Spivak’s Fantasy of Silence: A Secular Look at Suicide

Abstract

Gayatri Spivak’s response to the attack of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2011, the event otherwise known as 9/11, was one of many responses that denote the event’s traumatic impact. In psychoanalytic terms, the psychic condition of trauma, identified by Lacan as the encounter with the real, is a shock which the subject initially misses; as such, the subject is compelled to make intelligible what was missed through what Lacan calls ‘fantasy.’ According to Zizek in Welcome to the Desert of the Real, the cinematic quality of the planes crashing into the towers, iterating the fantasies of Hollywood disaster films (16), pointed to a haunting in America of some historical trauma that returned in the real of 9/11 (17). Zizek’s reflection on 9/11 as a haunting in cinematic terms, pointing to a confluence of his scholarship and the event, sets a precedent for this paper’s focus on seeing in Spivak’s response to the suicide acts of 9/11 a haunting of the suicide rite of Sati in her earlier scholarship. This paper reviews Spivak’s representation of suicide in “Can the subaltern speak?” (1988) and “Terror: A Speech After 9/11” (2004), noting the non-coincidental echoes between these projects with respect to secularism and silence, affirming this paper’s proposal that in Spivak’s work, a trauma shared by western secular society is evident as a fantasy of silence.

Notes

1. In her Introduction to Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature, Kaplan (2005) explores expressions of trauma in the various responses to 9/11 within the city by citizens and media, in the immediate aftermath.

2. Zizek argued that the event had been prefigured in American disaster films like Indepedence Day; “in a way, America got what it fantasized about, and that was the biggest surprise” Žižek (2002, p. 15).

3. Spivak’s … brilliant upheavels of texts which expose the fabrications and exclusions in the writing of the archive, is directed at challenging the authority of the received historical record and restoring the effaced signs of native consciousness, and it is on these grounds that her project should be estimated, Parry (1987, p. 36).

4. “Maoism” here simply creates an aura of narrative specificity, which would be harmless rhetorical banality were it not that the innocent appropriation of the proper name “Maoism” for the eccentric phenomenon of French intellectual “Maoism” and subsequent “New Philosophy” symptomatically renders “Asia” transparent” (Spivak 1988, p. 272).

5. “The divine power is attested not only by religious tradition but is also found in present-day life in at least one sanctioned manifestation. The educative power, which in its perfected form stands outside the law, is one of its manifestations” Benjamin (1986, p. 297).

6. Since, as I argue in the paper, secularism is ideologically driven by Christianity, and Qutb’s engagement with secularism is obviously ideologically driven by Islamic thought, then his inversion of the trace of Christ’s resurrection in secularism, would involve refuting Jesus’ divine status as irrational. The ideological stand-off between Christianity and Islam does not change begging the question how effective reversal is in unbinding existing binds. This dynamic is described in his work, Social Justice in Islam (translated by John B Hardie. New York, NY: Octagon Books, 1970) in which he defends Islamic belief as promoting a Marxist-like politics ordained by God, long before Marxism was invented.

7. In Hyphen: Between Judaism and Christianity, Lyotard (1998) argued that the hyphenated “Judeo-Christian” subsumed Judaism into the new and better faith of Christianity.

8. In his conclusion to History and Meaning, Lowith argues that the eschatological vision of history began with Augustine (p. 191). Lowith’s project, one of many works criticizing secularism, was critiqued by Blumenberg in his Legitimacy; as far as Blumenberg was concerned, the Christian ground of secularism has legitimized modernity.

9. Gustavo Gutiérrez, the founding figure of the movement (1973) outlined how Marxism was used to politically frame values of equality and redemption in the Christian movement.

10. Mawdudi (1981). The name “Islam” comes from the etymological root “to submit” and reflects the human response to God’s will (p. 1). The word also means “peace” which, I would argue, operates in Spivak’s article as a counter-point to the violence she keeps at the margins of the text.

11. Asad notes: “The majority of Muslims have tended to regard even the deliberate seeking of martyrdom (talab al-shahada) as prohibited … Today this position is also that of the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia … Other muftis, such as the Egyptian Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, have taken a countrary view in the case of Palestinian suicide bombings” (2007, pp. 112–113).

12. In Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase, Talmon (1960) reviews messianism in 19th century France and highlights that, figures like St. Simon and Fourier, deeply influenced Marx’s ideas of social and political equality for his communist project. These messianic figures were returning to principles of equality and liberation from poverty laid out by St. Paul and the Gospels.

13. I do not mean to imply that Spivak is not aware of the Palestinian cause; in fact, earlier in the article she discusses the issue in relation to the American interest in invading Iraq in 2003: “It was troublesome to see how a debate presumably on our right to invade Iraq turned into such a rhetorical tirade against Palestine. (Here I would want to use stronger words.) The repetitive condemnation of Palestinians showed no ability to imagine them in a material context where Israel figured as anything other than ‘a good figure’” (Spivak 2004, p. 100).

14. Caruth (1996, p. 2) and Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI, 54.

15. This secular prejudice can be seen reinforced in her last work, “In Response,” in which she questions to what extent Scripture arbitrates desire and concludes: “the search for secularism as legal instrument of social justice that can accommodate the subaltern, a consuming interest only to be mentioned here” (Spivak 2010, pp. 235–236).

16. Spivak’s representation of Bhuvaneswari is strikingly parralleled in Paul’s representation of Jesus: “and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain.” (1 Corinthians 15:14).