shetty postcolonialisms archive fever

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POSTCOLONIALISM’SARCHIVE FEVER

SANDHYA SHETTY AND ELIZABETH JANE BELLAMY

Jacques Derrida. ARCHIVE FEVER. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: U of ChicagoP, 1996.

________. OF GRAMMATOLOGY. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: JohnHopkins UP, 1976.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. “CAN THE SUBALTERN SPEAK?” Marxism and theInterpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: U ofIllinois P, 1988. 271–313.

1. Reading the Subaltern Archivally—or, Back to Antiquity

Many readers of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” have been disturbed by Spivak’s contro-versial answer to her own question, which is that “no scene of speaking” can arise forthe subaltern woman; no discursive space can emerge from which she could formulatean “utterance.”1 One way of rephrasing Gayatri Spivak’s highly resonant question mightbe, Can there be such a thing as a “postcolonial archive”? The purpose of our essay is todemonstrate just how crucial the concept of an “archive”—perhaps even a “postcolonialarchive”—is for a more sympathetic understanding of Spivak’s now notorious “silenc-ing” of the subaltern woman. The underread and scarcely commented-on third and fourthsections of Spivak’s essay raise the question, Can we approach the gendered subalternmore productively if our project is to recover not “lost voices” but rather lost texts? Inthe process of unpacking the textual complexities underlying Britain’s 1829 abolitionof sati (the widow’s self-immolation on her husband’s funeral pyre), Spivak pushes usfurther back in time when she observes intriguingly that “the archival . . . work involvedhere is indeed a task of ‘measuring silences’” [286, our emphasis].2 We contend that her

We wish to thank John Archer, Dominick LaCapra, Parama Roy, Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, andGayatri Chakravorty Spivak for their helpful comments on our paper.

1. A “reception history” of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” can now be traced, and it wouldseem that the original polemical energies of Spivak’s essay are becoming effaced amidst chargesthat her essay is too depoliticized. The impulse to depoliticize Spivak’s deconstructive feminismbegins with Benita Parry’s well-known “Problems in Current Theories of Political Discourse,”one of a number of responses that read Spivak’s contention that the subaltern woman cannot“speak” as tantamount to producing a “silent subaltern,” a “deafness to the native voice whereit is to be heard,” and, at its most extreme, “a disparaging of nationalist discourses of resistance”[40–41]. Since its publication, Parry’s essay has led to widespread confusion over the relevanceof “Can the Subaltern Speak?” for ongoing efforts at theorizing subaltern subjectivity. To pro-vide a brief sampling, Neil Lazarus, in his essay “National Consciousness and the Specificity of(Post)Colonial Intellectualism,” though acknowledging Parry’s reading of Spivak’s position onpostcolonial subjectivity and nationalism as “somewhat reductive,” nevertheless argues thatSpivak’s deconstruction is “so saturating in its claims for colonial discourse” (as the “producer”

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choice of the term “archival” is highly motivated and can serve as the long-overdueoccasion for a return to the largely unread sections of “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

We can think of at least two risks involved in our undertaking. For one thing,revisitations to well-known essays can often seem more regressive than innovative. Weare well aware that we may have to overcome a certain indifference on the part ofreaders who, feeling confident that they know it well, judge that “Can the SubalternSpeak?” (now over ten years old) has had its theoretical “moment” and should now giveway to more current efforts to locate nonelite, subaltern subjectivity within a politics ofresistance. A second concern is that because our project of reading the subaltern woman“archivally” must necessarily reexamine and justify Spivak’s career-long engagementwith Derrida and with deconstruction, we must be aware of the extent to which herdeconstructive feminism has been prematurely and unfairly associated with the sup-posed political shortcomings of Derridean deconstruction, the regrettable result beingan almost reflex aversion to her deconstructive theory within both feminism andpostcolonialism. Despite these risks, however, we hope that our use of the archive as thegoverning principle for our return to Spivak’s essay can pave the way for a more sympa-thetic reading of Spivak’s “silent” subaltern. Our essay will argue that “Can the Subal-tern Speak?” deserves a foundational or canonical status within postcolonial theory andshould experience a “staying power” on the current critical scene as far-reaching andsignificant as Edward Said’s Orientalism.

Spivak’s essay at one point refers quite literally to the concept of an archive, that is,the colonial “archive” of the East India Company, consisting of the “correspondenceamong the police stations, the lower and higher courts, the courts of directors, the princeregent’s court,” and so on [298]—all the documents instrumental in British law’s re-codification of sati from “ritual” to “crime” (also, we might add, the archive of subal-tern historiography).3 However, as Foucault’s concept of the archive reminds us, the

of the colonial object) that native agency “in its insurgent aspects” drops out [205–06]. ForLazarus, in the final analysis, Spivak’s deconstruction evinces “an air of hesitancy” when repre-senting the postcolonial subject: it is a “holding action in the process of ossifying into a stand-point” [210]. In her essay “Dead Women Tell No Tales: Issues of Female Subjectivity, SubalternAgency and Tradition in Colonial and Postcolonial Writings on Widow Immolation in India,”Ania Loomba provides a generally sympathetic summary of “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” but shealso writes, “An insistence on subaltern silence is disquieting for those who are engaged in pre-cisely the task of recovering such voices; it can be linked to Spivak’s curious detachment . . . fromthe specificities of post-colonial politics” [218]. More recently, Asha Varadharajan’s theoreti-cally sophisticated Exotic Parodies, whose chapter on Spivak is, surprisingly, the only sustainedreading of Spivak’s work, also relies heavily on a false binary between deconstruction and dis-courses of resistance in order to argue that Spivak’s deconstructive essay leaves the subaltern“nowhere.” For Varadharajan, Spivak’s deconstruction of subaltern subjectivity is a radicallydehistoricized, “paralyzed reflexivity” that cannot allow for a resistant subaltern. For a moresympathetic reading of Spivak’s “silencing” of the subaltern woman that nevertheless does notdirectly engage the “deconstruction question” in any particular detail, see the ninth chapter ofRobert Young’s White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. For rare (though brief) praiseof the usefulness of Spivak’s deconstruction for postcolonial critique, see Gyan Prakash,“Postcolonial Criticism and Indian Historiography” [esp. 10–11]. For an intriguing reading of“Can the Subaltern Speak?” within the context of the Nicaraguan elections, see Leerom Mederoi,Shankar Raman, and Benjamin Robinson, “Can the Subaltern Vote?”

2. For a related emphasis on the “archive,” specifically the colonized woman as caughtbetween indigenous patriarchy and the politics of archival production, see Spivak’s “The Rani ofSirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives.”

3. In her pathbreaking essay “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial In-dia,” Lata Mani examines the archival documents dealing with Britain’s abolition of sati in orderto show how the widow was caught between the colonial and the indigenous male elite’s contend-


archive is not just “that whole mass of texts that belong to a single discursive [in thiscase, legal] formation,” but can also be conceptualized more abstractly as the “law ofwhat can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events”[126, 129]. Foucault’s reference to “the appearance of statements as unique events”within the archive can, in turn, remind us of Spivak’s own “sentence” (her term) sum-marizing British law’s abolition of widow sacrifice: “White men are saving brown womenfrom brown men” [296]. In a Foucaultian context, British law’s “benevolent” act ofabolishing widow sacrifice as one way of establishing “a good and civil society” getsformulated as an archival “statement/sentence” that reestablishes the “law of what canbe said” (as opposed to the “silent” widow) by means of the discursive apparatus ofcolonialist legal power/knowledge. Foucault describes the archive as “that which dif-ferentiates discourses in their multiple existence and specifies them in their own dura-tion” [129]. In other words, for Foucault there is no “origin” to the archive—only shift-ing discursive domains that “specify” these discourses “in their own duration” [129].

As a means of describing the “postcolonial archive” of “Can the Subaltern Speak?,”we could rest content within the discursive practices of Foucault’s archive and its state-ments “specifie[d] in their own duration” were it not for a second statement or “sen-tence” that Spivak insists is crucial to an understanding of the legal underpinnings ofsati, and that we argue necessitates another conceptualization of the archive. This sen-tence reads: “She [the self-immolating widow] wanted to die.” As the Foucaultian “lawof what can be said,” this sentence emanates not from within the “duration” of colonialIndian modernity in the nineteenth century, but rather from the laws of Hindu antiquitydating as far back as the sixth century BCE. The statement “She wanted to die” is atsemantic as well as legal odds with the statement “White men are saving brown womenfrom brown men,” and is a key reason why Spivak is prompted to summarize Britishlaw’s abolition of sati textually as “the palimpsestic narrative of imperialism” [281]. Ifimperialism is indeed a kind of “palimpsest,” Spivak’s observation suggests that al-though (as in Foucault’s conception) there may be no “origin” for an archive, those whoare committed to a fuller understanding of the legal underpinnings of sati are obliged topush back much earlier than colonial modernity in order to understand the disastrouslegal gap between the statements “White men are saving brown women from brownmen” and “She wanted to die”—a gap that renders the self-immolating widow’s subjec-tivity unlocatable. In other words, we will have to uncover an earlier “archive,” one thatis up to the task of “measuring silences” between sentences as the textual first steptoward probing the “silence” of the subaltern woman.

