"Traveling Theory"

When has history ever contradicted that practice norms theory . . .? In the open-ended "making-other" . . . of the properly self-identical . . . lies an allegory of the theorist's relationship to his subject matter.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds

When Said proposed his conception of the traveling of theories, their "transplantation, transference, circulation and commerce,"^[19] he did not pause to dwell on the fact that "traveling theory" is, after all, a pleonasm—for most theories one might name have a history and are destined for future borrowing and transformation. He was more concerned with the kinds of stages one could plot along a theory's course—from a provisional point of origin, the necessary traversal of distance to conditions of acceptance and change in another time and place.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak seems to suggest a similar tack for the significance of "travel" when she considers theory to be an "active transaction" of reading. But where Said poses his explorations in terms of the more or less straightforward relationship between a traveling theory and its changing circumstances (which could be measured and determined by what he called a "critical consciousness"), Spivak operates differently and in ways more conducive to my purposes here.

To begin with, two of her essays I wish to examine are themselves structured by the actual practice of travel, becoming sites for transactions between deconstructive methods, strands in Western feminist theories, and texts of Indian subaltern historiography and fiction. Second, and quite unexpectedly, it is by following through the discrepancies between these essays—"Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography" and "A Literary Representation of the Subaltern: A Woman's Text from the Third World"^[20] —that the notions of partiality and compositeness I have been trying to make analytical room for can emerge more substantively. Given the com-

plex and continually growing corpus of Spivak's work, there can be no question of doing justice to her scholarship, let alone of assessing the decisive impact she has had on the agendas of theory. My decision to limit myself largely to the two aforementioned essays has to do with their initial publication in India, unlike her other writings, which have been published predominantly in the West, mostly in the United States.

As the title of the first of the two essays makes manifest, a theory—here deconstruction—is made to analyze or "read" the subject of historiography. I do not mean historiography in a general sense but rather a body of work known as "subaltern studies" produced by a collective of scholars who have been making critical interventions in the discipline of Indian colonial history for more than a decade.

It would be impossible to summarize the work of these historians in such a limited space, let alone provide a detailed sense of the theoretical, historiographical, and political trends within and against which this group has been self-consciously writing. Moreover, the range of themes and approaches has diversified over the years.^[21] Within the complex presence of colonialist, liberal, Marxist, nationalist, and indigenous writing on India, Marxism—as a paradigm both for politics and for theory—has played a dominant role in the intellectual history and self-understanding of a group such as this one.^[22] Indeed, the legacy of Marxism is evident precisely in these historians' attempt to provide themselves with a distinct and distinguishing self-definition. According to an early formulation by Ranajit Guha, they identified themselves by an orientation toward a

domain of Indian politics in which the principal actors were not the dominant groups of the indigenous society or the colonial authorities but the subaltern classes and groups constituting the mass of the laboring population and the intermediate strata in town and country—that is, the people. This was an autonomous domain. . . . As modern as indigenous elite politics, it was distinguished by its relatively greater depth in time as well as in structure.^[23]

How one might follow up such a notion of autonomy, historically and methodologically, has interested and troubled many reviewers.^[24]

But for Spivak, this very focus on the subaltern, sometimes iterated as the desire to gain access to forms of subaltern consciousness, reveals in itself structures of irreducible failure. Indeed, the experience of failure is by no means identified as specific to subaltern attempts to become agents of historical change: "If we look at the varieties of activity treated by them [ie., the collective], subaltern, insurgent, nationalist, colonialist, historiographic, it is a general field of failures that we see" (OW , p. 200). To take some scattered examples, subaltern movements fail mostly because of the strength of elite and colonial power, the nationalist movement fails to form potential alliances with subaltern struggles, and even elite historiography fails to determine what could count as credible evidence in the archive. But—and this is absolutely crucial—Spivak further implies that we cannot afford to ignore how all these conceptions of failure are tied up with preconceived and dominant criteria of success. She therefore seems to suggest that both because of its generalizability and because of its often hidden binary relation with success, the tracking of levels of failure in the texts of the subaltern historians should be conducted via the practice of deconstruction. Thus, although Spivak does not explicitly announce it as such, Derrida's mode of textual analysis is brought into transaction with Indian historiography.

