Scratching the surface Book

This is a great introduction to the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, but in particular, it is a great source to find which of her key texts one should tackle first, and how they might be read. Moreover, there are a plethora of secondary sources to visit in order to understand her work in relation to other thinkers.

In terms of her own work, as Spivak has said, she is not one to restrict herself to disciplinary boundaries. Thus, there are various ways to enter her thought:- "Translator's Preface" to Of Grammatology - offers an account of the debates which preceded De la grammatologie.
- "French Feminism in an International Frame" - a critique of the post-structuralist gesture which, while attempting to touch the other, surfaces as a narcissism that preserves the West as subject
- "Scattered Speculations", "Ghostwriting" - the former develops use-value like writing in Derrida (speculation highly relevant in the halls of cultural theory), and the latter critiques Derrida's misreading of Marx's central argument in Capital Volume Two
- "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism" - critically reads Wide Sargasso Sea against Jane Eyre to show the "axiomatics of imperialism" embedded in the latter text, and questions via Frankenstein how an ethical relation can exist "to the singularity of the Other".
- "Can the Subaltern Speak?" - aesthetic representation and political representation are shown to have the same underlying structure of representation (but aesthetic representation tends to acknowledge its structure as "re-presentation"). Political representation is particularly problematic when it forgoes this acknowledgement, and thus a critique is leveled at Deleuze and Foucault as they are juxtaposed with the benevolent British colonial officials, both of which transparently represent the desires of political subjects, whose subject formation goes untouched. This is in contradistinction to Marx in the Eighteenth Brumaire. In terms of secondary sources:- The Post-Colonial Critic - a series of interviews which see Spivak providing critical insights into her own thought. These comments were often lucid when quoted by Stephen Morton, so I think this is probably a great place to enter Spivak's thought.
- "Ethics after Idealism" - Rey Chow's piece comparing the post-Marxist work of Žižek and Spivak, comparing their interventions in Marx and how it reflects their broader ethical and ontological projects, the former arguably more pronounced in Spivak's work and the latter arguably more pronounced in the later Žižek. An incredible piece.
- Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said, and Spivak - critiques the insistence of complicity in Spivak, seen as a remainder of a reliance on Derrida, and insists on Adorno as a way to "redeem the object in its alterity". There are many more sources, both in the 'Further Reading' section and mentioned throughout the book, but these are the ones which stood out to me.