ABSTRACT
Reviewing The Spivak Reader is no easy task. How to review a text whose project is to bring together the writings of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—but which also introduces those writings by the gesture of naming Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as ‘this collection of texts’ 1 (p.2)—is a question that demands an entry into the very status of the signature, and its relation to the field of writing. Whose text are we reading in reading The Spivak Reader? Does the collecting of the work of Spivak create, in itself, a work which has an independent existence, which remains irreducible to the signature revealed and concealed by the title? If such a Reader works as a work, then does it also foreclose the possibility of other work, other ways of reading Spivak? Or is the task of The Reader to provide the collecting together of the work, without letting such a collection act to foreclose that work? In order to collect without foreclosure, The Reader must first pose the very question of reading, of what it might mean to read the work of Spivak in the absence of any final word. This Reader is one which enables the gathering together of the work of an author, at the same time as it invites us to question the very possibility of such a gathering, drawing our attention, as readers, to the very necessity of thinking through how Spivak's work will always remain to be read. Hence, symptomatically, we move from the title of the book, The Spivak Reader, to the title of the introduction, ‘Reading Spivak’. The question of reading moves here—from the status of the book as a commodity-object (and we must remember that to have a Reader dedicated to an author's work constitutes a form of recognition in which that work is assumed to be already central) to the very event in which we begin to engage with the writing.
