Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak > Quotes

“When we seem to have won or lost in terms of certainties, we must, as literature teachers in the classroom, remember such warnings -- let literature teach us that there are no certainties, that the process is open, and that it may be altogether salutary that it is so.”
― Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline

“Love is just a four letter word! (laughter) Because that’s what it is for me! I don’t know what it means... I mean, love didn’t work, whatever the hell that is, in my life. Alone I am. I’m not particularly into self-love either. I’m quite prepared to die. And all the objects of my love slowly trail off.”
― Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

“The social science fear the radical impulse in literary studies, and over the decades, we in the humanities have trivialized the social sciences into their rational expectation straitjackets, not recognizing that, whatever the state of the social sciences in our own institution, strong tendencies toward acknowledging the silent but central role of the humanities in the area studies paradigm are now around.”
― Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline

“Cultural Studies and Ethnic Studies are on the rise, and many minority protests that I have witnessed say, in effect, “Do not racially profile us, we are Americans.”
― Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline

“Nationalism can only ever be a crucial political agenda against oppression. All longing to the contrary, it cannot provide the absolute guarantee of identity.”
― Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

“In this era of global capital triumphant, to keep responsibility alive in the reading and teaching of the textual is at first sight impractical. It is, however, the right of the textual to be so responsible, responsive, answerable. The “planet” is, here, as perhaps always, a catachresis for inscribing collective responsibility as right. Its alterity, determining experience, is mysterious and discontinuous—an experience of the impossible. It is such collectivities that must be opened up with the question “How many are we?” when cultural origin is detranscendentalized into fiction—the toughest task in the diaspora.”
― Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

“Politics of Friendship is, in other words, only a book between covers. For the real text, you must enter the classroom, put yourself to school, as a preview of the formation of collectivities. A single “teacher's” “students,” flung out into the world and time, is, incidentally, a real-world example of the precarious continuity of a Marxism “to come,” aligned with grassroots counterglobalizing activism in the global South today, with little resemblance to those varieties of “Little Britain” leftism that can take on board the binary opposition of identity politics and humanism, shifting gears as the occasion requires.”
― Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline

“Where possible, this [Foucault's] model of [localized] resistance is not an alternative to, but can compliment, macrological struggles along 'Marxist' lines. Yet if its situation is universalized, it accomodates unacknowledged privileging of the subject. Without a theory of ideology, it can lead to a dangerous utopianism.”
― Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? Postkolonialität und subalterne Artikulation

“The two sentences go a long way to legitimize each other. One never encounters the testimony of the women’s voice consciousness. Such a testimony would not be ideology-transcendent or “fully” subjective, of course, but it would constitute the ingredients for producing a counter-sentence. As one goes down the grotesquely mistranscribed names of these women, the sacrificed widows, in the police reports included in the records of the East India Company, one cannot put together a “voice.” The most one can sense is the immense heterogeneity breaking through even such a skeletal and ignorant account (castes, for example, are regularly described as tribes). Faced with the dialectically interlocking sentences that are constructible as “White men are saving brown women from brown men” and “The women wanted to die,” the metropolitan feminist migrant (removed from the actual theater of decolonization) asks the question of simple semiosis— What does this signify?—and begins to plot a history.”
― Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea

“Neither Deleuze nor Foucault seems aware that the intellectual within globalizing capital, brandishing concrete experience, can help consolidate the international division of labor by making one model of “concrete experience” the model. We are witnessing this in our discipline daily as we see the postcolonial migrant become the norm, thus occluding the native once again.”
― Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? Postkolonialität und subalterne Artikulation

“El marido vivo venga la muerte de su esposa, una transacción entre los grandes dioses machos culmina en la destrucción del cuerpo femenino e inscribe, por ello, la tierra como geografía sagrada.”
― Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea

“Reich implied notions of collective will rather than a dichotomy of deception and undeceived desire: “We must accept the screams of Reich: no, the masses were not deceived; at a particular moment, they actually desired a fascist regime” (FD 215).”
― Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

“always squinting around the corner for the future that is already with us, at our ease, elsewhere”
― Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

“Violencia epistemológica (...) pensar al Otro según un modelo que de ningún modo lo explica ni da cuenta de él.”
― Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea

“Imperialism’s (or globalization’s) image as the establisher of the good society is marked by the espousal of the woman as object of protection from her own kind. How should one examine this dissimulation of patriarchal strategy, which apparently grants the woman free choice as subject? In other words, how does one make the move from “Britain” to “Hinduism”?”
― Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea

“La contradicción no reconocida dentro de una posición que valora la experiencia de los oprimidos, mientras resulta tan acrítica en relación con el papel histórico del intelectual.”
― Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea