Reconstruction 5.1 (Winter 2005)

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Spivak after Derrida after Marx / Philip Leonard

Abstract: Spivak is often viewed as an unequivocally deconstructive theorist, and she frequently reinforces this impression by proclaiming her allegiance to Derrida's ideas. Recent comments by her suggest, however, that there are limits to her deconstructive convictions. This essay considers some of Spivak's debts to Derrida's work, though it is primarily concerned with those occasions when she states her misgivings about his ability to understand postcoloniality, global power, and resistance movements. Reading Marx more accurately would, she insists, have allowed Derrida both to grasp capitalism's complex logic and to consider the effects of subaltern interventions upon capitalism's global authority. Such an assertion does indeed raise important questions about the usefulness of Derrida's ideas for postcolonial and globalization theory. But, this essay argues, Spivak manages to highlight problems in Derrida's work only by appealing a curious form of textual positivism -- a postivism that seems impossible to reconcile with her earlier claim that textuality is the place where the subaltern subject simultaneously appears and disappears.

I. Spivak after Derrida

<1> Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak has never been reluctant to declare the solidarity that she feels with Jacques Derrida's work, and a range of Derridean lineaments inform her account of the elaborate orchestration of power in colonial and postcolonial systems. In 'Glas-Piece: A Compte Rendu', one of her earliest pieces on Derrida, the full extent of this identification with Derrida's ideas begins to take shape. Reading Derrida's ambidextrous and bipolar Glas, Spivak here reflects on how Derrida mimetically interlaces his own signature with those of Hegel and Genet: infecting Hegel's deliberations on the family by laying open their many fissures and parasitically draining Genet's writing of its disseminatory force, Glas' two adjacent columns also revive these bodies of work by folding them together and inseminating them with the other voices of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida himself. 'Derrida himself' does not, however, escape unscathed in this dual act of dispersion and insemination, but is instead rendered essentially incomplete and scattered as the phantasy he has always been. Glas can be read, Spivak states, 'as a fiction of Derrida's proper name turning into a thing, of an autobiographical autotherapy or interminable self-analysis against the duping of self-sovereignty, crypting the signature so that it becomes impossible to spell out' (Spivak, 1977: 24). The autopoeisis of Glas does not, as it might appear to do, unveil the secret name of a Derrida we all want to know; rather, it discloses -- and thus disfigures -- the figuring of autonomous authorship and turns against the graphing of the proper name. Echoing de Man's claim that autobiography is the replacement of a self that never existed (de Man, 1984: 67-81), as well as presaging her assertion that 'autobiography is a wound where the blood of history does not dry' (Spivak, 1992: 795), Spivak finds in Glas an assault on the subject's sovereignty that she pursues with greater vigour in 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' and A Critique of Postcolonial Reason [1].

<2> More recently, Spivak has continued to underline what she sees as the crucial role that Derrida's ideas should play in any advanced critique of cultural power. 'Deconstruction and Cultural Studies' turns to the notion of teleiopoeisis that Derrida develops in Politics of Friendship, rather than to Glas' auto-affective and self-defeating autopoeisis; here she points to the 'new politics of reading' (Spivak, 2000a: 30) that lies in the idea that complicity informs resistance, and argues that deconstruction can prompt a rethinking of cultural studies' positivism. For Derrida, the compound term 'teleiopoeisis' carries a critical ambiguity; it signals the way in which a certain logic works as a parti pris, seeking rhetorically to programme its own conclusions in advance (Derrida's example here is taken from Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil: '"Alas! If only you knew how soon, how very soon, things will be -- different --"' [Derrida, 1997: 31]). But while teleiopoiesis operates as a 'future-producing' (Derrida, 1997: 31) act it simultaneously works performatively as an event, detaching the futurity of the future from the present in the very moment that this coming difference is inscribed. The proximate becomes distanced, and what is disavowed becomes desired:

As soon as one needs or desires one's enemies, only friends can be counted . . . and here madness looms. At each step, on the occasion of every teleiopoetic event. (No) more sense [Plus de sens]. That which is empty and that which overflows resemble one another, a desert mirage and the ineluctability of the event (Derrida, 1997: 33).

