Critique, Complicity, Responsibility: Derrida, Spivak, and the Politics of Deconstruction In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Spivak takes aim

at what she considers the most dangerous blind spot of contemporary social theory: its delusion of selftransparency. Both feminist and postcolonial critics alike, she argues, fail to attend to their own foreclosures, to the exclusions both real and symbolic that their analyses unwittingly authorize. Insofar as these writers neglect the way in which their studies render certain forms of domination and exploitation unintelligible, Spivak contends, they remain accomplices to precisely those practices and institutions they criticize as unjust. Accordingly, she maintains that if the apparently crystalline disciplinary mainstream runs muddy, then it is the critics responsibility to engage in a persistent dredging operation1 in order to come to terms with her own complicity. At the same time, however, Spivak remains fully aware of the difficulties presented by such a task: because this dredging is counterproductive when it becomes a constant and selfrighteous shaming of fully intending subjects, she continues, deconstruction can help here.2 Taken together, these two statements intimate the basic methodological contours of Spivaks critique of postcolonial reason. On the one hand, she would like to follow Derridas example in holding that all responsible criticism must ultimately take its lead from the persistent activity of radical self-critique. On the other, however, Spivak allows herself at times to stray from the deconstructive itinerary, only embracing this method when it is most helpful in addressing the political problems with which she is concerned. In what follows then, I will try to account for why an erstwhile deconstructive critic like

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 1, my emphasis 2 Idem

Spivak might find herself inclined to give up the ghost in addressing the normative concerns of postcolonial criticism. In this paper, I would like to inquire into the extent to which deconstruction can accommodate normative political concerns such as those voiced by Marxist and postcolonial critics. Rather than focusing exclusively on Derridas own writings, however, I would like to pursue this question primarily by engaging the work of Spivak one of the foremost political theorists influenced by deconstructive criticism. In paying particular attention to those instances in which she seems to distance herself from the deconstructive problematic, I hope to clarify the difficulties a deconstructive project will inevitably encounter in promoting specific political objectives. After highlighting in the first part of the paper, some of the basic methodological commitments of deconstruction (as well as their attendant difficulties) as they emerge in Specters of Marx, I will consider in the second section the way in which Spivak differentiates her approach to Marxism from Derridas in her essay Ghostwriting. In that essay, Spivak suggests that without a sense of propriety, deconstruction forgoes its claim to responsibility. In the final section, I will concentrate on the way the notion of complicity Spivak employs in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason reveals some methodological differences which distinguish Derridas work from her own. Though she avows that the deconstructive figure is one of complicity,3 I will argue here that her reworking of this notion a notion that lies at the core of her analysis cannot simply be reduced to its deconstructive instantiation. Rather, Spivaks notion of complicity brings to light those supplements without which the work of deconstructive criticism remains irresponsible. 1.
3

CPR, 98

If there is a single guiding thread running through the lectures that comprise Specters of Marx, it is contained in the following passage: Deconstruction has never had any sense or interest, in my view at least, except as a radicalization, which is to say also in the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism.4 The gesture is clear enough Derrida would like to demonstrate through a sustained engagement with some of Marxs central texts that deconstruction and Marxism partake of a single impulse. What is less clear, however, is what motivates this gesture whether as Eagleton5 suggests, Derrida is out above all to empty Marxism of its political content or, as Ahmad6 insists, to greedily claim Marxs inheritance for himself after the collapse of Soviet Communism, or, as I will argue, to delineate the conditions for responsible political engagement. And yet, if Derridas chief concern here is to synthesize the concerns of deconstruction and Marxist politics, to temper political praxis by means of the responsible work of deconstruction, as I will show, difficulties already emerge in his basic articulation of this project difficulties, moreover, that intimate Spivaks peculiar inheritance of deconstruction. As Derrida undertakes, in his first lecture, to explain the occasion of his treatment of Marx, we already begin to catch sight of the problems his efforts entail. Upon rereading Marx, Derrida explains, few philosophical projects seemed to him more
4

