spivak gayatri chakravorty learning from de man looking back

8/13/2019 Spivak Gayatri Chakravorty Learning From de Man Looking Back

1/16

Learning from de Man: Looking Back

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

I find in the logic of parabasis a descriptive figure of action. This forme is the lesson of de Man. I ask the reader to bear this in mind as s/hereads the text of a speech I gave at the annual convention of the ModernLanguage Association in 2003, marking the twentieth anniversary of Paulde Mans death.

Should one read figure this way, to account for ones own work, sincethe agenda is to indicate learning? De Man puts this with his usual ele-gance in his discussion of de-facement, although illusion of reference

remains too binary for me: The autobiographical project . . . is in fact gov-erned by the technical demands of self-portraiture. . . . And since the mime-sis here assumed to be operative is one mode of figuration among others,is the illusion of reference not a correlation of the structure of the figure, thatis to say no longer clearly and simply a referent at all but something moreakin to a fiction which then, however, in its own turn, acquires a degree ofreferential productivity?1

1. Paul de Man, Autobiography as De-Facement, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism(NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1984), 69. Hereafter, this book is cited parenthetically as

b d 2 32 3 2005 C i ht 2005 b G t i Ch k t S i k


2/16

22 boundary 2 / Fall 2005

One correlation with the structure of the figure, thats what I amtalking about. It is more like grasping the narrative lineaments of the figurein this case describing stage practiceand seeing its instantiation in work

as theater. As Kant says, if we want to make systematic unity under . . .logical principles . . . sense-perceptible [sinnlich], we regard every con-cept . . . as the standpoint of an observer,2 looking out at horizons. Circleafter circle, perhaps the origin of geometry, ellipses, parabolas, asymptotes,this last giving a model of reason always operating by approximation. Andnever access to a singularity. This may be where de Mans notion of endlesssupplementary superpositions, never a closure of adequate reading, comesfrom. At any rate, I am operating broadly thus. Making the logic of the figure

sensuous. There are limits to this. Such a reading of a figure will not yieldthe singularity of the event. In the conclusion of this piece, I will signal somelimit-markings in de Mans text.

Shelley Disfigured, where de Man, in the last year of his life, thoughtto have come furthest in venturing up to those limits (the only place where Icome close to facing some of these questions about history and fragmenta-tion is in the essay on ShelleysTriumph of Life [RR, ix]), operates the kindof grasping I signal above. Because the narrative in that essay is of significa-tion, and the theater is the moves in reading, we tend not to notice the phe-

nomenalization. Werner Hamacher, an astute reader, catches it, I think, andat least implies, in my view correctly, that referencemaking reading read-ingfor de Man is a transcendental deduction in the Kantian sense.3 Butreading in de Mans way, learning from him, does not oblige one to that spe-cific instantiation: reading the moves of reading the transcendental deduc-tion of reference as a tracing of the first endeavors of our power of cognition

RR. Referential productivity is discussed well by Satya Mohanty in his various defenses

of reference, which I have had the good fortune of having heard as oral presentations. Iwould only add here that reference for de Man is a transcendental deduction in the Kantiansense. We translate it into the ethical by putting it this way: Language asks us to forgetit and do what it says. For transcendental deduction, see Immanuel Kant, The Critiqueof Pure Reason, trans. Paul Geyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1998), 21923. This ethical translation is not a mistake, it is what we must do (22021). But we must remember that if we want entitlement (Befugnis, Kants word) for ourclaims, we cannot prove it experientially, we must operate a transcendental deduction. Iam not suggesting, of course, that reference is for Kant a transcendental deduction. ForKant, they are space and time (for the senses), and categories (for the understanding).

