Spivak's Subaltern

The Left gave up the ghost in the Eighties, the decade of Thatcher and Reagan and Mitterand and Kohl and the disastrous Gorbachev. But the intellectual arguments which overpowered the Left had received mathematical rigour twenty or more years previously. 'Radical criticism'' was right wing. It aimed at rolling back the expanded post-war state. It succeeded because it was incentive compatible and therefore prescriptive. What this means is that its votaries could make self-regarding arguments which it was Socially beneficial to accept. By contrast, Leftists were clamouring for their own throats to be slit for no good reason.

As the Left retreated from actual politics, the Campus appeared a good escape from reality. Academics who had previously pretended to be mere fellow travellers, or useful idiots, were emboldened to cast lots for the mantle of a zombie Radicalism of an entirely gestural kind.

Spivak was from West Bengal- where a gerontocratic Left Front Government had entrenched itself through pure gangsterism. Still, it represented a last piece of red on the map and this gave her an enviable salience. However, Bengalis were too stupid to make any sort of criticism, radical or otherwise. All they could do is pretend they were deeply versed in Western literary culture so as to get tokenist employment.

Consider the opening of Spivak's famous 'Can the subaltern speak'. Thirty years later, how does it stand up?

Some of the most radical criticism coming out of the West today is the result of an interested desire to conserve the subject of the West, or the West as Subject.

What 'radical criticism' came out of the West in the late Eighties? None.  This was the period of the 'Great Moderation' as inflationary bias was contained. Markets triumphed. Unions crumbled. Trotskyites reinvented themselves as Straussian neo-cons. The West was indeed 'conserved' as a Hegelian Subject- but by Fukuyama. But then Kojeve himself was a Eurocrat. The West Coast Straussians and the Libertarians became the flag bearers for Social Liberalism.

The theory of pluralized 'subject-effects' gives an illusion of undermining subjective sovereignty while often providing a cover for this subject of knowledge.

There is no theory of 'subject-effects'. It does not give rise to any illusion. It is obvious nonsense.
Elsewhere Spivak writes- ' A subject-effect can be briefly plotted as follows: that which seems to operate as a subject may be part of an immense discontinuous network … of strands that may be termed politics, ideology, economics, history, sexuality, language, and so on. … Different knottings and configurations of these strands, determined by heterogeneous determinations which are themselves dependent upon myriad circumstances, produce the effect of an operating subject. Yet the continuist and homogenist deliberative consciousness symptomatically requires a continuous and homogeneous cause for this effect and thus posits a sovereign and determining subject.' How is this shite a 'brief plotting' of anything? It is empty verbiage. No effect of an 'operating subject' arises. A bullshitting subject, yes which is why Literary Theory is now considered a bullshit subject.

Although the history of Europe as Subject is narrativized by the law, political economy and ideology of the West, this concealed Subject pretends it has 'no geo-political determinations'.

Sheer nonsense. Europe was a Hegelian subject for Eurocrats like Kojeve. Germany was central to its project. But in Germany, Lawyers were more important than Economists. 'Geo-political determinations'- mountains and rivers- had created different legal regimens. However, each such legal regime had its own path to harmonisation. Kojeve's Europe did come into existence. There was a brief period when it was expansionary and sought to establish an 'ordo-liberal', rules based World Order. That failed. It may be that in the future Europe will seek to define itself in the manner of a Huntingdon, not a Fukuyama.

What Spivak is saying is that Europe had imposed its way of thinking on other parts of the globe. This isn't true at all. It is true there were Communist parties in Asia which, at one time, took their orders from White men in Europe. But those Communist parties lost salience.

Some Bengali and other diaspora pedants pretended to be 'Europeanists' and also that they had some political role in their own countries. They didn't. Consider Spivak's heroine, Mahashweta Devi. In the end she endorsed Narendra Modi and Mamta Bannerjee. Similarly, Jan Myrdal's supposedly 'radical' poet Sri Sri was a fan of the Emergency and came out as a supporter of NTR and YSR and so forth.

No Westerner has ever said 'this is the way we do things. You should too.' Instead they say, 'We are able to do things this way because we've progressed so much over the centuries. You probably can't do things the same way.' Conor Cruise O'Brien, for example, told the Indian historians that they'd be better off giving Foucault and such like a miss. Just concentrate on the basics. Get your facts straight. Write clear prose. O'Brien was right. India has ended up importing historians. Nobody reads Ranajit Guha or even Romilla Thapar. We prefer John Keay or Patrick French. William Darlymple- not some ex-pat Chatterbox- is the eminence grise of Anglo-Indian letters.  Why? These guys don't tell stupid, boring, anti-national, lies. Instead, they work hard to hold their readers' attention.

The much-publicized critique of the sovereign subject thus actually inaugurates a Subject. I will argue for this conclusion by considering a text by two great practitioners of the critique: 'Intellectuals and power: a conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze'.

A sovereign subject can't be critiqued any more than a cat can be critiqued. No subject is inaugurated when I prove, using Arrow's theorem, that cats can't exist. Why? Cats are indifferent to my stupid blog posts. Sovereign subjects, similarly, ignore shitheads who say they aren't really sovereign because they have been brainwashed by the Media which is controlled by Lizard people from the Planet V.
Spivak was writing at a time when  everyone knew that Foucault and Deleuze had fucked up. They weren't in the vanguard of anything. They had made fools of themselves by jumping on the '68 bandwagon and thinking they could inherit the mantle of a Sartre. But Sartre had been in the Resistance. He wrote well. He won a Nobel for literature- though, no doubt, he wrote nonsense in the Sixties because he was strung out on speed. Still, he and the Beaver had chosen the right side in 1941. Deleuze and Foucault hadn't in '68.