Conveying this madness, according to Politics of Friendship, is the adverb 'perhaps' that runs through Nietzsche's text. Signifying only contingently, 'perhaps' functions to presage what is to come (the 'arrivant'), but without assigning a predicative quality to the possible. This concept of the inconceivable, Derrida insists elsewhere, is 'a way of replacing the logic of necessity, the logic of dialectics, with a relationship to the future, to what is coming, to what could come to us under the modality of the maybe' (Derrida and Düttman, 1997, 3).

<3> Shuttling between the speculative and the undecidable, an 'impossible possible' (Derrida, 1997: 29) teleiopoiesis gestures towards the foolishness of the 'perhaps'. This, Spivak contends, can help to reshape and open up the concerns of Cultural Studies. At the most general level, such a structural shift would seek to prevent issues, critics, texts, or artefacts from hardening into a disciplinary orthodoxy. And this shift would bring about a further conceptual transformation by avoiding the attempt to determine cultural systems that (contradictorily) accompanies pronouncements on the social as simulation: 'To ignore this limit' that is pointed to by the deconstructive 'perhaps' 'is to transcendentalize systems, including "social constructions"' (Spivak, 2000a: 23). More specifically, these changes would demand a departure from the extrinsicality to which Cultural Studies sometimes aspires, whereby analysis and critique are seen to be uncontaminated by the institutions, processes, and power that are under scrutiny. This transformation would not simply constitute a loosening of methodological principles or a move away from positivism; rather, Spivak argues that Cultural Studies' transdisciplinarity can allow it to interrogate the uncritical metropolitanism that has informed the subjects that constitute it, especially Area Studies, Anthropology, Comparative Literature, and History.

<4> 'Glas-Piece' and 'Deconstruction and Cultural Studies' provide just two examples of the call to theoretico-political responsibility that Spivak's finds in Derrida's writing. Both essays also illustrate the equivocating way in which her work answers this call: 'Glas-Piece' reflects on Glas' myriad threads that tie Hegel to Genet and weave together reason and madness; 'Deconstruction and Cultural Studies' in contrast witnesses a Spivak whose thinking is punctuated by a series of Derridean locutions and motifs. In one sense, these differing strategies allow Spivak to avoid imposing a singular account of the material she explores, and the notion that deconstructive readings partially inhabit the text under consideration is certainly reflected in the polyvalence of her writing styles. However, while these multiple articulations might lend themselves to a voguish critical pluralism, potential problems with this shifting theoretical mode do -- as Spivak herself admits -- need addressing. Quite apart from the possibility that an uninterrogated notion of agency lies behind the motivation and selection of the critical techniques offered here, there is also the possibility that the critical attitudes adopted in 'Glas Piece' and 'Deconstruction and Cultural Studies' might betray the spirit of deconstructive theory by turning it into a theoretical model or critical method. Didacticism, it might be argued, is still at work in her reading of particular texts; in spite of her protestations ('to read all these open ended lines of writing at the same time calls for a different style of reading' [Spivak, 1977: 30]), 'Glas-Piece' retains a pedagogic function (indeed, her claim that 'An essay of this length cannot speak of the many riches of Derrida's discourse on Hegel's discourse of the family' (Spivak, 1977: 32) suggests that an extended piece could unravel the enigma of Derrida's discourse). That this 'piece' finds itself trapped between exegesis and deconstruction is captured in Spivak's subtitle, with 'compte rendu' ambivalently coding her response to Glas as both an iterative review and a summative overview.

<5> Purloining Derrida's concepts provides Spivak with an alternative route into deconstruction, but this too falls foul of a similar betrayal. Just as Julian Wolfreys voices misgivings about the institutionalizing of deconstruction as deconstructivism ('deconstruction cannot be practised because there is not an aspect of Derrida's work which, when translated, can be turned into a theory which can then, in turn, be put into practice as a method for reading' [Wolfreys, 1998: 47]), so Spivak identifies problems with work -- her own included -- which is telegraphically informed by Derridean questions, tropes, neologisms, and idioms. The danger here, she points out, is that such a treatment reduces Derrida's work to a repertoire of concepts that are transported across textual and contextual boundaries. 'I seem', she remarks, 'to fall back these days on miming a procession of figures rather than following an argument. This is, I realize in amused despair, a sort of thematization that annuls deconstruction yet once again' (Spivak, 1995a: 240). This problem is not one of exegetical transparency but one of thematic transposition: the ability to mime 'a procession of figures' would only be possible if those figures possessed an independence that would allow them to be wholly detached from the moment and circumstance of their articulation. While Derrida certainly finds the notion of contextual determination to be a problematic one [2], he is just as insistent that theoretical displacements are structured and framed by the scene of their emergence. Ventriloquizing such concepts as autopoeisis, teleiopoiesis, or perhaps would seem to run counter to this insistence, and it suggests that Derrida's work offers a free-floating critical argot that can be thematized and recalibrated for -- without, at the same time, being disfigured by -- a range of theoretical demands.

