deconstructive, feminist, postcolonial woman - her work can also be seen as an
illustration of some of the crucial problems of radical feminism.
One risk inherent in poststructuralism is what has already been called the
exorbitance of language, that is the move from an initial recognition of the
polysemic character of the sign to a kind of position in which the signifier, the
text, language, takes over the signified, the referent, real Hfe, and reigns
autonomous. Rather than difference or surplus we have here language in itself
and for itself. In such a position language is, as Kathi Weeks puts it, ‘attributed a
determinative power that isolates and exaggerates its constitutive force’.'3
Let me try to illustrate this by producing a very quick reading of one of
Spivak’s most renowned texts, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in which she discusses
a central theoretical problem for Brazihan feminists, that is, how to insert a
dominated group (and we would be dominated, in this sense, on at least two
counts, as women and as third world people) into a hegemonic culture.
More than two thirds of the text consists of refuting other theorists, Hned
up, or so it seems to my reading, not according to the contributions they have
made to the theme of the article but as if they were a∏ equivalent in their roles
of producers of discourse. Or maybe it is precisely because language is seen as
autonomous that one can quote Marx and Deleuze, Gramsci and Derrida in one
breath, disregarding their different historical and ideological commitments. This
IeveHing of real differences can hardly commend the practice of the apologists of
‘la difference’.
Spivak’s interventions are certainly designed to produce badly needed
pohtica∏y useful readings and yet the experience of going through the barbed
network of her style demonstrates what is lost in the rarefied atmosphere of
theory for theory’s sake. She discusses the notions of representation in Marx, of
the desiring subject in Deleuze and Guattari, ideology in Althusser, power in
Foucault, law as codified by Hindus, grammatology in Derrida. After a dazz∏ng
display of learned quotes - 92 footnotes in a 37-page article - she presents her
‘solution’:
Yet ɪ remain generally sympathetic in ahgning feminism with the critique
of positivism and the defetishization of the concrete. I am also far from
averse to learning from the works of Western theorists, though I have
learned to insist on marking their positionahty as investigating subjects.
Given these conditions and as a Hterary critic, I tactically confronted the
immense problem of the consciousness of the woman as subaltern. I
13 Weeks, Kathi, ‘Subject for a Feminist Standpoint’ in Marxism Beyond Marxism, Makdidsi S.,
Casarino, C., Karl, K. (eds.), NewYorkZLondon, Routledge, 1996, 95.
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