Foucault was too stupid to wear a condom when visiting bath-houses. He never acknowledged he had AIDS. The guy literally 'died of ignorance'- as the slogan was at that time. Deleuze and Guatarri were wrong about both Capitalism and Schizophrenia. This had become obvious to all by the time Spivak wrote this. With Schizophrenia, medication is the way to go. Foucault's psychiatrist had actually done some useful work on Lithium salts. Then the Maoists drove him out of the profession. He became an Academician on the basis of his French prose.

With Capitalism, it is mathematics not Hegelian shite which has utility. Delueze ultimately is a Spinozan. Foucault was simply a boring nutter with a poor grasp of even French history. They weren't 'practitioners' of anything save a paranoid type of pedantry.

Why did they at one time pretend to be interested in 'the other'? The answer is that the French Communist party was a plausible contender for Power. A militant section within it had launched a mass contact initiative inspired by Mao's Cultural Revolution. However, these entryists could not report truthfully on what they found- viz. race trumped class. Extremist tactics put off older workers. But even the young were more concerned with bread and butter issues than some delusional 'worker's control'.

I have chosen this friendly exchange between two activist philosophers of history because it undoes the opposition between authoritative theoretical production and the unguarded practice of conversation, enabling one to glimpse the track of ideology.

How? Neither was capable of 'authoritative theoretical production'- there is a Marxist State or counter-State but no Foucauldian or Deleuzian State or insurgency. No student of Foucault or Deleuze quit School to infiltrate the Trade Union movement. Why? These were confused men who wrote in a confusing way who, though displaying some aleatory preciousness of style, had nothing substantive to say. At best, they reprocessed canonical texts by 'strong' authors into a bland homogeneous gruel that could be spoon fed in Graduate School to the very very stupid.

Deleuze pays a back handed compliment to Foucault by saying- he was the first to show 'the indignity of speaking for others.' But this means Foucault can represent nothing but himself. He can't formulate any reform because reform is impossible. Why?
Delueze says- 'French capitalism now relies on a "margin" of unemployment and has abandoned the liberal and paternal mask that promised full employment. In this perspective, we begin to see the unity of the forms of repression: restrictions on immigration, once it is acknowledged that the most difficult and thankless jobs go to immigrant workers-repression in the factories, because the French must reacquire the "taste" for increasingly harder work;'. Capitalists extract surplus value from workers. They compete with each other to do so. Thus, there would be full employment provided no Malthusian dilemma exists and migration is restricted. So, what is really happening is that Capitalists are bringing in workers from poorer countries to under-cut wages and create a 'taste' for hard work by mimetic means.

Neither Foucault not Deleuze are going to paint themselves as bad guys by coming out against migration. But this is the only 'reform' which doesn't involve the 'indignity of speaking for others' because it is actually truthful and based on Price Equation kin-selective altruism.

Foucault excuses himself from History by pretending he doesn't understand what Power is. He says that Marx discovered what exploitation was but nobody has as yet made a similar discovery about Power. 

The conclusion both Foucault and Deleuze come to is the usual Liberal one viz. everybody has the right to challenge any application of power involving themselves. But this can be done by the market provided there is free exit and entry. It is in the interest of market based 'Tiebout models' to give 'Voice'. 

But, this solution suffers from the same problem as the Maoist solution. What of the migrant? What happens to rents if entry or exit is unrestricted? What happens to Tiebout model rights if there is an influx, for exogenous reasons, of those with different preferences? Take the homosexual living in a Tower block which increasingly houses refugees from the Middle East. The police and the courts may recognise his rights but his neighbours might not. In the end, however saintly this person is, he or she may have to call for violent homophobes to be incarcerated or deported.

Delueze and Foucault, engaging in a spot of mutual back-slapping in 1972, don't have to speak plainly. At the time it was thought that voluntary repatriation would work. Furthermore, primary producers were doing well. It made sense to think that Algerians and Senegalese and so on would go home. Indeed, had those countries pursued sensible economic policies, many might well have done so. 

What 'track of ideology', other than a common-sense nativism, can we glimpse in this 'unguarded practice of conversation'? Any thing we please provided we put it there ourselves. Two men are talking. If our ideology is that men are evil and only talk about fucking over women then that's what we will hear even if we don't know what language they are speaking.

The participants in this conversation emphasize the most important contributions of French poststructuralist theory: first, that the networks of power/desire/interest are so heterogeneous, that their reduction to a coherent narrative is counterproductive - a persistent critique is needed;

So, French post-structuralist theory is worthless. It can't 'factorise' anything. It does not lower complexity nor render computation more tractable. It failed and everybody will immediately realise it had failed if it attempts to present a 'coherent narrative'.

Suppose I have been arrested for killing and eating a bunch of kindergarten kids. My narrative is that I wanted to fuck one specific one while eating another and making the rest watch. However I ended up getting carried away and just killed and ate the whole bunch of them.  Even though my network of 'power/desire/interest' was heterogenous, I treated the kids in a homogeneous manner. Thus I should be appropriately compensated by the Court.

