Postcolonial Lack

Identity, Culture, Surplus

Gautam Basu Thakur

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781438477701
  9781438477695
• eBook ISBN:
  9781438477718
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Psychology

Examines representations of surplus enjoyment in postcolonial literature and film to focus on self-other relations rather than difference.

Postcolonial Lack reconvenes dialogue between Lacanian psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory in order to expand the range of cultural analyses of the former and make the latter theoretically relevant to the demands of contemporary narratives of othering, exclusion, and cultural appropriation. Seeking to resolve the mutual suspicion between the disciplines, Gautam Basu Thakur draws out the connections existing between Lacan's teachings on subjectivity and otherness and writings of postcolonial and decolonial theorists such as Gayatri Spivak, Frantz Fanon, and Homi Bhabha. By developing new readings of the marginalized other as radical impasse and pushing the envelope on neoliberal identity politics, the book moves postcolonial studies away from the perennial topic of identity and difference and into examining the form and function of the other as excess-surplus and/or lack-in colonial and postcolonial literature, film, and social discourse. Looking at writings by Mahasweta Devi, Amitav Ghosh, Leila Aboulela, Narayan Gangopadhyay, Katherine Boo, and films by Gillo Pontecorvo, Clint Eastwood, Ryan Coogler (Black Panther), and Tony Gatlif, Basu Thakur highlights a new set of ethical and political considerations emerging as a direct result of this shift and stakes a fundamental rethinking of postcoloniality through what he calls the "politics of ontological discordance."

ONE

The Subaltern Act of Freedom

I. SUBALTERNITY AND FREEDOM

It is difficult, if not downright impossible, to draw a straight line between subalternity and freedom. If we follow Spivak’s definition of subalternity as position without identity—the subaltern occupies a position in society (it figures in censuses, voter’s lists, etc.) but is bereft of political or voice-consciousness—then freedom can only exist as a negated concept in relation to subalternity. In other words, the question of subaltern freedom is directly contingent on reversing or eradicating the specific conditions of subalternity. The subaltern must transcend her peripheral position and enter the dominant center. However, insofar as the subaltern is strictly determined by a lack—its inability to self-represent—the possibility of subaltern (class) mobility is doubtful. This makes the proposition of subaltern freedom moot.

The paradox has led some critics to talk about an inherent “theoretical deadlock” in Spivak’s theory: “The deadlock emerges from the fact that Spivak’s concept of the subaltern displays a peculiar troubling quality, as it can only be defined via negativa, namely through its inherent status as a non-subject or non-agent” (Jong and Mascat 2016, 718). “The narrative of subalternity is always already subsumed by the discursive power of patriarchy, imperialism, and nationalism, which purport to both represent (in terms of politics) and re-present (in terms of artistic renditions) the subaltern subject,” therefore, irrespective of whether the subaltern remains on the margins or enters the center, the subaltern always occupies a subservient position, is always subject to domination, and her actions are always inscribed with the logic of dominant hegemony (Shandilya 2014, n.p.).

Correspondingly, it has been also argued that in the rare case a subaltern manages to enter the hegemonic center, she no longer remains a subaltern and loses or forfeits all right to represent those she left at the margins. For once at the center, she becomes part of the center—she speaks as the center—and can no longer authentically represent those at the margins. This debate, readers will remember, erupted in the wake of the publication of Rigoberta Menchu’s memoir, I, Rigoberta Menchu (1983). A K’iche’ woman, Menchu was part of the indigenous resistance against the Guatemalan government and army during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996). Her Testimonio brought to the world’s attention the plight of the indigenous and their rights. While some critics applauded her work as the ultimate validation of subaltern speech, others questioned the authencity of the document on basis of some historical and personal details contained in the testimony. Summarized, the problem is, indeed, can the subaltern (ever) speak? For when at the margins its speech remains unheard; and when, having broken through into the center the subaltern attempts to speak about the condition of life on the margins, its speech is scrutinized and ultimately dismissed for containing minute irregularities (see, Beverley 1999, ch. 3). The subaltern is caught between two deaths: on the margins, it does not exist; but once at the center it can no longer stake claim on the margins. It seems there cannot be a (subaltern) act that actually ever frees the subaltern.