For this endeavor, let us now turn to Derrida’s concept of the “archive” as set forthin his recent book Archive Fever. Not unlike his better-known concepts of trace ordifferance, Derrida’s “archive” is not readily defined, and it is certainly no lessnonoriginary than Foucault’s archive. Broadly speaking, his “archive” is a juridical con-cept, an attempt at a general theory of how the law becomes institutionalized as law.Thus, unlike Foucault’s archive, Derrida’s archive is a “thinking” of the law that ap-proaches it not so much discursively as ontologically. Derrida focuses on the etymologyof “archive” in the Greek arkhe as entailing the principle of “commandment”: the lawcan be found “there where men and gods command, there where authority, social orderare exercised, in this place from which order is given” [9]. Moreover, Derrida writesthat it is the archons who have the power to interpret the archive: “. . . it is at their home,

ing interpretations of Hindu custom. Mani discusses how the colonial British consulted withBrahmin pundits to determine whether sati was permitted by the ancient scriptural texts, in theprocess rendering these pundits spokesmen for a vast and diverse Hindu population. In such ascheme, Mani argues that the Indian woman, lost in the shuttle between tradition and modernity,becomes a signifier of the colonial conflict.

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in that place which is their house [arkheion as ‘house,’ ‘domicile,’ ‘address’] . . . , thatofficial documents are filed” [10]. Thus, Derrida is interested not so much in the law as“discursive domain” as he is in an actual place where the law is instituted (“there wheremen and gods command”)—a place where discernible acts of interpretation occur: thearchons (“men and gods”) are the site of the law as vested authority, hermeneutic power.Unlike Foucault’s archive of the law as “what can be said” (that is, the law as an anony-mous, indeed transhuman, discursive formation), Derrida’s archive involves actual ar-chons who “exercise social order” not discursively but hermeneutically through theinterpretation of texts.

At first glance, Derrida’s concept of the “archive,” deeply invested in archaic Greeketymologies and ancient scenarios of archons interpreting the law “at their home,” seemsfar removed from “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and its focus on British law’s abolition ofsati within the (Foucaultian) “duration” of colonial Indian modernity. But Spivak workshard to uncover just such a Derridean archive for postcolonialism—a postcolonial archivethat, paradoxically, reaches back to antiquity, “there where men and gods command.” Inher essay’s fourth section, Spivak undertakes a detailed analysis of the discourse onsanctioned suicide in the texts of Vedic and classical Hindu antiquity, namely the Rg-Veda and the Dharmasastra, resonantly referred to several times throughout “Can theSubaltern Speak?” as “the archaic origin”—the “origin,” that is, of “the palimpsesticnarrative of imperialism.” At one point in her essay, Spivak poses the question: “[H]owdoes one make the move from ‘Britain’ to ‘Hinduism’?” (as another way of phrasing thelegal and linguistic disjunction between “White men are saving brown women frombrown men” and “She wanted to die”). We contend that the answer to this question—aswith the question, Can the subaltern speak?—resides in the “archive.” Let us turn againto Archive Fever, where Derrida, with uncanny significance for Spivak’s essay, writesthat the archive “always holds a problem for translation” [57]. Thus, when the British,seeking to pin the label of “crime” onto the ritual of sati, ask the learned Brahminpundits (as the indigenous elite archons of colonial modernity) to interpret the legaltexts of the archive of Sanskritic antiquity, highly consequential errant commentariesensue: the abolition of sati becomes nothing less than the law as a linguistic “repres-sion” of Sanskrit. To be sure, this repression constitutes a “discursive” moment. But weare also presented with the interpretive layers of “the palimpsestic narrative of imperial-ism” that demand an analysis of the widow’s silence as a distinctly textual moment.Spivak’s archive is a diachronic “palimpsest” whose textual layers enfold not only thesynchronic court documents of British legal power/knowledge, but also the texts ofHindu antiquity, themselves palimpsestic layers of mistranslation and errant commen-tary by the archons of the Rg-Veda as, to echo Derrida, “this place from which order isgiven.”

The third and fourth sections of “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” with their referencesto the earlier history of British India, have remained resolutely unread in the last tenyears because of postcolonialism’s ongoing investment in the temporal frame of Euro-pean modernity—specifically, in colonial modernity as a moment of rupture. One con-sequence of postcolonialism’s fixation on modernity is that antiquity has been of virtu-ally no interest—an unnegotiated nonfactor that is, in effect, dismissed as irrelevant forpostcolonialism’s focus on the trauma of colonial modernity. To be sure, antiquity as anissue is inserted into postcolonial studies at its very inception with Said’s highly influ-ential Orientalism. But we argue that Spivak’s focus on Vedic and classical Hindu an-tiquity enables a very different, and no less effective, critique of imperialism than theFoucaultian-Saidian model prevalent in so much current colonial discourse analysis.

Let us briefly rehearse Said’s Orientalism and its investigation of how the “Orient”came into being as a product of European discourse. Said’s study of the conceptual area

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of colonial discourse has largely been shaped by Foucault’s emphasis on a discursive“management of space” as the most effective means of analyzing British territorialimperialism’s increasing reliance on administrative, institutional “development” (edu-cational, legal, and so on) to “produce” colonial subject formation. (In India, this wasthe process the British attempted to disguise as “social mission.”) One among manyexamples of such colonial “administrative management” is British legal scholar Will-iam Jones’s founding in 1784 of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and the subsequentformation of “Sanskrit studies” as a discipline [Said 77–79].4 In Said’s conception, theformalized study of Sanskrit in 1784 is an example of colonial discourse that conjoinsWilliam Jones the “legal scholar” with William Jones the “colonial administrator” (assupreme court judge under the East India Company), who accommodates the newlyformed discipline of “Sanskrit studies” within the purview of colonial power/knowl-edge.

Spivak, however, is less concerned with the modernist category of colonial dis-course than with the precise “textual ingredients with which such a subject [the imperi-alist Subject who produces the “Orient”] could cathect, could occupy (invest?) its itin-erary—not only by ideological and scientific production, but also by the institution ofthe law” [280, our emphasis]. For Spivak, what gets effaced in Said’s emphasis on thepower/knowledge nexus within colonial modernity is the specificity of ancient Sanskrittexts not as “discursive formations,” but as language available for—and vulnerableto—strategic (mis)interpretations dating back to antiquity. It is true that Said discusseskey eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western texts that were instrumental in the pro-duction of the “Orient” (that is, the tautology by which Orientalism textualizes the Ori-ent); but in his account of the “Orient” as a set of textual practices, he does not engagethe texts of antiquity that served as the substrate for the modern “Orient” produced andthen managed by the practices of colonial administration. And because Said remains socommitted to the conceptual area of colonial discourse (and to a critique of Westernrepresentations of the “Orient”), he does not so much “read” these ancient texts as de-ploy them as one among many disciplinary discursive domains comprising the forcefield of imperialist power/knowledge. In her essay Spivak certainly does not deny thescope and brilliance of Said’s analysis of colonial subject formation. However, to dis-miss her investment in how the “Orient” was produced is to disallow a critique of impe-rialism under any theoretical point of entry other than colonialist discourse analysis,and it is to overlook the significance of Derrida’s archive for understanding “thepalimpsestic narrative of imperialism” and its particular texturing of the ethnocentriccomplicity between writing and the formation of a “civil” society.

It is not discourse analysis, then, but rather the inherently textual preoccupations ofdeconstruction—reading, interpretation, hermeneutics, a rigorous attention to etymolo-gies, paleonymies, complex intertextualities, and so forth—that render the concept ofthe “archive” as the relevant horizon for an understanding of how sati has silenced thesubaltern woman. Spivak is intent on rediscovering what modernity has “repressed,”that is, the origins of the practice of sati in the Hindu texts of antiquity. Such a rediscov-ery of antiquity requires a rigorous “thinking” of the text; and perhaps now we canbetter understand why Spivak begins her important third section by frankly confessingher impatience with the usual assessments of Derrida’s work as apolitical because it istoo preoccupied with matters of the text: “. . . one encounters the following understand-ing: Foucault deals with real history, real politics and real social problems; Derrida isinaccessible, esoteric and textualistic” [291]. 5 More significant for her attempt to insert

4. In “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Spivak herself refers to the founding of the Asiatic Societyof Bengal, as well as of the Indian Institute at Oxford in 1882.

5. Spivak quotes Terry Eagleton’s claim (in Literary Theory) that Derrida “has been grossly


Derrida within a critique of imperialism, Spivak quotes Said’s objection to deconstructionin The World, The Text, The Critic: “Derrida’s criticism moves us into the text, Foucault’sin and out”—an observation that Spivak does not hesitate to label “a profound misap-prehension of the notion of ‘textuality’” [292].