My lawyer, however, may feel that it would be counterproductive for me to present this 'coherent narrative'. I should just sit drooling silently in a corner of my cage while my lawyer enters a plea of diminished responsibility. The subaltern shouldn't speak if it is essentially vicious and criminal by nature. It should plead the Fifth. But, it still needs a good lawyer.

and second, that intellectuals must attempt to disclose and know the discourse of society's Other.

Why? Suppose we live under an apartheid regime of the South African type. As intellectuals, we have the chance to talk to the oppressed section of society. They, quite naturally, say things like 'I want to beat my oppressor the way I've been beaten', or even 'I want to rape their wives and children the way they raped my wives and children'.
What possible good would it do to 'disclose' this 'discourse of Society's other'?

In 1972, Foucault and Deleuze were considered intellectuals because it wasn't yet obvious that they represented failed political and epistemic research programs. Nevertheless, what they are saying is- 'let's keep quiet about our failure. It would be counterproductive to present our own narrative because it is so obviously fucked in the head. Instead, lets pretend we are speaking for disadvantaged people. At least some of them are bound to be as crazy as shit because of all the suffering they have undergone. Since we too are crazy as shit, we can win plaudits for our paranoid drivel by pretending that it issues from some sullen and surd subaltern.'

Anyway, neither Foucault nor Deleuze is proposing actually learning Arabic or Vietnamese or whatever and talking to these migrants who, Deleuze tells us, are driving down wages and thus causing increased exploitation of the French working class.

Yet the two systematically ignore the question of ideology and their own implication in intellectual and economic history

 In other words, these two white men aren't saying to each other 'You are a white man! Go fuck yourself you evil bastard! Only a brown woman- viz. Spivak- should be heard or seen.' This fact proves those white men were evil bastards. Intellectual and economic history is stuff evil bastards produce. That's Spivak's ideology.

Although one of its chief presuppositions is the critique of the sovereign subject, the conversation between Foucault and Deleuze is framed by two monolithic and anonymous subjects-in-revolution: 'A Maoist' (FD, p. 205) and 'the workers' struggle' (FD, p.217).

Deleuze and Foucault were speaking 4 years after the student unrest of '68 before which De Gaulle initially fled. At that time the ageing Sartre had been compared to Voltaire- 'one can't arrest Voltaire' as the great man said. However, both the workers and the students subsequently turned against 'Maoist' tactics. Left terror was defeated. I recall 'free Astrid Proll' graffiti in North London in '78. But, a year later, it was Thatcher who got 'Dagenham Man's' vote.

By the time Spivak got in on the act, Maoism had been repudiated everywhere. Even in India, the Naxals were merely running an extortion racket. This doesn't faze her any. Somewhere, at some time, two men talked. Since they were white, regardless of anything they actually said, it must be the case that we can discern a common ideology- viz. that white men are evil bastards intent only on fucking over brown women.

Intellectuals, however, are named and differentiated; moreover, a Chinese Maoism is nowhere operative. Maoism here simply creates an aura of narrative specificity, which would be a harmless rhetorical banality were it not that the innocent appropriation of the proper name 'Maoism' for the eccentric phenomenon of French intellectual 'Maoism' and subsequent 'New Philosophy' symptomatically renders 'Asia' transparent. 

Chinese Maoism thought it was universal. It viewed fellow-travelling pedants as 'useful idiots'- in Lenin's phrase. Spivak is Bengali. China is even  more opaque to her than it was to M.N. Roy. French Maoism was crazy shit but then, as the Chinese soon decided, so was Chinese Maoism.

Deleuze's reference to the workers' struggle is equally problematic; it is obviously a genuflection: 'We are unable to touch [power] in any point of its application without finding ourselves confronted by this diffuse mass, so that we are necessarily led ... to the desire to blow it up completely. Every partial revolutionary attack or defense is linked in this way to the workers' struggle' (FD, p. 217). The apparent banality signals a disavowal. The statement ignores the international division of labor, a gesture that often marks poststructuralist political theory. 

The 'international division of labour' led to two oil shocks which directly led to deregulation of financial markets because the Oil producers would only recycle their surpluses through free markets where they got value for money. But, this meant Western governments could no longer use inflation to contain unemployment. In France there was some Maoist labour militancy famously sponsored by Sartre. But it failed. Peugot or Renault workers didn't want to kill their managers. They wanted more money. During the famous 'Battle of Poissy' National Front thugs fought Leftists. It became obvious that racial fault lines defeated class solidarity, Now the National Front is the main rival of the French Centre. The Left has simply thrown in the towel.

This needn't have happened. Communist parties ought to have benefited from the increasing impotence of the Keynesian State. However, they would have had to kill off their lunatic fringe in order to achieve this. In Bengal, the CPM was prepared to kill the Naxals and its superior gangsterism did entrench it for three decades. However, in the mid Nineties, when it could have made a bid for National salience, it backed down. It was too old and fixed in its ways.

Still, at the time Spivak wrote this, Bengal had a Communist government whereas France's Mitterrand, elected with Communist support, had taken a Rightist path. Thus, this brown woman was in a good position to rub Whitey's nose in it. Sadly, she failed because Foucault and Deluze had resiled from their Maoism long ago.

