Holding an essentialist position strategically requires an irreducible blindness that risks genuine belief.

Evidence

If it were embraced as a strategy, then the emphasis upon the “sovereignty,… consistency and…logic” of “rebel consciousness” (EAP, 13) could be seen as “affirmative deconstruction”: knowing that such an emphasis is theoretically nonviable, the historian then breaks his theory in a scrupulously delineated “political interest.” If, on the other hand, the restoration of the subaltern’s subject-position in history is seen by the historian as the establishment of an inalienable and final truth of things, then any emphasis on sovereignty, consistency, and logic will, as I have suggested above, inevitably objectify the subaltern and be caught in the game of knowledge as power. Even if the discursivity of history is seen as a fortgesetzte Zeichenkette, a restorative genealogy cannot be undertaken without the strategic blindness that will entangle the genealogist in the chain. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 1773

Categorization

• QUESTION: Directly probes the reader’s core question: whether ironic essentialism collapses into real essentialism — this passage names the mechanism (strategic blindness entangling the genealogist).
• XREF: Echoes the Foucault race-struggle counter-history motif in Society Must Be Defended and the general question of ironic identity performance. — connects to: Essentialism used strategically remains hostage to the irreducible essentializing moment it criticizes. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1762