One question best investigated deconstructively by means of Spivak’s “postcolonialarchive” is, What kind of violence are we talking about when we speak of the historicaltrauma known as imperialism? For those deeply invested in discourse analysis, the an-swer would be “epistemic violence”: British law’s recodification of sati would serve asa prime example of Foucault’s “epistemic violence” perpetrated by/through the ideo-logical state apparatus of British colonial administration. Said praises Foucault for pull-ing us “out of the text” and into the presumably more political realm of a critique ofcolonial discourse—of discourse as the “epistemic violence” inherent in the power/knowledge nexus of British colonial administration. But from the perspective of a“postcolonial archive,” such a move “out of the text” leads us away from the archive ofHindu antiquity. To repeat our earlier question: What kind of violence is being inflictedwhen British colonial administration seeks to establish a “civil” society through therecodification of Hindu legal texts dating back to antiquity? “Epistemic violence” is, tobe sure, one answer. But in Archive Fever Derrida writes of another kind of violence,what he calls an “archival violence,” or “the violence of the archive itself, as archive, asarchival violence” [12]. Derrida emphasizes that “the archive takes place at the place oforiginary and structural breakdown of the said memory” [14].6 To be sure, archivalviolence occurs within the purview of colonialist power/knowledge, but it also occurs“at the home” of the archons—or as Derrida would emphasize, “there” in the liminalspace where the law meets writing, where the letter of the law “originates” in the traceof an earlier “said memory.” At the point at which the British ask the learned Brahminpundits to interpret the ancient Sanskrit texts, the “said memory” that is structurallydestroyed is the texts of the smriti tradition of Hindu antiquity, loosely translated as

unhistorical,” as well as Perry Anderson’s critique of Derrida (in In the Tracks of HistoricalMaterialism) as so preoccupied with exposing a “nostalgia of origins” that he demonstrates “nocommitment to exploration of social realities at all” [291]. Accordingly, Spivak’s career-longengagement with deconstruction has itself been perceived by many as inaccessible, esoteric, ar-cane—a misguided attenuation of the political urgency of postcolonial agendas. But these dis-missals overlook Spivak’s consistent arguments throughout her career that deconstruction’s stra-tegic “dismantlings,” as she calls them, its refusal of premature resolutions of aporias and stub-born impasses, are moments of ethical responsibility that can do real political work. Refusing toyield to pressures to dismiss deconstruction as outmoded, Spivak continues to argue: “To act istherefore not to ignore deconstruction, but actively to transgress it without giving it up” [Outsidein the Teaching Machine 121]; “deconstruction is what must be critiqued, even as it is what oneinhabits entirely” [OTM 60]; and, most recently, “deconstructive reading [is] unaccusing,unexcusing, attentive, situationally productive through dismantling” [Critique of PostcolonialReason 82]. In short, for Spivak, deconstruction (to echo her own emphatic and frequently useddouble negative) cannot not be used in postcolonial critique.

6. At this point, we are particularly motivated to read “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in con-junction with Archive Fever. The concept of an originary, textual “violence” (not, it hardly needsemphasizing, in the same category as real, historical violence—although, in the case of sati, thetwo kinds of violence exist in a weird complicity) is a major reason why Spivak has often beendrawn to Derrida over Foucault. In her essay “More on Power/Knowledge,” Spivak writes, “Icannot find anywhere in Foucault the thought of a founding violence. . . . Indeed, Derrida’s initialcritique had been in terms of Foucault’s ignoring of the violence that founds philosophy” [150].Nevertheless, we should note that Spivak’s essay is a valuable attempt to get beyond a simpledichotomy between Derrida and Foucault—to, in her words, “speak of that impossible doublename—Derrida/Foucault” and “to give in to both, however asymmetrically” [143].

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“that which was remembered.” The subaltern cannot “speak” because of the violenceboth of and to this Sanskritic archive.

In sum, we propose a return to the third and fourth sections of Spivak’s “Can theSubaltern Speak?” in order to look more closely at her premise that the texts of antiquityare the “originary” terrain that must be traversed before one can arrive at an understand-ing of “epistemic violence” in colonial Indian modernity. All of which is to say that anepistemic shift may first entail a textual shift—not so much an epistemic violence as anarchival violence, a “violence” to the text that backdates the “origin” of colonial subjectformation from modernity to antiquity. In the archive of Hindu antiquity, we will dis-cover that there is no letter of the law “there where men and gods command”—only thejuridical as a primal scene of mistranslation and errant commentary. The “postcolonialarchive,” then, is a task of “measuring silences,” a task, in Spivak’s words, of “attempt-ing to recover a (sexually) subaltern subject [. . .] lost in an institutional textuality at thearchaic origin” [303].

2. Spivak’s “imperialist prejudice”: Ethnocentrism and the History of Writing

In our essay’s final section, we will turn to Spivak’s reading of the “archaic origin” ofthe Rg-Veda and the Dharmasastra and the archival violence ensuing from the archons’sanctioning of suicide through errant commentaries. But before we can logically link upwith this archival reading of sati, we must first revisit Spivak’s key but often over-looked summary of Derrida’s third chapter of Of Grammatology. For Spivak, OfGrammatology’s analysis of the ethnocentrism that has haunted Western philology’sencounter with Oriental languages offers an indispensable perspective on what happenswhen British law seeks to establish a “good and civil society” by recodifying Hindulegal texts dating back to antiquity. Archive Fever, published some ten years after Spivak’sessay, is certainly not a source for “Can the Subaltern Speak?” But it is worth consider-ing how Derrida’s concept of the “archive” is, in many ways, his most current incarna-tion of Of Grammatology’s focus on Western philology’s “prejudices” (his term) as theoccasion for teasing out the ethnocentric complicity between writing and the formationof a “civil” society.

We are well aware that in recent years, in the wake of dismissals of deconstructionas apolitical, a return to Of Grammatology (as well as to any number of Derrida’s earlyworks) has hardly been viewed as urgent for any kind of ideology critique, much less acritique of imperialism—hence, Of Grammatology’s increasing status as “unread.” SinceOf Grammatology’s publication, it is difficult to find any commentary on Derrida’s“prejudices.” Surprisingly, Spivak’s essay is the only sustained reading of and commen-tary on Derrida’s analysis of the ethnocentric “domestic outline,” as he puts it, underly-ing the three “prejudices” of Western philology’s history of writing.7 And, in turn, Spivak’sown summary in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” has been similarly overlooked in the re-ception history of her essay. Thus, we argue that both Derrida’s “prejudices” and Spivak’ssummary of them have become the site of a doubled “nonreading”: neither Derrida’s

7. We should remind the reader that Of Grammatology is, of course, a highly resonant textfor Spivak, who was the volume’s English translator and wrote an extensive preface that was akey document introducing deconstruction to the US. She leaves these facts uncommented on,leading the reader to wonder whether her ironic “silence” on this matter further highlights thesignificance of her return to Derrida’s text to undergird so much of her eventual analysis of sati.For Spivak’s own intriguing account of how she became interested in doing an English transla-tion of Of Grammatology, see her interview with Howard Winant entitled “Gayatri Spivak on thePolitics of the Subaltern.”


nor Spivak’s readers have seemed inclined to do anything more than skim these “preju-dices”—as if dismissing them as further examples of deconstruction’s arcane, hermeticindulgences.8 However, as a complex and ambitious attempt at nothing less than a his-tory of writing, Of Grammatology is a key source for Spivak’s discussion of Britishlaw’s misreading of ancient Vedic and classical Hindu texts, primarily because ofDerrida’s analysis of the “violence” that Western philology has perpetrated onto non-Western scripts of antiquity.

Spivak delays her analysis of the Rg-Veda and the Dharmasastra until the finalpages of her essay, a clear indication that she does not want to insert “the question ofSanskrit” (a synecdoche for Hindu antiquity and its “repression” within the colonialmoment) into her essay too prematurely, before first building a careful bridge betweenit and other non-Western scripts of antiquity. Spivak’s third section makes an extraordi-nary move, which is to argue for nothing less than an explicitly geopolitical Derrida asa theorist far more alert than, say, Foucault to the specter of Western ethnocentrism andits persistent constituting of the Other as the shadow of the European Self—and, byimplication, a theorist far more useful as a “relay” to her eventual return to Sanskrit.9

Moreover, Spivak does not suggest that the Derrida who critiques ethnocentrism is a“new” or heretofore “undiscovered” Derrida. Rather, this is the Derrida we have read(and so often dismissed) all along, ever since the publication of Of Grammatology andits seemingly apolitical history of textuality. In other words, Spivak demonstrates that acritique of ethnocentrism is intrinsic to Derrida’s project in the sixties and seventies toundertake a history of what he calls “the science of writing.”

Early in Of Grammatology, Derrida states his intention that his book be read notonly as a critique of the phenomenon of logocentrism but as, at its core, an investigationof “the ethnocentrism which, everywhere and always, had controlled the concept ofwriting” [3]. In a series of methodological questions that probe the history of writing,Derrida asks: “Where and when does one pass from one writing to another, from writingin general to writing in the narrow sense, from the trace to the graphie from one graphicsystem to another . . . ?” [74]. Significantly, these questions concerning the (non)originof writing lead Derrida to a consideration of the history of writing within a specificallygeopolitical context: “‘Where’ and ‘when’ may open empirical questions: what, withinhistory and within the world, are the places and the determined moments of the firstphenomena of writing?” [74, our emphasis]. The significance of this question shouldnot be passed over lightly. For Derrida, in other words, any consideration of a “scien-tific interest in writing” and of the ethnocentrism inherent in philological inquiry mustnegotiate the geopolitical question of “place”—of writing “within history” and of writ-ing “within the world.”

8. Even defenders of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” tend to overlook Spivak’s carefully laid-out declarations of Derrida’s “long-term usefulness for people outside the First World” [292] inorder to reach what they view as her essay’s real “payoff,” her concluding discussion ofBhuvaneswari Bhaduri’s enigmatic suicide in Calcutta in 1926 and what this suicide might revealabout “native agency.” But as long as Spivak’s third and fourth sections remain virtually ignored,any analysis of this widely discussed account is incomplete, because it is so resolutely unin-formed by the Derridean problematic that sets up Spivak’s notoriously misread conclusion thatBhuvaneswari “cannot be heard or read” [308]. We take up the issue of the Bhuvaneswari epi-sode in our concluding “Postscript.”

