Gayatri Spivak Overview

Applying the strategies of Deconstruction to Post-Colonialism, Gayatri Spivak seeks to undermine the power of centralized discourses in the interest of clearing a space for marginalized voices. Known for her ample erudition and opaque theoretical texts, Spivak combines abstract philosophical speculation... [more]

Applying the strategies of Deconstruction to Post-Colonialism, Gayatri Spivak seeks to undermine the power of centralized discourses in the interest of clearing a space for marginalized voices. Known for her ample erudition and opaque theoretical texts, Spivak combines abstract philosophical speculation and personal reflection, creating a dicourse that is both intimate and obtuse. Far from unconsciously absorbing the influences of other thinkers, she engages herself in a perpetual dialogue with the authors that inform her, reflecting on the inner conflicts and paradoxes inherent in her own theoretical position. For Spivak, Deconstruction is not simply the practice of breaking things down. As she puts it, '[It] is not the exposure of error. It is constantly and persistently looking into how truths are produced.' This is to say that Spivak does not challenge truths head on, but descends to the level of the cultural and political formations that produce them. From the margins of central discourses, she interrogates the operations that engender them and hold them in place. Approaching discourses and institutions from the margins is more than a preference for Spivak, as she is often cast as an outsider or marginal figure herself. An elite intellectual, a "Third-World woman," a "hyphenated American," and a Bengali exile living in the West, Spivak inhabits an identity that is nothing if not heterogeneous. She brings this personal eclecticism into her work: drawing from Post-Colonial theory, philosophy, literary criticism, and economic theory, her texts are intellectual hybrids. The course of a single essay shifts among disparate disciplines, simultaneously playing texts off of one another and weaving them together. Not only does she analyze Post-Colonial entanglements of discursive power; her text exemplifies and enacts these same entanglements. Spivak's renown initially stemmed from her translation of Jacques Derrida's Deconstructive monograph "Of Grammatology"; the introduction she wrote for the book enjoys a reputation as one of the few texts that rivals the opacity of Derrida's own writing. But while Spivak can be highly abstract and decidedly oblique, she brings an intensely personal, ethical perspective to her work. She is fascinated by human relations: encounters with otherness, intimacies created in the midst of differences, the responsibility implicit in every act of communication. She works to articulate a relation to others that is always singular, never preceded by socially produced categories. The ideal relation to the Other, Spivak says, is "an embrace, an act of love." [show less]