Gayatri Spivak: Future, pasts, languages, Balkans

source: Kanal uporabnika Prisotnoststeje    2012年5月20日
SUBVERSIVE FORUM - THE FUTURE OF EUROPE, Zagreb, 18. 5. 2012
Gayatri Spivak: Future, pasts, languages, Balkans
The idea of Europe is historically and currently precarious as the basis of any unification. The Latin Middle Ages do not offer a good analogy. Monocultures are always in a double bind. In order to think Europe as a territory with borders that can negotiate the performative contradictions of the borderlessness of global capital, every citizen must rethink nation as a site of capital-management. Is this possible? I believe it can be if education makes the appropriate changes and this shift is understood as both poison and medicine, depending upon its collective use. 'Future' can then be seen as part of the gamble. To supplement this shift away from nation-thinking to capital-management thinking, the incalculable element of languages must be taken with the utmost seriousness. This is particularly apposite in the Balkan context. This is the pre-text of the short term economic struggle. A comment on the byzantine movements of Greece and Turkey on the European chessboard might enter here. And digital idealism should be aware that social networking is dependent upon constituted subjects in transformed collectivities as described in the opening of this abstract.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Indian literary critic, theorist and a University Professor at Columbia University. She is best known for the essay Can the Subaltern Speak?, considered a founding text of postcolonialism, and for her translation of Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology. She describes herself as a 'practical Marxist-feminist-deconstructionist'. She is also a visiting faculty member at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Spivak is best known for her contemporary cultural and critical theories to challenge the 'legacy of colonialism' and the way readers engage with literature and culture. She often focuses on the cultural texts of those who are marginalized by dominant western culture: the new immigrant, the working class, women and other 'postcolonial subjects'. Some of her books are A Critique of Postcolonial Reason Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), Death of a Discipline (2003), Nationalism and Imagination (2010).
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