<6> Spivak does indeed acknowledge the 'annulment' of deconstruction that occurs with conceptual transposition, but a further danger -- one to which she does not draw our attention -- becomes apparent when the precise theoretical demands that saturate her thinking are considered. Some commentators on the relationship between poststructuralism and postcolonial theory place Spivak among those who politicize deconstruction by forcing its allegedly abstracted critique of metaphysical marginalia into debates concerning the social function of colonial and postcolonial signifying systems. Thus, for Stephen Morton, 'Spivak expands Derrida's deconstructive thinking beyond the framework of western philosophy, and sets it to work in diverse fields ranging from "Third World" women's political movements to postcolonial literary studies and development studies' (Morton, 2003: 25). By transferring Derridean motifs in the way that it does, Spivak's work might suggest that a reconstruction of Derrida's ideas is needed so that they can speak to theorists whose concerns lie with questions of colonialism, postcoloniality, and the emerging operations of global capital. If, as she has observed on several occasions, translation is 'necessary but impossible' (Spivak, 1999a: 17) -- if it is not just an act of affiliation, affirmation, devotion, or a relationship between equivalents but is also an act of disaffiliation, denial, and treachery -- then her work might be viewed as a postcolonial recoding of an otherwise unrelated conceptual intervention. Yet another version of catachresis, Spivak's translation of Derridean concepts into theories of postcoloniality would seem to imply that deconstruction lacks just such a theoretical vector.

<7> In much of her work, Spivak insists that such an impression depends on a spurious distinction between deconstruction and postcolonial theory. There are, she admits, moments in Derrida's writing which could respond more precisely to questions of national identity: 'At the Planchette of Deconstruction is/in America', for example, points to work by Asian Marxists who have been reading Marx against the grain of 'the predictive Eurocentric scenario' and whose work opens 'the space of a "new International"'. Since he does not consider this work, Spivak asks, does Derrida miss an opportunity to break with restricted -- European -- visions of an alternative future?

I am aware that Derrida always speaks of a Western metaphysics because he does not wish to overstep the boundaries of what he knows and what writes him. The messianic and metempsychosis are thus not aberrant. But if one proposes a 'new International', should one not perhaps cast a glance at the fate of these other sustained efforts? (Spivak, 1995a: 241)

II. Misreadings

Misgivings are expressed here, but remarks such as these also highlight the fact that divisions between Derrida's work and theories of colonialism, postcoloniality, and globalization cannot be maintained. Indeed, a significant part of Spivak's work seeks to throw light upon 'an unknown "postcolonial" Derrida' (Spivak, 1995a: 242), and the slippages and transpositions that are to be found in her 'own (mis)interpretation of Derrida' (Spivak, 1993: 99) take place between allied versions of cultural intervention -- both of which expose and explore the auto-affection that is central to Europe's miraculating self-invention -- and not between the discrete terrains of a partitioned theoretical topology (deconstruction/postcolonial theory).

<8> Spivak's account of her relationship with deconstruction, and of the ways in which Derrida's work might contribute to theories of postcoloniality, undergoes a dramatic shift in both tone and direction when she considers what are, for her, Derrida's shortcomings as a reader of Marx. In one of her earliest essays on Derrida and Marx, the 1987 'Speculation on Reading Marx: After Reading Derrida', Spivak considers deconstruction's consequences for political theory by challenging the assumption that 'deconstruction' and 'Marxism' are proper names that designate fixed, finite, and separate fields of inquiry, and she argues that Derrida's work can productively contribute to a reassessment of Marxist concepts. Her focus here is a footnote in 'White Mythology' that reflects on the notion of 'the proper' -- the proper name, self-proximity, self-possession, propriety, cleanliness, truth, and so on -- in The German Ideology. This footnote takes Marx to task for leaving metaphysical concepts of property (such as bodily properties) uninterrogated, but it also claims that the resources for redressing this unwitting metaphysicality can be found in Marx's text; for Derrida, Marx 'opens, or leaves open, the questions of the "reality" of the proper' (Derrida, 1982: 217, n.13). For Spivak, this analysis of the ambiguities that underpin Marx's materialism can be extended to his concept of labour-power: what Marx's readers often fail to acknowledge, she argues, is that if capitalism invents the body of the labouring class, then this class must be characterized by a radical impropriety. The source of resistance to capitalism should not, then, be located in the 'proper labour' of a class that needs to overcome its alienation, but should instead emerge from the improper logic that is central to capitalism's identifications.