2. Kant,The Critique of Pure Reason, 59899; translation modified.3. Werner Hamacher, LECTIO: de Mans Imperative, in Reading de Man Reading, ed.Li d W t d Wl d G d i h (Mi li U i it f Mi t P 1989)


3/16

Spivak / Learning from de Man 23

to ascend from individual perceptions to general concepts. . . . [T]he famousLockes mistake.4 As I look back, I at least seem not to have considered it asubstantive obligation. To read the social text, taking the risk of the impera-

tive to reference as such, tracing the production of historical referentiality,may be bolder than the purists and acolytes might imagine. (In de Man, thehistorical reference is to Shelleys actual death, untheorizable into the textof the essay.) I will comment further on the matter of politics in conclusion.For now, let us examine the instantiation in Shelley Disfigured.

I will quote backwards from the end of de Mans essay. Notice thefigure of interruption (parabasis) at work here as well.

If in making logic sense-perceptible we cannot have access to the

singular, when we are working from within the singular case that is a poem,we cannot generalize. (I myself happen not to agree with this. Never mind.)I believe this is why de Man commends Shelley: Reading as disfiguration,to the very extent that it resists historicism, turns out to be historically morereliable than the products of historical archaeology. To monumentalize thisobservation into a methodof reading would be to regress from the rigorexhibited by Shelley which is exemplary precisely because it refuses to begeneralized into a system (RR, 123).

Now see how he describes the imperative to reference, to forget lan-

guage as anything but a medium to understand by repeating (differently,of course, for in that gap reference rises, and repeating-with-difference isa species of effacement). It is not a pathology but an enabling madness,whose enablement de Man does not quite acknowledge: To read is to un-derstand, to question, to know, to forget, to erase, to deface, to repeatthatis to say, the endless prosopopoeia by which the dead are made to have aface and a voice which tells the allegory of their demise and allows us toapostrophize them in our turn, no degree of knowledge can ever stop this

madness, for it is the madness of words (RR, 122).Cognition as necessary madness. I can relate this (without confla-

tion) with Derridas reading of a good moment in Levinas, quoting myselfreading that reading:

The law of curvaturethat one cannot access another directly andwith a guarantee (by appresentational analogy only, Husserl willwrite)is not a deterrent to politics.5 . . . If you call the imperative

4. Kant,The Critique of Pure Reason, 221.5. This is an important moment in Husserl, for Derrida. In Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas(t P l A B lt d Mi h l N [St f d C lif St f d U i it P


4/16


to straighten the curvecourbureintodroiturea madness, it is amadness that writes the history of politics.6 [T]he instant of decisionmust remain heterogeneous to all knowledge as such, to all theoreti-

cal or constative determination, even if it may and must be precededby all possible science and conscience. . . . [P]ractical performativityis irreducible to any theorem. . . . Without the possibility of radicalevil, of perjury, and of absolute crime, no responsibility, no freedom,no decision. . . . How this madness can then negotiate with whatit is not, protect and translate itself in the good sense of things, inproofs, guarantees, concepts, symbols, in a politics, in thispoliticsand not another, this is the whole of history, of what is called history.7

Any political philosophy that does not take this grounding errancy intoaccount will cover over the impossibility of simple collectivities withvarious ruses. For Schmitt this errancy is not only not a ground, it isa gap to be bridged. As Slavoj iek observes, the core of Schmittsargumentationthe decision which bridges this gap [between a nor-mative order and actual life] is not a decision for some concrete order,but primarily the decision for the formal principle of order as such.8

In Shelleys absence, the task . . . of reinscribing the disfiguration

now devolves entirely on the reader (RR, 121), writes de Man. Like manyreaders of de Man, I find this relay encouraging and especially so because

nology and Levinasian ethics: a certaininterruption of phenomenology by itself alreadyimposed itself upon Husserl, though he did not, it is true, take note of it as an ethical neces-sity. . . . [T]his became necessary in the Cartesian Meditationsprecisely when it was aquestion of the other; of analter egothat never makes itself accessible except by way ofan appresentational analogy and so remains radically separated, inaccessible to originaryperception. . . . Levinas himself considers this interruption of self to be a paradox . . . [that]requires a description that can be formed only in ethical language (5153). We are in the

