Preface

T his is a collection spanning at least twenty-three years.

Looking back, I discover in them what Derrida called a théorie
distraite in the introduction to Psyché, when he discovered shared
theoretical motifs in the essays collected in his book.1 In this book, after
writing the Preface, I have actively looked for a distracted theory (poor but
accurate translation) of the double bind. Following the rule of “In literary
criticism, when you look for something, you find it,” I’ve found it. The
point is, of course, that now I feel that a double bind is rather more than
the suggestion that having found it, you can play it. (That, incidentally, was
the problem with “strategic use of essentialism.”)
As I say in the Introduction, there is often the suggestion in them that the
humanities can somehow learn to resolve double binds by playing them. I
have often suggested that “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperi-
alism” (springing up out of teaching an undergraduate class in 1978 at the
University of Texas–Austin), “French Feminism in an International Frame,”
and the translation of “Draupadi” with a critical introduction (both writ-
ten in reaction against recognition of my “French” expertise), and, finally,
“Can the Subaltern Speak?,” represented the start of a new direction in my
thinking.2 The first essay here, “The Burden of English,” represents the re-
sponsibility of such a turn, looking homeward, my first professional pre-
sentation at an institute of tertiary education in India. The double bind
here is between caste and class, necessarily also understood as race and class.
The hope at the end of the piece refuses to acknowledge that certain con-
tradictions between the preserved performatives of indigeneity and civili-
zationism cannot even enter the security of a double bind. Doubt rather
X PREFACE

than hope, or, archaic rather than residual. Couldn’t see it or say it then.
But the Introduction brings us there.
This first foray into Indian tertiary education was immediately fol-
lowed by the second essay in this book, “Who Claims Alterity?,” written
in 1987 by invitation for The Statesman, the oldest daily newspaper in my
hometown of Calcutta, celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Indian
Independence. For some vague reason, I think this is not quite what the
paper wanted. I expanded the piece for presentation in the series called
“Remaking History” for the Dia Art Foundation. Many people had
bought tickets. I used to live in Pittsburgh then. The American writer, film-
maker, and visual artist Gary Indiana was in the audience, I remember.
That with-it crowd in Chelsea, when it still retained its attractively lugu-
brious streetfrontage, was puzzled by the auto-critique of a member of the
model minority, before the term was invented. Did these two rather dispa-
rate hosts mind the double bind: between metropolitan minority and
postcolonial majority perspectives in a tug of war in the same subject?
“How to Read a ‘Culturally Different’ Book,” the next piece in the
book, was written in response to an individual request. Badrel Young,
Pakistani-British, who taught at the time at a Council school in Hackney,
was assigned R. K. Narayan’s Guide as a text for the multicultural class-
room. She asked me to give some “Hindu mythology” as background. This
essay emerged in response. Harish Trivedi, Professor of English at Delhi
University, who remains critical of my postcolonial stance, complained
that I don’t treat Guide as an “Indian” novel. I don’t know how to. Is that a
double bind? In the fifth essay, “Culture: Situating Feminism,” chronologi-
cally askew upon the Table of Contents, I spell it out: “Culture is its own
irreducible counter-example.”
Ruedi Kuenzli asked me to keynote at the Midwestern Modern Lan-
guage Association in 1991. Ruedi is a tremendously conscientious per-
son. In response to his call, all I felt was a desperate honesty, thinking to
inhabit the double bind between being a Calcuttan and being a New
Yorker. I had just come to Columbia then but I already felt the seduction
of New York. By March 2011, I have lived longer in New York than in
Calcutta. I remember my Columbia colleague Leonard Gordon in the
audience. I knew he was in touch with the Bengali academic community
in the United States. Quite unreasonably, I wanted him to see that, in my
prepared remarks, there was no trace of Bengali identitarianism.
In the lineaments of globalization, to recognize this cultural predica-
ment as a performative double bind rather than the “double bind” repre-
sented so that it can cover over the contemporaneity of capital is to re-
fuse to acknowledge damage control.
 PREFACE XI

