Al-Kassim-The Face of Foreclosure

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The face of foreclosureDina Al-Kassim

Published online: 01 Jun 2011.

To cite this article:Dina Al-Kassim (2002) The face of foreclosure, Interventions: International

Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 4:2, 168-175, DOI: 10.1080/13698010220144171

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THE FACE OF FORECLOSURE

Dina Al-Kass imUniversity of California at Irvine

The face of foreclosure summarizes the central figure of Gayatri Spivaks

A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, name ly the parabasic trope of trans-

national literacy in motion. In addition to offering a concise explanation of

the rhetorical, ethical and political framework of Spivaks book, the essay

also provides a definition of the concept of foreclosure that orients Spivaksreading practice of parabasis in the opening chapter on philosophy. The

essay describes the effect of A Critique of Postcolonial Reasons amplifi-

cation of the famous essay Can the subaltern speak?, and, through this

emphasis on foreclosure as one of the cultural impasses facing the trans-

national critic, The face of foreclosure offers an account of this trenchant

criticism of postcolonial studies.

A recent episode of a television news magazine provides a succinct example

of the complex textual web of transnational exploitation that increasingly

wears the mask of universal feminism. Connie Chung, playing the metro-

politan minority, goes abroad with the task of saving Bangladeshi girls, often

described within the story as children, from the irredeemably violent Third

World men who victimize and, in this case, literally disgure them by throw-

ing sulfuric acid in their faces. The ABC 20/20 website carries both the TV

parabasis

foreclosure

Lacan

Spivak

representation

postcolonial

subaltern

feminism

interventions Vol. 4(2) 168174 (ISSN 1369-801X print/1469-929X online)

Copyright 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/13698010220144171


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transcript and Chungs piece, a rst-person travel narrative containing such

gems as I had heard of barbaric acts of violence against women in the Third

World and when I visited the burn unit all I could think of was how fortu-

nate we are in America. As we watch Chungs travelogue, Bina Akhter, a

victim turned activist, is transgured from organizer, counsellor, and advo-cate working against the power of social shaming and abjection that disg-

ures the public faces of these young women, into a migrant Native

Informant, whose evident needs she travels to Cincinnati to undergo facial

reconstructive surgery come to serve as an alibi for the continuation of the

technological civilizing mission that underwrites the project of globalizing

capital. That Akhter must turn to the west is itself never questioned, for the

global distribution of goods and knowledge, here specically inscribed as

charity and access to plastic surgery, is assumed. Instead, the tabloid expos

takes the salvation narrative as its plot despite the fact that Akhter herself isreported in other sources (e.g. Ms. website, November 1999) as saying that

violence against women is global; thus, the possibility that Akhter might hold

views at odds with the project of civilization or that those views might rise

to the occasion of a politics is utterly excluded by the universalist feminism

of the tabloid tale. Akhter becomes an advertisement for American medical

superiority and compassionate charity, as she is shown frolicking in a mani-

cured Ohio park while another South Asian womans voice translates Akhters

speech in an articially higher pitch, Its a dream!

In other words, Chungs tale of Bangladesh dramatizes what Gayatri Spivak

in her recent book, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a Historyof the Vanishing Present, calls a UN-style universalist feminism, which

simulates a womens collectivity, unwittingly, one hopes, to use the needs of

the needy in the interests of the greedy.1 Spivaks accomplishments in the

elds of feminism, Marxism, deconstruction, and literary studies set the stan-

dard for critical vigilance with respect to the network of advocacy, univer-

salist feminism, subalternity and violent erasure at work in this television

example, where, despite the particular focus and locality of her activism,

Akhter is made to serve as a mouthpiece for universality and the essential

privilege and rightness of American civilization. Spivak teaches us to situate

the condescending moves of Chungs feminism sceptically without therefore

requiring Akhter to represent herself in the terms of a universal subject; or,

from another angle, Spivak might have us hear Akhters dreaming as some-

thing other than a desire to belong to the suburban landscape at which she

marvels. The text of Critique would suggest, instead, that Akhter identies

the dreams origin in the exclusion of everything she might call real. In fact,

according to the analysis of global capital found in the pages of Critique,

Akhters comment correctly identies Third World labour as the unrepre-

sented real centre of a transnational distribution of wealth that siphons off

the dream to the west while, simultaneously, the marvelling and disgured

TH E FA CE O F F O R EC L OS URE

Dina Al -Kass im

1 Gayatri Spivak

(1999: 361).


