diacritics / spring 2000

25

POSTCOLONIALISM’S
ARCHIVE FEVER

SANDHYA SHETTY AND ELIZABETH JANE BELLAMY

Jacques Derrida. ARCHIVE FEVER. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: U of Chicago

P, 1996.

________

. OF GRAMMATOLOGY. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: John

Hopkins UP, 1976.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. “CAN THE SUBALTERN SPEAK?” Marxism and the

Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: U of
Illinois P, 1988. 271–313.

1. Reading the Subaltern Archivally—or, Back to Antiquity

Many readers of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” have been disturbed by Spivak’s contro-
versial answer to her own question, which is that “no scene of speaking” can arise for
the subaltern woman; no discursive space can emerge from which she could formulate
an “utterance.”

1

One way of rephrasing Gayatri Spivak’s highly resonant question might

be, Can there be such a thing as a “postcolonial archive”? The purpose of our essay is to
demonstrate just how crucial the concept of an “archive”—perhaps even a “postcolonial
archive”—is for a more sympathetic understanding of Spivak’s now notorious “silenc-
ing” of the subaltern woman. The underread and scarcely commented-on third and fourth
sections of Spivak’s essay raise the question, Can we approach the gendered subaltern
more productively if our project is to recover not “lost voices” but rather lost texts? In
the process of unpacking the textual complexities underlying Britain’s 1829 abolition
of sati (the widow’s self-immolation on her husband’s funeral pyre), Spivak pushes us
further back in time when she observes intriguingly that “the archival . . . work involved
here is indeed a task of ‘measuring silences’” [286, our emphasis].

2

We contend that her

We wish to thank John Archer, Dominick LaCapra, Parama Roy, Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, and
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak for their helpful comments on our paper.

1. A “reception history” of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” can now be traced, and it would

seem that the original polemical energies of Spivak’s essay are becoming effaced amidst charges
that her essay is too depoliticized. The impulse to depoliticize Spivak’s deconstructive feminism
begins with Benita Parry’s well-known “Problems in Current Theories of Political Discourse,”
one of a number of responses that read Spivak’s contention that the subaltern woman cannot
“speak” as tantamount to producing a “silent subaltern,” a “deafness to the native voice where
it is to be heard,” and, at its most extreme, “a disparaging of nationalist discourses of resistance”
[40–41]. Since its publication, Parry’s essay has led to widespread confusion over the relevance
of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” for ongoing efforts at theorizing subaltern subjectivity. To pro-
vide a brief sampling, Neil Lazarus, in his essay “National Consciousness and the Specificity of
(Post)Colonial Intellectualism,” though acknowledging Parry’s reading of Spivak’s position on
postcolonial subjectivity and nationalism as “somewhat reductive,” nevertheless argues that
Spivak’s deconstruction is “so saturating in its claims for colonial discourse” (as the “producer”

diacritics 30.1: 25–48

26

choice of the term “archival” is highly motivated and can serve as the long-overdue
occasion for a return to the largely unread sections of “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

We can think of at least two risks involved in our undertaking. For one thing,

revisitations to well-known essays can often seem more regressive than innovative. We
are well aware that we may have to overcome a certain indifference on the part of
readers who, feeling confident that they know it well, judge that “Can the Subaltern
Speak?” (now over ten years old) has had its theoretical “moment” and should now give
way to more current efforts to locate nonelite, subaltern subjectivity within a politics of
resistance. A second concern is that because our project of reading the subaltern woman
“archivally” must necessarily reexamine and justify Spivak’s career-long engagement
with Derrida and with deconstruction, we must be aware of the extent to which her
deconstructive feminism has been prematurely and unfairly associated with the sup-
posed political shortcomings of Derridean deconstruction, the regrettable result being
an almost reflex aversion to her deconstructive theory within both feminism and
postcolonialism. Despite these risks, however, we hope that our use of the archive as the
governing principle for our return to Spivak’s essay can pave the way for a more sympa-
thetic reading of Spivak’s “silent” subaltern. Our essay will argue that “Can the Subal-
tern Speak?” deserves a foundational or canonical status within postcolonial theory and
should experience a “staying power” on the current critical scene as far-reaching and
significant as Edward Said’s Orientalism.

Spivak’s essay at one point refers quite literally to the concept of an archive, that is,

the colonial “archive” of the East India Company, consisting of the “correspondence
among the police stations, the lower and higher courts, the courts of directors, the prince
regent’s court,” and so on [298]—all the documents instrumental in British law’s re-
codification of sati from “ritual” to “crime” (also, we might add, the archive of subal-
tern historiography).

3

However, as Foucault’s concept of the archive reminds us, the

of the colonial object) that native agency “in its insurgent aspects” drops out [205–06]. For
Lazarus, in the final analysis, Spivak’s deconstruction evinces “an air of hesitancy” when repre-
senting the postcolonial subject: it is a “holding action in the process of ossifying into a stand-
point” [210]. In her essay “Dead Women Tell No Tales: Issues of Female Subjectivity, Subaltern
Agency and Tradition in Colonial and Postcolonial Writings on Widow Immolation in India,”
Ania Loomba provides a generally sympathetic summary of “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” but she
also writes, “An insistence on subaltern silence is disquieting for those who are engaged in pre-
cisely the task of recovering such voices; it can be linked to Spivak’s curious detachment . . . from
the specificities of post-colonial politics” [218]. More recently, Asha Varadharajan’s theoreti-
cally sophisticated Exotic Parodies, whose chapter on Spivak is, surprisingly, the only sustained
reading of Spivak’s work, also relies heavily on a false binary between deconstruction and dis-
courses of resistance in order to argue that Spivak’s deconstructive essay leaves the subaltern
“nowhere.” For Varadharajan, Spivak’s deconstruction of subaltern subjectivity is a radically
dehistoricized, “paralyzed reflexivity” that cannot allow for a resistant subaltern. For a more
sympathetic reading of Spivak’s “silencing” of the subaltern woman that nevertheless does not
directly engage the “deconstruction question” in any particular detail, see the ninth chapter of
Robert Young’s White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. For rare (though brief) praise
of the usefulness of Spivak’s deconstruction for postcolonial critique, see Gyan Prakash,
“Postcolonial Criticism and Indian Historiography” [esp. 10–11]. For an intriguing reading of
“Can the Subaltern Speak?” within the context of the Nicaraguan elections, see Leerom Mederoi,
Shankar Raman, and Benjamin Robinson, “Can the Subaltern Vote?”

2. For a related emphasis on the “archive,” specifically the colonized woman as caught

between indigenous patriarchy and the politics of archival production, see Spivak’s “The Rani of
Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives.”

3. In her pathbreaking essay “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial In-

dia,” Lata Mani examines the archival documents dealing with Britain’s abolition of sati in order
to show how the widow was caught between the colonial and the indigenous male elite’s contend-

diacritics / spring 2000

27

archive is not just “that whole mass of texts that belong to a single discursive [in this
case, legal] formation,” but can also be conceptualized more abstractly as the “law of
what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events”
[126, 129]. Foucault’s reference to “the appearance of statements as unique events”
within the archive can, in turn, remind us of Spivak’s own “sentence” (her term) sum-
marizing British law’s abolition of widow sacrifice: “White men are saving brown women
from brown men” [296]. In a Foucaultian context, British law’s “benevolent” act of
abolishing widow sacrifice as one way of establishing “a good and civil society” gets
formulated as an archival “statement/sentence” that reestablishes the “law of what can
be said” (as opposed to the “silent” widow) by means of the discursive apparatus of
colonialist legal power/knowledge. Foucault describes the archive as “that which dif-
ferentiates discourses in their multiple existence and specifies them in their own dura-
tion” [129]. In other words, for Foucault there is no “origin” to the archive—only shift-
ing discursive domains that “specify” these discourses “in their own duration” [129].

As a means of describing the “postcolonial archive” of “Can the Subaltern Speak?,”

we could rest content within the discursive practices of Foucault’s archive and its state-
ments “specifie[d] in their own duration” were it not for a second statement or “sen-
tence” that Spivak insists is crucial to an understanding of the legal underpinnings of
sati, and that we argue necessitates another conceptualization of the archive. This sen-
tence reads: “She [the self-immolating widow] wanted to die.” As the Foucaultian “law
of what can be said,” this sentence emanates not from within the “duration” of colonial
Indian modernity in the nineteenth century, but rather from the laws of Hindu antiquity
dating as far back as the sixth century BCE. The statement “She wanted to die” is at
semantic as well as legal odds with the statement “White men are saving brown women
from brown men,” and is a key reason why Spivak is prompted to summarize British
law’s abolition of sati textually as “the palimpsestic narrative of imperialism” [281]. If
imperialism is indeed a kind of “palimpsest,” Spivak’s observation suggests that al-
though (as in Foucault’s conception) there may be no “origin” for an archive, those who
are committed to a fuller understanding of the legal underpinnings of sati are obliged to
push back much earlier than colonial modernity in order to understand the disastrous
legal gap between the statements “White men are saving brown women from brown
men” and “She wanted to die”—a gap that renders the self-immolating widow’s subjec-
tivity unlocatable. In other words, we will have to uncover an earlier “archive,” one that
is up to the task of “measuring silences” between sentences as the textual first step
toward probing the “silence” of the subaltern woman.