The invocation of the workers' struggle is baleful in its very innocence; it is incapable of dealing with global capitalism: the subject-production of worker and unemployed within nationstate ideologies in its Center; the increasing subtraction of the working class in the Periphery from the realization of surplus value and thus from 'humanistic' training in consumerism; and the large-scale presence of paracapitalist labor as well as the heterogeneous structural status of agriculture in the Periphery. Ignoring the international division of labor; rendering 'Asia' (and on occasion 'Africa') transparent (unless the subject is ostensibly the 'Third World'); reestablishing the legal subject of socialized capital - these are problems as common to much poststructuralist as to structuralist theory. Why should such occlusions be sanctioned in precisely those intellectuals who are our best prophets of heterogeneity and the Other?

French intellectuals aren't 'prophets of heterogeneity'. France, as Edmund Burke enviously noted, is synoecist. In this case they were simply repackaging a failed German phenomenological program for export to the gullible Americans. Derrida, it will be remembered, was Harvard's practical joke on the Yale English Department.

Spivak, in the eighties, might have believed that the global south would get poorer because of the 'international division of labour'. We know different. China embraced the market and shifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. How? Through international trade and the division of labour.

The link to the workers' struggle is located in the desire to blow up power at any point of its application. This site is apparently based on a simple valorization of any desire destructive of any power. Walter Benjamin comments on Baudelaire's comparable politics by way of quotations from Marx: Marx continues in his description of the conspirateurs de profession as follows: '... They have no other aim but the immediate one of overthrowing the existing government, and they profoundly despise the more theoretical enlightenment of the workers as to their class interests. Thus their anger not proletarian but plebian at the habits noirs (black coats), the more or less educated people who represent [vertreten] that side of the movement and of whom they can never become entirely independent, as they cannot of the official representatives [Reprasentanten] of the party.' Baudelaire's political insights do not go fundamentally beyond the insights of these professional conspirators .... He could perhaps have made Flaubert's statement, 'Of all of politics I understand only one thing: the revolt', his own.  The link to the workers' struggle is located, simply, in desire. Elsewhere, Deleuze and Guattari have attempted an alternative definition of desire, revising the one offered by psychoanalysis: 'Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is lacking desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject except by repression. Desire and its object are a unity: it is the machine, as a machine of a machine. Desire is machine, the object of desire also a connected machine, so that the product is lifted from the process of producing and something detaches itself from producing to product and gives a leftover to the vagabond, nomad subject.

Why could Spivak not see that Baudelaire or Flaubert or Deleuze weren't Economists? They were writing poetically- expressing themselves within a particular elite literary tradition.
Psychoanalysis, by contrast, was a money making scheme now known to be larcenous.

The mass-contact movement of the French Left could have succeeded. The Communists, not the Socialists, could have taken power in the Eighties. Some Professors would have been showered with undeserved largesse. Others would have cried their little eyes out.
Little else would have changed.

In 1987, Roop Kunwar committed suttee and was idolised by hundreds of thousands. J.D.M Derrett- an eccentric lawyer who was already losing his marbles- wrote something silly in response. Spivak's magpie mind picked up on it.

If we remember that the British boasted of their absolute equity toward and noninterference with native custom/law, an invocation of this sanctioned transgression of the letter for the sake of the spirit may be read in J.D.M. Derrett's remark: 'The very first legislation upon Hindu Law was carried through without the assent of a single Hindu.' The legislation is not named here. The next sentence, where the measure is named, is equally interesting if one considers the implications of the survival of a colonially established 'good' society after decolonization: 'The recurrence of sati in independent India is probably an obscurantist revival which cannot long survive even in a very backward part of the country.'

Derrett was wrong about British India just as he was wrong about 'Blemmya'. British legislation, delegated or otherwise, receives the assent of the Crown in Parliament. No single Hindu or Anglican or Confucian assents to it. In the case of Laws affecting Hindus or Anglicans or Confucians, Hindus or Anglicans or Confucians are consulted. Assent is something purely formal. It is a legal fiction. Blemmya too are a fiction. There is no race which lacks a head.

As a Bengali, Spivak knows very well what role Raja Ramohan Roy played in lobbying Westminster re. Suttee. Why does she endorse a silly barrister like Derrett?

The leap of suttee from private to public has a clear and complex relationship with the changeover from a mercantile and commercial to a territorial and administrative British presence;

This is sheer nonsense. It was only after fifty years of 'territorial and administrative' British presence- years during which an enormous surplus had been extracted from a once 'Golden' Bengal- that people like Raja Ramohan Roy (the notional ambassador of the Moghul Emperor in whose name the Company exercised authority) got this sort of legislation passed so as to shore up their own position vis a vis their more orthodox cousins.

it can be followed in correspondence among the police stations, the lower and higher courts, the courts of directors, the prince regent's court, and the like.

No it can't. Such correspondence makes no mention of 'the changeover from a mercantile and commercial' British presence to anything else. Why? That changeover had happened long ago.

(It is interesting to note that, from the point of view of the native 'colonial subject' , also emergent from the feudalism-capitalism transition, sati is a signifier with the reverse social charge: 'Groups rendered psychologically marginal by their exposure to Western impact ... had come under pressure to demonstrate, to others as well as to themselves, their ritual purity and allegiance to traditional high culture. To many of them sati became an important proof of their conformity to older norms at a time when these norms had become shaky within.'

