10.13135/2036-542X/7707
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2036-542X
7707
2
en
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Trópos
Derrida for the World Economic Forum
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/tropos
7
Monografica
2014-12-01
2023-06-06
2014-12-01
2023-06-06
75-97
1
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
2014/12/01
10.13135/2036-542X/7707
75
2036-542X
2
97
Derrida for the World Economic Forum
https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/tropos/article/download/7707/6444
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                                                       trópos • anno VII • numero 2 • 2014 – ISBN 978-88-548-7972-0
                                                         DOI 10.4399/97888548797206 – pag. 75-97 (dicembre 2014)




                     Derrida for the World Economic Forum
                                                        Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak



   abstract: In this paper we question the World Economic Forum and its Global
      Agenda Council on Values regarding the eVectiveness of their new Social
      Covenant, with corporations and institutions, workers therein, and the larger
      world. From my early contact with Derrida’s work, and as a member of the
      Council I argue for a renewal of the epistemological, not only for workers and
      victims of the current state of aVaire, but also of those at the top, intellectuals,
      politicians and the corporate sector. We must supplement the one–size–fits–all
      toolkit–culture of problem solving and work to rearrange the desires of the
      highly diversified populations of the world. Derrida’s work helps us consolidate
      the argument that Humanities education can be this supplement. The possibility
      of receiving this help becomes harder if Derrida’s work is niched back into
      disciplinary discourse.

   keywords: rearrangement of desire; uninstrumentalizable ethics; philosophy of
      education; Marx; Balibar; Gramsci.

   Derrida has been niche–marketed in the academy. Nobody in a pol-
icy–making situation can pay attention to his work. In terms of making an
eVect on today’s economically devastated world, I believe Derrida would
express an anguish similar to that expressed in Rogues, the last book of his
published during his lifetime, regarding writing on democracy:

   I have not yet told you what was, in fact, the double “preliminary question” that,
   simultaneously, at the same time or by turns, has been torturing me ever since
   I began to prepare for this décade [the 10–day conference where the book was
   pesented verbally]. To speak democratically of democracy, it would be, to speak
   on/to the subject of democracy, to speak in an intelligible, univocal, and sensible
   fashion of democracy, to make oneself understood by anyone who can hear the
   word or the sentences that one makes with the word1 .

   In the economic context, the text would not have to speak intelligibly to
quiconque, just anyone, but economists who can aVect the world. In Rogues
Derrida goes on to complicate matters with superb rhetoric–in–logic. I
cannot make those moves, but also will not, for reasons given below. My

     1. J. Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale–Anne Brault and Michael Naas,
Stanford, Stanford Univ. Press, 2005, p. 105; translation modified.


                                                                                                               75
76      Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak


own complaint to Derrida was made on the last occasion we performed
together, as follows:
     I know you have chastised me in print for misreading you on Marx. I haven’t read
     those pages for fear of being hurt. But I must insist on the diVerence between
     industrial capital, predicated upon the diVerence between making and needing;
     commercial capital, the appearance of money begetting money; and finance capital,
     competitive markets in negotiable instruments, where capital moves mit Gedanken-
     schnelle (with the speed of thought); and the movement of data — telecommunica-
     tion — is indistinguishable from the circuit of capital. Surplus value is not interest,
     use value is not usefulness. I repeat this litany not because I’m right, but because I
     am obstinate2 .

    His response to me was most aVectionate. My original title had been
Touched by Deconstruction. Just before the actual event I, like many others,
was overwhelmed by Derrida’s book On Touching — Jean–Luc Nancy3 . I
therefore said on that occasion, recalling Jacques Lacan’s description of the
subject in the field of vision, that I would think of myself as une forme tachée
— a stained (in) form on the field of deconstruction4 . Derrida generously
reminded the audience that la tache had another meaning in French — task
— and dubbed me the task of/in deconstruction. Whatever that means, I
would rather think of myself as such than bear the “third world” label5 . De
la grammatologie carries the word “ethnocentrism” on its first page6 . It was
1967 when I opened the book. I had never seen the word before. A formed
task of deconstruction, then. Take what follows in that spirit. An account
of Derrida aimé/mangé showing up, nourishing, in a serious attempt to
rearrange desires in some economic masters.
    I write from South Africa, where I have just participated in a regional
meeting of the World Economic Forum, as a member of the Global Agenda
Council on Values, which has proposed a New Social Covenant. It is an
assembly of powerful people in the global economic, political, and financial
sectors and they can make change. These are the quiconque–s at the top.
    The evening before the actual Forum meeting began, I was supposed, I
had thought, to give a full–scale talk in the Department of Philosophy. (In
      2. G.C. Spivak, Touched by Deconstruction, «Grey Room» 20 (Summer 2005), p. 101.
      3. J. Derrida, On Touching, Jean–Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry, Stanford, Stanford University
Press, 2005.
      4. J. Lacan, The Split Between the Eye and the Gaze, in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-
analysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, trans. Alan Sheridan, ed. Jacques–Alain Miller, New
York, Norton, 1977), p. 74.
      5. Like many others, I think the “third world” ceased to exist as such almost immediately after
its formation. See N. Harris, The End of the Third World: Newly Industrializing Countries and the Decline
of An Ideology, New York, Meredith Press, 1986.
      6. J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G.C. Spivak, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Univ. Press,
1976, p. 3.
                                                  Derrida for the World Economic Forum          77


the event, and to my surprise, I merely had a desultory chat with six white
female faculty members in English, Afrikaans, and Philosophy, over dinner,
moderated by an altogether charming white–haired white male dean.)
   Yet, obsessed by the sort of anguish Derrida teaches us in Rogues (Ch. 7),
I had really wanted to touch these corporate people, as well as the Value
Council. Nine months before the meeting I wrote to the New York Society
for Women in Philosophy (SWIP):
    Philosophy and the World Economic Forum