For this endeavor, let us now turn to Derrida’s concept of the “archive” as set forth

in his recent book Archive Fever. Not unlike his better-known concepts of trace or
differance, Derrida’s “archive” is not readily defined, and it is certainly no less
nonoriginary than Foucault’s archive. Broadly speaking, his “archive” is a juridical con-
cept, an attempt at a general theory of how the law becomes institutionalized as law.
Thus, unlike Foucault’s archive, Derrida’s archive is a “thinking” of the law that ap-
proaches it not so much discursively as ontologically. Derrida focuses on the etymology
of “archive” in the Greek arkhe as entailing the principle of “commandment”: the law
can be found “there where men and gods command, there where authority, social order
are exercised, in this place from which order is given” [9]. Moreover, Derrida writes
that it is the archons who have the power to interpret the archive: “. . . it is at their home,

ing interpretations of Hindu custom. Mani discusses how the colonial British consulted with
Brahmin pundits to determine whether sati was permitted by the ancient scriptural texts, in the
process rendering these pundits spokesmen for a vast and diverse Hindu population. In such a
scheme, Mani argues that the Indian woman, lost in the shuttle between tradition and modernity,
becomes a signifier of the colonial conflict.

28

in that place which is their house [arkheion as ‘house,’ ‘domicile,’ ‘address’] . . . , that
official documents are filed” [10]. Thus, Derrida is interested not so much in the law as
“discursive domain” as he is in an actual place where the law is instituted (“there where
men and gods command”)—a place where discernible acts of interpretation occur: the
archons (“men and gods”) are the site of the law as vested authority, hermeneutic power.
Unlike Foucault’s archive of the law as “what can be said” (that is, the law as an anony-
mous, indeed transhuman, discursive formation), Derrida’s archive involves actual ar-
chons who “exercise social order” not discursively but hermeneutically through the
interpretation of texts.

At first glance, Derrida’s concept of the “archive,” deeply invested in archaic Greek

etymologies and ancient scenarios of archons interpreting the law “at their home,” seems
far removed from “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and its focus on British law’s abolition of
sati within the (Foucaultian) “duration” of colonial Indian modernity. But Spivak works
hard to uncover just such a Derridean archive for postcolonialism—a postcolonial archive
that, paradoxically, reaches back to antiquity, “there where men and gods command.” In
her essay’s fourth section, Spivak undertakes a detailed analysis of the discourse on
sanctioned suicide in the texts of Vedic and classical Hindu antiquity, namely the Rg-
Veda and the Dharmasastra, resonantly referred to several times throughout “Can the
Subaltern Speak?” as “the archaic origin”—the “origin,” that is, of “the palimpsestic
narrative of imperialism.” At one point in her essay, Spivak poses the question: “[H]ow
does one make the move from ‘Britain’ to ‘Hinduism’?” (as another way of phrasing the
legal and linguistic disjunction between “White men are saving brown women from
brown men” and “She wanted to die”). We contend that the answer to this question—as
with the question, Can the subaltern speak?—resides in the “archive.” Let us turn again
to Archive Fever, where Derrida, with uncanny significance for Spivak’s essay, writes
that the archive “always holds a problem for translation” [57]. Thus, when the British,
seeking to pin the label of “crime” onto the ritual of sati, ask the learned Brahmin
pundits (as the indigenous elite archons of colonial modernity) to interpret the legal
texts of the archive of Sanskritic antiquity, highly consequential errant commentaries
ensue: the abolition of sati becomes nothing less than the law as a linguistic “repres-
sion” of Sanskrit. To be sure, this repression constitutes a “discursive” moment. But we
are also presented with the interpretive layers of “the palimpsestic narrative of imperial-
ism” that demand an analysis of the widow’s silence as a distinctly textual moment.
Spivak’s archive is a diachronic “palimpsest” whose textual layers enfold not only the
synchronic court documents of British legal power/knowledge, but also the texts of
Hindu antiquity, themselves palimpsestic layers of mistranslation and errant commen-
tary by the archons of the Rg-Veda as, to echo Derrida, “this place from which order is
given.”

The third and fourth sections of “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” with their references

to the earlier history of British India, have remained resolutely unread in the last ten
years because of postcolonialism’s ongoing investment in the temporal frame of Euro-
pean modernity—specifically, in colonial modernity as a moment of rupture. One con-
sequence of postcolonialism’s fixation on modernity is that antiquity has been of virtu-
ally no interest—an unnegotiated nonfactor that is, in effect, dismissed as irrelevant for
postcolonialism’s focus on the trauma of colonial modernity. To be sure, antiquity as an
issue is inserted into postcolonial studies at its very inception with Said’s highly influ-
ential Orientalism. But we argue that Spivak’s focus on Vedic and classical Hindu an-
tiquity enables a very different, and no less effective, critique of imperialism than the
Foucaultian-Saidian model prevalent in so much current colonial discourse analysis.

Let us briefly rehearse Said’s Orientalism and its investigation of how the “Orient”

came into being as a product of European discourse. Said’s study of the conceptual area

diacritics / spring 2000

29

30

of colonial discourse has largely been shaped by Foucault’s emphasis on a discursive
“management of space” as the most effective means of analyzing British territorial
imperialism’s increasing reliance on administrative, institutional “development” (edu-
cational, legal, and so on) to “produce” colonial subject formation. (In India, this was
the process the British attempted to disguise as “social mission.”) One among many
examples of such colonial “administrative management” is British legal scholar Will-
iam Jones’s founding in 1784 of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and the subsequent
formation of “Sanskrit studies” as a discipline [Said 77–79].

4

In Said’s conception, the

formalized study of Sanskrit in 1784 is an example of colonial discourse that conjoins
William Jones the “legal scholar” with William Jones the “colonial administrator” (as
supreme court judge under the East India Company), who accommodates the newly
formed discipline of “Sanskrit studies” within the purview of colonial power/knowl-
edge.

Spivak, however, is less concerned with the modernist category of colonial dis-

course than with the precise “textual ingredients with which such a subject [the imperi-
alist Subject who produces the “Orient”] could cathect, could occupy (invest?) its itin-
erary—not only by ideological and scientific production, but also by the institution of
the law” [280, our emphasis]. For Spivak, what gets effaced in Said’s emphasis on the
power/knowledge nexus within colonial modernity is the specificity of ancient Sanskrit
texts not as “discursive formations,” but as language available for—and vulnerable
to—strategic (mis)interpretations dating back to antiquity. It is true that Said discusses
key eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western texts that were instrumental in the pro-
duction of the “Orient” (that is, the tautology by which Orientalism textualizes the Ori-
ent); but in his account of the “Orient” as a set of textual practices, he does not engage
the texts of antiquity that served as the substrate for the modern “Orient” produced and
then managed by the practices of colonial administration. And because Said remains so
committed to the conceptual area of colonial discourse (and to a critique of Western
representations of the “Orient”), he does not so much “read” these ancient texts as de-
ploy them as one among many disciplinary discursive domains comprising the force
field of imperialist power/knowledge. In her essay Spivak certainly does not deny the
scope and brilliance of Said’s analysis of colonial subject formation. However, to dis-
miss her investment in how the “Orient” was produced is to disallow a critique of impe-
rialism under any theoretical point of entry other than colonialist discourse analysis,
and it is to overlook the significance of Derrida’s archive for understanding “the
palimpsestic narrative of imperialism” and its particular texturing of the ethnocentric
complicity between writing and the formation of a “civil” society.

It is not discourse analysis, then, but rather the inherently textual preoccupations of

deconstruction—reading, interpretation, hermeneutics, a rigorous attention to etymolo-
gies, paleonymies, complex intertextualities, and so forth—that render the concept of
the “archive” as the relevant horizon for an understanding of how sati has silenced the
subaltern woman. Spivak is intent on rediscovering what modernity has “repressed,”
that is, the origins of the practice of sati in the Hindu texts of antiquity. Such a rediscov-
ery of antiquity requires a rigorous “thinking” of the text; and perhaps now we can
better understand why Spivak begins her important third section by frankly confessing
her impatience with the usual assessments of Derrida’s work as apolitical because it is
too preoccupied with matters of the text: “. . . one encounters the following understand-
ing: Foucault deals with real history, real politics and real social problems; Derrida is
inaccessible, esoteric and textualistic” [291].

5

More significant for her attempt to insert

4. In “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Spivak herself refers to the founding of the Asiatic Society

of Bengal, as well as of the Indian Institute at Oxford in 1882.

5. Spivak quotes Terry Eagleton’s claim (in Literary Theory) that Derrida “has been grossly

diacritics / spring 2000

31

Derrida within a critique of imperialism, Spivak quotes Said’s objection to deconstruction
in The World, The Text, The Critic: “Derrida’s criticism moves us into the text, Foucault’s
in and out”—an observation that Spivak does not hesitate to label “a profound misap-
prehension of the notion of ‘textuality’” [292].

One question best investigated deconstructively by means of Spivak’s “postcolonial

archive” is, What kind of violence are we talking about when we speak of the historical
trauma known as imperialism? For those deeply invested in discourse analysis, the an-
swer would be “epistemic violence”: British law’s recodification of sati would serve as
a prime example of Foucault’s “epistemic violence” perpetrated by/through the ideo-
logical state apparatus of British colonial administration. Said praises Foucault for pull-
ing us “out of the text” and into the presumably more political realm of a critique of
colonial discourse—of discourse as the “epistemic violence” inherent in the power/
knowledge nexus of British colonial administration. But from the perspective of a
“postcolonial archive,” such a move “out of the text” leads us away from the archive of
Hindu antiquity. To repeat our earlier question: What kind of violence is being inflicted
when British colonial administration seeks to establish a “civil” society through the
recodification of Hindu legal texts dating back to antiquity? “Epistemic violence” is, to
be sure, one answer. But in Archive Fever Derrida writes of another kind of violence,
what he calls an “archival violence,” or “the violence of the archive itself, as archive, as
archival violence” [12]. Derrida emphasizes that “the archive takes place at the place of
originary and structural breakdown of the said memory” [14].