arena, therefore, not of the stoppage of politics but of the relationship between ethics andpolitics that is crucial to Derridas work.6. The relationship between originary curvature refigured into responsible uprightness isone of the basic insights of Levinas and is pervasively discussed in Derrida, Adieu toEmmanuel Levinas. Thus does Derrida put Carl Schmitts Christo-Hellenism out of jointwithout substituting Hebraism for it.7. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas(New York: Verso, 1997), 21920.8. Slavoj iek, Carl Schmitt in the Age of Post-Politics, in The Challenge of Carl Schmitt,ed. Chantal Mouffe (New York: Verso, 1999), 18; my emphasis. The quotation from myselfis from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Schmitt and Post-Structuralism: A Response,Car-dozo Law Review21, no. 56 (May 2000): 172728. The last three footnotesare embedded


5/16


here the figure of interruption is taken out of the mostly verbal text into theworld where things happen. Shelleys death, which happens for everyonebut Shelley, as de Mans, for all others, including me. The examples I will

append will show, I hope, that by historical happenstance and influence,I chose the indefiniteness of lives to come rather than the finitude of adeath; in hindsight and in a setting-to-work, attempted to keep on substitut-ing the a of a-venir, for the a of differance.9

The autobiographical moment, de Man writes, happens as analignment between the two subjects involved in the process of reading inwhich they determine each other by mutual reflexive substitution (RR, 70).Happens, not is. Autobiography as event. All autobiography happens in

the species of influence-study, where a third (structural correlate) negotiatesthe alignment. Here the name of that third is Paul de Man. The restoration ofmortality by (auto)biography (the prosopopeia [bestowal of a face as mask]of the voice and the name) deprives and disfigures to the precise extent thatit restores (RR, 81; I have placed the first parentheses). I have difficultywith to the precise extent. Yet I must remind the reader that what followsmust be read under the austere sign of de-facement. And indeed, of a pos-sible disobedience. As Deborah Esch reminds us, an analysis of Words-worths Essays Upon Epitaphslike that undertaken in Autobiography as De-

Facement can disclose that the text counsels against the use of its ownmain figure. 10 How much of the transaction of reading is transgression?

The lightly edited text of the 2003 MLA speech now follows.

l l l l

I learned of de Mans death at the MLA in 1983. As usual, I was justback from Asia. I had said to him before leaving that I would see him uponmy return. His last words to me were: That will be delightful.

I met him in 1961 when I came to Cornell for a PhD in English. Iwas nineteen years old. There was no academic feminism or multicultural-ism. It was four years before Lyndon Johnson would lift the quota in 1965,which would lead to an exponential increase in Asian immigration. Therewas no other South Asian, male or female, in the English department, thedepartment of comparative literature, classics, and any of the modern lan-guage departments. I was relentlessly exoticized by bad low-grade genderpolitics and, on occasion, advances from faculty that would qualify today

9. Jacques Derrida, Voyous(Paris: Galile, 2003), 154.10 Deborah Esch A Defence of Rhetoric / The Triumph of Reading in Reading de Man


6/16


as sexual harassment. De Mans unquestioning and civilized recognitionthat I was merely intelligent was my food and shelter. It would be difficult toconvey to you how very unusual this was. It is a racialized perspective that

finds racism more troubling than classism or sexism. I initially wondered if Ishould mention this. But when yesterday, at an occasion mourning a feministpathfinder, a photographer treated fourteen senior feminists in a way thatMary Daly called belittling befriending, and we tolerated him for the sake ofgood form, I pondered again the relationship between the millennially prac-ticed everyday low-grade degradation of not-men on the one hand, and whatHannah Arendt calls radical evil on the other, and decided that I wouldbegin this way.

I could not then understand everything de Man said in his seminars.But two things were coherent with sustained instruction I had received fromteachers at Calcutta University: an insistence on literal reading in the gen-eral sense, and a refusal to mistake the textual representation of the linea-ments of a desire as proof of its fulfillment.