    I am a member of the Global Agenda Council on Values of the World Economic
    Forum. Generally, humanities professors, even when called, do not attend the
    meetings, I think because of the infantile procedures of knowledge management
    techniques in coming to important decisions. I myself feel that in order to aVect
    global policy, we must attempt to create a compromise between the conviction that
    knowledge management is the best way to produce results and the more complex
    preparation for both accountability and, beyond that responsibility, and, perhaps
    even unconditional ethics7 . I will be attending one of the regional meetings of
    this council in South Africa and, quite independently, because the local Council
    member is an academic (not in the humanities, although formerly so, choosing a
    more lucrative discipline in graduate school), I have been invited by the philosophy
    department of his university to present a paper. This gives me an opportunity to
    think through these questions at the same time as I will be attending the council
    meetings themselves, where I am not one of the most persuasive members, al-
    though tolerated gracefully, in a minority of one. I tried to bring the two approaches
    together in a speech where I was asked to comment on the usefulness of Marx in
    the current century, but I think I was too enthusiastic about the WEF, although
    even then I was careful enough to point at the problems. I should add that my
    own convictions, as opposed to those of the enthusiasts for knowledge manage-
    ment, are based on teaching the humanities as a vehicle for the rearrangement
    of desires in the United States for nearly fifty years and training teachers among
    the landless illiterate in a backward area of West Bengal, India, in the interest of
    the insertion of the intuitions of democracy in the children of the largest sector
    of the electorate, for nearly thirty years. I think trying it out at NYSWIP would
    be particularly challenging and useful for me, because of the fact that in my work,
    certain convictions generated by early contact with the work of Jacques Derrida
    has been repeatedly tested and what remains seems to be practically useful. I hope
    this abstract, although not 750 words, will be persuasive for you, and you will give
    me a chance to address you and be instructed. Thank you.

   (I should mention here that, at the South African meeting that is just
over, no one, in spite of the provision of white paper stands and colored
magic markers, seemed interested in using them for the typical knowledge
management production of solutions. There were repeated calls for “mess.”)
     7. I remain haunted by Derrida’s warning against a self–congratulatory “ethical” instrumen-
talization of his work, J. Derrida, Passions: ‘An Oblique OVering’, in David Wood (ed.), Derrida: A
Critical Reader, Cambridge, Blackwell, 1992, p. 9.
78       Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak


   I produced a first draft for SWIP where I was quite unable to bring
together my deconstructive intuitions and my sense of audience at the
Philosophy department abroad. (I remind you that that audience did not
materialize.) Seven months later, and quite desperate to hit the right note, I
took the Global Marx? piece (about to be translated into Spanish but with
no English publication commissioned), took out the reading of Etienne
Balibar, expunged the Marxist language without seriously compromising
my position, and devised something that might fly, although we must
continue to remember that the foreign exchange tax might not fly. Since
that letter never arrived at its destination, I redirect it here, with Balibar
reading and Marxist language restored. Please remember this as you think
of Derrida’s availability to the hard core bankers, the quiconques at the
top. With the impossible motto of “human dignity, common good, and
stewardship of the planet,” the Council on Values has the bankers’ ears. By
contrast, the Occupiers and informal marketeers are not into the austere
rigor of Derrida on the economy/economic either. I am involved at both
ends and want to masquerade as William Blake’s Idiot Questioner8 .
   In the meantime, I got a request for a blog on the Covenant and some
reassuring words from a smart associate director. I put the blog and a
bit I added when I was supposed to address a general group at the very
beginning of the conference, as my second exergue:
     Staking a claim to improve the world

     The World Economic Forum is dedicated to improving the world. We cannot
     improve our world top down. Our New Social Covenant has potential for realizing
     this. Its itemized list calls for the re–arrangement of desires. For it begins with
     “agreement on basic, universal ethical values” and continues with “the promotion
     of human well–being, happiness, flourishing and equality of freedom to live a
     valued life,” although it also imposes practical tasks. These last are directed towards
     corporate and nation state policy makers and may be done by other methods,
     but even here the desires at the top must be generally rearranged so that the
     prime emphasis changes in turn from sustaining economic development. And the
     broad ones — the philosophical ones — definitely require going beyond usual
     knowledge management techniques. Perhaps we should have separated them into
     two diVerent categories. One talking the talk (basic human values), the other
     walking the walk (“good” jobs for non–graduates; strong technical education
     opportunities; apprentice schemes, a pro–active tax and incentive system and 21st
     century industrial strategy). One cannot walk the walk by merely agreeing to
     do so. It is a collective decision, not merely something enforced from the top.
     You have to learn the habit of thinking about other people as equal though not
     same, comparable to the relationship between the reading pupil and the one who
     produced the literary work.

     8. World Economic Forum, Outlook on the Global Agenda 2014 Report, p. 44b. Available at
http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GAC_GlobalAgendaOutlook_2014.pdf.
                                                       Derrida for the World Economic Forum             79


    I am thinking of the production of Derrida’s notion of the “New In-
ternational” here, although the palliative language for the quiconques at the
top makes it almost unrecognizable9 . I am thinking of the protocol of the
“how many are we?” in Politics of Friendship and betraying the language
requirement as I go along; to make my Derrida — not the right one, but
where is there such a thing? — speak to the economic; I must avoid being
patronized as a tenured radical or dismissed, as I so often am, as a great
speaker but incomprehensible10 .
    Let me explain the statement above about the relationship between
the reading pupil and the one who produced the literary work. I am a
teacher of literature as well as a member of the Council on Values, so
perhaps I emphasize literary reading too much. But I have also given time
and skill (not just money and site–visits) for thirty years, training teachers
and children at six small elementary schools established by me among the
landless illiterate Dalits in western West Bengal. So however impractical I
may seem, hear me out.
    Normally our desire is to do things ourselves or for ourselves. In good
literary teaching, the student is taught carefully to hang out in the space
of the other — understand what s/he confronts in terms of the unknown
person who wrote what s/he confronts. This hanging out is also the secret
of the ethical and the democratic. One has to stay with it, not follow easy
steps so that one can say “I have helped you.” We at the Council have begun
with one teaching module, and I hope we will proceed to many others.
The long–term implementation of our Covenant’s values, in addition to
persuading CEO–s and heads of state, calls for the teaching of the humanities
at all levels and in all places so that the desire for social justice, spelled out
in the various items of the Covenants, rather than only be taken for granted
if one joins up, can inhabit souls long–term, not always susceptible to
evaluation by checking statistically how each item on a list is institutionally
fulfilled. Are these positions, I ask the readership of this collection, implicit
in the University in the Eyes of its Pupils, in Mochlos, in Of the Humanities and
the Discipline of Philosophy?11
    With respect, religion, when mobilized for good, also opens itself up
to producing the opposite. It encourages a sort of belief that often leads


     9. G.C. Spivak, A Note on the New International, «parallax» 20 ( July–September 2001), p. 12–16.
    10. G.C. Spivak, Schmitt and Post–Structuralism: A Response, «Cardozo Law Review» 21.5–6 (May
2000), p. 1723–1737.
    11. J. Derrida, University in the Eyes of Its Pupils, «Diacritics» 13, 3 (Autumn 1983), p. 2–20; Id.,
Mochlos: or The Conflict of the Faculties, in Richard Rand (ed.), Logomachia, Lincoln, University of
Nebraska Press, 1992, p. 1–34; Id., Of the Humanities and the Discipline of Philosophy, «Surfaces» 4 (1994),
p. 8–20.
80      Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak


to the expectation of results by following a kind of spiritual toolkit12 . We
teachers of the humanities — literature and philosophy — at our best train
the imagination into knowing ourselves diVerently, and knowing the world
diVerently, so that we want to do the good things contained in the Covenant
rather than have to be checked following enforcement.
    If religion is belief in faith, knowledge is management.
    “Why is there such an upsurge of interest in knowledge?” asks Laurence
Prusak, editor of Knowledge in Organizations and cites the Pre–Socratics13 .
Such a question ignores the plain fact that the word “knowledge” has
changed since the Pre–Socratics. (There was of course no English at that
time. And, if we are thinking the world, we must — absolutely — remember
the many languages that make meaning for its peoples. As a doctor working
in Kenya who refuses to be a top–down health worker remarked: “The
people will understand Swahili, but you can’t speak to their heart unless you
speak their language: ‘I’m getting what you’re saying, but I’m not taking
it in.’” That is a basic human value: talking to the heart. If you think it
is inconvenient, as it is, indeed, don’t dream of improving the world.) (I
am thinking of the exhortation to translate in Rogues)14 . Our new Social
Covenant, at least in the ethical rather than the merely responsible sections,
understands that real knowledge depends on cooking the soul with slow
learning, not the instant soup of a one–size–fits all toolkit. The world is not
populated by humanoid drones. You cannot produce a toolkit for “a moral
metric,” or if you do you will be disappointed.
    The needs I have described are reflected in the world–famous journalist
Thomas L. Friedman’s recent mistake in the New York Times. He writes about
the difference between 2013 (when the New Social Covenant was imagined)
and the world of today, 2014: «the world of disorder is expanding against the
world of order», he writes. He mentions «refugee children from collapsing
Central American countries», «major Ebola outbreak in West Africa [. . . ]
straining governments», «jihadists carving out a [. . . ] caliphate inside Iraq
and Syria», Russia «eat[ing] Crimea [and] taking more bites out of Ukraine»,
and cites the United Nations announcement that «the number of refugees,
asylum–seekers and internally displaced people worldwide has, for the first
time in the post–World War II era, exceeded 50 million people»15 . I have
traveled since mid–May in Turkey, Austria, France, the United Kingdom,

