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

Revisiting Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak” through the lens of affect theory

“…As Principe (2013) further observes, "Spivak returns in 1999 to the ambivalence of her concluding thoughts in the 1988 version of the article, with a qualified retraction: the subaltern is speaking all the time, she stresses, but western history has made her mute" (p. 240). In other words, the moment the subaltern enters western culture, privileged with political representation and artistic/philosophical re-presentation, she disappears (Spivak, 2010, p. 65).…”

“…In other words, the moment the subaltern enters western culture, privileged with political representation and artistic/philosophical re-presentation, she disappears (Spivak, 2010, p. 65). In that respect, explains Principe (2013), the critics' assertions that Spivak has silenced the subaltern or that she has essentialized a silenced description of the subaltern "miss Spivak's political interest not in 'preserving subalternity' by retrieving her trace from history where it does not even exist; but, rather, in exposing the violence by which the subaltern's silence is enforced by the hegemonic order" (p. 240). The tools of representation (and re-presentation) that Spivak refers to expose: […] the incommensurability between the terms of the investigator's analytics and the subaltern as "object" of investigation.…”