Gayatri Spivak, in her essay 'Echo', writes-
'It was finally my contact with the ethical philosopher Bimal Krishna
Matilal that allowed me to make room for Freud in my intellectual
world. Professor Matilal argued that nineteenth-century Indologists
were basically correct in estimating that India had no tradition of
moral philosophy in the Western European sense.'
Matilal was not aware that the Greeks had translated 'dharma' as 'eusebia'- i.e. a middle path between scandalous impiety or antinomian behaviour on the one hand and excessive rigidity (akrebia) or paranoid superstition on the other hand- two thousand years ago. This eusebia, they considered a vital attribute of an Ethical way of life. Impiety (asebia) was guarded against by theories reminding one of the interdependence of all beings and the duties and sentiments towards others such interdependence militates for. Paranoid Superstition (deisidemonia) was guarded against by cosmological theories stressing the rationality and law like behaviour of the forces that shape the Universe. Excessive rigidity (akrebia) was critiqued by Game theoretic dilemmas.
Matilal, however, believed that Dharma contains
genuine action-guiding dilemmas because its obligation and evaluation principles can conflict. Clearly, such a Dharma, or deontic system, is not one anybody would freely choose because there will be instances when it precipitates catastrophe. No one in their right mind could call it 'eternal' or 'uncreated'.
The truth is that where obligation are impossible to discharge in a sensible manner then those obligations are 'akrebia' not 'eusebia'- they are adharma because they hurt human flourishing and so dharmic thinkers use game-theoretic dilemmas to change how those obligations are to be evaluated so that no 'action guiding dilemma' remains.
Matilal can't be blamed for not knowing much about developments in Game theory, nor for being ignorant of the manner in which 'Regret Minimising' decision theory sublates 'Expected Utility' based theories because only the former is adapted to deal with Knightian Uncertainty.
Matilal wholly misses the meaning of the Bhagvad Gita because he does not understand it is the 'dual' of the Vyadha Gita & Nalophkyanam.
In that last mentioned chapter of the Mahabharata, the Just King has to learn Statistical Game theory to overcome his 'vishada' (abulia). But the King is a Principal. The Bhagvad Gita, on the other hand, discusses the case of the Agent. The Dharmic content of the Epic arises out of its careful observance of a system of symmetries which conserve 'karma' as operating in time and 'dharma' as constituting a field. Economics, not Philosophy, has no difficulty in reading Itihasa in this way because Economics it is in essence a Moral Science. A flexible, liberal, rational 'Oiknomia' is an imitation of the beneficent and merciful Divine Dispensation. An optimistic mood is created so that rigid 'akrebia' can be relaxed and fearful shibboleths and superstitions banished.
Westerners have no difficulty understanding their own tradition of Moral Philosophy as deriving from eusebia as a regulative, Oikonomic, principle. Indeed, the thing is too obvious to require much elaboration- it is an 'unthought known'.
Since 'dharma' received a Kripkean 'rigid designator' as eusebia a very long time ago from people who were familiar with both Greek and Indian thought, it follows that there is a correct 'Western European sense' of every Indian dharmic text which, however, was unknown to Matilal and others of his ilk. This isn't a big surprise. Philologists seldom understand their own language's subtleties while philosophy professors, notoriously, are stupid and incapable of reasoning. Thus, Indian dharmic texts were misinterpreted by 'savants' as speculations of an epistemological, metaphysical or soteriological type.
Matilal says-
'Professional philosophers of India over the last two thousand years have been consistently concerned with the problems of logic and epistemology, metaphysics and soteriology, and sometimes they have made very important contributions to the global heritage of philosophy. But, except some cursory comments and some insightful observations, the professional philosophers of India have very seldom discussed what we call "moral philosophy" today.'
Since most Indian Acharyas and Upadyayas and Gurus and Swamis continue to adhere to millennia old practices and since their disciples compile their sermons into books in vernacular languages, Indians know for a fact that almost everything that Indian lovers of Wisdom (which is what the word philosopher means) or 'Darshan-gyan' say or write has to do with ethical behaviour and moral science.