I think “Acting Bits/Identity Talk,” the seventh essay, was written for a
conference arranged by the National University in Singapore. That visit
is forever marked for me by the death of my friend Bimal Krishna Mati-
lal. I was coming to Singapore from Bangladesh (my “activist” life began
in 1986). I had spoken to Bimal before leaving the United States. It was
not possible to phone from Bangladesh, since I was in rural areas. I called
as soon as I got to Singapore. He was already dead.
There is a bit about flatulence in the essay. This is of course embarrass-
ing. I remember a South Asian professor commenting after my talk that it
had resembled a series of farts. I am used to the hostility of men (some-
times women) of my own cultural inscription. I did not say then what I
feel I can write now.
Bimal Matilal died of multiple myeloma. Toward the end his rib cage
had collapsed and was pressing on his lungs. We would work together as
long as he could but then his mind would cloud and he would ask me to
sing. All through this time, I think because of the pressure on his lungs,
he was constantly flatulent and this embarrassed him considerably. To ease
him I had brought up the passage in Glas—“Ontology cannot lay hold
of a fart”—commenting on Genet, who writes on farts, and Bimal had
brought up the discussion of bodily winds in the pranayama. This is the
double bind between body and mind, the place of an impossible ethics
for the mature Lévinas, the baby marked for death as it is born.3
The semester I gave “Teaching for the Times,” the sixth essay, I was a
visiting professor at the University of California at Riverside. The air there
was full of Derrida. The eighth essay, “Supplementing Marxism,” was writ-
ten there. It was a very special audience. I hope to write a book on Derrida
after I put the slim book on Du Bois in press. “Touched by Deconstruction”
(2000) and “Notes toward a Tribute to Jacques Derrida,” written with this
audience in mind (my “school-mates”), will find their place there.4 Here the
double bind is self and other. I’ve put “What’s Left of Theory?” next to it
because it gives the tremendous double bind between the counter-intuitive
and the intuitive in the learning of a theory made for changing the world.
It was written in response to Judith Butler’s invitation to present a pa-
per at the English Institute, at rather short notice. It was a busy semester.
But my tremendous loyalty to Butler, which has led to, and will lead to,
much work together, made me respond to this first call. I should, however,
also mention that I have an overblown respect for the Institute. I continue
to believe that it is the scholarly apex of the profession. I have carried
around a burden of intellectual insecurity since my undergraduate days as
a consequence of everyday sexism, especially applied to seemingly charis-
matic females. An invitation to the Institute I could not refuse.
XII PREFACE

Yet I had little time to prepare. I took therefore the lesson that I was
teaching at the time in my Marx seminar and let it carry me where it would.
It led me outside the classroom, not surprisingly. This repeated gesturing
toward the outside of the teaching machine from the inside is my rise and
fall.
I have been teaching this course on Marx since the late 1970s, when
I started teaching at the University of Texas at Austin. We read about a
thousand pages of selections from various texts, German and English
side by side. The brief is to think “Marx” as a textual figure in the writing
and not to read the text because one will need it for some project of cul-
tural theory. Although I have written bits and pieces of my class experi-
ence here and there, I cannot imagine writing the book that I always say
will rise from there: Can there be a socialist ethics? I cannot, yet, “imag-
ine that which I know.”5
In 1981, ravaged by the departure of a beloved partner, I gave a talk at
the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale on the gender injustice of Christo-
pher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism.6 A couple of years later, in re-
sponse to Ralph Cohen’s invitation, I gave a more extended version of it
(“Echo,” the tenth essay) at the University of Virginia. I knew Jacqueline
Rose would be in the audience. I read my Freud as carefully as I could. I
had established my profound friendship with Bimal Krishna Matilal in
1985. My intellectual exchange with Professor Matilal, who believed that
Indic rational critique was an instrument for philosophizing rather than
merely a cultural artifact, allowed me to understand (or imagine) Freud in
the context of Ovid in a more generous way. I could begin to read Freud as
a body-mind philosopher.
In 1992, another friendship began. Assia Djebar and I acknowledged a
resonance with each other. It was this writer of Mediterranean Algeria, a
feminist Muslim who has been fascinated by the history of the Berber
language, who gave me a sense of “echo at the origin.” We have encoun-
tered her already in “Acting Bits.”
Muslim Europe, but only by way of France. Can I call this theory? I feel
that my use of psychoanalysis in this essay is different from its use as a de-
scriptive taxonomy. The double bind here is more obvious, having to do
with the imperative to ab-use, of which I speak in the Introduction.
One consequence of this one I’ve already introduced as looking home-
ward. The next essay, “Translation as Culture,” thematizes this double
bind, in its very structuring suggesting that it can be played both ways. On
the one hand a “diasporic” teacher of English at a university and on the
other hand an upper-class, caste-Hindu, radical-minded Indian citizen,
both a dime a dozen, so to speak. It is, of course, up to readers to catch the
 PREFACE XIII

