"In Other Worlds"

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is a renowned American scholar of literary theory and criticism. As a female born in the colonized India, she has always been concerned with the Other in terms of sex, race and class. Her theoretical work across cultures and disciplines is deeply marked by the ethical thinking of the Other, which links her disparate theoretical works into a logical whole.Spivak was academically recognized when she successfully translated and introduced Of Grammatology into the English-speaking world. As a student of Derrida, Spivak’s ethical thinking took a somewhat similar course:a gradual recognition of the singularity of the Other and then a relentless effort to keep the singularity of the Other from being appropriated and subsumed by the dominant discourses. Spivak’s academic interest centers around those racial and sexual marginal, foreclosed in the dominant discourses which are inherently hierarchical, suppressive and violent. Spivak defines alterity in the terms of deconstruction. Unlike Levinas, in whose works the Other is approached mainly philosophically and the call of the Other preconditions the existence of the Self, Spivak stresses the interrelationship of the call of the Other and the response from the Self and cautions that the aporia of the ethics might be used to justify the marginal condition of the subaltern.We can see a consistent development of ethics of alterity in Spivak’s feminist writings which can be mapped out in three stages according to different concerns with the Other:the anti-essentialism in her early works; a critique of European feminist theorists with Kristeva as a special case study, who is blamed for her imperialist arrogance in the description of Chinese women and her complicity with the eurocentrism in face of the Third World Other; a retrieval of two suicide stories of Indian women as a showcase of the inaccessibility of the Other in the ethics of alterity.Spivak’s postcolonialism is also marked by this ethical thinking. Spivak reads Narcissus and Echo, two mythic figures in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as the aporia between self-knowledge and knowledge for others. Based on this reading, Spivak points out two models of ethics: self-referential Narcissus model and Echo model of absolute alterity. The Narcissus model stresses the appropriation and dissolution of the Other by the Self while the Echo model refers to the absolute alterity of the Other beyond the scope of the dominant discourses. Spivak critiques the Western philosophers as they fall within the Narcissus model and treat the colonized Other as an imperialist inferior. In her reading of some literary canons, Spivak analyzes different approaches to the Other and reveals the absolute alterity which cannot be fully expressed by these texts.Spivak’s notions about translation and Comparative Literature are also deeply tinged by her ethical thinking. Spivak’s three-tiered notion of language (logic, rhetoric and silence) is based on the (non)expression of the Other. Silence is what embodies the ethical alterity in the level of language. Translation is therefore seen as communication and reading of and in love, an intimate act of reading. Spivak puts forward the concept of "planetarity" in opposition to globalization to stress the equal play of all languages and literatures on this planet. Her notion of translation and Comparative Literature is fully exemplified in her translation of Mahasweta Devi, which gives us a more vivid understanding of Spivak’s notion of ethics of alterity.