novel 'Grace', the daughter of the handsome South Indian socioproctologist refuses to lend her Dad a tenner. She is then raped, beaten to death and her tits are repeatedly shat upon. At the end of the novel she says 'Daddy, not only should I have leant you a tenner, but everybody in the Galaxy should lend you all their money. Now I don't care how many billions of people rape and kill me and shit on my tits so long as everybody understands you are very handsome and the Doctor was lying when she said you were morbidly obese.'  

Apomane hote hobe tahader shobar shoman. Insofar as Disgrace is a father-daughter story the intertextuality here is with Lear.

Nope. Lear wasn't fucking anything which moved. You may say that Lucy is a sort of reverse Perdita. But why bother? She is no such thing.  

If Lucy ends with nothing,

she remains attached to the land. Petrus may find it in his interest to keep her around. 

Cordelia in the text of King Lear begins with the word “nothing.”

In answer to the question 'what can you say which will draw a rich gift from me?' The answer is 'Daddy doesn't need to hear anything from me in order to give me nice nice gifts.' 

That word signifies the withholding of speech

No. It signifies that she is speaking not withholding speech.  

as an instrument for indicating socially inappropriate affective value. In Cordelia’s understanding, to put love in the value-form—let me measure how much—is itself absurd.

What is absurd is to think Daddy won't give me nice nice pressies even though I'm much cuter than my sisters.  

Indeed, in the first impact of the word “nothing” in the play, this protest is mimed in the clustering of silences in the short lines among the regular iambic pentameter lines.

Most of Lear is in blank verse. In what follows, there may be no pause between Lear's rejoinders. That is a matter for the director.  

“Cor. Nothing, my lord. [six syllables of silence] / Lear. Nothing? [eight syllables of silence] / Cor. Nothing. [eight again]/ Lear. Nothing will come of nothing: speak again” [1.1.87–90]. The meter picks up, and Cordelia speaks. Now Cordelia shows that she is also a realist and knows that love in the value-form is what makes the world go around.

Nobody knows any such shite. Cordelia shows she knows her Christian duty to honor her parents but not indulge in vain flattery.  

She is made to chide her sisters for not thinking of the love due to their husbands: “Why have my sisters husbands if they say / They love you all?” 

Again, Cordelia is upholding the 'natural' laws of oikeiosis. This may not be politic but, after all, this is a domestic matter.  

Just as Disgrace is also a father-daughter story,

It is a father and daughters story. Like the Winter's Tale, Disgrace is a father-daughter story. In some obscure way, we feel the daughter, by embracing a bitter fate, has somehow absolved her father or put him on the path to expiation.  

so is King Lear also a play about dynastic succession in the absence of a son, not an unimportant topic in Jacobean England.

In Tudor England- yes. But not in Jacobean England. Indeed, the fact that James II unexpectedly had a son was the trigger for the Glorious Revolution. Spivak is wholly ignorant of English History.  

It has been abundantly pointed out that the play’s turnaround can be measured by the fact that “the presence of Cordelia at the head of a French army . . . marks the final horrific stage in the process by which Lear’s division of the kingdom goes on turning the world upside down” [Foakes 141].

That army is defeated. Fuck you France! Go eat some more smelly cheese and just surrender already.  

Thus the love due to fathers bows to the love due to husbands and is then displaced, as it were. It is this story of fathers and husbands, and dynastic succession at the very inception of capitalist colonialism,

It already existed. England had planted colonies in Ireland. Spain and Portugal had been making lots of money from their colonies across oceans.  

that Disgrace destabilizes, reasking the question of the Enlightenment

which was 'why burn witches when witchcraft doesn't actually exist?'  

(“let those who will walk together get to know each other by the dawning universal light,” says the cover of the Pratichi Report)

Why the fuck would they have been wandering around in the dark? At dawn, you are welcome to go for a walk. But you don't need to get to know anybody. Just take your constitutional, read the paper and then go to the office for fuck's sake.  

with reference to the public sphere and the classed and gendered subject, when Lucy, “perhaps” a lesbian, decides to carry the child of rape to term and agrees to “marry” Petrus, who is not (one of) the biological father(s).

But that didn't actually happen. Coetzee was writing fiction. The Brits liked his book. Fuck you Boers! Fuck you very much!  

Lucy’s “nothing” is the same word but carries a different meaning from Cordelia’s.

Cordelia didn't think she needed to be raped a great deal because of Apartheid or the Celtic invasion or some such shite.  

It is not the withholding of speech protesting the casting of love in the value-form and giving it the wrong value.

Saying 'nothing' means you aint withholding speech.  

It is rather the casting aside of the affective value-system attached to reproductive heteronormativity as it is accepted as the currency to measure human dignity.

Because nobody is truly dignified till they have been raped to death and their tits have been well and truly shat upon- more especially if they might be Lezzers.  

I do not think this is an acceptance of rape, but a refusal to be raped, by instrumentalizing reproduction.

Which is like refusing to fart when you have a great big turd hanging out of your arse.  

Coetzee’s Lucy is made to make clear that the “nothing” is not to be itself measured as the absence of “everything” by the old epistemicoaffective value form—the system of knowing-loving. It is not “nothing but,” Lucy insists. It is an originary “nothing,” a scary beginning.

It is the end of a novel which was timely enough in that it depicted the outcome the Brits had always hoped would befall the Boers. Coetzee lost little time in getting the fuck out of South Africa after it was published. Otherwise Reality might imitate Art with a vengeance.  

Who imagines that centuries of malpractice—shotek shatabdir ashommanbhar—

Tagores had been sucking up to whoever ruled Bengal for centuries. But they were in no hurry to get raped to death.  

can be conveniently undone by diversified committees, such as the one that “tried” David Lurie for rape Enlightenment style?

It did no such thing. The question was whether the fucker should be sacked. The answer was yes.  

“Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art,” Lear had said to Edgar’s faked madness, erasing the place of the phallus: “a poor, bare, forked animal.”

Some animals have dicks. Spivak may not have noticed because she was well brought up. 

What does it mean, in the detritus of colonialism, for one from the ruling race

there is no such thing. Don't tell Spivak. She might run amok if she finds out Whitey aint running everything anymore.  

to call for interpellation

Althusserian shite. Still, the guy did kill his wife. She was Jewish and had been in the Resistance. That's what you get for marrying a Marxist. What Hitler started, they will finish. 

as “unaccommodated woman, a poor, bare, forked animal,” and hold negotiating power without sentimentality in that very forkèdness 

It means getting raped to death and then having your tits shat upon.  

What if Lévinas’s catachrestic holy man is a catachrestic holy woman, quite unlike the maternity that Lévinas embarrassingly places in the stomach in the passage from which I quoted?

Then her tits will be shat upon because of the catachresis of the consilience of the interpellation of the anteriority which posits its own head as being up the posterior of the post-structuralist Sublime.  

Is it a gendered special case, or can it claim generality, as making visible the difficulty of the postcolonial formula: a new nation?

Emigrate to 'new nations' like America, Canada, Australia etc. Don't live in old nations like India.  

Neither Lear nor Disgrace is a blueprint for unmediated social policy.

Nor for mediated policy of any kind. They are stories which are entertaining enough. Sadly, some shitheads have to teach that shit. 

These are figures, asking for dis-figuration, as figures must.

Lucy's figure was asking for it- right?  

And it is the representation of the “I” as figured object—as woman relinquishing the child as property, as always, and as former colonizer in the ex-colony.

But white peeps didn't gang-rape white women, shoot their dogs and set fire to their fathers. Nor did blecks- save in Coetzee's novel.  

This is how critique is operated through fictions.

Lies aint critiques. They are merely lies.  

I emphasize that it is not an equality in death—mrityumajhe.

 which means at the time of death. But this is not equal for different people if death comes by natural causes.

It is not the sort of equality that suicide bombing may bring.

because some may survive 

Suicidal resistance is a message inscribed in the body when no other means will get through.

But we are welcome to ignore peeps who top themselves.  

It is both execution and mourning, for both self and other, where you die with me for the same cause, no matter which side you are on,

if you die for the same cause as me, you are on my side 

with the implication that there is no dishonor in such shared and innocent death.

More particularly if those raping and killing you don't neglect to shit on your tits.  

That is an equality in disgrace brought about by the withholding of response, or a “response” so disingenuously requiring duress as to be no response at all, as from Israel to Palestine.

Which Levinas was cool with.  

Since 1983, when I delivered “Can the Subaltern Speak?” as a lecture at the Summer Institute at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, I have been interested in suicide as envoi.

Spivak pretended a great aunt of hers who killed herself while on the rag because her Dad sent her to skool instead of getting her married was actually a revolutionary assassin.  

Partha Chatterjee reminded me in conversation last night (October 31, 2003) that the “cause” is metaleptically constructed by the suicide, as the effect of an “effect.”

In other words, if a Bengali lass tops herself because her brother-in-law teased her for being ugly and unmarriageable, then the true cause of her suicide was that she was a highly trained assassin tasked with going back in time and killing Queen Victoria. However, she decided to top herself instead so as to send a message to a right-deviationist clique in the Andromeda galaxy.  

My point is that Lucy is not represented as the “subject” of a “cause.”

Yes she is. She gets raped a lot and can look forward to lots more rape and beating.  

 If Lucy is intertextual with Lear, Lurie is intertextual with Kafka’s The Trial, a novel not about beginning with nothing, but ending like a dog when civil society crumbles.

It doesn't.  

Here is the end of The Trial, where Josef K.’s well-organized civil society gives way: Logic is no doubt unshakable, but it can’t withstand a person who wants to live. Where was the judge he’d never seen? Where was the high court he’d never reached? He raised his hands and spread out all his fingers. But the hands of one man were right at K’s throat, while the other thrust the knife into his heart and turned it there twice. With failing sight K. saw how the men drew near his face, leaning cheek-to-cheek to observe the verdict. “Like a dog!” he said; it seemed as though the shame was to outlive him.

Josef K isn't guilty of anything. He dies like a dog because there is no God. Civil Society can't prevent citizens from dying. This is because of Neo-Liberalism.  

This is how Lurie understands Lucy’s remarks about “nothing but.” Not as a beginning in disgraceful equality but the end of civil society (with the withdrawal of the colonizer?), where only shame is guaranteed continuity.

She is a fictional. Sadly, her rapists forgot to shit on her tits. No doubt, they will be diligent in the sequel 'Disgrace II- the rise of Zuma'.  

This is a profound misunderstanding. And this brings me to the second point about literature. The literary text gives rhetorical signals to the reader, which lead to activating the readerly imagination.

No shit, Sherlock! 

Literature advocates in this special way. These are not the ways of expository prose. Literary reading has to be learned.

No. You may have to learn to read. But you can understand a book which is being read out even if you can't read.  

Metaphor leans on concept and concept on metaphor; logic nestles in rhetoric.

Alternatively, Spivak could just dash off any catachrestic gobbledygook and nobody will call her on it because she is a darkie and lacks a dick.  

But they are not the same and one cannot be effaced in the other. If the social sciences describe the rules of the game,

they don't 

literary reading teaches how to play.

We already know how to play before we learn to read.  

One cannot be effaced in the other. This is too neat an opposition, of course. But for the moment, let it suffice as a rule of thumb.

which is up your ass.  

What rhetorical signal does Disgrace give to the canny reader?

South Africa has turned to shit. Don't visit. Stay the fuck away.  

It comes through the use of focalization, described by Mieke Bal as “the relation between the vision and that which is ‘seen’” [100].

 Mieke is Dutch. She should be jamming her rule of thumb into a dike. Focalisation is about focusing on one thing in your visual field. 