But these are not the only issues emerging from Spivak’s theorization of the subaltern. Critics commonly accuse Spivak of culturalizing politics. That is, of substituting Marx with Derrida in her analyses of subalternity and class; of imposing a unitary subjectivity on the subaltern by framing subalternity via a poststructuralist fantasy of cultural identity; and of resigning the subaltern to its (im)possible condition of lack. The subaltern cannot speak, act, or be free and it appears that Spivak believes the only way the subaltern can exact some modicum of communication in a sociosymbolic heavily stacked against her is by dying.1

What if the subaltern’s immobility, its definition via negativity, is not a “theoretical deadlock” but, rather, Spivak’s most fundamental point about subalternity? I read or misread Spivak differently. Instead of thinking in terms of the subaltern’s movement from margin to center, I find it useful to think of the subaltern as expository of the real condition of the social. Accordingly, I read the aphorism—the subaltern cannot speak—as Spivak’s brutal and unambiguous identification of subalternity as social impasse. The subaltern names the insurmountable impossibility existing not just as a differential between the enlightened center and the brackish margin but as substantive of the impossible antagonism constitutive of this social relation. Pushing farther this line of thinking, I wager in this chapter a reading of subalternity as asynchrony, nonreciprocity, and nonrelation(ship).

We should exercise extreme caution with the hypothesis noted above. I am not suggesting we reduce the idea of subaltern nonrelationality into a coda for understanding oppositional identity politics or explaining the social as irreparably schismatic. Consider how a literal reading of the hypothesis risks silencing the subaltern by turning her into a formula for understanding the social: the absence of subaltern speech means society is irreversibly divided by class; consequently, responses to social inequality must take either one of two (hyperbolic) forms. First, if the nonrelational other is restricting the social from achieving its full harmonious potential, then we must erase this impediment (through the use of concentration camps or by building walls). We identify this as the conservative reaction. The second or the neoliberal response states that we remain deeply empathic toward the other, and that we do this in number of ways, from slapping “Refugees Welcome” stickers on the boots of our cars to advocating tolerance and celebrating difference as part of an all-welcoming multicultural society.

However, imagining the subaltern outside the “struggle of two opposed principles” or the subaltern as a “paradoxical object in which negativity itself acquires positive existence,” we arrive at another theoretically interesting idea about the subaltern (Žižek 2012, 797). We do not need to depart from Spivak’s singular construction of subalternity as position without identity to remark further that the subaltern is the excluded included of the social, and as such it is the traumatic extimité constitutive of but irreducible to the sociosymbolic. The impossible alterity of the subaltern is a threat to hegemony; its eruption in the symbolic defatigates the imaginaries of power, authority, and identity.

L’extimité. Lacan coined this neologism specifically for describing the inside-outsiderly character of the Thing (das Ding). I will invoke it here to characterize the subaltern as an exterior that is always already present in the interior, thus assigning to the interior a quality of exteriority (Miller 1994, 76). Put differently, the subaltern makes the interior uncanny, unrecognizable, and violently fissured. The subalterns Spivak has in mind—the indigenous tribal women in South Asia—indeed live out their lives in the absolute obscurity of the subcontinent’s withering forests, drought-ravaged interiors, and remote mountainous terrains. It is a rare accomplishment of Indian democracy that these subalterns even feature on the voter’s list and the census. But this democratic obligation toward equal franchise apart from supplementing the politics of vote-based democracy (one person, one vote) also pushes us to experience the subaltern as the concrete yet ambiguous within everyday life. Demographic bodies, the subaltern are physically locatable yet metaphysically irreducible. Yet their irreducibility is not simply symbolic difference but irrecuperable impossibility. While symbolic difference can be understood or even overwritten from within the symbolic register, we cannot negotiate the real insofar as it is outside of symbolization. The real is not just a rupture in the symbolic; it is constitutive of the symbolic.

My hypothesis of subaltern nonrelationality is therefore an invitation to think about replacing neoliberal democratic politics with a politics of ontological discordance. Unlike the neoliberal thrust on arranging a “non-totalizable multiplicity of singularities” into a “democratic network,” the politics of ontological discordance focuses on identifying nonrelationality as the constitutive condition for the social and the pivot for imagining a new politics of the social (Zupančič 2016, 90).