In one of his more well-known interviews, Derrida explained the logic of his deconstructive method as follows. Instead of "simply neutralizing the binary oppositions of metaphysics," there was a need, he claimed,

to recognize that in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful co-existence of a vis-a-vis , but rather of a violent hierarchy. . . . [T]o deconstruct the opposition, first of all, is to overturn the hierarchy at a given moment. . . . [T]he necessity of this phase is structural.

That being said, . . . we must also mark the interval between inversion, which brings low what was high, and an irruptive emergence of a new "concept," a concept that can no longer be, and never could be, included in the previous regime. . . . Henceforth, it has been necessary to analyze, to set to work within the text of the history of philosophy, as well as within the so-called literary text, certain marks . . . that by analogy I have called undecidables. . . . Neither/nor, that is simultaneously either or^[25]

It is by following through this kind of "theory" of reversal and displacement in the structure of binary oppositions that Spivak seeks out the "failure" lodged within the very "success" of historiographic methodology. Where the text valorizes success, her reading would "overturn the hierarchy" suppressing moments of failure, ultimately revealing the undecidable co-construction of them both. In fact, she points to a more invidious and perhaps intractable version of "sanctioned ignorance" in the form of "success-in-failure": The very belief of having successfully interpreted a historical moment is the strongest barrier against the realization of possible cognitive failure, hence calling for the most stringent efforts of deconstruction. (Consider, for instance, the "success-in-failure" of so much economic historiography on India, which has interpreted levels of subaltern consciousness within a purely "working-class" or "peasant" frame, thus obscuring from view crucial concurrent identities such as those of community, caste, region, and gender.)

Spivak's point seems to be, therefore, that it does not matter what the specific type of failure may be—it is ultimately unimportant who is failing or for what reasons. We may be speaking of the failure of peasant insurgency brought about by the specific successes of colonial power, or of Gandhi's success-in-failure in his negotiations with the nationalist bourgeoisie, or even of the ways cognitive failure casts its shadow over the vigilance of the most successful deconstructive critic. The lesson to be learned is that no one is immune from the recursive structure of the sanctioned ignorance that incites us to see success despite the co-presence of failure.

What kind of theory travel are we witnessing here? To an extent, the kinds of questions left unresolved in Barbara Johnson's analyses seem to return again, especially those relating to "theory's" problematic position as the successor to philosophy. For when Derrida was looking for a new "concept" that could never be included "in the previous regime," the regime he explicitly referred to was the history of Western philosophy. Now the structural necessity he reveals to have been governing those philosophical discourses will certainly crop up in the most unlikely places, where one would least expect it, and it is crucial to be reminded of that. Indeed, the most innovative and rewarding aspect of Spivak's scholarship for us today

lies precisely in her ability to transact with, and so dislocate, colonial and postcolonial rather than Western contexts.

At the same time, however, the new deconstructive concepts that can emerge by working through texts concerning subaltern struggles in colonial India (texts that are not merely further extensions of a seamless Western philosophical text) should then be marked by the specific context in which the deconstructive reading is performed. In other words, these emergent concepts cannot be governed by the context—the comparatively homogeneous medium of philosophy—within which questions of undecidability initially took form in Derrida's writing. Therefore, when Spivak claims that "what had seemed the historical predicament of the colonial subaltern [i.e., the irrecoverability of a direct, unmediated subaltern consciousness] can be made to become the predicament of all thought, all deliberative consciousness" (OW , p. 204, emphasis original), I sense an example of all-too-successful travel, leaving too little room for an experience of failure not preordained by the theory being deployed.