6

To be sure, archival

violence occurs within the purview of colonialist power/knowledge, but it also occurs
“at the home” of the archons—or as Derrida would emphasize, “there” in the liminal
space where the law meets writing, where the letter of the law “originates” in the trace
of an earlier “said memory.” At the point at which the British ask the learned Brahmin
pundits to interpret the ancient Sanskrit texts, the “said memory” that is structurally
destroyed is the texts of the smriti tradition of Hindu antiquity, loosely translated as

unhistorical,” as well as Perry Anderson’s critique of Derrida (in In the Tracks of Historical
Materialism) as so preoccupied with exposing a “nostalgia of origins” that he demonstrates “no
commitment to exploration of social realities at all” [291]. Accordingly, Spivak’s career-long
engagement with deconstruction has itself been perceived by many as inaccessible, esoteric, ar-
cane—a misguided attenuation of the political urgency of postcolonial agendas. But these dis-
missals overlook Spivak’s consistent arguments throughout her career that deconstruction’s stra-
tegic “dismantlings,” as she calls them, its refusal of premature resolutions of aporias and stub-
born impasses, are moments of ethical responsibility that can do real political work. Refusing to
yield to pressures to dismiss deconstruction as outmoded, Spivak continues to argue: “To act is
therefore not to ignore deconstruction, but actively to transgress it without giving it up” [Outside
in the Teaching Machine 121]; “deconstruction is what must be critiqued, even as it is what one
inhabits entirely” [OTM 60]; and, most recently, “deconstructive reading [is] unaccusing,
unexcusing, attentive, situationally productive through dismantling” [Critique of Postcolonial
Reason 82]. In short, for Spivak, deconstruction (to echo her own emphatic and frequently used
double negative) cannot not be used in postcolonial critique.

6. At this point, we are particularly motivated to read “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in con-

junction with Archive Fever. The concept of an originary, textual “violence” (not, it hardly needs
emphasizing, in the same category as real, historical violence—although, in the case of sati, the
two kinds of violence exist in a weird complicity) is a major reason why Spivak has often been
drawn to Derrida over Foucault. In her essay “More on Power/Knowledge,” Spivak writes, “I
cannot find anywhere in Foucault the thought of a founding violence. . . . Indeed, Derrida’s initial
critique had been in terms of Foucault’s ignoring of the violence that founds philosophy” [150].
Nevertheless, we should note that Spivak’s essay is a valuable attempt to get beyond a simple
dichotomy between Derrida and Foucault—to, in her words, “speak of that impossible double
name—Derrida/Foucault” and “to give in to both, however asymmetrically” [143].

32

“that which was remembered.” The subaltern cannot “speak” because of the violence
both of and to this Sanskritic archive.

In sum, we propose a return to the third and fourth sections of Spivak’s “Can the

Subaltern Speak?” in order to look more closely at her premise that the texts of antiquity
are the “originary” terrain that must be traversed before one can arrive at an understand-
ing of “epistemic violence” in colonial Indian modernity. All of which is to say that an
epistemic shift may first entail a textual shift—not so much an epistemic violence as an
archival violence, a “violence” to the text that backdates the “origin” of colonial subject
formation from modernity to antiquity. In the archive of Hindu antiquity, we will dis-
cover that there is no letter of the law “there where men and gods command”—only the
juridical as a primal scene of mistranslation and errant commentary. The “postcolonial
archive,” then, is a task of “measuring silences,” a task, in Spivak’s words, of “attempt-
ing to recover a (sexually) subaltern subject [. . .] lost in an institutional textuality at the
archaic origin” [303].

2. Spivak’s “imperialist prejudice”: Ethnocentrism and the History of Writing

In our essay’s final section, we will turn to Spivak’s reading of the “archaic origin” of
the Rg-Veda and the Dharmasastra and the archival violence ensuing from the archons’
sanctioning of suicide through errant commentaries. But before we can logically link up
with this archival reading of sati, we must first revisit Spivak’s key but often over-
looked summary of Derrida’s third chapter of Of Grammatology. For Spivak, Of
Grammatology’s analysis of the ethnocentrism that has haunted Western philology’s
encounter with Oriental languages offers an indispensable perspective on what happens
when British law seeks to establish a “good and civil society” by recodifying Hindu
legal texts dating back to antiquity. Archive Fever, published some ten years after Spivak’s
essay, is certainly not a source for “Can the Subaltern Speak?” But it is worth consider-
ing how Derrida’s concept of the “archive” is, in many ways, his most current incarna-
tion of Of Grammatology’s focus on Western philology’s “prejudices” (his term) as the
occasion for teasing out the ethnocentric complicity between writing and the formation
of a “civil” society.

We are well aware that in recent years, in the wake of dismissals of deconstruction

as apolitical, a return to Of Grammatology (as well as to any number of Derrida’s early
works) has hardly been viewed as urgent for any kind of ideology critique, much less a
critique of imperialism—hence, Of Grammatology’s increasing status as “unread.” Since
Of Grammatology’s publication, it is difficult to find any commentary on Derrida’s
“prejudices.” Surprisingly, Spivak’s essay is the only sustained reading of and commen-
tary on Derrida’s analysis of the ethnocentric “domestic outline,” as he puts it, underly-
ing the three “prejudices” of Western philology’s history of writing.

7

And, in turn, Spivak’s

own summary in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” has been similarly overlooked in the re-
ception history of her essay. Thus, we argue that both Derrida’s “prejudices” and Spivak’s
summary of them have become the site of a doubled “nonreading”: neither Derrida’s

7. We should remind the reader that Of Grammatology is, of course, a highly resonant text

for Spivak, who was the volume’s English translator and wrote an extensive preface that was a
key document introducing deconstruction to the US. She leaves these facts uncommented on,
leading the reader to wonder whether her ironic “silence” on this matter further highlights the
significance of her return to Derrida’s text to undergird so much of her eventual analysis of sati.
For Spivak’s own intriguing account of how she became interested in doing an English transla-
tion of Of Grammatology, see her interview with Howard Winant entitled “Gayatri Spivak on the
Politics of the Subaltern.”

diacritics / spring 2000

33

nor Spivak’s readers have seemed inclined to do anything more than skim these “preju-
dices”—as if dismissing them as further examples of deconstruction’s arcane, hermetic
indulgences.

8

However, as a complex and ambitious attempt at nothing less than a his-

tory of writing, Of Grammatology is a key source for Spivak’s discussion of British
law’s misreading of ancient Vedic and classical Hindu texts, primarily because of
Derrida’s analysis of the “violence” that Western philology has perpetrated onto non-
Western scripts of antiquity.

Spivak delays her analysis of the Rg-Veda and the Dharmasastra until the final

pages of her essay, a clear indication that she does not want to insert “the question of
Sanskrit” (a synecdoche for Hindu antiquity and its “repression” within the colonial
moment) into her essay too prematurely, before first building a careful bridge between
it and other non-Western scripts of antiquity. Spivak’s third section makes an extraordi-
nary move, which is to argue for nothing less than an explicitly geopolitical Derrida as
a theorist far more alert than, say, Foucault to the specter of Western ethnocentrism and
its persistent constituting of the Other as the shadow of the European Self—and, by
implication, a theorist far more useful as a “relay” to her eventual return to Sanskrit.

9

Moreover, Spivak does not suggest that the Derrida who critiques ethnocentrism is a
“new” or heretofore “undiscovered” Derrida. Rather, this is the Derrida we have read
(and so often dismissed) all along, ever since the publication of Of Grammatology and
its seemingly apolitical history of textuality. In other words, Spivak demonstrates that a
critique of ethnocentrism is intrinsic to Derrida’s project in the sixties and seventies to
undertake a history of what he calls “the science of writing.”

Early in Of Grammatology, Derrida states his intention that his book be read not

only as a critique of the phenomenon of logocentrism but as, at its core, an investigation
of “the ethnocentrism which, everywhere and always, had controlled the concept of
writing” [3]. In a series of methodological questions that probe the history of writing,
Derrida asks: “Where and when does one pass from one writing to another, from writing
in general to writing in the narrow sense, from the trace to the graphie from one graphic
system to another . . . ?” [74]. Significantly, these questions concerning the (non)origin
of writing lead Derrida to a consideration of the history of writing within a specifically
geopolitical context: “‘Where’ and ‘when’ may open empirical questions: what, within
history and within the world, are the places and the determined moments of the first
phenomena of writing?” [74, our emphasis]. The significance of this question should
not be passed over lightly. For Derrida, in other words, any consideration of a “scien-
tific interest in writing” and of the ethnocentrism inherent in philological inquiry must
negotiate the geopolitical question of “place”—of writing “within history” and of writ-
ing “within the world.”

8. Even defenders of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” tend to overlook Spivak’s carefully laid-

out declarations of Derrida’s “long-term usefulness for people outside the First World” [292] in
order to reach what they view as her essay’s real “payoff,” her concluding discussion of
Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri’s enigmatic suicide in Calcutta in 1926 and what this suicide might reveal
about “native agency.” But as long as Spivak’s third and fourth sections remain virtually ignored,
any analysis of this widely discussed account is incomplete, because it is so resolutely unin-
formed by the Derridean problematic that sets up Spivak’s notoriously misread conclusion that
Bhuvaneswari “cannot be heard or read” [308]. We take up the issue of the Bhuvaneswari epi-
sode in our concluding “Postscript.”

