Essentialism used strategically remains hostage to the irreducible essentializing moment it criticizes.

Evidence

Reading the work of Subaltern Studies from within but against the grain, I would suggest that elements in their text would warrant a reading of the project to retrieve the subaltern consciousness as the attempt to undo a massive historiographic metalepsis and “situate” the effect of the subject as subaltern. I would read it, then, as a strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest. This would put them in line with the Marx who locates fetishization, the ideological determination of the “concrete,” and spins the narrative of the development of the moneyform; with the Nietzsche who offers us genealogy in place of historiography, the Foucault who plots the construction of a “counter-memory,” the Barthes of semiotrophy, and the Derrida of “affirmative deconstruction.” This would allow them to use the critical force of anti-humanism, in other words, even as they share its constitutive paradox: that the essentializing moment, the object of their criticism, is irreducible. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 1762

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s strategic-essentialism genealogy project and Spivak’s own coining here versus her later qualifications. — connects to: Essentializing is unavoidable even in anti-essentialist critique, so it should be deployed consciously. — Elizabeth Grosz, Criticism, Feminism and the…, 125; A critique of essentialism must remain internal to essentialism. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 55; The essentializing moment that criticism attacks is itself irreducible. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1762 (+3 more)
• DEFINE: Defines ‘strategic use of positivist essentialism’ as the chapter’s originating formulation — including its constitutive paradox which already predicts its own instability.

Broader Connections

• One cannot not be an essentialist to some degree, even in critique. #corroborates (0.88) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 55
• The essentializing moment that criticism attacks is itself irreducible. #qualifies (0.85) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 1762
• Holding an essentialist position strategically requires an irreducible blindness that risks genuine belief. #expands (0.85) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 1773
• Essentialist-sounding definitions can be adopted provisionally without belief in essence #contradicts (0.82) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 453