However, a few pages further on, just when we might have been left with the impression that the differences between historiography, philosophy, and accounts of political struggle were being effectively neutralized, the argument takes a new turn—we are introduced to historiography not as an exemplary model for deconstruction but as strategy. The most telling aspect of Spivak's use of this term does not lie for me in the oft-quoted oxymoronic phrase "strategic essentialism." Rather, I am interested in the way her consideration of "historiography as strategy" forces a wedge into the narrowly philosophical and linguistic edifice structuring the essay so far, thus demanding that the historiographical no longer just remain an instance of the philosophical.^[26]

It is when a theory recognizes its entrance onto territory for which concepts are not ready at hand, starts to stumble over the new ground, that a theory can be said to be traveling well. Inserting the additional concept of strategy—not determined in advance—is one way of coming to terms with the partial nature of the theory one is working within—in this case, deconstruction's partiality for levels of abstraction that bypass more specific issues.

What meanings can we attach to the notion of strategy? Thinking of one's theory as a strategy is immensely suggestive—it strikes a middle ground between the tendency of viewing theory as the logical application of a preset method, on the one side, or as a practical tool, with no subsequent effects or commitments, on the other. The text unfortunately does not elaborate or refer us to its militaristic and Marxist connotations, where strategy, as deliberative and careful planning in the overall deployment of one's forces, has mainly been contrasted to tactics, the more immediate maneuvers in the field. Moving strategically enables Spivak to bring other figures and concepts into potential alignment with the practice of the subaltern group—Marx's fetishism, Nietzsche's genealogy, Foucault's counter-memory, even Derrida's affirmative deconstruction.

Yet the elaboration of Marxist notions of class consciousness to produce richer and more plausible accounts of subaltern consciousness appears constricted in Spivak's essay. One gets the sense that problems of consciousness in the "narrow" sense are never quite theoretical but are only of strategic value. As she put it in a recent interview: "[A] strategy suits a situation, a strategy is not a theory."^[27] Therefore, the efforts of the subaltern historians to delineate autonomous moments in anticolonial struggles are effectively pulled out of an extended consideration by being marked "theoretically unviable," though of undoubted "political interest" (OW , p. 207). The point I am trying to get at is that too much is given up in such undeconstructed juxtapositions of "theory" and "politics," "theory" and "strategy"; we lose the full force of her suggestion that the desire to claim "a positive subject-position for the sub-altern might be reinscribed as a strategy of our times" (OW , p. 207).

The nexus of theory and politics is clearly not straightforward or simple. As Spivak herself has returned to it in painstaking and at times self-critical length in the context of the relations between feminism and deconstruction, perhaps a look at those arguments will help locate my dissatisfaction with "Deconstructing Historiography" more carefully and productively.^[28]

In the course of revising her position, Spivak's major emphasis is to warn against the conflation of theoretical and political moves.

Thus, when Derrida makes Nietzsche's "woman" one of the names for undecidability, Spivak criticizes her earlier view that, as a feminist, she must question Derrida's politics because he is guilty of instrumentalizing the position of women for his deconstructive ends. Deconstruction, she now argues, is located in a different register from a feminist interrogation of patriarchy because it does not take a narrative form—it is not a description of the position of women in philosophy. Rather, deconstruction is about the suppression and precomprehension of difference necessary for any act, thought, or narrative, a precomprehension "which we cannot get a handle on"^[29] but which deconstructive readings make manifest. "Woman" in deconstruction is strictly nominal—the term Spivak uses is catachresis , a metaphor without adequate referent—one way (among others) of naming the lack of a foundation for truth claims. Derrida's "woman," therefore, is not the subject of feminism as we might conceive of her in the women's movement or in feminist theory.