9. In summarizing Foucault’s career, Spivak writes that he is “a brilliant thinker of power-in-spacing, but the awareness of the topographical reinscription of imperialism does not informhis presuppositions” [290]. Foucault’s privileged “objects” of historical investigation—the clinic,the asylum, the prison, the university—serve as “screen-allegories that foreclose a reading of thebroader narratives of imperialism” [291].

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Derrida centers his investigation of ethnocentrism “within the world” of writing ona detailed account of Western philology’s three “prejudices,” which he designates the“theological,” “Chinese,” and “hieroglyphist prejudices.” Derrida begins his account ofthe “prejudices” in the sixteenth century and the extent to which its theories of thewritten sign become nothing less than a “symptom of the crisis of European conscious-ness” [75]. The sixteenth century demonstrated a “theological prejudice” toward writ-ing, defined by Derrida as “the myth of a primitive and natural writing given by God,”such as ancient Greek or Hebrew script [76]. By the eighteenth century, however, thebelief in a primitive writing given by God is replaced by a second “prejudice”; the“ahistorical” phenomenon of “the Chinese prejudice,” that is, the West’s “logico-philo-sophical” effort (Descartes, Leibniz, and others) to construct a universal script and auniversal language from the recently discovered Chinese script.10 For Leibniz and oth-ers, true philosophical writing as abstracted from the Chinese model is “independentwith regard to history” [79], and thus the cartographical specificity of Chinese writingas such becomes sublated within the “rational” demand for a “universal” philosophicalscript, “not disturbed by the knowledge of Chinese script, limited but real, which wasthen available” [80]. For Derrida, such a concept of Chinese writing “thus functioned asa sort of European hallucination” [80]. The real linguistic script of a real China is ef-faced by the hallucinatory needs of a European philological imaginary.

Unlike what Derrida refers to as the obvious “ethnocentric scorn” inherent in theChinese prejudice, the third prejudice, the “hieroglyphist” prejudice, “takes the form ofan hyperbolical admiration” [80]. Thus even though the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kirchersought, in the eighteenth century, to introduce Egyptology to the West, he warned againstany attempts at scientifically deciphering the hieroglyphs because of the perceived “mys-terious” and, indeed, sublime nature of the script. But as Derrida observes, the “ratio-nalism” of the Chinese prejudice and the admiring “mysticism” of the hieroglyphistprejudice are oddly complicit: “The writing of the other is each time invested with adomestic outline,” whereby the other is constituted only as a reflection of the EuropeanSelf [80]. These three prejudices are what Derrida means when he speaks of writing“within history and within the world”: any study of writing “within the world” neces-sarily entails either a manifest “ethnocentric scorn” or a “hyperbolic admiration,” withboth impulses disguising an underlying “domestic outline” that has less to do with thelanguage under investigation than with tracing the psychic contours of a “Europeanhallucination” and a “symptom of the crisis of European consciousness.”

We now propose to look more closely at the ways in which Spivak’s uncovering ofthe geopolitical Derrida becomes a crucial and carefully thought through first step ofher critique of imperialism, as well as the overlooked framework for her focus on thecomplicity between textuality and imperialism in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” For read-ers eager to dismiss Spivak’s revisiting of Derrida’s overview of the theological, Chi-nese, and hieroglyphist “prejudices” as a politically irrelevant exercise in Derrideandiscipleship, we suggest the following possibility: in “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Spivakmay be intent on tracing the history of a fourth “prejudice” that can situate a critique ofimperialism within the West’s “science of writing.” If we keep in mind Derrida’s em-phasis on Western philology’s “prejudices” as hovering symptomatically between “eth-nocentric scorn” and “hyperbolical admiration” in their encounters with ancient, non-Western scripts, then one impulse behind Spivak’s third section of “Can the SubalternSpeak?” might be to use his teasing out of the complex relationship between writing

10. Derrida quotes from Leibniz’s 1703 letter to Father Bouvet: “. . . Chinese characters areperhaps more philosophical and seem to be built upon more intellectual considerations, such asare given by numbers, orders, and relations” [79].


and history as the necessary first step toward investigating the British engagement withSanskrit within the historical moment of imperialism.

It is difficult to locate the precise point where Derrida’s third chapter “ends” andSpivak “begins” her own attempt at a geopolitical grammatology that insists on pre-serving textuality as a vital political category. For Spivak, Western theory has exhausteditself, something Derrida himself may be conceding when he suggests, noting the“hyperbolical admiration” that constitutes the “hieroglyphist” prejudice: “We have notfinished demonstrating the necessity of this pattern” [80]. In other words, Derrida claims,the West has not yet finished a study of the history of writing as nothing less than “asymptom of the crisis of the European consciousness.” The limit not just of Westernphilosophy, but also of Western philosophy’s attempt to place writing “within historyand within the world”—a limit which, to be sure, implicates Derrida himself—becomesa moment of relay and, paradoxically, the enabling “origin” of “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

Derrida, then, is the “origin” of Spivak’s project to situate the history of writingwithin imperialism, and yet, positioned as he is at the limit of Western theory, he him-self is not adequate to the task. Spivak notes that Derrida, despite his important expo-sure of the “ethnocentric scorn” residing at the core of the study of writing, “has notmoved (or perhaps cannot move) into that arena [of imperialism]” [294]. But for thosereaders of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” who have expressed their disappointment withSpivak for not having simply jettisoned Derrida so that she could proceed to what theyperceive as the far more urgent talk of “giving voice” to the muted subaltern woman, weoffer the following motive for her essay’s continued investment in deconstruction: inher fourth section, Spivak undertakes an account of what we would call the “imperialistprejudice” that is a carefully thought-through engagement with Derrida’s own accountof, in her words, “the complicity between writing and the opening of domestic and civilsociety” [293]. Along with Greek, Hebrew, Egyptian, and Chinese texts—ancient scriptsthat Western philology ethnocentrically incorporated into its “domestic outline”—Spivakwould appear to be adding the badly mistranslated and misinterpreted texts of Sanskritto Derrida’s list of key “prejudices” in the history of writing. In the final analysis, thereis no better example of the West’s symptomatic hovering between “hyperbolical admi-ration” and “ethnocentric scorn” than this sentence from a letter by an English soldier-scholar in the 1890s: “The study of Sanskrit, ‘the language of the gods,’ has afforded meintense enjoyment during the last 25 years of my life in India, but it has not, I amthankful to say, led me, as it has some, to give up a hearty belief in our own grandreligion” [qtd. in Spivak 248].

We conclude this section by forging a link between Derrida’s “prejudices” and hisconcept of the “archive.” When Spivak poses the question, “[H]ow does one make themove from ‘Britain’ to ‘Hinduism’?,” we hear the echoes of Derrida’s resonant questionin Of Grammatology: “Where and when does one pass . . . from one graphic system toanother?” [our emphasis]. And we are reminded of Derrida’s warning in Archive Feverthat the law’s encounter with the text “always holds a problem for translation.” But asSpivak points out, the ethnocentric “prejudices” of Of Grammatology cannot move intothe “arena” of imperialism. We add that Derrida’s juridical concept of the “archive” issimilarly unable to move into the “arena” of imperialism. Spivak’s “imperialist preju-dice” achieves a crucial mediation between the ethnocentric valences of Derrida’s “preju-dices” and the juridical valences of his “archive,” offering a point of entry into what wehave provisionally called a “postcolonial archive”: her “imperialist prejudice” is Britishlaw’s ethnocentric violence to the archive of Sanskritic antiquity.

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3. Reading Spivak Reading the “Archons”

It remains now for us to uncover an archive for postcolonialism—a postcolonial archivethat, paradoxically, stretches from colonial modernity back to antiquity, “there,” to echoDerrida, “where men and gods command.” Spivak’s “imperialist prejudice” has depos-ited us on the threshold of the archive of Sanskritic antiquity; and we now move to herwidely overlooked analysis of key passages in the ancient documents of Rg-Veda andthe Dharmasastra in order to complete the archival task of, in her words, “recovering a(sexually) subaltern subject [. . .] lost in an institutional textuality at the archaic origin.”

The sentence “White men are saving brown women from brown men” marks nine-teenth-century British law’s “benevolent” appropriation of the woman as the object ofprotection—a consequence as distinctly textual as it is ideological. This sentence is aprime example of Derrida’s “hyperbolic admiration”; but the relationship between theimperialist subject and the subject of imperialism is more ambiguous than, say, Europe’sethnocentric benevolence toward Egyptian writing, as illustrated by Derrida’s“hieroglyphist prejudice.” A question that Spivak seeks to answer is, What history ofthe repression of Sanskrit has produced this resonant sentence of imperialist “benevo-lence”? Or, to rephrase the question within the temporal frame of antiquity, What his-tory of the repression of Sanskrit has effaced the ancient Hindu archons’ ruling that theself-immolating widow “wanted to die”? To what extent, then, can Spivak’s “imperial-ist prejudice” be brought to bear on the legal disjunction between “White men are sav-ing brown women from brown men” and “She wanted to die”? Confronted with whatshe terms these “dialectically interlocking” sentences, Spivak writes: “The postcolonialwoman intellectual asks the question of simple semiosis—What does this mean?—andbegins to plot a history” [297].