Let there be no mistake: I know the subaltern exists. I am not seeking to dematerialize the subaltern. My point rather is that by thinking about subalternity as “immanent impossibility” we can revise our understanding of subaltern (re)actions against hegemonic oppression (Žižek 2012, 800). I claim that, far from being non-agental, subaltern acts expose the real caveats of a disarticulated socius. What I am calling the subaltern act, though, is nothing more than an exceptional enunciative moment via which the subaltern’s negative positivity gains a disruptive social presence. The act re-presents the subaltern as the inherent non-logic of the social (Zupančič 2016, 89; Flemming 2015, 155).

II. THE SUBALTERN ACT

Set at the turn of nineteenth-century-colonial Bengal, Rabindranath Tagore’s (1861–1941) short story “Jibito O Mrito” (“Alive and Dead” [1892]) revolves around the life and death of a young Bengali widow. In the wake of her husband’s untimely passing, Kadombini is condemned to the extreme domestic fringes of her in-laws’ home. As the story goes, Kadombini’s marginalization within the household is so complete that eventually everyone forgets about her; she becomes a veritable specter in her departed husband’s household, and whenever anyone sees her they react as if they had seen a ghost. Kadombini accepts her condition and takes care to keep away from the in-laws, thus pushing herself deeper into the shadows. The situation comes to a head when a child in the family falls sick and “Kadombini’s ghost” is blamed for this illness. Desperate to prove that she is not the cause, or that she is not a ghost or even dead, Kadombini jumps into an adjoining pond to prove that she cannot die twice. The story ends with the sound of Kadombini’s body hitting the water hard, and as this sound tears through the domestic tranquility of the bourgeois household, Rabindranath is quick to moralize: Kadombini moriya proman korilo se more nai (Kadombini died to prove that she was not dead).

Rabindranath’s critique of nineteenth-century-Bengali bourgeois is penetrating—vacuous customs, punishing rituals, and habitual neglect from the in-laws reduce the young widow to a nonentity, a shadow of her former self, and though alive a ghost. But this story gives us more than a critique of a particular sociohistorical context. The peculiar character of Kadombini’s suicide invites a theoretical possibility, which I am calling “the subaltern act.” I will detail the theoretical features of the subaltern act more substantially in my discussion of Mahasweta Devi’s “Draupadi” later in this chapter. Here let me introduce two signal points.

It is clear that Kadombini does not commit suicide to end her life of misery but, rather, to convey a message to the big Other, namely, that she is not dead. But in order to prove she is not dead she has to die. Kadombini commits suicide therefore not to die but in order to validate her being alive previously. Apropos my first point: the subject enunciating or initiating this message, namely, Kadombini, is also the object in the message. Or it is by objectifying herself into a dead body that she manages to convey her message. Second, this erasure of the subject is the message that Kadombini wishes to convey to the big Other. However, her act both temporarily ruptures the big Other’s ability to comprehend and ends up erasing the big Other’s authority. Rabindranath tells us that when Kadombini confronts the patriarch of the house to prove she is alive, the latter freezes and fails to react. Then, as Kadombini runs out of the house and jumps into the adjoining pond, the patriarch, still frozen in his place, hears the sound of something heavy crashing into the water but fails to react. I contend that because the subject becomes an object—the speaker and the spoken about, the inflictor of pain and the victim of that pain—she erases the symbolic order by erasing or cutting the big Other out of the scene. The big Other is rendered impotent to (re)act and can only stand witness to the effacement of its authority from the scene. As further example, let us consider Jose Dolores’s death at the end of Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1969 film Queimada (Burn!).

Jose’s death is similar to Kadombini’s suicide. Though Jose is executed and does not commit suicide, it can be argued that by not escaping when given an opportunity Jose actually does commit suicide. A prisoner charged with leading a peasant insurrection against the newly formed decolonial government of Queimada, a fictional Caribbean island in the Lesser Antilles, Jose (Evaristo Marquez) is sentenced to death by hanging. William Walker (Marlon Brando), a retired English navy officer and agent provocateur, who knew Jose from before the time of the nationalist government, however, decides to set the prisoner free.2 It is not clear from the film if Walker’s decision to let the prisoner escape is due to his old friendship with Jose or because he is concerned about the political implications of executing Jose. The latter seems more probable, because on the night before the execution Walker cautions the administration against making Jose a martyr: a rebel alive is easier to contain than a martyr because the latter becomes part of local songs, oral histories, and inspires rebellions outside the ken of state surveillance. On the morning of the execution, Walker appearing to be acting on his own conviction and accord, slips unnoticed into the prisoner’s tent, cuts his bonds, and tells him to escape. Jose refuses. Jose refuses to accept freedom not wrested away from the oppressors, preferring to die instead, especially if his death becomes an inconvenience for the government.