This term is deemed more useful than “point of view” or “perspective” because it emphasizes the fluidity of narrative—the impression of (con)sequence as well as the transactional nature of reading.

You read stuff you like. You may even pay for that pleasure.  

Disgrace is relentless in keeping the focalization confined to David Lurie.

It isn't quite that bad.  

Indeed, this is the vehicle of the sympathetic portrayal of David Lurie. When Lucy is resolutely denied focalization,

she is not a convincing character. We think Coetzee has given up on South Africa. That may involve some 'disgrace' but we understand that the guy didn't want to be beaten to death and set on fire.  

the reader is provoked, for he or she does not want to share in Lurie-the-chief-focalizer’s inability to “read” Lucy as patient and agent.

We don't greatly care about Lucy because she can't be a real person. In my own study of Coetzee I have suggested she might be a goat. Indeed, all his characters might be barnyard animals.  

No reader is content with acting out the failure of reading.

Because reading a book in a language you don't know is frustrating unless it is by Gramsci. I never learned Italian simply for the pleasure of reading him in the original. The trick is to put on a fake Bengali accent. Incidentally, I once knew a guy called Sumit who pronounced his name Shumit. Sadly, he refused to describe the College where he taught Bengali as Show-ass.  

This is the rhetorical signal to the active reader, to counterfocalize.

on the grave harm that was done to the catachresis of the postcolonial subject by the failure of Lucy's rapists to shit on her tits.  

This shuttle between focalization and the making of an alternative narrative as the reader’s running commentary, as it were, used to be designated by the prim phrase “dramatic irony” when I was an undergraduate.

The irony was Coetzee ran away before he himself could sample the delights of being gang-raped or set on fire. Had Zuma been President, perhaps Life could have imitated Art in a more satisfactory manner.  

You will see immediately how much more effortful and active this counterfocalization is than what that term can indicate. This provocation into counterfocalization is the “political” in political fiction—the transformation of a tendency into a crisis.

which can be avoided by running away.  

Thus when Lurie asks, after Lucy’s impassioned speech, “Like a dog?” Lucy simply agrees, “Yes, like a dog.”

Her rapists shot the dogs she was looking after. Coetzee is signaling that if you don't fuck off to Holland or Australia or some other place still ruled by Whites, you will die like a gangraped dog whose tits have been well and truly shat upon.  

She does not provide the explanation that the reader who can work the intertextuality will provide. Lear and The Trial are not esoteric texts.

They are irrelevant. South Africa under majority rule is a place to avoid. England isn't. Nor is Prague.  

We can sense the deep contradiction of a split understanding of postcoloniality here: between the risk of beginning with nothing and the breakdown of civil societies.

If corrupt shitheads are in charge- sure. But look at Singapore.  

If not, we can at least see that Lurie literalizes her remark and learns to love dogs as the other of being-human, as a source, even, of ethical lessons of a special sort.

Most people like dogs. In South Africa 'kaffirhund' means 'ultra-loyal'.  

He is staged as unable to touch either the racial or the gendered other.

The one can touch him while the other is what he will pay good money to touch.  

These may be Lucy’s last words, object-human as the figure that subtends all knowing, including the cognition of a cause. About suicide bombing I speculate at greater length in “Terror: A Speech after 9-11.” 8. Karl Marx uses the need to transform a tendency into crisis to describe why the tendency of the rate of profit to fall does not result in increasingly lower profits 

It does. They go to zero in the long run. That's the final crisis.  

but the novel continues, focalizing Lurie loving dogs, avoiding bathos only by his obvious race-gender illiteracy,

he doesn't get that moving to a farm in South Africa is a bad idea. Go to Australia you fucking cretin! 

as we counterfocalize the absent Lucy. Literary reading teaches us to learn from the singular and the unverifiable.

No. It teaches us that all writers fuck up some of the time. 'Disgrace' isn't utterly shit because it was prescient.  

It is not that literary reading does not generalize. It is just that those generalizations are not on evidentiary ground. In this area, what is known is proved by vyavahara,

which means 'behavior' or, in jurisprudence, the proper conduct of a court case. 

or setting-towork. Martin Luther King, in his celebrated speech “Beyond Vietnam,” given on April 4, 1967, in Riverside Church, had tried to imagine the other again and again. In his own words, “[p]erhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. . . . Surely we must understand their feelings even if we do not condone their actions.”

Their feelings were clear enough. They wanted foreign troops to fuck the fuck off. That's what they got.  

Here is a setting-to-work of what in the secular imagination is the literary impulse: to imagine the other who does not resemble the self.

The Vietnamese wanted the Americans to fuck the fuck off the same way the Americans had wanted the Brits to fuck the fuck off. Ho Chi Minh had tried to explain this to Woodrow Wilson.  

King, being a minister, had put it in terms of liberation theology, in the name of “the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them.”

But he came back to life in three days.  

For the secular imagination, that transcendental narrative is just that, a narrative, singular and unverifiable.

Nope. It is verified by reading the New Testament. If you believe it is Holy Writ, then all your doubts are removed.  

When it is set to work, it enters the arena of the probable: King’s imagination of the Viet Cong.

Who wanted foreign troops to fuck off. That wasn't really difficult to understand.  

I believe this is why Aristotle said poiesis, or making-in-fiction, was philosophoteron—a better instrument of knowledge—than historia—because it allowed us to produce the probable rather than account for that which has been possible.

No. He said it was more 'philosophic'- i.e. more could be said on either side of the question. But a better instrument of knowledge would uncover clinching evidence that one proposition was correct and its opposite was false. But poetry or tragedy didn't have to be 'probable'. But there had to be some element of design to it- some internal logic.  

In my words on suicide bombing, I was trying to follow Dr. King’s lead halfway, use the secular imagination as emancipatory instrument.

Your words failed to emancipate shit.  

