Learning from de Man: Looking Back

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

I nd in the logic of parabasis a descriptive gure of action. This for me is the lesson of de Man. I ask the reader to bear this in mind as s/he reads the text of a speech I gave at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association in 2003, marking the twentieth anniversary of Paul de Mans death. Should one read gure this way, to account for ones own work, since the agenda is to indicate learning? De Man puts this with his usual elegance in his discussion of de-facement, although illusion of reference remains too binary for me: The autobiographical project . . . is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture. . . . And since the mimesis here assumed to be operative is one mode of guration among others, is the illusion of reference not a correlation of the structure of the gure, that is to say no longer clearly and simply a referent at all but something more akin to a ction which then, however, in its own turn, acquires a degree of referential productivity? 1
1. Paul de Man, Autobiography as De-Facement, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 69. Hereafter, this book is cited parenthetically as
boundary 2 32:3, 2005. Copyright 2005 by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

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One correlation with the structure of the gure, thats what I am talking about. It is more like grasping the narrative lineaments of the gure in this case describing stage practiceand seeing its instantiation in work as theater. As Kant says, if we want to make systematic unity under . . . logical principles . . . sense-perceptible [sinnlich], we regard every concept . . . as the standpoint of an observer, 2 looking out at horizons. Circle after circle, perhaps the origin of geometry, ellipses, parabolas, asymptotes, this last giving a model of reason always operating by approximation. And never access to a singularity. This may be where de Mans notion of endless supplementary superpositions, never a closure of adequate reading, comes from. At any rate, I am operating broadly thus. Making the logic of the gure sensuous. There are limits to this. Such a reading of a gure will not yield the singularity of the event. In the conclusion of this piece, I will signal some limit-markings in de Mans text. Shelley Disgured, where de Man, in the last year of his life, thought to have come furthest in venturing up to those limits (the only place where I come close to facing some of these questions about history and fragmentation is in the essay on Shelleys Triumph of Life [RR, ix]), operates the kind of grasping I signal above. Because the narrative in that essay is of signication, and the theater is the moves in reading, we tend not to notice the phenomenalization. Werner Hamacher, an astute reader, catches it, I think, and at least implies, in my view correctly, that referencemaking reading readingfor de Man is a transcendental deduction in the Kantian sense.3 But reading in de Mans way, learning from him, does not oblige one to that specic instantiation: reading the moves of reading the transcendental deduction of reference as a tracing of the rst endeavors of our power of cognition
RR. Referential productivity is discussed well by Satya Mohanty in his various defenses of reference, which I have had the good fortune of having heard as oral presentations. I would only add here that reference for de Man is a transcendental deduction in the Kantian sense. We translate it into the ethical by putting it this way: Language asks us to forget it and do what it says. For transcendental deduction, see Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Geyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 21923. This ethical translation is not a mistake, it is what we must do (220 21). But we must remember that if we want entitlement (Befugnis, Kants word) for our claims, we cannot prove it experientially, we must operate a transcendental deduction. I am not suggesting, of course, that reference is for Kant a transcendental deduction. For Kant, they are space and time (for the senses), and categories (for the understanding). 2. Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, 59899; translation modied. 3. Werner Hamacher, LECTIO: de Mans Imperative, in Reading de Man Reading, ed. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 19798.

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to ascend from individual perceptions to general concepts. . . . [T]he famous Lockes mistake.4 As I look back, I at least seem not to have considered it a substantive obligation. To read the social text, taking the risk of the imperative to reference as such, tracing the production of historical referentiality, may be bolder than the purists and acolytes might imagine. (In de Man, the historical reference is to Shelleys actual death, untheorizable into the text of the essay.) I will comment further on the matter of politics in conclusion. For now, let us examine the instantiation in Shelley Disgured. I will quote backwards from the end of de Mans essay. Notice the gure of interruption (parabasis) at work here as well. If in making logic sense-perceptible we cannot have access to the singular, when we are working from within the singular case that is a poem, we cannot generalize. (I myself happen not to agree with this. Never mind.) I believe this is why de Man commends Shelley: Reading as disguration, to the very extent that it resists historicism, turns out to be historically more reliable than the products of historical archaeology. To monumentalize this observation into a method of reading would be to regress from the rigor exhibited by Shelley which is exemplary precisely because it refuses to be generalized into a system (RR, 123). Now see how he describes the imperative to reference, to forget language as anything but a medium to understand by repeating (differently, of course, for in that gap reference rises, and repeating-with-difference is a species of effacement). It is not a pathology but an enabling madness, whose enablement de Man does not quite acknowledge: To read is to understand, to question, to know, to forget, to erase, to deface, to repeatthat is to say, the endless prosopopoeia by which the dead are made to have a face and a voice which tells the allegory of their demise and allows us to apostrophize them in our turn, no degree of knowledge can ever stop this madness, for it is the madness of words (RR, 122). Cognition as necessary madness. I can relate this (without conation) with Derridas reading of a good moment in Levinas, quoting myself reading that reading: The law of curvaturethat one cannot access another directly and with a guarantee (by appresentational analogy only, Husserl will write)is not a deterrent to politics.5 . . . If you call the imperative
4. Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, 221. 5. This is an important moment in Husserl, for Derrida. In Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999]), for example, it is precisely through this that he connects Husserlian phenome-