I left Cornell in the fall of 65 to take up my first job as assistant pro-fessor of English at the University of Iowa. De Man had not yet met Derrida. Istarted reading Derrida on my own in 67. Mikel Borch-Jakobsen found it dif-ficult to believe that I didnt know Derridas name in 1967. Think again of the

academic scene I described. For most, I was a piece of exotica, the prov-erbial monkey that could speak Latin. For de Man, a smart, young foreignstudent who had been successfully placed in her first job. There was no fax,no personal computer, no telephone message machines, no overnight mail,and of course no e-mail, no Internet. Why would I know?

During that decade, what I had learned from de Man began to per-colate in my head and heart, infused by an untutored reading of Derrida.Remember that I knew almost no French. Because this rumination and per-

colation took place away from his classroom, I never learned to make deManian moves in my actual reading. In 1972, I heard myself mentionedin public (after the publication of Allgorie et histoire de la posie inPotique11) for the first time, by an unknown person at an MLA session,coupled with Paul de Man as one of the sons of Walter Benjamin. De Mancame to Iowa from time to time to give talks at my invitation. On one of theseoccasions, in the English Department lounge, in the post-talk milling crowd,he muttered to me about The Rhetoric of Temporality: I hadnt read Der-

11. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Allgorie et histoire de la posie: hypothse de travail,Potique8 (1971): 42744.


7/16


rida yet.12 I went to Yale regularly. On one of these visits, de Man introducedme to Edward Said.

I am not a scholar of de Man. I am his student, perhaps his first PhD.

I have not engaged with the posthumous publications much. For me thepenny dropped withAllegories of Reading, published in 1979.13 I remembernow with some amusement that Michael Ryan thought I was hiding the bookbecause I did not want to share its riches. It is this book that has becomefor me timely.

Indeed, my not-quite-not-disfigurement of the de Manian figure ofparabasis, borrowed from Schlegel borrowing from the theatrical practiceof Attic comedy, is itself an allegory of reading. Reading here is also a

figure, for a transactional or performative relationship with the social fabric,the social textile, the social text.

l l l l

I have often remarked on the dizzying chain of mis-citations in theone place where Marx speaks of the proletarian revolution as subject, inThe Eighteenth Brumaire.14

Let us look at the staging of parabasis in de Man with the same eye.

This vigilance relates for me to Kants caution. One cannot proceed to thesingularity of an event by direct application of a figure.15 As I write, it seemsto me that Jacques Derridas general suggestion (at least as I understandit) that practice norms theory, again and again (for this the reference canonly be passim), belongs to this family. This then leads on to the thinkingof singularity as repetition of difference. The event is singular. Practice is arepetition of theorywith a difference that makes repetition iteration.

I offer this to halt the charge of evasiveness. Careful staging canbe read as a persistent caution against the vanguardism of theory fromsome practitioners of theory. This is also contained within de Mans apho-rism Nothing can overcome the resistance to theory since theoryisitself

12. Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Temporality, inBlindness and Insight(New York: Rout-ledge, 1989), 187228.13. Paul de Man,Allegories of Reading(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979).14. Karl Marx, Surveys from Exile, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Vintage, 1973),150. For my reading, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Other Asias (Oxford: Blackwell,forthcoming).

15. Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, 599. In an extended format, I would have to accountfor the slippage from individual to event.


8/16


this resistance.16 Nothing is more dangerous than theory seen as purelyapplicable. Cultural revolutions hang in there.

In the very last pages ofAllegories, de Man offers us parabasis as

an alternative namecan also be calledfor anacoluthon in the lan-guage of representational rhetoric.17 That is the first remove: not a namebut a nickname as it were, a.k.a. The trajectory of anacoluthon/parabasisname/nickname and vice versais comparable. In a second, not the first,footnote on the word, anacoluthonis given in Rousseaus description, re-ported, not cited, by Corancez, of a passage in Tasso, only tentatively lo-cated a century later. Many more removes now. What happens on the pageis prose: Second footnote, not the primary reference; a cited description

of a text, not a definition, and that without the authority of the author; thecitation a report delayed in time and uncertain in provenance. Permanentparabasis itself is given as a slight extension of Friedrich Schlegels formu-lation, not its exact citation, not even its extension, but a slight extension.The similarity betweenno longer the substitutability ofanacoluthonand parabasis stems from the fact that the figures interruptthe expectationsof a given . . . movement (emphasis mine). It is this interruption thatde Man calls, in the text, the undoing, in other words, of understanding(emphasis mine). It is this bit of text, broken by all these interruptions and

reminders of discontinuity, that has become for me the description of theresistance fitting our time. I am obsessed by this. Like Freud on Oedipus, Iam obliged to say, If you think this is an ide fixe, I am helpless.

