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đŸȘ” The Threshold

Spivak meant the subaltern is not heard, not literally mute

Properties2
tagsja-picks, definitional_content, singleton, xref, category/definitional-content
aliases@landry_spivak_1996, loc. 2296, @landry_spivak_1996, loc. 2235, @landry_spivak_1996, loc. 43

4 min read

Spivak meant the subaltern is not heard, not literally mute

Evidence

That is what did not happen in the case of a woman who took her own body at the moment of death to inscribe a certain kind of undermining—too weak a word—a certain kind of annulment of all the presuppositions that underlie the regulative psychobiography that writes sati. When we act we don’t act out of thinking through details; we act in something that Derrida calls, following Kierkegaard, the “night of nonknowledge.” Even the just decision thinks itself in the night of nonknowledge. We act out of certain kinds of reflexes that come through, by layering something through learning habits of mind, rather than by merely knowing something. That is the way in which her action was inscribed in her body. And even that incredible effort to speak did not fulfill itself in a speech act. And therefore, in a certain kind of rhetorical anguish after the accounting of this, I said, “the subaltern cannot speak!” This is always read as a rational remark about subalterns as such— Meaghan Morris has made the witty comment that my critics rewrite the sentence as: “the subaltern cannot talk.” — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 2296 (#expands, via linked claim)

Incidentally, derisive comments made by upper-middle-class Indian Americans about the public version of Chuni’s suicide put me in mind of the dismissal of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri’s suicide by women of the next generation, anger against which produced my remark that the subaltern could not speak. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 2235 (#expands, via linked claim)

Thinking of the ethical relation as an embrace, an act of love, in which each learns from the other, is not at all the same thing as wanting to speak for an oppressed constituency. Throughout her work Spivak has been concerned with addressing questions of the international division of labor (of the super-exploitation of Third World female labor in particular) and she is well-known for her formulations on the subaltern, that constituency which remains most excluded from the circuits and possible benefits of socialized capital. As she explains in the interview “Subaltern Talk” (see p. 287), when she claims that the subaltern “cannot speak,” she means that the subaltern as such cannot be heard by the privileged of either the First or Third Worlds. If the subaltern were able to make herself heard—as has happened when particular subalterns have emerged, in Antonio Gramsci’s terms, as organic intellectuals and spokespeople for their communities—her status as a subaltern would be changed utterly; she would cease to be subaltern. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 43 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: A subaltern who becomes audible thereby ceases to be subaltern. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of
, 43; A class’s derision of subaltern suicide underpinned Spivak’s statement that the subaltern cannot speak — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of
, 2235; Subaltern speech fails as a transaction between speaker and listener, not as utterance — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of
, 2296

Broader Connections

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