To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Critical Intimacy: An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Hey podcast listeners, if you're the kind of person who knows her way around phrases like the gender binary, or if you maybe have a battered copy of something by Jacques Derrida lurking around your bookshelves, then I probably don't have to sell you on today's topic. This is it to the best of our knowledge extra about deconstruction, a literary and philosophical movement that was huge back in the early 80s. We're talking about the age of the talking heads, the remones, quailudes, skinny jeans. I was in college then, majoring in English and French, and you couldn't do that without reading the deconstructionists. I'm an strain champs, and nobody really talks that much about deconstruction anymore, and yet it's everywhere. The way we talk about and analyze TV commercials, song lyrics, fashion trends, in fact public radio listeners, if it weren't for deconstruction, we probably wouldn't have this American life. I'm actually serious about that. Ira Glass got a degree in semiotics at Brown. He told an interviewer once that his religion was semiotics, and you can hear the influence in his show all the time. So

I don't actually remember that much about deconstruction or Derrida anymore, but luckily I'm married to a guy who does, and you know him too, Steve Paulson. So Steve, why are we talking about deconstruction on the radio? Because this is the 40th anniversary of the book that helped launch the whole deconstruction movement. It's called Of Grammetology by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida actually originally published in the mid -60s, but then translated into English in 1976 by Gayatri Chakravorti Speevak, who was an unknown scholar back then, a young emigrate from India, but she is now an academic superstar. So this is a big deal. This is kind of a cultural event. In certain circles. So this sounds like a classic Steve interview, and I know it's coming up. But first for the uninitiated, or those of us who just don't remember our deconstruction, what does it mean? Well there are a couple of basic ideas. One

is to unpack the relationship between a text and its meaning, and by text I don't just mean books. It could be decoding an advertisement or a political platform, a school curriculum, really anything where the meaning is not obvious, and there's a particular focus on identifying what are called binary oppositions like black and white or good and evil, male and female. Polarities. Polarities, yeah. The idea is that you cannot really understand one without knowing its opposite. Those meanings are shaped by specific historical conditions, and they keep changing over time. Does anybody other than academics still care about this? Yes. As a matter of fact, I mean, for instance, the way we now talk about gender has been profoundly influenced by these ideas. I mean, we know that male and female are not strictly biological categories. They are socially constructed identities, which keep changing. So queer theory comes directly out of this, and it would be hard to explain the emergence of intersex identities or the trans movement without this kind of underlying theory. Okay, you sold me. So you're going to take it from here.

What do you have lined up? So first, I talked with an intellectual historian named Greg Jones Katz, who's writing a history of deconstruction in America, because I wanted to get some historical context for why this pretty esoteric school of French theory became so popular in America, and also to sort of set the stage for the emergence of Gayatri Spivak, so I asked Greg to take us back to the heyday of deconstruction. Well, in literature departments, the late 70s to early 80s. So for example, Barbara Johnson was an important second generation deconstructor, and she was a professor of French in the paraphernal literature at Yale. She helped introduce Mary Shelley into the canon of romantic writers. Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. Author of Frankenstein. Up to that point, the canon of romantic writers was, you know, Percy Shelley teets Byron Wordsworth, Colourist. Exactly. Exactly. And she pointed out, and Mary Shelley was sort of denigrated by many scholars as being an introduction to the

male counterparts, okay? And she pointed out that, no, the story of Frankenstein, for example, is a commentary, you know, ingenious commentary on the assumptions of the romantic male creator. Dr. Frankenstein is trying to give birth, and then what does he create? He creates Frankenstein's monster. So the point is that Frankenstein is a critique from within the Western tradition of the male fantasy of creation. So is it fair to say that deconstruction went out of fashion at a certain point, that I mean, it's like people no longer wanted to be associated with that work, even if it's sort of infiltrated the academy? Yes, and no. In terms of the high, let's call it high deconstruction, practiced by Paul Demand, which is solely on, you're looking at couplets in romantic poems. That's pretty much over, but deconstruction mutated and was used in different ways. And so the techniques, the identification of binary oppositions, you know, became, I guess, a reflex or habit of mind or habit of thought, let's say. So if that is your definition of deconstruction, then

it's everywhere. I mean, like, Huffington Post, for example, has this new blog series called Beyond the Binary. Now, I'm not going to argue that the authors of the blogs read Paul Demand, they may have or Hillest Miller, but I think it's important to recognize that in terms of the dissemination of ideas and the changing of ideas, the deconstructions there. Okay, let me pivot here to talk about Gayatri Speevak. Where does she fit into this history? Okay. She was a student of Demand's and her first major intervention, scholarly intervention, was the 80 -page introduction and then translation of Jacques Derrida's of Grammetology. For many people, for many scholars in the American Academy, North American Academy, this was their first introduction to Derrida's thought. But of course, her importance is not in there because by the late 70s and early 80s, Speevak is making critiques of subaltern studies. So, she is this very important essay in 1983, I'm saying hugely important, can the subaltern speak? And subaltern

is a term that's used for essentially colonized peoples, often used regarding the Indian subcontinent, which is where she's from. And her essay raises the issue of whether scholars do violence in terms of knowledge production in terms of colonized people by trying to give them a voice when the colonized people are dispossessed. Well, and it raises this profound question, which is still very relevant today, what's the role of the Western scholar who goes to a country like India to try to interpret what's going on there, and even for the best of intentions to try to help the oppressed there. Absolutely. And there's no clear answer, there's no, yes, we can help or no, we can help, or yes, we're doing only beneficial things, etc. I admire the risks, intellectual risks, personal risks, and professional risks that must have gone into writing that essay, for example. What, why would that be controversial or risky for her? You know, we're talking in the early

80s, I mean, she's taking deconstruction from many people in a completely unexpected controversial way. She's not looking at Percy Shelley's The Triumph of Life. She's looking at, let's say, quote, unquote, real world implications of ethical, political and historical implications of knowledge production, and of course, there's a politics to all of this. And I mean, the scholars who were in this field are on the left politically, but there are divisions there. And so there are many people on the left who are committed, almost revolutionaries in a sense. I mean, you want to, you know, want to help the oppressed in the third world, and it would seem that the Spivak is coming along and saying, actually, it's way more complicated than that. Absolutely. And so one of the more important things that she's saying is that one has to be careful of imagining or casting the dispossessed as an other with the capital, oh, you're who you are and they're the other and you were going to come help the other rise

up. And the implication implicitly is that you're going to help the other become you. You're going to appropriate the other to become more like you. And those qualifications are upsetting to people who have, let's say, grand narratives or grand schemes or large -scale revolutionary projects. I think that's very irritating. That's Greg Jones -Cats, an intellectual historian who is now writing a history of deconstruction in America. Now, as we mentioned, a new edition of Deridaz landmark book of Grammetology has just been published with a new translation by Gayatri Spivak. I should say a lot has changed for Spivak over those 40 years since her original translation. She's now a famous intellectual who has speaking engagements all around the world. And one of the things that's most fascinating about Spivak is that there seems to be a paradox at the center of her life. For several decades, she's been teaching critical theory to grad students at an Ivy League School, Columbia University, but she's also set up elementary schools for illiterate students in India, where she grew up. And she's also been teaching there for the last 30 years, so her work

raises all kinds of interesting questions about the responsibility of the intellectual in radically different cultures where power relationships get played out in very different ways. I recently sat down with Gayatri Spivak and we had a really wide -ranging conversation. We talked about her friendship with Deridaz, her childhood in India during the time of the partition and the tragic family story that inspired her work on the subaltern, and also the current crisis in the humanities. You have just come out with the 40th anniversary edition of Deridaz of Gramatology. Why do we need a revised translation of this book? When I translated it, I didn't know who Deridaz was and didn't know anything about his thinking. And so I did my best to introduce it and the introduction really caught on for which I'm very grateful, so did the translation. But now, after a lifetime of working with through Deridaz, I can say something more. And so I think

this is a kind of tribute to lived life rather than encountering great new texts. So has your understanding of Deridaz's book changed over the four decades since you first translated it? So I found when I began, I didn't notice how critical the book was of Eurocentrism, because the word in 1967 was not so common, and that aspect of it, that here was an Algerian Jew who was born before the Second World War, and he was actually encountering Western philosophy from the inside, a brilliant man, and he was looking at its Eurocentrism. That aspect I don't think I had caught on to as much as I do now, and I also know a little bit more perhaps about Hegel than I did at that time, so

I was able to make some connections. So you see this book as basically a critique of Western philosophy? You see, that's what deconstruction is about, right? So it's not just destruction, it's also construction. That's what it is, deconstruction, right? A very good friend of mine, Akbar Abbas, he gave me this phrase, once I was really struggling trying to describe what was going on in deconstruction, and as I was describing, he was in my audience in Taiwan, and he shouts out, Guy three, you're describing critical intimacy, not critical distance, so that you actually speak from inside, that's deconstruction. You speak from inside, he knows, my teacher, Paul Demand once said to another very great critic, Fred Jameson Fred, you can only deconstruct what you love, because you are doing it from the inside with real intimacy,

you're kind of turning it around. So what was that kind of critique? What was Derrida trying to deconstruct? I mean, what was it about Western philosophy that he wanted to put a new lens on? That it had a focus on being dominant and being the same thing that could run through centuries, and it wasn't acknowledging that there was change, there was a way in which whole groups get excluded, because a certain kind of dominant discourse is established, and he said the very powerful thing about African morality, that there the writing is on the substance of memory, so that you know they could remember seven generations back, we've lost that one. So therefore he said that rather than pushing, pushing, saying you have

to be there, and that's what reality is, he was saying look, look at it carefully, and it's actually not like that, it's coded so that other people, even if we are not present, can understand what we are saying. This was one of the basic things that he said, and he looked how this was suppressed in philosophical traditions. Do you consider this book of grammatology a radical text in the history of philosophy? It's an important text, yes, he did publish two books before, but it is to an extent a first book by a younger man, he was about 36, but yes, I think it's a very important book. Well, can you take me back to your own involvement in this? So the late 60s, as I understand it, you first started working on the translation, you were an unknown scholar at the time, and he was still, Derrida was still largely unknown in the United States, and this was a very difficult book, highly theoretical, still very hard for a lot of

people to read, to understand, why did you want to take on such a daunting project? Well, you know, I didn't know who Derrida was at all. I was an assistant professor, 67, I was 25 at that point. I was an assistant professor at the University of Iowa, and I was trying to keep myself intellectually clued in, and so I would order books from the catalog, which looked like, you know, unusually enough that I should read the books, and so that is how I ordered the book. In the original French, and then you thought, oh, maybe there should be an English translation? No, no, I managed to read it and thought it was an extraordinary book, and you know, this was before the internet was active in our lives, so there was no way I was only a very smart foreign woman student, so nobody was particularly telling me anything about Derrida, and my teacher had not met Derrida when I left Cornell with this

job, so I truly didn't know who he was, so I thought, well, I'm a young woman, and here's an unknown author, so nobody's going to give me a contract for a book on him, so why don't I try to translate him, and so I had heard at a cocktail party that the University of Massachusetts Press was doing translations, and so I wrote them a very innocent query letter in 1970, and they told me later that they found my query letter so brave and sweet, that they thought they should give me a chance. Kind of humble origins for a book that has become a classic since then. You know, I was surprised, you see, you must put yourself back into my shoes, neither English nor French was my first language, and I had left India only in 61, and so to have this translation