This is sheer lunacy. What do you do with a widow? Give her a share of the inheritance? Fuck that! Sell her to a brothel if you can. Keep her around as a servant otherwise. Burn her only if her people don't want to see her in a brothel nor as a servant nor wish to take her back into their own homes.
The reason poor Brahmins- who supplied brides to wealthier families regardless of caste (which is why many Kayasthas and Kshatriyas have Brahmin maternal ancestry)- wanted inheritance rights for widows was because these could be used to finance the education of male siblings. Wealthy families didn't mind paying the paltry, statutory, amount which, however, was crucial for the very poor families which supplied them daughters.
Consider the Tagore family. They were stigmatised as 'PirAli' because one branch had been forcibly converted to Islam. That's why they had to take brides from poor families. It is also the reason sons had to obey their fathers. Their in-laws were in no position to help them. Sharat's 'Devdas' captures the social dynamics involved. Paro's family 'sells brides'. Devdas's takes dowry. True, Devdas could elope with Paro and go make his fortune in Rangoon. But, he's too much of a wimp. He drinks himself to death, like that Prince of Cooch Bihar who wasn't allowed to marry an English music hall artiste.
Purdah and feet-binding and other such female specific injustices are costly signals creating a separating equilibrium from which rents can be derived. Though individually rational, they are collectively irrational. It makes sense to replace costly signals of an inutile type with screening or signalling devices- like higher education- which may have some utility. That is the story of what happened to suttee and feet-binding. The veil and female genital mutilation however have made a comeback. Why? They may appear to genuinely constrain female sexuality. The Bohras of India are well educated and quite wealthy. Yet, f.g.m seems to be rising in their community. Recently, a 44 year old female doctor, who was born in Washington, was arrested by American authorities for cutting little girls.

Interestingly, Bohra women are now prepared to appeal to Narendra Modi- the Hindu Prime Minister of India- to outlaw the practice in the same manner that triple talaq has been outlawed.
It seems that the 'subaltern' has no difficulty speaking for itself and demanding that the powerful do the needful. There is no indignity in this sort of 'speaking for others'.

Why is Spivak so worked up about Suttee? The answer is that there was a guy called Edward Thompson who attached himself to Tagore but whose book about him wasn't fulsome enough for Bengali tastes. Also the guy taught Bengali to ICS probationers thus taking the food out of the mouths of fellow Bengalis. Thompson probably wasn't very good at Bengali. He translates 'arup' as 'ugly'. Still, he had no power save by association with the I.N.C.

Consider Thompson's praise for General Charles Hervey's appreciation of the problem of sati: 'Hervey has a passage which brings out the pity of a system which looked only for prettiness and constancy in woman. He obtained the names of satis who had died on the pyres of Bikanir Rajas; they were such names as: "Ray Queen, Sun-ray, Love's Delight, Garland, Virtue Found, Echo, Soft Eye, Comfort, Moonbeam, Love-lorn, Dear Heart, Eye-play, Arbour-born, Smile, Love-bud, Glad Omen, Mist-clad, or Cloud-sprung the last a favourite name.'" Once again, imposing the upper-class Victorian's typical demands upon 'his woman'(his preferred phrase), Thompson appropriates the Hindu woman as his to save against the 'system'. Bikaner is in Rajasthan; and any discussion of widow-burnings of Rajasthan, especially within the ruling class, was intimately linked to the positive or negative construction of Hindu (or Aryan) communalism. A look at the pathetically misspelled names of the satis of the artisanal, peasant, village-priestly, moneylender, clerical and comparable social groups in Bengal, where satis were most common, would not have yielded such a harvest (Thompson's preferred adjective for Bengalis is 'imbecilic'). Or perhaps it would. There is no more dangerous pastime than transposing proper names into common nouns, translating them, and using them as sociological evidence. I attempted to reconstruct the names on that list and began to feel Hervey-Thompson's arrogance. What, for instance', might 'Comfort' have been? Was it 'Shanti'?

WTF! Even non Indian readers of TS Eliot know that 'Shanti' means Peace. 'Comfort' may have been 'Kalyani'.

Spivak thinks that poor Bengalis gave their daughters ugly names because, obviously, nice names cost money. Only rich Marwaris can afford nice names.
Would it surprise Spivak to learn that you can name your kid anything you like? There is no charge. Also, why speak of Bengali names as 'pathetically misspelled'? The fact is there were regional differences in speech which were reflected in orthography. 

Thompson didn't really say Bengalis are imbecilic. It was not in his interest to do so. His own claim to fame was his association with Tagore and his supposed knowledge of Bengali. He disapproved of Red Oleanders- which, truth be told, is unreadable shite- and this still angers Bengalis more particularly because it is supposed to represent a Leftward shift of their great poet.

Thompson wrote a lot and his book on Suttee is nothing special and had and has no importance.

Readers are reminded of the last line' of T. S. Eliot's Waste Land.

No they aren't! They know Shanti means Peace, not Comfort. Only Spivak is capable of such a mistake.

There the word bears the mark of one kind of stereotyping of India - the grandeur of the ecumenical Upanishads.

Nonsense! Eliot isn't talking about India. He is talking about the emptiness of life in modern, Western, cities.

Or was it 'Swasti'?

That can't be translated as Comfort. It means lucky, auspicious, fortunate etc. The Swastika is an auspicious symbol common to all Indic Religions. Buddhism spread its usage far and wide. Thus, it is Shramanic, not Brahmanic.

Readers are reminded of the swastika, the Brahmanic ritual mark of domestic comfort (as in 'God Bless Our Hornet) stereotyped into a criminal parody of Aryan hegemony.

Which readers? Not Indian ones- because they know Swasti doesn't mean 'Comfort'. Not foreign ones, because they don't know any Indian words at all. Only Spivak is guilty of these 'appropriations'. She projects her stupidity and ignorance onto the whole universe even though her mistake is of a wholly idiosyncratic sort.

Between these two appropriations, where is our pretty and constant burnt widow? The aura of the names owes more to writers like Edward FitzGerald, the 'translator' of the Rubayyat of Omar Khayyam who helped to construct a certain picture of the Oriental woman through the supposed 'objectivity' of translation, than to sociological exactitude. (Said's Orientalism, 1978, remains the authoritative text here.)

WTF? There is no Oriental woman in Khayyam.  The Saqi and Nadim are male as is, by convention, the beloved. Tom Moore wasn't translating anything. Nor was Edward Lawrence's 'Empire of the Nairs' which inspired Shelley. This type of romantic writing wasn't anthropological in any sense. Pierre Lotti, or Flaubert or even the early Mircea Eliade did write in that vein. So did Captain Burton- but that literature was suppressed in British India. Thus, it has no salience. Even 'Mother India' was written by an American Lesbian carefully briefed by British officials hoping to undermine American support for Indian independence.
There was only one occasion when the British made a political intervention in the name of protecting women. That was when a briefless barrister, Cornelia Sorabjee- a protege of Jowett & Florence Nightingale who had lost her heart to a married ICS officer and thus remained a spinster- succeeded in getting a Government job as a lawyer for the 'purdah-nasheen'. But she was chased out of India by purdah-nasheen women who reviled her for supporting the scurrilous 'Mother India'. The Brits paid for her to go on a lecture tour of America but it had no effect.
By contrast, the Brits made great play of protecting minorities and 'Scheduled Castes and Tribes' from the majority. Women did not feature. Why? They could speak for themselves. They did speak for themselves. They kicked the Brits out.

Spivak won't acknowledge this. Why? One white man, a long time ago, translated some Indian names into English. Then another white man- whom Leftist Bengalis dislike- quoted him about a century later. Fifty years later, Spivak is still hopping mad-

By this sort of reckoning, the translated proper names of a random collection of contemporary French philosophers or boards of directors of prestigious southern US corporations would give evidence of a ferocious investment in an archangelic and hagiocentric theocracy. Such sleights of pen can be perpetuated on 'common nouns' as well, but the proper name is most susceptible to the trick. And it is the British trick with sati that we are discussing. After such a taming of the subject, Thompson can write, under the heading 'The psychology of the "Sati" , , 'I had intended to try to examine this; but the truth is, it has ceased to seem a puzzle to me.,

Wow! The British played a trick on the Indians with the result that England was enriched and India despoiled. What was that trick? Those crafty Brits translated some Indian female names. They only did this once and nobody noticed but, by some strange magic, this retroactively created the British Raj.

 Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the 'third-world woman' caught between tradition and modernization.

Imperialism was patriarchal. There was no space between the two. Subject-constitution by the Raj was perfectly transparent and expressed in legal language. That's why the I.N.C was dominated by lawyers and characterised by constitutional discourse. 'Object formation' was Literary and was achieved in vernacular languages by poets and novelists and orators and so forth. That's why writers and poets played a big role in Social movements and also during periods of Political upheaval.

The 'figure of the woman' doesn't disappear at all. Why? Because women actually exist and their flourishing is essential for any sort of Human flourishing.

There has been no 'displaced figuration of the third-world woman'. Spivak can point to no example of any such thing. I can. It is her worthless gibberish.

These considerations would revise every detail of judgments that seem valid for a history of sexuality in the West: 'Such would be the property of repression, that which distinguishes it from the prohibitions maintained by simple penal law: repression functions well as a sentence to disappear, but also as an injunction to silence, affirmation of non-existence; and consequently states that of all this there is nothing to say, to see, to know.'

Spivak is quoting Foucault- a gay dude into S&M- who never came out of the closet. We know what he is getting at. It has nothing to do with Suttee because that's a public ceremony and has nothing to do with sex. It's about status or spirituality. The word 'maha-suttee' (great sati) means a nun.

What does Spivak think happened when a widow was drugged up and pushed onto the funeral pyre? Does she think the lady started masturbating? If so, okay, there may have been some 'injunction to silence' or 'affirmation of non-existence'.

Suppose I were forced to commit suttee after a shotgun marriage to Didi. I'd shit my pants. Hopefully, the cheering Trinamool workers assembled would preserve a tactful silence and so my incontinence would be erased from the historical record. This may be unfair to such amazing turds as I might produce. But, failure to appreciate my turds would not be my chief grievance with respect to the procedure.

The case of suttee as exemplum of the woman-in-imperialism would challenge and reconstruct this opposition between subject (law) and object-of-knowledge (repression) and mark the place of 'disappearance' with something other than silence and nonexistence, a violent aporia between subject and object status.

Suttee can't be an exemplum of the 'woman-in-imperialism' because it didn't exist in the British Empire. It had existed under the Mughals and their various assignees- including John Company.  There was no 'violent aporia' for any woman as a result of laws in this respect.