When I was a graduate student, on the eve of the Vietnam War, I lived in the same house as Paul Wolfowitz, the ferocious Deputy Secretary of Defense who was the chief talking head for the war on Iraq. He was a Political Science undergraduate, disciple of Allan Bloom, the conservative political philosopher. As I have watched him on television lately, I have often thought that if he had had serious training in literary reading and/or the imagining of the enemy as human, his position on Iraq would not be so inflexible.

Wolfowitz took courses with Leo Strauss and thus well understood that a text may be saying the opposite of what it appeared to be saying. His position on Iraq was simple. Talk of spreading Democracy is a 'noble lie'. The fact is, it has a lot of oil and if. my fellow neo-con, Ahmed Chalabi is put in charge, he'd make sure all of us will get very very fucking rich. In other words, the hope was that Iraq would pay for the war on terror so it would turn a profit like the first Gulf War. 

This is not a verifiable conviction. But it is in view of such hopes that humanities teaching acts itself out.

In other words, it is deluded. Hopefully, it will move to South Africa and get gangraped.  

To repeat: literature is not verifiable.

It is verifiable enough.  

The only way a reading establishes itself— without guarantees—is by sharing the steps of the reading. That is the experience of the impossible; ethical discontinuity shaken up in a simulacrum.

Nonsense! Either the thing has some verisimilitude or psychological plausibility or else we know it is fantasy. Thankfully my novel about a very handsome South Indian socioproctologist whom everybody lends a tenner to because they think he is so sweet and nice and not fat at all has high verisimilitude. Also, I really am married to Mary Poppins.  

Unless you take a step with me, there will be no interdisciplinarity, only the tedium of turf battles.

Only of interest to those whose turf is shit.  

Insofar as Lucy is a figure that makes visible the rational kernel of the institution of marriage—rape, social security, property, human continuity—we can check her out with Herculine Barbin, the nineteenth-century hermaphrodite who

wasn't raped had no property and couldn't get married 

committed suicide but left a memoir, which Foucault edited and made available.

In other words there was no similarity between her and Lucy.  

Herculine Barbin was a scholar—a diligent student who became a schoolmistress. But when she was named a man by doctors, she could not access the scholarly position—of writing and speaking to a general public—that Kant secures for the enlightened subject in “What Is Enlightenment?”

Because she wasn't well enough educated. Still, she was a devout Catholic. The Church should have made better provision for her/him.  

Let us look at Herculine/Abel’s cautious elation at the moment of entry into the world of men: So, it was done [C’en était donc fait]. Civil status called me to belong henceforth to that half of the human race that is called the strong sex [L’état civil m’appelait à faire partie désormais de cette moitié du genre humain, appelé le sexe fort]. I, who had been raised until the age of twenty-one in religious houses, among shy [timides] female companions, was going to leave behind me a past entirely delightful [tout un passé délicieux], like Achilles, and enter the lists, armed with my weakness alone and my profound inexperience of men and things!

French women didn't get the vote till 1945. I suppose Abel might have gained literary success. Balzac and Malfatti kept droning on about the mystic hermaphrodite.  

[89, trans. modified] 24 It is this hope—of entering the public sphere as the felicitous subject—that is dashed as the possibility of agency is annulled in suicide [98].

Did you know you might not get tenure if you top yourself? Fuck you Neo-Liberalism! Fuck you very much! 

Barbin cannot articulate the relationship between the denial of agency and the incapability to reproduce.

There is no such denial. Some people can reproduce. Others can't. 

Yet, Tiresias-like, he offers a critical account of marriage: It has been given to me, as a man, the most intimate and deep knowledge of all the aptitudes, all the secrets, of the female character. I read in that heart, as in an open book. I count every beat of it. In a word, I have the secret of its strength and the measure of its weakness; and just for that reason I would make a detestable husband; I also feel that all my joys would be poisoned in marriage and that I would cruelly abuse, perhaps, the immense advantage that would be mine, an advantage that would turn against me. [107; trans. modified]

Her dick was tiny. Wifey might have pointed this out. Not my wifey. Mary Poppins is above that sort of thing.  

I presented “Can the Subaltern Speak?” as a paper twenty years ago. In that paper I suggested that the subaltern could not “speak” because, in the absence of institutionally validated agency, there was no listening subject.

Very true. Did you know that monkeys can speak just as well as you or me but because of Neo-Liberalism's refusal to finance institutionally validating agencies, they just chatter away like Bengali buddhijivis?  

My listening, separated by space and time, was perhaps an ethical impulse.

You were lying your head off. Great aunty wasn't a member of the Chattri Sangh which only came into existence a couple of years after she died.  

But I am with Kant in thinking that such impulses do not lead to the political.

Kant knew that all sorts of impulses can lead to 'the political'. 

There must be a presumed collectivity of listening and countersigning subjects and agents in the public sphere for the subaltern to “speak.”

Anything at all can be presumed. I write this blog though I'm pretty sure nobody reads it except Mary Poppins and that Chimney Sweep she says is her brother which is why she keeps kissing him.  

Herculine Barbin wrote abundantly, presuming a reader repeatedly. And yet she could not speak.

It is what she said in the confessional which caused the medical examination which reclassified her as male.  

Her solution would be the normalization of the multisexed subject, a civil and agential rather than subjective solution.

It would also be a subjective solution. Nothing wrong with that at all.  

There would then be a listening public who could countersign her “speech act.”

She could have earned some money from books and articles and so forth. Indeed, she could have become an advocate for female suffrage. How come she had the vote when George Sand didn't?  

In the arrangement of counterfocalization within the validating institution of the novel in English,

published there by a reputable firm 

the second half of Disgrace makes the subaltern speak, but does not presume to give “voice,” either to Petrus or Lucy.

Who don't really come alive. Still, it was true that guys living on farms did get attacked.  

