1. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected essays and interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Cornell University Press: Ithaca, NY, 1977, pp.205-17 (hereafter cited as FD). I have modified the English version of this, as of other English translations, where faithfulness to the original seemed to demand it.
2. It is important to note that the greatest ‘influence’ of Western European intellectuals upon US professors and students happens through collections of essays rather than long books in translation. And, in those collections, it is understandably the more topical pieces that gain a greater currency. (Derrida’s ‘Structure, sign and play’ is a case in point.) From the perspective of theoretical production and ideological reproduction, therefore, the conversation under consideration has not necessarily been superseded.
There is an implicit reference here to the post-1968 wave of Maoism in France. See Michel Foucault, ‘On Popular justice: a discussion with Maoists’, in Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972-77, trans. Colin Gordon et al., Pantheon: New York, p.134 (hereafter cited as PK). Explication of the reference strengthens my point by laying bare the mechanics of appropriation. The status of China in this discussion is exemplary. If Foucault persistently clears himself by saying ‘I know nothing about China’, his interlocutors show toward China what Derrida calls the ‘Chinese prejudice’.
3. This is part of a much broader symptom, as Eric Wolf discusses in Europe and the People without History, University of California Press: Berkeley, 1982.
4 . Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A lyric poet in the era of high capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn, Verso: London, 1983, p.12.
5. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, trans. Richard Hurley et al., Viking Press: New York, 1977, p.26.
6. The exchange with Jacques-Alain Miller in PK (‘The Confession of the Flesh’) is revealing in this respect.
7. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, Monthly Review Press: New York, 1971, pp.132-3.
8. For one example among many see PK, p.98.
9. It is not surprising, then, that Foucault’s work, early and late, is supported by too simple a notion of repression. Here the antagonist is Freud, not Marx. ‘I have the impression that [the notion of repression] is wholly inadequate to the analysis of the mechanisms and effects of power that is so pervasively used to characterise today’ (PK, p.92). The delicacy and subtlety of Freud’s suggestion—that under repression the phenomenal identity of affects is indeterminate because something unpleasant can be desired as pleasure, thus radically reinscribing the relationship between desire and ‘interest’—seems quite deflated here. For an elaboration of this notion of repression, see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, MD, 1976), pp.88f. (hereafter cited as OG); and Derrida, Limited inc.: abc, trans. Samuel Weber, Glyph, 2, 1977, p.215.
10. Althusser’s version of this particular situation may be too schematic, but it nevertheless seems more careful in its program than the argument under study. ‘Class instinct’, Althusser writes, ‘is subjective and spontaneous. Class position is objective and rational. To arrive at proletarian class positions, the class instinct of proletarians only needs to be educated; the class instinct of the petty bourgeoisie, and hence of intellectuals, has, on the contrary, to be revolutionised’ (op. cit., p.13).
11. Foucault’s subsequent explanation (PK, p.145) of this Deleuzian statement comes closer to Derrida’s notion that theory cannot be an exhaustive taxonomy and is always formed by practice.
12. Cf. the surprisingly uncritical notions of representation entertained in PK, pp.141, 188. My remarks concluding this paragraph, criticizing intellectuals’ representations of subaltern groups, should be rigorously distinguished from a coalition politics that takes into account its framing within socialised capital and unites people not because they are [105] oppressed but because they are exploited. This model works best within a parliamentary democracy, where representation is not only not banished but elaborately staged.
13. Karl Marx, Surveys from Exile, trans. David Fernbach, Vintage Books: New York, 1974, p.239.
14. idem, Capital: A critique of political economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, Vintage Books: New York, 1977, p.254.
15. ibid., p.302.
16. See the excellent short definition and discussion of common sense in Errol Lawrence, ‘Just plain common sense: the “roots” of racism’, in Hazel V. Carby, The Empire Strikes Back: Race and racism in 70s Britain, Hutchinson: London, 1982, p.48.
17. ‘Use value’ in Marx: can be shown to be a ‘theoretical fiction’—as much of a potential oxymoron as ‘natural exchange’. I have attempted to develop this in ‘Scattered speculations on the question of value’, a manuscript under consideration by Diacritics.
