Textual Practice 21(4), 2007, 623–640

Jane Hiddleston
Spivak’s ‘Echo’: theorizing otherness and the space of
response

Postcolonial and poststructuralist theorists of cultural difference have

always been troubled by the question of how to write about alterity
without incorporating it into a preconceived framework of understanding.
Frequently quoted thinkers such as Derrida, Barthes or Kristeva, for
example, stress the importance of looking beyond the terrain of the fam-
iliar, and troubling one’s sense of a secure cultural grounding, as one con-
templates the singularity of a potentially opaque other. At times, however,
readers have objected that in such theoretical works, the other all but
vanishes, perplexingly, from the framework of the exegesis, either as a
result of a focus on the writer’s own subject position, or, in the case of
Derrida, as a result of what is seen as his self-reflexive and abstract ‘textu-
alism’.1 This article will analyse Spivak’s rebuttal of such accusations with
regard to her own work, and argue that, despite her apparently excessive
introspection, her work succeeds, in both argument and structure, in
showing how traces of the other’s voice could be given space to resonate.
First, in ‘Echo’ Spivak theorizes Echo’s voice as an imitation without inten-
tion, and goes on to suggest that an awareness of that hidden intentionality
could open up a locus for subaltern response. Spivak’s theoretical writing
in ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ then questions the relation between imita-
tion and intention in representations of the self-immolating woman, and
in drawing attention to slippages and assumptions in these existing rep-
resentations, uncovers a space of ‘play’ in which the women’s agency lies
present but hidden. Next, I shall go on to argue that Spivak’s own intro-
spective musings also work to undo the stability of her perspective on
the other, so that her theory cannot be taken for an authoritative treatise
determining the position and voice of that other in advance. What
might at first appear like introspective narcissism ultimately undermines
the stability of the inquiring self and reveals the text’s limits as it strives
to theorize an other it knows it cannot access. This digressive and revisio-
nist structure, together with the exploration of Echo and Narcissus, offers a

Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online # 2007 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/09502360701642359
Textual Practice

model of an encounter from which many comparable thinkers may have

something to learn.
A number of critics argue that Spivak’s work is so painstakingly self-
conscious as to be crippling, or indeed paralysing, and she is accused as a
result of occluding otherness in similar ways to the theorists mentioned
above. Most obstreperously, Terry Eagleton complains not only that her
writing style is careless and wayward, but also that she distracts attention
from the important issue of colonialism and its aftermath by spending
too much time guiltily pointing out the bad faith of her position.2 In
addition, Benita Parry famously objects that Spivak exaggerates the
importance of the work of the postcolonial female intellectual, and that
her endless critiques of the Western institution still leave no space for
the voice of the subaltern. Ultimately, and in spite of herself, ‘Spivak in
her own writings severely restricts (eliminates?) the space in which the
colonized can be written back into society’.3 Furthermore, with perhaps
more nuance Peter Hallward criticizes Spivak’s concept of the subaltern
for positing her voice as singular and inaccessible, and for failing to
think through the means by which she might consolidate her identity
and voice. For Hallward, ‘the subaltern, in other words, is the theoretically
untouchable, the altogether-beyond-relation: the attempt to “relate” to
the subaltern defines what Spivak will quite appropriately name an
“impossible ethical singularity” ’.4 The result is apparently that the
critic deprives the subaltern of a voice while endlessly theorizing and re-
theorizing the mechanics of her own critical, and unavoidably Western,
enunciation.
Certainly, in response to this it should be conceded that Spivak spends
as much time on representational blindness, in her own and others’ work,
as she does on the material and empirical conditions of subaltern experi-
ence. My intention is as a result not so much to defend her against these
objections, as to pinpoint the irresolute dynamics that her self-conscious
musings dramatize, and to suggest that her explicit engagement with the
contradictions of her project makes abundantly clear the loopholes that
necessarily appear in any theorization of alterity. To be sure, she does
not provide a clear political strategy enabling the subaltern’s seizing of
agency, but she does reveal, and goes some way to look beyond, the
limits of the theorist’s power to speak in the other’s place. More specifi-
cally, her interrogation of the relationship between Echo and Narcissus
proposes an ambiguous, elusive form of response, and, although this
response risks remaining unheard, its conceptualization succeeds at least
in opening up the discursive space. Spivak’s argument that ‘play’ can be
found within the concept of imitation then suggests that a hidden response
might reside between the lines of her own representations of the subaltern.
In addition, by drawing attention to the occlusion of the subaltern’s agency