    12. Here I vulgarize Derrida’s rereading of Kant’s view of religion’s Nebengeschäfte in Religion
Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason in J. Derrida, Faith and Knowledge: the Two Sources of Religion
Within the Limits of Reason Alone, in Gil Anidjar (ed.), Acts of Religion, New York, Routledge, 2002,
p. 83.
    13. L. Prusak (ed.), Knowledge in Organizations, Boston: Butterworth–Heinemann, 1997.
    14. Cf. J. Derrida, Rogues, op. cit., p. 159.
    15. T.L. Friedman, Order vs. Disorder, part 3, «International New York Times» (06/25/14), p. 7.
                                                     Derrida for the World Economic Forum             81


Poland, and India; perhaps with the exception of Poland, I could add the rise
of right–wing governments to Friedman’s list; South Africa could add its own.
    After citing his list, Friedman makes a major mistake. He correctly
describes “freedom from” as national independence. But he incorrectly
describes “freedom to” as «the freedom to live your life, speak your mind,
start your own political party, build your own business, vote for any can-
didate, pursue happiness, and be yourself, whatever your sexual, religious
or political orientation». This is a good American list. But this list is based
on the more fundamental freedom to think of dissimilar others as equal.
This is the profound contradiction within democracy: autonomy (freedom
from), liberty; and others (freedom to), equality: us and them. This is why
I chose, in my own home state of West Bengal, as title for the last Netaji
oration: “Freedom After Independence?” Freedom to, after Freedom from.
Our New Social Covenant wants to perform that movement and therefore
requires the literary — as training for the ethical — as a method.
    The contradiction at the heart of the literary is laid out by Derrida in an
interview with Derek Attridge16 .
    For ethics as such cannot be practiced after business, or the business of
medicine–as–triage has been sustained. Ethics are unconditional. Our real
challenge is to combine the unconditionality of ethics — faith–based — and
the conditions of the contract. Samir Haddad has written most perceptively
about the play of the unconditional and conditionality in Derrida and the
Inheritance of Democracy17 .

    The following example shows us the politico–economic provenance of
the global “rule of law.” My own sense of the marginal was enhanced by
Derrida’s reminder in 196818 and related to his anguish in Rogues to make
himself understood by anyone.
    Many of us have seen a picture, which apparently is no longer being
used by Care.org, of a stunningly beautiful African woman, dressed in cloth,
with the caption “I am powerful.” I recently wanted to cite the picture in
the interest of arguing the limits of equality–thinking. In addition to the
question of permission to cite, there arose a question of permission from
the individuals photographed. The academic radical niche was thus exposed
to its own absurdity.

    16. J. Derrida, This Strange Institution Called Literature, in D. Attridge (ed.), Acts of Literature,
New York, Routledge, 1991, pp. 3–75.
    17. S. Haddad, Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy, Bloomington, Indiana University
Press, 2013.
    18. I am thinking here of J. Derrida, The Ends of Man, «Philosophy & Phenomenological Re-
search» 30, 1 (1969), pp. 31–57, p. 32, where there one can find a passage about there being people who
cannot imagine an academic colloquium.
82      Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak


    The woman is a refugee and cannot be located. She herself may be
adrift in the world, but her case is still imprisoned in “the rule of law”
where intellect is property. Her representation demanded non–exclusive
permission for all future editions of the book, in all formats and in all
languages for distribution throughout the world, and for inclusion of
excerpts from the book that might appear in advertising, publicity, and
promotional materials for the book, for example Amazon’s Search Inside
the Book.
    Kant says that global right can be rationally if not amicably practiced
between «all those of the earth’s peoples who can enter into active rela-
tions with one another [and it] is not something philanthropic (ethical),
but a rights–related principle»19 . Active relations, wirksam in the original,
which reminds the reader of the more common word wirklich — real.
There was no real continuity — no active relationship — between the
woman in the photograph and my audience, the readership of the book,
or the people in charge of the “rule of law.” She is still lost.
    The “rule of law” arises because barriers between national capital and
global capital are removed, and the state is run to manage the global econ-
omy, rather than to look after its citizens. Once again, political economy,
not economy as such.
    I resonate with Gramsci’s interest in the production of the subaltern intel-
lectual. That project relates to his understanding of Marx’s undertaking to be
gnoseological. My resonance with the idea of the “New International” and
the tending of a collectivity in “How many are we?” — already mentioned
— made me move “gnoseological” to an unrestricted epistemological task.
As Derrida has often done, I lodged myself in the space between translations.
I cannot tell if this was “influence.” You judge.
    Gramsci writes in Notebook 10:

     The proposition contained in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political
     Economy20 to the effect that men acquire consciousness of structural conflicts
     on the level of ideologies should be considered as an affirmation of gnoseolog-
     ical [gnoseologico] and not simply psychological and moral value. From this, it
     follows that the theoretical–practical principle of hegemony has also gnoseo-
     logical significance. [. . . ] The realization of a hegemonic apparatus, in so far
     as it creates a new ideological terrain, determines a reform of consciousness
     and of methods of knowledge. [. . . ] When one succeeds in introducing a new
     morality in conformity with a new conception of the world, one finishes by

   19. I. Kant, Political Writings, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 172; translation
modified. It is important to keep in mind that in Rogues, the last book published during his lifetime,
Derrida warned that Kant could not serve as a solution in contemporary globality.
   20. K. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Maurice Dobb, London,
International Publishers, 1979.
                                             Derrida for the World Economic Forum     83


   introducing the conception as well; in other words, one determines a reform of
   the whole of philosophy21 .