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to straighten the curvecourbure into droiturea madness, it is a madness that writes the history of politics.6 [T]he instant of decision must remain heterogeneous to all knowledge as such, to all theoretical or constative determination, even if it may and must be preceded by all possible science and conscience. . . . [P]ractical performativity is irreducible to any theorem. . . . Without the possibility of radical evil, of perjury, and of absolute crime, no responsibility, no freedom, no decision. . . . How this madness can then negotiate with what it is not, protect and translate itself in the good sense of things, in proofs, guarantees, concepts, symbols, in a politics, in this politics and not another, this is the whole of history, of what is called history. 7 Any political philosophy that does not take this grounding errancy into account will cover over the impossibility of simple collectivities with various ruses. For Schmitt this errancy is not only not a ground, it is a gap to be bridged. As Slavoj iek observes, the core of Schmitts argumentationthe decision which bridges this gap [between a normative order and actual life] is not a decision for some concrete order, but primarily the decision for the formal principle of order as such. 8 In Shelleys absence, the task . . . of reinscribing the disguration now devolves entirely on the reader (RR, 121), writes de Man. Like many readers of de Man, I nd this relay encouraging and especially so because
nology and Levinasian ethics: a certain interruption of phenomenology by itself already imposed itself upon Husserl, though he did not, it is true, take note of it as an ethical necessity. . . . [T]his became necessary in the Cartesian Meditations precisely when it was a question of the other; of an alter ego that never makes itself accessible except by way of an appresentational analogy and so remains radically separated, inaccessible to originary perception. . . . Levinas himself considers this interruption of self to be a paradox . . . [that] requires a description that can be formed only in ethical language (5153). We are in the arena, therefore, not of the stoppage of politics but of the relationship between ethics and politics that is crucial to Derridas work. 6. The relationship between originary curvature regured into responsible uprightness is one of the basic insights of Levinas and is pervasively discussed in Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Thus does Derrida put Carl Schmitts Christo-Hellenism out of joint without substituting Hebraism for it. 7. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (New York: Verso, 1997), 21920. 8. Slavoj iek, Carl Schmitt in the Age of Post-Politics, in The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, ed. Chantal Mouffe (New York: Verso, 1999), 18; my emphasis. The quotation from myself is from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Schmitt and Post-Structuralism: A Response, Cardozo Law Review 21, no. 56 (May 2000): 172728. The last three footnotes are embedded in the self-quotation.

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here the gure of interruption is taken out of the mostly verbal text into the world where things happen. Shelleys death, which happens for everyone but Shelley, as de Mans, for all others, including me. The examples I will append will show, I hope, that by historical happenstance and inuence, I chose the indeniteness of lives to come rather than the nitude of a death; in hindsight and in a setting-to-work, attempted to keep on substituting the a of a-venir, for the a of differance. 9 The autobiographical moment, de Man writes, happens as an alignment between the two subjects involved in the process of reading in which they determine each other by mutual reexive substitution (RR, 70). Happens, not is. Autobiography as event. All autobiography happens in the species of inuence-study, where a third (structural correlate) negotiates the alignment. Here the name of that third is Paul de Man. The restoration of mortality by (auto)biography (the prosopopeia [bestowal of a face as mask] of the voice and the name) deprives and disgures to the precise extent that it restores (RR, 81; I have placed the rst parentheses). I have difculty with to the precise extent. Yet I must remind the reader that what follows must be read under the austere sign of de-facement. And indeed, of a possible disobedience. As Deborah Esch reminds us, an analysis of Wordsworths Essays Upon Epitaphs like that undertaken in Autobiography as DeFacement can disclose that the text counsels against the use of its own main gure. 10 How much of the transaction of reading is transgression? The lightly edited text of the 2003 MLA speech now follows.
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I learned of de Mans death at the MLA in 1983. As usual, I was just back from Asia. I had said to him before leaving that I would see him upon my return. His last words to me were: That will be delightful. I met him in 1961 when I came to Cornell for a PhD in English. I was nineteen years old. There was no academic feminism or multiculturalism. It was four years before Lyndon Johnson would lift the quota in 1965, which would lead to an exponential increase in Asian immigration. There was no other South Asian, male or female, in the English department, the department of comparative literature, classics, and any of the modern language departments. I was relentlessly exoticized by bad low-grade gender politics and, on occasion, advances from faculty that would qualify today
9. Jacques Derrida, Voyous (Paris: Galile, 2003), 154. 10. Deborah Esch, A Defence of Rhetoric / The Triumph of Reading, in Reading de Man Reading, 74.

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as sexual harassment. De Mans unquestioning and civilized recognition that I was merely intelligent was my food and shelter. It would be difcult to convey to you how very unusual this was. It is a racialized perspective that nds racism more troubling than classism or sexism. I initially wondered if I should mention this. But when yesterday, at an occasion mourning a feminist pathnder, a photographer treated fourteen senior feminists in a way that Mary Daly called belittling befriending, and we tolerated him for the sake of good form, I pondered again the relationship between the millennially practiced everyday low-grade degradation of not-men on the one hand, and what Hannah Arendt calls radical evil on the other, and decided that I would begin this way. I could not then understand everything de Man said in his seminars. But two things were coherent with sustained instruction I had received from teachers at Calcutta University: an insistence on literal reading in the general sense, and a refusal to mistake the textual representation of the lineaments of a desire as proof of its fulllment. I left Cornell in the fall of 65 to take up my rst job as assistant professor of English at the University of Iowa. De Man had not yet met Derrida. I started reading Derrida on my own in 67. Mikel Borch-Jakobsen found it difcult to believe that I didnt know Derridas name in 1967. Think again of the academic scene I described. For most, I was a piece of exotica, the proverbial monkey that could speak Latin. For de Man, a smart, young foreign student who had been successfully placed in her rst job. There was no fax, no personal computer, no telephone message machines, no overnight mail, and of course no e-mail, no Internet. Why would I know? During that decade, what I had learned from de Man began to percolate in my head and heart, infused by an untutored reading of Derrida. Remember that I knew almost no French. Because this rumination and percolation took place away from his classroom, I never learned to make de Manian moves in my actual reading. In 1972, I heard myself mentioned in public (after the publication of Allgorie et histoire de la posie in Potique 11) for the rst time, by an unknown person at an MLA session, coupled with Paul de Man as one of the sons of Walter Benjamin. De Man came to Iowa from time to time to give talks at my invitation. On one of these occasions, in the English Department lounge, in the post-talk milling crowd, he muttered to me about The Rhetoric of Temporality: I hadnt read Der11. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Allgorie et histoire de la posie: hypothse de travail, Potique 8 (1971): 42744.

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rida yet. 12 I went to Yale regularly. On one of these visits, de Man introduced me to Edward Said. I am not a scholar of de Man. I am his student, perhaps his rst PhD. I have not engaged with the posthumous publications much. For me the penny dropped with Allegories of Reading, published in 1979.13 I remember now with some amusement that Michael Ryan thought I was hiding the book because I did not want to share its riches. It is this book that has become for me timely. Indeed, my not-quite-not-disgurement of the de Manian gure of parabasis, borrowed from Schlegel borrowing from the theatrical practice of Attic comedy, is itself an allegory of reading. Reading here is also a gure, for a transactional or performative relationship with the social fabric, the social textile, the social text.
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I have often remarked on the dizzying chain of mis-citations in the one place where Marx speaks of the proletarian revolution as subject, in The Eighteenth Brumaire.14 Let us look at the staging of parabasis in de Man with the same eye. This vigilance relates for me to Kants caution. One cannot proceed to the singularity of an event by direct application of a gure.15 As I write, it seems to me that Jacques Derridas general suggestion (at least as I understand it) that practice norms theory, again and again (for this the reference can only be passim), belongs to this family. This then leads on to the thinking of singularity as repetition of difference. The event is singular. Practice is a repetition of theorywith a difference that makes repetition iteration. I offer this to halt the charge of evasiveness. Careful staging can be read as a persistent caution against the vanguardism of theory from some practitioners of theory. This is also contained within de Mans aphorism Nothing can overcome the resistance to theory since theory is itself
12. Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Temporality, in Blindness and Insight (New York: Routledge, 1989), 187228. 13. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979). 14. Karl Marx, Surveys from Exile, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Vintage, 1973), 150. For my reading, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Other Asias (Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming). 15. Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, 599. In an extended format, I would have to account for the slippage from individual to event.

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this resistance. 16 Nothing is more dangerous than theory seen as purely applicable. Cultural revolutions hang in there. In the very last pages of Allegories, de Man offers us parabasis as an alternative namecan also be calledfor anacoluthon in the language of representational rhetoric. 17 That is the rst remove: not a name but a nickname as it were, a.k.a. The trajectory of anacoluthon/parabasis name/nickname and vice versais comparable. In a second, not the rst, footnote on the word, anacoluthon is given in Rousseaus description, reported, not cited, by Corancez, of a passage in Tasso, only tentatively located a century later. Many more removes now. What happens on the page is prose: Second footnote, not the primary reference; a cited description of a text, not a denition, and that without the authority of the author; the citation a report delayed in time and uncertain in provenance. Permanent parabasis itself is given as a slight extension of Friedrich Schlegels formulation, not its exact citation, not even its extension, but a slight extension. The similarity betweenno longer the substitutability ofanacoluthon and parabasis stems from the fact that the gures interrupt the expectations of a given . . . movement (emphasis mine). It is this interruption that de Man calls, in the text, the undoing, in other words, of understanding (emphasis mine). It is this bit of text, broken by all these interruptions and reminders of discontinuity, that has become for me the description of the resistance tting our time. I am obsessed by this. Like Freud on Oedipus, I am obliged to say, If you think this is an ide xe, I am helpless. Schlegels fragment is a declarative unconnected to what comes before and after that can, therefore, only be displaced: Die Ironie ist eine permanente parekbase.18 As the person from Porlock, who broke Coleridges dream of Kubla Khan, I offer background: Attic comedy had an infrastructural model of the chorus repeatedly breaking up the main action.
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I will proceed to give a handful of examples, the rst two in some detail. The examples should be read as instantiations of the narrative lineaments of parabasis, a legacy from my teacher, down the long line of iterations, recognized after the fact: not-quite-not disgurations.
16. Paul de Man, Resistance to Theory, in Resistance to Theory, ed. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 19. 17. De Man, Allegories of Reading, 300301. 18. Friedrich Schlegel, Fragment 668, in Kritische Ausgabe, Band 18, Philosophische Lehrjahre, 17961806, ed. Ernst Behler (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schningh, 1962), 85.

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At the convention, I referred back to work already in the public domain to emphasize that the instantiations were not trotted forward to t the occasion. I see no reason to look for new examples now. The rst instantiation of parabasis is the Bangladeshi peasant interrupting the reasonable plans of the Flood Action Program, building huge embankments. It comes from an article published in boundary 2 : Living in the rhythm of water, the Bangladeshi peasant long sowed two types of rice paddy seed. One of them survived submerged in water, the other came to full growth after the season of rain and ood. In 1971, agricultural reformers introduced a different variety of rice for a single high-yield crop. In the intervening years, the peasant has quietly and gradually shifted the time of sowing of this modern crop to Phalgun-Chaitro (FebruaryMarch). As was their established custom, accommodating the play of land and water, they now sow pulses and vegetables before this. And now, at the reaping time of the new crop, the old ood-seed is sown, so that in the rain and ood-time, the elds are once again full of that submersible paddy.19 (By contrast, the land protected from water by the embankments loses the fertilizing algae, thus providing an opportunity for the enhancement of the debt trap and the destruction of the ecobiome by the peddling of chemical fertilizers.) I hesitate to call this silent interruption ood management by exporting a metaphor of Nature as the great laboratorium, the arsenal which furnishes both means and material of labor . . . , coming from (what is confusedly called) European culture, producing an evolutionary account.20 I hesitate to denominate the responsible deconstruction (learning critique from within leading to a new setting to work, as in Derridas reading of Heidegger) as technology transfer, as if a gift from a superior civilization. Count this interruption in the nature of a permanent parabasis, the peasants rather than the philosophers disarticulated rhetoric, a setting-to-work, not an explication, of the philosophers dream. Ask the question again: what exactly does the fullled dream of Reason bring about on its way? If the subaltern offers us, say, learning, and the ecological deconstructor supplements this with internalized
19. I am grateful to Muhammad Ghulam Mustafa Dulal for providing these details of quiet change in connection with a ood-management project with compartments controlled by locks. I cannot of course claim that such changes have taken place all over Bangladesh. 20. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage, 1973), 471; translation modied.