unexpected asymmetries of this deliberate shift in voice, merely cited. The

first part was given as a keynote at the Annual Convention of the Inter-
national Association of Commonwealth Literature (IACL) in Oviedo, Spain.
The provenance of the second is explained within the text.
I have placed “Translating into English” next, where the double bind is
how to inhabit the readerly position when one is the published implied
reader and, of course, the scary double bind of betraying the mother
tongue into the global idiom. I have put “Nationalism and the Imagina-
tion” next to that, because that brought these asymmetries home; for that
meeting of the IACL was upon homeground, in Hyderabad, India. (A ver-
sion revised for delivery in Bulgaria, Nationalism and the Imagination, was
published by Seagull Books in 2010, and translated into French and pub-
lished by Payot in 2011.) The double bind there described is between the
underived private and the tremendous public function of nationalism. The
problem here is that we do inhabit that unacknowledged double bind; to
acknowledge it would destroy that habitation. One of the reasons why this
must be used to supplement globality. Hope against hope.
In my first seminar with Paul de Man in 1961, I gave a paper on Rabin-
dranath Tagore. He is an invariable resource for Bengalis abroad and at
home. In my first lecture in India, you will have noticed, I spoke of Tagore.
Given all the double binds I have been describing, it is not surprising that
of all Tagore’s prose fiction, I am most moved by Gora. It seemed to me im-
possible, of course, not to attempt the Kim/Gora couple. It always irritates
me when Gora is taught in indifferent English, simply as a narrative of nation-
alism, exemplary outside of Tagore’s varied itinerary in prose and verse. Yet,
without a tradition of Bengali teaching, can it be otherwise?
Valiantly trying, I taught Gora/Kim in an undergraduate narrative class
at Columbia. I have no doubt that I was not able to convey very much
beyond the usual clichés of colonial discourse.
The Society of Fellows at Columbia is a fairly traditional organization
and, as such, has, quite correctly, not sought to involve me in its workings.
Ann Waters, a student of Nicholas Dirks at Michigan, was a member of
the Society one year. At her invitation, I presented a paper at the Society for
the first and the last time. The paper was an account of the class on Gora/
Kim.
When Sugata Bose at Tufts asked me to give a paper at a valedictory
conference for Amartya Sen (he was leaving Harvard to be the only Mas-
ter of color at Trinity College, Cambridge, for a bit), “Resident Alien,”
the fourteenth essay, was the only appropriate thing to hand. I suppose it
must have crossed my mind that Sen and I were both resident aliens in
the United States. In that crowd of South Asianist historians and social
XIV PREFACE