Every single epistemological or metaphysical or soteriological innovation made by what Matilal calls a 'philosopher', was instrumentalised to either combat asebia or relax akrebia or root out deisidemonia.
These innovations were complementary rather than competing though they were also useful in taxonomising schools or sects such that each maintained its own protocol bound 'buck stopping' mechanism and thus was able to serve as a mimetic rival for others.
Returning to Spivak mindlessly echoing Matilal- we read
But they (western savants) had
not been able to grasp either the Indic tradition of rational critique
or the tradition of practical ethics in India. According to Matilal,
the latter was based on the reading of narrative instantiations of
ethical problems. We read some of the Mahabharata together in this
way. I realized that this way of doing rather than exclusively talking
about doing (the other is also an ethical decision, of course-this
is at the root of my unease with the use of psychoanalysis in cultural
critique) ethics was a rather widespread, rather global, phenomenon,
not confined to non-European cultures.
Reading a story and then talking about it may be fun. But it isn't 'doing Ethics' anymore than it is 'doing Kung Fu' even if the epic in question has a lot of guys jumping into the air and kicking each other's heads off.
The 'other' is not an ethical decision at all. Either there's some one else out there or there isn't. I can't say 'I obey the injunction not to steal because I've made the ethical decision that my ipseity includes that lady's purse I just snatched.'
It had been ranked as
"popular" by most high-cultural European-model moral philosophical
systems. (I am not speaking, of course, of diagnosing story lines
as formal allegories, drawing morals from parables, or attention to
the "moral dimension" of fiction.) Jon Elster's Ulysses and the Sirens,
which I was reading at the time, seemed an example of moral
philosophizing on that "popular" model."
Jon Elster, though a Marxist, was a fan of rational choice theory when he wrote that book. He hadn't grasped- few had- that Hannan consistency (Regret minimization) was the proper basis for Rational Choice but that it must operate stochastically at the population level. This ties in with the Folk theorem. It takes the entire society using a simple rule- like for Tit for Tat- to get to the Hannan Consistent Evolutionary Stable State.
The notion that Ulysses alone should be permitted to hear the Sirens because his crew, their ears stopped up with wax, will unquestioningly obey his injunction not to release him is clearly foolish. If the Sirens really are that melodious, Ulysses will hire another crew and return to his certain death. Underlying this story is the same theory as underlies the doctrine of the 'noble lie'- viz. that of the natural superiority of the philosopher-king. This is not 'moral philosophizing on a popular model'. It is elitist drivel of which a Straussian would be ashamed.
Dharma is indeed subtle if considered substantively but the middle way is blindingly obvious because it is a very simple procedural rule and, what's more, involves 'hedging', thus militating for Hannan consistency as well as genuine, individually cognized, regret minimization.
But this Dharma is something common to all and practiced by all without any 'privileged frames of reference' or 'noble lie' expounding seers of the esoteric.
And psychoanalysis, as
a challenge to systematic moral philosophy, had certainly read received
narratives and the sequentially constructed narratives of
analysands as instantiations of socioethical problems.
Did psychoanalysis say homophobia was stupid and based on superstition? Nope. It charged an arm and a leg to treat an imaginary disease.
Did Dr. Strangelove type 'rational irrationality' help anyone? Nope. Like Psychoanalysis it created the disease it was meant to treat.
Hedging- putting your eggs in different baskets- is taking the middle way, provided everybody is allowed to do the same thing. That's when the magic of the folk theorem of repeated games gains purchase and a true moral oikonomia flourishes.
As a cultural
critic rather than a clinical practitioner, I was not obliged to take
the conclusions as scientific system. As a being in ethics, I could
share them as malleable situational lessons.
Professor Matilal also suggested that the moral dilemma was the
most important terrain for the exercise of this type of practical
ethics as encountered in the Indic tradition. Freud's recognition of
the aporia between terminable and interminable analyses, and Derrida's
thinking of ethics as the experience of the impossible, resonated
with this suggestion.