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face of a Third World female child reects back to Chungs imagined audi-

ence a luckier America. To be dreaming in and of Ohio is one representation

of the dominant [that] also trace[s] a subliminal and discontinuous emergence

of the native informant: autochthone and/or subaltern (Spivak 1999: xi).

This media example reects a more intractable problem, one that Spivakanalysed long ago in her ground-breaking essay Can the subaltern speak?,

where she argued that western liberal and radical efforts to represent the inter-

ests of Third World women have the unwitting effect of reinscribing a global

class system precisely through the unexamined politics of speech. The

representative intellectual, in wanting to/attempting to speak for the other,

inevitably rebounds into a descriptive and representational depiction of that

others speech and interest because the subaltern is denied the right of entry.

To demand or make room for the subalterns speech is equivalent to demand-

ing that the subaltern adopt the discourse of political agency and enter intothat enlightenment space of self-representation. This demand effectively

censors those others who cannot assume their own image in the space

cleared for an enlightenment politics by perversely asking that the subaltern

cease to be herself as the price of becoming a modern subject. Thus the sub-

altern other is never presented and does not speak in her own name or her

own voice because to do so would mean ceasing to be that aboriginal whose

knowledge and memory is a priori excluded from the domain of Reasons

cultivation.

Critique raises the problem of the subaltern differently by rst locating her

ancestor in the strange invocation of an Aboriginal man, a native of Tierradel Fuego at a key moment in Kants Third Critique. This Fuegan appears

as an example of a wildness from which the civilized cultivation of reason

departs. According to the analysis that sustains the entirety of Spivaks

Critique this Native Informant enters only to be immediately ushered off the

scene of Enlightenment history. In essence, the Aboriginal/Fuegan/Native

Informant is threatened both with disappearance andrepresentation, and the

latter in at least two ways: rst as the gure of the aboriginal pre-modern

so useful to the self-reection of the enlightenment subject and second by the

later substitution of another gure, and this as a perverse effect of freedom,

that of the postcolonial critic who comes to stand in for the subaltern Native

Informant (1999: 35864).

My aim, to begin with, was to track the gure of the Native Informant through

various practices: philosophy, literature, history, culture. Soon I found that the

tracking showed up a colonial subject detaching itself from the Native Informant.

After 1989, I began to sense that a certain postcolonial subject had, in turn, been

recoding the colonial subject and appropriating the Native Informants position . . .

today with globalization in full swing . . . the foreclosure that I see . . . continues,

rather more aggressively. (Spivak 1999: ix)

in tervent ions 4 :2


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Culture, alive and at work in a play of differences, can be tracked only in

the series of the many gures that orient and frame knowledge. Calling these

gures and the relations that materialize them folds in the social textile,

Spivak analyses the many folds of power and knowledge, even knowledge of

the limits of what we know, from Enlightenment philosophy through manyheterogeneous texts and several elds, humorously named for us as History,

Literature and Culture. The transnational critic reads a mobile text and

from a point of view itself in motion, with the result that we seem more

directly gured in the textile of the social, and in the social folds of textile.

The negativity of foreclosure is, in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, not

turned towards the positive terms of a realer, righter substance but becomes

itself the possibility of an insubordinate practice of reading variously theo-

rized in her earlier essays as allegorical insubordination or as permanent

parabasis. Permanent parabasis, as a gure for a lawful abuse that retrievesa critical perspective by bringing the margin on to the stage, demands of

reading that it be a movement, a doing and turns the metaphor of motion into

a mode of political address that grounds the activism of the book in the

reading of foreclosure.

Imagining the Aboriginal, Spivak performs a quasi-ctional speech, what

she calls speaking otherwise, spoken in the shadow of the Aboriginals forced

departure from the project of Enlightenment philosophy. Such a speaking is

no knowing substitution of that banished Others speech. Projecting the

perspective of the Native Informant back into the foundational texts of

Enlightenment Reason, Spivak restores neither the Native Informant nor hisimage but the ghostly act of dematerialization that conserves him in the

margins of western Reason. To speak otherwise, here, in the fringe of Kants

text is neither to accept Kants founding exclusion from the civilizing media-

tion of reason nor is it to pretend to speak in the name of the Aboriginal.