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knowledge from the main text of knowledge about knowledge, in the absence of deep infrastructural involvement, the best it will provide, for the subaltern, is uninstructed information command, at worst, only command. Parabasis is no longer a formal possibility. Good imperialism works by destroying what is, no doubt confusedly, called culture, in this case a popular culture, traditional learning and knowledge, traditional agronomic patterns, and, what I have left until last, the traditional pattern of subaltern womens freedom on the impermanent oating islands, or chors.21 In place of the destroyed culture of learning, a continually expanding amount of money continues to be spent, on the aid-debt model, to collect hydrological data, as if nothing had been known. A large section of the post-colonial subjects of Bangladesh is, of course, crazy about Geographical Information Systems, and not in the service of accountable reason. They provide the Euro-US main text the opportunity to invoke the Bangladeshis as willing beneciaries and silence all critique as merely romantic,
21. These points were presented by Mushrefa Mishu, president of the Bangladesh Student Unity Forum, at the conference. I hope the reader will forgive a long quotation, inserted into this already too-long essay, to illustrate the relay from Imperialism to Development and the continuity of subaltern insurgency, a permanent parabasis: By the mid-eighteenth century, the Bengalis had extensively engineered the delta, both to protect against oods and to ensure that the silt-bearing river-waters could fertilize and irrigate elds. The rst Britons to travel across the delta reported seeing thousands of kilometres of canals and embankments. . . . What they never realised, says Willcocks [the imperial water engineer who rst made sense of the structures in a report published in 1930] was that the primary purpose of the canals was to irrigate and fertilise the land of the delta. . . . The British oversaw the gradual destruction of the ancient feudal system under which landlords forced peasants to maintain the dykes and clear the canals. . . . As the canals silted up, they began to overow and became, for the British, a menace to the country. Inspectors were appalled to see that the peasant farmers continued to cut holes in the canal banks during the ood season. Ignorant of the fact that the breaches fertilised elds, they banned this practice. For many years, there were running battles between gangs of peasants who set out each night to cut holes in the canals, and the British police, who tried to stop them. . . . Willcocks concluded with proposals for the restoration of the ancient works, in order to bring in again the health and wealth which central [the larger part of todays Bangladesh ood-plain] and west Bengal once enjoyed. . . . The ancient works took many years to construct. They were built, moreover, in small steps, bending to the will of the rivers at each stage. It was a training, rather than a taming, of the rivers. The Bangladeshi authorities and their foreign advisers today show neither the patience nor the contrition to adopt such an approach. They want to mould the rivers to their design (Fred Pearce, The Dammed: Rivers, Dams, and the Coming World Water Crisis [London: The Bodley Head, 1992], 243 45). The peasants and shers are still cutting embankments.