This is not the novel’s failure, but rather a politically fastidious awareness of the limits of its power. By the general dramatically ironic presentation of Lurie, he is shown to “understand” Petrus by the neat reversal of the master-slave dialectic without sublation:

For Hegel, the slave becomes the master through the work which makes the latter dependent on him. Death is what is sublated here. Adam must toil by the sweat of his brow because by his sin death came into the world.  

“Petrus needs him not for pipefitting or plumbing but to hold things, to pass him tools—to be his handlanger, in fact. The role is not one he objects to. Petrus is a good workman, it is an education to watch him. It is Petrus himself that he is beginning to dislike” 

This is 'foreshadowing'.  

Once again, the novel and Lurie part company, precisely on the issue of reading, of control. This is a perfectly valid reading, as is the invocation of the end of Kafka’s The Trial to describe the difficult birth of the new nation. It is precisely this limited perfect validity of the liberal white ex-colonizer’s understanding that Disgrace questions through the invitation to focalize the enigma of Lucy. It is interesting that Petrus’s one-liner on Lucy shows more kinship with the novel’s verdict: “‘She is a forward-looking lady, not backward-looking’”.

i.e. she has accepted the new order. But she could have fucked off to Holland. She didn't. Thus she will die in a place that is moving backward.  

If we, like Lurie, ignore the enigma of Lucy, the novel, being fully focalized precisely by Lurie, can be made to say every racist thing. Postcoloniality from below can then be reduced to the education of Pollux, the young rapist who is related to Petrus.

He should understand that rape is not enough. You must shit on the tits of your victim so that the catachresis of the subaltern's interpellation can fuck off to Australia.  

Counterfocalized, it can be acknowledged as perhaps the first moment in Lucy’s refusal of rape by generalizing it into all heteronormative sexual practice: “‘When it comes to men and sex, David, nothing surprises me any more. . . . They spur each other on. . . .” “And the third one, the boy?” “He was there to learn’

Sadly, instruction on shitting on tits was omitted due to austerity imposed by Neo-Liberalism.  

I want now to come to the second way in which Tagore’s refrain can be understood: the failure of democracy.

to protect minorities? Tagore saw that coming.  

The Pratichi Trust in India,

Amartya Sen's outfit 

to whose Report I have referred above, is doing astute work, because it realizes that, if the largest sector of the electorate misses out on early education, democracy cannot function, for it then allows the worst of the upper sectors to flourish.

It was set up when the Left Front was in office. It was so successful that it is now Mamta's thugs who are in charge.  

Democracy sinks to that level, and we are all equal in disgrace.

Nope. Modi isn't in disgrace at all though Bengalis keep bad mouthing him.  

When we read statistics on who wins and who loses the elections, the nonspecialist-located middle class as well as the rest of the world, if it cares, thinks it shows how the country thinks. No.

Yes.  

In the largest and lowest sector of the electorate,

The largest is not the lowest sector.  

there is a considerable supply of affect, good and bad; there is native sharpness, and there is acquired cunning. But there is no rational choice.

Yes there is. Vote for the guy who pays you more or who will burn down your house if he isn't elected.  

Election does not even pretend to be based on rational platforms. (This applies to the United States as well, in another way. But it would take me too far to develop that here.) Gendering must be understood simply here: female teachers are preferred, though they have less authority;

Females are less likely to rape your kids and shit on their tits.  

gendering presuppositions must be changed through education, and so on. There is little I can add to the Trust’s magisterial work.

Pratichi praises Mamta and says boo to Modi. That's all that is required of it.  

After a general caution that work in this sphere runs the risk of structural atrophy, like diversified committees in Disgrace, and therefore must be interrupted by the ethical, I will add a few codicils here and there.

She means qualifications.  

Professor Sen, the founder of the Trust, supports the state in opposing “the artificially generated need for private tuition,” artificial because generated by careless nonteaching in the free primary schools [Pratichi 10]. While the state waits to implement this opposition legally, I have been trying to provide collective “private tuition”

in which case it isn't 'private tuition'.  

to supplement the defunct primary schools, to a tiny sector of the most disenfranchised. It is my hope that private tuition in this form can be nationalized and thus lose its definition.

The State can certainly take over supplemental or remedial education.  

I will ask some questions in conclusion, which will make the direction of my thoughts clear. The one-on-one of “private” tuition—at the moment in the service of rote learning that cannot relate to the nurturing of the ethical impulse—is the only way to undo the abdication of the politically planned “public” education.

If the State abdicates its role, you can make good the deficit but you can't undo the abdication.

“Private tuition,” therefore, is a relation to transform rather than prohibit.

You hire a tutor to transform illiteracy into literacy. You don't pay a guy for saying 'I prohibit you from being illiterate!'  

The tutorial system at the other end of the spectrum is proof of this. I must repeat that I am enthralled by the report and whatever I am adding is in the nature of a supplement from a literary person. The work of the Trust is largely structural.

No. It is largely focused on 'research' and virtue signaling and saying Mamta is very nice. Modi is the devil.  

The humanities—training in literary reading in particular—is good at textural change.

It can turn any text into meaningless shite. 

Each discipline has its own species of “setting-to-work”—and the texture of the imagination belongs to the teacher of literary reading. All good work is imaginative, of course. But the humanities have little else. There is a tiny exchange on page 69 of the book: “On the day of our visit [to a school in Medinipur], we interviewed four children of Class 4. . . . well, can you tell us something about what was taught? All four children were silent.” Part of the silence rises from the very class apartheid that bad rural education perpetuates.

No. All of the silence arises from the fact that they weren't taught shit. 

The relationship between the itinerant inspector and the child is, in addition, hardly ethical. Training in literary reading can prepare one to work at these silences.

The silence of the first child was a catachrestic deconstruction of the ipseity of the posterior analytics or the post-colonial subject. The silence of the second was the reverse. The third child's silence was actually an otter having magical adventures up Uranus. The fourth's silence was Tagore shitting on the tits of Coetzee in the Australian outback.  