The “ultimate expression of sovereignty,” according to Achille Mbembe, “resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.” Hence, to kill or to allow life constitutes the limits of sovereignty, its fundamental attributes (Mbembe 2003, 11–12). By refusing sovereignty this power, Jose withholds satisfaction from the big Other. Like Kadombini, Jose too recognizes and sends a message to the big Other. But in both cases the message reaches the big Other as a stain, inexplicable and incomprehensible. Struggling to make sense of the subaltern’s desire, the big Other finds itself absent from the message. This act of sending a message to the big Other but which the big Other is incapable of hearing or understanding creates a possibility for subaltern freedom. This (speech) act I term therefore as the subaltern act of freedom. It is not a freedom into a different or better world but, rather, the freedom to speak. Or, freedom in the (moment of) enunciation. Freedom here is the authentic subjective moment that unravels the big Other’s lack—it is not all-knowing and has no power to authorize. Kadombini’s and Jose’s suicide/execution are expressions of them remaining alive outside the strict jurisdiction of the Law.

Though Kadombini commits suicide, her act appears closer to an execution than suicide. For Kadombini was pushed to suicide as the hegemony silencing her left her with no other recourse. No matter how many times Kadombini screamed “I am alive” no one heard. Similarly, Jose’s execution is also a suicide. He had the option to escape but only by not escaping could he articulate his message. Both the subalterns therefore use their bodies to speak; their bodies slithering out from being overwritten by law. By erasing their bodies to correspond with their already erased speech, that is, by unraveling the body as an object of speech, the subaltern shocks the big Other. Their wanton disregard for the body delivers a traumatic truth, namely, there’s a difference between having and being a body. As humans, we can have a body but never be the body. The association we make between the self and the body is perpetually flawed. Inaugurated by misrecognition, the image of the corporeal body never stands up against the signifier subjectifying us as lack-in-being. “This lack in being as effect of the signifier divides being and body, reducing the body to the status of having it” (Miller 2001, 21). Therefore, in throwing their bodies away, the subalterns force the big Other to confront its own lack, delivering in process a sharp rebuff to the big Other’s promise of a positive relationship between the image and an idea of being.

The subaltern act challenges, foregrounds, and uncongeals the already existing systemic aporias within the dominant symbolic order. As excess of the signifying function or remainder of the signifying process, however we wish to conceptualize the subaltern-in-the-act, the subaltern is the signifier gone missing (Zupančič 2017, 47). It is the name for an unbecoming of signification. Confrontation with the subaltern act is therefore a confrontation with something extremely traumatic, a negative positivized or the coming face-to-face with nonbeing. This results in momentary lapse of reason and evisceration of the logic for differential identities, symbolic power struggles, libidinal economies, and commodity cultures.

Before moving forward to a detailed explication of my theory, I wish to clarify that this effort to re-theorize the concept of the subaltern is not exclusively Lacanian in orientation but, in fact, most of my cues for reading the subaltern in this manner comes from Spivak. Lacan aids by giving the framework required for thinking through, especially via the Lacanian theory of acts, to which I will now briefly turn before returning again to discussing the subaltern act in more detail.

III. THE SUBALTERN ACT AND LACAN’S THEORY OF THE ACT

On first reading, the psychoanalytic theory of the act might seem inappropriate or even unusual to analyzing subalternity (for reasons discussed below). But I will underline in this section the braiding I pursue between Lacan’s theory of the act and what I term the subaltern act.

The act in psychoanalysis, Ed Pluth explains in Signifiers and Acts (2007), must not be conflated with the well-known psychoanalytic concepts of “acting out” and the “passage to the act” (passage à l’acte). The act is different from both. The fundamental distinction has to do with their different relations to fantasy. To elaborate: while “acting out” and the “passage to the act” lea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Postscript
• Chapter One The Subaltern Act of Freedom
• Chapter Two Postcolonial. Animal. Limit.
• Chapter Three Hysterization of Postcolonial Studies; or, Beyond Cross-Cultural Communication
• Chapter Four Fictions of Katherine Boo’s Creative Non-Fiction, or, The Unbearable Alterity of the Other
• Chapter Five Political Correctness Is Phallic: Idaho Politics, Black Panther, and Gran Torino
• Conclusion: Particular Universal
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover