Spivak's ridiculous 'Righting Wrongs'.

There was a time when stupid Professors from shithole countries were coopted by various International or Non Governmental bodies so as to more nakedly display the stupidity and abject impotence of their own people. Thus Amartya Sen- who came from a place which had had two big famines during his lifetime because corrupt, elected, Bengali politicians were shit at running things- was the expert on famine who would say 'different people may have different metabolisms. Thus a guy who is getting lots of food may not realize he is actually starving to death because he is bad at digesting food and extracting nutrition from it.' This was useful because, clearly, Bengalis were not just incapable of growing food, they were also so fucking stupid they might starve to death even if they had plenty of stuff to eat. 

The 'interessement' or 'obligatory passage point status' gained by darkies or those who lacked dicks was for the malign purpose of showing that dark or dickless people objected to the righting of any wrongs done to their people. Rather they wanted to be compensated, with money or fame, on behalf of those they pretended to speak for. 

There may be a right way to do a thing or a correct account of how a thing is done. There are also certain legal 'rights'- i.e. immunities or entitlements- which people may have and for which the law can supply a remedy if the matter is justiciable. A person who fails to meet a legal obligation may have 'wronged' a person, and law may provide a means for that 'wrong' to be 'righted'. However, the enforcement of that legal order- i.e. the one whereby a 'wrong' is 'righted' (e.g. a stolen piece of property is retrieved and returned to its owner)- may be done by any suitably qualified person either for a fee or on a pro bono basis. All that matters, when it comes to 'righting wrongs' is whether you have the power to do so or if you can in some manner acquire such power. Otherwise, there is nothing you can contribute under this rubric. 

Spivak does not understand this. In an essay for Amnesty International (which seeks the release of wrongfully arrested or imprisoned people) she writes- 

The primary nominative sense of rights cited by the Oxford English Dictionary is ‘‘justifiable claim, on legal or moral grounds, to have or obtain something, or to act in a certain way.’’ There is no parallel usage of wrongs, connected to an agent in the possessive case—‘‘my wrongs’’— or given to it as an object of the verb to have— ‘‘she has wrongs.’’

This is not the case. My record of  'wrongs' are my claims against people who have not fulfilled their obligations to me or who have inflicted a crime or tort upon me. In some cases, I may transfer, for a fee, some of my 'wrongs'- i.e. my justiciable claims against a third party- to someone better able to obtain damages. Thus, for example, if Hollywood makes a movie based on a story of mine (this did happen. Julia Roberts role in 'Pretty Woman' is based on the diary I kept as a trainee auditor) then I may sell my 'rights' in the book to somebody who has the money and legal nous to get damages for the wrong I suffered. 

Rights entail an individual or collective.

No. They may be wholly hypothetical.  

Wrongs, however, cannot be used as a noun,

In the old days, sticklers may have said 'wronghood' is the correct noun. But 'wrongs' as a noun denoting the set of claims for damages a person may have is perfectly acceptable.  

except insofar as an other, as agent of injustice, is involved.

No. The court may recognize you have been wronged but may decide that no party can be held accountable. The thing was an 'act of God'.  

The verb to wrong is more common than the noun, and indeed the noun probably gets its enclitic meaning by back-formation from the verb.

Wrong is not 'enclitic' because it can't be further shortened. Can't for 'can not' is enclitic.  

The word rights in ‘‘Human Rights, Human Wrongs,’’ the title of the Oxford Amnesty Lectures series in which this essay was first presented, acquires verbal meaning by its contiguity with the word wrongs. 

No. A right can be an immunity with respect to an activity which can't affect or be affected by anybody. Thus my right to privacy allows me to dress up as Beyonce in my bedroom. You may find this repugnant but there's nothing you can do about it.  The law says you haven't suffered a wrong even though everybody knows that watching me doing my Beyonce booty-shake is the summum bonum of human felicity. 

The verb to right cannot be used intransitively on this level of abstraction. 

Yes it can. I ask you, 'Is the post office down this road?'. You say 'Right'. 

tt can only be used with the unusual noun wrong: ‘‘to right a wrong,’’ or ‘‘to right wrongs.’’

No. Teachers often say 'Right!' or 'Wrong!' in response to their student's account of a subject.  It appears Spivak is ignorant of the language whose literature she is paid to teach.

Thus ‘‘Human Rights’’ is not only about having or claiming a right or a set of rights; it is also about righting wrongs, about being the dispenser of these rights.

No. A Human Rights lawyer does not 'dispense' remedies. The Court or the Legislature or the Executive may do so.  However, anybody at all may feel some person has suffered a wrong. They may offer money or other assistance to make that person whole or repair the damage done to them. 

The idea of human rights, in other words, may carry within itself the agenda of a kind of social Darwinism—the fittest must shoulder the burden of righting the wrongs of the unfit—and the possibility of an alibi.

No. Social Darwinism would say 'let the weak go to the wall.'  What Spivak is getting at is that the notion of legal rights suggests that there may be legal remedies under a vinculum juris- or bond of law. However, it is perfectly possible for the remedy to be extra-legal. In the film 'Godfather', a man whose daughter was raped asks the Don for justice. He wants the rapist to be badly beaten. In return, he offers his fealty to the Mafia boss. The State may be considered a 'Stationary Bandit' which is like a Mafia and which turns a profit by 'righting wrongs'. 

Only a ‘‘kind of ’’ Social Darwinism, of course. Just as ‘‘the white man’s burden,’’ undertaking to civilize and develop, was only ‘‘a kind of ’’ oppression.

Kipling used the phrase with respect to US occupation of the Philippines which was oppressive.  

It would be silly to footnote the scholarship that has been written to show that the latter may have been an alibi for economic, military, and political intervention.

It is sillier to say 'Right' or 'Wrong' can't be intransitive or that they are enclitic.  As for 'alibis', no such things were needed. Either a colonial adventure pays for itself or else yields a strategic advantage or else nothing can justify it. People of one country don't want to squander blood and treasure because bad things are happening in some distant country. Spivak is very naive to think otherwise. 

It is on that model that I am using the concept-metaphor of the alibi in these introductory paragraphs.

It isn't a concept-metaphor. It is nonsense. An alibi is evidence you could not have committed a particular crime because you were somewhere else doing something quite different.  

Having arrived here, the usual thing is to complain about the Eurocentrism of human rights.

Not for an Indian citizen. India has plenty of human rights lawyers. But it also has had some quite draconian laws as well as extra-judicial killing in connection with various insurgencies. This may have been of interest to Amnesty International. A separate subject would be the manner in which Public Interest Litigation had been used by activists to right various wrongs suffered by poorer people, minorities, etc.  

I have no such intention. I am of course troubled by the use of human rights as an alibi for interventions of various sorts.

At that time 'interventions' were against terrorists who weren't accorded much in the way of 'human rights'.  

But its so-called European provenance is for me in the same category as the ‘‘enabling violation’’ of the production of the colonial subject.

Colonial subjects were not 'produced'. They were conquered or prevented from rebelling. The notion of Human Rights does have a Western provenance. The question was whether trade treaties should include Human Rights clauses. The answer was no because it rendered them multi-dimensional and thus subject to agenda control by the McKelvey chaos theorem.  

One cannot write off the righting of wrongs. The enablement must be used even as the violation is renegotiated.

Why renegotiate with a guy violating your butt hole before he chops off your head? We are welcome to right wrongs done to us, if we have the power to do it. Thus if somebody breaks into your house and tries to stab you, you don't have to negotiate with the fellow. You can shoot him. You have an immunity arising out of your right to self-defense. It is perfectly legal for you or anybody else to teach self-defense to others so that they will have an equal ability.  

Colonialism was committed to the education of a certain class.

No. Colonized people were welcome to pay a little money to get some education.  Colonialism did not insist that any particular person of a particular class be educated if that person had a strong objection to receiving any such benefit. 

It was interested in the seemingly permanent operation of an altered normality.

Everybody is. We don't want to go back to the normality of the Stone Age.  

Paradoxically, human rights and ‘‘development’’ work today cannot claim this self-empowerment that high colonialism could.

Because they don't rule over shit.  

Yet, some of the best products of high colonialism, descendants of the colonial middle class, become human rights advocates in the countries of the South.

Most didn't. They tried to get as rich as possible and ensured their kids got American passports. Look at Sheikh Hasina.  Equally, plenty of poor people sought to organize their own communities so as to avail of remedies to wrongs they had suffered. 

I will explain through an analogy. Doctors without Frontiers—I find this translation more accurate than the received Doctors without Borders

Space is 'the final frontier'. Spivak thinks Doctors are constantly popping off to Uranus to give it a colonoscopy.  

—dispense healing all over the world, traveling to solve health problems as they arise. They cannot be involved in the repetitive work of primary health care,

Sure they can. Interestingly MSF is providing primary health care to detained asylum seekers in the UK. They do plenty of this in refugee camps around the world.  

which requires changes in the habit of what seems normal living: permanent operation of an altered normality.

MSF doctors work with ordinary people to improve hygiene etc. in such places.  

This group cannot learn all the local languages, dialects, and idioms of the places where they provide help.

Some do remarkably well.  

They use local interpreters.

OMG! That's like 'native informants'! This proves MSF is neo-colonial! 

It is as if, in the field of class formation through education, colonialism, and the attendant territorial imperialism had combined these two imperatives—clinic and primary health care—by training the interpreters themselves into imperfect yet creative imitations of the doctors.

Nope. A guy who can speak a bit of French as well as the local language isn't passing himself off as a Doctor. Still, he may train as a para-medic or rural health worker etc.  

the human rights aspect of postcoloniality has turned out to be the breaking of the new nations, in the name of their breaking-in into the international community of nations.

