Thik Beat Hotel

I am listening to a tape recording of Gayatri Spivak and Judith Butler's recent conversation at NYU. Spivak is an Indian born postcolonial theorist and Comparative Literature scholar currently teaching at Columbia. While she is as close as one gets in academia to being an intellectual rockstar, having translated several widely used canonical texts and written extensively on feminism and postcolonialism, she is at times derided for the obtuse syntactical presentation of her texts. In fact, some critics have suggested that the introduction to her translation of 'Of Grammatology' makes Derrida seem straightforward and user-friendly. In person she is surprisingly pointed, straightforward, and does not lapse into academic jargon if it does express her ideas lucidly. I don't even remember or give a shit what the conversation was meant to be about, because thankfully, I have voices, not text. I have conversation, not dialectic. I have meanings, not signifiers. The tape recorder truly is the greatest invention since the condom. You can all quote me on that.



This is such a cool fucking picture.


From the upcoming Quotable Spivak Chapbook, available illustrated from Slave Labor Graphics:

"Essentialism is nothing but ontological commitment."

"The uncoercive desires is the way I want to try to teach the humanities as humanities. The humanities, themselves, whatever they are ,most people don't know what they are. If you're a good teacher, you don't know what they are. It's like love, the other person becomes marvelously indescribable, the more you know them."

"When one looks at the Socratic model and sees what Socrates actually did to those notes, you can't call it uncoercive."

"Rather than the human rights worker who enter to teach those who have been deprived, what they themselves have turned their backs on. In other words, the human rights worker, and I abhore human rights work, goes toward the Other with a moral interest in the Other denying self-interest, but teaches the Other self-interest"