I will submit an example which it would be useless to translate here. It is lesson 5 from Amader Itihash, a Class 4 history book, specifically devoted to national liberation, one item in which is the story of Nelson Mandela. Let us overlook the implicit misrepresentation of Gandhi’s role in Mandela’s political victory in the lifting of apartheid, or the suggestive detail that the section on national liberation starts with George Washington. One cannot, however, overlook, if one is a reader of Bengali, the hopeless ornamentation of the prose, incomprehensible to teacher and student alike at the subaltern level, in the outer reaches of rural West Bengal.

Why kids are not taught in simple language to deconstruct the catachresis of the interpellation of the sodomized subaltern post-Singur? Would that be too much to ask?  

The point is not only to ask for “a radically enhanced set of commitments” “from the primary teachers,” as the Report stresses. The real disgrace of rural primary education is that even the good teacher, with the best will in the world, has been so indoctrinated into rote learning that, even if s/he could understand the lugubrious prose and even if s/he had retained or imbibed enough general knowledge of the world—both doubtful propositions—the technique of emphasizing meaning is not what s/he would understand by teaching.

Also, teechur is illiterate and paid bribe to get job.  

Elsewhere I have emphasized this as the systematic difference in teaching between baralok and chhotolok—translated by Pratichi as highborn and low-born, brave attempts—gatar khatano and matha khatano—manual labor and intellectual labor does not quite translate the active sense of khatano—setting-towork, then, of the body alone, and of the mind as well—that keeps class apartheid alive.

Khatano means supervision. Presumably, Pratichi distinguishes between supervising games or other such activities from the supervision of academic study. 

The common sight of a child of the rural poor trying to make the head engage in answer to a textbook question and failing is as vivid a figure of withholding humanity as anything in Tagore or Coetzee.

Spivak thinks the rural poor are stupid. We think she is stupid. Still, she serves a useful purpose. If some American kid is puzzled as to how a handful of Brits could have ruled India they need only attend a lecture by Spivak or Sen.  

The “silence” is active with pain and resentment. The solution is not to write new textbooks, the liberal intellectuals’ favorite option. The teachers at this level do not know how to use a book, any book, however progressive.

Many of them are monkeys. We should listen to monkeys otherwise how will they learn to speak properly about the catachresis of the interpellation of the sodomized post-Singur subaltern?  

Many of the textbooks, for instance, have a list of pedagogic goals at the top of each lesson. The language of these lists is abstract, starting with the title: shamortho, capacity.

difficulty. Cover the easier topics first. If the kids are smart you can go on to the harder portions of the curriculum. But, if you are illiterate, don't bother. Just be sure to maintain good relations with the Rulin Party.  

Some times, for nine or ten lessons in a row, this abstract title is followed by the remark: “see previous lesson.” No primary or nonformal teacher over the last thirteen years has ever noticed this in my presence, or, when informed of the presence of this pedagogic machinery, been able to understand it, let alone implement it.

It is done easily enough. We get that the same curriculum goals are covered by a number of lessons in the lesson plan.  

Given the axiomatics of the so-called education within which the teacher has received what passes for training, it is foolish to expect implementation. 

If the teacher is literate, it is easy enough.  

I have developed the idea of the role of rural education in maintaining class apartheid in “Righting Wrongs.”

Spivak doesn't understand the lesson of Coetzee's 'Disgrace' which is 'rural education' can't stop Apartheid collapsing or your daughter getting gang-raped while you yourself are set on fire.  

There are progressive textbooks that try to combine Bengali and Arithmetic—the famous Kajer Pata.

All Bengali language Arithmetic books combine Bengali and Arithmetic. There are good Bengali maths textbooks which have been translated into other languages.  

This combination causes nothing but confusion in student and teacher alike on this level.

Whereas Spivak never causes any such things.  

And frankly, it serves no specific purpose here. There are also books where some metropolitan liberal

like Spivak 

or a committee of them tries to engage what they think is a rural audience. I wish I had the time to recount the failure of their imagination case by case.

Spivak has no imagination. She needs none. She is sure of her own superiority.  

There is no possibility of the emergence of the ethical when the writing subject’s sense of superiority is rock solid. The useless coyness of these failed attempts would be amusing if the problem were not so disgraceful. Both Hindu and Muslim poets are included—communalism must be avoided at all costs, of course. The point is lost on these children—though a sort of equality is achieved. All poetry is equally opaque, occasions for memorization without comprehension, learning two-way meanings—what does a mean? b; and what is b? a, of course. The meaning of meaning is itself compromised for these children, these teachers.

Says a nutter who writes meaningless shite.  

A new textbook drowns in that compromise. Two girls, between eleven and fifteen years of age, show me what they are being taught in primary school. It is the piece about South Africa. I ask them some questions. They have absolutely no clue what the piece is about, as they don’t about any piece in the book, about any piece in any book. To say “they haven’t understood this piece” would be to grant too much. The girls are not unintelligent. Indeed, one of them is, I think, strikingly intelligent. They tell me their teachers would go over the material again the next day. The next day after school, we meet again. Did the teachers explain? “Reading poriyechhe,” is the answer—an untranslatable Bengali phrase for which there are equivalents in all the major Indian languages, no doubt. “They made us read reading” would perhaps convey the absurdity? Any piece is a collection of discrete spelling exercises to be read in a high drone with little regard to punctuation. The scandal is that everyone knows this. It is embarrassing to put it in an essay about Tagore and Coetzee. Better to present social scientific surveys in English. This too is a way of disgracing the disenfranchised. To continue with the narrative: after the girls’ answer begins the process of explaining. As I have already mentioned, the experience of a head attempting but failing to set itself to work is killingly painful. Most of us interrupt such silences with noise, speak up and create a version of explanation to break the experience. At that point we think we are teaching although no teaching is taking place.