Freud's 'neurosis' is no longer accepted as a genuine illness. There is no distinction between a terminable and interminable fraud. Thinking 'ethics is the 'experience of the impossible' isn't thinking- it is high falutin' nonsense. Matilal was wrong about the 'Ethics' in the Indian 'Epics'. That's why he said stupid things like 'Rama's dharma is rigid, Krishna's is flaccid'.
Derrida's work is also a critique of traditional
European systematic moral philosophy, after all. Further, this particular
privileging of the aporia in the field of ethical decision seemed
quite apposite to the tale of Narcissus. As I will attempt to show
in my reading of Ovid, it is a tale of the aporia between self knowledge
and knowledge for others.
In this matter of knowledge for others I also received an impetus
of interest from my discussions with Bimal Matilal. He discussed
an argument advanced by Gangesa, a twelfth-century linguist, that the production of truth was not necessarily dependent upon the
speaker's intention. (This is bhrantapratarakavakya, the case of the
deluded deceiver, who speaks the truth while thinking to lie.)'" I
felt that Ovid himself, against his probable intentions, had monumentalized
in neglected Echo the random possibility of the emergence
of an occasional truth of a kind.'"
Gangesa was not a 'linguist' but a Logician and Epistemologist, on a par with Kant, revered by Hindus as the principal founder of the Navya Nyaya Philosophical School. There was a misconception, not properly addressed by Matilal, that any true statement was 'pramaana' (means of valid knowledge production) for Navya Nyaya. However, the technical term used-
bhranta (erroneous, wandering aimlessly)
prataraka (deceiver- like the Cretan Liar)
vakya (utterance)- has a particular
'sabdobodha' semantic valency such that there is a procedure to elicit truth from that Liar by reason of his very perversity. Another way of looking at it is to think of error as being so wild and vagrant as to cover, as if with a Peano curve, every space save the narrow path of the Truth. In this sense, there is a path from
'sabdobodha' (linguistic understanding) to '
sabdopramana' (substantive knowledge rigidly designated by utterance) for Navya Nyaya which can dispense with the earlier stipulation regarding the authoritative veracity of the speaker. In the context of multiple centres of scholarship and many competing schools or sects, some method of 'factorising' utterances and then expressing them in a context independent manner- i.e. giving them an 'absolute' representation- would have salience. Factorising judgements on
quid juris/quid facti lines enables us to understand why, for example, a man judged a rapist in one state may be considered a properly married loving husband in another. It is not that 'rapist' and 'husband' are meaningless or interchangeable terms. Nor is it the case that anyone whose laws are different from us is to be considered as lost to reason. Rather, the same word may convey different things till properly processed by an objective epistemic system which proceeds in a rational manner and reestablishes Knowledge derived from words in a univocal and prescriptive manner.
We all understand the nature of protocol bound epistemic systems. Thus, if I correctly diagnose your illness and recommend appropriate medication, the Pharmacist may still refuse to sell you the pills in question in specific jurisdictions. What I have uttered is not 'prescriptive' because I'm not a Doctor licensed in that jurisdiction. Medicine is protocol bound. Similarly, my barrister might tell me that I am innocent according to the law. Yet, only the Bench can confirm this. Similarly, no system of logic or other protocol bound system of defeasible reason can hold any statement which happens to be true to have equal status with an authoritativ
e 'pramaana'- or binding precedent. The latter is 'buck stopped' in the sense of being rendered an axiom for deductive reasoning. The former is a useful type of 'noise'- which may be admitted as such to drive the dynamics of the system. Indeed, the Rabbis say that even the
'bat kol' (voice from Heaven) is not to be accepted as authoritative or as cancelling
stare decisis reasoning or Scriptural injunction. Similarly, the Hindus equate
'upashruti' with Rumour- a type of noise which increases rather than reduces the need for vigilance with respect to ensuring the autonomy of Dharmic reasoning.