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 115 5 What he wants, in effect, is a Marxism without Marxism, which is to say a Marxism on his own coolly appropriative terms. [] If Derrida thinks, as he appears to do, that there can be any effective socialism without organizationthen he is merely the victim of some academicist fantasy which he has somehow mistaken for an enlightened anti-Stalinism. Terry Eagleton, Marxism without Marxism, in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derridas Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker (New York: Verso, 1999), 86 6 Ahmad claims that Derridas analysis of the dynamics of inheritance are intended to show that he and his deconstruction, not communists and those who are generally known as Marxists, are the true heirs of Marx, the dead Father. Aijaz Ahmad, Reconciling Derrida: Specters of Marx and Deconstructive Politics, in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derridas Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker (New York: Verso, 1999), 91

urgent. However, what appears to Derrida most pressing for our political present, is neither Marxs critique of political economy, nor even his analysis of class society; what is most timely, according to Derrida, in the entire Marxian problematic is, paradoxically, its utter untimeliness. Who has ever called for the transformation to come of his own theses, Derrida asks, so as to incorporate in advance, beyond any possible programming, the unpredictability of new knowledge, new techniques, and new political givens?7 Derrida would like to conjure up a certain spirit of Marxism, a radically selfcritical spirit that recognizes the intrinsically irreducible historicity8 of its own thinking. One might ask here, however, whether any spirit of Marxism in fact embraces the kind of radical political indeterminacy that Derrida is describing, or whether the normative political commitments that generally fall under the heading of Marxism are even compatible with a kind of thinking that would project itself beyond any possible programming. The contrast Derrida implicitly sets up in the above quote between a negative, self-critical spirit of Marxism and a positive, programmatic one, appears somewhat more clearly a little further down the same page this time, framed in what appear to be baldly ethical terms. It will always be a fault, Derrida writes, not to read and reread and discuss Marx and to go beyond scholarly reading and discussion. It will be more and more a fault, he continues, a failing of theoretical, philosophical, political responsibility.9 The same critical spirit that would resist any positive political program that would attempt to remain open to the unpredictability of new political givens emerges here as one that would consider the continual reading, rereading, and discussing
7 8

Specters, 14 Idem 9 Idem, my emphasis

of Marxs texts a matter of responsibility. Derrida contrasts this spirit with that of Marxist ideological production: When the dogma machine and the Marxist ideological apparatuses (States, parties, cells, unions, and other places of doctrinal production) are in the process of disappearing, we no longer have any excuse, only alibis, for turning away from this responsibility. There will be no future without this.10 Although Derrida appears here to be invoking a dichotomy between, on the one hand, a positive spirit that would proceed from established Marxist doctrine to an ideologically informed mode of political praxis, and a negative spirit on the other, whose responsible resolve never to stop reading, rereading and discussing Marxs writings would seem to prevent it in principle from ever moving on to a positive political program, as it turns out, the distinction he is drawing here is somewhat less stark.11 Derridas claim is not only that it is a failing of responsibility to stop reading, rereading, and discussing Marx; it is just as much a fault, he contends, when one fails to go beyond scholarly reading and discussion.12 Here we begin to catch sight of an apparently positive dimension of the otherwise negative spirit Derrida would enjoin us to inherit, and it is precisely this dimension that he will elaborate under the heading of the New International. That certain spirit of Marxism with which Derrida is concerned here will not rest content with a scholarly orientation toward its own activity; it must, as he says, go beyond such an orientation, making the activities of reading, rereading, and discussing

10 11

Specters, 14 The clearest expression of this contrast appears in the following: We would distinguish this spirit from other spirits of Marxism, those that rivet it to the body of Marxist doctrine, to its supposed systemic, metaphysical, or ontological totality (notably to its dialectical method or to dialectical materialism), to its fundamental concepts of labor, mode of production, social class, and consequently to the whole history of its apparatuses (projected or real: the Internationals of the labor movement, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the single party, the State, and finally the totalitarian monstrosity) (Specters, 110). Even here, however, Derridas distinction is, expectedly, hard to pin down. 12 Specters, 14

themselves a form of political praxis. In other words, Derrida considers that certain spirit of Marxism that he would like us to inherit not merely in negative terms, but as already positive. Indeed, Derrida considers the vigilant activity of radical and interminable self-critique the very substance of the political program he calls the New International: an untimely link without coordination, without party, without country without common belonging to a class [that] calls to the friendship of an alliance without institution among those who, even if they no longer believe or never believed in the socialist-Marxist International continue to be inspired by at least one of the spirits of Marx or of Marxism in order to ally themselves in the critique of the state of international law, the concepts of the State and nation, and so forth: in order to renew this critique, and especially to radicalize it.13 In other words, the New International is an alliance engaged entirely in the activity of a persistent and thoroughgoing critique of the basic concepts that comprise contemporary politics (State, nation, class, labor, party, etc.). Nevertheless, Derridas attempt here to turn a critique of a politics into a politics of critique reveals a difficulty constraining any effort to address deconstructively the practical concerns that animate a political program such as Marxism or postcolonialism. Derrida would like to suggest that in the New International criticism goes beyond scholarly reading and discussing,14 constituting a positive political program in its own right. However, once we see that, for Derrida, responsible political engagement is in fact exhausted by the procedure of radical, perpetual critique, that it will be a failing of theoretical, philosophical, political responsibility15 even to rivet criticism to the fundamental concepts of labor, mode of production, social class,16 the political potential of deconstruction begins to appear rather
13 14

Specters, 106-107, my emphasis Specters, 14 15 Idem 16 Specters, 110

vacuous. Derridas New International can incorporate in advance, beyond any possible programming, the unpredictability of new knowledge, new techniques, and new political givens,17 but it cannot yield anything more for political praxis than an uninformed critique for the sake of responsibility, it cannot even articulate the conditions for a form of resistance that would go beyond a critical reading of Marx.18 Accordingly, any attempt to reconcile deconstruction with the goals of a normative political program must ultimately come to grips with this difficulty.

2. Specters came out in 1993 to decidedly unfavorable reviews. One might have expected that the work would find little sympathy among polemical Marxist critics like Terry Eagleton, Aijaz Ahmad, and Tom Lewis. Far less expected, however, was the contentious review Ghostwriting offered by fellow deconstructive critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Ive always had trouble with Derrida on Marx, Spivak explains at the beginning of her essay. A friend said maybe thats because I feel proprietorial about Marx. Who knows? she continues, Maybe.19 In fact it is precisely a matter of propriety a stake in the normative concerns that motivate Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial criticism that informs Spivaks dissatisfaction with Derrida. Nevertheless, her apparent proprietorialism indicates not only a difference of commitment, but also an important

17 18

Specters, 14 The point is certainly not lost on Spivak. Of Derridas New International, she writes: To continue with the program (which is not a program, of course): We wont repoliticize, we will be an alliance without institution, and we will produce events, new effective forms of action, practice, organization, and so forth. In a world where nonalignment is no longer possible as a collective position, what good is such anonymous internationality? and how will it come to pass? Never mind. We dont like totalitarianism, and we are unsympathetic with the labor movement. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Ghostwriting, Diacritics, 25.2 (Summer 1995), 69 19 Ghostwriting, 65

methodological difference distinguishing Derridas work from her own. As I will show, her two main points of criticism (1) that Derridas intervention into the political ills of the present leaves women entirely unaccounted for, and (2) that his critique of Marx stems from an unfortunate misunderstanding of the basic categories of the latter reflect a sense of propriety which, though decried by deconstruction, remains nevertheless indispensible to any normative political project. If Derrida plays Hamlet to Marxs Ghost, Spivak writes, there are no takers for Gertrude or Ophelia.20 Though it may seem incidental that Derrida has failed to include women in his account, Spivaks contention is that Specters is in fact unable to address women21 and at the price of its political relevance. Her argument proceeds in two steps. First, she laments the fact that the ghost with which Derrida is concerned is described in exceedingly abstract terms indeed, it returns to the bosom of Abraham in Derridas account shorn of all specificity.22 Nevertheless, Spivak contends, the peculiar corporeality of the ghostis not just any corpus23 the ghosts lack of specificity does not preclude, but rather belies, a certain gender. This, in turn, reveals for Spivak an additional limitation to Derridas account. Because Specters cannot account for women, his analysis of the new world order rests upon a misunderstanding of the current configuration of global capitalism: in the new new [sic] international economic order after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it is the labor of the patriarchally defined subaltern woman that has been most effectively socialized.24 With the recent upsurge of
20 21

Ghostwriting, 66 Spivaks argument here is actually quite underdeveloped. She insists that Specters of Marx cannot bring in women (Ghostwriting,68), but she provides little more than suggestive statements to support this claim. 22 Ghostwriting, 66 23 Ghostwriting, 67 24 Ghostwriting, 67

global home working, she explains, the subaltern woman has come to stand at the foundation of capitalist production. And yet, Derrida must remain as blind to this fact as he is to the economic system that has made it possible. It is his blindness to the latter that Spivak takes up in the remainder of her review. After criticizing Specters for its apparent inability to address women, Spivak provides a list of mistakes25 Derrida makes in his reading of Marx. One might be inclined here to object that such mistakes are like the ghosts gendered body inessential to Derridas general account. Spivak insists, however, that these details in fact make all the difference: Is it just my proprietorial reaction to think that you cant catch at any specter of Marx if you dont attend to the ghosts signature?26 Spivak counts at least three major mistakes that expose Derridas limited understanding of Marx; I will focus here on one especially revealing case his confusion regarding the categories of use-value and exchange-value. In the last section of Specters, Apparition of the Inapparent, Derrida hazards a critique of Marx. After suggesting that Marxs critique of Stirner in The German Ideology ought to be understood as an attempt to exorcise his own ghosts,27 Derrida proceeds to Capital, where he locates yet another specter. The commodity, Derrida says, haunts the thing, its specter is at work in use-value.28 Derrida offers this point as a rejoinder to a Marx that conceives use-value in terms of empirical actuality a Marx that fails to notice the spectrality peculiar to the commodity. The problem with this, as Spivak points out, is that it is directed at the wrong Marx. Though it is conceivable that one might find such a figure in The German

25 26

Ghostwriting, 71 Ghostwriting, 65 27 Derrida claims that Marx fears the ghost of Hegel, the dead Father, among others. 28 Specters, 189

Ideology,29 in Capital he is nowhere to be found. As Spivak rightly identifies, Marx is concerned in the latter with that spectral character that emerges precisely in the production of useful items. Accordingly, she concludes that Derrida is just reinventing the wheel when he points out that exchange (and therefore the ghost) is implicit in use. If that imminence were not proper to man, she continues, there would be no socialism.30 Spivak may be correct in thinking that mistakes such as these belie a somewhat limited understanding of Marxism. Judging from her approach to these errors, however, I would suggest that they reveal just as much about deconstruction itself. In correcting Derridas confusion concerning the categories of use-value and exchange-value, Spivak offers a revealing disclaimer. She insists here that her reading does not propose to provide a more deconstructive way of thinking.31 Though this line may appear to be no more than a passing gesture of filial piety, I would suggest that it indicates another difficulty that a deconstructive politics must negotiate a difficulty that is perhaps the very subject of Ghostwriting. Derrida and Spivak both offer deconstructive readings of Marx. And yet, they each arrive at vastly different conclusions: while Spivaks reading attends to the possibilities both opened up and foreclosed by Marx for transnational feminist thinking,32 Derridas reading amounts, in Spivaks words, to a transformation of militancy into religion.33 If, however, neither reading is more deconstructive than the other, the difference between the two would seem to suggest something about the activity of deconstructive criticism. And this, I
29

In the passage that Derrida reads, Spivak writes, there is certainly a reference to the field of empirical actuality, of the materiality of the mode of production as a corrective to Stirners apparent conviction that egology would be a cure for the mistaken phantoms of youth. Yet it may be problematic, she continues, to christen the writer of those pages as Marx, once and for all (Ghostwriting, 74). 30 Ghostwriting, 75 31 Idem 32 See, for instance, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 67-111. 33 Ghostwriting, 71