     Our general idea about Marxism is a change in governance, dependent
upon regime change, the will and wisdom of a leader, supported by a
responsible government. What we have seen over the last hundred years
is that the success of the system depends a great deal on the power of
the people — either in education or resistance — in conjunction with the
capacity of the head of state to protect his or her national economy, in the
interest of redistribution from the incursions of the global economy.
     This model did not work in the great revolutions of the 20th century,
because the immensely diversified populations of Russia and China, the two
great mammoths of Eurasia, were not equally resistant or educated. They,
as well as the Balkans, were too dependent upon charismatic leaders, and
their idea of gender empowerment was too mechanical.
     Today, that model — charismatic leader and resistant or motivated popu-
lation — is threatened by the impersonal anti–humanist selective absolutism
of global capitalism. The supposedly well–educated peoples of the European
socialist or social–democratic sector are either remodeling the resources
of the welfare state in reaction against what is elegantly called the “visi-
ble minorities,” engendered by the sweeping migration and labor export
brought on by the vicious inequalities and violence/corruption attendant
in turn upon the abstract march of capital harnessed to unregulated greed;
and/or manipulating the ekphrastic or miniature globality of the European
“Union,” a collection of debtor and creditor states.
     Marx knew the ways of capital, even if he did not know our worldly
modernity. As I have already pointed out, Marx’s prediction, that capital,
if it could, would want to move at the speed of thought is today fulfilled.
With the silicon chip, capital can in fact move at a speed greater than
that of thought, since the neuro–ethicists can so far only describe how
the brain behaves in the modes of right and wrong. They have not been
able to upgrade the computer in the head, although, silicon technolo-
gists affirm that the newest model robots (which are called something
other than “drones”) can be programmed for empathy. Bio–intervention
for criminal–tracking, medical support and such, have been in place for
some time. No doubt the head will upload. My words may therefore be
contingent.
     What escapes the program is the contingent as such. The pursuit of
the contingent is the edge of the technological will to power through

  21. A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey
Noell–Smith, New York, International Publishers, 1972, p. 365.
84      Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak


knowledge. However, the power to be surprised by the contingent is now
becoming less and less available because the global disincentive for imagina-
tive training.
    Let us go back to Gramsci’s comment: «Marx’s proposition [. . . ] should
be considered as an aYrmation of gnoseological value». ‘Gnoseological’ —
in the logic of gnosis, knowing; a word–fragment that is still in colloquial
English use in diagnosis, prognosis, and similar words related to healing or
the impossibility of healing — can, then, contain the double bind of healing.
The Italian political philosopher Michele Spanò writes:

     Actually between gnoseologico and ‘epistemological’ there is no diVerence. Gnose-
     ologico is more “old fashioned” than epistemologico; I mean: any analytic Italian
     philosopher [as opposed to earlier traditions] would by no means use epistemologico.
     More generally, I would say that if we are talking of a contemporary text, the
     translation of ‘epistemological’ will be epistemologico/a for sure22 .

    Quintin Hoare and GeoVrey Nowell–Smith translate Gramsci’s gnoseo-
logico as ‘epistemological.’ «Actually between gnoseologico and ‘epistemolog-
ical’ there is no diVerence». Yet they are two diVerent words, gnoseological
in an older tradition which is “continental” for us, itself tacitly aYrming a
metonymic “Europe” as origin. Spanò’s final piece of evidence, which tacitly
aYrms the Anglo–Saxon as philosophical origin, is a back–translation with
English as the “original.” Therefore their so–called identity is a heterotau-
tology. It is in that diVerence–as–identity of a smooth translation that I will
place the globalizability of Marx today. The reader will recall the analyses of
the heterotautology in «the wholly other is wholly other»23 .
    ‘Gnoseological’ in diagnosis and prognosis carries the double bind24 of
healing as the impossibility of healing; let us extend this from the individual
to collective social abnormalities. In any extended discussion of the double
bind, we would have to bring in the question of the female appropriation of
phallocentrism. (I make this mysterious remark here because I first knew
Juan O’barrio — the initiator of “Global Marx?” and its translator — when
he was a student in my course on Jacques Derrida’s Glas, where the male
double bind or double bande was part of the problematic)25 .
    Here suYce it to say that Gramsci recognizes that Marx wishes to in-

