So you read it in the original French and then thought maybe there should be an English translation? My introduction was a humble introduction because I had never even had a course in philosophy. So I turned around to think differently. Derrida was an Algerian Jew, born before World War II, who was actually encountering Western philosophy from the inside. An excerpt is below, the full version via LARB. She was offering his text to the rest of the world and they were picking it up. What was Derrida trying to deconstruct? Did you grow up in a family of intellectuals? But I assume you got to know him quite well after that. I was 25 and an assistant professor at the University of Iowa in 1967, and I was trying to keep myself intellectually clued in. You see, one of the things he understood, perhaps more than I did at that point, was the meaning of this Asian girl who really didn’t have much French, launching this book into the world in her own way, so far out of the European coterie of high philosophy. He and I would go out to eat — and he was a swarthy man, a Sephardic Jew from Algeria — and people would take him to be Indian, and I’m Indian and my cultural inscription is strong and sometimes I wear a sari, so it was a joke and he would say, “Yes, I’m Indian.” He understood the beauty of the situation of this young person who was neither a French PhD nor a native French speaker or native English speaker for that matter, and she was offering his text, not because she was worshipful toward him, because she hadn’t even known who he was. No, no. So Partition was the price that we were obliged to pay. For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Steve Paulson interviews feminist, Marxist, and post-colonial studies scholar Gayatri Spivak. I owe almost everything to my parents. He looked at how this was suppressed in philosophical traditions. So I borrowed money and came with a one way ticket and $18 in my pocket. I was only 18 years old and didn’t have a father — he died when I was 13 — and I realized I was not going to get a first class because I was editor of a journal and I’d been very critical of the university. You know, we also thought of it as Independence. Independence was marked by the horror of Partition. We were allies. STEVE PAULSON: You have just come out with the 40th anniversary edition of Derrida’s Of Grammatology. Now it just fills me with shame and embarrassment. I got my degree at the University of Calcutta, and I was working on my MA. I did not want to go to Britain because I would have had to take a second BA and I was just immediately post-independence. When he did well in his high school graduating exam, his father said to him, “Ah, then you can be postmaster in the county town,” and my father was much more ambitious, so ticketless, he ran off to Calcutta in 1917. It’s really ridiculous, but there it was. They told me later that they found my query letter so brave and sweet that they thought they should give me a chance. But when that started in our neighborhood, you would hear Allahu akbar and then Hara hara Mahadeo and you knew that someone was being killed. So I would order books from the catalog which looked unusual enough that I should read, so that’s how I ordered the book. I also understand the thread that runs through it in terms of not only how we should read but how we should live, which was not as clear to me then. So I wrote in my contract, I will not do the translation if I cannot write a monograph-length introduction. In the wintertime, they sat by the fire with a wrap around their shoulders. A brilliant man, he was looking at its Eurocentrism. So you see this book as basically a critique of Western philosophy? You must also have seen how Muslims came to be branded as outsiders. I was in my mid-20s when I wrote that letter. He also said a very powerful thing about African orality: they could remember seven generations back; we’ve lost that capacity. I went to Cornell because I only knew the names Harvard, Yale, and Cornell and I thought Harvard and Yale were too good for me. The discussion of Spivak's reading of Specters of Marx leads to larger questions about the political effectiveness of deconstructive thinking within colonial and postcolonial contexts, and in particular what Spivak sees as the two most significant limits of deconstruction, namely its inattention to contemporary forms of exploitation of subaltern women, and its inability to account for the realities and effects of globalization and multinational finance capital. And you locate a moment where the text teaches you how to turn it around and use it. It was an extraordinary upbringing. My teacher Paul de Man once said to another very great critic, Fredric Jameson, “Fred, you can only deconstruct what you love.” Because you are doing it from the inside, with real intimacy. That’s deconstruction. Neither English nor French was my first language and I had left India only in 1961. GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK: When I translated it, I didn’t know who Derrida was or anything about his thinking. (c) Copyright Liverpool University Press, 2020. She speaks about what it was like to first translate Derrida’s Of Grammatology in the '60s as a young woman shortly after immigrating from India, as well as her new afterward for the 40th anniversary edition of that book, and everything that happened in between. In this essay, I will examine Gayatri Spivak’s characterization of the Subaltern, and present the problem that she identifies with postcolonialism’s attempt to establish counter- It had a focus on being dominant for centuries without change. So this had become part of my way of moving. This chapter examines Gayatri Spivak's highly ambivalent relationship to deconstruction, and specifically her reading of Derrida's Specters of Marx. Liverpool Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Is there a connection between this work and your earlier work on deconstruction and translating Derrida? But the postcolonial business had come as a sort of autobiographical moment that comes to most middle-class metropolitan migrants — like Edward Said, thinking “I was Orientalized.” In 1981 when I was asked by the Yale French Studies to write on French feminism and by Critical Inquiry to write on deconstruction, I asked myself, how is it that I have become an authority on French material? https://literariness.org/2017/04/07/key-theories-of-gayatri-spivak Published to Liverpool Scholarship Online: June 2013, PRINTED FROM LIVERPOOL SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.liverpool.universitypressscholarship.com). Derrida was born on July 15, 1930 in El-Biar (a suburb of Algiers),Algeria (then a part of France), into a Sephardic Jewishfamily. This was a highly theoretical, very difficult book that’s still challenging to read. considering that as a self-labeled “deconstructivist,” Spivak attributes her own work to be heavily influenced by Jacques Derrida, another iconoclast of his time. My teacher had not met Derrida when I left Cornell, so I truly didn’t know who he was. Opening the small house, he would stand with Muslim men on the terrace and women and children inside the house, saying, “As long as I’m alive, nobody is going to touch you.” We didn’t think of the difference so much. Whole groups get excluded because a certain kind of dominant discourse is established. As children we thought we were the same people. It’s critical intimacy, not critical distance. Why do we need a revised translation of this book? Yes, we became friends. You got your undergraduate degree in India. Nobody’s going to give me a contract for a book on him, so why don’t I try to translate him?” And I had heard at a cocktail party that the University of Massachusetts Press was doing translations, so I wrote them a very innocent query letter in late 1967 or early 1968. So you actually speak from inside. Deconstruction, a critical practice introduced by French philosopher and critic Jacques Derrida, ostensibly serves to interrogate the assumptions of Western thought by reversing or displacing the hierarchical "binary oppositions" that provide its foundation.