10

propose, is just what Spivak seeks to indicate through the theme of propriety. After elaborating her list of the various mistakes made in Specters, Spivak concludes Ghostwriting with a reading of Assia Djebars Far from Medina. Here she reflects upon what has motivated her article: The chief occasion for my essay is Specters of Marx. I am so taken by these ghostwomen of Islam that I cannot end the piece without giving an account of my possession. (In fact, this entire piece is obsessed with the stakes that academics develop after years of work, peculiar identifications that drive their life: Derrida, Marx, women [no capital, plural].)34 Throughout Specters of Marx, Derrida criticizes the proprietorial possessiveness of Marxs would-be inheritors. Here, Spivak takes Derridas charge head-on, suggesting that such stakes are not only ineradicable, but, indeed, even necessary for critique to proceed. If Specters cannot bring in women, Spivak claims, this is no fault of deconstruction, but of the critic who has left them unaccounted for. Likewise, if Derridas reading depoliticizes Marxism, reducing it to a messianism without content,35 this reflects less on the work of deconstruction, for Spivak, than it does on the stakes, identifications, and commitments that orient the critic who engages in a deconstructive reading. Thus, I submit that Spivak would like to displace the notion of responsibility that Derrida restricted in Specters to the radically self-critical spirit of Marx, proposing that a spirit such as this remains possessed of (by?) certain fundamental identifications and commitments even in the very act of critique. In the next and final section, I will show that Spivak would like to think responsibility with and against Derrida as a productive acknowledgment of complicity.36 Before moving on, however, I would

34 35

Ghostwriting, 80, my emphasis Ghostwriting, 74 36 CPR, xii

11

briefly emphasize the difficulty raised by the issue of propriety. Though Spivak suggests in Ghostwriting that deconstruction is not incompatible with, but, indeed, is informed by the commitments of the critic, Derrida appears unwilling to grant her this point. A proprietorial claim such as Spivak makes upon Derrida, Marx, women he contends in a response to Ghostwriting, presupposes that such a title deed has been duly authenticated, so that one can adamantly continue to invoke it in defending ones property. But, he asks, who ever authenticated this property right?37

3. For all of her problems with Specters, the goal of Spivaks A Critique of Postcolonial Reason is not entirely different from that of Derridas. Like Derridas hypothesis in Specters, that the whole history of European politics at leastsince Marx can be understood as a ruthless war between solidary camps that are equally terrorized by the ghost, the ghost of the other, and its own ghost as the ghost of the other,38 Spivaks Critique is guided by the conviction that the too-easy West-and-the-rest polarizations39 prevalent in postcolonial theory, along with their correlates in feminist criticism, tend to legitimate the very oppositions they are meant to overturn. To negotiate this difficulty, Spivak advocates a careful deconstructive method, capable of displacing rather than only reversing oppositions (such as between colonizer and colonized) by taking the investigators own complicity into account.40 Nevertheless, while Spivak would like to bring the auto-critical dimension of deconstruction to bear
37

Jacques Derrida, Marx & Sons, Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derridas Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker (New York: Verso, 1999), 222 38 Specters, Cite? 39 CPR, 39 40 CPR, 244

12

upon the project of transnational feminism, the notion of complicity she elaborates here marks a subtle, but important divergence from the deconstructive itinerary. And this, I will suggest, emphasizes once more the difficulties involved in combining deconstruction with a normative political project. In Literature, the second chapter of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Spivak demonstrates that a trivial intimacy inhering between feminist criticism and the imperialist axiomatics of the twentieth century can be seen prefigured in the bourgeois British literature of the nineteenth. After offering critical readings of Jane Eyre and Frankenstein, Spivak looks to the way in which the imperialist tendencies of these texts are reconfigured in Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea and Mahasweta Devis Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha. Though Spivak praises Rhys and Devi for thematizing the interpellation of the colonial subject, she contends that their texts nevertheless continue to be complicit with the imperialism they oppose to the extent that they remain necessarily bound by the reach of the European novel41 and its hegemonic framing. A similar difficulty, Spivak contends, can be seen in the case of twentieth-century feminist criticism. The latter has discovered that to take the privileged male of the white race as a norm for universal humanity is no more than a politically interested figuration a trope that passes itself off as truth and claims that woman or the racial other is merely a kind of troping of that truth of man.42 Although the deconstructive43 insight that such truthclaims depend upon an operation of exclusion in which women are derived from some masculine ideal has proven to be a powerful weapon for feminist criticism, Spivak
41 42

CPR, 146 CPR, 147 43 These problems, Spivak writes, that truths can only be shored up by strategic exclusions, by declaring opposition where there is complicity, by denying the possibility of randomness, by proclaiming a provisional origin or point of departure as ground are the substance of deconstructive concerns (CPR, 147, my emphasis).