Rather, the name of the Aboriginal/Native Informant is spoken again, taken

up as the occasion, even the alibi, for a disruptive retelling of our most

enabling ctions. Such insubordinate speech remembers the ghost of the

Aboriginal foreclosed, while simultaneously refusing to presume to know in

any nal way, what the Native Informant may or may not know.2 This critical

position does not speak for others but, instead, imagines a speech that takes

stock of the violent proscription of those others.

Her restrained sidestepping of appropriative certainty regarding the Abor-

iginals knowledge resists the reduction of the Native Informant to mere

mascot of counter-hegemonic activism while it also preserves the critical com-

mitment to an old-fashioned Marxism reworked within the frame of the

present nancialization of the globe. This ethical problematic is referenced

in Spivaks habit of placing brackets around a key term like the (im)possible

perspective of the native informant, where the possibility of reguring the

Aboriginals point of view depends upon a clear-headed understanding that


Dina Al -Kass im

2 See Laplanche

and Pontalis (1973:

1669), also cited in

Spivak.


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172

this perspective comes to the forefront of our concern with race and gender

by dint of its original exclusion in the text of empire as of philosophy. This

point is worth labouring because Spivaks claim is not simply that patriarchal

imperial philosophy banished the Aboriginal other to unrepresentablity, i.e.

that the raw man of Kants Third Critique was silenced, but that philos-ophy preserved the image and the name of the Aboriginal, the Fuegan as the

representation of a savage basis from which the cultivation of Reason with-

draws. In the idiom of the text, the Aboriginal is foreclosed at the origin of

Enlightenment philosophy. I am proposing to situate rather than expur-

gate the anthropomorphic moment in Kant. Such a moment is irreducible in

his text (Spivak 1999: 16). According to Spivaks unlicensed reading, the

Aboriginal/Native Informant continues to perform this labour of represen-

tation at the edge of our reason for we are inescapably situated within (ibid.:

25) the domain of Reason, nor could we want to give it up. As Spivak put itearlier (1993), we cannot not want to reason with Reason though we must

offer an account of our complicity with the exclusionary logic that subtends it.

The gure of the Native Informant takes her even further. The brackets she

places around her own representational activism are just as evident in her

approach to the varied forms of culturalist and developmental typologies and

taxonomies she analyses. Discussing the effects of postmodernist recapitula-

tions of hegemonic literary and art critical periodization, her text weaves in

the almost imperceptible, subliminal features of the Native Informant to

register his (im)possible perspective . . . as a reminder of alterity, whose trace

can disclose the irregular commonality of foreclosure and permit an imagin-ative and ethical openness to difference rather than remain[ing] caught in

some identity forever (ibid.: 352). One might wonder if this work of remem-

oration leaves us building memorials to the lost Aboriginal. Far from it,

though a certain pathos of mourning colours Spivaks text and anchors even

the peals of wild laughter that echo through the book. Instead, one nds that

the trace of the Aboriginal binds the reader within an ethical relation consti-

tuted by the awareness of that foundational banishment and the captive

haunting still under way. This exposure leads the transnational feminist critic

to identify with the work of imagining and projecting a foreclosed gure as

something more than a gure of foreclosure (i.e. he is not just a concept-

metaphor). The critic of philosophy, global capital, womens work, develop-

ment aid, and modernist ction is moved by the trace of the Fuegan, moved

to track his presence and transguration in the history of his marginalization

and to put her own imaginative resources to work in the place left to the

Native Informant. I gather that this ethical inspiration toward Reasons

captive aboriginal is one means of retying the affect to the concept. A far cry

from a politics of identity, such a work must anxiously return to the com-

plicitous space of the Aboriginals dislocation.

The Native Informant and the ethical relation established by a critique that

in tervent ions 4 :2


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takes up his ghostly positionality are not the whole story of Critique, for, as

Spivak says throughout the book, culture is on the move. Accordingly,

Spivak revamps Can the subaltern speak? to thematize the historical shift

from Native Informant to postcolonial critic. In brief, the postcolonial critic

prefers to dwell on cultural forms of resistance at the expense of a neededcriticism of global capital. In order to pull off this culturalist sleight of argu-

ment, the postcolonial critic masquerades as the subaltern other in the Ameri-

can intellectual scene by performing the work of Native Informant herself.

