Difficulties of grappling with the question: Can the sublaltern speak?

Introduction

 Puja opened and led the discussion  by presenting some of the themes and questions of the text. One of the main themes that she identified was the criticism of the obsession of the West with the idea of Subject, and how even in philosophers such as Deleuze and Foucault when they criticize the subject, they still continue to preserve it. Spivak criticizes the monolithic and anonymous subject, the subject of the socialized capital, the subject of desire and the subject detached from the empirical. 

Discussion

We started the discussion with the question of ideology, Spivak’s criticism of the term and her definition of the concept. First, we revised Spivak criticism that Deleuze and Foucault don’t have an understanding of ideology and how they assume the transparency of the marginalize subject. She questioned critiques to ideology that understand it as a form of false consciousness intended to deceive. For her is important to understand how interest operate within ideology. Ideology is for her “constituted interest with a system of representation.” In the case of Deleuze part of the problem is the collapse between desire and interest. Ricardo reminded us that the question for Deleuze is why people desire against their own interest. We had questions as to how Spivak understand is the relationship between desire and interest, and we struggle to understand a passage where she states that between desire and interest there is a schematic rather than textual opposition. 

The group questioned how Spivak was reading these authors, whether her criticism was fair and how we understand tis the view of these authors on subject and ideology. One of the observations we made in terms of Spivak’s analysis was her choice of an interview between Deleuze and Foucault, and how the format of orality and the spoken word reveals how the thinking of both philosophers more directly and open than written texts. For Spivak this interview reveals how both thinkers valorize the experience of the oppressed without being critical of their role as intellectual as part of the socialized capital and international division of labor. 

We move to discuss Spivak’s methodology, what she takes from Foucault, Deleuze, and how she pair Gramsci and Derrida. We ask what she finds in Derrida that help her for her analysis of the subaltern.  At one part of the text, Spivak recognizes the value of Derrida for understanding the constitution of the Other and the value of Foucault for understanding disciplinary mechanisms. 

“[w]hat I find useful is the sustained and developing work on the mechanics of the constitution of the Other; we can use it to much greater analytic and interventionist advantage than invocations of the authenticity of the Other. On this level, what remains useful in Foucault is the mechanics of disciplinarization and institutionalization, the constitution, as it were, of the colonizer. […] They are of great usefulness to intellectuals concerned with the decay of the West.” (p.90)

We contrasted the differences in how Foucault and Derrida think alterity. Whereas in Foucault it seems the other can be known through discourse and its encounter with power, in Derrida the Other cannot be assimilated. This led to a discussion about radical alterity in Spivak/Derrida and how it can be contrasted with Enrique Dussel’s radical alterity. Something that Zeinab brought to our attention is how in Spivak learning to engage with radical alterity also requires learning and unlearning how to listen to silences. This can be contrasted with Foucault’s genealogical method of tracing processes of marginalization. 

Overall, we ended with the difficulty with grappling the different critiques and works of Spivak in this text and the implication this have for feminist philosophy (particularly phenomenology), subaltern studies and our own research. 

Dussel and Transmodernity

 On September 2nd, 2020, our group met to discuss two articles by Enrique Dussel: "Transmodernity and Interculturality: An Interpretation from the Perspective of Philosophy of Liberation" (2012) and "World-System and "Trans"-Modernity" (2002). Rosa O'Connor Acevedo introduced the texts and facilitated our discussion. 

At issue is the definition of modernity and the work the concept does. The concept of "trans"-modernity turns on the question of what modernity is, and similarly, Dussel's concept of exteriority may depend on what it is exterior to or else how the distinction of inner and outer is determined.

Dussel's emphasis in these two texts we discussed is less on defining modernity and more about the ways in which the colonized, oppressed, and those at the periphery complicate the sense of modernity as an exclusively European history. Dussel's efforts are towards showing how modernity is understood Eurocentrically and inaccurately when it is considered solely as a European phenomenon, for modernity must take into account the way in which modernity was borne out of experiences with other cultures, and not only experiences but violent acts of conquering.

Trans-modernity is a productive concept for other cultures because it opens up the possibility of appropriating and redefining the concept of the modern so that it is not a unitary and exclusive phenomenon, but is instead a potential for other cultures to constitute a "more human and complex world, more passionate and diverse" ("World-System and "Trans"-Modernity" 237).

Rosa's presentation guided us through discussions of major issues of the two texts: the importance of modernity, the concept of exteriority, what it means to be inclusive of other cultures, and intercultural dialogue. Our discussion closed with a discussion of the concept of the subaltern and in what ways it might illuminate Dussel's thought further. The subaltern may be a way to clarify and extend Dussel's concept of exteriority, for example. For this reason, we resolved to read Spivak's essay, "Can the Subaltern Speak?", for next week. 

-Ricardo Friaz