So, Spivak babbled nonsense in America because she thought Americans were as thick as shit. Then she went to rural Bengal and babbled nonsense because she knew Bengalis were as thick as shit. Teaching is pointless. Don't do it if you can earn money some other way.  

Sometimes we learn to resist this by excruciating self-control that often fails. In Foe, another novel by J. M. Coetzee, there is a moment when a character called Friday (as in Robinson Crusoe), an abducted savage with his tongue cut out, resists the attempt of the white woman to teach him how to write.

because she will expect cunnilingus?  

Varieties of such resistance in the ground-level rural classroom can be read as the anger of the intelligent child not being able to work his or her head. Such readings are necessarily off the mark. But the literary critic is practiced in learning from the unverifiable. If the older girl was just frustrated by not grasping at all what I was trying to explain, the younger one, the strikingly intelligent one, faced me with that inexorably closed look, jaws firmly set, that reminds one of Friday, withholding. No response to repeated careful questions going over the same ground over and over again, simplifying the story of Nelson Mandela further at every go. These are students who have no concept or percept of the neighboring districts, of their own state of West Bengal—because, as the Pratichi Report points out, they have arrived at Class 4 through neglect and no teaching. How will they catch the reference to Africa? Into the second hour, sitting on the floor in that darkening room, I tried another tack. Forget Africa, try shoman adhikar—equal rights. It was impossible to explain rights in a place with no plumbing, pavement, electricity, stores, without doors and 28 windows. Incidentally, do people really check—rather than interrupt the painful experience of having failed to teach—the long-term residue of so-called legal awareness seminars? What is learnt through repeated brushes with the usual brutality of the rural judiciary is not significantly changed by the conviction that the benevolent among the masters will help them litigate. What is it to develop the subject—the capital I—of human rights, rather than a feudal dispensation of human rights breeding dependency and litigious blackmail and provoking a trail of vendettas in those punishers punished remotely? Let us return to the schoolroom in gathering dusk. It is common sense that children have short attention spans. I was so helpless in my inability to explain that I was tyrannizing the girls. At the time it seemed as if we were locked together in an effort to let response emerge and blossom with its own energy. The ethical as task rather than event is effortful. And perhaps an hour and a half into the struggle, I put my hand next to the bright one’s purple-black hand to explain apartheid. Next to that rich color this pasty brown hand seemed white. And to explain shoman adhikar, equal rights, Mandela’s demand, a desperate formula presented itself to me: ami ja, tumi ta—what I, that you. Remember this is a student, not an asylum seeker in the metropole, in whose name many millions of dollars are moved around even as we speak.12 This is just two students, accepting oppression as normality, understanding their designated textbook. Response did emerge. Yesses and noes were now given; even, if I remember right, a few words uttered as answers to questions. In a bit I let them go. The next morning I asked them to set down what they remembered of the previous day’s lesson. The older one could call up nothing. The younger one, the more intelligent one, produced this: ami ja, tumi ta, raja here gachhe—what I, that you, the king was defeated. A tremendous achievement in context but, if one thinks of all the children studying under the West Bengal Board, including the best students from the best schools in Kolkata, with whom these girls are competing, this is a negligible result. I have no doubt that even this pitiful residue of the content of the lesson is now long lost and forgotten. The incident took place about four years ago. The two girls are young women now, in high school. Speaking to them and their teachers in December, I stressed repeatedly the importance of explaining the text, of explaining repeatedly, of checking to see if the student has understood. A futile exercise. You do not teach how to play a game by talking about it. No one can produce meanings of unknown words. There are no dictionaries, and, more important, no habit of consulting dictionaries. As I continued with the useless harangue, I said, “as two of you might remember, I spent two hours explaining Nelson Mandela to you some years ago. It is important to explain.” A fleeting smile, no eye contact, passed across the face of the bright one, sitting in the last row. It is unusual for such signals to pass from her class to mine.

I suppose they thought the crazy widow might put a curse on them.  

The number of calculative moves to be made and sustained in the political sphere, with the deflecting and overdetermined calculus of the vicissitudes of gendered classmobility factored in at every stop, in order for irony-shared-from-below communication to be sustained at this level, would require immense systemic change.

Nope. The truth was these girls saw a crazy widow with a shaved head. She talked funny. Was she a witch? Perhaps. The older girl was smart enough to play dumb.  

Yet, in the supplementary relationship between the possibility of that fleeting smile—a sign of the interruptive emergence of the ethical

the ludic. The crazy widow lady just farted. It would be enough to make a cat laugh.  

—and the daunting labor of the political calculus, we must begin with the end, which must remain the possibility of the ethical.

don't begin from the beginning. That's what White people do.  

That inconvenient effort is the uncertain ground of every just society. If the political calculus becomes the means and the end, justice is ill served and no change sticks. The peculiar thing about gendering is that, in Lucy’s vision of “starting with nothing,” in the reproductive situation shorn of the fetishization of property, in the child given up as body’s product, the ethical moment can perhaps emerge—at least so the fiction says.

Ethical moment can perhaps emerge if after you are gang-raped you give up the baby so it can be gang-raped and then maybe some kind soul will do the needful and shit on your tits.  

I have recounted this narrative to make clear that although on the literary register, the register of the singular and the unverifiable (this story, for example, is unverifiable because you have nothing but my testimony),

which is enough to convince us that the girls thought you were a crazy widow with a shaven head. You might be related to someone important or you might be a witch. The safer course was to play dumb.  

the suggestive smile, directed by indirection and a shared experience, is a good event; it has no significance in terms of the public sphere, to which education should give access.

Clearly the crazy widow lady thought her husband was some dude in Africa or maybe he was Mahatma Gandhi. She might want you to go fetch him for her.  

The discontinuity between the ethical and the political is here instrumentalized—between the rhetoric of pedagogy and the logic of its fruition in the public sphere.