Spivak's corrective gesture is salutary and persuasive. But whereas she wants to prevent the reduction of deconstruction to a narrative, to warn against confusions between the dislocating maneuvers of deconstructive "theory" and feminist attacks upon "unmarked" patriarchal epistemologies or the instabilities wrought by feminist politics, my concern stems from the other direction—after according deconstruction its structural level of operation, don't questions of feminism, politics, and strategy return with even greater force, precisely because they are not equivalent to, subsumed under, or narrativized by "theory" as she understands it? If "woman" is, indeed, a catachresis, a concept-metaphor without adequate referent, and, moreover, if feminists often further conflate political and epistemological considerations, then, as feminists, we have to work in many different registers simultaneously. Our investigations, therefore, are as much conditioned by the effects of the women's movement and the work of feminist scholarship as by the realization that "woman" has also been one of the names for undecidability.

Unlike the male deconstructivist, whose efforts can remain parasitical upon a philosophical tradition inherited in a straightforward and unproblematic manner and who has been able to keep the

historical and institutional marks of his text more or less transparent, the feminist deconstructivist has a more obviously composite task to perform.^[30] In other words, I do not wish to detract from Spivak's warning that our patterns of thought are caught within structural binds and metaphysical traps, perhaps especially so when we are motivated by political and strategic considerations. I am only arguing for an equal emphasis upon the ways in which our questions move within and between levels of abstraction, forms of analysis, and institutional constraints. The texts we read, the traditions of theorizing (feminist, postcolonial, and so on) we harness to our projects, the impasses we name—all have a great deal to do with strategies, including those fashioned in the past and whose consequences we now inherit and have to contend with.

It is time to bring these reflections back to "Deconstructing Historiography." Should we now read the "subaltern" as yet another name for the economy of undecidability, a catachresis like "woman"? If so, then we would indeed have to distinguish between the "subaltern" who becomes "the predicament of all thought, all consciousness" and the subalterns of Indian history and not collapse theory and politics, theory and strategy. As before, however, there is every reason to work these levels and layers together, in irreducible complicity but not equivalence. At the level of "theory," we should ask ourselves what difference is inaugurated when the emblem of the fundamental alienation of all consciousness is the subaltern in colonial India rather than an exemplar from the Hegelian paradigm. What destabilization of the authority and self-contained character of Western philosophy is wrought by going so far afield to provide an embodiment of its universal claims?

Moving to more specific considerations that go beyond the very privileged connotations of theory as deconstruction, we would then need to conceive of alternate configurations of subaltern agency rather than come to a halt with "theoretically unviable" and, one should add, politically unsatisfactory notions of strategic essentialism. If I have understood Spivak correctly, it is in the face of undecidables such as her notion of cognitive "success-in-failure," the lack of an ultimate criterion to ground our interpretations, that further strategies must be risked and accounts rendered.

To take one example, in an essay contained in an early volume of Subaltern Studies , Ranajit Guha meticulously plots the failures of colonial, nationalist and even Marxist historiographers in their construction of history as the narrative of a single Subject—whether it be the Raj, the will of the state, the Indian National Congress, or class struggle.^[31] A deconstructive reading would no doubt alert us to all the difficulties that attend Guha's claims regarding what he calls "the specificity of rebel consciousness."^[32] At the same time, this very specificity makes subsequent analytical demands upon the reader, demands that do not end with the kind of contrast deconstructive readings often propose—the contrast between some unchanging essence and a purely differential notion of identity. For one is still prodded to account for those positive aspects of subalternity—religiosity, territoriality, combinations of sectarianism and militancy, contradictions of solidarity and betrayal—that historical discourses so far have naturalized, trivialized, or missed out altogether. Even the demand that "the rebel as the conscious subject of his own history" be no longer treated exclusively as a "contingent element in another history with another subject"^[33] can surely be fruitfully explored by investigating the double sense of "subject"—being subjected to processes of domination, as in Foucauldian analyses of subjectification, as well as the excesses, resistances, and more active makings of subjectivity. That no simple lines of distinction or forms of measurement for such an ambivalent subject exist calls for both deconstructive and political interventions in the remaking of history.