18. Derrida’s ‘Linguistic circle of Geneva’, especially pp.143f., can provide a method for assessing the irreducible place of the family in Marx’s morphology of class formation. In Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL, 1982.
19. Marx, Capital, 1, p.128.
20. I am aware that the relationship between Marxism and neo-Kantianism is a politically fraught one. I do not myself see how a continuous line can be established between Marx’s own texts and the Kantian ethical moment. It does seem to me, however, that Marx’s questioning of the individual as agent of history should be read in the context of the breaking up of the individual subject inaugurated by Kant’s critique of Descartes.
21. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus, Viking Press: New York, 1973, pp.162-3.
22. Edward W. Said, The World, The Text, The Critic, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 1983, p.243.
23. Paul Bové, ‘Intellectuals at war: Michel Foucault and the analysis of power’, Sub-Stance, 36, 137, 1983, p.44.
24. Carby et al., op. cit., p.34.
25. This argument is developed further in Spivak, ‘Scattered speculations’. Once again, the Anti-Oedipus did not ignore the economic text, although the treatment was perhaps too allegorical. In this respect, the move from schizo- to rhyzo-analysis in Mille plateaux, Seuil: Paris, 1980, has not been salutary.
26. See Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A history of insanity in the age of reason, trans. Richard Howard, Pantheon Books: New York, 1965, pp.251, 262, 269.
27. Although I consider Fredric Jameson’s Political Unconscious: Narrative as a socially symbolic act, Cornell University Press: New York, 1981, to be a text of great critical weight, or perhaps because I1 do so, I would like my program here to be distinguished from one of restoring the relics of a privileged narrative: ‘It is in detecting the traces of that uninterrupted narrative, in restoring to the surface of the text the repressed and buried reality of this fundamental history, that the doctrine of a political unconscious finds its function and its necessity’ (p. 20).
28. Among many available books, I cite Bruse Tiebout McCully, English Education and the Origins of Indian Nationalism, Columbia University Press: New York, 1940.
29. Thomas Babington Macaulay, Speeches by Lord Macaulay: With his minute on Indian education, ed. G. M. Young, Oxford University Press, AMS Edition: Oxford, 1979, p.359.
30. Keith, one of the compilers of the Vedic Index, author of Sanskrit Drama in Its Origin, Development, Theory, and Practice, and the learned editor of the Krsnayajurveda for Harvard University Press, was also the editor of four volumes of Selected Speeches and Documents of British Colonial Policy (1763 to 1937), of International Affairs (1918 to 1937), and of the British Dominions (1918 to 1931). He wrote books on the sovereignty of British dominions and on the theory of state succession, with special reference to English and colonial law.
31. Mahamahopadhyaya Haraprasad Shastri, A Descriptive Catalogue of Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Government Collection under the Care of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Society of Bengal: Calcutta, 1925, Vol. 3, p.viii.
47. This violence in the general sense that is the possibility of an episteme is what Derrida calls ‘writing’ in the general sense. The relationship between writing in the general sense and writing in the narrow sense (marks upon a surface) cannot be cleanly articulated. The task of grammatology (deconstruction) is to provide a notation upon this shifting relationship. In a certain way, then, the critique of imperialism is deconstruction as such.
32. Dinesachandra Sena, Brbat Banga, Calcutta University Press: Calcutta, 1925, vol. 1., p.6.
33. Edward Thompson, Suttee: A historical and philosophical enquiry into the Hindu rite of widow burning, George Allen & Unwin: London, 1928, pp.130, 47.
34. Holograph letter (from G. A. Jacob to an unnamed correspondent) attached to inside cover of the Sterling Memorial Library (Yale University) copy of Colonel G. A. Jacob (ed.) Mabanarayana-Upanisbad of the Atbarva-Veda with the Dipika of Narayana, The Government Central Books Department: Bombay, 1888, italics mine. The dark invocation of the dangers of this learning by way of anonymous aberrants consolidates the asymmetry.
35. I have discussed this issue in greater detail with reference to Julia Kristeva’s About Chinese Women, trans. Anita Barrows, Marion Boyars: London, 1977, in ‘French feminism in an international frame’, Yale French Studies, 62, 1981.
36. Antonio Gramsci, ‘Some aspects of the Southern question’, Selections from Political Writing: 1921-1926, trans. Quintin Hoare, International Publishers : New York, 1978. I am using ‘allegory of reading’ in the sense developed by Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust, Yale University Press: New Haven, CT, 1979.
37. Their publications are: Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies I: Writing on South Asian History and Society, Oxford University Press: New Delhi, 1982. Ranajit Guha (ed.) Subaltern Studies II: Writings on South Asian History and Society, Oxford University Press: New Delhi, 1983; and Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, Oxford University Press: New Delhi, 1983.
38. Edward W. Said, ‘Permission to narrate’, London Review of Books, 16 February 1984.
39. Guha, Studies, 1, p.1.
40. ibid., p.4.
41. Jacques Derrida, ‘The double session’, in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson, University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1981.
42. Guha, Studies, 1, p.8 (all but the first set of italics are the author’s).
43. Ajit K. Chaudhury, ‘New wave social science’, Frontier, 16-24, 28 January, 1984, p.10 (italics are mine).
44. ibid.
45. Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall, Routledge: London, 1978, p.87.
46. I have discussed this issue in ‘Displacement and the discourse of woman’, in Mark Kruprvick (ed.) Displacement: Derrida and After, Indiana University Press: Bloomington, IN, 1983, and in ‘Love me, love my ombre, elle: Derrida’s ‘La carte postale’, Diacritics, 14, 4, 1984, pp.19-36.
47. This violence in the general sense that is the possibility of an episteme is what Derrida calls ‘writing’ in the general sense. The relationship between writing in the general sense and writing in the narrow sense (marks upon the surface) cannot be cleanly articulated. The task of grammatology (deconstruction) is to provide a notation upon this shifting relationship. In a certain way, then, the critique of imperialism is deconstruction as such.
48. ‘Contracting poverty’, Multinational Monitor, 4, 8, August 1983, p.8. This report was contributed by John Cavanagh and Joy Hackel, who work on the International Corporations Project at the Institute for Policy Studies (italics are mine).
49. The mechanics of the invention of the Third World as signifier are susceptible to the type of analysis directed at the constitution of race as a signifier in Carby et al., op. cit.
50. Mike Davis, ‘The political economy of late-imperial America’, New Left Review, 143, January-February 1984, p.9.
51. Bové op. cit., p.51.
52. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1983, p.205.
53. Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, Verso: London, 1983, p.53.
54. ibid., p.52.
55. Said, The World, p.183.
56. Jacques Derrida, ‘Of an apocalyptic tone recently adapted in philosophy’, trans. John P. Leavy, Jr., Semia, p.71.
57. Even in such excellent texts of reportage and analysis as Gail, Omvedt’s We Will Smash This Prison! Indian Women in Struggle, Zed Press: London, 1980, the assumption that a group of Maharashtrian women in an urban proletarian situation, reacting to a radical white woman who had ‘thrown in her lot with the Indian destiny,’ is representative of ‘Indian women’ or touches the question of ‘female consciousness in India’ is not harmless when taken up within a first-world social formation where the proliferation of communication in an internationally hegemonic language makes alternative accounts and testimonies instantly accessible even to undergraduates.
Norma Chincilla’s observation, made at a panel on ‘Third World feminisms: differences in form and content’ (UCLA, 8 March, 1983), that anti-sexist work in the Indian context is not genuinely anti-sexist but anti-feudal, is another case in point. This permits definitions of sexism to emerge only after a society has entered the capitalist mode of production, thus making capitalism and patriarchy conveniently continuous. It also invokes the vexed questions of the role of the ‘“Asiatic” mode of production’ in sustaining the explanatory power of the normative narrativisation of history through the account of modes of production, in however sophisticated a manner history is construed.
The curious role of the proper name ‘Asia’ in this matter does not remain confined to proof or disproof of the empirical existence of the actual mode (a problem that became the object of intense manoeuvring within international communism) but remains crucial even in the work of such theoretical subtlety and importance as Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst’s Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (Routledge: London, 1975) and Fredric Jameson’s Political Unconscious. Especially in Jameson, where the morphology of modes of production is rescued from all suspicion of historical determinism and anchored to a poststructuralist theory of the subject, the ‘Asiatic’ mode of production, in its guise of ‘oriental despotism’ as the concomitant state formation, still serves. It also plays a significant role in the transmogrified mode of production narrative in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, in the Soviet debate, at a far remove, indeed, from these contemporary theoretical projects, the doctrinal sufficiency of the ‘Asiatic’ mode of production was most often doubted by producing for it various versions and nomenclatures of feudal, slave and communal modes of production. (The debate is presented in detail in Stephen F. Dunn, The Fall and Rise of the Asiatic Mode of Production, Routledge: London 1982.) It would be interesting to relate this to the repression of the imperialist ‘moment’ in most debates over the transition from feudalism to capitalism that have long exercised the Western Left. What is more important here is that an observation such as Chinchilla’s represents a widespread hierarchisation within third-world feminism (rather than Western Marxism), which situates it within the longstanding traffic with the imperialist concept-metaphor ‘Asia’.
I should add that I have not yet read Madhu Kishwar and Ruth Vanita (eds.), In Search of Answers: Indian women’s voices from Manushi, Zed Press: London, 1984.
58. Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, Cornell University Press: Ithaca, NY, 1982, p.48.
59. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, ‘Placing women’s history in history’, New Left Review, 133, May-June 1982, p.21.
60. I have attempted to develop this idea in a somewhat autobiographical way in ‘Finding feminist readings: Dante-Yeats’, in Ira Konigsberg (ed.), American Criticism in the Postructuralist Age, University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, MI, 1981.
61. Sarah Koftnan, LÉnigme de la femme: La Femme dans les textes de Freud, Gali1ée: Paris, 1980.
62. Sigmund Freud, ‘“A child is being beaten”‘: a contribution to the study of the origin of sexual perversions’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey et al., Hogarth Press: London, vol. 17, 1955.
63. idem, ‘“Wild” psycho-analysis’, Standard Edition, Vol. 11.
64, idem, ‘“A child is being beaten”‘, p.188.
65. For a brilliant account of how the ‘reality’ of widow-sacrifice was constituted or ‘textualised’ during the colonial period, see Lata Mani, ‘The production of colonial discourse: sati in early nineteenth-century Bengal’ (Master’s Thesis, University of California at Santa Cruz, 1983). I profited from discussion with Ms. Mani at the inception of this project.
66. J. D. M. Derrett, Hindu Law Past and Present: Being an account of the controversy which preceded the enactment of the Hindu code. and text of the code as enacted, and some comments thereon, A. Mukherjee & Co: Calcutta, 1957, p.46.
67. Ashis Nandy, ‘Sati: a nineteenth-century tale of women, violence and protest’, in V. C. Joshi (ed.), Rammobun Roy and the Process of Modernization in India, Vikas Publishing House: New Delhi, 1975, p.68.
68. The following account leans heavily on Pandurang Varman Kane, History of Dharmasastra, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute: Poona, 1963 (hereafter cited as HD, with volume, part and page numbers).
69. Upendra Thakur, The History of Suicide in India: An Introduction, Munshi Ram Manohan Lal: New Delhi, 1963, p.9, has a useful list of Sanskrit primary sources on sacred places. This laboriously decent book betrays all the signs of the schizophrenia of the colonial subject, such as bourgeois nationalism, patriarchal communalism and an ‘enlightened reasonableness’.
70. Nandy, op. cit.
71. Jean-François Lyotard, Le Différend, Minuit: Paris, 1984.
72. HD, 11.2, p.633. There are suggestions that this ‘prescribed penance’ was far exceeded by social practice. In this passage below, published in 1938, notice the Hindu patristic assumptions about the freedom of female will at work in phrases like ‘courage’ and ‘strength of character’. The unexamined presuppositions of the passage might be that the complete objectification of the widow-concubine was just punishment for abdication of the right to courage, signifying subject status. ‘Some widows, however, had not the courage to go through the fiery ordeal; nor had they sufficient strength of mind and character to live up to the high ascetic ideal prescribed for them [brahmacarya]. It is sad to record that they were driven to lead the life of a concubine or averred stri [incarcerated wife].’A. S. Altekar, The Position of Women in Hindu Civilization: From prehistoric times to the present day, Motilal Banarsidass: New Delhi, 1938, p.156.