9. In summarizing Foucault’s career, Spivak writes that he is “a brilliant thinker of power-

in-spacing, but the awareness of the topographical reinscription of imperialism does not inform
his presuppositions” [290]. Foucault’s privileged “objects” of historical investigation—the clinic,
the asylum, the prison, the university—serve as “screen-allegories that foreclose a reading of the
broader narratives of imperialism” [291].

34

Derrida centers his investigation of ethnocentrism “within the world” of writing on

a detailed account of Western philology’s three “prejudices,” which he designates the
“theological,” “Chinese,” and “hieroglyphist prejudices.” Derrida begins his account of
the “prejudices” in the sixteenth century and the extent to which its theories of the
written sign become nothing less than a “symptom of the crisis of European conscious-
ness” [75]. The sixteenth century demonstrated a “theological prejudice” toward writ-
ing, defined by Derrida as “the myth of a primitive and natural writing given by God,”
such as ancient Greek or Hebrew script [76]. By the eighteenth century, however, the
belief in a primitive writing given by God is replaced by a second “prejudice”; the
“ahistorical” phenomenon of “the Chinese prejudice,” that is, the West’s “logico-philo-
sophical” effort (Descartes, Leibniz, and others) to construct a universal script and a
universal language from the recently discovered Chinese script.

10

For Leibniz and oth-

ers, true philosophical writing as abstracted from the Chinese model is “independent
with regard to history” [79], and thus the cartographical specificity of Chinese writing
as such becomes sublated within the “rational” demand for a “universal” philosophical
script, “not disturbed by the knowledge of Chinese script, limited but real, which was
then available” [80]. For Derrida, such a concept of Chinese writing “thus functioned as
a sort of European hallucination” [80]. The real linguistic script of a real China is ef-
faced by the hallucinatory needs of a European philological imaginary.

Unlike what Derrida refers to as the obvious “ethnocentric scorn” inherent in the

Chinese prejudice, the third prejudice, the “hieroglyphist” prejudice, “takes the form of
an hyperbolical admiration” [80]. Thus even though the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher
sought, in the eighteenth century, to introduce Egyptology to the West, he warned against
any attempts at scientifically deciphering the hieroglyphs because of the perceived “mys-
terious” and, indeed, sublime nature of the script. But as Derrida observes, the “ratio-
nalism” of the Chinese prejudice and the admiring “mysticism” of the hieroglyphist
prejudice are oddly complicit: “The writing of the other is each time invested with a
domestic outline,” whereby the other is constituted only as a reflection of the European
Self [80]. These three prejudices are what Derrida means when he speaks of writing
“within history and within the world”: any study of writing “within the world” neces-
sarily entails either a manifest “ethnocentric scorn” or a “hyperbolic admiration,” with
both impulses disguising an underlying “domestic outline” that has less to do with the
language under investigation than with tracing the psychic contours of a “European
hallucination” and a “symptom of the crisis of European consciousness.”

We now propose to look more closely at the ways in which Spivak’s uncovering of

the geopolitical Derrida becomes a crucial and carefully thought through first step of
her critique of imperialism, as well as the overlooked framework for her focus on the
complicity between textuality and imperialism in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” For read-
ers eager to dismiss Spivak’s revisiting of Derrida’s overview of the theological, Chi-
nese, and hieroglyphist “prejudices” as a politically irrelevant exercise in Derridean
discipleship, we suggest the following possibility: in “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Spivak
may be intent on tracing the history of a fourth “prejudice” that can situate a critique of
imperialism within the West’s “science of writing.” If we keep in mind Derrida’s em-
phasis on Western philology’s “prejudices” as hovering symptomatically between “eth-
nocentric scorn” and “hyperbolical admiration” in their encounters with ancient, non-
Western scripts, then one impulse behind Spivak’s third section of “Can the Subaltern
Speak?” might be to use his teasing out of the complex relationship between writing

10. Derrida quotes from Leibniz’s 1703 letter to Father Bouvet: “. . . Chinese characters are

perhaps more philosophical and seem to be built upon more intellectual considerations, such as
are given by numbers, orders, and relations” [79].

diacritics / spring 2000

35

and history as the necessary first step toward investigating the British engagement with
Sanskrit within the historical moment of imperialism.

It is difficult to locate the precise point where Derrida’s third chapter “ends” and

Spivak “begins” her own attempt at a geopolitical grammatology that insists on pre-
serving textuality as a vital political category. For Spivak, Western theory has exhausted
itself, something Derrida himself may be conceding when he suggests, noting the
“hyperbolical admiration” that constitutes the “hieroglyphist” prejudice: “We have not
finished demonstrating the necessity of this pattern” [80]. In other words, Derrida claims,
the West has not yet finished a study of the history of writing as nothing less than “a
symptom of the crisis of the European consciousness.” The limit not just of Western
philosophy, but also of Western philosophy’s attempt to place writing “within history
and within the world”—a limit which, to be sure, implicates Derrida himself—becomes
a moment of relay and, paradoxically, the enabling “origin” of “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

Derrida, then, is the “origin” of Spivak’s project to situate the history of writing

within imperialism, and yet, positioned as he is at the limit of Western theory, he him-
self is not adequate to the task. Spivak notes that Derrida, despite his important expo-
sure of the “ethnocentric scorn” residing at the core of the study of writing, “has not
moved (or perhaps cannot move) into that arena [of imperialism]” [294]. But for those
readers of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” who have expressed their disappointment with
Spivak for not having simply jettisoned Derrida so that she could proceed to what they
perceive as the far more urgent talk of “giving voice” to the muted subaltern woman, we
offer the following motive for her essay’s continued investment in deconstruction: in
her fourth section, Spivak undertakes an account of what we would call the “imperialist
prejudice” that is a carefully thought-through engagement with Derrida’s own account
of, in her words, “the complicity between writing and the opening of domestic and civil
society” [293]. Along with Greek, Hebrew, Egyptian, and Chinese texts—ancient scripts
that Western philology ethnocentrically incorporated into its “domestic outline”—Spivak
would appear to be adding the badly mistranslated and misinterpreted texts of Sanskrit
to Derrida’s list of key “prejudices” in the history of writing. In the final analysis, there
is no better example of the West’s symptomatic hovering between “hyperbolical admi-
ration” and “ethnocentric scorn” than this sentence from a letter by an English soldier-
scholar in the 1890s: “The study of Sanskrit, ‘the language of the gods,’ has afforded me
intense enjoyment during the last 25 years of my life in India, but it has not, I am
thankful to say, led me, as it has some, to give up a hearty belief in our own grand
religion” [qtd. in Spivak 248].

We conclude this section by forging a link between Derrida’s “prejudices” and his

concept of the “archive.” When Spivak poses the question, “[H]ow does one make the
move from ‘Britain’ to ‘Hinduism’?,” we hear the echoes of Derrida’s resonant question
in Of Grammatology: “Where and when does one pass . . . from one graphic system to
another?” [our emphasis]. And we are reminded of Derrida’s warning in Archive Fever
that the law’s encounter with the text “always holds a problem for translation.” But as
Spivak points out, the ethnocentric “prejudices” of Of Grammatology cannot move into
the “arena” of imperialism. We add that Derrida’s juridical concept of the “archive” is
similarly unable to move into the “arena” of imperialism. Spivak’s “imperialist preju-
dice” achieves a crucial mediation between the ethnocentric valences of Derrida’s “preju-
dices” and the juridical valences of his “archive,” offering a point of entry into what we
have provisionally called a “postcolonial archive”: her “imperialist prejudice” is British
law’s ethnocentric violence to the archive of Sanskritic antiquity.

36

3. Reading Spivak Reading the “Archons”

It remains now for us to uncover an archive for postcolonialism—a postcolonial archive
that, paradoxically, stretches from colonial modernity back to antiquity, “there,” to echo
Derrida, “where men and gods command.” Spivak’s “imperialist prejudice” has depos-
ited us on the threshold of the archive of Sanskritic antiquity; and we now move to her
widely overlooked analysis of key passages in the ancient documents of Rg-Veda and
the Dharmasastra in order to complete the archival task of, in her words, “recovering a
(sexually) subaltern subject [. . .] lost in an institutional textuality at the archaic origin.”

The sentence “White men are saving brown women from brown men” marks nine-

teenth-century British law’s “benevolent” appropriation of the woman as the object of
protection—a consequence as distinctly textual as it is ideological. This sentence is a
prime example of Derrida’s “hyperbolic admiration”; but the relationship between the
imperialist subject and the subject of imperialism is more ambiguous than, say, Europe’s
ethnocentric benevolence toward Egyptian writing, as illustrated by Derrida’s
“hieroglyphist prejudice.” A question that Spivak seeks to answer is, What history of
the repression of Sanskrit has produced this resonant sentence of imperialist “benevo-
lence”? Or, to rephrase the question within the temporal frame of antiquity, What his-
tory of the repression of Sanskrit has effaced the ancient Hindu archons’ ruling that the
self-immolating widow “wanted to die”? To what extent, then, can Spivak’s “imperial-
ist prejudice” be brought to bear on the legal disjunction between “White men are sav-
ing brown women from brown men” and “She wanted to die”? Confronted with what
she terms these “dialectically interlocking” sentences, Spivak writes: “The postcolonial
woman intellectual asks the question of simple semiosis—What does this mean?—and
begins to plot a history” [297].