    22. Unpublished electronic communication.
     23. J. Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995, p. 83.
    24. For those unfamiliar with “double bind”: let us call it «living within equally insistent contra-
dictory instructions».
     25. J. Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1990. My first
reading of Glas is captured in Glas–piece: A Compte–rendu, «Diacritics» 22 (1977), p. 22–43, the only
piece of mine for which I got praise from both de Man (“you’ve got Jacques’s game”) and Derrida
(“l’objet est superbe”).
                                                    Derrida for the World Economic Forum            85


troduce the worker into the double bind of the contamination of manual
labor by intellectual labor, not only the knowledge of the technology of
capital, but its gnoseology; so that any worker could become a “dirigent,”
and “real–ize” (verwirklichen) a new hegemonic apparatus, a reform of con-
sciousness and of methods of knowledge, introduce a new morality26 . The
revolution is not only economic. Dictatorship (“dictating” the priorities of
socialization) must be intertextual (folded together) with the pedagogic
founding of a new hegemony. This is the task of the new intellectual in
the Party as well as in civil society. Leadership training — a phrase that
seems to be acceptable in globality. Or is it? When any worker can be a
dirigent? A re–formulation of the petty bourgeois ideology from everyone
a potential capitalist to every worker a dictator (dictating agent) of social
priorities. This essay is concerned with a possible re–formulation for the
current conjuncture. Via Derrida.

   Marx’s Preface was written in 1859. The body of A Contribution was
written between 1861–63. This was as much a preparation for Capital vol-
ume 1 as was the multilingual notebooks known as the Grundrisse that
were first published in 193927 . Amidst all of this, he discovered the secret
of surplus–value which he describes in Capital I as the Sprengpunkt or
“the pivot of his critique,” and everything changed. He discovered the
secret of reproductive heteronormativity, that everything human and up-
per primate emerges out of the differences between needing and making.
He described it in human terms — the worker advances the capitalist
his labor and the capitalist repays less then he gets out of it; and he also
describes it in rational terms — labor power is the only commodity which,
when consumed, produces value. Yet, this discovery of human and top
primate hetero–norm (that the contingent surplus produced in the differ-
ence between need and the capacity to make runs the world), was seen
subsequently as lodged in the autonormative idea, identical with itself,
scientific socialism. Hence Gramsci’s word — gnoseological — neither
psychological, the logic of the psyche is at the mercy of the individuated
contingent — nor moral — though consciousness and morality are at
issue, Marx is in Hegel and Gramsci in his teacher Benedetto Croce too
much not to know that the moral must make room for the contingent
re–written as the transcendental. In the event, the tremendous discovery

   26. Terry Eagleton was right to complain about my habit of hyphenating normally un–hy-
phenated words (In the Gaudy Supermarket, «London Review of Books» 21.x [1999], p. 3–6). But
“real–ize,” consistently used in this essay, would not qualify for his dispraise. It means making real,
the transformation of capital into money; by analogy, in Gramsci, the making real of a tendency.
    27. K. Marx, Grundisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus,
New York, Vintage Books, 1973.
86      Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak


of the heteronormative as the source of simple as well as expanded re-
production is put in the service of autonormative gnoseology — gnosis,
diagnosis, prognosis: the way to scientific socialism.
    The Preface to the Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy belongs to
a period before the preoccupation with surplus value. Here the emphasis
is indeed on gnoseology, to know that ideology is a more conflictual text
than the scientifically precise economic base, and tease out that relationship.
However, this text already lays down the possibility of backtracking from
gnoseology — knowing — to epistemology — constructing civil society as
the object of knowledge —, because it does not preclude the inclusion of
the writer’s own ideological production, and make us move toward being
folded together “within the framework of the old society”, emphasizing
the complicity with the relations of production. Not only is this not nec-
essarily incoherent with the protocols of the text, there is an emphasis on
the epistemological performance because the Preface is nothing if not an
account of how a student of philosophy with a minor in jurisprudence
studies to become the text’s writer. Our last step is to open this apparently
end–stopped narrative into the persistence of the run–on — a continuing
commitment to the historic and generational.

    Let us now move back to the beginning, and consider how to write the
World Economic Forum into this: perhaps as the site of a new hegemony.
(I now know that this cannot happen as the situation is today). It is a large,
non–profit, private sector organization, admonishing civil society, exam-
ining the decimation of the constitutional state, considering redress to
corporate, military, and extra–state violence, consequences of inequality,
and climate change, to name a few. It attempts to re–think technology by
making it sit down with Amnesty International and Africa. It moves from
local, national, to regional, perhaps to access the global. Access to global,
unlike for the digital idealists, is not a certainty here. If Gramsci was inter-
ested in educating any subaltern/proletarian as potentially a “dirigent,”
this diversified body, and certainly the Council, wishes to persuade the
1% — to use today’s language — potentially to feel not just for, but as,
the 99%.
    Yet it is also caught firmly in the older hegemony of sustainable underde-
velopment. Its teaching method is knowledge management, and its morality
“Judeo–Christian” faith base28 . The World Social Forum, its legitimation by
exact reversal — first planned to run concurrently with the World Economic
Forum in Davos — is caught within various older hegemonies — including