Schlegels fragment is a declarative unconnected to what comesbefore and after that can, therefore, only be displaced:Die Ironie ist eine per-manente parekbase.18 As the person from Porlock, who broke Coleridgesdream of Kubla Khan, I offer background: Attic comedy had an infrastruc-tural model of the chorus repeatedly breaking up the main action.

l l l l

I will proceed to give a handful of examples, the first two in somedetail. The examples should be read as instantiations of the narrative lin-eaments of parabasis, a legacy from my teacher, down the long line ofiterations, recognized after the fact: not-quite-not disfigurations.

16. Paul de Man, Resistance to Theory, in Resistance to Theory, ed. Wlad Godzich (Min-neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 19.17. De Man,Allegories of Reading, 300301.18. Friedrich Schlegel, Fragment 668, in Kritische Ausgabe, Band 18, Philosophische


9/16


At the convention, I referred back to work already in the public domainto emphasize that the instantiations were not trotted forward to fit the occa-sion. I see no reason to look for new examples now.

The first instantiation of parabasis is the Bangladeshi peasant inter-rupting the reasonable plans of the Flood Action Program, building hugeembankments. It comes from an article published inboundary 2:

Living in the rhythm of water, the Bangladeshi peasant long sowedtwo types of rice paddy seed. One of them survived submerged inwater, the other came to full growth after the season of rain and flood.In 1971, agricultural reformers introduced a different variety of ricefor a single high-yield crop. In the intervening years, the peasant has

quietly and gradually shifted the time of sowing of this modern cropto Phalgun-Chaitro (FebruaryMarch). As was their established cus-tom, accommodating the play of land and water, they now sow pulsesand vegetables before this. And now, at the reaping time of the newcrop, the old flood-seed is sown, so that in the rain and flood-time, thefields are once again full of that submersible paddy.19 (By contrast, theland protected from water by the embankments loses the fertilizingalgae, thus providing an opportunity for the enhancement of the debt

trap and the destruction of the ecobiome by the peddling of chemi-cal fertilizers.) I hesitate to call this silent interruption flood manage-ment by exporting a metaphor of Nature as the greatlaboratorium,the arsenal which furnishes both means and material of labor . . . ,coming from (what is confusedly called) European culture, producingan evolutionary account.20 I hesitate to denominate the responsibledeconstruction (learning critique from within leading to a new settingto work, as in Derridas reading of Heidegger) as technology trans-fer, as if a gift from a superior civilization.

Count this interruption in the nature of a permanent parabasis,the peasants rather than the philosophers disarticulated rhetoric, asetting-to-work, not an explication, of the philosophers dream. Askthe question again: what exactly does the fulfilled dream of Rea-son bring about on its way? If the subaltern offers us, say, learning,and the ecological deconstructor supplements this with internalized

19. I am grateful to Muhammad Ghulam Mustafa Dulal for providing these details of quietchange in connection with a flood-management project with compartments controlled bylocks. I cannot of course claim that such changes have taken place all over Bangladesh.20. Karl Marx,Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin


10/16


knowledge from the main text of knowledge about knowledge, in theabsence of deep infrastructural involvement, the best it will provide,for the subaltern, is uninstructed information command, at worst, only

command. Parabasis is no longer a formal possibility. Good imperi-alism works by destroying what is, no doubt confusedly, called cul-ture, in this case a popular culture, traditional learning and knowl-edge, traditional agronomic patterns, and, what I have left until last,the traditional pattern of subaltern womens freedom on the imper-manent floating islands, or chors.21 In place of the destroyed cultureof learning, a continually expanding amount of money continues tobe spent, on the aid-debt model, to collect hydrological data, as if

nothing had been known. A large section of the post-colonial subjectsof Bangladesh is, of course, crazy about Geographical InformationSystems, and not in the service of accountable reason. They providethe Euro-US main text the opportunity to invoke the Bangladeshisas willing beneficiaries and silence all critique as merely romantic,

