Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in a Time of Terror by Dabashi Hamid

Author:Dabashi, Hamid [Dabashi, Hamid]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

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At one critical moment in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Gayatri Spivak and Edward Said, rarely on the same page, come together when she catches the tiger of the European progressive politics by the toe and notes Michel Foucault’s hurried conflation of language and discourse as he hastens to salvage his theory of power. The occasion of this concurrence between Spivak and Said is when she wants to insert the function of the public intellectual between “the Subject of desire and power as an irreducible methodological presupposition,” on one hand, and “the self-proximate, if not self-identical, subject of the oppressed,” on the other. 20 Spivak’s position is that “the intellectuals, who are neither of these S/subjects, becomes transparent in the relay race, for they merely report on the nonrepresented subject and analyze (without analyzing) the working of (the unnamed Subject irreducibly presupposed by) power and desire.” 21 Here, Spivak resorts to a strategic alliance with Said and quotes him affirmatively for having wondered why Foucault’s critique of power disregards “the role of economics, the role of insurgency and rebellion.” 22 This is where Spivak’s alliance with Said becomes pronounced:

I add to Said’s analysis the notion of the surreptitious subject of power and desire marked by the transparency of the intellectual. Curiously enough, Paul Bové faults Said for emphasizing the importance of the intellectual, whereas “Foucault’s project essentially is a challenge to the leading role of both hegemonic and oppositional intellectuals.” I have suggested that this “challenge” is deceptive precisely because it ignores what Said emphasizes—the critic’s institutional responsibility. 23

Spivak is much gentler here with Said’s characteristic humanism than was James Clifford in his famous critique of Orientalism , where he exposed what he considered to be the central paradox of the text, namely its being “ambivalently enmeshed in the totalizing habits of Western humanism.” 24 Spivak’s gentle defense of Said, taking on Bové for having ignored “what Said emphasizes—the critic’s institutional responsibility,” is as close as she can get to Said’s persistent and embattled humanism without compromising her own relentless critique of the European encounter with the sovereign subject. This is a particularly endearing moment in the mutual (but divergent) history of these two towering figures of our critical disposition: Said’s defiant humanism and Spivak’s rebellious uprising against the European critique of the sovereign subject. This is the crucial occasion where the sovereignty in which Edward Said effectively partakes, and (here is the rub) which in effect “inaugurates a [European] Subject,” at the expense of silencing the (poor, colored, and female) subaltern, come together to aufgehoben into a third-level critique that embraces them both.

Here we are put in a very privileged position to see Spivak’s postcolonial critique of post-structuralism to the left of the European critique of the sovereign subject and Said’s defiant insistence on (what he would later call “democratic) humanism” to its right. Spivak wants to up the ante and put forward a far more radical critique of the European dismantling of the sovereign subject (by way

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