Sati as a woman's proper name is in fairly widespread use in India today.

Satya is a common man's name. Like Sati, it connotes Truthfulness. Sat is truth.

Naming a female infant 'a good wife' has its own proleptic irony,

As opposed to what? Naming her Lezza Ho?

and the irony is all the greater because this sense of the common noun is not the primary operator in the proper name.

Why? Are good wives or good husbands not truthful? Are they inveterate cheats and liars?

Behind the naming of the infant is the Sati of Hindu mythology, Durga in her manifestation as a good wife.

Does she have a manifestation as an evil bitch of a wife?

  In part of the story, Sati she is already called that, arrives at her father's court uninvited, in the absence, even, of an invitation for her divine husband Siva. Her father starts to abuse Siva and Sati dies in pain. Siva arrives in a fury and dances over the universe with Sati's corpse 

Oho! Now I get it. Spivak has seized upon the Suttee so as to dance the Charleston over the universe with that charred corpse.

What entitles her to do so? She can point to no suttees in her own family. But she did have a great aunt who hanged herself.

A young woman of sixteen or seventeen, Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri, hanged herself in her father's modest apartment in North Calcutta in 1926. The suicide was a puzzle since, as Bhuvaneswari was menstruating at the time, it was clearly not a case of illicit pregnancy. Nearly a decade later, it was discovered that she was a member of one of the many groups involved in the armed struggle for Indian independence. She had finally been entrusted with a political assassination. Unable to confront the task and yet aware of the practical need for trust, she killed herself. Bhuvaneswari had known that her death would be diagnosed as the outcome illegitimate passion. She had therefore waited for the onset of menstruation. While waiting, Bhuvaneswari, the brahmacarini who was no doubt looking forward to good wifehood, perhaps rewrote the social text of sati-suicide in an interventionist way. (One tentative explanation of her inexplicable act had been a possible melancholia brought on by her brother-in-Iaw's repeated taunts that she was too old to be not-yet-a-wife.) She generalized the sanctioned motive for female suicide by taking immense trouble to displace (not merely deny) in the physiological inscription of her body, its imprisonment within legitimate passion by a single male. In the immediate context, her act became absurd, a case of delirium rather than sanity. The displacing gesture - waiting for menstruation - is at first a reversal of the interdict against a menstruating widow's right to imollate herself; the unclean widow must wait, publicly, until the cleansing bath of the fourth day, when she is no longer menstruating, in order to claim her dubious privilege. 

A girl who hangs herself might miscarry and bleed. After death, all blood flow, including menstrual flow ceases. When cutting down a hanged woman nobody is going to notice the condition of her genitals. Later, the coroner would look for signs of sexual intercourse. That's what matters. A girl who has been raped or seduced might well kill herself even if not pregnant. Why? She is probably being pressured into more sex. She will be passed around the neighbourhood and finally end up in a brothel.

Traditionally, because most parts of India have high pathogen stress, Hindus have had restrictions of a hygienic kind, in relation to menstruation, which we now know to be unwarranted.

Suttee is about burning yourself, not hanging yourself. Fire purifies. Drowning too has merit- though there is a chance that the body won't be recovered or properly identified. Hanging oneself at home, however, has a different impact on the family. Spivak mentions a brother-in-law who had been taunting and teasing the girl. The reason Spivak gives for the suicide- viz. that the girl had been entrusted with an assassination- is foolish. Guns were in short supply. They wouldn't be entrusted to a teenager. Furthermore, if she had to kill herself so as to reassure her comrades that she wasn't going to turn informer, she could have thrown herself under a train. There was no need to horrify and traumatise her own family.

Spivak says her Aunty waited till she was on the rag before hanging herself. How does Spivak know? Suppose I've been entrusted with an assassination. I have to kill myself before the date assigned, otherwise the rest of the gang might have qualms about my trustworthiness. I can't hang about waiting for my period but must get busy with the noose already.

One final point. In 1926, Calcutta witnessed the first big Hindu-Muslim riots. The British had lost salience. Political assassination was passe. Knifing people, or beating them to death with lathis, was the cool new fad. Sadly, women weren't greatly enthused by this activity. Why? Well, at that time they were poorly placed to profit by Municipal corruption. Thankfully, India has made great strides in female empowerment since then. Thus, post-Godhra, a female Doctor was found guilty of inciting mob violence against Muslims. She came from a refugee family. Despite being a senior Minister in the State, the Govt. of Gujerat asked for the death penalty in her case. Sadly, it was later discovered that all the evidence against her was fabricated. She was saving lives in a hospital, not running around handing out swords. Shame, but there it is.

In this reading, Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri's suicide is an unemphatic, ad hoc, subaltern rewriting of the social text of sati-suicide as much as the hegemonic account of the blazing, fighting, familial Durga.

Spivak thinks her aunty was a revolutionary who identified Durga with Hindu nationalism. Fair enough. Unfortunately, her aunty was a shite revolutionary who hanged herself. This isn't a 'subaltern rewriting' of anything. It is a pathetic failure to inscribe oneself in the annals of history.

Sati, the Truth, is devoted to the Lord. It burns itself up where the Lord is derided. A revolutionary too is devoted to a Truth and sacrifices life and limb in that cause. What Truth was this girl dedicated to? As far as her family knew, she'd killed herself to put her brother-in-law's nose out of joint. This is not Suttee, it is stupidity.