21. These points were presented by Mushrefa Mishu, president of the Bangladesh StudentUnity Forum, at the conference. I hope the reader will forgive a long quotation, insertedinto this already too-long essay, to illustrate the relay from Imperialism to Development

and the continuity of subaltern insurgency, a permanent parabasis: By the mid-eighteenthcentury, the Bengalis had extensively engineered the delta, both to protect against floodsand to ensure that the silt-bearing river-waters could fertilize and irrigate fields. The firstBritons to travel across the delta reported seeing thousands of kilometres of canals andembankments. . . . What they never realised, says Willcocks [the imperial water engineerwho first made sense of the structures in a report published in 1930] was that the primarypurpose of the canals was to irrigate and fertilise the land of the delta. . . . The Britishoversaw the gradual destruction of the ancient feudal system under which landlords forcedpeasants to maintain the dykes and clear the canals. . . . As the canals silted up, theybegan to overflow and became, for the British, a menace to the country. Inspectors were

appalled to see that the peasant farmers continued to cut holes in the canal banks duringthe flood season. Ignorant of the fact that the breaches fertilised fields, they banned thispractice. For many years, there were running battles between gangs of peasants who setout each night to cut holes in the canals, and the British police, who tried to stop them. . . .Willcocks concluded with proposals for the restoration of the ancient works, in order tobring in again the health and wealth which central [the larger part of todays Bangladeshflood-plain] and west Bengal once enjoyed. . . . The ancient works took many years to con-struct. They were built, moreover, in small steps, bending to the will of the rivers at eachstage. It was a training, rather than a taming, of the rivers. The Bangladeshi authoritiesand their foreign advisers today show neither the patience nor the contrition to adopt such

an approach. They want to mould the rivers to their design (Fred Pearce, The Dammed:Rivers, Dams, and the Coming World Water Crisis[London: The Bodley Head, 1992], 243


11/16


humanities-based, and impractical. This parabasis is thus no longeroperative because of the hybrid seeds/chemical fertilizer/pesticidecombo that ruins soil and water.22

This brings us to the sense that irony is an undoing of understanding onlyso that understanding can repeat its aberration. The leader of the chorusbegins to dominate, the main play resumes, in order for another interruptionto occur, for a discontinuous resistance to come forth. There is a metonymicdisplacement of the main play itself. Many removes.

l l l l

If, on the other hand, there were to be infrastructural involvement, sothat the subaltern were inserted on the circuit of hegemony, can this sociallyempowered subject engage in the homeopathic use of abstract averagelabor, labor as commodity, labor-powerMarxs formula for the socializedworker?23 How can we think of using that poison as medicine in our time?

We have to remember that labor-power was such a useful thing be-cause it, among all commodities, made economically negotiable value whenused up. Value, simple and contentless, is just a form in use when thingsare made commensurable. Because Deleuze and Guattari felt that the idea

of value in Marx was an extremely potent idea, which Althusser tended toignore or dismiss, they redid or rethought the idea of value as that whichgives a common measure by way of the word desire. Desire was not tiedto an individual subject, not to a subject at all, but was a kind of misnomerfor something that ran everything. I feel that the risks of choosing such apsychologically weighted word are too great. Today we can think of dataas such a ubiquitous empty word. Thats the substance of value now. Ifeverything is put into data-form, it becomes commensurable in terms of the

system, the financialization of the globe. But Marx thought that the value-thing lost substantiality. How does that figure? What is it for data to bede-substantialized?24

There is not room enough here to go into this, but I will hint at an

22. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Responsibility,boundary 221, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 5557.The last three footnotes are embedded in the self-quotation. I have changed the end ofthe passage to bring it up to date.23. For a discussion of this homeopathy, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, From Haver-stock Hill Flat to US Classroom, Whats Left of Theory? in Whats Left of Theory?: NewWork on the Politics of Literary Theory, ed. Judith Butler et al. (New York: Routledge,2000), 140.


