spivak - can the subaltern speak文档.pdfVIP

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Can the Subaltern Speak? An understanding of contemporary relations of power, and of the Western intellectuals role within them, re- quires an examination of the intersection of a theory of representation and the political economy of global capi- talism. A theory of representation points, on the one hand, to the domain of ideology, meaning, and subjec- tivity, and, on the other hand, to the domain of politics, the state, and the law. The original title of this paper was Power, Desire, Interest.1 Indeed, whatever power these meditations command may have been earned by a politically interested refusal to push to the limit the found- ing presuppositions of my desires, as far as they are within my grasp. This vulgar three-stroke formula, applied both to the most resolutely committed and to the most ironic discourse, keeps track of what Althusser so aptly named philosophies of denegation.2 I have invoked my positionality in this awkward way so as to accentuate the fact that calling the place of the investigator into question remains a meaningless piety in many recent cri- tiques of the sovereign subject. Thus, although I will attempt to foreground the precariousness of my position throughout, I know such gestures can never suffice. This paper will move, by a necessarily circuitous route, from a critique of current Western efforts to problematize the subject to the question oflllgw the third-world subject is represented within Western dis- course. Along the way, I will have occasion to suggest tha