No. A nation may refuse admission to people from the MSF, Red Cross, WHO etc.  

This is the narrative of international maneuvering. Thomas Risse, Stephen Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink’s recent book, The Power of Human Rights, takes the narrative further. In addition to the dominant states, they argue, since it is the transnational agencies, plus nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), that subdue the state.

Not if the State doesn't want them to. This is paranoid garbage.  

Nevertheless, it is still disingenuous to call human rights Eurocentric, not only because, in the global South, the domestic human rights workers are, by and large, the descendants of the colonial subject,

because everybody in a post-colonial country is descended from colonized people 

often culturally positioned against Eurocentrism, but also because, internationally, the role of the new diasporic is strong, and the diasporic in the metropolis stands for ‘‘diversity,’’ ‘‘against Eurocentrism.’’

Not really. You cousin in the States speaks American and eats burgers.  

Thus the work of righting wrongs is shared above a class line that to some extent and unevenly cuts across race and the North-South divide.

Providing humanitarian assistance is not a 'righting of wrongs'. It is charity. This silly woman should be talking about Amnesty and other such organizations which try to get political prisoners released or who make a stink about the treatment of minorities.  

It is simply false to suggest that there is a 'class' or 'race' line, or even a North-South divide in such matters. Human rights advocates or those seeking to remedy deficits of various types belong to all classes or races. North Korea and South Korea are both in the Northern hemisphere. But they are not at all alike. 

 Here is a typical example, as it happens about the Philippines: ‘‘‘Human rights’ have gained prescriptive status independent of political interests.... [We] doubt that habitualization or institutionalization at the state level have proceeded sufficiently to render pressure from societal actors futile.’’

Sadly, Society may want gangsters and drug dealers to be shot in the back of the head without any trial. 

This is pressure ‘‘from below,’’ of course. Behind these ‘‘societal actors’’ and the state is ‘‘international normative pressure.’’

There may be but it seldom has any effect.  

I will go on to suggest that, unless ‘‘education’’ is thought differently from ‘‘consciousness-raising’’ about ‘‘the human rights norm’’ and ‘‘rising literacy expand[ing] the individual’s media exposure,’’

Thinking education differently does not actually produce any education. However thinking farting differently will cause unicorns to erupt from your arsehole.  

‘‘sufficient habitualization or institutionalization’’ will never arrive, and this will continue to provide justification for international control.

There is no 'international control'. True, a particular country may be invaded but then the occupation becomes too costly and so the US pulls out.  

I have been suggesting, then, that ‘‘human rights culture’’ runs on unremitting Northern-ideological pressure,

Because you are ignorant. Back in the Seventies, 'human rights' looked like a good stick to beat the USSR with. It wasn't. What was needed was 'Star Wars' and pushback against Cubans in Angola etc. The Soviet economy was too inefficient to catch up with the new types of tech America was coming up with.  

even when it is from the South; that there is a real epistemic discontinuity between the Southern human rights advocates and those whom they protect.

There is 'epistemic discontinuity' between everybody everywhere. It is a fact that most postcolonial countries kept the legal system of the colonizer and that they changed it along similar lines as was happening in the West. One may say 'India was ahead when it came to affirmative action and ensuring all adults got the vote' but the response would be 'a lot of the Indian involved in that were barristers who had qualified in London'.  

The question is whether, in India, 'human rights advocates' are different sociologically speaking from those they represent. The answer is- no. It is a different matter that lawyers or administrators or economists they hire or otherwise enlist and employ may be of a different class or gender or sexuality. 

Consider a school set up by tribal people in Birbhum for tribal people. It will employ good teachers. It will try to get as much money as possible from every type of source. It will concentrate on teaching things which enable kids to rise economically and socially. It won't try to fill their heads with ignorant, paranoid, nonsense. In other words, it won't be like any school Spivak set up. 

Is there such a school? Yes.  Gokul Hansda and Boro Baski, two Santals with degrees from the Visva-Bharati-University in Santiniketan, set up a good primary school for Santals (with mother tongue instruction in the first couple of years). It is called the Rolf-Schoembs-Vidyashram. A German astrophysicist left money in his will for the school. It produces good results.

At the 'elite' end of the scale is 'Levelfields Schools', also in Birbhum which ranks in the top ten in the country. It was set up by Arghya Bannerjee- an IIT, IIM alumni and former techie. The Santal kid who does well at the Rolf-Schoembs school has a great place to go for middle and high school education within her own District. Will she join the IAS or become a tech entrepreneur? Decisions, decisions!

In order to shift this layered discontinuity, however slightly, we must focus on the quality and end of education, at both ends; the Southern elite is often educated in Western or Western-style institutions.

Everybody is. Subjects like Chemistry and Mathematics are wholly Western.  

We must work at both ends—both in Said/ Rorty’s utopia

i.e. the Ivy League campus 

and in the schools of the rural poor in the global South.

No. A different skill-set is needed. Also, to teach the rural poor, you actually have to go and live in the village.  

I will argue this by way of a historical and theoretical digression.

Ignorant twaddle.  

As long as the claim to natural or inalienable human rights—rights that all human beings possess because they are human by nature—was reactive to the historical alienation in ‘‘Europe’’ as such

there was no 'historical alienation' in Europe as such. Europeans remain in possession of European territory. They have not been dispossessed.  

—the French ancien régime or the German Third Reich—

were French and German respectively. There was no alien overlord.  

the problem of relating ‘‘natural’’ to ‘‘civil’’ rights was on the agenda.

No. There was a 'natural justice' and 'natural religion' Enlightenment ideology in the eighteenth century but this did not have much effect on the Law which continued to develop in its accustomed form.  

Since its use by the Commission on Decolonization in the sixties,

which didn't matter in the slightest. 

its thorough politicization in the nineties,

Its utter impotence in the Nineties 

when the nation-states of the South, and perhaps the nation-state form itself, needed to be broken in the face of the restructuring demands of globalization,

Nothing of the sort happened. Which nation-state of the South was 'broken' over the last thirty five years? None at all. Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union did split up. But they are in the North.  

and its final inclusion of the postcolonial subject in the form of the metropolitan diasporic, that particular problem—of relating ‘‘natural’’ to ‘‘civil’’ rights— was quietly forgotten.

Not by lawyers. There is the claim that certain things are required by 'Natural Justice' or that certain rights are inalienable. However, most jurists now accept that the law is defeasible. 

In other words, that the question of nature must be begged (assumed when it needs to be demonstrated),

Assumptions or axioms don't need to be demonstrated. They must simply have some intuitive credibility.  

in order to use it historically, has been forgotten.

This is not the case. In India, the Bench has arrogated to itself any and every method of 'righting wrongs'. There is no 'doctrine of political question'.  

The urgency of the political calculus obliges Thomas Paine to reduce the shadow of this immense European debate—between justice and law,

there was no such debate. Justice may be provided either by legal or extra-legal means. Such has always been the case. 

between natural and civil rights (jura), at least as old as classical antiquity— to a ‘‘difference.’’

No. Paine took one view. The vast majority of Americans took another. Few attended his funeral. Attacking Washington was a mistake.  

The structural asymmetry of the difference—between mental theater and state structure—remains noticeable:

They are completely different things.  Why not say 'the difference between shit and food remains noticeable?' 

His natural rights are the foundation of all his civil rights.

Nonsense! There is no natural right to stand for a particular elective office even if you are above a certain age.  

But in order to pursue this distinction with more precision, it will be necessary to mark the different qualities of natural and civil rights....

Why? We all understand that a Mum has a natural right to keep her baby rather than allow it to be sold to a stranger. But, we also understand that if the Mum is judged to be incompetent to care for the baby, then- as a matter of civil law- it may be removed from her and given to somebody else.  

Every civil right has for its foundation, some natural right pre-existing in the individual,

Nonsense! People have a natural night not to join a particular Civic or Political Association. Loyalists were welcome to leave for Canada.  

but to the enjoyment of which his individual power is not, in all cases, sufficient.

No. There are plenty of civil rights which have nothing to do with 'nature'- e.g. the right to vote.

The context of the second Declaration brings us close to our present. To situate it historically within the thematic of the begged question at the origin,

there is no 'begged question'. Constitutions and other such documents may have a preamble where it is stated that those subscribing to it hold certain truths to be self-evident.  

I refer the reader to Jacques Derrida’s treatment of how Walter Benjamin attempts to contain this in his  essay ‘‘Critique of Violence,’’ dealing precisely with the relationship between natural and positive law and legitimate and illegitimate violence.

Benjamin wasn't a lawyer. The proper way to approach the subject is through Hohfeldian analysis, not writing garbled nonsense.  Still, there may have been a Messianic moment after the Great War when some stupid people thought that the 'peasants and workers' would come out onto the streets all over the globe and suddenly all nasty types of politics or economic power would disappear and the State would wither away and rich peeps would give beejays to poor peeps and soldiers in the Army would all get gender reassignment surgery. 

Robert Zacharias writes on Derrida's comment on Walter Benjamin's Critique of Violence-  

( Benjamin asks) whether violence itself can ever be considered just.

If judgments are coercively enforced, the answer is yes.  

For such a project, he argues that neither natural law (which suggests that the justness of ends guarantees the justness of means)

This is never the case. Just means may imply just ends. In other words, you may lawfully do with your own property what seems best for you. I may think it unjust that you don't use your resources to buy me a Rolex watch, but this has nothing to do with 'natural law'.  

nor positive law (which suggests that just means will always produce just ends)

No. Positive law is law as command. I may be prohibited from doing one particular thing by the law for no good reason. There is a purely arbitrary taboo or other constraint which has been imposed on me.  

is sufficient; such arguments, he reasons, are part of a tautological logic of means and ends used by the political state to justify its monopoly on violence.