<9> However, as much as 'Speculation on Reading Marx' insists that this rethinking of alienation and property can contribute to a rewriting of the political lexicon, elsewhere Spivak maintains that Derrida's remarks on Marx (at least, until the appearance of Specters of Marx) extend little further than a series of scattered associations. 'Limits and Openings of Marx in Derrida' lists some of these 'many analogies and references' (Spivak, 1993: 100) to Marx; these include Limited Inc. (where 'one finds analogies between normative language taxonomies and capitalism and its crisis-management'), 'The Retrait of Metaphor' (in which 'Heidegger's metaphoric practice itself is described in economic terms'), 'Restitutions to the Truth in Pointing' (where 'criticism is presented in terms of use-, exchange-, and surplus-value'), and 'Economimesis' ( where 'the naturalization of political economy by Kant is presented in terms of the God-poet relationship' [Spivak, 1993: 100]). Typifying Derrida's reflections on the relationship between capital and value, these essays suggest to Spivak that the Marxist problematic figures in his work 'only by a clandestine metonymy' (Spivak, 1993: 100) which authorizes itself by discreetly parrying Marxist interventions in the very moment that it appears to confront them.

<10> 'Limits and Openings' is concerned to question those moments in Derrida's work where Marxist discourse props up interventions that are not primarily concerned with the subtleties of Marx's thinking, and one example of this is his citing of 'surplus-value' when gesturing towards a generalized relationship beyond intentional consciousness. The problem here for Spivak is not that Derrida appropriates Marx's concepts for his own ends. Rather, these occasional detours into Marxist vocabulary signal a larger misunderstanding of political economy, and especially of capital's transnational appetites. Turning to Derrida's reflections on the future of Europe in The Other Heading, Spivak picks out his claim that 'capital' in Valéry's La liberté de l'esprit is laden with polysemia: for Derrida,

Valéry puts to work the regulated polysemy of the word 'capital'. This word compounds interests, it would seem; it enriches with surplus-value the significations of memory, cultural accumulation, and economic or fiduciary value. Valéry assumes the rhetoric of these tropes, the different figures of capital referring to each other to the point where one cannot nail them down into the propriety of a literal meaning (Derrida, The Other Heading, cited in Spivak, 1993: 112).

As in 'Speculation on Reading Marx', Spivak here salutes the non-proprietary route that Derrida follows through this polysemia, and, she argues, it allows theory to hear Marx's disparate voices. On the other hand, as much as this non-heuristic reading allows Marxism to move beyond the entrenchments of a canonized orthodoxy, it nonetheless for her shows that a disregard for Marxist concepts continues in Derrida's writing, and this in spite of his pronouncement that it is necessary to reread Marx ('It will always be a fault not to read and reread and discuss Marx' [Derrida, 1994: 13]). Specifically, value is misconstrued here, she maintains, since Derrida fails to finesse the theory of surplus-value in the way that Marx does. Not only does he fall short of addressing the strict sense in which surplus-value denotes the difference between the labour-power that actuates commodity production and the exchange-value that is attached to the commodity produced. He also sees absolute surplus-value as 'the infinite source of more and more value' (Spivak, 1993: 112), rather than as the value that is created when the working day is lengthened. While for Derrida a deregulation of critical and theoretical methods can allow a plethora of meanings to spill out of Marx's text, for Spivak such eccentric readings allow the signifier of Marx's text to become wholly detached from its signified. By diluting the force of Marx's interventions, she asserts, Derrida's Marxism fails to provide a satisfactory method either for mapping capital's transnational trajectories, or for understanding the increasing feminization of the workforce.