In her move from colonial modernity back to antiquity (from “Britain” to “Hindu-

ism,” or, phrased linguistically, from the British transcription suttee to the original San-
skrit sati), Spivak turns first to the Dharmasastra, a multiply authored series of docu-
ments, dating from about the seventh to the second centuries BCE, whose codifications
of Hindu law and custom were, legally speaking, by far the most important of the post-
Vedic smriti tradition, or “that which is remembered.” From the perspective of a Derridean
“archive,” the Dharmasastra is indeed “this place from which order is given,” “this
place” where the archons are vested with the hermeneutic power of interpreting the law.
But it is also the site of archival violence as, again to echo Derrida, “the place of originary
and structural breakdown of the said memory”: in the act of codifying the law in the
Dharmasastra, the archons violate “that which is remembered.”

11

We will now uncover

the archival violence implicit in Spivak’s dense and elliptical account of the legal origin
of sati in the Dharmasastra. In effect, we seek to render more “readable” this largely
“unread” section of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and its account of how the “epistemic
violence” of the British abolition of sati in 1829 originates in the “archival violence”
within the Dharmasastra some twenty-five centuries ago. Spivak’s deconstructive femi-
nism, an ongoing source of frustration for so many of her readers, may nevertheless
prove to be the only methodology rigorous enough to guide us through the legal laby-
rinth of the archive of Sanskritic antiquity.

The discourses on sanctioned suicide and on proper rites for the dead are the two

relevant moments in the Dharmasastra that Spivak turns to in order to frame her discus-
sion of widow self-immolation as exception to the rule of classical Hindu law. It is

11. Spivak’s most significant return to the Sanskritic Hinduism of classical antiquity since

“Can the Subaltern Speak?” occurs in her most recent book, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason:
Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, in her critique of Hegel’s reading of the Bhagavadgita
in his Philosophy of History [39–58].

diacritics / spring 2000

37

worth noting here that the legal narrative of the self-immolating widow “originates”
within discussions of sati as a solely male experience. As a rule, the scriptures (thinking
only of the male) consider the act of suicide or atmaghata (“killing of the self”) as
generally reprehensible, but the law accommodates certain forms of suicide viewed as
formulaic “performances.” If the suicide arises out of tatvajnana (“knowledge of truth”),
if, in other words, the “knowing subject” or “enlightened self” commits suicide as an
act of full comprehension of its tatva (its “thatness” or “quiddity”), then such a self-
annihilation, in Spivak’s words, “lose[s] the phenomenal identity of being suicide” [299].
Under the law, the self-annihilating male has achieved a state of “felicity,” a kind of
spiritual completion or bliss, that annuls the suicide itself.

A second category of sanctioned suicide in the Dharmasastra concerns not suicide

as “philosophical enlightenment” but rather suicide as “sacredness of place”; and it is
this category that engages Spivak, inserting, as it does, the wedge of “gender trouble”
into classical Hindu law. In this case, the law sanctions suicide by interpreting self-
annihilation as enacting a journey to a “designated sacred place.” In both cases (self-
annihilation as tatvajnana, and self-annihilation as journey to a “sacred place”), the
letter of the law dictates that sanctioned suicide can pertain only to the male. Tatvajnana,
or knowledge of the truth of one’s insubstantiality, is not a “philosophical” state (le-
gally) available to a woman. In other words, the law offers no conceptual space for
considering women’s suicide; or, put even more directly, the law cannot imagine how a
woman could kill her “self.” Taken in its most absolute sense, then, the law on sanc-
tioned suicide is constituted as a denial of a woman’s agency: she can die—but she
cannot kill her own “proper” self. However, even though tatvajnana is not available to
women, the second category of suicide as “sacredness of place” does legally accommo-
date women into sanctioned suicide in the exceptional form of sati, or self-immolation
on the husband’s funeral pyre. Thus, as we shall see, it is this “sacredness of place”
where the category of “woman” (however tentatively) can be raised in the Dharmasastra.

Spivak chooses to read the woman’s self-immolation on two levels as “a simulacrum

of both truth-knowledge and piety of place” [300, our emphasis]. In the case of the self-
immolating woman’s suicide as simulacrum of “truth-knowledge,” the law sanctions
the suicide on the following grounds: while the dead husband’s burning body drama-
tizes the insubstantiality of identity, the widow who throws herself on her dead husband’s
pyre dramatizes or mimetically (secondarily) “acts out” her husband’s philosophical
knowledge of the insubstantiality of the self. And in the case of the widow’s suicide as
“simulacrum of piety of place,” the husband’s funeral pyre (ritually elaborate in con-
struction) becomes, in Spivak’s words, “the metonym for all sacred places” [300].

The legal shift in the Dharmasastra from an interior sanction (truth-knowledge) to

an exterior, exceptional law sanctioning suicide as “place of pilgrimage” succeeds in
accommodating women into the category of sanctioned suicide, but Spivak argues that
it does so only “improperly” such that (by definition) the woman is displaced from
herself. As Spivak writes of the widow, “For her alone is sanctioned self-immolation on
a dead spouse’s pyre” [300]. That is to say, there can be no suicide in the case of a
husband “acting out” the wife’s death. Thus, even here in this latter category of sanc-
tioned suicide for widows, the woman does not have a “proper” place. Even here, the
“place of pilgrimage” or “piety of place” as woman’s performance of suicide displaces
her from herself: for the woman, it is only her (mimetic) immolation on the husband’s
funeral pyre that can sanction her death as (non)suicide—with the funeral pyre serving
not as her own, proper “sacred place,” but rather the “piety of place” where her dead
husband is burning. The woman can kill her “self” only by means of a performative
displacement, that is, only on the displaced place of the husband’s bed of burning wood.
The woman, legally displaced from herself on at least two levels, that is, displaced from

38

her own material body to her husband’s burning body, and displaced from her own
“piety of place” to her husband’s funeral pyre (itself at a “metonymic” remove from the
“place of pilgrimage”), is thus also displaced on a third level, that of her own agency.

However (and here, one could say, begins “the palimpsestic narrative of imperial-

ism”), the exception that sanctions widow suicide does actually allow for the woman’s
agency by recognizing her suicide as an “act of choice” on her part, and Spivak care-
fully traces this attribution of “choice” to the widow. According to the law, if the widow
immolates herself, then it is as if she is saying, “I want to die.” The archons of Hindu
law represent this (unuttered, unverifiable) moment as “choice,” which they in turn
code as the widow being courageous, noble, worthy of reward in heaven. The only way
the widow can even approach the enlightened “felicity” of tatvajnana, then, is through
this legally constructed “choice” as a legal signifier of her desire—of her desire as
agency (an agency that, nevertheless, can occur only by way of her death). Such an
encoding of “choice,” however, produces a precarious subjecthood for the woman, per-
haps best summarized here in an Althusserian sense: following the husband’s death, the
archons “produce” a widow who, out of a seemingly verifiable and uncoerced free will,
“chooses” to immolate herself. The widow understands sanctioned self-immolation as,
in Spivak’s words, “an exceptional signifier of her own desire” [300].

We are now at the heart of the “archival violence” of the Dharmasastra. Sati as

exception to sanctioned suicide is not only the unstable site of the widow’s (non)agency,
but it is also the unstable site where classical Hindu law (to echo Derrida, “this place
from which order is given”) becomes displaced from itself, a displacement that results
from a series of exceptions granted by the Dharmasastra. First, the law’s instituting of
sati is an exception to barring women from legally sanctioned suicide. Second, the
law’s instituting of sati is an exception to the legal denial of woman’s agency. Third and
most significant, as Spivak notes cogently, the law’s instituting of sati as sanctioned
suicide constitutes a major exception to the general rule for the widow’s proper con-
duct, which was living out the rest of her life in complete austerity, self-mortification,
denial of all pleasures. As we saw earlier, sati as exception to the law, whereby a widow
may “choose” the husband’s pyre as her proper “piety of place,” has already become an
act of dis-place-ment for the woman on at least two levels. Moreover, when the archons
allow for an exception to the general rule for a widow’s conduct, that is, offer an alter-
native to lifelong asceticism by way of introducing the “choice” of “She wants to die”
(Hindu law’s implied utterance that, in Spivak’s words, will become fatefully and “dia-
lectically interlocked” with imperialism as “social mission”), they inadvertently insert
the wedge of gender difference into the classical discourse on sanctioned suicides within
archaic Hinduism. When the law recasts the male suicide’s “felicity” into the “courage”
of the widow’s “free choice,” the female subject reads this exception to the law as “I
want to die.” But the concept of woman’s “choice” is dubious if she cannot (legally) kill
her “proper” self, but rather can only act out the dead husband’s “piety of place” within
the context of the husband’s death.

The three exceptions outlined above, then, have the effect of displacing the law

from itself. These exceptions are in excess of the letter of the law, even as sati codes
woman’s desire (“I want to die”) as being in excess of the law (that is, in excess of the
general rule of lawful conduct for widows). Indeed, sati reveals the fissure that is the
law itself, the law as exception. Sati is not a stable, “originary” practice but always
already exists as a legal exception. Put another way, sati “originates” only as a supple-
ment—never occupying a “proper” place within ancient Hindu law. Although the ritual
of sati seemingly grants woman’s agency at the moment of death, the widow’s seeming
“free choice” is more accurately seen as an archival violence at the “archaic origin” of

diacritics / spring 2000

39

classical Hindu law—and a major reason why Spivak refers to the narrative of imperi-
alism as a textual “palimpsest.”