   28. For a discussion of the emergence of this phrase, see J. Derrida, Interpretations At War, in
G. Anidjar (ed.), Acts of Religion, New York, Routledge, 2002, p. 152–158.
                                                  Derrida for the World Economic Forum         87


benevolent feudalism, culturalism, again sustainable underdevelopment,
and a vague leftism.
   The World Economic Forum is, of course, and also, based on the het-
eronormative that produces the “human,” the anthropomorphic and the
anthropocene. Capitalism negotiates the product of this diVerence to its
own end and the Forum seeks to correct this, wishing to go beyond corpo-
rate social responsibility to corporate moral responsibility. This may signal
a complicity — a folded togetherness — of the confidence in scientific
socialism in the 19th century and the 21st century confidence in the social
productivity of globalized capital, with the 20th century as the disaster area
of collaboration between communism and capitalism, carefully studied in
the early work of Stephen Resnick and Rick WolV29 .
    Etienne Balibar is the felicitous heir of the marxian heritage — a French
philosopher deeply trained in German classical philosophy. I am fortunate
enough to be able to call him my friend. At his suggestion, I have consulted
his brilliant book, The Philosophy of Marx30 .
    I write as a woman with no institutional training in philosophy, with
thirty years of work in backward districts of West Bengal, where the general
social oppression of the landless illiterate outcastes and aboriginals was
certainly ameliorated by the Communist–Party–(Marxist), the party in
power within the Left Front that also engaged in goon politics in certain
rural sectors, and lost the elections after thirty four years. My involvement
with Western Marxism is through the soft margins of the U.S. left, a rather
diVerent story. Before I put together my response to Balibar’s challenge in
his magisterial and wise slim book, I should perhaps say that my discussion
of the Council on Values at the World Economic Forum is an indication
of the politically incorrect eVort required to rectify persistently the digital
idealism of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s massive volumes that posit
a “multitude” automatically produced.
    My ignorant alliance with my learned friend is by way of his conviction
that one must “argue” with Marx. I also do agree with him that «Marxism
is an improbable philosophy today»31 . Improbable but not more impossible
than anything else. My tendency is to go as far as possible.
    As our best philosophers call Marxism improbable can I pull it into the
global economic, the belly of the beast, to suggest that employability is not
the last instance of human dignity? Will Derrida be at work here?
    Like Balibar, I too do not think that Marx is “postmodern.” I think the
    29. S. Gabriel, S.A. Resnick, and R.D. Wolff, State Capitalism versus Communism: What Happened
in the USSR and the PRC?, «Critical Sociology» 34:4 (2008), p. 539–556.
    30. E. Balibar, The Philosophy of Marxism, trans. Chris Turner, London, Verso, 2007.
     31. Ivi, p. 118.
88      Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak


changeful task is “persistent,” adding to the thought of Marx, Gramsci, Bal-
ibar, and all my brothers, the dimension of the turnover of the generations,
a gendered concern of a teacher of other people’s children.
    Balibar perceives the ambiguities, contradictions, and amphibologies in
Marx, including the important textual suggestion that «no theorist, when
he has eVectively found something new, can re–cast his own thinking. [. . . ]
Others will do that»32 . I have learned to perceive these as the double binds
that are the very defining character of life, action, thought. The condition
of impossibility as the only available condition of possibility. A persistent
rewriting of the improbable.
    Before I learned the lesson of the double bind, in the late seventies, I
taught and wrote in my own way Balibar’s later and more dismissive descrip-
tion: «Revolution and science (revolution in science, science of revolution):
[this] alternative was never resolved by Marx. This also means that he never
accepted sacrificing the one to the other, which is a mark of his intransi-
gence»33 as «the heterogeneous dialectic of knowing and doing»34 . Forest
Pyle, now teaching at Oregon, who took my Marx class in 1978, will recall
the much repeated–phrase, described as an asymmetry that opens to action.
    Balibar charts Marx’s lifetime move from an evolutionist history toward
its undoing — by way of the experience and study of failed revolutions
(1848, 1871), and the tendency of left movements to move away from
Marx’s methods, and, finally, the out–of–system (or anti–systemic) poten-
tialities of the agricultural communes in Russia. The consequence of this
chain of displacements is described as follows by Balibar: «I am tempted,
rather, to believe that he never, in fact, had the time to construct a doc-
trine because the process of rectification went faster»35 . Given my reading
and teaching style, I see this as Marx’s great gift, autodidact as he was,
acquiring knowledge as new needs opened up, not only to be constrained
by, but creatively to be able to learn from his mistakes — again a chain
into which we can, transindividually and responsibly, insert ourselves36 . A
persistent set of epistemological performative instructions kept overtaking
the stern requirements of a gnoseology.
    Perhaps because of this tendency to notice ambiguity, intransigence,
failure, Balibar is not prepared to recognize an opening moment already
waiting in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, as I
have tried to show above.
    32. Ivi, p. 112; other perceptions on pp. 21, 27, 33, 92, 102 and passim.
    33. Ivi, p. 115.
    34. G.C. Spivak, Speculations on Reading Marx: After Reading Derrida, in D. Attridge et al. (eds.),
Poststructuralism and the Question of History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 50.
    35. E. Balibar, The Philosophy of Marxism, op. cit., p. 117.
   36. For the transindividual, see ivi, p. 30.
                                                       Derrida for the World Economic Forum             89


    The thinking of globality requires thinking the contemporary. “In glob-
alization every site is contemporary,” I have written elsewhere, “and yet
also unique.”
    Balibar is able to grasp this intuition of globality in Marx: «communal
form was ‘contemporary’ (a term to which Marx insistently returned) with
the most developed forms of capitalist production, the techniques of which
it would be able to borrow from the surrounding ‘milieu’»37 . To go to the
Council on Values of the World Economic Forum is part of such borrowing,
in the interest of the real–ization of a new hegemony.

