Document Type
Article
Abstract
Spivak is often viewed as an unequivocally deconstructive theorist, and she frequently reinforces this impression by proclaiming her allegiance to Derrida's ideas. Recent comments by her suggest, however, that there are limits to her deconstructive convictions. This essay considers some of Spivak's debts to Derrida's work, though it is primarily concerned with those occasions when she states her misgivings about his ability to understand postcoloniality, global power, and resistance movements. Reading Marx more accurately would, she insists, have allowed Derrida both to grasp capitalism's complex logic and to consider the effects of subaltern interventions upon capitalism's global authority. Such an assertion does indeed raise important questions about the usefulness of Derrida's ideas for postcolonial and globalization theory. But, this essay argues, Spivak manages to highlight problems in Derrida's work only by appealing a curious form of textual positivism -- a positivism that seems impossible to reconcile with her earlier claim that textuality is the place where the subaltern subject simultaneously appears and disappears.
Repository Citation
Leonard, Philip. "Spivak after Marx after Derrida." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 5, no. 1, 2025, pp. 1–17. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol5/iss1/6
Included in
Discourse and Text Linguistics Commons, French and Francophone Literature Commons, Metaphysics Commons, Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons