Your episteme is my abstraction, and we'll keep it

Nobody is invested here, it is said.  Nobody wants to risk taking a firm stand for Spivak.  As Terry Eagleton once announced, in post-colonial studies this dilemma is itself practically a cliché.  One must renounce just in order to belong (meanwhile "individualization belies a collective lifestyle," Ulrich Beck has muttered).  Very well though, let me play the role, or play at the role, at least (we are all role players here, to some degree, as everyone surely knows; bloggers are not serious).  There is a sort of enviable gravity to the sacrificial victim, after all.  Still, I've very little genuine desire to play at being, as Eagleton also gibes, "that ultimate source of embarrassment, [the] devoted acolyte."

Nevertheless.  Here's something I think is pretty fucking great.  I found it, just now, using Google.  It's about painting, about a condition of language even, as painting, and it comes toward the end of a rather short and good, year-old essay by Aveek Sen:

It is, therefore, in the necessary speechlessness of painting, its circumvention of language (though not of signification), that Chandana sought a different kind of resolution to the problem of representation. Her struggle was to find a silence that would do justice to another woman’s silence, and then to let these two silences create a presence that would be proxy as well as portrait.  The silence of her painting is more absolute than reticence for reticence (“I know, but I choose not to speak”) comes on its own high horse.  But this is the silence of what the work cannot say, the assertion of an incapacity, a negative capability.  “We exist on different planes,” Chandana would say about herself and Shondhadi. But she kept trying to describe to me the feel of the thickness and softness of pigments as the brush pressed them, layer upon layer, over the stretched, but yielding canvass. That feel is, for her, the sensual, even sexual, correlative of what she called “the merging of existences” in the making of a picture — existences that otherwise must remain painfully and awfully apart...

Spivak has often used the term "persistent critique" as a way of explaining 'deconstruction' to (notoriously) overworked and underpaid, impatient grad students.  Here's how it appears in print (or at least in the version of an interview, more precisely that which is published in The Spivak Reader):

Deconstruction does not say there is no subject, there is no truth, there is no history.  It simply questions the privileging of identity so that someone is believed to have the truth.  It is not the exposure of error.  It is constantly and persistently looking into how truths are produced.  That's why deconstruction doesn't say logocentrism is a pathology, or metaphysical enclosures are something you can escape.  Deconstruction, if one wants a formula is, among other things, a persistent critique of what one cannot not want.  And in that sense, yes, it's right there at the beginning.

The double negative would seem rather crucial.  This would seem to imply, among other things, that we are always-already (AA) alienated, and not just by Capital (though Eagleton will object), but also within language itself, for instance.  I happen to agree.

Spivak's "style" could probably be described in many ways, some more entertaining or charitable, or ever negatively capable than others.  (Regarding which, tell me dear reader, do you really prefer the Keats or the Harpers)?  Let us conjure the image of devout Spivakians swaying, to the cadence of her prose, a veritable fog bank issuing from her sacred mouth and folding itself over the folded hands of the audience, &c.  It all sounds very mystical, this suspension of critical felicity, if you like that sort of thing.

This is a false reading, of course, but one with which Spivak does sometimes flirt, it seems to me (cf. flirtation vs. seduction, in various feminist readings of Derrida).  She's practically famous for these pithy, oxymoronic fragments, or near-aphorisms, qualifications often posing as simplistic reversals, such as "productive bafflement," and so on.  The point she is attempting to make, consistently I believe, is however serious.  And she's been nothing if not generous in trying to explain it. 

Without excusing anything, I wonder, is there any sense in speaking, albeit, or at least in my case, wistfully, of a reading that is beyond charitable, or charitable nearly to a fault?  To a point where charity may clear a space for something other than charity, as patronizing tolerance?  That suspends its judgment of each sentence, not in the service of any pure poetic, sublime, or High Romantic ideal, but rather in order to grant the other every possible chance of freedom, in its fundamental mystery to oneself; to grant the other, if only provisionally, every imaginable benefit of the doubt?  Perhaps these are not all the same thing, you will object (really, it's ok; we're just painting here).

A serious question, it seems to me, is whether some negative capability (of another sort than Keats himself may not have glimpsed entirely) isn't required as a gesture of good faith that necessarily gets the relation–any relation–going.

One might also consider, attempting to be as charitable as possible (and assuming there is some value in so doing), that the question of styles (in the plural, of course), and of rhetoric, are not simply mundane.

In any case John singles out this passage, from "Scattered Speculations" (what a horrid title):

In closing, I will invoke the very threshold, the second paragraph of this essay, where I write: "The ‘idealist’ and the ‘materialist’ are both exclusive predications." All predications are exclusive and thus operate on the metonymic principle of a part standing for the putative whole: "As soon as one retains only a predicate of the circle (for example, return to the point of departure, closing off the circuit), its signification is put into the position of a trope, of metonymy if not metaphor" [Derrida, "White Mythology" 264]. In this sense, the "idealist" and the "materialist" predications of the subject are metonyms of the subject.

 

Without getting hung up on the "all predications are exclusive" bit (seemingly she means this in a certain sense), one could probably do worse than begin with Christopher Norris (forgive me, these buffering blockquotes are certainly death to blog, but Spivak cites "White Mythology" in her essay, so then why not briefly revisit it, via Norris):

Thus Derrida is not for one moment suggesting that just because Aristotle  has recourse to metaphor - or to metaphor-related notions like resemblance, mimesis, the 'perception of similarity', etc. - at crucial points in his argument, therefore his entire ontology and epistemology (along with his logic, metaphysics, and conception of enquiry in the natural or physical sciences) comes down to nothing more than a series of figural tropes and substitutions, indifferent with regard to their truth-content or capacity for conceptual elucidation and critique.  Nor is he committed to the absurd view that truth and reality just are what we make of them according to this or that favoured rhetoric, language-game, discourse, vocabulary, or whatever. Such a doctrine could be extracted from 'White Mythology' only by ignoring those many passages - among them the sections on Aristotle, Canguilhem, and Bachelard - that offer a precise and detailed account of the critical epistemology of metaphor and its role in the process of scientific knowledge-production. [...]

[A]gain, we shall mistake Derrida's purpose - or (not to beg the intentionalist question) the logic of his argument in 'White Mythology' - if we read such passages as opening the way to a wholesale metaphorization of philosophy, or a levelling of the metaphor/concept distinction that would view it as merely a symptomatic instance of this drive for the 'reappropriation' of metaphor by the philosophic will-to-truth.  For there could then be no accounting for that other (often strongly counter-intuitive) process of conceptual 'rectification' that enables scientific metaphors, models, and analogies to bring about genuine advances in our knowledge of physical objects, processes, and events. Empson makes the point succinctly when he remarks - in a review of E.A. Burtt's book The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science - that 'it is unsafe to explain discovery in terms of a man's intellectual preconceptions, because the act of discovery is precisely that of stepping outside preconceptions

Well I thought that was pretty interesting.  It's not often Derrida and Empson get together in the same essay.

It is also rather crucial, I think, to wager the strong possibility that Spivak, like Derrida, is aligned more on the "side" of The Enlightenment than "against" it.  That is, if we are going to allow this word to breath, perhaps, and to have a future.  Of course this demands to be qualified (and dare one say it, complicated), but it's a self-positioning that deserves to be taken seriously.  To wit:

Secularism is not an episteme...In fact the two eighteenth century ideas that have served us so well, the separation of church and state and also the privatization of religion, that served us so well, are in fact not working for this violent world today.  That does not mean that we throw secularism away.  That means that we do not mistake secularism for an episteme.  Secularism is an impoverished, abstract system that must be protected as such.  Teaching tolerance is not secularism (teaching tolerance is good), yet there are many (don't teach intolerance!)...but there are many, many examples which would show that you cannot tolerate without non-de-transcendentalizing the religion within which you stand.  Everything else is de-transcendentalized and tolerated...

The person who doesn't at all believe in religion as a system of belief (which is me) are not, is not necessarily tolerant; nothing matters...so what would you be tolerant of?  It's a non-problem.  I mean, you're respectful of cultural differences systems, etc. because it's a good thing to be, and you like literature, you treasure the imagination and imaginative constructs, but on the other hand, it's not tolerance. 

And I'm not taking myself as an example.  In fact the privatization of religion works fine for me.  The separation of church and state works fine for me, because I'm a certain kind of class product.  But to think that it is by imposing what works for me, that I'm going to win a secular world...I think I would be completely blind.  So in that context, the idea of producing a possibility where secularism is protected as small r-reason as our ally, within (again the agent-subject problem) within a much richer acknowledgment of the imagination...

I can't epand on this now, but... I go to Kant not because I think Modernity began with the Enlightenment.  I go to Kant because Kant's sense of the public sphere is not based on a separation of public and private, and also...here, in his very late work, he actually saw that some de-transcendentalization had to take place in order for a real secularism to work, and he actually made grace itself into the effective and effect....

Kant had problems, he thought Christianity was the best religion (although he was  trying to be very tolerant...and that's the problem with being tolerant)...Christianity was the best religion, both historically and in its message, and the best world would be patriarchal, those are mistakes, but nonetheless...

 

I must say, I like Spivak's style, especially in person.  Perhaps she takes herself too seriously, at times (who doesn't).  Less a mechanical exercise of privilege, though, her "style" seems to me, most charitably, a practice of persistent and uncompromising 'wonder', that is to say above all, a wonder at this impure silence conditioning relations, a silence, as Aveek ventures, of what the work (which is to say, the work of representation) "cannot say."

 

Once you grant some privilege to gathering and not to dissociating then you leave no room for the other, for the radical otherness of the other, for the radical similarity of the other. I think that separation, dissociation is not an obstacle to society or to community, it is the condition.
-JD