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by colonial and Hindu texts on sati, she helps to empower the women
themselves, perhaps not politically but certainly theoretically, since she
demonstrates that they need to be conceived as active subjects, even if
the intricacies of their agency are not wholly accessible to us now. Hallward
is as a result not quite correct in describing Spivak’s subaltern as ‘theoreti-
cally untouchable’, since the structure of Spivak’s writing on intention
manages to indicate the possibility of a complex but self-conscious
agency absent from official accounts. An awareness of Echo’s potentiality
and the complex construction of her choice is conveyed by her text,
despite her recurring self-doubts. Finally, the very self-reflexive, anxious
structure of Spivak’s writing in turn warns against the dangers both of a
return to the ‘self ’ and of any blind tendency to speak in the place of
the other. Her contradictory and fluctuating stance may not, therefore,
provide a flawless example of a theory successfully accessing the other; it
does at times become almost opaque in its self-qualifications. Nevertheless,
both the argument and the structure of her thought on the subaltern
uncover the intricacies of a textual encounter that many writers either
simplify or foreclose.
References to the myth, or the concept, of Narcissus crop up intermit-
tently in Spivak’s work and provide useful background to her engagement
with Echo in the essay of that name. In ‘Asked to Talk About Myself ’, pub-
lished in Third Text in 1992, Spivak discusses the function of origins in the
postcolonial critic’s staging of herself, and identifies the dilemma between
her resistance to a grounded, essentialist concept of origin and her sense
of the need to honour the difference of the other’s origin. This uncertainty
is then translated into the possibility that the postcolonial critic becomes, on
the one hand, ‘a certain kind of Narcissus: fixated on our image as the model
of our identity’, or, on the other hand, that she refuses the construction of a
secure, alternative origin and offers herself as a more insubstantial counter-
echo to Western discourse.5 The choice is structured as an aporia, so that
both strategies are revealed to be insufficient, since the one reifies the
critic’s identity and the other assimilates her into the culture she also
wanted to critique. She is as a result condemned to shuttle between Narcissus
and a form of counter-echo reliant on Western discourse in a state of perpe-
tual unease concerning the construction and positioning of her voice. In a
more recent piece, ‘On the Cusp of the Personal and the Impersonal’,
Spivak similarly asserts that there is a very thin line between introspective
narcissism and the attempt to use one’s experience as representative of a
broader cultural group, though here again both stances are unsatisfactory.6
The claim for representativity can flip over into an appropriation of the
other’s experience, whereas a narcissistic concern only with the self is
clearly reductive and limited in its critical value. Narcissism, then, is a
danger that threatens Spivak’s writing, one that she seeks to avoid, but

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one whose alternatives also bring their own traps and insufficiencies. The
task remains urgent to conceive a way to open up the position of Narcissus,
or to allow space for a simultaneous contestation or response to the auto-
biographical self-image that Spivak also retains.
‘Echo’ is Spivak’s most sustained engagement with the problem of
Narcissism and the viability of Echo’s response. First, Spivak discusses
Freud’s ‘On Narcissism’ and observes that, like Christopher Lasch in his
Culture of Narcissism, ‘[Freud] too had located the richest examples of nar-
cissism among women’.7 Her own essay as a result turns to Echo in order to
provide an alternative understanding of the role of the woman in Narcis-
sus’s story, as well as to show how Narcissus’s introspection might be met
with a contestatory response. Spivak goes on to note how Freud’s use of
Narcissus ignores the framing of Ovid’s story and its portrayal of an
inequality between the sexes. Freud omits to take into consideration that
Narcissus’s story is part of that of Tiresias, who is punished by Juno
because he sides against her in her dispute with Jupiter, and stricken
blind. Tiresias’s punishment is not disabling, however, since he retains
his gift of infallible prophecy. Narcissus, moreover, who is also punished
because he is the product of the rape of Liriopes by Cephisus, is told by
Tiresias he will live as long as he does not know himself. He is condemned
not to coincide with himself, and sure enough, when Narcissus falls in love
with himself by gazing at his reflection in the pool only then to recognize
his own image, he must die. This moment for Freud is, as in Lacan’s
Mirror Stage, one of self-fulfilling jubilation rather than punishment,
though Narcissus’s subsequent death is also a figure for the ultimately
impossible union with the self. For Spivak, however, it is noteworthy
that Freud does not refer to the original frame of the story, since the dis-
crepancy between Tiresias’s and Narcissus’s punishments, and Echo’s dis-
ablement, is indicative of her role as subsidiary. Spivak reminds us that
Echo is also punished by Juno, this time for engaging her in chat while
Jupiter played with nymphs. Echo is allowed only to repeat back words
spoken to her, her voice is never her own, and eventually her body shrivels
and withers away until all that is left of her is this voice without intention.
The punishments take very different forms, then, since Tiresias turns out
only to speak the truth, while Narcissus, at the moment of his death,
achieves a form of self-consolidation. He is also depicted as at harmony
with nature when his sisters come to mourn him and find his body replaced
by a flower. Echo, conversely, has no identity, her body ‘is obliged to be
imperfectly and interceptively responsive to another’s desire, if only for
the self-separation of speech’.8 She is nothing but the echo of another’s
voice, a disembodied reverberation who, in Spivak’s account, is neither
fully alive nor able to die. This story of punishment and gender imbalance
is what is missing from Freud’s essay on Narcissus.

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 Jane Hiddleston Spivak’s ‘Echo’