Instruments have a purpose. The 'political' means 'Government jobs'. Give them to illiterate people who pay a bribe or who are loyal party workers.  

For the smile of complicity to pass between the adivasi and the caste-Indian,

a crazy widow with a shaven head. 

unprovoked, marks an immense advance.

Nope. The girl was laughing at the nutcase.  

But it is neither a beginning nor an end, only an irreducible grounding condition. When I was attempting to teach in that darkening room, I had no thought but to get through.

With what? Crazy shite. 

It so happened that the topic was shoman adhikar, equal rights.

They may have thought Shoman was the name of the crazy widow's husband.  

Writing this for you, on the other hand, I put myself grandiosely in Tagore’s poem: manusher odhikare bonchito korechho jaare, shommukhe danraye rekehe tobu kole dao nai sthan—those whom you have deprived of human rights, whom you have kept standing face-to-face and yet not taken in your arms. So, spending considerable skill and labor, to teach precisely the meaning of shoman adhikar, was I perhaps undoing the poet’s description of the behavior of the Hindu historical dominant, denying human rights over centuries to the outcastes (today’s dalits) and adivasis?

This silly moo doesn't get that Brahmins like her and Tagore had never ruled Bengal. Those who got a bit of education either sucked up to the Muslims or, later on, to the Brits.  

The point I am laboriously making is that it is not so. Although the literary mode of instruction activates the subject, the capital I, in order to be secured it must enter the political calculus of the public sphere.

But Spivak's 'instruction' activated nothing in India or America or anywhere in between. 

Private voluntarism such as mine remains a mongrel practice

it is virtue signaling simply. Spivak pretends she is doing great things in rural India to her American acolytes. To an Indian audience she confesses that she is useless. They can read between the lines. Rural Bengalis would assume she was a widow (because of her cropped hair). They might fear the power of a widow's curse- more particularly if she was clearly mad. That was the humorous side to Spivak's self-aggrandizing account.  

between the literary and the rational, rhetoric and logic.

Setting up an NGO can be lucrative. If you have an idiot unmarriageable daughter she could go into this line of work.  

And so the reader of literature asks the social scientists a question.

Can the Government fund me? Also, I'd really like a Nobel prize. Could you get me one?  

Is it not possible for the globally beleaguered state to institute civil service positions that will call, on a regular and optional basis, upon interested humanities professionals from the highest ranks to train ground-level teachers, periodically, yet with some continuity, gradually integrating and transforming the existing training structure, thus to deconstruct or sublate private tuition and slowly make it less possible for “a teacher of [sic] Birbhum village” to say: “How can we carry over the training to our classrooms? Baro baro katha bala soja—Talking big is easy” [Pratichi 68].

Is it not possible for South Africa to employ all gang-rapists as civil servants instructing Professors of Literature on the importance of shitting upon the tits of one's victims so as to correctly deconstruct the catachresis of the interpellation of the post-colonial Sublime?  

Before I had started thinking about the heritage of “disgrace,” I had tried to initiate the production of same-language dictionaries in the major Indian languages, specifically for ground-level teachers and students.

They already exist. The first Bengali to Bengali dictionary was published in 1817.  

It came to nothing, because the situation was not imaginable by those whom I had approached, and because the NRI (Non Resident Indian, Indian designation for diasporics) has other kinds of uses. Should the NRI have no role but to help place the state in metropolitan economic bondage? Is it not possible to think of subaltern single-language dictionaries as an important step toward fostering the habit of freedom—the habit of finding a meaning for oneself, whoever suggests this?

This has to be comedy. Every language- including Indian languages- has dictionaries. We don't need an NRI to compile something which already exists.  

Is it not possible to think not of writing new textbooks, but of revising what is now in existence—to make them more user-friendly for the least privileged, 

This is done every time a new edition of a textbook is issues. But the 'least privileged' don't use textbooks because they are screaming in pain and will die any moment now.  

We have to have an idea of how fiction can be made to speak through the transactional heading beyond the limits of the author’s authority, which would expose the frivolousness of a position such as Rajat Ray’s in Exploring Emotional History: Gender, Mentality, and Literature in the Indian Awakening [79, 115n28]. 30 even as such teachers and students are texturally engaged? I do not believe the more privileged child would suffer from such a change, though I can foresee a major outcry. It must be repeated, to foster such freedom is simply to work at freedom in the sphere of necessity, otherwise ravaged by the ravages of political economy—no more than “the grounding condition [Grundbedingung] for the true realm of freedom” [Marx, Capital 3: 959] always around the corner. Shakespeare, Kafka, Tagore, Coetzee, Amartya Sen. Heavy hitters.

says a heavy bullshitter.  

My questions are banal.

They are mad.  

I am always energized by that paragraph in the third volume of Capital from which I quote above, and where Marx writes, in a high philosophical tone: “the true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself begins beyond [the realm of necessity], though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its ground.” That sentence is followed by this one: “the reduction of the working day is its grounding condition.”

Spivak does not understand that Marx was speaking of a time when scarcity has ended- presumably for technological reasons.  

In Marx’s text philosophy must thus displace itself into the everyday struggle.

to talk utter bollocks.  

In my argument, literature, insofar as it is in the service of the emergence of the critical, must also displace itself thus.

i.e. become unreadable shite.  

Its task is to foster yet another displacement: into a work for the remote possibility of the precarious production of an infrastructure that can in turn produce a Lucy or her focalizer, figuring forth an equality that takes disgrace in its stride.

while shitting copiously on the tits of the victims of its gang-rapes.  This is where Tagore could teach Coetzee a trick or two. Remember the ending of Ghare Bhaire? Bimala's silence prefigures her own gangrape at the hands of the catachresis of the interpellation of Queen Victoria shitting on her tits. Indeed, so does Amartya Sen's silence when I asked him if he had farted and thus caused the eruption of the Ethical within the ditopology of the postponement of the Epistemological so the Ontological can pop out for a fag.