Abstract
I was honored to have been asked to deliver the 2014 Juliet Mitchell capstone lecture at Cambridge. I was in awe of Juliet Mitchell before I met her—I believe in 1993, with Michael Riffaterre at the School of Criticism and Theory—and have retained that feeling. I taught her iconic Psychoanalysis and Feminism again and again after the mid-1970s, in the obligatory feminist theory class that I had begun to teach from the end of the 1960s.1
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Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism. A Radical Reassessesment of Freudian Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1963).
Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in Ecrits: A Selection, tr. Alan Sheridan (New York & London: Norton, 1977), pp. 30–113.
Jacques Derrida, “Force de loi: le ‘fondement mystique de l’autorité/ Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’“ Cardozo Law Review 11 (1990), pp. 920–1046.
Roland Barthes, S/Z. An Essay, tr. Richard Miller (New York: The Noonday Press, 1974).
Mahasweta Devi, Imaginary Maps: Three Stories, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Routledge, 1995);
Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987).
Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 256. Recently, in an interesting film by Aleksander Motturi of Clandestine), the subaltern chosen, who had been tortured and jailed and undoubtedly wins our admiration, speaks his philosophy, because Aleksander wants to give him something more than just to be the example of refugee dumping: “The survival of the fittest as exemplified by the sperm managing to climb to the egg and going upward on the human line while the woman remains ‘natural’ and has to do nothing but wait for the child to be born.” Rape can be this will to power sexualized.
For rather a long time, the early work of Emmanuel Levinas continued to influence many of us, so that we could write innocent sentences such as “to be human is to be born angled toward the other.” What guaranteed this? A picture of access to humanship built on a nuclear heterosexual middle-class marriage. For a good comment on this, see Luce Irigaray,” The Phenomenology of Eros,” in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, tr. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (London & New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 154–179. Levinas moved on to a more powerful position: “in the relationship in which the other is the one next to me [le prochain]… for reasons not at all transcendental but purely logical, the object-man must figure at the beginning of all knowing” (Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, tr. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Press, 1999, pp. 58–59). But this too was secured by an embarrassingly inaccurate description of the woman in gestation and, on quite another front, remained consistent with support for legitimized violence of the state of Israel.
“Pro-pose” takes me back to an earlier discussion in my paper of the famous line of Nagarjuna: Nasti ca mama kacana pratijna [roughly, My proposition is not at all there]. Incidentally, my description of deconstruction work here found a nice bit of vindication. In the last chapter of Peggy Kamuf tr., Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994), Derrida shook the stakes of ahamvada in Marx to release the multitudinous iterations of an idamvada. Mechanical Marxists will not want to know it.
Jacques Lacan, “Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectics of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” in Écrits, tr. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2007), p. 692; translation modified.
Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the Subject (Boston: Routledge, 1977).
Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 322.
Kant, Political Writings, tr. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 160; translation modified.
Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” in Standard Edition of the Psychological Works, tr. James Strachey et al. (New York: Norton, 1961), vol. XXI, p. 152.
Spivak, Nationalism and the Imagination (Kolkata: Seagull Books, 2010).
Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. 259.
Spivak, “Outside in the Metropolis: Diasporics?,” reprinted in German translation in Isolde Charim and Gertraud Auer Borea, eds. Lebensmodell Diaspora: über moderne Nomaden (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012), pp. 65–73.
Spivak, “Foucault and Najibullah,” Other Asias (Boston: Wiley Blackwell, 2007), pp. 132–160.
Gregory Massell, The Surrogate Proletariat Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet Central Asia, 1919–1929(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974).
Peter Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Capital: For a Philosophical Theory of Globalization, tr. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 28.
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© 2015 Robbie Duschinsky and Susan Walker
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Spivak, G.C. (2015). Crimes of Identity. In: Duschinsky, R., Walker, S. (eds) Juliet Mitchell and the Lateral Axis. Palgrave Macmillan’s Critical Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137367792_11
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