12/16


answer. The re-substantialization of data in resistance is much like the de-fetishization of the commodity. If it is understood by the empowered socialsubject that data is generalized labor-power, that is where the homeopathic

use of self-abstractionMarxs lesson of the transformation of the workerinto agent of production in class-consciousnessmight allow the new sub-altern to unpack and confront TRIPS and TRIMS (Trade-Related Intellec-tual Property and Trade-Related Investment Measures), to turn crisis intostrategy, command into information command. Telecommunication (in thenarrow sense) might then be re-substantialized, interrupting financializa-tion. As in the case of all formulas, let us keep this subject contained withinKants law. We cannot proceed to unmediated examples here. The phar-

makonis a figure.This second example, the turning of capitalism into socialism asstrategy-driven globalization, cannot be advanced without the reminder thatno socialist can be against the promises of globalization. That they must befalse promises necessarily belongs to the straining of capital toward capital-ism. The instantiation of permanent parabasis in this instance is in the pushand pull between promise and false promise. Socialist strategy wrenchescapitalist globalization. But socialists and capitalists alike are cynically be-nevolent and clueless about the need for the humanities in this battle. In

theory, the only difference between capitalism and socialism is in the redis-tributive impulse of the human beings who run the state. For both systems towork, capital-formation, the driving force of globalization, must take place.And redistribution is against self-interest. It cannot happen without a highlytrained sympathetic imagination. And the imagination is nourished by theslow learning of the others language, with the memory of that first learningin the works. The learning of ones first language (the native language, themother tongue, marked by birth) is at once slow and fast, linked, as the phi-

losophers of artificial intelligence and neural networking tell us, to the verytelecommunication (in the general sense) that needs to make uniform themultiplicity of languages.

The very forces we are fighting will make sure that not everybody willhave access to the powerful uniformity of a global language. As among therural poor, so here, imagination is potentially fostered in this lack of access.Humanities teaching must supplement this and transform the lack into anexcess, the excess of the multiplicity of languages.25 In other words, the

25. Some of this is quoted from The Future of the Humanities in a Fragmented World(paper presented at the MLA Annual Convention, Philadelphia, Pa., December 2730,


13/16


humanities must operate a permanent parabasis on the tug of war betweenthe two protagonists for globalization, so that false promise can continue tobecome promising.

If this model is displaced into the theater of imperial war as we knowit now, the discontinuous interruption of guerrilla insurgency and suicidebombing cannot be a self-destructive last instance. It is in this despair thatI bring up another feature of the de Manian parabasis. It is not merely anundoing, but a systematic undoing. I can defend my long-standing engage-ment with details of rural literacy as an attempt at such a systematic un-doing. This is not my research. It is interruptive hands-on training of sub-altern teachers, breaking into the main text represented, let us say, by the

MLA.26

I will mark the mention of it here as an interruptive moment, remindmy readers that theoryisits own resistance, and close by referring myselfback to the main text, and, even if bringing news from the outside, remaininthis teaching machine, here.

The MLA again, then.At the presidential forum in 2003, I was attempting to wrench secu-

larism from its ruts. The subtext of that effort would allude to

Lalan Shah Fakir (17741890), who undid the division between Islam

and Hinduism. Lalan wrote the scene of woman within the way ofbhaktior devotion, widely recognized as a historical challenge fromwithin to the caste-fixed inflexibility of high Hinduism.27 Bhakti, cre-ating affective links between the subject and the polytheist mind-set, inscribes and assigns the subjects position within a taxonomyof phenomenal affect: the Sanskrit wordbhaktiliterally invokes thistaxonomic division. When Lalan iconized the eleven wives of Muham-mad as worshiping him in the servants way, he was not guilty of natu-ralisticsexism (see note 17). He utilized rather the various assignedsubject-positions within the text of bhakti, themselves undoubtedlyrelated to the highly detailed taxonomy of the rasas (names of impliedaffective responses to texts) available within the general Indic aes-