Spivak also notices, moreover, that the English translation of the Ovid
reveals an ambiguity that is not present in the Latin. While Ovid directly
quotes Echo when she repeats Narcissus calling ‘Is anyone here?’, ‘Come’,
and ‘Let us meet’, when Narcissus asks ‘why do you fly from me?’, he does
not quote the words but merely narrates that they are repeated.9 This is
because, if the phrase were quoted, the second person interrogative
‘fugis’ could hypothetically with just a tiny shift become ‘fugi’, the impera-
tive, which would allow Echo to speak in her own voice, independently,
and yet this is precisely the transformation that Ovid does not allow. In
Spivak’s words, ‘[Echo] marks the withheld possibility of a truth outside
intention’; her voice, in Ovid, represents the removal of agency from
speech.10 Spivak’s interest, conversely, lies in the possibility that the ‘fly
from me’ might have, but did not, become a warning rather than simply
a repetition of the interrogative, and in the English, the phrase contains
that ambiguity – it could be either the end of the question or a
command. The single phrase allows the critic to imagine the alternative
future anterior, absent from Ovid’s text, that might have been interpreted
as Echo drawing Narcissus away from the self-recognition that brings
about his death. This then becomes for Spivak a Derridean moment of
différance, since it combines difference, the imagination of an alternative,
with the simultaneous deferral of that alternative response. Echo’s ambig-
uous statement, between a parroted question and a command, figures a
response that is at once the same and different, it is a repetition that con-
tains the trace of an (im)possible reinvention. For Spivak, this provides a
flicker or glimmer of an ethical response: ‘under the broken rebus – legendary
bones and paradoxically persistent absent voice, connected by nothing at all
– that is her mark or guarantee that she will be around, the mastership of
truth (Derrida’s critique of the Lacanian analyst) is the experience of the
impossible (Derrida’s description of ethics)’.11 This reading of Echo’s
imitation opens the possibility of a mimicry that contains difference, of a
repetition whose meaning cannot be appropriated by that which it
repeats. Echo’s warning and longing resonate even as her voice is condemned
only to reiterate the sounds already produced by another speaker.
In her references to Narcissus in the two previously quoted essays,
‘Asked to talk about myself ’, and ‘On the cusp of the personal and the
impersonal’, Spivak points out the dangers of a Narcissism that leaves
no space for Echo’s response. By thinking further about Echo’s potential
imitation without imitation, and the ambiguity of her intention,
however, we might come closer to conceiving a subtle, deconstructive
way to trouble the vanity and introspection of Narcissus’s self-reflexive
gaze. Echo represents the trace of otherness within imitation, or the
impossibility of constructing a self that fully and essentially coincides
with its own image. She raises the possibility of difference within

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self-representation, of alterity within the copy, and encourages us also to

imagine how the critic’s narcissistic turn to autobiography in her engage-
ments with the other might reflect back meanings she did not intend
and cannot control. Introspection and self-expression might also take us
outside ourselves; writing the self also makes that self other. In Spivak’s
terms, ‘where justification is sought and offered, we see the knowledge
of the self as writing, stalled; and the symbolic circuit not as a relatively
fixed Eurocentric scenario, but as a contentless, enclitic, monstrative
vector, its definitive responsive character unfilled with the subject’s inten-
tion, though the intentional moment (Echo’s speech toward Narcissus)
is not absent’.12 At the same time, Echo equally allows us to conceive
the slipperiness and ambivalence of intention, she enables us to look for
forms of response in which intention is either subversively indicated
against the grain of the text, or in which intention has been assumed but
cannot be substantiated. She alerts us to our potential blindness in ascrib-
ing intention to the statements and representations of the others that we
analyse and reproduce, and reminds us that in such reproductions inten-
tion must remain undecidable. The communication between Narcissus
and Echo appears to disallow Echo’s intention but nevertheless, in
Spivak’s reading, suggests the faint, residual possibility of an intention
where we were least expecting it. This troubles our assumptions about
intentionality and could be used to add nuance to our readings of
agency and choice in the voice of the oppressed.
Spivak takes Assia Djebar’s Fantasia as an example in contemporary
writing of such an ambiguous response to Narcissus, and the analysis is
worth mentioning briefly now in order to clarify Spivak’s conceptualiz-
ation of Echo.13 Fantasia is figured by the author as a fraught attempt at
a collective autobiography of Algerian women, or, perhaps more accu-
rately, as a ‘preparation’ for an autobiography.14 Uncomfortable with
using the pronoun ‘I’, since Algerian Muslim women were on the whole
not expected to speak of themselves in the first person, and unwilling to
claim a straightforward form of self-assertion and self-presence, Djebar
nevertheless attempts a form of French autobiography and is for Spivak
‘not-quite-not-Narcissus’.15 Her investigation of the self contains a form
of introspective narcissism, but her stance also cannot be that of a self-assertive
French-speaking subject in the tradition of Rousseau since her language
cannot figure the Algerian woman’s body – neither that of the narrator
nor that of her compatriots. In this sense she is both Narcissus and not,
her writing both tentatively reflects a mirage of her form and fails irrevoc-
ably to encapsulate her. Moreover, Spivak draws our attention to Echo’s
inscription in the work by quoting Djebar’s exploration of the double
meaning of the Arabic tzarl-rit, which can mean either ‘to utter cries of
joy ’ or, paradoxically, ‘shout, vociferate (of women when some misfortune

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 Jane Hiddleston Spivak’s ‘Echo’

befalls them)’.16 Djebar’s quotation here reveals a duality, an ambivalence

that cannot be translated; like Echo’s ambiguous response, it is a represen-
tation in which the intention has been obscured. Quoted in a francophone
text, the term also figures everything whose meaning the author cannot
transfer or mimic perfectly. Djebar’s text is full of such ambiguities, and
for Spivak these can be read as floating echoes, terms, and idioms that
cannot be appropriated by the francophone narrator and that do not
represent a constituted, unmediated other. They suggest the Echo of an
otherness whose intention has been lost and whose meaning is suspended,
like the hypothetical ‘fly from me’ absent from, though haunting, the text
of Ovid.
For Spivak, then, Echo’s is a response that cannot be fully known,
grasped and assimilated. Echo evokes not the concrete, assertive voice of
the other but the resonance of traces of uncertainty that linger beneath imi-
tative representation. She figures at the same time the obscurity of the
other’s intention even as we quote her in our efforts to back up our argu-
ments. Having elucidated the role of the concept of Echo in Spivak’s think-
ing, moreover, it seems pertinent now to look for her reverberations in the
theorist’s own writings. Spivak conceptualizes a coupling of Narcissus with
the trace of Echo, but we might also try to locate this form of response
within her own theoretical project. In Spivak’s famous, or notorious,
essay ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, she criticizes the obfuscation of the
Other by Deleuze and Foucault, and goes on to use the textual treatment
of the sati, which has come to name the immolation of widows in India, to
illustrate more concretely the effacement of the subaltern woman’s voice in
both native patriarchal and colonial accounts of cultural practice. First,
Spivak reminds us that the British colonial authorities abolished widow
suicide in 1829, and that this abolition ‘has generally been understood
as a case of “White men saving brown women from brown men”’.17 At
the same time, the nativists’ claim that ‘the women wanted to die’, that
the woman was exercising free choice, persists in defiance of the colonial
assumption of coercion. In both narratives, Spivak asserts that the
women’s voices are absent; the two arguments oppose one another, but
the widows’ consciousness has no space in this dynamic. Spivak asserts
that the colonizer sets himself up as the saver and protector of women,
and at the same time, in a complex reading of Hindu archives on
suicide, she demonstrates that the nativist assumption of the women’s
agency masks leaps and distortions of argument. The upshot of both
accounts is that the widow is silenced and cannot speak for herself. At
the end of her analysis, Spivak even shows that the very term sati doubly
effaces the woman, first of all because in Hindi it has come to mean
simply ‘good wife’, even though the masculine form sat in the sacred
texts connotes a universal essence or spirit, and secondly because the

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British used the term in such a way as to equate being a good wife with self-
immolation. The term in such usages evacuates the voice of the other to
which it is supposed to refer. To link this back to the concept of Echo,
Spivak reveals these leaps in order to allow sati to represent a more
complex layering, she opens up the term to uncover its hidden conflations.
She lets us hear, not the voices of the widows, but at least the ambiguity of
the word’s echo. She does not reconstruct the subjectivity or agency of the
sati, but allows the reverberations of the term’s muted referents to be
discerned.18
The main drive of Spivak’s argument here concerns the manipulation
of the concept of free will in the Dharmasastra and the Rg-Veda, texts of
Hindu and Vedic antiquity where the self-immolation of widows is
explained, and from which the subaltern’s voice is nevertheless excluded.
It is here that notions of intentionality are problematized in a way that
recalls the ambiguous response of Echo. Spivak shows how, in the Dhar-
masastra, suicide is generally reprehensible, but certain forms of suicide
are acceptable for men, for example if the act is the subject’s response to
knowing ‘the insubstantiality or mere phenomenality (which may be the
same thing as non-phenomenality) of its identity’.19 The suicide in this
case accomplishes a paradoxical completion of the self. Suicide is also per-
mitted for men if performed in certain places, as a journey to a sacred place
of pilgrimage, for example. The self-immolation of widows, however, is
sanctioned as an exception in the Dharmasastra, because it is seen to
conform to these conditions on a secondary level. The text permits the
immolation of women by positing the husband’s funeral pyre as the
metonym for the sanctioned, sacred place. For Spivak, however, this
means that woman’s suicide is also a sort of displacement, she can only
commit suicide improperly by taking the husband’s place. In addition,
when conceived in relation to the sanctioned suicide of the subject who
knows his insubstantiality, the widow’s suicide can be seen as a secondary
act of mimicry. The widow is allowed to kill herself because the dead
husband exteriorizes her knowledge of her limits, and she ‘acts out’ that
awareness of his phenomenality. The text makes an exception here both
in its permission of women’s suicide, and in its attribution of agency to
widows (who were relegated permanently to a passive, premarital status),
in order to justify self-immolation. Yet for Spivak, this agency is fragile,
given that it manifests itself, as she shows, on this secondary level both
in the woman’s acting out of her husband’s phenomenality and in her
taking his place on the funeral pyre. As in Echo’s response, then, intention
here becomes blurred with imitation, with mimetic performance, and is as
a result in itself unidentifiable and unlocatable. The widows’ intention is
only a model or a copy, in which it is ultimately impossible to locate
any individual’s authentic intention. Again, as in Echo’s ‘fly from me’,

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agency is a lost potential here, the glimmer of a possibility, but it is also

dissolved because the supposed free choice is just an imitation of a code
created for men, and in other contexts. The aim of Spivak’s reading,
then, is not to seek simply to recover the women’s lost voices or agency,
since the contestatory power of the Echo here lies precisely in the defeat
of any attempt, on the part of the reader, to reduce their act to a statement
of this or that desire. Her point is rather, as with Echo, to uncover a slip-
pery conflation of imitation and intention, and to insist that it is in this
ambiguity that the women’s lost response lies hidden.
Moving on from the Dharmasastra, Spivak goes on to note further
slippages in the Rg-Veda, in order to unveil a history of the misreadings
upon which justifications of widows’ self-immolation rely. One key
example of such a misunderstanding concerns the line ‘let these wives
first step into the house’, where the word agré, meaning first, was read
by some as agne, meaning fire. Not surprisingly perhaps, the statement
was taken to be sanctioning self-immolation. I shall not quote all the
leaps and distortions identified in Spivak’s text here, since a careful and
scrupulous reading of her use of archives has already been undertaken by
Sandya Shetty and Elizabeth Jane Bellamy in ‘Postcolonialism’s archive
fever’.20 The interest of Spivak’s strategy, however, is that it hinges on slip-
pages of meaning, false representations and unlocatable intentions, and the
ambivalence of the women’s response emerges, tentatively, between the
lines of her reading. She pays attention to the ambiguities and errors of
both British colonial assumptions about sati, and of Hindu and Vedic jus-
tifications, and suggests that the agency and voice of the women only echo
tentatively in the gaps left by the leaps of logic and interpretation they
demand. In their errors and contradictions, the texts Spivak reads do not
betray traces of the widows’ agency or free will, but the ultimately unloca-
table nature of their intention, and their over-determination by codes that
mask the slippery origins of their practice. Agency is constructed by every-
one other than the women themselves, and the ambivalence and complex-
ity of their choice is signalled only by the texts’ ellipses and lacunae.
Critics of Spivak’s strategy object that her very question ‘can the sub-
altern speak?’, and her focus on the loss of the subaltern’s voice beneath
contrary accounts that celebrate either colonial protection or a false
notion of agency and intention, do not provide an adequate strategy for
the widow’s renewed coming to voice. Asha Varadharajan’s inspired cri-
tique argues that Spivak generally over-stresses the impenetrability of her
objects of analysis, but that an alternative reading of the subaltern,
informed by Adorno’s dialectics, could make her position more concrete
and substantiate her capacity for resistance. If Adorno’s dialectics empha-
size the recalcitrance of the object in its resistance to the identifications of
the subject, then Spivak’s subaltern could similarly throw back to the

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dominant discourses of the West a vision of the concrete otherness that

does not remain complicit with its structures.21 Similarly, Bart Moore-
Gilbert suggests that Spivak at times presents the subaltern as helpless
and irretrievable, and ‘she does not recognize that there might be a
number of intermediate positions between “full” subalternity and hege-
mony’.22 For both critics, Spivak’s unspeaking subaltern is fully effaced
by the discourses acting upon her, and she would do well to offer a
more affirmative theory of contestation and response. Perhaps the point
of Spivak’s argument in the sections discussed above, however, is precisely
to open out our understanding of response in such a way as to make it
impossible for the critic or writing subject to create the subaltern’s response
herself. Her analysis certainly does not provide a practical vision of resist-
ance, but it sketches the ways in which Echo might resonate within criti-
cism without the critic appropriating her voice, forging her agency or
giving her a specificity that is not hers. Spivak’s is undoubtedly a highly
subtle textual strategy and not an alternative history, and she never set
out to produce an anthropology of the experience of sati. She deliberately
avoids making the subaltern more concrete or resistant, since such a con-
struction would risk becoming in turn another appropriation, whereas her
goal is to indicate the traces of response within the accounts of the subal-
tern that we do have. The theory of Echo, the problematization of imita-
tion, and the argument that the intention of the other is not for the critic to
locate, incite Spivak to leave space in her text for response.
Where, however, does this attention to Echo leave the Narcissus of
Spivak’s self-conscious theoretical voice? In addition to her conceptualiz-
ation of the self-immolating woman’s ambiguous, hidden response,
Spivak’s writing persona interrogates itself in order, at the same time, to
continually open up her stance and prevent her voice from becoming
reified or self-fulfilling. The text of ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, and most
importantly its reworking in the Critique, is inward-looking and self-reflex-
ive, but it also amends, refines, and revises its own premises to produce a
theoretical position that is never at one with itself. It is useful to look at the
changes made to the later version of the text in order to pinpoint this self-
doubt and self-modification. I shall concentrate on the section dealing with
the sati, since it is here that we have already located the traces of an Echo,
and these traces of response can be complemented by a problematization of
the assertions of Narcissus. First, Spivak omits a number of sections in the
later version, such as her comments near the beginning of the discussion of
the sati stressing the relationship between information retrieval in anthro-
pology, political science, history and sociology on the one hand, and her
own challenge to the construction of a subject position that underpins
such work on the other.23 The paragraph containing this assertion is
absent from the version printed in the Critique, suggesting that she no

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longer wants to make such bold claims for her strategy. This later version is
clearly more doubtful about its broader resonance and impact than the
earlier text. Furthermore, the revised version is less trenchant, and contains
more discussion, and more ambivalence, about its own practice. Here,
Spivak precedes her analysis of the Dharmasastra with the observation
that the colonial subject normalizes the notion of ‘woman’ in this
context and avoids the question of psychobiography, and she goes on to
ask, ‘what is it to ask the question of psychobiography?’24 The question
remains unanswered, but indicates the impossibility of telling the subaltern
woman’s biographical story, and introduces a further level of methodologi-
cal unease absent from the earlier version. It also contradicts a statement
made by Spivak in an interview that one of her purposes as a critic is to
search out ‘psycho-biographies, regulative psycho-biographies for the con-
stitution of the sexed subject which would be outside of psychoanalysis or
counter-psychoanalysis’.25 The assertions of earlier writings are in this way
intermittently tempered and opened out in this later reworking. The
critic’s subject position and argumentative drive become less affirmative.
In addition, in the later version Spivak inserts a further section devel-
oping the resonance of Lyotard’s concept of the differend, and the expan-
sion of this analysis indicates a less dogmatic attitude to the subaltern’s
silencing. Spivak describes the aporia between the patriarchal admiration
of the women’s free will and the rhetoric of colonial benevolence by
quoting Lyotard at length, and stresses that these are two perspectives
between which there is no common ground, no terms in which to nego-
tiate. This conception of a stand-off between incompatible positions
chimes at the same time with Lata Mani’s description of the block
between colonial officials’ critique of coercion and the indigenous
defence that sati was carried out by choice, since this created too stark a
conflict that glossed over the complexity of the women’s agency.26 For
Spivak, however, the widow’s response lies in the space between these
poles, the space left open by differend. Spivak goes on to underline the
impossibility for the woman to overcome this differend, but indicates
that her analysis will end with a reflection on ‘an idiomatic moment in
the scripting of the female body’, which will remain in the space of the dif-
ferend, but which is nevertheless not the same as total effacement or
silence.27 Even if this space is one of impossible negotiation, the terminol-
ogy of space connotes a chink that can be analysed, rather than outright
effacement or ignorance.
This potential field of analysis then relates to Spivak’s discussion of
the suicide of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri, which in the earlier version con-
cludes with the stark statement ‘the subaltern cannot speak’. In the
revised version, however, she admits that this was an inadvisable remark,
since of course, in its certainty it silenced the very other whose voice she

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was trying to rescue.28 Spivak then stresses that she sought not to flatten
out the subaltern’s response in this way, but to emphasize the misguided
efforts of ‘her more emancipated granddaughters’ in their attempts to
speak for her. The aim, then, was not so much to reinforce the effacement
of the subaltern’s voice, but to trouble the endeavour to respond in her
place. Spivak herself knows that, in accessing the story through family con-
nections, her approach to it is necessarily circumscribed and builds on
layers of rewriting and recreation. In this sense she herself also risks conti-
nuing to speak for Bhaduri, interpreting her gesture as an act of free will
without actually accessing the woman’s voice and agency. Even more,
the reading could fall accidentally into repeating the role of British colonial
officials monitoring the widow’s suicide to check that it was indeed an act
of free will, when the very concept of free will was constructed in too
complex a way to be secure and knowable. In acknowledging her limit-
ations, in particular in the later version of the essay, however, Spivak suc-
ceeds in leaving the text open enough to reveal the ambivalence of
Bhaduri’s gesture. Between the lines of this analysis is the sense that her
piece allowed Bhaduri to respond in some secondary way – perhaps as
an Echo, the trace of an ultimately unknowable female body answering
back to, as well as evading, the archives discussed earlier in the essay.
Spivak responds here to Abena Busia’s reading of her text in ‘Silencing
Sycorax’, which suggests that the interdiction of speech is not the same
as silence, and this final version does then claim to offer a glimmer of
Bhaduri’s story that was foreclosed by previous accounts.29 Her echo
resonates in the space of the differend, rather than remaining completely
beyond conceptualization. Most importantly, the rewriting theorizes the
anxiety of the critic and the subaltern’s interception of her speech, rather
than reinforcing the other’s silence.
Spivak’s self-reflexivity is also, then, a self-refinement and an ability to
admit to her own errors, as she continually explores the layers and echoes of
her own text. If the text of ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ and its later rewriting
do incorporate, alongside the Echo of the sati, self-conscious, even narcissistic
musings on the work’s own mechanics and implications, then that introspec-
tive gesture is one that is not carried out by a voice that knows itself fully. The
text also contains the story of the critic’s own learning (and unlearning), not
in order to deflect attention from the other but in order to reveal that this
Narcissus has not achieved self-completion but recognizes her inevitable
mutability, her difference from herself. Furthermore, Spivak’s abstruse, con-
voluted and at times impenetrable style is part of this attempt to open out her
voice, to allow it to attend to the intricacies of the other without incorporat-
ing each step in the analysis into a single over-riding principle. As Mieke Bal
argues, Spivak’s difficulty stems from her ability constantly to refine, explore
and interrogate her own arguments, her desire to present her standpoints as

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part of an evolution, an internal debate. Her self-conscious references to her

own teaching practices also imply a process of introspection that supersedes
the control of a single, knowing subject and present her thought processes as
part of an ongoing dialogue. For Bal, the Critique’s tortuous prose instructs
us to read as if we were in Spivak’s classroom, and she suggests that, ‘listen-
ing, knowing you can object, argue, “apply” in your own work, and go with
its current, then, is the best way of reading this book’.30 Spivak’s obscurity
might also, once again, be seen as a refusal to appropriate the other in
straightforward imitative prose, as she writes against the tendency for
Western philosophy to claim to produce the truth about its object.
Stephen Morton quotes Spivak’s response to accusations of excessive diffi-
culty when she states, ‘we know plain prose cheats’, and this demonstrates
her mistrust of clarity, of an apparently self-same critical language.31 The
statement itself, five monosyllables, challenges the reader to look beyond
its simplicity and to question demands for illusory transparency. Her convo-
luted style, then, is not that of a self-consolidating Narcissus but one that
draws attention to its own concealed nuances, complexities, and potential
slippages.
Finally, in the Critique of Postcolonial Reason Spivak’s revisions,
digressions and convoluted musings lead to a questioning also of the
very borders of ‘Theory’. Several times Spivak characterizes theory precisely
as this form of anxious self-reflexivity, the offering up of a set of prop-
ositions and their immediate questioning or withdrawal. At the end of
the discussion of Coetzee’s Foe, she asserts that, ‘theory itself has no con-
sequence. It is autosequential rather than automatic. Theory is the pro-
duction of theory, lost in its setting to work. It is always withdrawn
from that open end, as it is from that which it wants to theorize’.32
Later, she critiques the assumed opposition between positivism or essenti-
alism and Theory, and suggests that this very division makes of Theory an
artificially distinct category in which, again, ‘the position of the investi-
gator remains unquestioned’.33 ‘Theory’, with a capital T signifying a
grand narrative or master discourse, is undermined in favour of Spivak’s
own ‘implausible and impertinent readings’, her ‘obtuse angling’ con-
stantly in dispute with itself.34 Equally, the theorist is not the possessor
or controller of her discourse but ‘one woman teetering on the socle
mouvant of the history of the vanishing present, running after “culture”
on the run, failure guaranteed’.35 The image here of precarity, of a
writing subject scarcely grasping the cultural history that slips through
her fingers, implies at the same time a simultaneous immersion in and
alienation from her subject matter. Spivak’s hazy theoretical persona,
announcing her presence in order immediately to question the usefulness
of that gesture, aptly performs this precarious position between analysis,
self-awareness and self-doubt.