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humanities-based, and impractical. This parabasis is thus no longer operative because of the hybrid seeds/chemical fertilizer/pesticide combo that ruins soil and water.22 This brings us to the sense that irony is an undoing of understanding only so that understanding can repeat its aberration. The leader of the chorus begins to dominate, the main play resumes, in order for another interruption to occur, for a discontinuous resistance to come forth. There is a metonymic displacement of the main play itself. Many removes.
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If, on the other hand, there were to be infrastructural involvement, so that the subaltern were inserted on the circuit of hegemony, can this socially empowered subject engage in the homeopathic use of abstract average labor, labor as commodity, labor-powerMarxs formula for the socialized worker? 23 How can we think of using that poison as medicine in our time? We have to remember that labor-power was such a useful thing because it, among all commodities, made economically negotiable value when used up. Value, simple and contentless, is just a form in use when things are made commensurable. Because Deleuze and Guattari felt that the idea of value in Marx was an extremely potent idea, which Althusser tended to ignore or dismiss, they redid or rethought the idea of value as that which gives a common measure by way of the word desire. Desire was not tied to an individual subject, not to a subject at all, but was a kind of misnomer for something that ran everything. I feel that the risks of choosing such a psychologically weighted word are too great. Today we can think of data as such a ubiquitous empty word. Thats the substance of value now. If everything is put into data-form, it becomes commensurable in terms of the system, the nancialization of the globe. But Marx thought that the valuething lost substantiality. How does that gure? What is it for data to be de-substantialized? 24 There is not room enough here to go into this, but I will hint at an
22. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Responsibility, boundary 2 21, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 5557. The last three footnotes are embedded in the self-quotation. I have changed the end of the passage to bring it up to date. 23. For a discussion of this homeopathy, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, From Haverstock Hill Flat to US Classroom, Whats Left of Theory? in Whats Left of Theory?: New Work on the Politics of Literary Theory, ed. Judith Butler et al. (New York: Routledge, 2000), 140. 24. Here I quote from Position without Identity, Positions (forthcoming).

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answer. The re-substantialization of data in resistance is much like the defetishization of the commodity. If it is understood by the empowered social subject that data is generalized labor-power, that is where the homeopathic use of self-abstractionMarxs lesson of the transformation of the worker into agent of production in class-consciousnessmight allow the new subaltern to unpack and confront TRIPS and TRIMS (Trade-Related Intellectual Property and Trade-Related Investment Measures), to turn crisis into strategy, command into information command. Telecommunication (in the narrow sense) might then be re-substantialized, interrupting nancialization. As in the case of all formulas, let us keep this subject contained within Kants law. We cannot proceed to unmediated examples here. The pharmakon is a gure. This second example, the turning of capitalism into socialism as strategy-driven globalization, cannot be advanced without the reminder that no socialist can be against the promises of globalization. That they must be false promises necessarily belongs to the straining of capital toward capitalism. The instantiation of permanent parabasis in this instance is in the push and pull between promise and false promise. Socialist strategy wrenches capitalist globalization. But socialists and capitalists alike are cynically benevolent and clueless about the need for the humanities in this battle. In theory, the only difference between capitalism and socialism is in the redistributive impulse of the human beings who run the state. For both systems to work, capital-formation, the driving force of globalization, must take place. And redistribution is against self-interest. It cannot happen without a highly trained sympathetic imagination. And the imagination is nourished by the slow learning of the others language, with the memory of that rst learning in the works. The learning of ones rst language (the native language, the mother tongue, marked by birth) is at once slow and fast, linked, as the philosophers of articial intelligence and neural networking tell us, to the very telecommunication (in the general sense) that needs to make uniform the multiplicity of languages. The very forces we are ghting will make sure that not everybody will have access to the powerful uniformity of a global language. As among the rural poor, so here, imagination is potentially fostered in this lack of access. Humanities teaching must supplement this and transform the lack into an excess, the excess of the multiplicity of languages.25 In other words, the
25. Some of this is quoted from The Future of the Humanities in a Fragmented World (paper presented at the MLA Annual Convention, Philadelphia, Pa., December 2730, 2004).