Near the close of "Deconstructing Historiography," Spivak touches upon the problematic figure of woman in the work of the subaltern group. The problem, as she sees it, lies not with a lack of documentation on women's participation in the histories being reconstructed but with the historians' overall nonrecognition of the instrumental role women play in enabling the emergence of coherent analyses. Notions of femininity, for instance, often provide a metaphoric and discursive basis for insurgent mobilization. Or, to take another example, in order to affirm the village solidarity achieved by rebel groups in their construction of a common ancestry, what gets passed over are the women "acquired by marriage"

from elsewhere, who must consequently be "drained of proper identity" (OW , p. 220). Focusing on the female subaltern in these ways, therefore, disrupts notions of territoriality and community that achieve their coherence at her expense.

Is this why, two years after her analysis of Subaltern Studies , Spivak comes to offer an interpretive essay on the gendered subaltern to this collective of historians? "A Literary Representation of the Subaltern: A Woman's Text from the Third World," along with Spivak's translation of Mahasweta Devi's story (originally written in Bengali), makes for an excellent counterpoint to the essay I have just been discussing.^[34] Via a movement that is at least doubleedged, a negotiation between fiction and theory is staged here, which could serve to deepen and transform some of the questions that emerged out of the transaction between theory and historiography. In order to compare the different strategies adopted and to explain how they can make the disparate structures of theory more visible, it will be necessary to provide the briefest of summaries of Mahasweta Devi's story.

"Stanadayini," meaning "Breast-Giver," tells the multilayered fable-like narrative of Jashoda, poor Brahmin wife and "professional mother" (OW , p. 222, in English in the original), who first prospers as the wet nurse for the innumerable children of a wealthy household, (many of whom subsequently leave to make their own way in the world), only to die unclaimed and alone of breast cancer. There is enough to invite an allegorical reading of this narrative, and not only because Jashoda is also the name of the Hindu god Krishna's foster mother. As Spivak herself succinctly encapsulates such a reading,

[l]ike the protagonist Jashoda, India is a mother-by-hire. All classes of people, the post-war rich, the ideologues, the indigenous bureaucracy, the diasporics, the people who are sworn to protect the new state, exploit and abuse her. . . . [In addition,] the ideological construct "India" is too deeply informed by the goddess-infested reverse sexism of the Hindu majority. As long as there is this hegemonic cultural self-representation of India as goddess-mother (dissimulating the possibility that this mother is also a slave), she will collapse under the burden such a self-representation permits (OW , p. 244).

Spivak, however, embarks upon an unexpected theoretical strategy. Instead of reading "Breast-Giver" as parable, she privileges literality over allegory. This means that one can raise questions around Jashoda's possible subject position as a subaltern woman , rather than allowing her to disappear completely as the instrument and metaphor of the nation. Already we can glimpse an initial response to the instrumental position in which "woman" was placed in many of the contributions to Subaltern Studies.^[35]

Such a literalizing move enables a remarkable orchestration, a space into which feminist theories can travel and be interrogated by the translated narrative. One by one, dominant strains within recent Western feminism—variously (and problematically) titled as Marxist-feminist, liberal feminist, French "high" theory—take their stand and are examined for what they can offer by way of illumination.^[36] At first glance it appears as though it is essentially the limitations of these theories that get emphasized as the theories are questioned by a piece of fiction. This is all the more surprising when we recall how theory traveled in the previous essay, where at one point it was so "successful" that the subaltern could become a model for the deconstructive method. If anything, one would have expected Western feminisms to have at least as much—if not more —relevance for an Indian writer's fictional woman as does the practice of deconstruction for a subaltern historiography.