13

identifies a certain complicity involved in this strategy. Even as feminist critics expose this troping at work in the construction of truth, they begin to establish the truth of this troping that is, in setting up a new truth, Spivak argues, they become complicit with the same process of epistemological production that they are working to resist. By this logic, Spivak writes, varieties of feminist theory and practice must reckon with the possibility that, like any other discursive practice, they are marked and constituted by, even as they constitute, the field of their production.44 In other words, just as Rhys and Devis literary representations of the dynamics of colonial subject-formation remain constrained by the Eurocentric frame of the novel, insofar as feminist criticism continues to move in the very field of discursive production that it would like to contest, it too persists in a form of complicity. As Spivak goes on to show, the case is no different with postcolonial criticism. In the remainder of this section, I will take a closer look at Spivaks notion of complicity, endeavoring to mark the ways in which it seems to push beyond the bounds of deconstruction. For now, I would like to briefly indicate that this difference has already begun to emerge in Spivaks comparison between feminist literature and criticism: we have no choice, she writes, but to allow the literary imagination its promiscuities. But if, as critics, she continues, we wish to reopen the epistemic fracture of imperialism without succumbing to the nostalgia for lost origins, we must turn to the archives of imperialist governance.45 What is significant for our analysis here is not Spivaks recommendation to turn to the archives, but the opposition she sets up between literature and criticism, between irrepressible promiscuity and the potential for

44 45

CPR, 147, my emphasis CPR, 146, my emphasis

14

resistance an opposition that, I will argue, is central to Spivaks articulation of complicity. It would be a mistake to think that Spivak offers the unmasking of complicity as an alibi, a clever subterfuge that would allow her to disclaim her own responsibility as a transnational feminist critic. It would be just as mistaken, however, to suppose that the unremitting exposure of complicity is meant by Spivak to exhaust or even derail the activity of critique.46 Rather, as Stephen Morton argues, the acknowledgment of complicity provides a crucial starting point from which to develop a more responsible intellectual practice.47 Both of the above errors, I submit, fail to recognize Spivaks peculiar appropriation of Derrida, misconstruing her project as either too deconstructive (in the latter case), or as not deconstructive enough (in the former). What is more, these errors once again call attention to deconstructions uneasy accommodation of particular political objectives. In the first place, to understand Spivaks dredging up of the mainstream as an attempt to divest herself of responsibility is to miss a crucial deconstructive insight guiding her analysis at every turn namely, that the critic is never in a position of epistemological or ethical purity. The challenge of deconstruction, she writes, is not to excuse, but to suspend accusation.48 Indeed, Spivak is concerned perhaps above all in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason with those forms of complicity in which she herself is

46

For Spivak, Asha Varadharajan argues, critique involves the unremitting exposure of complicity rather than the charting of opposition, the shifting of the ground under ones feet as a prelude to walking somewhere. Asha Varadharajan, Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said, and Spivak (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 89-90. It seems that Varadharajan is led to this conclusion by failing to recognize the difference between Derridean deconstruction and Spivaks particular appropriation of it. This can be seen in Varadharajans suggestion that Spivak would do well to trade-in Derrida for Adorno. 47 Stephen Morton, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Routledge, 2003), 41, my emphasis
48

CPR, 98

15

implicated.49 Because the confusions underlying the second error concern Spivaks divergence from deconstruction, they are far less obvious than the first. Throughout the Critique, Spivak makes known her intention to cultivate a productive acknowledgment of complicity, a power to proceed minus the cleanest bill of health.50 By way of such remarks, Spivak suggests that the acknowledgment of complicity is not merely an admission of guilt, but also points the way forward for responsible critique. The complicity of the critic, in other words, is also the collusion of the colonizer: just as the former remains determined by the discourse of the dominant, the latter, in indicating through its foreclosures the subliminal and discontinuous emergence of the native informant,51 unwittingly articulates sites of resistance. Spivak is thus quite right to claim that deconstruction can help here.52 I would suggest, however, that we hear in this methodological statement only a qualified affirmation of the deconstructive problematic. The acknowledgment of complicity provides, for Spivak, a starting point necessary for responsible criticism; if it is to be productive, it cannot exhaust the activity of the critic as in the case of Derridas New International. Accordingly, Spivak contends that it is important to acknowledge our complicity in order precisely to be more effective [!] in the long run. Our work cannot succeed, she adds, if we always have a scapegoat.53 That is to say, though Spivak contends that responsible criticism must begin in full awareness of its fundamental impurity, she would insist that it must not end with this

49

Terry Eagleton remains convinced that this deconstructive strategy is one of bad faith: She herself is rightly out to scotch this sentimentalism, reminding these fans of the Black Female that she is also a highlypaid bourgeoise and the scion of a colonial lite. She would thus rather opt for the bad faith of refusing the system while proposing no general alternative to it, than the bad faith of denying her collusion with it. Terry Eagleton, In the Gaudy Supermarket, London Review of Books, May, 1999 50 CPR, xii 51 CPR, xi 52 CPR, 1, my emphasis 53 CPR, 309

16

acknowledgment.54 In several passages, Spivak makes it quite clear that transnational feminist criticism must aspire to reduce some forms of complicity.55 It would seem, however, that such aspirations cannot be accommodated by a project that accepts without qualification the radical and interminable work of deconstructive criticism. In this paper, I have tried to articulate the limits that deconstruction brushes up against in striving to accommodate a normative political project. In the first section, I argued that Derridas confinement of responsible political engagement in Specters of Marx to the self-critical activity of a certain spirit of Marxism could only result in that vacuous alliance without institution he calls the New International. In the second, I showed how Spivak, in her review of Specters, rather contentiously denied that deconstruction could be responsible or even politically relevant without owning up to those possessions and commitments that inform and orient the work of the critic. Finally, I argued in the last section that insofar as it provides the starting point for but not the telos of criticism, the notion of complicity Spivak develops in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason marks an effort to think responsibility with and beyond Derrida. I have identified these moments as difficulties that seem to problematize deconstructions ability to take on the goals of a normative political program goals such as decolonization, gender equity, and the advancement of class struggle. While it is clear
54

Asha Varadharajan notes that Spivak does not suggest how the modulating of opposition into the recognition of complicity might change things (EP, 78). While this may be true, as I have suggested, Spivaks primary concern here is to articulate a suitable starting point not to delineate an exhaustive program for responsible criticism. 55 Consider, for instance, the following passage: Complicity with patriarchy puts the blame for the exhaustion of the world's resources between the legs of the poorest women of the South, leading to pharmaceutical dumping of dangerous coercive long-term contraception, an unexamined population control rigorously to be distinguished from family planning. The transnationally illiterate benevolent feminist of the North supports this wholeheartedly, with 'ignorant goodwill.' Any critique is put down to a culturally conservative position against family planning. Similarly, complicity with racism allows the benevolent transnationally illiterate liberal to stop at supporting sanctions against Southern garment factories that use child labor (CPR, 416, my emphasis).

17

that a deconstructive critic like Spivak is better able to negotiate these difficulties than can Derrida, I am not convinced that she addresses these concerns deconstructively, that is, in the strictest sense of the term; in Derridas response to Ghostwriting, for instance, he implies that, between Specters and Spivaks review of it, his work is in fact the more deconstructive. Rather, as I have suggested, Spivak helps articulate the points at which deconstructive criticism stands in need of supplementation if it is to ever make good on its claim to responsibility.

Bibliography

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Ahmad, Aijaz. Reconciling Derrida: Specters of Marx and Deconstructive Politics. In Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derridas Specters of Marx. Edited by Michael Sprinker. New York: Verso, 1999. Derrida, Jacques. Marx & Sons. In Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derridas Specters of Marx. Edited by Michael Sprinker. New York: Verso, 1999. ---. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. Eagleton, Terry. In the Gaudy Supermarket. London Review of Books. May, 1999. Morton, Stephen. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. New York: Routledge, 2003. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. ---. Ghostwriting. Diacritics. Summer, 1995. Varadharajan, Asha. Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said, and Spivak. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

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