This is not the case. The State does not have the monopoly on legitimate violence. You may kill in self-defense. 

States may justify violence they engage in by referring to profit, security, glory, or anything else they please. Equally, they may not bother to justify shit and just beat people.  

Since "the most elementary relationship within any legal system is that of ends to means,"

This is not the case. The most elementary relationships have to do with Hohfeldian incidents- e.g. immunities, entitlements, obligations etc.  

he looks for a space outside the structure of both positive legal philosophy and natural law, wherein he might consider acts of violence "within the sphere of means themselves, without regard for the ends in which they serve" 

The distinction is meaningless. We gain expected utility by using certain means which we think will secure certain ends but this is equally the case if we have no particular ends in mind and are merely following custom or habit.  

In his search for a place "outside," Benjamin notes that the legal authority of the
state hinges on a distinction that exists between "founding violence" and "preserving
violence";

There is no such distinction. There may be a War or an insurrection after which a new sovereign is created. But, speaking generally, the legal regime continues as before till the sovereign decides to change it. 

the authority of the state is established by an originary act of great violence
that is considered separate and distinct from all the state's other acts of violence,

This has never happened.  In the case of a Revolution, there was no Sovereignty or Statehood prior to the successful completion of the rebellion. Rather there is a transition from one Sovereignty to another. In the case of conquest, the conquered state disappears. The conquering state's boundaries have expanded. That is all. 

and which is meant to preserve its authority.

Utter bullshit. There is no example of any such thing in the whole of human history.  

Such a distinction cannot hold, he argues, for
any moment of "founding violence" always, by definition, seeks to dominate, authorize,
and preside over the moments to come, and, as such, always anticipates its preservation,
just as it is always echoed and reiterated in the every act of "preserving violence."

Rubbish! William the Conqueror created a new State but his successors didn't seek to preserve the social order this had created. They used different meals to deal with foreign or domestic threats. Sometimes, they took the path of conciliation. At other times they did not.  

Benjamin argues that this co-contamination of authorizing violences means the state
exists in a condition of decay, always allowing for the very forms of violence that will, in
time, rise up against it, found a new law, and begin the cycle anew.

Benjamin hadn't studied law. Why did he not look at the work of Hugo Preuss who wrote the Weimar Constitution?  

Describing a historical dialectic without Hegel's teleological optimism, Benjamin writes that "the law governing their oscillation rests on the circumstance that all law-preserving violence, in its duration, indirectly weakens the lawmaking violence represented by it. [. . .]

There is no 'law-making violence'. There may be war or other violence which results in a change in the sovereign but the law abides till altered by the Sovereign's command. Thus when a conqueror arrives some noblemen will fight him while others will come forward to pledge allegiance to him. The laws remain the same till the sovereign decides otherwise.  

This lasts until either new forces or those earlier suppressed triumph over the hitherto lawmaking violence and thus found a new law, destined in its turn to decay" (300).

Laws change, with the Sovereign's assent, for fiscal and other reasons of a utilitarian type. So what?  

So far, so good: Derrida's essay will follow Benjamin approvingly

because Derrida had shit for brains. He thought 'Justice was undecideable'. He had noticed that there were people called Chief Justices whose decisions were final and binding. It was a different mater that the Supreme Court could overrule itself. Still, the fact remains, that any justiciable question is decidable. A person may complain that a particular decision isn't ideal and is thus unjust but one may equally well complain that 3 plus 4 shouldn't be 7 because I don't like that number. 

throughout this movement, right down to a shared analysis of how the death penalty and the spectral presence of the police affirm the decadence of the law;

They don't. The law has only decayed if it is not being applied. It is no good saying 'Law is very nasty. It wants to kill or incarcerate a nice serial killer. This is decadence!' because people might shove a pineapple up your rectum to discover if you are too decadent to call the fucking police and put an end to your torture.  

Various ancient Empires were conquered at different times by 'barbarian' tribes. The Law did not change. Only the name of the sovereign did. The Law itself is not about violence though it may license the use of violence by people paid to enforce a judgment. This is known to anyone who has opened a book on constitutional law. Benjamin and Derrida were too stupid.

Benjamin argues that law-founding violence - the force that is used to establish a new law -

There is no such violence. A new constitution or legal code is promulgated after all the killing has ended. 

cannot properly be considered violent because violence specifically speaking, belongs to the symbolic order of law.

No. It is something the Court can either order or punish. The law may be associated with symbols of various sorts. It is not associated with violence. 

As violence is the illegal or unsanctioned use of force,

No. Legal violence- e.g. lawful killing- is still violence. 

it depends, by definition, upon a structure of law by which it may be defined.

No. It depends upon matters of law and matters of fact.  

For this reason, he argues that an act like a proletariat general strike is neither properly violent nor non-violent,

as a matter of fact, it may be either. However, as a matter of law, a peaceful demonstration may be deemed to be violent under certain conditions.  

neither illegal nor legal, because, inasmuch as it attacks the very structure that distinguishes between such terms, it is prior to such distinctions.

Sadly, the law doesn't work that way. You may say you were attacking the very structure that distinguishes between eating a pineapple and shoving it up the Judge's bum but you will still get sent to jail for violent and indecent assault.  

According to Benjamin, such acts have the potential to escape or even end the cycle of historical violence, for the truly revolutionary act would not seek to found or preserve any new (and necessarily violent) authority.

A nutter like Gandhi might well have said something like that- if he was getting paid to do so by Birla & Co.  

That is, truly revolutionary moments

e.g. when we all collectively unite to fart vigorously while saying 'Boo to Neo-Liberalism' 

- which Benjamin extends, strangely, to "the educative power" ("Critique" 297)

of saying 'Boo to Neo-Liberalism'. Sadly, it doesn't change anything. 

Benjamin’s consideration of the binary opposition between legitimate and illegitimate violence as it relates to the originary violence that establishes authority can be placed on the chain of displacements from Hobbes’s consideration of the binary opposition between the state of nature and the law of nature,

Not if the 'originary violence'- e.g. the American Revolution- ends with a Peace Treaty such that there is a clear transfer of legitimate authority. Even otherwise, uncontested authority becomes legitimate by something like the doctrine of laches. 

Benjamin believed that "When not in the hands of the law, an act of violence "threatens it not by the ends that it may pursue but by its mere existence outside the law". Violence may indeed threaten the peace or viability of a polity or society. There may be a change in regime or gangsters may take over more and more territory. But the law doesn't change until some sovereign body changes it. This may be done implicitly- i.e. people may say there are a set of customary norms or procedures which may be more ancient than the State- e.g. the Anglo-Saxon 'Common Law' or Islamic Sharia Law- and that, by default, they have come into operation. However, even in these cases there is no 'originary violence'. There is originary obedience or consensus which may or may not preceed some violent convulsion.

with the former split by what George Shelton sees as the difference between the fictive and its representation as the real.

Fiction seeks to make you forget that what you are reading didn't actually happen. Hobbes was over-egging the cake. Actual Princes found it paid to observe certain international norms at least some of the time.  After all, they tended to marry into each other's families and, if only this reason, it made sense to have some common religious values or beliefs. Sadly this could break down. In India the case of Princess Krishna Kumari, in the early Nineteenth Century, is often quoted. Rajput power collapsed because of a dispute between Princes as to who should get to marry her. Finally, a Muslim Pindari chief suggested that she take poison and kill herself to remove the bone of contention. Shortly thereafter, the Brits took over the whole shooting match. The 'fictive' representation of the beautiful Princess's bitter fate had a powerful effect on both Indian Princes and British public opinion. Clearly the 'eusocial' solution was British paramountcy such that customary or religious law be applied to prevent such conflicts. In this case, the girl should have been married off as a kid, not betrothed simply. As an unmarriageable widow, under Hindu law, she could have lived out her life in comfort. There would have been no devastating cycle of violence such that her people, in Udaipur, were repeatedly decimated and subject to rapine. 

I will mention Ernst Bloch’s Natural Law and Human Dignity here to give a sense of a text at the other end of the Third Reich.

He was an eccentric Marxist who had to leave the GDR.  He has no importance whatsoever. 

The sixties will witness the internationalization of Human Rights. The Benjamin/Bloch texts represent the European lineaments that brought forth the second Declaration.

Nonsense!  It was prepared by René Cassin, who worked on the initial draft prepared by Canadian legal scholar John Peters Humphrey. They didn't read Benjamin or Bloch. 

Bloch faces the problem of the ‘‘natural’’ by historicizing it. He gives an account of the ways in which the European tradition has finessed the begged question of nature.

The Europeans made great progress in the natural sciences. However, with Darwin's theory, optimism about 'natural justice' or 'natural religion' diminished.  

His heroes are the Stoics—especially Epicurus—and Marx. Marx contains the potential of setting free the question of nature as freedom:

Nobody was holding it hostage. Nature isn't freedom. It is having to run away from beasts who want to eat you.  

‘‘A Marxism that was what it was supposed to be would be a radical penal theory, indeed the most radical and at the same time most amiable: It kills the social mother of injustice.’’

It would also buy everybody a nice Rolls Royce car.  

I cannot credit a ‘‘Marxism in its proper outlines.’’ But I can at least suggest that in these times, when an internationalized human rights has forgotten to acknowledge the begged question of nature, a nondisciplinary ‘‘philosopher’’ who has been taught the value of philosophy as an ‘‘art of living’’ in the Stoic style through the Nietzschean line of Foucault and Derrida, might want to point out that Zeno and Epicurus were, necessarily, what would today be called ‘‘colonial subjects,’’

No. They were free citizens of independent city-states. It was only later on that the Romans annexed those cities. Perhaps Spivak is thinking of Epictetus.   

and suggest that we may attempt to supplement a merely penal system by reinventing the social mother of injustice as worldwide class apartheid, and kill her, again and again, in the mode of ‘‘to come,’’ through the education of those who fell through colonial subject-formation.

Why not just say 'Whitey be debil! Also some white peeps have dicks. How is that fair?'  

I have not the expertise to summarize the long history of the European debate surrounding natural/civil rights.

There was no such debate. People believed some rights were natural and others were civic in nature- e.g. the right to stand for election as opposed to the right to scratch your arse.  

With some hesitation I would point at the separation/imbrication of nature and liberty in Machiavelli, at the necessary slippage in Hobbes between social contract as natural fiction and social contract as civil reality, at Hobbes’s debate on liberty and necessity with Bishop Bramhill.

There is no such separation in either. Both wanted a strong Prince to act ruthlessly to advance some agenda of their own.  

George Shelton distinguishes between a ‘‘hypothetical’’ and a ‘‘real’’ social contract in Hobbes, at a certain point calling the former a ‘‘useful fiction.’’

like his squaring of the circle? The plain fact is, nobody in England bothers to read Hobbes or Locke. The law developed along different lines. America sharpened its mother wits on Coke's Institutes. England, it is true, gave more power to the Executive- the Crown in Parliament became sovereign- and this did lead to considerable reform over the course of the nineteenth century. It is only recently, at the behest of the EU, that England has got a Supreme Court. Otherwise, it had a capacious doctrine of political question and this did mean rights and obligations were more defeasible. Currently, it is unclear whether the UK can abandon Human Rights law incorporated by international treaty. My guess is no. 

New interest in Hobbesian theology has disclosed a similar pattern in Hobbes’s discussion of God as ground.  This is particularly interesting because Hobbes is so widely seen as the initiator of individualism.

Locke, maybe. Not Hobbes. 

Hobbes himself places his discussions within debates in Roman law and I think we should respect this chain of displacements— rather than a linear intellectual history—that leads to the rupture of the first European Declaration of Human Rights.

Hobbes wanted the Prince to have absolute power. However, the Humanists, who had previously rediscovered Cicero, were going in the opposite direction. Human Rights was about limiting the power of the State.  

I am arguing that such speculative lines are not allowed to flourish within today’s global human rights activities where a crude notion of cultural difference is about as far as grounds talk will go.

People are allowed to think anything they like even if they are part of the Human Rights industry. It is not the case that George Clooney slaps Amal if she starts babbling on about Hobbes and Machiavelli.  

Academic research may contest this trend by tracking rational critique and/or individualism within non-European high cultures.

Why bother? If you do 'academic research' on human rights, you should be gathering material which is admissible in a court of law. There were plenty of such people in India or Kenya or other such places who were assembling evidence which could be used for Public Interest Litigation.  

This is valuable work. But the usually silent victims of pervasive rather than singular and spectacular human rights violations are generally the rural poor.

There were activists who went to live with them and who studied the law so as to gain remedies for rights' violations which they suffered.  

These academic efforts do not touch their general cultures, unless it is through broad generalizations, positive and negative. Accessing those long-delegitimized epistemes requires a different engagement.

A wholly useless one.  

The pedagogic effort that may bring about lasting epistemic change in the oppressed is never accurate, and must be forever renewed.

Pedagogic effort by an illiterate cretin should not be renewed.  

Otherwise there does not seem much point in considering the Humanities worth teaching.

If you are taught by Spivak, that is certainly the case.  

And, as I have already signaled, the red thread of a defense of the Humanities as an attempt at uncoercive rearrangement of desires runs through this essay.

That's the business of the Church. You get a Humanities degree so as to come across as a cultured person.  

. (I expand my argument beyond postcoloniality in the narrow sense because of what I hope is the beginning of a long-term involvement with grassroots rural education in China.)

The Chinese want their kids to be smart. They don't want them to be taught by stupid Bengalis.  

 In disciplinary philosophy, discussion of the begged question at the origin of natural rights is not altogether absent.

Sadly, philosophers haven't kept up with category theory and thus are unaware that 'naturality' (i.e. non arbitrariness) is far to seek.  

Alan Gewirth chooses the Rational Golden Rule as his PGC (principle of generic consistency), starting his project in the following way: ‘‘The Golden Rule is the common moral denominator of all the world’s major religions.’’

No it isn't. The Pope doesn't like it when I try to lecture him on the evils of masturbation.  

From a historical point of view, one is obliged to say that none of the great religions of the world can lead to an end to violence today.

Nope. One can't say that if one such religion prevailed everywhere then there would be no war because the supreme pontiff would resolve all bilateral issues.  

Where Gewirth, whom nobody would associate with deconstruction, is important for our argument, is in his awareness of the grounding of the justification for Human Rights in a begged question.

But, since the time of Lord Coke, law has been defined as 'artificial reason'. It is a deontic logic which clearly states its axioms- i.e. fundamental assumptions.  

He takes it as a ‘‘contradiction’’ to solve and finds in the transposition of ‘‘rational’’ for ‘‘moral’’ his solution ‘‘The traditional Golden Rule [Do unto others as you would have them do unto you] leaves open the question of why any person ought to act in accordance with it.’’

The answer was 'God will send you to the bad place if you don't.'  

This is the begging of the question, because the moral cannot not be normative.

Sure it can. There's a little thing called 'consequentialism'. If Heaven and Hill really exist it would be rational to do whatever the right Religion tells you to do.  

According to Gewirth, a commonsensical problem can be theoretically avoided because ‘‘it is not the contingent desires of agents but rather aspects of agency which cannot rationally be avoided or evaded by any agent that determine the content of the Rational Golden Rule [because it] . . . focuses on what the agent necessarily wants or values insofar as he is rational.’’ It would seem to us that this begs the question of the reasonable nature of reason (accounting for the principle of reason by the principle of reason).

No. Gewirth makes a stipulation and sticks with it. If you reject the stipulation, you reject Gewirth.  

We would rather not construct the best possible theory, but acknowledge that practice always splits open the theoretical justification.

Nonsense! The practice of medicine does not 'split open' the medical theory it relies on.  

In fact, Gewirth knows this. Toward the end of the essay, this curious sentence is left hanging: ‘‘Materially, [the] self-contradiction [that to deny or violate the Rational Golden Rule is to contradict oneself ] is inescapable because . . . the Rational Golden Rule [is] derived from the necessities of purposive agency’’ (emphasis mine).

This is Kantian. There is a right way to think. If we were thinking in the right way, we would not do evil shit. Sadly, this isn't true.  

If we acknowledge the part outside of reason in the human mind then we may see the limits of reason as ‘‘white mythology’’ and see the contradiction as the necessary relationship between two discontinuous begged questions as I have just suggested: proof that we are born free and proof that it is the other that calls us before will. Then the question: Why must we follow the Golden Rule (the basis of human rights) finds an answer: because the other calls us. But it is never a fitting answer, it is not continuous with the question.

It is nonsense. The other who calls us tends to be a tele-marketeer.  

Let us then call this a relationship, a discontinuous supplementary relationship, not a solution. Instead, Gewirth is obliged to recode the white mythology of reason as an unavoidable last instance, as an ‘‘inherent capab[ility] of exercising [human rights].’’

 Gewirth is 'dialectical'- i.e. the 'extension' of an intension changes. But this also means his theory is 'anything goes'. The objection was made long ago, that you could be a Kantian Nazi by saying 'if I were a Jew, I'd want some kind soul to be put me out of my misery. Sadly, Jews are too stupid to see this and just top themselves already the way Otto Weininger did.' The 'dialectical' version of this would be even worse. 

If one enters into a sustained give-and-take with subordinate cultures attempting to address structural questions of power as well as textural questions of responsibility, one feels more and more that a Gewirth-style recoding may be something like a historical incapacity to grasp that to rationalize the question of ethics fully (please note that this does not mean banishing reason from ethics altogether, just giving it an honorable and instrumental place) is to transgress the intuition that ethics are a problem of relation before they are a task of knowledge.

Ethics is neither. It is about having a better 'ethos'- i.e. that which one is for oneself. Sadly, some people can make a little money teaching shite under that rubric.  

This does not gainsay the fact that, in the juridico-legal manipulation of the abstractions of contemporary politics by those who right wrongs, where a reasoned calculus is instrumentally necessary, nothing can be more welcome than Gewirth’s rational justification.

They don't need it. They get by just fine with Cost Benefit analysis and other such evidence.  

What we are describing is a simplified version of the aporia between ethics and politics.

There is none. Politicians are welcome to gas on about ethics and morality.  

An aporia is disclosed only in its one-way crossing.

Nope. It is disclosed by a self-contradiction.  

This essay attempts to make the reader recognize that human rights is such an interested crossing, a containment of the aporia in binary oppositions.

It isn't. Human Rights are part and parcel of a body of law which lawyers can use to win cases. Nothing philosophical or literary is involved.  

A few words, then, about supplementing metropolitan education before I elaborate on the pedagogy of the subaltern. By subaltern I mean those removed from lines of social mobility.

e.g. President Murmu who actually taught in a rural school.  

I will continue to insist that the problem with U.S. education is that it teaches (corporatist) benevolence while trivializing the teaching of the Humanities.

It is true that some Professors in the Humanities are illiterate shitheads. But, if they are bleck or lack a dick, one should make allowances.  

The result is, at best, cultural relativism as cultural absolutism (‘‘American-style education will do the trick’’).

America has a good education system. Sadly, the Chinese may have a better one.  