26. A description of this work can be found in my essay Righting Wrongs, in HumanRights, Human Wrongs: Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2001, ed. Nicholas Owen (Oxford: Ox-ford University Press, 2003), 168227.27. The task here is to transfer Gauri Viswanathans extraordinary argument about theresistances of converts to the erasure of their subjectivity (Outside the Fold: Conver-sion, Modernity, and Belief[Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998], 17), mutatismutandis, to a precolonial setting.


14/16


thetic.28 Dasyaor servant-ness is one of the affective roles cultivablewithin the script ofbhakti. It is not a natural attitude to be developedas a virtue, and it is not gendered.

Bhaktiis thus a parabasis or interruptive irony of rule-bound highHinduism as well as of the advaita(Hindu non-dual or monistic) mind-set. It seems to me more and more that permanent parabasis maybe a name for the most effective and plural way of dealing, frombelow, with the repeated mortal experience of nonpassage to theother side.29 The plurality in this plural way is fragile and irreduciblyunevendependent upon an institution that can be as amorphousas culture (gendering plus religion? I risk a definition of cultures

bottom line) that it interrupts, of which we can speak only by beggingthe question.

This comes from a piece published inCultural Critique.30

l l l l

I have now testified to the presence of the narrative instantiation ofpermanent parabasis in my work. I came to it through attention to Paul deMans staging of the history of this figure. Yet, if I were committed to any

and all interruptions to the hegemonic order, my politics would be different.How then make substantive judgments? That is where understanding andirony change places and understanding, mere reasonableness as our ally,itself interrupts the state of suspended ignorance where we end up if westay with literature and its criticism, as de Man avowedly does. In his pref-ace, de Man diagnoses this as a shift, not an enda shift from historicaldefinition to the problematics of reading . . . typical of my generation, . . .of most interest in its results than in its causes 31careful words, camou-

flaging the causes as uninteresting. Yet, the pugnacious literalism thatthis teacher taught makes this student sniff at those very causes: shiftinga generation born in Europe in the twenties away from historical definition

28. For the sheer multiplicity of the rasas, see Venkatarama Raghavan, The Number ofRasa-s(Madras: Adyar Library, 1975).29. In From Haverstock Hill, for instance, I have suggested this as a description ofactually existing counter-globalist struggles in the Southern hemisphere (Whats Left ofTheory, 31).

30. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Moving Devi, Cultural Critique47 (Winter 2001): 12627.The last three footnotes are embedded in the self-quotation.31 De Man Allegories of Reading lx


15/16


to a problematics of reading which, for them, remained contained within thecanonical principles of literary history.

Critics have noted these words, of course, and fitted them in with

other instances of contrast between history and language. No one, however,seems to have noticed that de Man is speaking not just of himself but hisgeneration. My generation was born when de Mans generation was flirt-ing with fascism, the uninteresting cause of a subsequent shift from historyto reading. We came of age outside of Europe, when their war, where wefought for our masters, inaugurated the end of territorial imperialism. I amnow nearly as old as de Man was when he died. Typical of my generationis this concern for preserving the dreams of postcoloniality in the face of

globalization. It is the story of that parabasis that I have told in these pages:displacing the lesson of Paul de Man to another theater.De Man goes on to say that the shift from history to reading typical

of his generation could, in principle, lead to a rhetoric of reading reachingbeyond the canonical principles of literary history which still serve, in thisbook, as the starting point of their own displacement.32 Reaching beyond.Displaced to another place. How far beyond? As far as I pull, in these times?Altogether elsewhere? You judge.

32. An almost identical statement is made in the introduction to The Rhetoric of Romanti-cism(viiix), without the generational reference, but with the poignant metaphor of takingrefuge in more theoretical inquiries into the problems of figural language


16/16

spivak gayatri chakravorty learning from de man looking back

Documents