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humanities must operate a permanent parabasis on the tug of war between the two protagonists for globalization, so that false promise can continue to become promising. If this model is displaced into the theater of imperial war as we know it now, the discontinuous interruption of guerrilla insurgency and suicide bombing cannot be a self-destructive last instance. It is in this despair that I bring up another feature of the de Manian parabasis. It is not merely an undoing, but a systematic undoing. I can defend my long-standing engagement with details of rural literacy as an attempt at such a systematic undoing. This is not my research. It is interruptive hands-on training of subaltern teachers, breaking into the main text represented, let us say, by the MLA.26 I will mark the mention of it here as an interruptive moment, remind my readers that theory is its own resistance, and close by referring myself back to the main text, and, even if bringing news from the outside, remain in this teaching machine, here. The MLA again, then. At the presidential forum in 2003, I was attempting to wrench secularism from its ruts. The subtext of that effort would allude to Lalan Shah Fakir (17741890), who undid the division between Islam and Hinduism. Lalan wrote the scene of woman within the way of bhakti or devotion, widely recognized as a historical challenge from within to the caste-xed inexibility of high Hinduism.27 Bhakti, creating affective links between the subject and the polytheist mindset, inscribes and assigns the subjects position within a taxonomy of phenomenal affect: the Sanskrit word bhakti literally invokes this taxonomic division. When Lalan iconized the eleven wives of Muhammad as worshiping him in the servants way, he was not guilty of naturalistic sexism (see note 17). He utilized rather the various assigned subject-positions within the text of bhakti, themselves undoubtedly related to the highly detailed taxonomy of the rasa s (names of implied affective responses to texts) available within the general Indic aes26. A description of this work can be found in my essay Righting Wrongs, in Human Rights, Human Wrongs: Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2001, ed. Nicholas Owen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 168227. 27. The task here is to transfer Gauri Viswanathans extraordinary argument about the resistances of converts to the erasure of their subjectivity (Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998], 17), mutatis mutandis, to a precolonial setting.

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thetic.28 Dasya or servant-ness is one of the affective roles cultivable within the script of bhakti. It is not a natural attitude to be developed as a virtue, and it is not gendered. Bhakti is thus a parabasis or interruptive irony of rule-bound high Hinduism as well as of the advaita (Hindu non-dual or monistic) mindset. It seems to me more and more that permanent parabasis may be a name for the most effective and plural way of dealing, from below, with the repeated mortal experience of nonpassage to the other side.29 The plurality in this plural way is fragile and irreducibly unevendependent upon an institution that can be as amorphous as culture (gendering plus religion? I risk a denition of cultures bottom line) that it interrupts, of which we can speak only by begging the question. This comes from a piece published in Cultural Critique.30
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I have now testied to the presence of the narrative instantiation of permanent parabasis in my work. I came to it through attention to Paul de Mans staging of the history of this gure. Yet, if I were committed to any and all interruptions to the hegemonic order, my politics would be different. How then make substantive judgments? That is where understanding and irony change places and understanding, mere reasonableness as our ally, itself interrupts the state of suspended ignorance where we end up if we stay with literature and its criticism, as de Man avowedly does. In his preface, de Man diagnoses this as a shift, not an enda shift from historical denition to the problematics of reading . . . typical of my generation, . . . of most interest in its results than in its causes 31careful words, camouaging the causes as uninteresting. Yet, the pugnacious literalism that this teacher taught makes this student sniff at those very causes: shifting a generation born in Europe in the twenties away from historical denition
28. For the sheer multiplicity of the rasa s, see Venkatarama Raghavan, The Number of Rasa-s (Madras: Adyar Library, 1975). 29. In From Haverstock Hill, for instance, I have suggested this as a description of actually existing counter-globalist struggles in the Southern hemisphere (Whats Left of Theory, 31). 30. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Moving Devi, Cultural Critique 47 (Winter 2001): 12627. The last three footnotes are embedded in the self-quotation. 31. De Man, Allegories of Reading, lx.

Spivak / Learning from de Man 35

to a problematics of reading which, for them, remained contained within the canonical principles of literary history. Critics have noted these words, of course, and tted them in with other instances of contrast between history and language. No one, however, seems to have noticed that de Man is speaking not just of himself but his generation. My generation was born when de Mans generation was irting with fascism, the uninteresting cause of a subsequent shift from history to reading. We came of age outside of Europe, when their war, where we fought for our masters, inaugurated the end of territorial imperialism. I am now nearly as old as de Man was when he died. Typical of my generation is this concern for preserving the dreams of postcoloniality in the face of globalization. It is the story of that parabasis that I have told in these pages: displacing the lesson of Paul de Man to another theater. De Man goes on to say that the shift from history to reading typical of his generation could, in principle, lead to a rhetoric of reading reaching beyond the canonical principles of literary history which still serve, in this book, as the starting point of their own displacement. 32 Reaching beyond. Displaced to another place. How far beyond? As far as I pull, in these times? Altogether elsewhere? You judge.

32. An almost identical statement is made in the introduction to The Rhetoric of Romanticism (viiix), without the generational reference, but with the poignant metaphor of taking refuge in more theoretical inquiries into the problems of gural language.