If the Subaltern Speaks, Can We Listen?

Julia Kristeva still has a great deal of credibility in literary critical circles, but she is not
without her detractors. For instance, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak criticizes Julia Kristevas apparent
narcissism, particularly as displayed in Kristevas book, About Chinese Women. According to Spivak,
Kristeva is so absorbed in her own European female subjectivity, she fails to properly notice the
Chinese women to whom she has supposedly devoted her book (Morton 79). Contrary to Spivaks
intention, this criticism does not diminish Kristevas achievement, in About Chinese Women or
elsewhere, so much as it reveals the crucial difference between the two. Though Kristevas thought
has strong roots in the work of Jacques Lacan and (to a lesser extent) Jacques Derrida, with their
emphasis on the slipperiness of signifier/signified relationships, in her mature work she moves
beyond this linguistic netherworld into a focus on the equally mysterious but more tangible area of
bodily experience (McAfee 5-7). Conversely, Spivak remains far more committed to the Derrida-
derived deconstructive approach with its almost exclusive preference for language (Morton 28-29).
What this amounts to is that Kristevas project has, at least relatively, become one of construction,
whereas Spivaks is primarily one of deconstruction, if not destruction. Spivak seeks to clear a space
in which all voices, especially those of Third World women, can be heard. In her zeal to do this, she
may have cleared away too much, so that even if such voices manage to speak, no one will be able to
hear them.
Julia Kristeva was born in Bulgaria in 1941. Her family was part of the non-Communist
minority. This led to a certain ostracization even in the educational system, though Kristeva was a
brilliant student. When the Communist director of her college was out of town, she absconded to
the French embassy and successfully took an exam that won her a scholarship provided by the
French government for promising foreign students to study in France. Once in Paris, she quickly
impressed the local intelligentsia by expounding upon the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, whose thought
had not yet been widely disseminated in the West. She soon fell in with the likes of Barthes, Lacan,
and Derrida. Though her dutiful intellectual apprenticeship established in her thinking a powerful
interest in the linguistic analysis of these thinkers, she soon outgrew them. Much more influenced
by Lacan than Derrida -- and thus grounded in actual psychoanalysis rather than literary theory
proper -- , Kristeva returned to the biological foundation emphasized by Freud while retaining
Lacans general developmental framework as well as his linguistic concern (McAfee 6-9). Lacan
believe that once a subject enters into the symbolic order, in childhood, there is no going back. The
maternally-oriented, pre-verbal consciousness of infancy cannot be accessed by the verbal
consciousness of later childhood and adulthood. Every attempt to do so must be done by means of
language, and therefore pre-verbal existence is necessarily excluded. The adult speaking subject thus
lives in an unsatisfying world governed by the law of the father, the law of language and symbolic
thinking, adrift in an almost entirely mental reality (McAfee 32-37).
Kristeva takes this further, by taking it back to infancy. According to Kristeva, this
orthodox Lacanian view unnecessarily and simplistically separates pre-verbal and verbal
consciousness. She does not deny that any attempt by the adult subject to regain whatever vestiges
of pre-verbal life remain in the unconscious is made by means of language. Kristevas assertion is
that pre-verbal, instinctual, bodily awareness is found throughout language; the symbolic order is
permeated by what Kristeva terms the semiotic. Thus, language is never a free-floating cloud of
linguistic signification; it is always rooted in the embodied subject. The law of the father is enlivened
throughout by the play of the mother (McAfee 18-24). The extent to which one can attune to and
embrace this semiotic dimension of experience largely determines the extent to which one can be
considered male or female (76-77). Because Kristeva bases her work in psychoanalysis rather than in
literary theory, and because her way of doing this foregrounds the body, which is pretty well the
same in any culture, Kristeva tends to come closer to the sort of generalization or universalization
that Spivak so deplores.
In an interview collected in the book, Outside in the Teaching Machine, Spivak says, Im
repelled by ... what seems to me to be [Kristevas] long-standing implicit positivism: naturalizing of
the chora, naturalizing of the presemiotic [sic] (Outside 17). The charge of positivism is a familiar
charge levelled by proponents of deconstruction against those who would dare ground their thinking
in some mere trope of fantasized physical existence. Unlike Kristeva, Spivak is more of a pure
theorist. Though she has diverged somewhat from her favorite thinker, Jacques Derrida, as Kristeva
diverged from Lacan, Spivaks work uses the deconstructive approach as its primary strategy
(Morton 25-44). Spivak seeks not so much to create a model of human subjectivity, as does
Kristeva, as to demolish those cultural obstacles which silence the voices of those she terms, after
Gramsci, the Subaltern. Given this difference in goals, it is no wonder Spivak should object to
Kristevas project. Born in India in 1942, Spivak breezed through her heavily Anglicized education,
graduating with honors in English literature. She sooned moved to the United States to work as a
professor, first at Iowa University and later at Columbia. Probably due to her own anger as a
member of a recently colonized people, her work has been far more political than that of Kristeva
(who renounced overtly political theory once she committed to psychoanalysis). Spivak has been
primarily concerned with clarifying the way in which even the best-intentioned Western attempts to
speak for Third World people in fact obscure and further silence those people.
Her classic statement on this subject is an article entitled, Can the Subaltern Speak? In it,
she identifies what she terms the epistemic violence of even such progressive thinkers as Michel
Foucault in relation to supposed Western knowledge of the Subaltern. Subaltern is a term
originally used by the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci to refer to rural peasants (Morton 48). The
term has been taken up by a group of Marxist scholars in India called the Subaltern Studies
collective (49-51), who seek to regain the lost accounts of the activities of lower-class revolutionaries
whose role in the history of Indian resistance to English colonization, and finall y nationalism, has
been ignored. Spivak sympathizes with this cause, but takes great pains to point out that in using
even as progressive a Western classificatory system as Marxism to conceptually contain these
ignored figures does epistemic violence to their identities. Spivak claims the Marxist approach tends
to focus on males and also looks primarily at class as the differentiating factor. Spivak wants to
emphasize that women have played a strong role in such movements, and some of the women have
been middle or upper class. In Can the Subaltern Speak? Spivak claims that these women are
effectively ignored both by the dominant power structure and by the epistemically misguided
thinkers who apply the wrong interpretive devices. Her answer to the question she poses in the
essays title is no.
Can the Subaltern Speak? makes clear Spivaks abiding concern that the Other not be
eclipsed by even well-meaning Western attempts to speak for them. That the Subaltern Other be
allowed to exist and speak freely requires constant vigilance on the part of the Western thinker. As I
have already noted, Spivak is heavily indebted to Derridas method of deconstructive linguistic
analysis. The destabilization of fixed meaning acheived by this approach allows Spivak to clear a
conceptual space so that the Subaltern can emerge. Given Spivaks concern with not speaking for
the Other, it is a bit surprising to read her criticism of Kristevas About Chinese Women. Spivak
argues that Kristevas project remains obsessi vely self-centred (Morton 80). If it is, in fact, not
only oppressive for Westerners to speak for the Other, but also impossible, then one could
reasonably conclude that there is no other reasonable option for a Western author but to speak of
her own subjectivity. According to Spivak, Kristeva does exactly that in her account of her
encounter with Chinese women. Kristeva essentially admits she does not understand these women;
she chooses to focus on her own experience, which is all that is available to her. This would seem to
converge well with Spivaks insistence upon the danger of epistemic violence. Spivak, however, is
not satisfied with this. It seems Spivak succumbs here to a contrariness that seems to be part of her
nature. Should one attempt to speak for the Other or not?
Such contrariness is not without usefulness in Spivaks line of work. Indeed, the struggle of
the Subaltern population to be recognized demands from sympathetic thinkers a great deal of the
intellectual demolition work in which Spivak engages. The drawback to her approach is that
deconstruction is of limited value without (re)construction. Her mania for negation and her near-
fetishization of Otherness lead inevitably to both a crippling overemphasis on difference and a
concomitant reluctance, if not inability, to say anything. Even if the Subaltern can speak, this speech
will be unheard by those too paralyzed by epistemic timidity to dare translate such speech into the
listeners own terms -- which is part of what listening always requires. In any communicative
exhange, whether collective or personal, there is a necessary partial loss of some aspects of ones
difference. All communication requires the establishment of epistemic common ground. Some
mutual epistemic violence is inevitable. This can be minimized, but not eliminated. Kristevas
model of human subjectivity might require slight adjustment for application to non-European
people, but if we are serious about a real and just engagement with Other peoples, a common
ground of shared humanity must be discovered and recognized. Difference and shared humanity
must never be mistaken as mutually exclusive.



Works Cited
McAfee, Nolle. Julia Kristeva. London: Routledge, 2004.
Morton, Stephen. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. London, Routledge, 2003.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Can the Subaltern Speak? Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture.
Ed. Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. 271-
313.
---. Outside in the Teaching Machine. London: Routledge, 1993.