spivak

de a poco voy entiendiendo mas a spivak. en una notas viejas tenia una frase "spivak critica a foucault y deleuze confundir deseo con interes" y no tenia mucha idea de que queria decir con eso, o como eso se relacionaba a la discusion de sujeto, esta vez lo sigo poco mejor. cambie un poco el resumen viejo, pero no llego a releerlo detenidamente entero.
foto: lua (que no es para nada una sujeta unificada).

Spivak makes a critique to the problematization of the subject and to the representation of third world subject. She presents the impossibility of the subalterns to speak for themselves. She criticizes Deleuze and Foucault, for reproducing a unitary notion of subject one uniformly effected by power, but not showing any of the contradictions. Part of this problem she argue is to have gotten away form a discussion of ideology (In Althusser and Marx) and confusing desire and interest as the same. “Because desire is tacitly defined on a orthodox model, it is unitarily opposed to “being desived””(274) by ideology. This is because they are making a theory of western subject , and assuming that the other as privileged knowing subjects “they know far better than [the intellectual] and they certainly say it very well” (Foucault FD 206 in Spivak 274). With this move this authors assume a homogeneous and unitary subject and essentialyze their condition. They reproduce the representational realism, Deleuze says “the reality os what happenes in the factory”, detaching the intellectual form the social field consolidationg an international division of power. She critiques the division between theory and practice that I bridged in Deleuze in the asseveration of “theory as tool box”, but this does not recognize the situation of theory making, what are the politics of this practice.

She presents this as a problem of Deleuze of confusing the double sense of representation: as “representation as “speaking for” as in politics, and representation as re-presentation, as in the art of philosophy.” (275) She takes Marx and claim that he never tried to present a unified subject or unified class. The first sense implies that the subaltern can speak is of political representation. When a political leader claims to represent the subaltern he himself moves away form subalternity. He creates a principle of a totality he is supposed to be representing, in order to legitimize his position, and jumps to a level of hegemonic politics, which is different to the domain of the habit and politics of the subaltern. In a second sense when the postcolonial intellectual makes a symbolic representation of the subaltern, in this move intellectuals assume a unitary subject, uniformly constituted as effect of power relations, they assume a single form of power and a single form of subjectivity, confusing desire and interest as a single and not contradictory movements.

In this critique she is directly engaged with the Subaltern Studies Group. She celebrates their work as re-installing a focus on the subaltern as a negative other necessary for creating a the field of dominant politics;. However she criticizes their political project of giving voice to the voiceless as a recreating a relation in which the production of knowledge about the other imposes a form of power and recreates a dependence to a western “logos” that creates the other as an homogeneous totality, ignores the heterogeneous body politic of the subaltern, and recreate their subordination. She proposes that the intellectual should open a space so that the subaltern can be heard, search to speak to rather than listen or speak for. This learning implies a process of unlearning the privilege of the intellectual. She analyzes the widow sacrifice in India as an example in which there are different powers attempting to give a sense of it, but the widows are never able to speak for themselves. She follows a particular case in which a variety of circumstances, among them political positioning leads a young woman to suicide, this action is appropriated by men in her family, religious figure, political activists and intellectuals, each assigning meaning in regards to a particular aim. In this the complexity, contradictions and multiple lines transversing this case are lost.