Subaltern speech fails as a transaction between speaker and listener, not as utterance

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

Categorization

• QUESTION: Spivak’s own retrofit of ‘the subaltern cannot speak’ as a failure of the speaker-listener transaction rather than a claim about utterance is directly relevant to whether strategic essentialism can be sustained—here she models how a famous formulation gets ‘corrected’ in retrospect.
• XREF: Speaks to the reader’s existing reading of Foucault’s race-struggle counter-history as a discourse meant to be heard by a specific audience; Spivak’s transaction model parallels Foucault’s concern with who is positioned to listen. — connects to: Subaltern speech becomes agency only within responsive resistance; The ambiguity of speech emerges only for the listener, not the speaker; Language itself cannot represent a state radically different from the present of utterance (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• The ambiguity of speech emerges only for the listener, not the speaker #complicates (0.80)
• Even networked subalterns remain objects of critique rather than speaking subjects #corroborates (0.80) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 1519
• Language itself cannot represent a state radically different from the present of utterance #corroborates (0.75)
• A subaltern who becomes audible thereby ceases to be subaltern. #expands (0.75) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 43
• Speech that merely returns another’s words can preserve its own subject-position #qualifies (0.70) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 1487