Learning from de Man: Looking back

Boundary 2

Volumn 32, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 21-35

  Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 67650107494     PISSN: 01903659     EISSN: 15272141     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01903659-32-3-21     Document Type: Article

References (30)

1. Paul de Man, "Autobiography as De-Facement," in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 69.
2. Hereafter, this book is cited parenthetically as RR. "Referential productivity" is discussed well by Satya Mohanty in his various defenses of reference, which I have had the good fortune of having heard as oral presentations. I would only add here that reference for de Man is a transcendental deduction in the Kantian sense. We "translate" it into the ethical by putting it this way: Language asks us to forget it and do what it says. For "transcendental deduction," see Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Geyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 219-23.
3. Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, 598-99; translation modified.
4. Werner Hamacher, "LECTIO: de Man's Imperative," in Reading de Man Reading, ed. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 197-98.
5. This is an important moment in Husserl, for Derrida. In Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999]), for example, it is precisely through this that he connects Husserlian phenomenology and Levinasian ethics: "a certain interruption of phenomenology by itself already imposed itself upon Husserl, though he did not, it is true, take note of it as an ethical necessity. . . . [T]his became necessary in the Cartesian Meditations precisely when it was a question of the other; of an alter ego that never makes itself accessible except by way of an appresentational analogy and so remains radically separated, inaccessible to originary perception. . . . Levinas himself considers this interruption of self to be a 'paradox' . . . [that] requires a description that can be formed only in ethical language" (51-53). We are in the arena, therefore, not of the stoppage of politics but of the relationship between ethics and politics that is crucial to Derrida's work.
6. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (New York: Verso, 1997), 219-20.
7. Slavoj Žižek, "Carl Schmitt in the Age of Post-Politics," in The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, ed. Chantal Mouffe (New York: Verso, 1999), 18; my emphasis.
8. The quotation from myself is from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Schmitt and Post-Structuralism: A Response," Cardozo Law Review 21, no. 5-6 (May 2000): 1727-28. The last three footnotes are embedded in the self-quotation.
9. Jacques Derrida, Voyous (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 154.
10. Deborah Esch, "A Defence of Rhetoric / The Triumph of Reading," in Reading de Man Reading, 74.
11. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Allégorie et histoire de la poésie: hypothèse de travail," Poétique 8 (1971): 427-44.
12. Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," in Blindness and Insight (New York: Routledge, 1989), 187-228.
13. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979).
14. Karl Marx, Surveys from Exile, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Vintage, 1973), 150.
15. For my reading, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Other Asias (Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming).
16. Paul de Man, "Resistance to Theory," in Resistance to Theory, ed. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 19.
17. De Man, Allegories of Reading, 300-301.
18. Friedrich Schlegel, "Fragment 668," in Kritische Ausgabe, Band 18, Philosophische Lehrjahre, 1796-1806, ed. Ernst Behler (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1962), 85.
19. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage, 1973), 471; translation modified.
20. These points were presented by Mushrefa Mishu, president of the Bangladesh Student Unity Forum, at the conference. I hope the reader will forgive a long quotation, inserted into this already too-long essay, to illustrate the relay from Imperialism to Development and the continuity of subaltern insurgency, a permanent parabasis: "By the mid-eighteenth century, the Bengalis had extensively engineered the delta, both to protect against floods and to ensure that the silt-bearing river-waters could fertilize and irrigate fields. The first Britons to travel across the delta reported seeing thousands of kilometres of canals and embankments. . . . What they never realised, says Willcocks [the imperial water engineer who first made sense of the structures in a report published in 1930] was that the primary purpose of the canals was to irrigate and fertilise the land of the delta. . . . The British oversaw the gradual destruction of the ancient feudal system under which landlords forced peasants to maintain the dykes and clear the canals. . . . As the canals silted up, they began to overflow and became, for the British, 'a menace to the country.' Inspectors were appalled to see that the peasant farmers continued to cut holes in the canal banks during the flood season. Ignorant of the fact that the breaches fertilised fields, they banned this practice. For many years, there were running battles between gangs of peasants who set out each night to cut holes in the canals, and the British police, who tried to stop them. . . . Willcocks concluded with proposals for the restoration of the ancient works, in order to 'bring in again the health and wealth which central [the larger part of today's Bangladesh flood-plain] and west Bengal once enjoyed.' . . . The ancient works took many years to construct. They were built, moreover, in small steps, bending to the will of the rivers at each stage. It was a training, rather than a taming, of the rivers. The Bangladeshi authorities and their foreign advisers today show neither the patience nor the contrition to adopt such an approach. They want to mould the rivers to their design" (Fred Pearce, The Dammed: Rivers, Dams, and the Coming World Water Crisis [London: The Bodley Head, 1992], 243-45). The peasants and fishers are still cutting embankments.
21. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Responsibility," boundary 221, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 55-57. The last three footnotes are embedded in the self-quotation. I have changed the end of the passage to bring it up to date.
22. For a discussion of this homeopathy, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "From Haverstock Hill Flat to US Classroom, What's Left of Theory?" in What's Left of Theory?: New Work on the Politics of Literary Theory, ed. Judith Butler et al. (New York: Routledge, 2000), 1-40.
23. Here I quote from "Position without Identity," Positions (forthcoming).
24. Some of this is quoted from "The Future of the Humanities in a Fragmented World" (paper presented at the MLA Annual Convention, Philadelphia, Pa., December 27-30, 2004).
25. A description of this work can be found in my essay "Righting Wrongs," in Human Rights, Human Wrongs: Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2001, ed. Nicholas Owen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 168-227.
26. The task here is to transfer Gauri Viswanathan's extraordinary argument about "the resistances of converts to the erasure of their subjectivity" (Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998], 17), mutatis mutandis, to a precolonial setting.
27. For the sheer multiplicity of the rasas, see Venkatarama Raghavan, The Number of Rasa-s (Madras: Adyar Library, 1975).
28. In "From Haverstock Hill," for instance, I have suggested this as a description of actually existing counter-globalist struggles in the Southern hemisphere (What's Left of Theory, 31).
29. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Moving Devi," Cultural Critique 47 (Winter 2001): 126-27. The last three footnotes are embedded in the self-quotation.
30. De Man, Allegories of Reading, lx.