Let us now attempt to trace the archival violence by which, centuries later, the

widow’s seeming “free choice” would eventually become interpreted by the British as a
victimized woman going to slaughter. As Spivak emphasizes, what was hardly ever
debated (either among Hindus, or, centuries later, between Hindus and the British) was
the general law for proper conduct of the widow (that is, living out her life in austerity
and self-mortification). The focus of the debate was always the exceptional law of sati.
Only agency at the moment of death (“She chose to die”) was of legal interest, such that
the “choice to die” became recoded as the widow’s free will. The self-immolation of the
widow thereby became, in Spivak’s words, “the extreme case of the general law rather
than an exception to it” [303]. One strange result of the legal perception of the widow’s
“free choice” as “courageous” was that the widow who chose to live was cast in a more
negative light. Thus, we are presented with a prime example of archival violence as, to
echo Derrida, “the place of originary and structural breakdown of the said memory.” It
is clear from Spivak’s reading of the Dharmasastra that the legal texts of Hindu antiq-
uity never intended that sati replace self-mortification as the general rule for proper
widow conduct. The “normative” widow was effaced by the exceptional rule of sati as
the “new” general rule, in Spivak’s words, “ideologically cathected as ‘reward’’’ for the
widow who courageously “chose” to die [301].

Spivak’s next major move pinpoints the historical moments and regions where sati

as exceptional rule in the legal texts of classical antiquity turns into the general rule in a
class-specific way in, for example, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Bengal.

12

At stake

here is the archival issue of “untranslatability,” whereby nineteenth-century colonial
law “sublated” what the British perceived as “heathen ritual” into crime. The Hindu
scriptural notion of a “reward” for the self-immolating widow’s “courage” was at odds
with British colonialism’s sense of itself as “social mission” and its need to interpret
sati not as an exceptional sanctioned suicide, but as the widow’s unfair punishment.
Once again, the widow’s “free choice” is the contended issue. Spivak argues that we
must turn to indigenous colonial patriarchy to rediscover a Hindu patriarchal diagnosis
of female free will that is at odds with the local British police officer supervising the
widow’s immolation. For the British police officer, real free choice for the woman was,
in Spivak’s words, “to be dissuaded after a decision” [301], to choose freedom instead
of self-immolation. But within Hindu ritual prescription, the widow’s turning back from
the pyre was interpreted not as free choice, but as “transgression,” an exceeding of the
letter of ritual which then necessitated a type of penance. Moving between Hindu ritual
prescription on the one hand, and the texts of imperial discourse on the other (that is,
sifting through the layers of the “palimpsestic narrative of imperialism”), Spivak con-
cludes that within these two contending versions of freedom, the place of mutual
untranslatability and irreconciliation appears to be “the constitution of the female sub-
ject in life” [301].

13

12. A primary source for Spivak’s historical overview is Pandurang Varman Kane’s 1963

History of Dharmasastra. Not only is Kane an archon-ic authority, but he is also an example,
mirroring for Spivak the particular production of the sexed subaltern subject accepted by even
“benevolent and enlightened” Indian men who admired the widow’s courage. She quotes from
Kane: “. . . it is a warped mentality that rebukes modern Indians for expressing admiration and
reverence for the cool and unfaltering courage of Indian women in becoming satis . . .” [300].
Another source is Ashis Nandy’s 1975 essay “Sati: A Nineteenth-Century Tale of Women, Vio-
lence, and Protest,” which was a pioneering effort at historicizing sati.

13. The logical next step in any project of tracing the constitution of the sexed subaltern

subject would not be the itinerary of the dead woman, but rather an investigation of the female
subject “in life,” specifically within the context of what Spivak refers to as a “Hindu regulative

40

What underwrites the colonial redefinition of sati as crime is a fundamental mis-

reading of its ritual significance, an overlooking of the legal itinerary by which sati
became “ideologically cathected as ‘reward,’’’ a perception of the widow’s “courage”
that can be comprehended only within a laborious reading of the texts of archaic law. In
such a scheme, as Spivak writes, “the possibility of recovering a (sexually) subaltern
subject is lost in an institutional textuality at the archaic origin.”

14

Spivak’s tracing of the legal itinerary of sati and the “silenced” subaltern woman

does not end here with the Dharmasastra and its discourses on sanctioned suicide and
proper rites for the dead. The Dharmasastra was by far the most important document of
the classical smriti tradition. But this text should also be viewed as a “palimpsest,”
because its authority in codifying Hindu law and custom derived from at least two (if
not three) prior texts: the Dharma Sutras, sectarian manuals for proper conduct written
in short aphorisms derived from the earlier ritualistic Vedic literature of the Brahmanas,
which was concerned mostly with sacrifice and its symbolism. These latter texts began
to be orally composed and transmitted around 900 BCE, a process continuing for sev-
eral centuries. But the “palimpsestic” layers do not end here. The Brahmanas were
themselves appendages of the Vedas, the most archaic of the religious texts of antiquity.
The Rg-Veda, in turn the oldest of the Vedas and historically considered the first and
most important of the sruti literature (or “that which is heard”), is a collection of hymns
that were so sacred they were rarely if ever written down until the 1780s. The
Dharmasastra, therefore, must be viewed as bearing a complexly layered relationship
to the Vedic and sruti texts, or writings of original revelation, which it augments only
after the Brahmanas and the Dharma Sutras [see Basham 98–104].

Again using Kane’s History of Dharmasastra as her source, Spivak turns to the

commentary of Raghunandana, a late fifteenth-, early sixteenth-century legalist whose
interpretations of the Rg-Veda provided the most authoritative legal validation of sati in
those times and places where the widow’s self-immolation became the general rule for
proper conduct for widows. Thus, it is through this influential archon/interpreter that
we gain access to the archival origin of the enigmatic and sacred Rg-Veda. But what we
discover is not the law as arkhe, the law as absolute “commandment,” but rather the
archival violence of a primal misreading at the archaic origin.

In keeping with centuries-long hermeneutic tradition, Raghunandana cites as his

authority for the practice of sati a particular Rg-Vedic verse passage/hymn that outlines
the steps in the rites for the dead. Even a simple reading makes it clear that this passage
is not addressed to the bereaved widow, but rather to women of the dead husband’s
household whose husbands are living. Yet for centuries, on the basis of a crucial trans-

psychobiography” [302]; whereby one could further pursue the question of what happened to the
widow who, obeying the general law for proper widow conduct, lived out her life in a regressive
“anteriority transformed into stasis” [302]. For more on Spivak’s call to piece together these
“regulative psychobiographies” in the indigenous legal tradition, and “to track the regulative
psychobiographies that constitute the subject-effect of these women, give these women a sense of
their ‘I,’” see her essay “The Political Economy of Women as Seen by a Literary Critic,” [esp.
227–28]. In her chapter “Representing Sati,” Rajeswari Sunder Rajan offers just such a focus on
“the widow who ‘chooses’ life over death” in her brief reading of the Shilappadikaram, a classi-
cal Tamil epic.

14. At this juncture in her argument, Spivak inserts the topic of martyrdom into her discus-

sion of the British authorities’ misconception of sati: “Perhaps sati should have been read with
martyrdom, with the defunct husband standing in for the transcendental One; or with war, with
the husband standing in for sovereign or state, for whose sake an intoxicating ideology of self-
sacrifice can be mobilized. In actuality, it was categorized with murder, infanticide and the lethal
exposure of the very old. The dubious place of the free will of the constituted sexed subject as
female was successfully effaced” [301].

diacritics / spring 2000

41

42

position of the dead for the living husband, this passage has been read as if it were
addressed to the widow. Emphasizing that this transposition of the dead for the living
husband is a different “order of mystery” from the manipulations of female subject-
construction evident in the legal interpretations of the Dharmasastra, Spivak asks a
simple but resonant question: “Why then was it [this misreading] taken as authorita-
tive?” [304]. In this recursive performance of a textual tradition upholding the law,
Raghunandana, in Spivak’s apt phrasing, ends up “commemorating a peculiar and trans-
parent misreading at the very place of sanction” [304].

But, once again, the “violence” of the archive of Vedic Hinduism does not end here.

Spivak observes that the practice of sati relies on the following verse: “Let these whose
husbands are worthy and are living enter the house with clarified butter in their eyes.
Let these wives first step into the house, tearless, healthy, and well adorned” [qtd. in
Kane’s History of Dharmasastra 2.2.634]. A closer look at the second line, “Let these
wives first step into the house,” reveals that the word for “first” is agré. But some
commentaries have misread this word as agné, “O fire,” thus transforming the verse
into: “Let these wives, O fire, step into the house.” In addition to “originating” in the
misconception that the addressee of this passage is the widow, scriptural authorization
of sati also originates in a highly disputed passage and its alternate reading of agré as
agné. Again, to repeat Spivak, Raghunandana “commemorat[es] a peculiar and trans-
parent misreading at the very place of sanction.” In this strained use of agré/ agné in the
context of funeral rites for the dead, truly we have discovered a catachresis at the archi-
val “origin.”