III. Between hauntology and ontopology

<11> If 'Limits and Openings' insists that the concept of 'use-value remains the unquestioned possibility' of deconstruction, but that Derrida's 'politicoeconomic vocabulary' (Spivak, 1993: 118) has often inhibited the actualization of this possibility, then Spivak's later 'Ghostwriting' maintains that Derrida's restricted understanding of political economy continues in Specters of Marx. Opening with a short avant-propos on her 'relationship to "deconstruction"' (Spivak, 1995b: 65), Spivak declares that this bond has become 'more intimate, more everyday, more of a giving -- away, and in -- habit of mind' (Spivak, 1995b: 65). At the same time, these prefatory remarks also anticipate what is to follow by looking back to 'Glas-Piece', revisiting the mimicry -- the affirmation-negation coevality -- that is intrinsic to Derrida's reading of Hegel and Genet, and which extends into Spivak's reading of Glas. Again, this ambivalence is played out in the way in which 'Ghostwriting' both applauds the left-leaning convictions of Specters of Marx and expresses Spivak's frustration with Derrida's Marxism. But 'Ghostwriting' does not simply update Spivak's earlier claims about the shortcomings of Derrida's Marxism. One of the striking traits of 'Ghostwriting' is that it is more outspoken about what remains implicit in 'Limits and Openings': despite its complexity, Spivak tellingly argues in this later essay, Marx's work nevertheless offers a stable and definable corpus that is open to unequivocal interpretation.

<12> When thinking about exactly which ghosts appear in Marx's writing, Spivak insists that the body of the working woman is one that, for him, inhabits the shifting corpus of the revenant, yet neither the increasing centrality of women to the processes of productive work nor women's reproductive labour are tackled in Specters. Where Derrida's 'hauntology' stresses the messianic arrivant and a community that cannot be anticipated, Spivak argues that 'the reproductive body of woman has now been "socialized" -- computed into average abstract labor and thus released into what I call the spectrality of reason -- a specter that haunts the merely empirical, dislocating it from itself' (Spivak, 1995b: 67). Similar problems for Spivak surround the critique of ontopology that lies behind the (non-)concept of the New International. This notion sets out to shake the foundations of the (Europhilic) nation-state by placing national community out of joint with itself and challenging the 'axiomatics linking indissociably the ontological value of present being (on) to its situation, to the stable and presentable determination of a locality, the topos of territory, native soil, city, body in general' (Derrida, 1994: 82). For Spivak, however, both the concept of ontopology and the non-concept of the New International are based on a weak understanding of the complex movement of capital. Derrida does indeed name ten plagues of the new global hegemony [3], but, she insists, he collapses together different functions of capital, confuses different notions of value, and as a consequence fails to examine the complex interconnectivity of these plagues:

Derrida cannot see the systemic connections between the ten plagues of the New World Order . . . because he cannot know the connection between industrial capitalism, colonialism, so-called postindustrial capitalism, neocolonialism, electronified capitalism, and the current financialization of the globe, with the attendant phenomena of migrancy and ecological disaster (Spivak, 1995b: 68) [4].

In addition to these deficiencies in Specters' account of capitalism's transnationality, there are also problems with its critique of ontopological axiomatics. Fixing on the territorializing logic that strictly roots identity in locality, Derrida's concept functions in Specters as an antonym for the (inconceivably) atopic and unlocalizable. The trouble with this concept for Spivak is that it allows theory no position from which to consider counter-hegemonic activity. If the main thrust of Specters is to allow the difference of the New International to disconcert both European exceptionalism and more general forms of ethnocentrism, then Derrida's text seems once again to render voiceless those engaged in resistance writing and thinking. Spivak:

The subaltern are neither 'nationally rooted' nor migrant; their intra-national displacement is managed by the exigencies of international capital. . . . Their struggles reflect a continuity of insurgency which can only too easily be appropriated by the discourse of a come-lately New internationality in the most extravagantly publicized theoretical arenas of the world. Subalternity remains silenced there (Spivak, 1995b: 71) [5].

Between the notions of hauntology and ontopology, then, the subaltern drops out of sight: Specters, 'Ghostwriting' insists, fails to see the systemic interplay of capitalism's various forces, but at the same time attributes too much systemicity to a subaltern idiom that here becomes once again an unheard utterance.