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It would be ironic, however, to take this conception of theory as a

model for a genre we might copy. If she performs all the contradictions
of her chosen genre, Spivak remains wary of the assumption that her ques-
tioning might be exemplary or that it might provide a sense of an appro-
priate balance between introspection and an engagement with the other.
Part of her withdrawal from her own autobiographical reflections, for
example, stems from a reluctance to speak ‘for’ any wider community
(of Bengali women, of feminist postcolonial intellectuals, for example),
and her dissolution of her subjective writing position also disables any
representative standpoint she might be construed to adopt. When she
reflects on her ‘Indian example’ in the Critique, for example, she assures
her reader that this is not ‘a nostalgic investigation of the lost roots of
my own identity’, and promises that her cultural background merely pro-
vides her with scattered tools for analysis.36 It certainly does not give her
insight into some sort of broader postcolonial experience. Similarly,
when she does name her biculturality as an ‘example’ of transnationaliza-
tion in the closing pages of that work, she actually finishes by fictionalizing
her persona and eradicating any subjectivity from the portrait. She com-
ments on her curious sartorial combination of an Indian sari beneath a
French Connection T-shirt when visiting an exhibition in New York,
but her sardonic self-description as ‘an exhibit’ simultaneously hypostatizes
the ‘Gayatri Spivak’ she describes.37 As David Huddart argues, Spivak, like
Derrida, presents herself as an example ‘in order to test our general sense of
exemplarity, of what makes a good political example’, and warns against
the extrapolation of broader truths from her auto-exposition.38 Neverthe-
less, if not exemplary, her writing does expose both the traps of an excessive
attention to the theorist’s own inscription in her work, and the dangers of a
straightforward dismissal of one’s critical, even autobiographical, assump-
tions. Her schizophrenic deployment and retraction of autobiography in
her cultural analyses disable the construction of a constant, representative
position, but succeed in performing nonetheless a wider aporia between
subjectivity and analytical inquiry that many postcolonial theorists still
struggle to resolve.
Not surprisingly, there is, in Spivak’s writing, at times a sense of
defeat, the disillusionment that she did not express what she meant and
that the writing contradicts its initial purpose. Her texts are littered with
examples of such frustration, but we might note as an acute instance her
recent response to criticisms of the lectures assembled in Death of a Disci-
pline. The title of Eric Hayot’s interview with Spivak on the subject quotes
her lament at ‘The slightness of my endeavour’, and Spivak sheepishly con-
fesses that the work was written quickly, and seems parochial to her now.39
She rejects her own use of the term ‘planet’, comments that it has nothing
to do with the Comparative Literature and Area Studies that were, in fact,

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 Jane Hiddleston Spivak’s ‘Echo’

her focus, and regrets that it was interpreted to be bound up with environ-
mentalism. Certainly, the concept of planetarity is among Spivak’s most
vague and least politicized, and the term clearly has not caught on as a
broadly applicable figure for an open, uncanny global community. More
generally, for much of the interview, Spivak retracts, refines or builds on
the arguments proposed in the original text, and though she cheerfully
thanks her critics for reading her with such care, there is an underlying
sense of a failure to make herself understood. Her writing turns against
itself in its generation of effects and implications it cannot control. Further-
more, it is evident that Spivak’s self-conscious theoretical writing belongs
to a genre whose popularity is waning, and whose subversiveness is gener-
ally being questioned. Many poststructuralist and postcolonial thinkers
such as Barthes and Kristeva, as well as Derrida, Lyotard or Spivak, are
becoming increasingly out of fashion, and many critics believe that their
moment has passed. As Colin Davis has noted, a spate of books with
titles indicating the demise of ‘theory’, in a broadly poststructuralist
sense, have appeared since the early 1990s, and it is certainly a genre
that has caused scandals and aroused distrust.40 What I have hoped to
draw attention to here, however, is not so much theory’s self-defeat as its
highly challenging identification of traps and lures that will continue to
plague postcolonial criticism, even if such self-consciousness has now
largely been superseded. Spivak’s work records a moment of anxiety, an
opening out of the voice of the critic, and a reassessment of the very
limits of theoretical discourse. While questioning her own stance, she
also theorizes at least a potential opening for a response within the dis-
course of academic mastery, and her writing on Echo opens a chink or a
space for ambivalence within representation, even if it is unable to access
the subaltern’s unmediated voice. The fluctuations of Spivak’s writing
and the aporias of her stance address and reconfigure real difficulties,
such as the conflict between self and other, between introspection and
the call for response, difficulties that continue to obstruct postcolonial
thought, even if the moment of their self-reflexive interrogation has to pass.

Exeter College, Oxford

Notes

1 See for example Benita Parry’s discussion of Derrida’s New International in

‘Internationalism revisited, or in praise of internationalism’, Postcolonial
Studies: A Materialist Critique (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 93–103.
2 Terry Eagleton, ‘In the gaudy supermarket’, London Review of Books, 21.10
(May 1999), pp. 3–6 (p. 6).