The emergent dissenting possibilities of that hegemonic account of the fighting mother are well documented and popularly well remembered through the discourse of the male leaders and participants in the independence movement. The subaltern as female cannot be heard or read.

Because it keeps hanging itself coz brother-in-law was mean to it.

I know of Bhuvaneswari's life and death through family connections. Before investigating them more thoroughly, I asked a Bengali woman, a philosopher and Sanskritist whose early intellectual production is almost identical to mine, to start the process.

Spivak went to the same school as this lady. She doesn't say 'we studied together'. Why? Because women can't study. Scholarship is 'produced' in them by some alien agency. Men aren't the object of 'intellectual production'. They say 'I studied with so and so at such and such College' not 'me and him were intellectually produced by such and such College'.

Two responses: (a) Why, when her two sisters, Saileswari and Raseswari, led such full and wonderful lives, are you interested in the hapless Bhuvaneswari? (b) I asked her nieces. It appears that it was a case of illicit love.

So a kid was being diddled by her brother in law or some other such cad.  Her sisters were smart and did well. Later, after Bina Das's failed assassination bid in 1932, a convenient discovery of Aunty's revolutionary pedigree was made. It was obvious nonsense. There was no revolutionary cell in North Calcutta in 1926 which would have been irresponsible enough to recruit a teenager.
 There was a female Jugantar type women's organisation- the Chattri Sangha- set up in 1928 which got involved in violence from 1930 onward, most notably in Chittagong. Its Calcutta membership was better educated and older. Its martyrs tended to live independently- earning money as teachers or running women's hostels etc. These girls trained themselves in martial arts, shooting guns, operating bomb factories- one even learned to fly a plane. Bina Das tried to shoot the Governor.  Her sister wrote a book Spivak could have consulted. These women could and did speak for themselves. Their courageous deeds inspired many. Some joined mainstream politics and, like Bina, were elected to the Legislature. In no way where they inferior to male revolutionaries.

Why did Spivak not ask a female revolutionary of the period about her aunt? Why ask some Sanskrit professor? The Chattri Sangha was not some hole-in-the-corner affair. Over a hundred female revolutionaries of the period have been commemorated.

On the other hand, a Sanskritist would have quoted to Spivak, the Smarta text which says that failure to marry off a girl before she reaches her menses is to cause the oblation to the ancestors to be polluted by menstrual blood. The girl hanged herself while on the rag to send the message to her parents that they should have married her off, not insisted she finish school.

 If Spivak had made inquiries in Bengal, she would have found out that Bengali women were courageous and clear thinkers. They could and did speak. 

I have attempted to use and go beyond Derridean deconstruction, which I do not celebrate as feminism as such.

Derrida's deconstruction did not consist in just writing any random shite that came into his head. He was quite a good literary critic, smarter, not dumber, than most.

However, in the context of the problematic I have addressed, I find his morphology

Deconstruction can't have a morphology. If it did, it would be Constructivist. Moreover it could 'recover origins'.

much more painstaking and useful than Foucault's and Deleuze's immediate, substantive involvement with more 'political' issues- the latter's invitation to 'become woman' - which can make their influence more dangerous for the US academic as enthusiastic radical.

In the 1972 conversation, Foucault & Deleuze are supporting every protest movement, including feminist ones. Derrida- not so much.

Derrida marks radical critique with the danger of appropriating the other by assimilation.

Sure. The guy was Jewish. Radical Critique had swung round to anti-semitism once again. Thus he was more circumspect.

He reads catachresis at the origin.

In which case it can't be the origin. It is the later linguistic usage which represents catachresis. 

He calls for a rewriting of the utopian structural impulse as 'rendering delirious that interior voice that is the voice of the other in us'.

So, if the voice of the other in us says 'stop farting' we should render it so delirious that it gets an orgasm sniffing our farts. But people stop inviting us to parties because of our stinky flatulence. Sad.  

I must here acknowledge a long-term usefulness in Jacques Derrida which I seem no longer to find in the authors of The History of Sexuality and Mille Plateaux.  The subaltern cannot speak.

Why is this useful to Spivak? The answer is that if poor Bengali women can't speak- or become C.M like Mamta- then Spivak gains importance by speaking for them. Thus Derrida is useful to her. But she herself is useless.  

There is no virtue in global laundry lists with 'woman' as a pious item.

Virtue signalling is not virtuous- true enough. 

Representation has not withered away. The female intellectual as intellectual has a circumscribed task which she must not disown with a flourish. 

Why not? Can't her 'intellectual production' be re-tooled so that she can flounce around disowning her circumscribed or circumcised tasks with a flourish?

Why does Spivak think women are utterly shite? Her essay on Jane Eyre gives us a clue. Apparently, Spivak was forced to read Charlotte Bronte for her job. Charlotte Bronte was a woman. Thus she was subaltern. Subalterns can't speak or write. Fuck you Bronte for writing a book which people are forced to read just so as to keep their jobs!

All literature is created by the subaltern. Once writers understand that they can't speak or write, Literature will end. That will make the job of Literature Professors so much easier. We must silence 'that interior voice that is the voice of the other in us' so as to give Literature professors a richly deserved break.

Alternatively, we could take Spivak's path and just write any random shite that comes into our heads. Who knows? Some guilt ridden Whitey might even give us a prize for doing so.