This is not to say that Hindus can't sometimes chose to believe or act otherwise than conventionally, nor that the Sanhedrin could not have chosen to accept 'bat kol'. It wouldn't be 'regret minimizing' to chose such a deontics. Consensus, or some agreed Preference Aggregating procedure too won't automatically yield 'regret minimising' solutions because there may be 'holes' in the Decision space. What matters is that there is an overall robustly moral oikonomia where different protocol bound discourses co-exist and there is 'limited arbitrage' between them with respect to such matters as may be channelised by 'overlapping consensus'. However, 'noise' too must have places where it can be dammed up as capacitance diversity. That is why the 'pramaana' for 'meta-pramaana' must, for intensional reasons, appear extensional.
My ancestors understood Gangesa's 'deluded deceiver' as self-referential- this was a Gettier case such that one could accede the status of justified true belief to the utterance of a Naturalist/Externalist (paratahprakasa/paratahpramanya) without holding that it constituted Knowledge. In other words, it was 'Avidhya'- not Knowledge but Soteriologically obstructive delusion- though justified and true. Thus the Advaitin could continue to be an Advaitin while using Navya Nyaya techniques and giving and receiving plaudits from Pundits of other sects because of an 'overlapping consensus' such that there was no need to commit to any particular ontology in order to use these techniques. No moral hazard arose since even if those knaves were deploying their seductive logic in order to mislead us, still, themselves caught in the toils of Avidhya, their strategy must backfire and like 'deluded deceivers' who tell you there is food in the dish, believing the opposite to be true, you can still eat that food and thank them for pointing you to it.
By contrast, for Navya Nyaya as itself a soteriological praxis (which Smarthas concede it to be), strategic propositions couldn't be denied a place in its constitutive epistemic 'pramaana' because choice of logic itself affects dimensionality such that 'agenda control' is worth gaming. Alternatively, there is a concurrency problem such that some of Djikstra's philosophers starve.
Another way of saying the same thing is that Navya Nyaya's intensional language gives it the appearance of having an extensional Truth function but only with respect to a prespecified Moral Oikonomia or Fitness landscape. Which? One in which first and second order public goods are univocal. This happens where all accept, as by Muth Rationality, that the Evolutionarily Stable Solution for Ethics is vector not scalar. In practice, this solution is unknown. We have no Muth Rational path to 'memoryless' equilibria. Thus Navya Nyaya has a evolutionary game theoretic, not ergodic, notion of pramaana. That is perfectly Dharmic and the reason no actual action guiding dilemmas can arise adventiously in the Itihasas precisely because they are a 'History' optimised to display game theoretic equilibria such that, for Hindus, a comprehensive 'Niti'- i.e. Moral Philosophy- can gain 'overlapping consensus' by purely rational means. But this 'Niti' is evolutionary.
At any rate, Bengali scholars- often descended from Navya Nyaya savants- in the early twentieth century helped broadcast this understanding to other parts of India. Matilal's engagement with analytical philosophy somewhat muddies his ability to reflect an earlier, albeit, evolving 'overlapping' Dharmic consensus.
Gangesa, taken literally, has an odd theory of truth such that metaphors are simply lies. However, he is part of a literature which already had a 'dhvani' theory of truth such that metaphors weren't 'language's dreamwork' whose truth value was jointly established by a Freudian analyst and analysand. On the contrary, they were established as focal solutions to a coordination problem for the entire Moral oikonomia.
Spivak, quite properly, suspects that Western males distort things when they appoint themselves as analysts. However, her suspicion falls short of what is required. A Doctor who invents a new specialty which turns out not to exist but which has proven very lucrative is no sort of a Doctor. He is a Quack.
The same must be said for a Professor whose critique of 'traditional systematic European moral philosophy' has yielded not a single actual moral advance, nor bridge over a 'wedge issue', nor assisted any mass movement but, instead, has inspired nothing but a vacuous careerism wholly unintelligible to the wider public.
It is not the case that Gangesa, or anyone else, thought that truth could be found in the aleatory mockingbird song of the surd subaltern. Echo, in Ovid, still says all she means though invisible and under Juno's curse. Poor people, however much our Gods may curse them, are perfectly capable of parrhesia. Indeed, it is their songs which, by a Divine inversion of Tarde's Law, end up as both the fashionable 'pop' as well as the even more time-lagged classical
mousike of our elites. There is no need for a Confucian Music Bureau to collect those songs or for some 'Subaltern Studies' maven, or 'Post Colonial Theorist' to interpret what they say. The very poor tribal woman isn't as stupid as Mahashweta Devi. She can and does speak to some better purpose than to defeat the ends of literature.
What prompted Spivak's essay?
I started to think specifically about Narcissus when I came
across Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism.' The book
seemed such an attack on the few social gains made by feminism.
Yet Narcissus was a boy! What seemed particularly unjust was the
description of the young executive as "the happy hooker."
Lasch wrote '
"The happy hooker stands in place of Horatio Alger as the prototype of personal success." He meant that young people weren't building their careers on hard work and arduously acquired alethic knowledge involving breaking new ground and exploring new horizons (as Alger had counselled)- but rather behaving selfishly and insensitively in a manner instantaneously gratifying to themselves like our Twittering, cheeseburger eating, Leader of the Free World.
Spivak takes Lasch literally. She says-
Prostitutes,
however, were already organizing precisely because their
class-position was rather different from that of young executives.
Xaviera Hollanda was the original 'happy hooker' about whom a movie was made which attracted the Horatio Alger comparison from Roger Egbert. She was a call-girl turned madam. She did not organize a prostitute's collective or anything of that sort.
Nevertheless Spivak feels that a claim about narcissism being somehow female has been made. Actually, in the movie, it is men who are shown as being narcissistic. Still, Spivak's train of thought continues to flee where none pursue-
I turned to Freud and found that he too had located the richest
examples of narcissism among women, especially women unfulfilled
by the secondary narcissism of motherhood. Where was Echo, the
woman in Narcissus's story? My essay is an attempt to "give woman"
to Echo, to deconstruct her out of traditional and deconstructive
representation and (non)representation, however imperfectly.
To say 'so and so is a veritable Narcissus' is a figure of speech- a metaphor. To speak of an objective 'Narcissus Complex' is to coin a 'meta-metaphor' based on taking as fact something which was merely an allusion or analogy. There is an error of a schizophrenic sort in doing so- this is
'bhranta'. Something worse than schizophrenia- viz. outright swindling or
'pratarakavakya'- occurs when a further metaphor is erected on the supposedly factual nature of the first and this meta-metaphor is passed off as equally factual. Thus to stipulate a pathology on the basis of a figure of speech is stupidity merely. To take money to treat that merely metaphoric pathology is the act of a scoundrel. Yet, the 'meta-metaphor' as text can still be read univocally with Alethia. Why? It is the Peano Curve of that baroque pain of those in vicious error which darkens every path save the slender thread of salvation which it alone denies so as to remain its own cause.
Consider this-
The power of narcissism." Where does it come from? The last
words Echo gives back to Narcissus, to his emoriar, quam sit tibi copia
nostri (M 150, 1. 391)-translated in the Loeb edition as "May I die
before I give you power o'er me!"-are sit tibi copia nostri! (I give
you power over me). Copia nostris "our plenty, our plenitude," but
also "the provisions that we have laid up for the future," even "our
forces," as in military forces, the same metaphor as in Besetzung,
lost both in "cathexis" and investissement. Following the powerful
tricks of Ovid's text, Narcissus's ambivalence toward death here"May
I die," nothing more than a rhetorical exclamation-is turned
into truth independent of intention (explicit-implicit in Weber's text,
bhrantapratarakavakya in Gangesa), even as Echo bequeathes her
reserves to him by way of an "imperfect" repetition.