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3 Benita Parry, ‘Problems in current theories of postcolonial discourse’, Postcolonial

Studies: A Materialist Critique (London and New York: Routledge, 2004),
pp. 13–36 (p. 23). Reprinted from Oxford Literary Review, 9 (1987), pp. 27–58.
4 Peter Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the
Specific (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 30.
5 Gayatri Spivak, ‘Asked to talk about myself ’, Third Text: Third World Perspec-
tives in Contemporary Art and Culture, 19 (Summer 1992), pp. 9–18 (p. 18).
6 Gayatri Spivak, ‘On the cusp of the personal and the impersonal’, Biography,
22.1 (2004), pp. 203–221.
7 Gayatri Spivak, ‘Echo’, The Spivak Reader, ed. Donna Landry and Gerald
Maclean (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 175–202 (p. 176).
See also Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Norton,
1983), and Sigmund Freud, ‘On Narcissism: an introduction’, The Penguin
Freud Library Vol 11: On Metapsychology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991),
pp. 65–97.
8 Ibid., p. 185.
9 See Ovid, Metamorphoses: Book III with an English translation by Frank Justus
Miller (London: Heinemann, reprinted 1971), p. 151. Spivak’s translation
uses ‘fly’, whereas Miller uses ‘run’.
10 Spivak, ‘Echo’, p. 183.
11 Ibid., p. 186.
12 Ibid., p. 193.
13 I have written on this text at length in Jane Hiddleston, Assia Djebar: Out of
Algeria (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006).
14 See Mildred Mortimer, ‘Entretien avec Assia Djebar’, Research in African
Literatures, 19.2 (1988), pp. 197–203 (p. 203).
15 Gayatri Spivak, ‘Echo’, p. 187. Spivak uses a similar construction to talk about
herself in the US as a ‘not-quite-not-citizen’, ‘Scattered speculations on the
question of cultural studies’, Outside in the Teaching Machine (London:
Routledge, 1993), pp. 255–284 (p. 262 and p. 270). In both cases, the formu-
lation implies both belonging, or identification with Narcissus, the colonizer,
or US culture, and non-belonging or exclusion.
16 Ibid., p. 187.
17 Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Van-
ishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 287. I am
quoting here from a revised version of Spivak’s ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, and
have chosen to use the most recent rewriting here in order to provide an up-to-
date analysis. The differences between the renewed version and the original will
be discussed later in this article.
18 Spivak’s reading of the obfuscation surrounding notions of free choice in this
debate are treated in more detail, and on a historical level, by Lata Mani in
Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998). Mani also argues that the argument
between colonial officials and Hindu men supporting the tradition revolves
around a very basic conception of female agency and occludes the complex
ways in which the very notion of choice and agency are constructed.

638
 Jane Hiddleston Spivak’s ‘Echo’

19 Ibid., p. 292.
20 Sandya Shetty and Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, ‘Postcolonialism’s archive fever’,
Diacritics, 30.1 (2000), pp. 25 –48.
21 See Asha Varadharajan, Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said and Spivak
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
22 Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London:
Verso, 1997), p. 106.
23 See Gayatri Spivak, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, printed in Colonial Discourse
and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman
(Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), pp. 66– 111 (p. 90).
24 Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, p. 291.
25 Gayatri Spivak, ‘Criticism, feminism, and the institution’, The Post-colonial
Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (London: Routle-
dge, 1990), pp. 1–16 (p. 9).
26 Mani argues that the widow was always posited as a victim, and that the rep-
resentation of her as victim was always structured according to a stark binary:
‘either a pathetically beaten down and coerced creature or a heroic person,
selflessly entering the raging flames unmindful of pain’. Lata Mani, Contentious
Traditions, p. 31.
27 Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, p. 295.
28 Gayatri Spivak, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, p. 104, and Critique, p. 308. The
story of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri, briefly, is that she hanged herself at the age of
16 or 17 because she was involved in the armed struggle for Indian indepen-
dence, but did not want to commit an assassination. She killed herself while
menstruating, however, so that it was clear that it was not because she was preg-
nant as a result of an illicit affair. Bhaduri’s act is also a reversal of the rule that
women cannot immolate themselves during menstruation, but accounts of her
death either eradicate her femininity, or insist on the illicit love narrative. Her
own intentionality and agency are as a result silenced.
29 Abena Busia, ‘Silencing Sycorax: on African colonial discourse and the
unvoiced female’, Cultural Critique, 14 (Winter 1989–1990), pp. 81 –104.
Busia argues, ‘far from being unable to read, Spivak herself gives us a
reading by accepting the body as a legitimate text which can be used to inscribe
itself out of multiple conscriptions’ (p. 103). Theorizing at the same time her
intervention as a Black African woman, Busia boldly concludes: ‘we women
signify: we have many modes of (re)dress’ (p. 104).
30 See Mieke Bal’s review article on the Critique, ‘Three-way misreading’, Diacri-
tics, 30.1 (2000), pp. 2–24 (p. 23).
31 Stephen Morton, Gayatri Spivak (London and New York: Routledge, 2003),
p. 6.
32 Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, p. 194.
33 Ibid., p. 283.
34 Ibid., p. 336.
35 Ibid., p. 359.
36 Ibid., p. 209.
37 Ibid., p. 414.

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38 See David Huddart, ‘Making an example of Spivak’, Angelaki, 6.1 (2001),

pp. 35–46.
39 Eric Hayot ‘The slightness of my endeavour: an interview with Gayatri Spivak’,
Comparative Literature, 57.3 (2005), pp. 256–272.
40 See Colin Davis, After Poststructuralism: Reading, Stories and Theory (London:
Routledge, 2004). Davis quotes Paul Bové’s In the Wake of Theory (Hanover,
NH, and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1992), Barbara Johnson’s The
Wake of Deconstruction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), Thomas Docherty’s After
Theory: Postmodernism/Postmarxism (London and New York: Routledge,
1990), Valentine Cunningham’s Reading After Theory (Oxford: Blackwell,
2002) and Butler et al.’s (eds.), What’s Left of Theory? New Work on the Politics
of Literary Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 2000) (p. 193). Davis’s
own argument is that theory does provide a forum for ‘the ongoing endeavour
to understand as best we can what is common and communicable about our
disparate lives’, and that its flaws and self-contradictions are part of the richness
of its provocation (p. 177).

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