From: "Samuel Durrant" <durrant-AT-ENGLISH.NOVELL.LEEDS.AC.UK>
Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2001 10:44:15 GMT0BST
Subject: Re: spivak


<color><param>0100,0100,0100</param>Dear Maci


Please do ask some specific questions about Spivak's book--I too 
could do with some help in mulling it over and it would be nice to 
hear what people have to say (assuming, perhaps over-
optimistically, that we can steer clear of the 'she's wilfully obscure' 
debate).  It is very hard going, but it's not a book that a 
postcolonialist can responsibly ignore. You might try moving on to 
the literature section--its much easier (at least for literature people), 
it 'fleshes out' her argument, and I think she is sometimes a brillliant 
reader of literary texts--and then go back, if needs be, to the first 
section.  It's not a book that demands to be read in a linear fashion.


Foreclosure is--as you have guessed--a key term in her argument 
about the location of the subaltern.  It's a psychoanalytic term that 
relates to primary repression, to that which is structurally excluded 
from the symbolic (or from any given discourse), to that which never, 
so to speak, gets a look in. maybe we should return to her text and 
see how she is using it, bearing in mind her maverick, Derridean 
relation to psychoanalysis. Do you have a particular passage in 
mind?


[ A really useful essay on foreclosure is the first part of Lyotard's<underline> 
Heidegger and 'the jews'</underline> where he claims that 'the jews' are the 
Forgotten of European thought--the capital F of Forgotten indicating 
that this is a primary repression that structures European thought--a 
'pre-historical' act of Forgetting.  If 'the jews' were simply forgotten 
(small f corresponding to secondary repression), if the act of 
forgetting took place within history, then 'the jews' could be 
remembered and their subjectivity recovered.   For Lyotard it is not 
possible to recover 'the jews' as subjects anymore than it is 
possible to recover a subaltern subject for Spivak; both are anti-
historicists, precisely because historicism tends to assume that 
everything is recoverable and that there is no such thing as 
foreclosure.]


I'm sure I've just muddied the waters some more....


Sam.

<nofill>
Samuel Durrant
Lecturer, School of English
Leeds University, Leeds LS2 9JT.
Tel 0113 233 4768
Fax 0113 233 4774


     --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---