In her move from colonial modernity back to antiquity (from “Britain” to “Hindu-ism,” or, phrased linguistically, from the British transcription suttee to the original San-skrit sati), Spivak turns first to the Dharmasastra, a multiply authored series of docu-ments, dating from about the seventh to the second centuries BCE, whose codificationsof Hindu law and custom were, legally speaking, by far the most important of the post-Vedic smriti tradition, or “that which is remembered.” From the perspective of a Derridean“archive,” the Dharmasastra is indeed “this place from which order is given,” “thisplace” where the archons are vested with the hermeneutic power of interpreting the law.But it is also the site of archival violence as, again to echo Derrida, “the place of originaryand structural breakdown of the said memory”: in the act of codifying the law in theDharmasastra, the archons violate “that which is remembered.”11 We will now uncoverthe archival violence implicit in Spivak’s dense and elliptical account of the legal originof sati in the Dharmasastra. In effect, we seek to render more “readable” this largely“unread” section of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and its account of how the “epistemicviolence” of the British abolition of sati in 1829 originates in the “archival violence”within the Dharmasastra some twenty-five centuries ago. Spivak’s deconstructive femi-nism, an ongoing source of frustration for so many of her readers, may neverthelessprove to be the only methodology rigorous enough to guide us through the legal laby-rinth of the archive of Sanskritic antiquity.

The discourses on sanctioned suicide and on proper rites for the dead are the tworelevant moments in the Dharmasastra that Spivak turns to in order to frame her discus-sion of widow self-immolation as exception to the rule of classical Hindu law. It is

11. Spivak’s most significant return to the Sanskritic Hinduism of classical antiquity since“Can the Subaltern Speak?” occurs in her most recent book, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason:Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, in her critique of Hegel’s reading of the Bhagavadgitain his Philosophy of History [39–58].


worth noting here that the legal narrative of the self-immolating widow “originates”within discussions of sati as a solely male experience. As a rule, the scriptures (thinkingonly of the male) consider the act of suicide or atmaghata (“killing of the self”) asgenerally reprehensible, but the law accommodates certain forms of suicide viewed asformulaic “performances.” If the suicide arises out of tatvajnana (“knowledge of truth”),if, in other words, the “knowing subject” or “enlightened self” commits suicide as anact of full comprehension of its tatva (its “thatness” or “quiddity”), then such a self-annihilation, in Spivak’s words, “lose[s] the phenomenal identity of being suicide” [299].Under the law, the self-annihilating male has achieved a state of “felicity,” a kind ofspiritual completion or bliss, that annuls the suicide itself.

A second category of sanctioned suicide in the Dharmasastra concerns not suicideas “philosophical enlightenment” but rather suicide as “sacredness of place”; and it isthis category that engages Spivak, inserting, as it does, the wedge of “gender trouble”into classical Hindu law. In this case, the law sanctions suicide by interpreting self-annihilation as enacting a journey to a “designated sacred place.” In both cases (self-annihilation as tatvajnana, and self-annihilation as journey to a “sacred place”), theletter of the law dictates that sanctioned suicide can pertain only to the male. Tatvajnana,or knowledge of the truth of one’s insubstantiality, is not a “philosophical” state (le-gally) available to a woman. In other words, the law offers no conceptual space forconsidering women’s suicide; or, put even more directly, the law cannot imagine how awoman could kill her “self.” Taken in its most absolute sense, then, the law on sanc-tioned suicide is constituted as a denial of a woman’s agency: she can die—but shecannot kill her own “proper” self. However, even though tatvajnana is not available towomen, the second category of suicide as “sacredness of place” does legally accommo-date women into sanctioned suicide in the exceptional form of sati, or self-immolationon the husband’s funeral pyre. Thus, as we shall see, it is this “sacredness of place”where the category of “woman” (however tentatively) can be raised in the Dharmasastra.

Spivak chooses to read the woman’s self-immolation on two levels as “a simulacrumof both truth-knowledge and piety of place” [300, our emphasis]. In the case of the self-immolating woman’s suicide as simulacrum of “truth-knowledge,” the law sanctionsthe suicide on the following grounds: while the dead husband’s burning body drama-tizes the insubstantiality of identity, the widow who throws herself on her dead husband’spyre dramatizes or mimetically (secondarily) “acts out” her husband’s philosophicalknowledge of the insubstantiality of the self. And in the case of the widow’s suicide as“simulacrum of piety of place,” the husband’s funeral pyre (ritually elaborate in con-struction) becomes, in Spivak’s words, “the metonym for all sacred places” [300].

The legal shift in the Dharmasastra from an interior sanction (truth-knowledge) toan exterior, exceptional law sanctioning suicide as “place of pilgrimage” succeeds inaccommodating women into the category of sanctioned suicide, but Spivak argues thatit does so only “improperly” such that (by definition) the woman is displaced fromherself. As Spivak writes of the widow, “For her alone is sanctioned self-immolation ona dead spouse’s pyre” [300]. That is to say, there can be no suicide in the case of ahusband “acting out” the wife’s death. Thus, even here in this latter category of sanc-tioned suicide for widows, the woman does not have a “proper” place. Even here, the“place of pilgrimage” or “piety of place” as woman’s performance of suicide displacesher from herself: for the woman, it is only her (mimetic) immolation on the husband’sfuneral pyre that can sanction her death as (non)suicide—with the funeral pyre servingnot as her own, proper “sacred place,” but rather the “piety of place” where her deadhusband is burning. The woman can kill her “self” only by means of a performativedisplacement, that is, only on the displaced place of the husband’s bed of burning wood.The woman, legally displaced from herself on at least two levels, that is, displaced from

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her own material body to her husband’s burning body, and displaced from her own“piety of place” to her husband’s funeral pyre (itself at a “metonymic” remove from the“place of pilgrimage”), is thus also displaced on a third level, that of her own agency.

However (and here, one could say, begins “the palimpsestic narrative of imperial-ism”), the exception that sanctions widow suicide does actually allow for the woman’sagency by recognizing her suicide as an “act of choice” on her part, and Spivak care-fully traces this attribution of “choice” to the widow. According to the law, if the widowimmolates herself, then it is as if she is saying, “I want to die.” The archons of Hindulaw represent this (unuttered, unverifiable) moment as “choice,” which they in turncode as the widow being courageous, noble, worthy of reward in heaven. The only waythe widow can even approach the enlightened “felicity” of tatvajnana, then, is throughthis legally constructed “choice” as a legal signifier of her desire—of her desire asagency (an agency that, nevertheless, can occur only by way of her death). Such anencoding of “choice,” however, produces a precarious subjecthood for the woman, per-haps best summarized here in an Althusserian sense: following the husband’s death, thearchons “produce” a widow who, out of a seemingly verifiable and uncoerced free will,“chooses” to immolate herself. The widow understands sanctioned self-immolation as,in Spivak’s words, “an exceptional signifier of her own desire” [300].

We are now at the heart of the “archival violence” of the Dharmasastra. Sati asexception to sanctioned suicide is not only the unstable site of the widow’s (non)agency,but it is also the unstable site where classical Hindu law (to echo Derrida, “this placefrom which order is given”) becomes displaced from itself, a displacement that resultsfrom a series of exceptions granted by the Dharmasastra. First, the law’s instituting ofsati is an exception to barring women from legally sanctioned suicide. Second, thelaw’s instituting of sati is an exception to the legal denial of woman’s agency. Third andmost significant, as Spivak notes cogently, the law’s instituting of sati as sanctionedsuicide constitutes a major exception to the general rule for the widow’s proper con-duct, which was living out the rest of her life in complete austerity, self-mortification,denial of all pleasures. As we saw earlier, sati as exception to the law, whereby a widowmay “choose” the husband’s pyre as her proper “piety of place,” has already become anact of dis-place-ment for the woman on at least two levels. Moreover, when the archonsallow for an exception to the general rule for a widow’s conduct, that is, offer an alter-native to lifelong asceticism by way of introducing the “choice” of “She wants to die”(Hindu law’s implied utterance that, in Spivak’s words, will become fatefully and “dia-lectically interlocked” with imperialism as “social mission”), they inadvertently insertthe wedge of gender difference into the classical discourse on sanctioned suicides withinarchaic Hinduism. When the law recasts the male suicide’s “felicity” into the “courage”of the widow’s “free choice,” the female subject reads this exception to the law as “Iwant to die.” But the concept of woman’s “choice” is dubious if she cannot (legally) killher “proper” self, but rather can only act out the dead husband’s “piety of place” withinthe context of the husband’s death.

The three exceptions outlined above, then, have the effect of displacing the lawfrom itself. These exceptions are in excess of the letter of the law, even as sati codeswoman’s desire (“I want to die”) as being in excess of the law (that is, in excess of thegeneral rule of lawful conduct for widows). Indeed, sati reveals the fissure that is thelaw itself, the law as exception. Sati is not a stable, “originary” practice but alwaysalready exists as a legal exception. Put another way, sati “originates” only as a supple-ment—never occupying a “proper” place within ancient Hindu law. Although the ritualof sati seemingly grants woman’s agency at the moment of death, the widow’s seeming“free choice” is more accurately seen as an archival violence at the “archaic origin” of


classical Hindu law—and a major reason why Spivak refers to the narrative of imperi-alism as a textual “palimpsest.”