73. Quoted in Sena. op. cit., 2, pp.913-14.
74. Thompson, op. cit., p.132.
75. Here, as well as for the Brahman debate over sati, see Mani, op. cit., pp.71f.
76. We are speaking here of the regulative norms of Brahmanism, rather than ‘things as they were’. See Robert Lingat, The Classical Law of India, trans. J. D. M. Derrett, University of California Press: Berkeley, 1973, p.46.
77. Both the vestigial possibility of widow remarriage in ancient India and the legal institution of widow remarriage in 1856 are transactions among men. Widow remarriage is very much an exception, perhaps because it left the program of subject-formation untouched. In all the ‘lore’ of widow remarriage, it is the father and the husband who are applauded for their reformist courage and selflessness.
78. Sir Monier Monier-Williams, Sanskrit-English Dictionary, Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1899, p.552. Historians are often impatient if modernists seem to be attempting to import ‘feministic’ judgments into ancient patriarchies. The real question is, of course, why structures of patriarchal domination should be unquestioningly recorded. Historical sanctions for collective action toward social justice can only be developed if people outside of the discipline question standards of ‘objectivity’ preserved as such by the hegemonic tradition. It does not seem inappropriate to notice that so ‘objective’ an instrument as a dictionary can use the deeply sexist-partisan explanatory expression: ‘raise up issue to a deceased husband’!
79. Sunderlal T. Desai, Mulla: Principles of Hindu law, N. M. Tripathi: Bombay, 1982, p.184.
80. I am grateful to Professor Alison Finley of Trinity College (Hartford, CT) for discussing the passage with me. Professor Finley is an expert on the Rg-Veda. I hasten to add that she would find my readings as irresponsibly ‘literary-critical’ as the ancient historian would find it ‘modernist’ (see note 79).
81. Martin Heidegger. An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim, Doubleday Anchor: New York, 1961, p.58.
82. Thompson, op. cit., p.37.
83. ibid., p.15. For the status of the proper name as ‘mark’, see Derrida, ‘Taking chances’.
84. Thompson, op. cit., p.137.
85. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley, Vintage Books: New York, 1980, p.4.
86. The fact that the word was also used as a form of address for a well-born woman (‘lady’) complicates matters.
87. It should be remembered that this account does not exhaust her many manifestations within the pantheon.
88. A position against nostalgia as a basis of counter-hegemonic ideological production does riot endorse its negative use. Within the complexity of contemporary political economy, it would, for example, be highly questionable to urge that the current Indian working-class crime of burning brides who bring insufficient dowries and of subsequently disguising the murder as suicide is either a use or abuse of the tradition of sati-suicide. The most that can be claimed is that it is a displacement on a chain of semiosis with the female subject as signifier, which would lead us back into the narrative we have been unravelling. Clearly, one must work to stop the crime of bride-burning in every way. If, however, that work is accomplished by unexamined nostalgia or its opposite, it will assist actively in the substitution of race/ethnos or sheer genitalism as a signifier in the place of the female subject.
89. I had not read Peter Dews, ‘Power and subjectivity in Foucault’, New Left Review, 144, 1984, until I finished this essay. I look forward to his book on the same topic [Peter Dews, The Logics of Disintegration: Post-structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory, Verso: London, 1987]. There are many points in common between his critique and mine. However, as far as I can tell from the brief essay, he writes from a perspective uncritical of critical theory and the intersubjective norm that can all too easily exchange ‘individual’ or ‘subject’ in its situating of the ‘epistemic subject’. Dews’s reading of the connection between ‘Marxist tradition’ and the ‘autonomous subject’ is not mine. Further, his account of ‘the impasse of the second phase of poststructuralism as a whole’ is vitiated by his non-consideration of Derrida, who has been against the privileging of language from his earliest work, the ‘Introduction’ in Edmund Husserl, The Origin of Geometry, trans. John Leavy, Nicholas Hays: Stony Brook, NY, 1978. What sets his excellent analysis quite apart from my concerns is, of course, that the Subject within whose History he places Foucault’s work is the Subject of the European tradition (pp.87-94).