A closer reading of Spivak's strategic negotiations with Western feminisms, however, would revise any initial sense of their limitation, in the sense of their simple inapplicability. I have been trying to indicate that we are in a much better position to explore the partial and composite structures of theories when their inability to travel easily is most obvious. One reason deconstruction traveled so "successfully" in the previous essay, I suggested, had to do with its philosophical level of abstraction, a level sufficiently general to make it feel unencumbered by, even indifferent to, questions of context, for instance. As against this, most feminist theories have had to be forged at different, often conflictual levels of abstraction. This has not necessarily made these theories more immediately aware of their own totalizing and homogenizing tendencies. When such an awareness has been forthcoming, moreover, it has too often

taken a relativizing turn—an increasingly common practice is for dominant feminisms to be marked as "Western," "middle class," and, less commonly, "white," and then go on as before. Spivak's essay can offer something else.

A critical transaction between, for example, the work of a selection of U.S. and British Marxist-feminists, on the one hand, and Jashoda's position as a professional mother supporting a crippled husband, on the other, reveals the following: The Marxist-feminist texts are shown to circulate unevenly among different levels of abstraction and themes, such as the insertion of the labor theory of value into sexed reproduction, the specificity of the unequal exchange structuring all motherhood, and historical explanations for the transition from precapitalist into class society. In other words, the assumptions and considerations of these theories range as much from the most abstract formulations of value theory, some explicitly cross-cultural claims about mother-centered infant care, to historical narratives on the nature of capitalist and imperialist social formations. This simultaneous use of economic, cultural, and historical registers is what makes these theories composite. When brought to bear on the "cacophony" and "singularity" of Mahasweta Devi's narrative, at times these theories have to be reversed (Jashoda produces the means of subsistence while a child-bearer, rather than being dependent on her husband), at times they stall (as it becomes clear that the imperialism under consideration in a British feminist text is taken to be continuous with capitalism), and at times they reach a "strained plausibility" (in the protagonist's transition from a domestic to a "domestic" economy, from the unpaid labor expended on her own family to the sale of her labor power through surplus milk) (OW , pp. 247–252).

In these and her subsequent stagings of feminist theories, Spivak does not really elaborate upon her decision to foreclose on the question of the narrative's allegorical intent (which, we were given to understand, also represented the author's reading). But instead of having to choose between a Jashoda who can either stand for a subaltern woman or be the metaphorical bearer of the nation, it remains possible, in the spirit of the subaltern historians, to reinscribe the gendered subaltern into the making and unmaking of

the nation. However pronounced the suppression of the gendered subaltern in most colonial and postcolonial histories may be, there is no reason to opt out of theorizing this particular failure. Furthermore, the special complexity of Jashoda's subject position as a subaltern, given that she is at once Brahmin in caste but a servant in class, may well be another contentious issue where dominant Western traveling theories will throw no light. We need to look elsewhere, or produce some of our own.

Perhaps because the partialities of both Marxist and liberal feminisms (OW , pp. 253–258) lead them to ignore crucial aspects of sexuality, Spivak also stages a section entitled "'Elite' Approaches: 'Stanadayini' in a Theory of Woman's Body." The privileged theorist she considers on questions of pleasure, or jouissance , turns out to be Jacques Lacan—someone who was not, though he could quite possibly have been, included among Skinner's practitioners of "grand theory." Although Spivak's choice may have been provoked by the unique position Lacan has occupied in the constellation of French feminist theory, I am more interested in seeing how a grand theory structured by psychoanalysis travels differently from those we have considered so far.