But even with this “commemorative” misreading we still have not reached the ori-

gin of the silenced subaltern woman. In a densely difficult but crucial analysis, Spivak
speculates on the range of meanings of the word yoni, which, in context with the adverb
agré (“first,” “in front”), means “house” or dwelling-place.” But the primary meaning
of yoni as “genital” remains a kind of connotative trace-effect, marking “genital” as an
anterior presence. The mystery of the verse is thus intensified by this double meaning of
yoni as both “dwelling-place” and “genital”: the verse can just as well be read as cel-
ebrating the entry of “well-adorned wives” into the “house” (both literal and metaphori-
cal) of domestic/social reproduction. Spivak makes two key observations here. First,
she underscores the hermeneutic irony of such a “domestic” passage being drawn on to
strengthen the interpretive claim of sati’s sanctioning in the most authoritative text of
Vedic Hinduism. But, as she also points out, the syntactic proximity of yoni (as “geni-
tal”) to agré (often misread as agné, or “fire”) does rather uncannily lend credence to
the archons’ (mis)reading of this passage as a legal sanction for sati, strengthened by
Raghunandana’s modification of the Rg-Vedic verse to read: “Let them first ascend the
fluid abode [or ‘origin,’ with the yoni-name, a rohantu jalayonimagné], O fire.” Spivak’s
central point is that the Rg-Vedic verses are so unstable that the hermeneutic possibili-
ties are nothing short of vertiginous.

In the scandalously underread fourth section of “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” then,

Spivak is concerned with a careful tracing of the textual path from the Dharmasastra
back in time to the Rg-Veda—a path littered with mistranslation, corrupt manuscripts,
and errant commentaries. Overwhelmed by these “palimpsestic” layers, perhaps we can
now truly appreciate the full resonance of Spivak’s often-invoked but not always fully
understood claim that the subaltern woman cannot “speak.” If, as Lata Mani would
claim, the subaltern woman is indeed the silenced signifier of a conflict between tradi-
tion and colonial modernity, then it is also because she is textually unlocatable within
the archive of Sanskrit antiquity. We hope that our close reading of the rigors of Spivak’s
feminist deconstruction has succeeded in demonstrating how the project of an archon/
interpreter such as Raghunandana to extract the legal “truth” of sati from the Vedic sruti

diacritics / spring 2000

43

literature was impossible from the outset. As we have seen earlier, the Dharmasastra,
the codifying of “that which is remembered,” yields only hermeneutic misremembrances.
The Vedic sruti texts, as “that which is heard,” are even more “originary” attempts at
recording a revelatory “voice” of truth and law. But as Derrida contends in Of
Grammatology (the very text Spivak uses as the starting point for her investigation of
the silencing of the “voice” of the subaltern woman in the context of British imperial-
ism), the “voice” cannot escape the effects of the (written) “trace”: any “system of
‘hearing (understanding)-oneself-speak’” is always vulnerable to deconstruction [7].
And here we are well reminded of the Rg-Vedic misreadings of agré for agné, or how
the trace-effect of “genital” cannot be excised from the word yoni as “dwelling-place.”
A question we would pose to critics of Spivak’s “silencing” of the subaltern woman is,
How can the subaltern speak if the archons cannot properly “hear” the Vedic sruti texts?

In concluding our close reading of Spivak’s focus on the Dharmasastra and the Rg-

Veda, we remind the reader that one of the “founding” gestures of deconstruction was
its questioning of Being itself, its rigorous critique of any attempt at a “thinking” of
Being as a transcendental signified. In this context, we are tempted to speculate that
Spivak may never have felt more justified in her career-long commitment to
deconstruction than when she turns to the inscribed fracture within the very word sati,
the feminine form of sat. Sat, the present participle of “to be,” means not only “being”
but also the True, the Good, the Right. (Spivak cannot resist noting that the term has
even entered the “most privileged discourse of modern Western philosophy: Heidegger’s
meditation on Being” in his An Introduction to Metaphysics.) Sati, as the feminine form
of sat, simply means “good wife.” Within British colonial discourse, however, sati as
the name for the rite of widow self-immolation constitutes what Spivak terms an obvi-
ous “grammatical error,” because the word in the Indian languages is “the burning of
the sati or good wife” [305]. In the discursive practice of a “benevolent” imperialism,
“good wifehood” becomes absolutely (and mistakenly) identified with self-immola-
tion. (Hence the perceived result of “white men saving brown women from brown men.”)
The British invested the proper noun sati with no significance other than the ritual burn-
ing of a helpless widow who they could then view as an object of protection to be
“saved.” And thus, once again, we see how claims for hermeneutic authority on both
sides of the colonial divide (“Britain” and “Hinduism”) rest on slippages, mistranslations,
and corrupt phrasings of the sacred texts.

Since the mid-1980s, scholarship on the practice of sati has had significant critical

purchase within much postcolonial theory, particularly postcolonial feminism. One could
say that for postcolonialism, “in the beginning” is sati, particularly sati as a synecdoche
for patriarchal violence to the body of the dead woman. But our tracing of the linea-
ments of a “postcolonial archive” (while thoroughly supportive of the scholarship on
sati) seeks to cut through “Can the Subaltern Speak?” at an oblique angle, traversing a
different terrain from so much of postcolonial theory’s rallying around sati and its
foregrounding of woman’s agency and woman’s victimhood.

15

The postcolonial archive

reveals sati as the unstable site of the widow’s nonagency. Put another way, the
postcolonial archive reveals sati as a legal supplement having less to do with the dead
woman than with a history of the repression of Sanskrit that deconstructs the law at its
very source.

15. A central irony here is that Spivak’s rigorous hermeneutic pursuit of the “origins” of sati

positions the postcolonial archive in an ultimately pregendered time. For example, we are think-
ing of the ironic fact that the practice of sati took shape within ancient discourses on suicide as a
solely male experience, or of the Rg-Vedic term yoni as a gender-indeterminate word for “geni-
tal.”

44

To be sure, the postcolonial archive encompasses the literal archive of Hindu antiq-

uity, assembled by such late eighteenth-century Orientalists as Anquetil-Duperron and
William Jones. But the postcolonial archive is also Spivak’s hermeneutic maneuver
performed on this Sanskritic archive—a maneuver that, in the process of mapping sati
onto an explicitly textual terrain, uncovers not so much the dead woman as the “dead
letter” of antiquity, in the wake of Hindu law’s violence to memory (that is, to “that
which is heard and remembered”). The postcolonial archive, then, is the site of the
complex interplay between antiquity and a major discourse of poststructuralism. And
perhaps now we can better appreciate the strange temporality of a postcolonial archive
reaching, paradoxically (retroactively?), back to antiquity. Even as the postcolonial
archive seeks deconstructive access to the literal archive of Hindu antiquity, the trauma
of colonial modernity remains encrypted. The postcolonial archive, temporally situated
in the aftermath of Orientalism (and of Said’s Orientalism), is, in effect, the archive-as-
“crypt,” incorporating but never fully introjecting the “dead letter” of Vedic and classi-
cal Hindu antiquity into its deconstructive critique of imperialism.

At this point, we hope it is not too tendentious to describe the postcolonial archive

in terms of a cultural melancholia. We should not attempt to summarize the postcolonial
archive prematurely as a “desire” for antiquity. Rather, phrased more tentatively (but,
we hope, more responsibly), the postcolonial archive means that we cannot not want
antiquity.

16

The melancholic double negative “cannot not” protests the foreclosure of

antiquity that has characterized the Foucaultian-Saidian critique of imperialism, even
as it must refuse any simple call for a “return” to antiquity. In this context, we remind
the reader of Spivak’s “symptomatic” use of Kane’s magisterial—and decidedly
Orientalist—History of Dharmasastra for her own deconstructive engagement with the
texts of Vedic and classical Hindu antiquity. As a major example of an indigenous elite
archon within colonial production, as the modern subject par excellence of the schol-
arly “knowledge” of antiquity, Kane is the necessary condition for sustaining any study
of the history of (errant) commentary on the Rg-Veda and the Dharmasastra. Thus he is
both the possibility of Spivak’s deconstructive hermeneutic, but also the impossibility
of discovering a “pure” archive of Vedic and classical Hinduism, untainted by the
Orientalist formation of “Sanskrit studies.” To be sure, when Spivak reminds the reader
that Kane is himself a “benevolent” Indian male admiring the self-immolating widow’s
“cool and unfaltering courage” [see our footnote 12], she adduces Kane for a critique of
the subject of Indological scholarship. But her simultaneous reliance on his scholarship
for her own deconstruction of sati is a reminder—perhaps even a melancholic reminder—
that the archive of Orientalist scholarship is still our only path “back to antiquity.” The
postcolonial archive, this impossible space where a deconstructive critique of imperial-
ism meets Orientalist scholarship, reveals antiquity belatedly as that which must be
both distanced and summoned in the aftermath of colonialism.

16. That any “desire” for a pure access to Sanskritic antiquity, in particular, must be viewed

as ideologically suspect is cogently summarized by Peter van der Veer, who writes that Orientalism’s
return to Vedic and Hindu scriptures “created an image of the decline of ‘Hindu society’ after the
Muslim invasion. All this led to the Hindu nationalist construction of the glorious Hindu past and
of the ‘foreignness’ of Muslims” [“The Foreign Hand” 40].

diacritics / spring 2000

45

POSTSCRIPT

The Postcolonial Archive—en famille: A Reply to Gayatri Spivak

17

But we are not yet finished. What, after all, should we make of Spivak’s riddling “story”
of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri’s unexplained suicide in Calcutta in 1926, strangely misinter-
preted by her own family?