become so popular that people learned so much from the fact that my introduction was a humble introduction, because I had never even had a course in philosophy ever. And we might add a very long introduction as well. I mean, almost a book in itself, just your introduction to Derri does book. That's not what I wrote in my contract because remember, I wanted to write a book on him, and so I wrote in my contract, I will not do the translation if I cannot write a monograph length introduction. See, it's really to think about it, you know, I was about 27 when I wrote that letter, it just fills me with shame and embarrassment. Did you have much contact with Jacques Derrida himself as you were working on the translation? No, I didn't know him at all. I only met him in 1971, so I did not recognize that it

was he until he came up to me and said, in French, and I assume you got to know him quite well after that. Yes, friends, we became, we were allies, and you see, one of the things about the way he thought was that he understood more than, perhaps I did at that point, the meaning of this Asian girl who really didn't have much friends in her own way, launching this book into the world. I mean, so far out of the sort of European go -to -ree high philosophy network, I think he always, you know, he and I would go out to eat, and he was a swarthy man, you know, Sephardic Jew from Algeria, and people would take him to be Indian, because I'm Indian, and you know, my cultural inscription is strong, sometimes I'm wearing a saree. And so, you know,

it was a joke, and he would say, yes, yes, I'm Indian, but now I understand that he understood himself. In fact, the beauty of the situation that there was this young person who was not a French PhD or a native French speaker or native English speaker for that matter, and she was kind of offering his text, not because she was worshipful, because I didn't know who he was. She was offering his text to the rest of the world, and they were picking it up. There was something very attractive for him in that, and I think that's what it was. He had read the situation in a way that I had not been able to. So it really mattered that you were from India. I mean, you were not a native English speaker, when you said you didn't even know French that well, and somehow that put a different spin on this whole project of translating this book. I mean, it brought something new to the table. Yes, it brought an

effort which was quite unlike just an excellent translation. It's something, you know, as a teacher myself, I will say, to be recognized when you don't know his name. In other words, I found the book so extraordinary without knowing his reputation. That's a big deal. Now, I'm curious about your own background. You were born in Calcutta a few years before the partition of India. Did you grow up in a family of intellectuals? Yes. My mother was married at 14, and my brother was born when she was 15. My father was born in a village way up in the foothills of the Himalayas, in what is now Bangladesh, in a community where they didn't even work clothes until they were six or seven years old, but just a metal ring around their middle, and a little dotty when they went to school, and in the winter time, they sat by the fire with a wrapper around their shoulders. These two people

really were both intellectuals and later led lives of intellectuals and brought up their children for the life of the mind, proto -feminist dad, feminist mother, the next extraordinary upbringing. Yes, I owe almost everything to my parents. So did the partition splitting the country into India and Pakistan? Did that have much of an impact on your family? We thought of it also as independence. The independence was marked by the horror of partition, so it was not just partition. That's the price that we were obliged to pay. Well, it marked my relatives more than my immediate family because my father had in fact run away from East Bengal, which is now Bangladesh, in 1917 because when he did well in his high school graduating exam, his father had 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. So that was a long time ago. And then because my mother's grandmother was a widow who had been remarried because they were very much into the reform cost in the reform groups. The people in the village had kind of excommunicated my grandfather as it was, so he left in 1937. And so therefore we were, I was born in Calcutta, we were already in Calcutta, but the way in which it did affect our lives was of course the terrible riots that were brought in the Calcutta killings of 1946. The famine, the artificially created famine of

