Theory After 'Theory' by Elliott Jane; Attridge Derek;

Author:Elliott, Jane; Attridge, Derek;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

And, so he concludes,

This is why we need to go to a Derrida, or a Lyotard or a Levinas, not because they have become ‘fashions in the West’ (that’s raising the question at the most superficial level) but because they are the philosophers of ‘difference’ and ‘non-commensurability’ for our times.

(Ibid.: 276)

In Chakrabarty’s account, the difficulty of Spivak’s ‘secret encounter’ – the necessary failures of that exchange – gives way to the celebration of a radical ‘openness’ to what we do not already understand. Yet, it is not the alterity of the subaltern subject evacuated in this celebratory invocation of an ‘ideal figure’, who appears not a subject at all, but a trope of jouissance (a joyous survivor) – or more exactly, as the figure of the investigator’s jouissance? Indeed, whose jubilant emancipation if not our own is inscribed in this vision of a (non)subject without a will to domination? The undisclosability of the subaltern’s assumptions and aspirations transmutes into a fantasy – but surely it is our fantasy – of ecstatic unmaking. Under the very auspices of Derrida and the philosophy of incommensurability, Chakrabarty envisions the subaltern as a subject without loss.

Here poststructuralism curiously falls in line with the strand of modernist idealism Rey Chow acutely notes, in which the oppressed resist on the basis of an essential integrity. Tracing this thought of ‘subjectivity-in-exploitation’ to the Lukács of History and Class Consciousness, Chow suggests how

numerous contemporary versions of identity-based critical thinking have, wittingly or unwittingly, been replicating Lukács’s modernist narrative with its telos of self-ownership and self-affirmation in both individual and collective senses. Most of all, such critical thinking has frequently resorted to a similarly idealized assumption about humanity and subjectivity, which are imagined as at once historically damaged and essentially beyond damage.

(Chow 2002: 40, my emphasis)1

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