Narcissus was cursed to love his reflection- because he couldn't command its love and thus the outcome would be tragic. The reason for the curse was because he had spurned all who- like Echo- pursued him and sought to lay hands on him and bring him under their power. So Narcissus is free of Power- he neither wields it nor yields to it- but not of Love though this breeds but Death by the unforcible method of inanition so praised by Tacitus. Echo, though cursed not to be able to speak as she willed, too achieves her object. She is revenged on Narcissus by exercising her power to refuse to echo the words he addresses to his reflection. Only when starvation has deprived him of the body she once loved, does pity stir in her and her voice joins his dying lamentations. Doing so, she repairs her previous offence to Hymen, the God of Marriage- she who had, by her distracting, deceitful,
bhrantapratrakavakya conversation, prevented Juno from safeguarding her own Marriage bed- yet lends her voice to solemnise Narcissus's deathly nuptials. This is not Powerlessness, but Pity so ennobling as to raise up one rejected and despised amongst women to so high a eusebiac, that is Dharmic, position as to hallow the union of one who had furiously scorned and berated her and caused her to waste away.
From Hellenic texts, we learn that no new house is well built save at the spot where the new bride's shadow first fell, and there is no better house than a flower for a self-pollinating passion.
Echo's voice remains with us as Pity's reflection upon its own desolation every time any of us cry out at the blind beauty of what is flower-like and our own voice returns to us, as if after an age, chilled and agued by the winds.
For Spivak, however, the story is quite different. Women have been abused and insulted and have faded into nothingness. They have no voice save as an aleatory echo pent up in the vainglorious annals of their tormentors. Spivak, must 'give woman' to Echo because they are subaltern and can't speak save by repeating the words of this great 'Europeanist' who can't see, for all her vaunted erudition, that, for Ovid, Echo's Pity is something higher than Power. It makes a sacred marriage even of starvation's death.
Spivak was born in a year when many of her own people starved while those of another race attended lavish banquets though having to step over crumpled corpses littering the streets. A few years later thousands of women of her own caste and station in life were raped, butchered or expelled from their homes. This was a staunchless wound- repeated in the early Seventies as she was making her way upward in American academia. Perhaps her poetic insensitivity is pardonable. What of her sense for racial injustice?
There is a curious moment, peculiarly susceptible to racist misuse,
in Freud's "On Narcissism: An Introduction": "We have learned
that libidinal instinctual inferences undergo the vicissitudes of pathogenic
repression if they come into conflict with the subject's cultural
and ethical ideas. . . . What he projects before him as his ideal is
the Ersatz of the lost narcissism of his childhood, in which he was
his own ideal. . . . The ego ideal . . . has a social side; it is also
the common ideal of a family, a class or a nation."
It is certainly
at least implied here that the felicitous emergence of the superego
happens because there is something other than mere conflict between
cultural and ethical ideas and the libidinal instinctual inferences.
Everyone knows that kids are meant to first play well with others and then work well with others and grow up to help run well functioning domestic and social units. Alethic 'mechanism design' turns 'conflict' in the nursery, the home, the academy, the agora and the Ecclesia into the 'felicitous', not aleatory, emergence of a paideia and praxis involving 'instinctual renunciation' of a salutary type.
This can still militate for racialist 'ethnic cleansing' or atrocities more horrendous yet. Freud can certainly be read as previsioning this aspect of his age.
Not Spivak who, despite Vietnam, can write-
The full-blown version of this particular theme-of non-European
cultures being stuck in varieties of narcissism and its vicissitudes--
is not uncommon. Asia and Africa are always supposed to have had
trouble with Oedipus. (Very broadly and irreverently speaking, if as
a man-you can't get to Oedipus, you are stuck with Narcissus.
Women can't pass through Oedipus, and therefore the secondary
narcissism of attachment to the (boy)child saves them from themselves,
from penis-envy and so forth.) Their growth is arrested on the civilizational scale. Hegel trumped Freud in this in his plotting
of the itinerary of the Spirit in Art.
But Lasch, a best-selling author invited to Carter's White House, said America had become the most narcissistic place! Why drag in the East when it is the West which is being indicted? Why excuse those with power by accusing those who lacked it?
In the case of India, which
in a certain way I "know" best, Sudhir Kakar, the eminent psychoanalyst,
has diagnosed the Indian male type to be arrested in the
moment of Narcissus.