Let us now attempt to trace the archival violence by which, centuries later, thewidow’s seeming “free choice” would eventually become interpreted by the British as avictimized woman going to slaughter. As Spivak emphasizes, what was hardly everdebated (either among Hindus, or, centuries later, between Hindus and the British) wasthe general law for proper conduct of the widow (that is, living out her life in austerityand self-mortification). The focus of the debate was always the exceptional law of sati.Only agency at the moment of death (“She chose to die”) was of legal interest, such thatthe “choice to die” became recoded as the widow’s free will. The self-immolation of thewidow thereby became, in Spivak’s words, “the extreme case of the general law ratherthan an exception to it” [303]. One strange result of the legal perception of the widow’s“free choice” as “courageous” was that the widow who chose to live was cast in a morenegative light. Thus, we are presented with a prime example of archival violence as, toecho Derrida, “the place of originary and structural breakdown of the said memory.” Itis clear from Spivak’s reading of the Dharmasastra that the legal texts of Hindu antiq-uity never intended that sati replace self-mortification as the general rule for properwidow conduct. The “normative” widow was effaced by the exceptional rule of sati asthe “new” general rule, in Spivak’s words, “ideologically cathected as ‘reward’’’ for thewidow who courageously “chose” to die [301].

Spivak’s next major move pinpoints the historical moments and regions where satias exceptional rule in the legal texts of classical antiquity turns into the general rule in aclass-specific way in, for example, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Bengal.12 At stakehere is the archival issue of “untranslatability,” whereby nineteenth-century coloniallaw “sublated” what the British perceived as “heathen ritual” into crime. The Hinduscriptural notion of a “reward” for the self-immolating widow’s “courage” was at oddswith British colonialism’s sense of itself as “social mission” and its need to interpretsati not as an exceptional sanctioned suicide, but as the widow’s unfair punishment.Once again, the widow’s “free choice” is the contended issue. Spivak argues that wemust turn to indigenous colonial patriarchy to rediscover a Hindu patriarchal diagnosisof female free will that is at odds with the local British police officer supervising thewidow’s immolation. For the British police officer, real free choice for the woman was,in Spivak’s words, “to be dissuaded after a decision” [301], to choose freedom insteadof self-immolation. But within Hindu ritual prescription, the widow’s turning back fromthe pyre was interpreted not as free choice, but as “transgression,” an exceeding of theletter of ritual which then necessitated a type of penance. Moving between Hindu ritualprescription on the one hand, and the texts of imperial discourse on the other (that is,sifting through the layers of the “palimpsestic narrative of imperialism”), Spivak con-cludes that within these two contending versions of freedom, the place of mutualuntranslatability and irreconciliation appears to be “the constitution of the female sub-ject in life” [301].13

12. A primary source for Spivak’s historical overview is Pandurang Varman Kane’s 1963History of Dharmasastra. Not only is Kane an archon-ic authority, but he is also an example,mirroring for Spivak the particular production of the sexed subaltern subject accepted by even“benevolent and enlightened” Indian men who admired the widow’s courage. She quotes fromKane: “. . . it is a warped mentality that rebukes modern Indians for expressing admiration andreverence for the cool and unfaltering courage of Indian women in becoming satis . . .” [300].Another source is Ashis Nandy’s 1975 essay “Sati: A Nineteenth-Century Tale of Women, Vio-lence, and Protest,” which was a pioneering effort at historicizing sati.

13. The logical next step in any project of tracing the constitution of the sexed subalternsubject would not be the itinerary of the dead woman, but rather an investigation of the femalesubject “in life,” specifically within the context of what Spivak refers to as a “Hindu regulative

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What underwrites the colonial redefinition of sati as crime is a fundamental mis-reading of its ritual significance, an overlooking of the legal itinerary by which satibecame “ideologically cathected as ‘reward,’’’ a perception of the widow’s “courage”that can be comprehended only within a laborious reading of the texts of archaic law. Insuch a scheme, as Spivak writes, “the possibility of recovering a (sexually) subalternsubject is lost in an institutional textuality at the archaic origin.”14

Spivak’s tracing of the legal itinerary of sati and the “silenced” subaltern womandoes not end here with the Dharmasastra and its discourses on sanctioned suicide andproper rites for the dead. The Dharmasastra was by far the most important document ofthe classical smriti tradition. But this text should also be viewed as a “palimpsest,”because its authority in codifying Hindu law and custom derived from at least two (ifnot three) prior texts: the Dharma Sutras, sectarian manuals for proper conduct writtenin short aphorisms derived from the earlier ritualistic Vedic literature of the Brahmanas,which was concerned mostly with sacrifice and its symbolism. These latter texts beganto be orally composed and transmitted around 900 BCE, a process continuing for sev-eral centuries. But the “palimpsestic” layers do not end here. The Brahmanas werethemselves appendages of the Vedas, the most archaic of the religious texts of antiquity.The Rg-Veda, in turn the oldest of the Vedas and historically considered the first andmost important of the sruti literature (or “that which is heard”), is a collection of hymnsthat were so sacred they were rarely if ever written down until the 1780s. TheDharmasastra, therefore, must be viewed as bearing a complexly layered relationshipto the Vedic and sruti texts, or writings of original revelation, which it augments onlyafter the Brahmanas and the Dharma Sutras [see Basham 98–104].

Again using Kane’s History of Dharmasastra as her source, Spivak turns to thecommentary of Raghunandana, a late fifteenth-, early sixteenth-century legalist whoseinterpretations of the Rg-Veda provided the most authoritative legal validation of sati inthose times and places where the widow’s self-immolation became the general rule forproper conduct for widows. Thus, it is through this influential archon/interpreter thatwe gain access to the archival origin of the enigmatic and sacred Rg-Veda. But what wediscover is not the law as arkhe, the law as absolute “commandment,” but rather thearchival violence of a primal misreading at the archaic origin.

In keeping with centuries-long hermeneutic tradition, Raghunandana cites as hisauthority for the practice of sati a particular Rg-Vedic verse passage/hymn that outlinesthe steps in the rites for the dead. Even a simple reading makes it clear that this passageis not addressed to the bereaved widow, but rather to women of the dead husband’shousehold whose husbands are living. Yet for centuries, on the basis of a crucial trans-

psychobiography” [302]; whereby one could further pursue the question of what happened to thewidow who, obeying the general law for proper widow conduct, lived out her life in a regressive“anteriority transformed into stasis” [302]. For more on Spivak’s call to piece together these“regulative psychobiographies” in the indigenous legal tradition, and “to track the regulativepsychobiographies that constitute the subject-effect of these women, give these women a sense oftheir ‘I,’” see her essay “The Political Economy of Women as Seen by a Literary Critic,” [esp.227–28]. In her chapter “Representing Sati,” Rajeswari Sunder Rajan offers just such a focus on“the widow who ‘chooses’ life over death” in her brief reading of the Shilappadikaram, a classi-cal Tamil epic.

14. At this juncture in her argument, Spivak inserts the topic of martyrdom into her discus-sion of the British authorities’ misconception of sati: “Perhaps sati should have been read withmartyrdom, with the defunct husband standing in for the transcendental One; or with war, withthe husband standing in for sovereign or state, for whose sake an intoxicating ideology of self-sacrifice can be mobilized. In actuality, it was categorized with murder, infanticide and the lethalexposure of the very old. The dubious place of the free will of the constituted sexed subject asfemale was successfully effaced” [301].

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position of the dead for the living husband, this passage has been read as if it wereaddressed to the widow. Emphasizing that this transposition of the dead for the livinghusband is a different “order of mystery” from the manipulations of female subject-construction evident in the legal interpretations of the Dharmasastra, Spivak asks asimple but resonant question: “Why then was it [this misreading] taken as authorita-tive?” [304]. In this recursive performance of a textual tradition upholding the law,Raghunandana, in Spivak’s apt phrasing, ends up “commemorating a peculiar and trans-parent misreading at the very place of sanction” [304].

But, once again, the “violence” of the archive of Vedic Hinduism does not end here.Spivak observes that the practice of sati relies on the following verse: “Let these whosehusbands are worthy and are living enter the house with clarified butter in their eyes.Let these wives first step into the house, tearless, healthy, and well adorned” [qtd. inKane’s History of Dharmasastra 2.2.634]. A closer look at the second line, “Let thesewives first step into the house,” reveals that the word for “first” is agré. But somecommentaries have misread this word as agné, “O fire,” thus transforming the verseinto: “Let these wives, O fire, step into the house.” In addition to “originating” in themisconception that the addressee of this passage is the widow, scriptural authorizationof sati also originates in a highly disputed passage and its alternate reading of agré asagné. Again, to repeat Spivak, Raghunandana “commemorat[es] a peculiar and trans-parent misreading at the very place of sanction.” In this strained use of agré/ agné in thecontext of funeral rites for the dead, truly we have discovered a catachresis at the archi-val “origin.”

