Death of a Discipline and the Task of Worlding

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article attempts to examine and understand how Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Death of a Discipline tackles with the task of worlding in its vision of a new geo-politics, signalling a future anterior and imagining a planetary comparative criticism. It underscores that a productive undoing of the aesthetic can possibilize a reflexive rearrangement of desires in a regime of capitalist globalization. It spotlights how the ethics and politics of translation in Spivak might resonate with her imperatives for the “necessary impossibility” of imagining the subject as planetary. Travelling with the text, as one moves onto the margins, calls for a reconfiguration of the pedagogical relations in the classroom of instructor and student, in terms of learning, expertise, authority and otherness fundamentally rearranged, creating the conditions of possibility for developing democratic reflexes and “learning to learn from below.” This insinuates the question and necessity of a supplemental pedagogy and, correspondingly, a training of the imagination for “literary reading” producing a flexible epistemology that can, perhaps, undo the crisis and sustain the will to social justice. Reclaiming the role of teaching literature, attending to the from-below interruption of the discipline, it asks and inquires, if the notion of the “literary” and the “figure” of the “planet” come up with a radical openness to the inappropriable other, quietly working as an unerasable principle of transformability inherent to the world.