Kakar has no currency in India. He wrote silly books which nobody read. Psychoanalysis has not taken off as a paying profession. A Palmist, a Numerologist, an old fashioned Dream interpreter, an Astrologer- every sort of charlatan can get rich in India. Not Psychoanalysts. Kakar had a Doctorate in Economics from Germany and was a Professor at an IIT. His therapeutic practice scarcely paid the bills. This wasn't because there was any lack of melancholy Marwaris or gay Gujeratis. It's just that the indigenous variety of quack had a more beguiling patter.
What makes him so great an authority that he can be quoted in the context of racism?
V. S. Naipaul, a diasporic Indian visiting
India for the first time in 1962, fell on this diagnosis with a vengeance.
Although he has put down his earlier overreaction against India to
his own ancestral Indo-Caribbean past in his new book, this particular
definitive view seems unchanged; "underdeveloped ego" in the first
book, infantile golden-agism in the second. These are the two
moments: Narcissus and the ego ideal.
Not according to Freud. Narcissus is the moment the ego ideal usurps the development path of the super-ego.
Naipaul has made a career of shitting on black people. That's his shtick. Why is Spivak appropriating it here?
Thus you might say that I
am interested in the psychoanalytic Narcissus because, in a kind of
"colonial" reconstellation of the matter of "Greece," he is made to
stand at the door of the free discourse of Oedipus.
He is only made to stand there by Spivak- nobody else. She is not writing about a pathology of Western narcissistic self-infatuation but uttering a schizophrenic
word-salad unique to herself.
I have always felt uneasy about the use of psychoanalysis in cultural
critique since it is so culture-specific in its provenance.
Psychoanalysis was rubbish in every culture. It was just a fraudulent
(prataraka), careerist, availability cascade which debauched the rent-seeking Academy that sought to credentialise it.
Like many
others, I too have felt that Marxism, focusing on something on a
much higher level of abstraction than the machinery, production,
and performance of the mental theater, and as obviously global as
capitalism, is not open to this particular charge. (To say capitalism
is all over the place is not as universalist as to say everyone has the
same-pattern psyche.)
Marx says Marxism is culture specific. So do all Marxists. However culture changes when the substructure changes. That's why the Khmer Rouge expected to succeed in building Communism in a deeply religious Buddhist country.
Their may be some racists who believe that 'culture' is genetic and that a white baby brought up by African gorillas will turn into a perfectly respectable member of the House of Lords. Nobody else does- except, on this account, Spivak.
Although I feel the weight of Derrida's critique
of institutional psychoanalysis in the world, especially in such deeply
ambivalent questions as psychiatric care for the Union Carbide
victims in Bhopal, since I am not qualified to speak of psychoanalysis
as clinical practice, I must leave it largely alone.
Either the Union Carbide victims have suffered a trauma which can be ameliorated by psychiatric care or they don't. There is no ambivalence or ambiguity here. I am not a Doctor but if I see a guy whose hand has been chopped off, I know that I should call an ambulance even if Union Carbide is responsible for his injury. Why mention Derrida? Unlike Lacan or Guatarri, the fellow wasn't swindling people by pretending to be a Shrink.
Is there any guiding principle to Spivak's
bhrantapratarakavakya- or swindling, schizophrenic torrent of verbiage?
Freud has remained one of my flawed heroes, an intimate
enemy. To his race, class, and gender-specificity I would apply the
words I wrote about Charlotte Bronte more than a decade ago: "If
even minimally successful, my reading should incite a degree of
rage against the gendered/imperialist narrativization of history, that
it should produce so abject a script for him."
If you can apply the same words to Charlotte Bronte and Sigmund Freud, your words are meaningless shite.
Spivak's reading should incite a degree of rage that Universities make you read her shite so as to get a degree in Literature of all things!
Or perhaps it shouldn't. What matters is that Spivak's
bhrantapratarakavakya secured her happy hooker status of the type Arthus Koestler described in
'The Call Girls'. She is the Trump of Narcissistic, Academic, Virtue Signalling, Gesture Politics. Chistopher Lasch must be turning in his grave.