To begin with, Spivak ties together Lacan's general propositions on the status of the unconscious with the experience of an "excess" over knowledge, the excess of jouissance:

The unconscious presupposes that in the speaking being there is something, somewhere, which knows more than he does. . . . As against the being upheld by the philosophical tradition, that is, the being residing in thought and taken to be its correlate, I argue that we are played by jouissance. Thought is jouissance. . . . There is a jouissance of being.^[37]

The extreme interest these considerations have engendered among feminists lies in the special position "woman" occupies in Lacan's scheme of things: "[W]hen thought thinks itself a place that cannot be known, that always escapes the proof of reproduction, it thinks according to Lacan, of the jouissance of the woman" (OW , p. 259). The first value in Spivak's redescriptions of Lacanian psychoanalysis for feminism lies in her ability to hold onto both senses of jouissance: forms of excess in general —the excess of being over

consciousness—on the one hand, and a more narrowly defined orgasmic pleasure for women, on the other. Unlike Lacan, she is unwilling to privilege the former and trivialize the latter. Thus, the psychoanalytic theory that is brought to bear on the narrative "Stanadayini" already has a two-tiered composite structure to start off with.

At a specific level, Mahasweta Devi's text seems to emphasize either the silence of woman or the inscrutability of her sexual pleasure. Jashoda only emphasizes the priority of her husband's desire, never referring to her own. Spivak also attends to a separate "minor" incident, where the cook of the household gives in to a lustful son's attack, saying, "Yah, do what you like." When he is subsequently worried that she might "tell," her response is, "What's there to tell?" (OW , pp. 222, 263). Of course, we may well wonder what else the "excess," the inability to speak, is concerned with—we are surely up against questions of coercion and consent during rape that are impossible to answer, as much as we do not have a language for women's pleasure.

Where might the second sense of jouissance, the more general form of excess, be located? The narrative site Spivak recovers is not Jashoda's psychic unconscious but her body, with her cancerous breast becoming that "other" place which ultimately knows more than she does:

The speech of the Other is recorded in a cryptic sentence. It is a response to Jashoda's last "conscious" or "rational" judgment: "'If you suckle you're a mother, all lies'. . . . The sores on her breast kept mocking her with a hundred mouths, a hundred eyes " (OW , p. 260).

During a brilliant analysis of this passage and subsequent ones, Spivak's essay subjects psychoanalysis to further transformations in its composition. In an uncharacteristic culturalist move, she claims that the Judeo-Greek underpinnings of this theory, its constitutive narratives of castration, Adam, and Oedipus, must make way for what she calls "Hindu regulative psycho-biographies." Having been "subalternized" by the master narratives of psychoanalysis, a specifically Hindu conception of "sanctioned suicide" might be re-

covered, she feels, and offer more productive interpretations of Jashoda's death (described in the story as the death of God) than does Lacan's heritage of Judeo-Christian monotheism (OW , pp. 261–262).

For the more limited purposes of my argument here, it is less necessary to evaluate the plausibility of such a theoretical turn.^[38] It seems far more important to point to the incredibly heterogeneous and composite structures of traveling theory that thereby demand recognition in this essay, in some contrast to the previous one. There, deconstruction was more or less the dominant traveler into the field of historiography, supplemented no doubt by a notion of strategy, but one that remained unduly constrained by its essentialist form.

Spivak's differing negotiations in the two essays I have read together illuminate many of the possibilities and difficulties in thinking about partial and composite traveling theories. As claimed in the beginning of this chapter, "theory" is by no means exempt from the profound effects of the West upon postcolonial subjects, even if it would clearly be a mistake to therefore club theory together with what Spivak has called the "enabling violations" of colonialism. The task is to make the most of its dislocating and subversive potential for us.

Whereas in "Deconstructing Historiography" one had the distinct impression that the subaltern historians were being assessed by deconstruction, the remarkable structure of the "Stanadayini" essay lies in the fictional narrative's empowerment as interrogator and disrupter of different modes of Western theory in order to make such theory interpret postcolonial contexts more fruitfully. The latter essay further demonstrates the analytical and political productivity of discrepancies rather than congruences between colonial or postcolonial concerns and those of the contemporary West.

Is it possible and, moreover, useful to undertake such interrogations within the West, in the very development of certain trends of theory, without necessarily having to seek out an "other" from elsewhere? This is what I shall be attempting in the following section on Freud and psychoanalysis.