1942 on. And those things really affected us and once the refugees started coming in, my mother who was by then a considerable social worker would leave at five in the morning and go to the railway station helping with refugee habilitations. So I could go on about this at much greater length. So yes, these were some of the things that marked my childhood. Well, and you must have also had the sense of how Muslims came to be seen in India. To some degree, you know, branded as outsiders as the other. Well, that sense of course is increasing now in India. At that time, I was too young, 47, I was five years old. The idea of a Hindu Muslim difference since I was in a very ecumenical household, we didn't really sense it. I mean, as children, we didn't sense it. It was all around us. And very unusual because until then there had been a sort of

conflictual coexistence for centuries. But in our neighborhood, when that started, it is true that you would hear Horiwal, Hori, or Allah Akbar, and you knew that someone was being killed. And you would see bloodshed. But I was so young and at home, there was so little differentiation between caste or religion or anything. And my father's Muslim students were so supportive, even to come and tell him dressed as Hindus, not to answer a phone call in the evening. And my father himself, very non -violent man, opening the small house, standing on the terrace, and women and Muslim women and children inside the house and men with my dad on the terrace, saying, as long as I'm alive, nobody's going to touch you, that we didn't think of the difference so much. We as children thought we were the same people. How did you end up coming to the United

States? I was told that I was not going to get a first class in Miami. And since dad had died when I was 13, and I was supporting myself, and I had managed to secure a first class in my BA. So you went to college in India? You got your undergraduate degree? University of Calcutta, yes. And I was working on my MA, and I realized that at that, I mean, I don't know if I was correct, you see, because I was only 18 years old, and I didn't have a father, and I thought I was very knowledgeable, so I didn't didn't ask anybody anything. I was not going to get a first class, because I was editor of a journal, and I had been very critical of the university. And so I'm cutting a very long story short. I borrowed money from an unknown philanthropist quote, unquote, whose name I had heard. Oh, and I don't even know if it was a legal thing or a life mortgage, because I didn't know what a

collateral was, and I got a phone acceptance from Cornell, and I came with a one -way ticket and $18 in my pocket. I did not want to go to Britain, because I would have had to take a second BA, which was the rule, and you know, I was just immediately post -independence, and I thought, no, no, no, I'm not going to take a second BA. So this is why I came to the United States, and 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. So today was 19 years old. Wow, amazing story. So today you are best known as one of the founders of post -colonial studies. Is there a connection here between your work there and your earlier work on deconstruction and translating Derrida? I have to think of it and rationalize, because the way I related to deconstruction, you know, in a very minor way, because I was not part of that kind of French

theory, go -to -ree at all. In a certain sense, as an outsider, I had been just the tiniest bit of a trend set, I would deconstruction. So, therefore, it had become so internalized that I certainly wasn't making connections, but the post -colonial business that had come as a sort of moment, autobiographical moment, that comes to most metropolitan migrants, you know, like Edward Said thinking I was orientalized. And so, in 81, 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? And so, I turned around to think differently. So, therefore, it was an engagement with

that part of deconstruction, which looked at what is excluded when we construct systems, that part of deconstruction, which said the best way to proceed is a very robust self -critique, and that part of deconstruction, which said that you do not excuse what you are deconstructing, but you do not accuse what you deconstructing. You enter it, remember that critical intimacy, and you locate a moment where the text teaches you how to turn it around and use it. And so, clearly, there was a connection, but one thing that I have never done, and I've encouraged my students not to do, is apply theory. You theorizing is a practice, it becomes internalized, you are changed in your thinking, and that shows in your work. So, that's what happened. So, we should talk briefly about your classic

1985 essay, Can the Subaltern Speak, which has become a foundational text in post -colonial studies. And first of all, can you explain what the word subaltern means? It's those who don't give orders, those who only receive orders. That's what is in Antonio Gramsci, who actually made the word current. And so, he was looking at people who were not, in fact, you know, working class folks, proletarians, if you like, who are victims of capitalism. He was looking at people who were outside of that logic, because he was himself from Sardinia, an area which was outside of the regular European high Italy of the North. And so, that's what it means. But it also means those who do not have access to the structures of citizenship, so that they may vote. I mean, this is now I'm

talking about India today, the largest sector of the electorate, rural, landless, illiterate. They may vote, but they have no access to the structures of citizenship. That's a subaltern. So, therefore, I was telling you the story of 1981, and that's when I began to think about going towards, I mean, just be a young Indian person, an authority on French material. And so, I found my mother's aunt who hanged herself when she was 17, in 1926, because she was part of an anti -imperialist group. And, in fact, she was unable to kill, and so therefore, she killed herself, but she

waited four days until she menstruated, so that people would not think that she was killing herself because of an illicit pregnancy, because she, in her action, wanted to say, women do not just belong to unique men. Can you imagine how hard it must have been? Oh, yeah. And so, she spoke with her body. So, she killed herself as a political act, as an act. As a political act? Yes, because that's what you do. If you can't carry through an assassination detail, then you kill yourself. I mean, I don't understand those kinds of things, but we've read enough, that I have skiing, we've read enough about the struggle against imperialism in India to know that this kind of thing happened, and she was a teenager. And so, she waited so that people would not think, because the only reason why teenage women hanged themselves was because they were illicitly pregnant, you

know, in middle -class families, but she wanted to make the point. She was an unusual person. They make the point that that was not the case, and she left a letter from my grandmother. I heard the story from my mom, and then I did not reveal in the essay that she was my great aunt, the woman who, as a subaltern, completely outside of these structures, had spoken with her body, but could not be heard. It's like saying, there is no justice. You know what I mean? In fact, it meant it's opposite. It meant, when the subaltern speaks, even with her body, she cannot be heard. And that's what you mean by, cannot speak. I mean, even if she does speak, there is no one there to hear. And this is, in fact, true of subaltern groups, because I didn't stay there. I moved from my own class, my own agenda. You know, this is a family. I moved from there, and I began to learn what

subaltern meant, and I went into subaltern groups in India, which is where my schools are, and these are people who have been millennially denied the right to intellectual labour by my own ancestors, caste Hindus. And so therefore, daily, I see how, even if they do speak, first of all, they are not allowed to speak in ways that we can immediately understand. There's no romanticizing when you've been teaching for 30 years, because, you know, I've been doing this for a long time. And so, this lesson that they speak, but they cannot be heard, or people are futilely benevolent towards them, and very philanthropic, etc. This doesn't change anything. These kinds of things are being born out, but it began when I started asking myself, should I just be an expert in French theory? Yeah. So, one of the things that's fascinating about

your career is you've really worn two hats, probably more than that, but I mean, you are a celebrated professor at Columbia University, and you also have been going back to India for decades to work with illiterate students in rural schools. What do you do in those schools? I train the teachers by teaching the kids, and I show them, as far as I can, how to teach the state curriculum. And I also try to devise a way of teaching, which will make the intuitions of democracy into mental habits for very small kids, because it's no use talking at them. That's not the way children should be taught, as you well know. It's like writing on wetsumand. So, this is a very difficult thing to do. It's a huge challenge, because, as I say, these are minds destroyed by us. And so, in order to be

able to access damaged learning machines, in order to teach not just their own justified rights and so on, because this in the long run can make them dependent, but to teach, since they vote, to teach the intuitions of democracy, which is also other people, other people's children, not just me. And they have nothing, these people. It's a very difficult challenge. So, that's what I try to do. And I train the teachers through teaching the children. I was just speaking to them on the phone, you know, the mighty cell phone, they put it on speaker phone. I talk every, you know, twice a month, because I go eight, nine times a year, but I talk to them, and I was telling them yesterday, when they were talking about some difficulties, some of the teachers are having, I have two supervisors. They're all from the community. And I was saying, well, be patient, because just look at how much trouble I have had over the years, trying to understand how to speak in such

a way that it will really get through to you. So, this is a very important challenge. I mean, it's fascinating to hear you talk about this, because I mean, I would assume, you know, if you're talking about, you know, training teachers to work with illiterate children, you know, the basic thing would be literacy, you know, teaching the fundamentals of reading and writing, you're talking about something much deeper. You're talking about democracy, about, you know, teaching these young kids to question power. My children, my teachers are themselves also from this community of literate landless folks. So, no, I mean, literacy and numeracy by themselves are not much. And especially when the education that's available is very bad education. So, therefore, in fact, I will say, although, of course, I value literacy and numeracy greatly, nonetheless, two or three people I have known over the last 30 years, with whom