Its undoing is best produced by way of the training of reflexes that kick in at the time of urgency, of decision and policy. However unrealistic it may seem to you, I would not remain a teacher of the Humanities if I did not believe that at the New York end—standing metonymically for the dispensing end as such— the teacher can try to rearrange desires noncoercively—

No. Her job is to ensure that the sucker paying fees to the College gets a sheepskin in worthless shite. People who desire to be pseudo-intellectuals pay Spivak's wages.  

as I mentioned earlier—through an attempt to develop in the student a habit of literary reading, even just ‘‘reading,’’

Spivak's students need to be cajoled into the habit of reading. Asking them to also wipe their own bums would be to ask too much.  

suspending oneself into the text of the other— for which the first condition and effect is a suspension of the conviction that I am necessarily better, I am necessarily indispensable, I am necessarily the one to right wrongs, I am necessarily the end product for which history happened, and that New York is necessarily the capital of the world.

But if this were not the case, why would Spivak and her brother and her Mummy come to settle in America? Reading Derrida just causes you to feel sorry for French kids who have to take Philosophy at High School which is why they may end up marrying their Drama Teacher.  

 The method of a specifically literary training, a slow mind-changing process, can be used to

babble nonsense and then play the race or gender card to get tenure.  

open the imagination to such mindsets.

Because poor rural women write literary fiction.  

One of the reasons international communism failed was because Marx, an organic intellectual of the industrial revolution,

Nonsense! He had a Doctorate in Law. He wasn't a mechanic who had gone to Night School.  

could only think the claiming of rights to freedom from exploitation by way of the public use of reason recommended by the European Enlightenment.

Rubbish! The man was a revolutionary.  

The ethical part, to want to exercise the freedom to redistribute, after the revolution, comes by way of the sort of education I am speaking of.

Nope. It happens immediately. The peasants take the land from the aristocrats. The workers take over the factories. They may not kill rich people with managerial skills but will get rid of a parasitical upper class.  

This intuition was not historically unavailable to Marx: ‘‘Circumstances are changed by men and . . . the educator himself must be educated.’’

i.e. Hegel should learn from me. Also Lasalle is a cunt. Don't listen to him. 

 My position is thus not against class struggle, but yet another attempt to broaden it, to include the ‘‘ground condition’’ (Grundbedingung)

prerequisite 

of the continued reproduction of class apartheid in ancient and/or disenfranchised societies in modernity.

Why should 'class struggle' want to maintain 'class apartheid'?  

If the industrial proletariat of Victorian England were expanded to include the global subaltern, there is no hope that such an agent could ever ‘‘dictate’’ anything through the structures of parliamentary democracy—I admit I cannot give this up—if this persistent pedagogic effort is not sustained.

The Labor party represented that proletariat. It received five thousand quid from the Gaekwad via Tilak and put Indian independence into its manifesto in 1918. But Raja Ram Mohan Roy had lobbied Westminster in the 1830s and Dadhabhai Naoroji had been elected to Parliament in the 1890s. This had nothing to do with pedagogy. Money talks. Bullshit walks. 

 I will now describe a small and humble experiment that I have tried over the last ten years nearly every day at the Columbia University gym and, unhappily, the rate of experimental verification is zero percent. There is an approximately six-foot-by-four-foot windowless anteroom as you enter the locker area. This useless space, presumably to protect female modesty, is brightly lit.

Good. Women feel more comfortable entering a well lighted room. They don't want to turn on the light only to discover a rapist is lurking in a corner.

There is a light switch by the door from the main gym into the anteroom, and another by the door leading into the lockers. In other words, it is possible to turn the light off as you exit this small, enclosed space. You can choose not to let it burn so brightly twenty-four hours for no one. Remember these are university folks, generally politically correct, interested in health, a special control group, who talk a good game about environmental responsibility. (I am drawing the example from within the cultural idiom of the group, as always.) I turn off the light in this windowless cube whenever I enter the locker and my sciatica keeps me going to the gym pretty regularly. In the last nine years, I have never reentered this little space and found the light off.

If the room is lit by a CFL bulb then it is cheaper to leave it on unless no one else will need it for more than a quarter of an hour. That is unlikely to be the case for a University gym.  

Please draw your own conclusions. The responsibility I speak of, then, is not necessarily the one that comes from the consciousness of superiority lodged in the self (today’s quote of the month at the gym is, characteristically, ‘‘The price of greatness is responsibility’’—Winston Churchill), but one that is, to begin with, sensed before sense as a call of the other.

The other is saying 'Granny stop switching off of lights. The thing is a nuisance.' 

 In the ‘‘real world,’’ there is, in general, a tremendously uneven contradiction between those who beg the question of nature as rights for the self and those who beg the question of responsibility as being called by the other, before will.

You can do both though the thing is pointless. Also axioms or assumptions don't 'beg the question'. They are part of a Gentzen type sequent calculus not a Hilbertian.  

If we mean to place the latter—perennial victims—on the way to the social productivity of capital—as an old-fashioned Marxist I distinguish between capital and capitalism and do not say these words ironically—we need to acknowledge the need for supplementation there as well, rather than transform them willy-nilly, consolidating already existing hierarchies, exporting gender struggle, by way of the greed for economic growth.

There we have it! The Bengali hates growth. Money is vulgar. Nobody should have any.  

(I have argued earlier in this essay that these cultures started stagnating because their cultural axiomatics were defective for capitalism.

Not if they got conquered. Cultural axiomatics don't matter. Being shit at fighting does.  

I have also argued that the socialist project can receive its ethical push not from within itself but by supplementation from such axiomatics.

In which case it will stop being Socialist and turn into Identity politics.  

I have argued that in their current decrepitude the subaltern cultures need to be known in such a way that we can suture their reactivated cultural axiomatics into the principles of the Enlightenment.

Why bother? The Enlightenment was about enlightened despots like Fredric the Great and Catherine the ditto. The trouble with hereditary despots is that their successor may be as stupid as shit. 

I have argued that socialism belongs to those axiomatics. That socialism turns capital formation into redistribution is a truism.

It is false. State Socialism means the state does capital formation- e.g. building factories. There may be some redistribution of Income but this is also true of Capitalist countries with a compulsory National Insurance scheme.  

 There is a growing library of books making it ‘‘fun’’ for kids to invest and giving them detailed instructions how to do so. The unquestioned assumption that to be rich is to be happy and good is developed by way of many ‘‘educational’’ excuses.

Spivak wants kids to learn how to become very very poor.  

Children are never too young to start grasping the fundamentals of money management. . . . Even toddlers understand the concept of ‘‘mine!’’ In fact, it’s the idea of owning something they like that sparks their interest in investing. Rest assured, you won’t turn your child into a little money-grubber by feeding that interest. Through investing you’re going to teach him more about responsibility, discipline, delayed gratification, and even ethics than you ever thought possible!

Unless your parents had encouraged you to save your pocket money and buy Apple stock when they were as cheap as chips.  

Such a training of children builds itself on the loss of the cultural habit of assuming the agency of responsibility in radical alterity.

Kids should constantly be thinking about starving people in far away places. That way, they won't feel bad if they leave Collidge with a useless degree and have to wash dishes to make rent.  

 When the UN offers violence or the ballot as a choice it is unrealistic because based on another kind of related mistake—unexamined universalism—the assumption that this is a real choice in all situations.

Everybody knows this. India was partitioned after the 1946 elections. America fought a Civil War after Lincoln was elected.  

I offer here a small but representative example: I was handing out sweets, two a head, to villagers in Shahabad, Birbhum. Some of the schools I describe later are located in this area. These villages have no caste-Hindu inhabitants. Sweets of this cooked traditional variety, that have to be bought from the Hindu villages, are beyond the villagers’ means. There are no ‘‘candy stores’’ in either type of village. Distribution of sweets is a festive gesture, but it makes my Calcutta-bred intellectualleftist soul slightly uneasy.

Sweets are Capitalist. You should be offering red chili peppers to the peasants.  

I have learned such behavior in my decades-long apprenticeship in these areas. A young man in his early thirties, generally considered a mover and a shaker among this particular ethnic group—the Dhekaros, straddling the aboriginal-untouchable divide

Spivak notices such things. She thinks of herself as very high caste.  

—was opening the flimsy paper boxes that swam in syrup in flimsier polythene bags, as I kept dipping my hand. Suddenly he murmured, Outsiders are coming in, one a piece now. I thought the problem was numbers and changed to one, a bit sad because there were now more children. Suddenly, the guy said in my ear, give her two, she’s one of ours. Shocked, I quickly turned to him, and said, in rapid monotone Bengali, Don’t say such things in front of children; and then, If I should say you’re not one of ours? Since I’m a caste-Hindu and technically one of his oppressors. This is the seedbed of ethnic violence in its lowest-common unit.

He meant that were from a different village. Spivak got it into his head that he was a 'casteist'.  

From the anthropological point of view, groups such as the Sabars and the Dhekaros may be seen to have a ‘‘closely knit social texture.’’

But they had a sense of 'oikeiosis'. Outsiders were people from a different village. Spivak had brought sweets for the locals not the outsiders.  

But I have been urging a different point of view through my concept-metaphor of ‘‘suturing.’’

But it was Spivak's sweets, not her concept-metaphors, which the villagers wanted.  

 The suturing argument that I will elaborate below develops in the historical difference between the first two sentences of this parenthesis.) Even if the immense labor of follow-up investigation on a case-by-case basis is streamlined in our era of telecommunication, it will not change the epistemic structure of the dysfunctional responsibility-based community, upon whom rights have been thrust from above.

The evidence suggests otherwise. 'Panchayat Raj' has generally been a success in India.  

It will neither alleviate the reign of terror nor undo the pattern of dependency.

Again, the evidence suggests otherwise. True, if you have an insurgency problem, then the State may have to put boots on the ground. But elected Panchayats can coopt indigenous insurgents thus providing a road for their reintegration into Society. Many ex-Naxals turned to electoral politics.  

