ABSTRACT
The paper attempts to analyze systematically how Spivak through the notion of the double-bind of racial difference problematizes the neat philosophical universalism of both European and Non-European systems of thought that produces their respective stereotype of ‘other’ in the very act of thinking. In course of the analysis, the paper takes up a Dalit autobiographical narrative, Manohar Mouli Biswas’s “Surviving My World” (2013) to argue that the nature of cognition is structurally incomplete without the recognition of the perception of subalternity. This, in turn, necessitates a more intimate analysis on Spivak’s notion of “imaginative activism”, i.e., her recent engagement with how we ‘learn’ to conceive of this alterity in order to ‘respond’, and here the function of literature appears as the strange institution in which “imagination is trained”. The paper then moves to the social text of sati-suicide, the violent production of the female subject, the discontinuity of subjectivity and agency and talks of a certain stylization of being when it is afflicted with the perception of death. It reads Bhubaneswari’s act of committing suicide with reference to two parallel narratives; one is Amodini Ghosh’s “Foska Gero” (“Loose Ties”), a novella published in 1931 and a recent one, Sibaji Bandyopadhyay’s “Latar Din” (“Lata’s Day”) (2007), to put forward the notion of a radical unbecoming, the feel of an unremitting combustion inside the fleshed being, which unravels how the woman can perform her transcendence by remaining within the structures of immanence. The paper also tries to understand and explore if the experience of unbecoming itself acts out as agency.