I have been able to speak as intellectual equals from this community have been illiterate because they have not been ruined by bad education. So, it sounds like you're saying that real education is by definition an ethical practice. Well, I think what it can do is with sufficient humility, think of making the children accessible to an ethical reflex. You see, because, remember, democracy is also a political system. Ethics are to an extent something that cannot be taught because ethics is not just doing the right thing. Mind you, there's a lot of, it teaches me a lot about what I do at the top because, you know, not too many people teach both at the very top. I mean, at Columbia, I don't teach South Asia, I'm a Europeanist. And so, therefore, I teach English, French, and German material to these PhD students at Columbia

University in the city of New York. That's about as close to the top as you can get. And then I have the landless illiterate and supposedly the world's largest democracy. So, it's a very good experience to be able to work at both ends and see how one can serve at both ends. Well, I mean, it is fascinating to hear you talk about that because, I mean, when I look at your career, there seems to be a deep paradox there. I mean, as you say, I mean, you are teaching, you know, PhD students at Columbia, I mean, you are regarded as the high priestess of literary theory teaching very theoretical books, you know, like Derry Dozz of Grammatology. And yet, you're also an activist. I mean, you're involved in these schools for illiterate students, which would seem to have nothing to do with the world of high theory. And it raises the question of whether there really is a connection between these two things. There is, yes. Like I said, I don't apply theory. When I'm actually teaching

in these schools, or I'm teaching at Columbia, it's like I've been thrown into water and I'm learning to swim every time. I'm still terrified before I go to class. But the thing is that afterwards, when I kind of think of the experience, I can see how theory is nuanced by what I have learned from the teaching, what part of the theory survives, because theorizing is also a practice. This is something that we have not been able to teach our students at the top. Do you think theory has a real political impact on real world problems? Well, you know, I was teaching Mao yesterday, so it's in my graduate seminar. And, you know, I was not teaching the little red book. I was teaching his intellectual stuff, like the Hunan peasant stuff, and then on contradiction, and then also on practice. Now, here's a man who was

trying. Of course, it's very difficult to get a good take on Mao in the United States, but that's fine. As an Indian, also, it's sometimes hard because we are competitors, but that's what an intellectual is, therefore, to question these kinds of, you know, received ideas. But we were looking at how what he's doing with Hegel, and of course, we were looking at the Chinese text. I've been learning Chinese now for six or seven years, but my Chinese is certainly not good, but the graduate student who was giving his paper is, in fact, an East Asian literature, is an Englishman who grew up in Hong Kong, and then began to do more than Chinese studies, very critical of his own, you know, situation in Hong Kong. And so together, we were looking at how this extraordinary essay on contradiction, when Mao had only read Hegel through Lenin and so on and so forth, what it was doing to Hegel, and Gramsci himself talking about the new intellectual as the permanent persuader,

even if one doesn't know that one is theorizing, one is doing so. If you generalize and you speak to groups, you are theorizing. And so, in fact, it's impossible to think without theorizing one way or the other. I don't think one should become so convinced of the excellence of theory by itself that one police has theory. I think that's what's happened. That theory has become a kind of thing that's completely cut off from everything, but it is not cut off. When you cut it off, you're also showing your own theory, except you don't know that you're showing it. What do you make of the common criticism that here you have all of these intellectuals teaching and universities, people of the left who are doing this very theoretical work and they think they're radicals, but they are in their ivory towers and have no impact at all on real world issues. I mean, does that critique carry any weight for you? I'm as critical of them