For the purposes of the essential and possible work of righting wrongs—the political calculus—the great European languages are sufficient.

In India, the State and local language are sufficient. French would be of little use.  

But for access to the subaltern episteme to devise a suturing pedagogy, you must take into account the multiplicity of subaltern languages.

Missionaries did this long ago.  

This is because the task of the educator is to learn to learn from below, the lines of conflict resolution undoubtedly available, however dormant, within the disenfranchised cultural system; giving up convictions of triumphalist superiority.

Spivak thinks we must be educated into becoming very poor and stupid. Also we should answer the call of the tele-marketeer.  

It is because of the linguistic restriction that one is obliged to speak of just the groups one works for; but, in the hope that these words will be read by some who are interested in comparable work elsewhere, I am always pushing for generalization.

President Murmu comes from a tribal community. She worked as a teacher before joining politics. She doesn't need Spivak's pedagogy. 

The trainer of teachers will find the system dysfunctional and corrupted, mired in ritual, like a clear pond choked with scum. For their cultural axiomatics as well as their already subordinated position did not translate into the emergence of nascent capitalism.

Mohammad Yunus is now ruling Bangladesh. He started Grameen Bank by lending his own money to poor women. It turned out that everybody is a 'nascent capitalist'.  

We are now teaching our children in the North, and no doubt in the North of the South, that to learn the movement of finance capital is to learn social responsibility. It is in the remote origins of this conviction—that capitalism is responsibility—that we might locate the beginning of the failure of the aboriginal groups of the kind I am describing: their entry into (a distancing from) modernity as a gradual slipping into atrophy.

Spivak forgets that 'tribals' have often ruled Princely States. Some specialized in long distance trade and rose in prosperity. But this was also true of Scandinavian and Russian and ancient Greek tribes.  

This history breeds the need for activating an ethical imperative atrophied by gradual distancing from the narrative of progress—colonialism/ capitalism.

Spivak doesn't get that her own people, by and large, were as poor as the tribal population. Also, the villagers, seeing her shaven head, assumed she was some sort of crazy widow lady with the power to place a curse upon them.  

 Consider the following, the vicissitudes of a local effort

she means a state supported effort  

undertaken in the middle of the nineteenth century: Iswarchandra Banerjee, better known as Iswarchandra Vidyasagar, a nineteenth-century public intellectual from rural Bengal, was twenty when Macaulay wrote his ‘‘Minute on Indian Education.’’

He was attending the State subsidized Sanskrit College where he would later work 

He fashioned pedagogic instruments for Sanskrit and Bengali that could, if used right (the question of teaching, again), suture the ‘‘native’’ old  with Macaulay’s new rather than reject the old and commence its stagnation with that famous and horrible sentence: ‘‘A single shelf of a good European library [is] worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.’’

Macaulay kept meeting Indians who said 'please stop subsidizing Arabic and Sanskrit. We can learn both easily enough from the Pundit or the Moulvi. Just concentrate on subsidizing a few English medium schools.' Vidyasagar had studied at the State subsidized Sanskrit College and got a job as Sanskrit instructor at Fort William. It was only after the 'Woods Dispatch' of 1854 that the Government decided to do something for mass education. That was Vidyasagar's opportunity to shine. 

Vidyasagar’s Bengali primer is still used in state-run primary schools in rural West Bengal.

There had been similar primers when he was a child. What mattered as that his 'Barnaparichay' was widely adopted and thus orthography and punctuation became standardized.  

It is a modernizing instrument for teaching. It activates the structural neatness of the Sanskritic Bengali alphabet for the teacher and the child, and undermines rote learning

No. Kids learnt literary passages by rote. As their skill with the alphabet grew they found they could read what they already chanted.  

by encouraging the teacher to jumble the structure in the course of teaching at the same time. The wherewithal is all there, but no one knows (how) to use it any more.

Bengali peeps are not knowing Bengali. Only Spivakji is knowing. Mind it kindly! 

The first part of the book is for the active use of the teacher. The child does not read the book yet—just listens to the teacher, and learns to read and write by reading the teacher’s writing and writing as the teacher guides.

Nonsense! The kid can have the primer in front of them. 

Reading and writing are not soldered to the fetishized schoolbook.

Yes they are, unless the teacher prefers some other method of instruction.  

In very poor rural areas, with no books or newspapers anywhere, this is still a fine way to teach. (If you have been stumped a hundred times in a lot of places by both teacher and student producing some memorized bit from the textbook when asked to ‘‘write whatever comes to mind,’’ you are convinced of this.)

If I were asked to give a sample of my Devanagri handwriting for some purpose, I might write out a shloka which springs to mind. Nothing wrong in that. 

Halfway through the book, the child begins to read a book, and the title of that page is prothom path, ‘‘first reading,’’ not ‘‘first lesson.’’

No. There are two parts to Vidyasagar's primer. The prathom bagh (not path) is the first section. Dwitiya bagh is the second.

What a thrill it must have been for the child, undoubtedly a boy, to get to that moment.

The first girls schools in Bengal were opened before Vidyasagar was born. It appears that female literacy was quite widespread.  

Today this is impossible, because the teachers, and the teachers’ teachers, indefinitely, are clueless about this book as a do-it-yourself instrument.

Spivak doesn't even know the name of Vidyasagar's primer.  

Well-meaning education experts in the capital city, whose children are used to a different world, inspired by self-ethnographing bourgeois nationalists

like whom? Rabindranath? His 'Sahaj Path' is beautifully illustrated. 

of a period after Vidyasagar, have transformed the teacher’s pages into children’s pages by way of ill-conceived illustrations.

They are good enough.  It may be that village schools in Vidyasagar's day had few primers and so the book remained with the teacher. However, the cost of printing fall as the books popularity increased and so kids could have their own primers. They were kids books. 

In the rural areas this meaningless gesture has consolidated the book as an instrument for dull rote learning.

No. It is still used to learn orthography, punctuation, grammar, vocabulary etc.  

The page where Vidyasagar encourages the teacher to jumble the structure is now a meaningless page routinely ignored.

Spivak may not be aware that earlier primers did so because...all primers do! You only learn a rule of grammar properly when you are able to use it with novel words or describe novel situations.  

I could multiply examples such as this, and not in India alone.

Because she teaches German to German kids and Chinese to Chinese kids- right?  

Most of the subordinate languages of the world do not have simple singlelanguage dictionaries that rural children could use. Efforts to put together such a dictionary in Bengali failed in false promises and red tape.

Ramchandra Bidyabagish had published such a dictionary in Kolkata in 1817. There have been numerous others in all Indian languages. 

My discovery of the specific pattern of the primer was a revelation that came after eight years of involvement with using the primer.

I discovered that you had to 'jumble' things up on my first day of teaching. It is not enough to get the kids to say 2 plus 2 is 4. You need to see if they can add 2 to 3 and get 5.  

Since I do not consolidate instruction for the teacher except in response to a felt need,

in other words, because Spivak doesn't know how to teach or to teach teaching methodology 

it was only then that I was letting the teacher at one school take down hints as to how to teach the students at the lowest level. As I continued, I realized the primer had preempted me at every step!

Because teaching kids to read is easy. Many Mums do it before their kids are old enough to go to skool.  

I hope the impatient reader will not take this to be just another anecdote about poor instruction.

It is mad. Teachers, or Mums, around the world know that you need to get kids to use a rule in novel situations.  

And I hope I have made it clear by now, in spite of all the confusion attendant upon straying from the beaten track, that the practice of elementary pedagogy for the children of the rural poor is one of my main weapons, however humble.

Meanwhile, lots of the 'rural poor' have become Ministers or multi-millionaires (like Kalpana Saroj). Spivak can't point to even one 'success story' from her worthless schools.  

The interference of the state can also be a cruel negligence. This is the point of the following story. I have included two personal details to show how caste politics, gender politics, and class politics are intertwined in the detail. These details are typical. Each of the rural schools of which I speak has a tube well. This provides clean water for the entire group. Near two of these schools the tube well is broken.

In 1984 I visited a village in UP. They had a broken tube-well and asked if I could do something about it. This was easy enough. I phoned the elder brother of a friend who was in the ruling party and took a bottle of whiskey with me to ensure a favorable reception. He thought it worthwhile to impress me with his own importance by picking up a phone and putting the fear of god into some bureaucrat. The tube well was fixed the very next day. The moral here is to get things done you take a bottle of whiskey to a 'neta'. You don't bother with the bureaucracy.  

The aboriginals cannot mend it for the same reason that the metropolitan middle class cannot do these repair jobs. They are not used to it and Home Depot hasn’t hit yet. One of my fellow students in college occupies a leading position in a pertinent ministry on the state level. I renewed contact with this man after thirty-one years, in his office in Calcutta, to ask for tube wells. Not only did I not get tube wells after two trips separated by a year, but I heard through the rumor mill that, as a result of his boasting about my visit, his wife had disclosed in public, at a party, that she had complained to his mother about our ancient friendship!

Spivak was very beautiful. The wife was right to be jealous.  

A near relative in the next generation, whom I had not seen but briefly when he was an adolescent, held a leading administrative position on the district level. I got an appointment with him, again to beg for the tube wells. I did not get them. But he did tell me that he was in line for a fellowship at the Kennedy School. Where the infrastructure for the primary education of the poor seems negligible even in the line of official duty, boasting about one’s own spectacular opportunities for higher education seems perfectly plausible: internalized axiomatics of class apartheid.

Spivak really does not know how India works. I suppose when she left the Civil Servants still had a lot of clout.  

