Teaching Spivak-Otherwise

"Teaching Spivak-Otherwise sharply contests Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's postcolonial, feminist, and (post)Derridean deconstructive reading practice, a reading practice that, because it claims to re-read Marx in and for the contemporary moment, is widely regarded as participating in the revolutionary project of Marx's ideological critique of capitalism. Through a patient and tightly focused Marxist close reading and ideological critique of influential texts by Spivak, Jerry Leonard's book offers a necessary 'other' education: he demonstrates that Spivak's reading practice is not only not revolutionary-it is counterrevolutionary, traversed by contradiction to the point of dis-integration. Leonard argues that Spivak's lessons in reading, presented under the banner of 'irreducibility,' are in effect 'an elaborate mystification of the transformative class politics of Marxist theory.' Such reading lessons as Spivak's have devastating consequences for the world's workers. Through a carefully sequenced series of lucid explications, Leonard shows that Spivak's pedagogy of 'irreducibility' actually reduces subjects of capital to confused readers-readers who repeatedly lose their place in Spivak's texts as they puzzle over the meaning(s) of her intellectual meanderings over and around Marx's concepts, especially the concept of class. Leonard emphasizes that the product of reading Spivak-a legion of confused readers-is precisely the way in which Spivak assists capital: confused readers who get lost in a contradictory textscape that makes a muddle of 'class' are likewise unprepared to locate themselves as class subjects in capital's brutal regime of wage labor. Teaching Spivak-Otherwise is a rigorous critical argument for the necessity of revolutionary historical and dialectical materialist thinking that alone offers a future of life-sustaining and enriching possibility, for all." -Deborah Kelsh, Professor at The College of Saint Rose (Albany, New York)