IV. Estates and Exegesis

<13> Spivak's reservations do indeed leave questions hanging over Derrida's readings of Marx. When voicing these reservations, however, she makes a number of surprising claims, and sometimes slips into the sort of discourse that seems improbable in a theorist so closely associated with deconstruction. On some occasions, the vocabulary that she employs in her response to Derrida is recriminatory. Thus, while she states in the Foreword to Outside in the Teaching Machine that she feels an '(always respectful) impatience' (Spivak, 1993: x) towards Derrida's characterization of Marx, this impatience is phrased less-respectfully elsewhere. 'Limits and Openings', for example, states that Derrida 'confuses' (Spivak, 1993: 97) Marx's arguments, and that his understanding of surplus-value demonstrates 'an embarrassing lack of awareness of Marx's use of the term' (Spivak, 1993: 112).

<14> On other occasions (and very much tied to the accusation that Derrida's appreciation of Marx is confused and embarrassing), an appeal to exact exegesis radiates out of Spivak's rejoinder. When in 'Limits and Openings' she states that 'Marx's ethicoeconomic counsel, in its detail, should be digested, incorporated, and thus inscribed in the body of the feminist and antiimperialist struggles' (Spivak, 1993: 115), Spivak turns away from the more deconstructive argument that she elsewhere promotes, and transcendentalizes Marx by implying that his counsel is constituted as a permanent critique, one that is not reshaped by the contexts in which it finds itself. Such a digestion, incorporation, and inscription would certainly see feminist and antiimperialist struggles learning the protocol of Marxist critique. But the notion that, in order to speak to these struggles, Marxism is obliged mutually to digest, incorporate, and be inscribed by feminist and antiimperialist struggles seems not to be an issue here. In contrast with the plurivocity of Glas that Spivak celebrates earlier, Marxism here turns into a static and enduring thematics that intervenes unilaterally. It is for this reason, as Moore-Gilbert observes, that 'Her relationship to Marxism is . . . difficult to fix. On the one hand she confesses to Sara Danius and Stefan Jonsson, "I'm not really a Marxist cultural critic", while to Robert Young she asserts, "I'm an old-fashioned Marxist"' (Moore-Gilbert, 1997: 78).

<15> In 'Ghostwriting' Spivak's appeal to core themes in Marxism is made more forcefully. Part of this essay is written in a confessional mode: several times she states that her misgivings about Derrida's reading of Marx arise out of her own sense of proprietoriality towards Marx. Her unhappiness with Specters surfaces because she 'so desperately wanted Derrida to get Marx rightish' (Spivak, 1995b: 72), but she then wonders whether these reservations are triggered by a clandestine craving for interpretive directness, asking 'Am I a closet clarity-fetishist when it comes to Marx?' (Spivak, 1995b: 72). 'Ghostwriting' frequently suggests that this may indeed be the case. Echoing her other writing, including 'Responsibility' and A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, this essay argues that an ethical response to the past is one which regards history as a hauntology, not as a bare and recuperable facticity: 'You crave to let history haunt you as a ghost or ghosts, with the ungraspable incorporation of a ghostly body, and the uncontrollable, sporadic, and unanticipatable periodicity of haunting. . . . It is not, then, a past that was necessarily once present that is sought' (Spivak, 1995b: 70). Working against such an alternative historiography, however, this essay also asks 'Is it just my proprietorial reaction to think that you can't catch any specter of Marx if you don't attend to the ghost's signature?' (Spivak, 1995b: 65). Implying that it is possible somehow to seize the 'ungraspable incorporation of a ghostly body', to treat Marx as the source and guarantor of his own utterance, Spivak therefore appeals to two conflicting forms of proprietoriality: she lays claim to the interpretation of a textual corpus that is also in full possession of itself.

<16> Given that Spivak constantly alerts us to the unreliability of the confessional mode, it would seem prudent to remain skeptical during those moments when she comes clean about her proprietoriality towards Marx. Surprisingly, Derrida finds no ambiguity in 'Ghostwriting'. His 'Marx & Sons', a somewhat uncharacteristic essay, assesses and responds to a series of commentaries on Specters of Marx. These commentaries -- by, among others, Ahmad, Hamacher, Jameson, Macherey, and Negri -- for him mostly engage responsibly with the readings that he offers: 'Nearly all seek to analyse, understand, argue -- to elucidate, not to obfuscate. Nearly all seek to discuss rather than insult (as one so often does today, to avoid asking oneself painful questions), to object rather than belittle or, in cowardly fashion, wound' (Derrida, 1999: 215). Nearly all, but not quite all, for Derrida also declares his unhappiness with certain commentators' 'prioprietorial' (Derrida, 1999: 222) claim to Marx's legacy. Embodying this sense of interpretive ownership is Eagleton ('One can only rub one's eyes in disbelief and wonder where he finds the inspiration, the haughtiness, the right. Has he learned nothing at all? What proprietary rights must be protected. . . . To whom is "Marxism" supposed to belong?' [Derrida, 1999: 222]), but he also discovers this tendency in Spivak's 'Ghostwriting'. Derrida's unhappiness with Spivak stems partly from what he sees as a series of misreadings in her essay; these are due, he states, to 'her unbridled manipulation of a rhetoric' and to a distortive ventriloquism -- 'so massive a falsification' -- which turns his critique of the stasis of the political into an injunction not to repoliticize (Derrida, 1999: 223).

<17> What lies behind this displeasure is not just a sense of professional injury on Derrida's part. Rather, his frustration with 'Ghostwriting' erupts from this essay's demand for truthful exegesis; this demand, he argues, is rooted in the notion that the right response to Marx precedes the act of interpretation. Not only does Spivak seek to define the parameters within which acceptable readings of Marx can take place, she also -- prioprietorially -- suggests that these parameters can be determined in advance of any encounter with Marx's writing. The implications of this prior appropriation are what Derrida rails against in 'Marx & Sons'. If Spivak's account of Derrida's confusion is a valid one, then critics like her will always have been the heirs to Marx's legacy; within such an economy other readers would therefore have to submit their readings for imprimatur by this estate.

<18> Further reflection on this disagreement could pick out the discourse of this contretemps, pointing out the ways in which it borders inflammatory invective: 'One of the things that jar in Specters is Derrida's constant correcting and patronizing of a "silly" Marx' (Spivak, 1995b, 79); 'Some of her errors stem from an outright inability to read' (Derrida, 1999: 223). To some readers, such phrasing might suggest that this dispute has deteriorated into a conflict between personalities, rather than forming part of a scholarly exchange on the question of validity in interpretation (Rapaport, 2001: 63). But although Derrida's excoriation of Spivak for her failure to read is open to dispute, his retaliation does raise question about her reaction to Specters' confusion. Certainly, some irony would be at work if Spivak misreads Derrida's failure to read Marx, and this would enervate the force of a number of her objections. For example, the concept of ontopology is a troubling one for Spivak. This concept, she argues, construes culture as a monolithic dominance, but when describing this process she slips from claiming that he 'can only see' the subaltern as a version of the dominant, to suggesting that he could see minorities differently, but fails to do so: her initial claim that 'The criticism of "ontopology" . . . can only see the unexamined religious nationalism of the migrant or national' becomes 'to see all activity attached to the South as ontopologocentric, denies access to the news of subaltern struggles against the financialization of the globe' (Spivak, 1995b, 71). Finding insight in Derrida's blindness, Spivak's initial point here is that Specters cannot consider the full effects of counter-hegemonic movements, but she then implies that even though he equates minority movements with a hegemonic reassertion of territorialized ethnicity, his work does not necessarily lead to this narrow response.

Conclusions

<19> Thumbnail sketches often characterize Spivak's work as a multivalent and polyvocal body of texts which lock together Marxism, feminism, and deconstruction in a rigorous reassessment of cultural systems. But, as other commentators have observed of her earlier writing, there are imbalances in this composite treatment of different critical modes: as much as Spivak at times associates her thinking with Derrida's, at other times she argues that Marxism offers greater insight into global power than the critical strategies provided by deconstruction. What starts as a disruptive polysemia, Young argues, turns into a terminal monocritique: 'For all the carefully constructed disparateness of her work, for all the discontinuities which she refuses to reconcile, Spivak's Marxism functions as an overall syncretic frame. It works . . . as a transcendentalizing gesture to produce closure' (Young, 1990: 173).