I use the detail to point at a pervasive problem. The Hindu villagers insulted a boy who went to fetch water from the tube well in the main village. At night, the oldest woman was about to go get water under cover. We sat together in her kitchen and boiled a pot of water. The next morning, the teacher in the school could not prove that the students had learned anything. She is a young Hindu widow from the village, who has failed her Secondary School leaving exam.

This is like Ved Mehta who discovered that the principal of the School for the Blind had been given that job because he was illiterate. He liked to have the kids read out from their Braille books for him.  

As a rural Hindu, she cannot drink water touched by the aboriginals, her students. As I kept berating her, one of these very students spoke up! (She loves the students; her not drinking water from their hands is internalized by them as normal, much less absurd than my drinking hot boiled water. On her part, going back to the village every afternoon, keeping the water-rule, which she knows I abhor, compares to my standing in the snow for six hours to replace my stolen green card, I later thought.)

A widow is expected to maintain ritual purity by various means. People respect this.  

The student spoke up to say that all but three in the school had accompanied their parents ‘‘east,’’ and so had not come to school for months. Going east: migrant labor. Just as not repairing tube wells is taken as proof of their fecklessness, taking their children on these journeys is seen as proof that they don’t know the value of education. These are oral tradition folks for whom real education takes place in the bosom of the family.

They had migrated to the city to earn money. The kids may have received better education there.  

By what absurd logic would they graduate instantly into a middle-class understanding of something so counterintuitive as ‘‘the value of education’’?

That value is 'making money' rather than some shite about Derrida's catachresis of alterity's deconstruction.  

Such lectures produce the kind of quick-fix ‘‘legal awareness’’–style lectures whose effects are at best superficial, but satisfying for the activists, until the jerrybuilt edifice breaks down.

It doesn't. Once you show people how to claim their entitlements, they do so because they like having money.  

When the community was addressed with sympathy, with the explicit understanding that behind this removal of the students from school lay love and responsibility,

and the knowledge that the school was shit 

some children were allowed to stay behind next year.

because the school was shit 

When I spoke of this way of dealing with absenteeism to the one hundred so-called rural teachers (stupid statistics) subsidized by the central government, one of the prejudice-ridden rural Hindu unemployed who had suddenly become a ‘‘teacher’’

Spivak is a prejudice ridden urban nutter who suddenly she knew how to teach Santal kids in the village 

advised me—not knowing that this elite city person knew what she was talking about—that the extended aboriginal community would object to the expenditure of feeding these children. Nonsense, of course, and prejudice, not unknown in the native informant. 

Sadly, there is some truth in the notion that an illiterate kid can earn more than a literate fellow. Employers prefer them because they think they are too stupid to embezzle money or to set up in competition. 

When I saw that the three students who had not ‘‘gone east’’ were doing fine, and that a year had gone by without tube wells, I said to them, write a letter. Another student, sitting back, looked so eager to write that I let her come forward as well. Each one give a sentence, I said, I will not prompt you. 

This was an occasion where a prompt was called for.  

I told them the secret of alphabetization. They successfully alphabetized their first names.

That wouldn't get them very far.  

My second visit to this man’s office, the source of the prurient party gossip in Calcutta, was to deliver the letter, in vain.

The guy had told his wife that Gayatri- who was once quite a looker- was stalking him. To flatter his ego, she pretended to believe him and repeated the story to her pals. Everybody was having a hearty laugh at Spivak. Who in their right mind goes to a bureaucrat when they want something fixed? You go to a politician. That's how Democracy works.  

I have covered the place names because we do not want a tube well from a remote international or national philanthropic source.

Yes we do. Also, kindly send us some nice sweets and a super-computer so we can start mining bit-coin.  

The water’s getting boiled for me. They are drinking well water. We want the children to learn about the heartlessness of administrations, without short-term resistance talk.

So, not a tube well then. Sadly, some of these kids might start going to an RSS school and thus end up rich and powerful.  

The bounty of some U.S. benefactor would be the sharp end of the wedge that produces a general will for exploitation in the subaltern.

I believe it was an American lady who gave Spivak the money to start this educational charity.  

Mutatis mutandis, I go with W. E. B. DuBois rather than Booker T. Washington:

Washington set up a Negro Business association. DuBois emigrated to Ghana and joined the Communist party.  

it is more important to develop a critical intelligence than to assure immediate material comfort.

But do so in America, not rural Bengal.  

This may or may not bear immediate fruit. Let me repeat, yet once again, although I fear I will not convince the benevolent ethnocentrist, that I am not interested in teaching ‘‘self-help.’’

She is interested in teaching tribals that they should stay poor and as illiterate as possible.  

I am interested in being a good enough humanities teacher in order to be a conduit (Wordsworth’s word) between subaltern children and their subaltern teachers.

This is like wanting to be a good enough Quantum Physicist to be a conduit between a Mummy and her darling little baby.  

That is my connection with DuBois, who writes a good deal about teacher training.

African American Colleges produced outstanding teachers.  

The teachers on this ground level at which we work tend to be the least successful products of a bad system.

like Spivak. 

Our educator must learn to train teachers by attending to the children.

rather than to goats 

For just as our children are not born electronic, their children are not born delegitimized.

Unless they are. Anyone can be of illegitimate birth. I myself am actually Queen Elizabeth's eldest son. Not the Second Elizabeth. I'm talking about the first one who was a Virgin. Yes. That's right. I was immaculately conceived. Please don't crucify me.  

They are not yet ‘‘least successful.’’ It is through learning how to take children’s response to teaching as our teaching text that we can hope to put ourselves in the way of ‘‘activating’’ democratic structures.

No. Teaching just means imparting useful knowledge so that kids very quickly end up earning way more than you do. Democratic structures are only worth having if they enable people to become more productive and opulent.  

And it is to distinguish between ‘‘activating’’ and producing good descriptive information for peers (the appropriate brief for an essay such as this) that I should like to point at the difference between Melanie Klein and Jean Piaget.

One was mad. The other was a bit of a bore but did do empirically testable science.  

Attending to children, Klein’s way of speaking had turned into a kind of sublime literalness, where the metaphor is as literal as reality itself. In order to flesh out Freud’s intuitions about children, Klein learned her system from the children themselves.

She would say to little kiddies 'you want to kill your daddy and fuck your Mummy.' The kiddies would giggle. The lady was mad but harmless.  

Her writings are practical guides to people who wished to ‘‘learn’’ that language. That, too, is to learn to learn from below. By contrast, all the confident conclusions of Piaget and his collaborators in The Moral Judgment of Children would be messed up if the investigators had been obliged to insert themselves into and engage with the valuesystem the children inhabited.

Don't insert yourself into a child. You will be sent to jail.  

Piaget is too sharp not to know this. ‘‘It is one thing to prove that cooperation in the play and spontaneous social life of children brings about certain moral effects,’’ he concludes, and another to establish the fact that this cooperation can be universally applied as a method of education. This last point is one which only experimental education can settle. . . . But the type of experiment which such research would require can only be conducted by teachers or by the combined efforts of practical workers and educational psychologists.

That actually happened. But there were great educational reformers in the early Nineteenth century like Pestalozzi. I have some vague notion that he influenced the great Hermann Grassmann such that the notion of a vector space as 'natural' was possible for him before anyone else. Grassmann also translated the Rg Veda. He was just a High School teacher, like his father. No wonder the Germans rose so rapidly over the course of the Nineteenth Century! 

And it is not in our power to deduce the results to which this would lead.

We want our kids to get up to speed in STEM subjects as fast as possible. Otherwise the Chinese will eat our lunch.  

The effort at education that I am describing

but not participating in. Spivak is not a rural teacher. She does not know Santali. She is a crazy lady who turns up from time to time and then talks about it endlessly so as to pose as some sort of Mother Theresa figure.  

—perhaps comparable to Piaget’s description of ‘‘practical workers’’—the teachers—and ‘‘educational psychologist’’—the trainers—with the roles productively confused every step of the way

Piaget was a scientist. His work improved educational and developmental outcomes. Spivak is merely a poseur.  

—hopes against hope that a permanent sanction of the social Darwinism

which is to grab land from the weak and let them starve to death 

—‘‘the burden of the fittest’’—implicit in the Human Rights agenda

There are people within every country who want better legal remedies based on human rights. If this can be done in an incentive compatible manner, well and good.  

will, perhaps, be halted if the threads of the torn cultural fabric are teased out by the uncanny patience of which the Humanities are capable at their best, for the ‘‘activation’’ of dormant structures.

Bullshit! We want kids who are good at Math not nutters who write verbose nonsense.  

 The Greek poet Archilochus is supposed to have written ‘‘the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’’ This distinction between two types of thinkers was developed by Isaiah Berlin into the idea that fox-thinkers are fascinated by the variety of things, and hedgehog-thinkers relate everything to an all-embracing system. My experience of learning from children for the last decade

has made you stupider than you started off. Sadly, it has also made them stupider.  

tells me that nurturing the capacity to imagine the public sphere and the fostering of independence within chosen rule-governance is the hedgehog’s definition of democracy, which will best match the weave of the torn yet foxy fabric—great variety of detail—of the culture long neglected by the dominant.

What we have seen in India over the last six decades is a transfer of power from the 'learned' castes to the 'educationally backward' castes and tribes. This has been accompanied by more rapid economic growth. The hedgehog aspect of democracy is about voting rights. In India, poorer people have used their greater numbers to gain more in the way of entitlements. Sadly, there are still plenty of human rights violations. Only continued economic growth can supply the resources for expanded State Capacity to 'right wrongs'. That can be done in a foxy manner.

Whatever the status of women in the old delegitimized cultural system, in today’s context emphasis must always be placed on girl-children’s access to that entry, without lecturing, without commanding, earning credibility, of course.

This has been done in India through various scholarship schemes or the provision of free bicycles for girls. This turned out to be a vote winner.  