as, you know, the most picket line type activists. I mean, I really do think that they need a reality check. In fact, that's not just ivory tower. I'm also on the Global Agenda Committee on Values of the World Economic Forum. And I go there because it's my fieldwork. I'm not listened to, but I'm extremely careful in always intervening. And in fact, these words, the two words reality check is also applicable there. It's not just the ivory tower theorists who are this way today. Below a certain radar, the world is unknown to these dooders also. So therefore, yes, I'm very critical of people who come forward to help without any idea of what it requires to be able to understand. The first right is the right to refuse at the bottom.

You know, this is something I say to my students in the villages. I say, I'm your enemy. I'm good and my parents were good, but two generations do not undo thousands of years. Why do you say you are their enemy? Because I'm a cast Hindu. I'm the top cast. We are the ones who have made these people untouchable. We are the ones who have refused them right to intellectual labor so that they could serve us so that they could be trained up for manual labor. This thing is not something that you just say, well, look, good parents, I'm good. I ask them, you know, these kinds of questions because I do some ecological agriculture with them. So I'm sitting under this banyan tree with lots of lots of people there who have come farmers for landless. So I say to them, look, how many casts are there and they know I don't believe in cast, right? So they don't know what to say. And then I say, I never tell them answers. I don't tell answers in my

Columbia classes either. And so the voice pipes up too. So I say, well, so who? And so this person says, the rich and the poor has a good come forward here. And I say, now look at me. Of course, compared to them, I'm unbelievably rich, right? I said, just don't forget, I'm rich and you're poor. So we are not in the same group at all. So this is the reality check that one must have rather than this kind of silly philanthropy where one gives a lot of money, but one never teaches how to use money. Money is a very different thing, you know what I mean? From, you know, for you and for me, and for someone who's never seen money. I have one final question. As you know, there is a lot of hand -ranging about the state of the humanities these days. You know, we often hear that the humanities are in crisis. Do you think that's true? Yes. Why? Because the

humanities have been trivialized, they are not a cash house, but they are as I wrote to the vice chancellor at the University of Toronto when I was asked to say something. And because they were closing the comparative literature department, I said, look, we are the healthcare system of cultures. This is what I say to the world economic forum. You cannot do moral metrics by knowledge management techniques. You have to cook the soul slow, and that's the humanities. And then people know how to use the digital, because otherwise, all you get is incredible crime with all the stuff. And in fact, also, I wrote another thing which became quite viral when he said, we are the personal trainers in the gym of the mind, the humanities folks. I mean, you know, you can't exercise your body by going somewhere fast, speed of learning, easy learning. In the same way, you can't really make good minds by only doing speed of

learning. And so we ourselves have actually allowed ourselves to be trivialized. So this is such a long story that it's really the final answer should not be very long. I should just simply say that I spend my life trying to make people understand that we should claim how useful we are and not just give in to the definitions of how to make ourselves useful by complete digitizing and all that stuff. We should not allow the humanities to be trivialized. I can't really say much more in a brief conversation, but I hope, and one of these days, we will have a much longer conversation about this. This has been wonderful. Thank you so much. And what a pleasure to talk with you. It was fun for me. That's Gayatri Spivak talking with Steve Paulson on the 40th

anniversary of her translation of Jacques Derrida's book of Grammatology. Johns Hopkins University Press has just published a revised edition. If you want to read more about her, you'll find Steve's extended interview in the I'm Ann Strainchamps. If you like conversations with writers, thinkers, and cultural figures, you should be a regular listener. For more episodes of To The Best of Our Knowledge, check our podcast feed. You'll find us on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever else you download your favorite podcasts. To The Best of Our Knowledge is a production of Wisconsin Public Radio based in Madison, Wisconsin, city of farmers markets, lakes, football fans, and a few semi -attitions. Thanks to audio engineer Joe Hartke and to our distributor, Public Radio International.