Elite postcolonialism seems to be as much a strategy of differentiating

oneself from the racial underclass as it is to speak in its name (Spivak 1999:

356). Softening somewhat her severe reading of postcolonial studies, Spivak

adds that this dissimulation is an inherent pitfall of feminist attempts to dis-

place the ordering narratives of global power. Against the postcolonial critic

she proposes a transnational feminist practice of ethical critique that does notsettle into the universalist conventions of Third World salvation, or substitute

itself in the place of the subaltern other, but seeks out, instead, the contra-

diction of its own position in the interests of a greater transnational literacy,

entailing a series of troubling self-reections. By the end of the book we are

back at the beginning where the author rst leapt ahead to nd her reader:

The implied reader whose face I discover . . . is too diversied to be assigned

a denite interest, a denitive preparation (Spivak 1999: x).

Critique seems to hold out a hope for the reparative work of gure to return

(im)possible affects to the enabling concepts of reason or history.

The new immigrant is as much the name of a gure as the native informant or

indeed the postcolonial . . . if a gure makes visible the impossible, it also invites

the imagination to transform the impossible into an experience, a role . . . the

Fuegan and the New Hollander could not read Kant. The person from Burkina

Faso or Albania can refuse Fukuyama by playing the new immigrant liberally or

critically.

This passage suggests that guration can exhibit the foreclosed in such a way

as to transform the lost life, affect or mode of being in the world into another

assumable artice, that of a role. To claim such a transformative, even per-

formative, power for guration would seem to imply that a founding fore-

closure can become a textual symptom to be played in the critical mode.

And, while the graphematic character of such symptoms must always admit

the possibility of a perverse performative, it seems to me that the concept of

foreclosure itself destines even the transnationally literate critic to the impos-

sibility of knowing ones positionality fully or even adequately. For if the

coherent outline of the discourse is cut by a relation to non-knowledge,

refused in the subject, this repudiated knowledge becomes the well-spring of

the subjects negative attachment to the social world. If we read foreclosure


Dina Al -Kass im


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174in tervent ions 4 :2

as the social regulation of intelligibility, it would seem that subjection in and

by this discursive frame constitutes a limit to the possibilities of play, even

critical play.3 It is no accident that, in the text where Lacan nds himself occu-

pying the vulnerable and even primitive position of inaugurating a new con-

ceptual tool, that of the concept of foreclosure, he suddenly must conjure aMuslim patient whose more innocent and archaic inscription by and of the

sacred law, and thus of the symbolic, will serve to ground the analytic dis-

covery under way.4 In this respect the psychoanalyst repeats Kant in the text

that authors the very concept of that repetition. When Spivak refolds the

philosophical text to nd the Aboriginal in Kant she highlights the continual

performance of a foreclosure haunting the very possibility of freedom within

the universalist framework. And, while allegorical insubordination is Spivaks

textualist redress of the recursive foreclosure of the wild, such an ethics

destines itself to continual motion or, in the idiom of her earlier work, apermanent parabasis that changes distance into persistent interruption

(1999: 430).

Why make so much of the gure/face/folds of her text? Because in chapters

devoted to canonical and Third World ction, to philosophys exclusions, to

the struggle for womens autonomy in the frame of global power, the text bets

on its readers readiness to investigate the possible link between her freedom

and a bondage elsewhere on the knowledge that an advance in civil rights

here may mean, in the transnational scheme of things, that the cost is paid

there. The text bets on this willingness to unlearn the lessons of US UN

universal feminism, and with it the imperative of universal development,through attention to the increasingly globalized scene of class division. To do

this without conjuring a portrait or representational identity that inevitably

transforms a potentially ethical and political literacy into a justication for

a project of exchange is the goal of uncovering our complicity or, as the author

has said elsewhere, unlearning your privilege as your loss.

References

3 For a discussion

of this conceptual

relay, see Judith

Butler (1993, 1999:esp. 13368) and,

for an extended

treatment of Lacans

handling of

foreclosure and the

symbolic, Antigones

Claim (Butler 2001).

4 This scene is

played twice in

Lacans rst two

seminars. For a

reading of this

gure, see my On

Pain of Speech,

forthcoming.

Butler, Judith (1993) Arguing with the real, inBodies that Matter, London: Routledge.

(1999) Excitable Speech, London: Routledge. (2001) Antigones Claim, New York: Columbia

University Press.Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J.-B. (1973) The

Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. DonaldNicholson-Smith, New York: Norton.

Spivak, Gayatri (1993) Outside in the TeachingMachine, New York: Routledge.

(1999) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason:Toward a History of the Vanishing Present,Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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