scientists, the paper seemed embarrassing. I have brought forward “Ethics

and Politics” here, for it situates both Sen and Tagore. The double bind
of history is lodged in the future anterior, the unexpected results of activist
education; but also in the swing between coercion and consent in teach-
ing. This is the biggest double bind, the biggest proof against the possibil-
ity of a just society, and it holds my life as an unanswered question: Can
vanguardism be supplemented?
In Gora, Tagore thematizes the supplementation of vanguardism by re-
moving Gora from the Hindu vanguard; but Gora remains the representa-
tion of a resident alien from above. In the next essay, “Imperative to Re-
imagine the Planet,” I attempt to imagine those from below, who would be
citizens. This is a different imagining from “Teaching for the Times,” in re-
sponse to a different kind of call.
In December 1997 my dear friend Willi Goetschel paid me the extraor-
dinary compliment of asking me to give the lecture inaugurating the turn
of a foundation named Stiftung Dialogik from Holocaust asylum to mi-
grant multiculturalism, in his native Zurich. Goetschel is now the Presi-
dent of the Stiftung, but at that time the founding President Hermann
Levin Goldschmidt, whose wife, Mary, had been the initial founder of this
particular asylum route, was still alive. There too, I did not say quite what
the group wanted. But, as I recount in the piece, Goldschmidt’s genius al-
lowed me to respond to that gap.
I repeat that I find it tedious to go on endlessly about my particular dia-
sporicity. Come what may, I cannot think of what used to be called “the
brain drain” as either exile or diaspora. I feel that as a literary intellectual,
I am here to use my imagination, not only to imagine the predicament of
diaspora, exile, refuge, but also to deny resolutely that the manifest des-
tiny of the United States is (to appear) to give asylum to the world. As such,
I often have to confront the question of “speaking for” groups that are not
my own.
I have responded to this question so many times that a particular refer-
ence would be silly. Yet I seem never to be heard. Let me repeat, then. Why
has this Enlightenment model of parliamentary democracy (representing
a constituency, “speaking for” them) become the master-model for rejec-
tion of diasporic academic work? Why has the imperative to imagine the
other responsibly been lifted? Ponder the answer, please, as you read this
section. This plea was already there in the decade-old first version of this
book. Today I locate the double bind as between the uselessness of human
life (planetarity) and the push to be useful (worldliness).
In the spring of 1998, I taught a senior seminar on reading. The class
was exceptionally focused, very smart, small. The reading of Lucy that fol-
 PREFACE XV

lows is an account of how the class read that novel. If “How to Read a
‘Culturally Different’ Book” reads in the imagination-retrieval mode “for
the multicultural classroom,” “Thinking Cultural Questions” reads in the
formalist mode for the student of English. It was written in the British Li-
brary in London, in the nine planned days that I had to wait for the flood-
waters to recede from Dhaka so that I could fly to Bangladesh. In its pres-
ent form, “Reading with Stuart Hall in ‘Pure’ Literary Terms,” it is related
to the work of Hall because it was subsequently published in a Hall Fest-
schrift. It was in 1996 that I began reclaiming the undergraduate teaching
of English literary criticism. It was what my teachers at the University of
Calcutta trained me for. You will judge if it was a good move. The double
bind here is between “truth” and rhetoric.
“The Double Bind Starts to Kick In,” earlier called “Moral Dilemma,”
frames this more teacherly turn. It should interest the general reader that
I have been able to read bits of it to my History of Literary Criticism
undergraduate class in order to explain to them why I cannot teach a
regular survey. I should also like to thank Emily Donaldson, a student of
this class in 1998, who inspired me by saying “Professor Spivak, you are
not even a hard A, you are a hard B.” Students have explained to me sub-
sequently that, when my more famous colleagues teach undergraduate sur-
veys, they teach them as “easy courses with few requirements,” so that
students with “harder” majors, or pre-law and pre-medical students, can
skate through them and earn credits. This gave me a clue to how close to
home are those operations of the trivialization of the humanities and the
privatization of the imagination. I would also like to thank Christopher
Brady, the only science major (Biology), who lasted the class, although he
was obliged to drop to a pass-fail grade, because the class was too demand-
ing. That you cannot inhabit this double bind, change it into the single
bind of course descriptions, should be obvious.
The essays that follow have crept into the kind of doubt that finally
emerges in the Introduction. I can tabulate more easily here. “Terror: A
Speech after 9/11”: between existing models of secular law and the need
for accommodating the intuition of the transcendental. “Harlem”: be-
tween development and impulse to resistance (this will find a fuller state-
ment in my Du Bois lectures, delivered at Harvard in November 2009).
“Scattered Speculations on the Subaltern and the Popular”: between sub-
alternity as a position without identity and the massive identitarian affect of
an epistemological engagement with specific cases of subalternity. “World
Systems and the Creole” and “Rethinking Comparativism” spell out the
double bind at the heart of comparativism; I think of the death of the dis-
cipline, precisely because of that more extreme sense of a double bind. In
XVI PREFACE

“The Stakes of a World Literature” it is a subaltern song that spells out the
double bind and will repeat it as all the other double binds in the book.
“Sign and Trace” and “Tracing the Skin of Day” are catalog essays, both
of which spell out the double bind in wanting to sign the trace—which
finds a way out in renouncing verbality altogether, but never with complete
success.

Gender is the last word. Figure out the double binds there, simple and
forbidding.