But even with this “commemorative” misreading we still have not reached the ori-gin of the silenced subaltern woman. In a densely difficult but crucial analysis, Spivakspeculates on the range of meanings of the word yoni, which, in context with the adverbagré (“first,” “in front”), means “house” or dwelling-place.” But the primary meaningof yoni as “genital” remains a kind of connotative trace-effect, marking “genital” as ananterior presence. The mystery of the verse is thus intensified by this double meaning ofyoni as both “dwelling-place” and “genital”: the verse can just as well be read as cel-ebrating the entry of “well-adorned wives” into the “house” (both literal and metaphori-cal) of domestic/social reproduction. Spivak makes two key observations here. First,she underscores the hermeneutic irony of such a “domestic” passage being drawn on tostrengthen the interpretive claim of sati’s sanctioning in the most authoritative text ofVedic Hinduism. But, as she also points out, the syntactic proximity of yoni (as “geni-tal”) to agré (often misread as agné, or “fire”) does rather uncannily lend credence tothe archons’ (mis)reading of this passage as a legal sanction for sati, strengthened byRaghunandana’s modification of the Rg-Vedic verse to read: “Let them first ascend thefluid abode [or ‘origin,’ with the yoni-name, a rohantu jalayonimagné], O fire.” Spivak’scentral point is that the Rg-Vedic verses are so unstable that the hermeneutic possibili-ties are nothing short of vertiginous.

In the scandalously underread fourth section of “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” then,Spivak is concerned with a careful tracing of the textual path from the Dharmasastraback in time to the Rg-Veda—a path littered with mistranslation, corrupt manuscripts,and errant commentaries. Overwhelmed by these “palimpsestic” layers, perhaps we cannow truly appreciate the full resonance of Spivak’s often-invoked but not always fullyunderstood claim that the subaltern woman cannot “speak.” If, as Lata Mani wouldclaim, the subaltern woman is indeed the silenced signifier of a conflict between tradi-tion and colonial modernity, then it is also because she is textually unlocatable withinthe archive of Sanskrit antiquity. We hope that our close reading of the rigors of Spivak’sfeminist deconstruction has succeeded in demonstrating how the project of an archon/interpreter such as Raghunandana to extract the legal “truth” of sati from the Vedic sruti


literature was impossible from the outset. As we have seen earlier, the Dharmasastra,the codifying of “that which is remembered,” yields only hermeneutic misremembrances.The Vedic sruti texts, as “that which is heard,” are even more “originary” attempts atrecording a revelatory “voice” of truth and law. But as Derrida contends in OfGrammatology (the very text Spivak uses as the starting point for her investigation ofthe silencing of the “voice” of the subaltern woman in the context of British imperial-ism), the “voice” cannot escape the effects of the (written) “trace”: any “system of‘hearing (understanding)-oneself-speak’” is always vulnerable to deconstruction [7].And here we are well reminded of the Rg-Vedic misreadings of agré for agné, or howthe trace-effect of “genital” cannot be excised from the word yoni as “dwelling-place.”A question we would pose to critics of Spivak’s “silencing” of the subaltern woman is,How can the subaltern speak if the archons cannot properly “hear” the Vedic sruti texts?

In concluding our close reading of Spivak’s focus on the Dharmasastra and the Rg-Veda, we remind the reader that one of the “founding” gestures of deconstruction wasits questioning of Being itself, its rigorous critique of any attempt at a “thinking” ofBeing as a transcendental signified. In this context, we are tempted to speculate thatSpivak may never have felt more justified in her career-long commitment todeconstruction than when she turns to the inscribed fracture within the very word sati,the feminine form of sat. Sat, the present participle of “to be,” means not only “being”but also the True, the Good, the Right. (Spivak cannot resist noting that the term haseven entered the “most privileged discourse of modern Western philosophy: Heidegger’smeditation on Being” in his An Introduction to Metaphysics.) Sati, as the feminine formof sat, simply means “good wife.” Within British colonial discourse, however, sati asthe name for the rite of widow self-immolation constitutes what Spivak terms an obvi-ous “grammatical error,” because the word in the Indian languages is “the burning ofthe sati or good wife” [305]. In the discursive practice of a “benevolent” imperialism,“good wifehood” becomes absolutely (and mistakenly) identified with self-immola-tion. (Hence the perceived result of “white men saving brown women from brown men.”)The British invested the proper noun sati with no significance other than the ritual burn-ing of a helpless widow who they could then view as an object of protection to be“saved.” And thus, once again, we see how claims for hermeneutic authority on bothsides of the colonial divide (“Britain” and “Hinduism”) rest on slippages, mistranslations,and corrupt phrasings of the sacred texts.

Since the mid-1980s, scholarship on the practice of sati has had significant criticalpurchase within much postcolonial theory, particularly postcolonial feminism. One couldsay that for postcolonialism, “in the beginning” is sati, particularly sati as a synecdochefor patriarchal violence to the body of the dead woman. But our tracing of the linea-ments of a “postcolonial archive” (while thoroughly supportive of the scholarship onsati) seeks to cut through “Can the Subaltern Speak?” at an oblique angle, traversing adifferent terrain from so much of postcolonial theory’s rallying around sati and itsforegrounding of woman’s agency and woman’s victimhood.15 The postcolonial archivereveals sati as the unstable site of the widow’s nonagency. Put another way, thepostcolonial archive reveals sati as a legal supplement having less to do with the deadwoman than with a history of the repression of Sanskrit that deconstructs the law at itsvery source.

15. A central irony here is that Spivak’s rigorous hermeneutic pursuit of the “origins” of satipositions the postcolonial archive in an ultimately pregendered time. For example, we are think-ing of the ironic fact that the practice of sati took shape within ancient discourses on suicide as asolely male experience, or of the Rg-Vedic term yoni as a gender-indeterminate word for “geni-tal.”

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To be sure, the postcolonial archive encompasses the literal archive of Hindu antiq-uity, assembled by such late eighteenth-century Orientalists as Anquetil-Duperron andWilliam Jones. But the postcolonial archive is also Spivak’s hermeneutic maneuverperformed on this Sanskritic archive—a maneuver that, in the process of mapping sationto an explicitly textual terrain, uncovers not so much the dead woman as the “deadletter” of antiquity, in the wake of Hindu law’s violence to memory (that is, to “thatwhich is heard and remembered”). The postcolonial archive, then, is the site of thecomplex interplay between antiquity and a major discourse of poststructuralism. Andperhaps now we can better appreciate the strange temporality of a postcolonial archivereaching, paradoxically (retroactively?), back to antiquity. Even as the postcolonialarchive seeks deconstructive access to the literal archive of Hindu antiquity, the traumaof colonial modernity remains encrypted. The postcolonial archive, temporally situatedin the aftermath of Orientalism (and of Said’s Orientalism), is, in effect, the archive-as-“crypt,” incorporating but never fully introjecting the “dead letter” of Vedic and classi-cal Hindu antiquity into its deconstructive critique of imperialism.

At this point, we hope it is not too tendentious to describe the postcolonial archivein terms of a cultural melancholia. We should not attempt to summarize the postcolonialarchive prematurely as a “desire” for antiquity. Rather, phrased more tentatively (but,we hope, more responsibly), the postcolonial archive means that we cannot not wantantiquity.16 The melancholic double negative “cannot not” protests the foreclosure ofantiquity that has characterized the Foucaultian-Saidian critique of imperialism, evenas it must refuse any simple call for a “return” to antiquity. In this context, we remindthe reader of Spivak’s “symptomatic” use of Kane’s magisterial—and decidedlyOrientalist—History of Dharmasastra for her own deconstructive engagement with thetexts of Vedic and classical Hindu antiquity. As a major example of an indigenous elitearchon within colonial production, as the modern subject par excellence of the schol-arly “knowledge” of antiquity, Kane is the necessary condition for sustaining any studyof the history of (errant) commentary on the Rg-Veda and the Dharmasastra. Thus he isboth the possibility of Spivak’s deconstructive hermeneutic, but also the impossibilityof discovering a “pure” archive of Vedic and classical Hinduism, untainted by theOrientalist formation of “Sanskrit studies.” To be sure, when Spivak reminds the readerthat Kane is himself a “benevolent” Indian male admiring the self-immolating widow’s“cool and unfaltering courage” [see our footnote 12], she adduces Kane for a critique ofthe subject of Indological scholarship. But her simultaneous reliance on his scholarshipfor her own deconstruction of sati is a reminder—perhaps even a melancholic reminder—that the archive of Orientalist scholarship is still our only path “back to antiquity.” Thepostcolonial archive, this impossible space where a deconstructive critique of imperial-ism meets Orientalist scholarship, reveals antiquity belatedly as that which must beboth distanced and summoned in the aftermath of colonialism.

16. That any “desire” for a pure access to Sanskritic antiquity, in particular, must be viewedas ideologically suspect is cogently summarized by Peter van der Veer, who writes that Orientalism’sreturn to Vedic and Hindu scriptures “created an image of the decline of ‘Hindu society’ after theMuslim invasion. All this led to the Hindu nationalist construction of the glorious Hindu past andof the ‘foreignness’ of Muslims” [“The Foreign Hand” 40].