Another minimally generalizable rule of thumb in this teaching I will focus on the one that Vidyasagar, the nineteenth-century Bengali intellectual, picked up a hundred and fifty years ago: undermine rote learning.

Vidyasagar mastered Paninian Sanskrit through rote-learning. Nothing wrong in that at all.  

As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, I am not speaking of the fact that a student might swot as a quick way to do well in an exam. I’m speaking of the scandal that, in the global South, in the schools for middleclass children and above, the felicitous primary use of a page of language is to understand it; in the schools for the poor, it is to spell and memorize.

Nothing wrong with first doing a lot of rote learning and then gaining understanding later on. It's how most of us got through our professional or other competitive exams.  

I walked a couple hours to a village high school in the national system and waited an hour and a half after opening time for the rural teachers to arrive. I begged them to take good care of the two aboriginal young women I was sending to the school. In late afternoon, the girls returned. Did she explain, I asked. No, just spelling and reading. An absurd history lesson about ‘‘National Liberation Struggles in Many Countries,’’ written in incomprehensible prose.

The Left Front was very keen on Castro and other such shitheads.  

I am going into so much detail because no urban or international radical bothers to look at the detail of the general system as they write of special projects—‘‘nonformal education,’’ ‘‘functional literacy,’’ science projects here and there.

Some do, more particularly if they attended Teacher Training College themselves.  

Just before I left India in January , a filmmaker made an English documentary entitled something like ‘‘A Tribe Enters the Mainstream.’’ My last act before departure was to make sure that the shots of my school be excised.

Why? Was she ashamed of them? I suppose she felt it was her 'intellectual property'.  

The so-called direct interviews are risible. How can these people give anything but the expected answers in such situations?

Why should they give any others? Do you like going to School? Yes. The kid should not say 'I hate Skool because I am not allowed to sodomize teechur the way Foucault would have wanted.' 

For the suturing with enforced class-subalternization I had to chance upon an immediately comprehensible concept-metaphor: when there is no exercise for the imagination, no training in intellectual labor—matha khatano—for those who are slated for manual labor—gatar khatano—at best, the rich/poor divide (barolok/chhotolok big people/small people) is here to stay.

This is silly. Plenty of 'intellectual laborers' in Bengal are as poor as shit. Guys who get into trade or politics can become rich.  

At least one teacher said, at leave-taking, that he now understood what I wanted, in the language of obedience, alas.

The crazy widow wanted people to think she was smart. Why not pretend this was the case?  

There is more work for the trainer down the road, uncoercive undermining of the class-habit of obedience.

Sooner or later a decent school will open in the vicinity. At that point her class-rooms will be empty. Why obey worthless shitheads?  

Perhaps you can now imagine how hard it is to change this episteme, how untrustworthy the activists’ gloat.

We can imagine how hard it is for Spivak to say anything sensible. Thankfully, she has never made the effort.  

For the solidarity tourist, it is a grand archaic sight to see rural children declaiming their lessons in unison, especially if, as in that mud-floored classroom in Yunan, six- to nine-year-olds vigorously dance their bodies into ancient calligraphy.

Nope. They just dance. Still, it is nice to know that Spivak believes she is also teaching Chinese kids.  

But if you step forward to work together, and engage in more than useless patter, the situation is not so romantic. Learning remains by rote. It is a cruel irony that when the meaning of sram in Vidyasagar’s Lesson —sram na korile lekhapora hoy na—is explained as ‘‘labor’’

rather than effort 

and the  aboriginal child is asked if she or he has understood, he or she will show their assent by giving an example of manual labor.

Nothing wrong with that. We may compare what we do at school with sowing seeds or building foundations or use any other such metaphor with which we are familiar.  

In English, the sentence would read—without labor you cannot learn to write and read—meaning intellectual labor, of course.

Without 'effort'.  

Produced by this class-corrupt system of education, the teachers themselves do not know how to write freely.

Spivak can't write sensibly.  

They do not know the meaning of what they ‘‘teach,’’ since all they have to teach, when they are doing their job correctly, is spelling and memorizing. They do not know what dictionaries are. They have themselves forgotten everything they memorized to pass out of primary school. When we train such teachers, we must, above all, let them go, leave them alone, to see if the efforts of us outsiders have been responsive enough, credible enough without any material promises.

No. We should send such teachers to a well run Mission Schools- or RSS schools- where they will develop self-confidence and learn better pedagogic methods. 

When I see rousing examples of ‘‘people’s movements,’’ I ask myself, how long would the people continue without the presence of the activist leaders?

Nothing wrong with having leaders. They solve a coordination problem and can better tackle collective action problems.  

It is in the context of earning that credibility that I am reporting my access to the new concept-metaphor binary: matha khatano/gator khatano: class apartheid: barolok/chhotolok.

It is foolish. Trade and arbitrage (politics is a type of arbitrage) is what enables people to rise up rapidly. Intellectual coolies may starve to death. Indeed, in India, it appears that higher education reduces employability for many.  

I am often reprimanded for writing incomprehensibly. There is no one to complain about the jargon-ridden incomprehensibility of children’s textbooks in this subaltern world.

Because they aren't incomprehensible at all.  

If I want you to understand the complete opacity of that absurd history lesson about ‘‘National Liberation Struggles in Many Countries,’’ devised by some state functionary at the Ministry of Education, for example, I would have to take most of you through an intensive Bengali lesson so that you are able to assess different levels of the language.

Not for Indians. We could quote similar instances in our own vernacular languages. But, the Sanskritized version of the language is helpful.  

Without venturing up to that perilous necessity, I will simply recapitulate: first, the culture of responsibility is corrupted. The effort is to learn it with patience from below and to keep trying to suture it to the imagined felicitous subject of universal human rights.

That is a wasted effort. Suppose you go to a poverty stricken part of India and want to implement the fundamental right to education. How do you go about it? The answer is you work with local lawyers, sarpanches, etc to compile evidence and then find an energetic 'neta' on the rise to push things along. The fact is, if you are seen to have successfully provided an entitlement, you get votes. That's how democracy functions.  

Second, the education system is a corrupt ruin of the colonial model.

Which was good enough but didn't have a big enough budget. Sadly, the Indians didn't want to pay taxes (or, in the case of Congress, rely on the cess on alcohol) so as to fund universal education. Still, in Travancore, it was only payment to poorer parents to send their kids to school which enabled near universal coverage.  

The effort is persistently to undo it, to teach the habit of democratic civility.

There is no such thing. Democracy means being able to say that Vance fucks his sofa.  

Third, to teach these habits, with responsibility to the corrupted culture, is different from children’s indoctrination into nationalism, resistance-talk, identitarianism. I leave this essay with the sense that the material about the rural teaching is not in the acceptable mode of information retrieval.

It is ignorant nonsense.  

Here are some nice abstract seemingly fighting words: Generative politics is by no means limited to the formal political sphere but spans a range of domains where political questions arise and must be responded to. Active trust is closely bound up with such a conception. . . .

This is gibberish.  The fact is, Bangladesh has just witnessed a student-led revolution. 'Generative politics', it turned out, did not involve building consensus. It involved kicking out the kleptocrats who kept shooting protesters. 

No longer depending on pregiven alignments, it is more contingent, and contextual, than most earlier forms of trust relations.

It is bullshit.  

It does not necessarily imply equality, but it is not compatible with deference arising from traditional forms of status.

Don't be polite to Granny. Call her a slut.  

If you want to attempt to bring this about—for the sake of a global justice to come—hands on—you begin in something like what I have described in this essay.

No. You do what smart people have already done or are doing. If you are interested in the education of tribal girls, learn from President Murmu, not Gayatri Spivak or Amartya Sen.  

I am so irreligious that atheism seems a religion to me. But I now understand why fundamentalists of all kinds have succeeded best in the teaching of the poor—for the greater glory of God.

Not in America. This silly woman hasn't heard of 'separation of Church and State'. In France, the Church was pushed out of Schools in 1904.  

One needs some sort of ‘‘licensed lunacy’’ (Orlando Patterson’s phrase) from some transcendental Other to develop the sort of ruthless commitment that can undermine the sense that one is better than those who are being helped, that the ability to manage a complicated life support system is the same as being civilized.

No. One just needs to imitate what smart and successful people, in your line of work, have done.  

But I am influenced by deconstruction and for me, radical alterity cannot be named ‘‘God,’’ in any language.

Why not? It has in fact been called that by people like Buber.  

Indeed, the name of ‘‘man’’ in ‘‘human’’ rights (or the name of ‘‘woman’’ in ‘‘women’s rights are human rights’’) will continue to trouble me.

Why not 'cat' instead? Hucat. Wocat.  Would that be less troubling for Spivak? I hope so. 

‘‘Licensed lunacy in the name of the unnamable other,’’ then.

Credentialized stupidity pretending to be some sort of educational Mother Theresa. 

It took me this long to explain this incomprehensible phrase. Yet the efforts I have described may be the only recourse for a future to come when the reasonable righting of wrongs will not inevitably be the manifest destiny of groups that remain poised to right them; when wrongs will not proliferate with unsurprising regularity.

Spivak is an Indian citizen. Plenty of wrongs- e.g. bonded labor, untouchability, deaths by starvation- have been righted by Indian people. Some have risen greatly in power or wealth or both power and wealth. Most don't know much English and have zero interest in Continental philosophy. But they do want their kids to study STEM subjects. Meanwhile, the country needs to find a way to raise the participation rate for women while finding some way to get jobless graduates onto good career paths in the organized sector. 

One possibility is a 'right to work' similar to the right to education. Here the Government becomes the employer of last resort. This would be an extension of MNREGA (the rural employment scheme) to cover the precariously middle class.