18

This concluding story of a family member is “what re-

mains,” even after Spivak’s reading of a bit of the official archive of Hindu antiquity.
What autobiographical “story” of the postcolonial archive is being told here? We now
wish to pose the question of questions for the postcolonial archive, by way of response
to an intriguing and challenging question Spivak posed directly to us at Harvard Uni-
versity: Can we forge a connection between the riddling “story” of Bhuvaneswari (as a
member of Spivak’s family) and one of Archive Fever’s overarching concerns, which is
the relationship between the concept of the archive and the institutional (and, for Derrida,
profoundly familial) question of what it means to “found” a discipline? In order to
pursue this question further, we choose to add to the postcolonial archive a third Derridean
text, Glas, as well as Spivak’s commentary on it, “Glas-Piece: A Compte Rendu.” We
will move (if only temporarily) from Archive Fever’s “law of the text” to Glas’s “law of
the family.” And eventually, we will return to our claim made early in our paper that
“Can the Subaltern Speak?” deserves a foundational or canonical status within
postcolonial theory.

Phrased broadly, Glas opens the (deconstructive) space of autobiography as con-

nection to ancestry. Spivak begins her essay on Glas with the following claim: “I can
read Glas as an ancestral rite” [22]. Here, Spivak alludes to the content of Derrida’s
Hegel column as largely preoccupied with the concept of the family, or what Derrida
terms the “law of the family.” Spivak is fully attuned to the autobiographical valences
of Glas, which, as she notes, was written shortly after the death of Derrida’s father. As
Spivak writes of the “filial” Derrida, “Inspired by the absence of the Father . . . the
Jewish child arranges his autobiography in that place” [23]. If Archive Fever (in its own
familial gesture) locates the “founding” act of psychoanalysis at the moment when the
father Jakob Freud reminds the son Sigmund of his Jewish origins through the gift of
the Philippsohn Bible (first given to the son on the occasion of his circumcision), Glas
includes Derrida’s more autobiographical remembrance of his own father (an allegory
of filial love that implicitly counters Hegel’s reading of the relationship between the
Christian and his Divine Father).

Glas is, among other things, Derrida’s mourning (a “tolling”) for his father, a mourn-

ing that also foregrounds the ritual of circumcision and its relationship to family gene-
alogy. But at this point we are well reminded that Derrida’s most extended meditation
on circumcision appears in his Circumfession, published some seventeen years after
Glas, and, perhaps constituting a fourth Derridean text for the postcolonial archive. In
this text, Derrida refers to his circumcision variously as “[t]he first event to write itself
right on my body,” and “the proper language of my life” [120, 144]. For Derrida, cir-

17. This postscript takes its impetus from a rich exchange with Gayatri Spivak that took

place in December 1998 at Harvard University’s Center for Literary and Cultural Studies, where
the authors presented this paper, with Spivak, who had read our paper in advance, in attendance.
We wish to express our gratitude to Gayatri Spivak for her generous reading of and response to
our paper.

18. We quote from Spivak’s account: “The suicide was a puzzle since, as Bhuvaneswari was

menstruating at the time, it was clearly not a case of illicit pregnancy” [“Can the Subaltern
Speak?” 308].

46

cumcision (as the “textual” mark of genealogy) is the convergence of body, blood, and
writing. As he confesses, “If the book doesn’t bleed, it will be a failure” [130].

A question begins to accrue around the trope of blood: Can we forge a connection

between the blood of circumcision and the menstrual blood of the dead Bhuvaneswari?
Pertinent here is Spivak’s commentary on family mourning in Glas, that is, her brief
summary of Abraham and Torok’s concept of the crypt via Derrida’s “Fors” (perhaps a
fifth Derridean text for the postcolonial archive?) and its commentary on the crypt as
failed mourning. Spivak reads “Fors” and its commentary on the crypt as (like Glas)
“the revelation of autobiography” [24]. The crypt, however, conceals autobiography
not as remembrance, but as “a mourning for the perpetual loss of the name” [24]—the
family name, that is.

With Spivak’s gesture toward Abraham and Torok’s crypt, we perhaps move closer

to the “perpetual loss of the name” of Bhuvaneswari—but we are not quite there yet.
(Could that be another way of saying that in 1977 Spivak was not “there” yet—not
“there” at the familial yet postcolonial “space” of Bhuvaneswari?) The special bril-
liance of Spivak’s reading of Glas is its discovery of gender at the core of family mourn-
ing. Meditating on the signifier Sa, Derrida’s acronym for the Hegelian savoir absolu as
“absolute knowledge,” Spivak suggests, “. . . it might be a pronoun possessing an unde-
fined feminine object” [27]. For Spivak, Sa is “a miring movement of autobiography
that will not allow ‘analytical distance’” [36]. Is Sa, in other words, (postcolonial)
autobiography’s “miring movement” that disseminates Derrida’s remembrances of the
ancestral rite of/as circumcision as the “proper language of [his] life”? Is Bhuvaneswari’s
suicide the Sa (sat, sat-i)—is it the gendering of “absolute knowledge” (or tatvajnana
as “knowledge of truth”)?

Perhaps now is the moment to draw attention to the status of the Bhuvaneswari

episode as a nonevent encrypted within the family, as marking a certain despair on
Spivak’s part at the interruption of or failure in passing down Bhuvaneswari’s specifi-
cally female legacy of counterhegemonic intervention in the text of sati-suicide. Spivak’s
emphasis, on the occasion of the Harvard presentation, on the failure of family women
across generations to hear properly or speak Bhuvaneswari’s name is a signal not only
of the breakdown of family memory but also, we contend, of postcolonial memory. The
concluding passages of Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” detailing the “example”
(of Bhuvaneswari) that is not “a model of intervention” [308], have now become “leg-
end”-ary (literally a legend: a reading of Spivak’s reading of Bhuvaneswari). We argue
that as the site of the breakdown of family memory, that is, the “crypt”-ic secret of
family shame, these passages constitute a gift—a gift that reminds the discipline of
“postcolonialism” (via the menstruating Bhuvaneswari’s psychological reinscription of
shastric injunctions prohibiting the menstruating woman from committing suicide) that
the female as subaltern is the space from which this discipline becomes possible.

In “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Spivak places Bhuvaneswari’s suicide very delib-

erately beside the Sati of Hindu mythology, the goddess Durga, the wife of Shiva. The
dis-membering of the goddess-good-wife Sati inaugurates what Spivak calls the myth’s
“sacred geography” that rewrites the sati-suicide text by “reversing every narrateme of
the rite” [307]. Thus Shiva dances carrying the corpse of his wife, seeking to avenge her
death; the female body dismembered, Spivak writes, inscribes the earth as sacred geog-
raphy. If the “luminous fighting Mother Durga” is one trace-effect of “Bhuvaneswari,”
who was herself, as Spivak reminds us, entangled with samitis (organizations involved
in armed anticolonial struggle for Indian independence in the 1920s), then Bhuvaneswari
must also be disengaged from the “blazing, fighting, familial Durga” insofar as the
latter is well documented and popularly well remembered—which is to say, institution-
ally validated—by the male nationalist leaders. It is the subaltern as female, as (the

diacritics / spring 2000

47

Antigonal) Bhuvaneswari—neither wife nor good daughter nor mother—whose protest
remains encrypted and institutionally invalidated both by the women of her own family
and by those readers of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” desirous of Bhuvaneswari’s resist-
ing agency.

Again, what is at stake in an investment in Derrida’s Archive Fever for our discus-

sion of Spivak’s “legend” of Bhuvaneswari? Archive Fever inserts the body (via the
young Freud’s circumcision) not only into genealogy-as-history, but also into the ques-
tion of the founding of a discipline. Similarly, if we view Bhuvaneswari’s act of sati-
suicide as an “example” (as in Circumfession and in Archive Fever) moved from the
domestic space of the family into the public space of the text (in this case, the canonical
text of postcolonial theory?), then we can read “Can the Subaltern Speak?” as inserting
the body (via menstruation) into the question of the founding of postcolonialism.
“Bhuvaneswari” as the proper name that the family cannot speak becomes part of the
public space of the postcolonial archive via “Can the Subaltern Speak?”—an archive
that encrypts both the “dead letter” of Hindu antiquity and the ashes of the dead/dying
subaltern as female. In other words, the postcolonial archive is the place where memory
breaks down in the face of an archival and a somatic/familial/institutional violence that
“founds” postcolonialism. Could we ask: are “antiquity” and “Bhuvaneswari” encrypted
within postcolonialism at the very moment of its founding?

Turning finally back to Spivak and her elegant reading of the columnar layout of

Glas as “the infinite exchange of these [Hegel and Genet] ‘columns’ that look back at
each other” [26], can we say that “Can the Subaltern Speak?” also oscillates between
the (phallic) text of the Dharmasastra/Rg-Veda and the (unruly) text of sati-suicide as
rewritten by Bhuvaneswari? We contend that “Can the Subaltern Speak?” should be
read as an exchange of (the shuttle between) these two “columns” that “look back at
each other.” Bhuvaneswari’s menstrual blood “pollutes,” “joins” (agglutinates?) the text
of antiquity and the text of gendered subalternity. And thus, to echo Spivak reading
Glas, we, too, can read “Can the Subaltern Speak?” as “an ancestral rite.”

Why Archive Fever for “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Let us end our postscript where

we began: with the question of what it means to found a discipline. Pushing the institu-
tional logic of Archive Fever, our next step would be to name the name of “Spivak” as
the “founder” of postcolonial studies. “But,” Spivak claimed a decade ago, “I don’t see
anything called postcolonialism” [Spivak and Winant 95]. How to give the “gift” of
founding to one who herself would refuse to receive it?

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