<20> Such a 'transcendentalizing gesture' persists in her recent comments on deconstruction and Marxism, and although she continues to declare her solidarity with Derrida, she is nevertheless equally prepared to voice her misgivings about his work. Her criticisms of Derrida are not just targeted at his relative inattention to the counter-hegemony of subaltern groups -- this criticism is perhaps the most provocative one for those who draw upon deconstruction when theorizing colonialism and postcoloniality. Rather, Spivak claims that Derrida's careless reading of value metonymically points to his inability to understand postcoloniality, capitalism's global hegemony, and transnational resistance movements. This conclusion is a remarkable one for a cultural commentator with Spivak's allegiances, and not only for the reason that it departs from the encomium that she often exhibits towards Derrida. This conclusion is also remarkable because she can only arrive at it by turning away from the notion of theoretico-political interpretation that she promotes elsewhere, and by endowing Marx's writings with a stable and static substance. What Derrida's misreading of Marx means for Spivak, in other words, is that the critique of European epistemic systems now demands a departure from Derrida as much as it does from, for example, Deleuze or Foucault. The foreword to Outside in the Teaching Machine underlines this sentiment: characterizing her relation to deconstruction by ventriloquizing Derrida's 'The Force of Law', she states here that 'As I have repeatedly acknowledged, all my work is a forcing of deconstruction(s) into an "impure, contaminating, negotiated, bastard and violent . . . filiation"' (Spivak, 1993: x). However, this contaminating negotiation of deconstruction becomes one that speaks from the uncontaminated interiority of Marx's text: infecting an already tainted theoretical articulation, Spivak seeks to render deconstruction impure by grafting purity onto it.

<21> Challenging what she sees as Derrida's unjustifiably revisionist treatment of Marx's writing, Spivak problematically suggests that the true sense of Marx's writing can be discovered. Not only does this entail recuperating textuality as an archive of enlightening texts -- a recuperation that Spivak contests elsewhere -- it also suggests that the ideas offered by Marxism provide the paradigm for perceiving exactly how postcoloniality and global culture operate. No longer is it the case for her that cultural power is confronted most effectively by transdisciplinary and transtheoretical work; instead, it is Marxism that steps in where other cultural theory fails. The critical feedback that is generated by this surprisingly non- (perhaps even anti-) deconstructive manoeuvre is one that threatens to overwhelm Spivak's status as theorist of postcoloniality, and it begs at least two questions. If Marx's theory of absolute surplus-value offers an accurate method for analysing and understanding the position of women workers in relation to capital's transnationality, does it therefore allow us to hear the muted voice of the subaltern? Alternatively, if -- as Spivak herself submits -- deconstructive critical strategies are needed in order to loosen the bonds of an exclusionary positivism, then is a more disconcerting infringement of interpretive othodoxies and analytical propriety needed in her response to Marx after Derrida?

Notes

[1] In this manner, the autobiographical vignettes that are scattered throughout Spivak's work should be seen as alternatives to the confessional and self-regarding tendencies that she excoriates in postcolonial studies. As Robert Young points out, 'Spivak disdains this small-time institutional game, and is always disarmingly up-front about her own provenance' (Young, 1996: 229). [^]

[2] 'Does not the notion of context harbor, behind a certain confusion, very determined philosophical presuppositions?' (Derrida, 1982: 310). [^]

[3] Derrida identifies ten such 'plagues' that are passed over in celebrations of the new world order: 1) unemployment; 2) 'the massive exclusion of homeless citizens from any participation in the democratic life of States'; 3) economic war between nations and its consequences for the implementation of international law; 4) 'the inability to master the contradictions in the concept, norms, and reality of the free market'; 5) 'the aggravation of the foreign debt'; 6) the centrality of the arms industry in Western democracies; 7) 'the spread . . . of nuclear weapons, maintained by the very countries that say they want to protect themselves from it'; 8) inter-ethnic wars; 9) the 'worldwide power of those super-efficient and properly capitalist phantom-states that are the mafia and the drug cartels on every continent'; 10) 'the present state of international law and its institutions' (Derrida, 1994: 81-4). [^]

[4] An early footnote in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason similarly makes this claim: 'Thus industrial (and specifically postindustrial) capitalism is now in an interruptive différance with commercial capital; World Trade with finance capital markets. To notice this différance is to learn from Derrida; yet Derrida's own resolute ignoring of the difference between the two is caught within it' (Spivak, 1999b: 3, n.4). [^]

[5] Spivak restates this claim in 'A Note on the New International': 'In Politics of Friendship, Derrida makes a plea for slow reading, even at a time of political urgency, arguing carefully that it must remain always inadequate. As so often, I echo him on another register, and make a plea for the patient work of learning to learn from below -- a species of "reading" perhaps -- how to mend the torn fabric of subaltern ethics with the thread of the subject whose trace is in the madness of a universal declaration of human rights -- necessarily bending curvature into droiture -- straightness, rights, uprightness. If this interests you, I have not altogether misread Derrida' (Spivak, 2001: 15). [^]

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