POSTSCRIPT

The Postcolonial Archive—en famille: A Reply to Gayatri Spivak17

But we are not yet finished. What, after all, should we make of Spivak’s riddling “story”of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri’s unexplained suicide in Calcutta in 1926, strangely misinter-preted by her own family?18 This concluding story of a family member is “what re-mains,” even after Spivak’s reading of a bit of the official archive of Hindu antiquity.What autobiographical “story” of the postcolonial archive is being told here? We nowwish to pose the question of questions for the postcolonial archive, by way of responseto an intriguing and challenging question Spivak posed directly to us at Harvard Uni-versity: Can we forge a connection between the riddling “story” of Bhuvaneswari (as amember of Spivak’s family) and one of Archive Fever’s overarching concerns, which isthe relationship between the concept of the archive and the institutional (and, for Derrida,profoundly familial) question of what it means to “found” a discipline? In order topursue this question further, we choose to add to the postcolonial archive a third Derrideantext, Glas, as well as Spivak’s commentary on it, “Glas-Piece: A Compte Rendu.” Wewill move (if only temporarily) from Archive Fever’s “law of the text” to Glas’s “law ofthe family.” And eventually, we will return to our claim made early in our paper that“Can the Subaltern Speak?” deserves a foundational or canonical status withinpostcolonial theory.

Phrased broadly, Glas opens the (deconstructive) space of autobiography as con-nection to ancestry. Spivak begins her essay on Glas with the following claim: “I canread Glas as an ancestral rite” [22]. Here, Spivak alludes to the content of Derrida’sHegel column as largely preoccupied with the concept of the family, or what Derridaterms the “law of the family.” Spivak is fully attuned to the autobiographical valencesof Glas, which, as she notes, was written shortly after the death of Derrida’s father. AsSpivak writes of the “filial” Derrida, “Inspired by the absence of the Father . . . theJewish child arranges his autobiography in that place” [23]. If Archive Fever (in its ownfamilial gesture) locates the “founding” act of psychoanalysis at the moment when thefather Jakob Freud reminds the son Sigmund of his Jewish origins through the gift ofthe Philippsohn Bible (first given to the son on the occasion of his circumcision), Glasincludes Derrida’s more autobiographical remembrance of his own father (an allegoryof filial love that implicitly counters Hegel’s reading of the relationship between theChristian and his Divine Father).

Glas is, among other things, Derrida’s mourning (a “tolling”) for his father, a mourn-ing that also foregrounds the ritual of circumcision and its relationship to family gene-alogy. But at this point we are well reminded that Derrida’s most extended meditationon circumcision appears in his Circumfession, published some seventeen years afterGlas, and, perhaps constituting a fourth Derridean text for the postcolonial archive. Inthis text, Derrida refers to his circumcision variously as “[t]he first event to write itselfright on my body,” and “the proper language of my life” [120, 144]. For Derrida, cir-

17. This postscript takes its impetus from a rich exchange with Gayatri Spivak that tookplace in December 1998 at Harvard University’s Center for Literary and Cultural Studies, wherethe authors presented this paper, with Spivak, who had read our paper in advance, in attendance.We wish to express our gratitude to Gayatri Spivak for her generous reading of and response toour paper.

18. We quote from Spivak’s account: “The suicide was a puzzle since, as Bhuvaneswari wasmenstruating at the time, it was clearly not a case of illicit pregnancy” [“Can the SubalternSpeak?” 308].

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cumcision (as the “textual” mark of genealogy) is the convergence of body, blood, andwriting. As he confesses, “If the book doesn’t bleed, it will be a failure” [130].

A question begins to accrue around the trope of blood: Can we forge a connectionbetween the blood of circumcision and the menstrual blood of the dead Bhuvaneswari?Pertinent here is Spivak’s commentary on family mourning in Glas, that is, her briefsummary of Abraham and Torok’s concept of the crypt via Derrida’s “Fors” (perhaps afifth Derridean text for the postcolonial archive?) and its commentary on the crypt asfailed mourning. Spivak reads “Fors” and its commentary on the crypt as (like Glas)“the revelation of autobiography” [24]. The crypt, however, conceals autobiographynot as remembrance, but as “a mourning for the perpetual loss of the name” [24]—thefamily name, that is.

With Spivak’s gesture toward Abraham and Torok’s crypt, we perhaps move closerto the “perpetual loss of the name” of Bhuvaneswari—but we are not quite there yet.(Could that be another way of saying that in 1977 Spivak was not “there” yet—not“there” at the familial yet postcolonial “space” of Bhuvaneswari?) The special bril-liance of Spivak’s reading of Glas is its discovery of gender at the core of family mourn-ing. Meditating on the signifier Sa, Derrida’s acronym for the Hegelian savoir absolu as“absolute knowledge,” Spivak suggests, “. . . it might be a pronoun possessing an unde-fined feminine object” [27]. For Spivak, Sa is “a miring movement of autobiographythat will not allow ‘analytical distance’” [36]. Is Sa, in other words, (postcolonial)autobiography’s “miring movement” that disseminates Derrida’s remembrances of theancestral rite of/as circumcision as the “proper language of [his] life”? Is Bhuvaneswari’ssuicide the Sa (sat, sat-i)—is it the gendering of “absolute knowledge” (or tatvajnanaas “knowledge of truth”)?

Perhaps now is the moment to draw attention to the status of the Bhuvaneswariepisode as a nonevent encrypted within the family, as marking a certain despair onSpivak’s part at the interruption of or failure in passing down Bhuvaneswari’s specifi-cally female legacy of counterhegemonic intervention in the text of sati-suicide. Spivak’semphasis, on the occasion of the Harvard presentation, on the failure of family womenacross generations to hear properly or speak Bhuvaneswari’s name is a signal not onlyof the breakdown of family memory but also, we contend, of postcolonial memory. Theconcluding passages of Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” detailing the “example”(of Bhuvaneswari) that is not “a model of intervention” [308], have now become “leg-end”-ary (literally a legend: a reading of Spivak’s reading of Bhuvaneswari). We arguethat as the site of the breakdown of family memory, that is, the “crypt”-ic secret offamily shame, these passages constitute a gift—a gift that reminds the discipline of“postcolonialism” (via the menstruating Bhuvaneswari’s psychological reinscription ofshastric injunctions prohibiting the menstruating woman from committing suicide) thatthe female as subaltern is the space from which this discipline becomes possible.

In “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Spivak places Bhuvaneswari’s suicide very delib-erately beside the Sati of Hindu mythology, the goddess Durga, the wife of Shiva. Thedis-membering of the goddess-good-wife Sati inaugurates what Spivak calls the myth’s“sacred geography” that rewrites the sati-suicide text by “reversing every narrateme ofthe rite” [307]. Thus Shiva dances carrying the corpse of his wife, seeking to avenge herdeath; the female body dismembered, Spivak writes, inscribes the earth as sacred geog-raphy. If the “luminous fighting Mother Durga” is one trace-effect of “Bhuvaneswari,”who was herself, as Spivak reminds us, entangled with samitis (organizations involvedin armed anticolonial struggle for Indian independence in the 1920s), then Bhuvaneswarimust also be disengaged from the “blazing, fighting, familial Durga” insofar as thelatter is well documented and popularly well remembered—which is to say, institution-ally validated—by the male nationalist leaders. It is the subaltern as female, as (the


Antigonal) Bhuvaneswari—neither wife nor good daughter nor mother—whose protestremains encrypted and institutionally invalidated both by the women of her own familyand by those readers of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” desirous of Bhuvaneswari’s resist-ing agency.

Again, what is at stake in an investment in Derrida’s Archive Fever for our discus-sion of Spivak’s “legend” of Bhuvaneswari? Archive Fever inserts the body (via theyoung Freud’s circumcision) not only into genealogy-as-history, but also into the ques-tion of the founding of a discipline. Similarly, if we view Bhuvaneswari’s act of sati-suicide as an “example” (as in Circumfession and in Archive Fever) moved from thedomestic space of the family into the public space of the text (in this case, the canonicaltext of postcolonial theory?), then we can read “Can the Subaltern Speak?” as insertingthe body (via menstruation) into the question of the founding of postcolonialism.“Bhuvaneswari” as the proper name that the family cannot speak becomes part of thepublic space of the postcolonial archive via “Can the Subaltern Speak?”—an archivethat encrypts both the “dead letter” of Hindu antiquity and the ashes of the dead/dyingsubaltern as female. In other words, the postcolonial archive is the place where memorybreaks down in the face of an archival and a somatic/familial/institutional violence that“founds” postcolonialism. Could we ask: are “antiquity” and “Bhuvaneswari” encryptedwithin postcolonialism at the very moment of its founding?

Turning finally back to Spivak and her elegant reading of the columnar layout ofGlas as “the infinite exchange of these [Hegel and Genet] ‘columns’ that look back ateach other” [26], can we say that “Can the Subaltern Speak?” also oscillates betweenthe (phallic) text of the Dharmasastra/Rg-Veda and the (unruly) text of sati-suicide asrewritten by Bhuvaneswari? We contend that “Can the Subaltern Speak?” should beread as an exchange of (the shuttle between) these two “columns” that “look back ateach other.” Bhuvaneswari’s menstrual blood “pollutes,” “joins” (agglutinates?) the textof antiquity and the text of gendered subalternity. And thus, to echo Spivak readingGlas, we, too, can read “Can the Subaltern Speak?” as “an ancestral rite.”

Why Archive Fever for “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Let us end our postscript wherewe began: with the question of what it means to found a discipline. Pushing the institu-tional logic of Archive Fever, our next step would be to name the name of “Spivak” asthe “founder” of postcolonial studies. “But,” Spivak claimed a decade ago, “I don’t seeanything called postcolonialism” [Spivak and Winant 95]. How to give the “gift” offounding to one who herself would refuse to receive it?

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