    For Christine Buci–Glucksmann, this particular thought of globality is
still in the future. However, her reading of Gramsci reading Marx “beyond
the letter,” reading gnoseology as epistemology («they are the same thing»,
says Michele Spanò) through Gramsci’s idea of the “critico–practical act,” is
deeply resonant with my own38 .
    These are philosophers with a more “proper” connection to the Euro-
pean tradition. It is Derrida who has taught me — precariously, as task, to
claim and teach destinerrance39 .

    I read Spanish slowly, with a dictionary. I will not therefore refer to the
work of Luis Tapia, who was present on the occasion of the first delivery
of this text as speech. For the same reason, I did not refer to the work of
René Zavaleta, which would have been relevant. Let me simply mention in
passing that both Luis Tapia’s work on Zavaleta and Zavaleta’s own work are
being translated into English in a series called Elsewhere Text that I edit for
Seagull Books based in Calcutta, with an oYce in London, and distributed
by the University of Chicago Press in the United States40 . This involvement
in translation — necessary but impossible — is a practical vulgarization of
Derrida’s exhortation to translate, to desist the implacable monolingualism
of the other41 . At this time of war, to read Khaled Ziadeh and Marilena
Chaui in that series gives us a great narrative — a grounding error — that
dislocates the ruling presuppositions of our global political economy, based

    37. Ivi, p. 108.
    38. C. Buci–Glucksmann, Gramsci and the State, trans. David Fernbach, London: Lawrence and
Wishart, 1980, pp. 348, 351.
    39. J. Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago,
University of Chicago Press, 1987. My own commentary on the book is in Love Me, Love My Ombre,
Elle, “Diacritics” 14.14 (Winter 1984), p. 19–36.
    40. L. Tapia, La producción del conocimiento local: Historia y política en la obra de René Zavaleta, La
Paz, Muela del Diablo Editores, 2002; R. Zavaleta, Lo nacional–popular en Bolivia, México: Siglo
Veintiuno Editores, 1986.
    41. J. Derrida, Rogues, op. cit., p. 159; Id., Monolingualism of the Other, or The Prosthesis of Origin,
trans. Patrick Mensah, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998.
90      Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak


still on the grand narrative of the Sykes–Picot conversation that established
an armed “condominium” nicknamed “the Holy Land”42 .
    In The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx suggested that the real
long–term result of the French Revolution was, paradoxically, to strengthen
the power of the executive43 . Some of us felt that the long–term result of the
great revolution in China and Russia was to make world capitalism possible.
Now, following in the same great narrative mode, it can be said that, just
as the Industrial Revolution made capitalist colonialism necessary, so does
the technological revolution make global governance necessary. And just as
monopoly capitalist colonialism did not represent mercantile capitalist colo-
nialism, so does this haphazard global governance not resemble a magnified
world state, on the model of nation–state governance. The world’s charter is
written by finance capital. World trade is financialized. The anthropocene
flourishes through greed. Climate is changed drastically. Those who are vic-
tims of inequality suVer the natural disasters more drastically than those not.
Class apartheid in education produces rape–culture and bribe–culture below.
Stoppage of imaginative training produces rape–culture and bribe–culture
above. Democracy is exported on the spear–point of war, and trade black-
mail. In spite of the abstractions of finance, the bull market is still driven by
investor confidence or aVect. And the subprime crisis is driven by family
values. Here I want to expand just slightly to show the importance of a
Marxian insight and prepare the passage from gnoselogy into epistemology,
the real–ization, in Gramsci’s dated words, of a new hegemony with a demo-
cratic morality. I have described this as the uncoercive rearrangement of
desire — quoting an undisclosed source — into the intuitions of democracy,
the double bind of liberty and equality44 .
    Buying a house, an individual releases the largest amount of capital into
the general flow of capital. Marx would call this “productive consumption,”
consumption that produces capital. Based on the deep–seated gendered ide-
ology of family and home, this is read as private consumption, establishing
or grounding a family on the patriarchal model, even when female–headed.
The point here is not that the two kinds of consumption should be kept
separate on the housing index issue but that their complicity should be
understood. (Com–plicity again! Derrida in the cracks of thinking — point-
   42. K. Ziadeh, Neighborhoods and Boulevards, trans. Samah Selim, New York, Palgrave, 2011; M.
Chaui, Between Conformity and Resistance, trans. Maite Conde, New York, Palgrave, 2011; Sykes–Picot,
available at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/sykes.asp.
   43. K. Marx, The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Surveys From Exile, trans. David
Fernbach, New York, Vintage Book, 1974.
   44. G.C. Spivak, Development: A Concept, forthcoming in volume edited by Ann Stoler. The almost
complete incomprehension of these problems by trained political scientists has taught me something
about disciplinary niches.
                                                  Derrida for the World Economic Forum    91


ing at gender in the cracks of citizenship in Politics of Friendship45 ). The
movement of capital is supported, here and elsewhere, by unquestioned
gendering.
    Behaviorist economics, attempting to thicken mere rational choice, is
no match for this ethical catastrophe. If international socialism died of an
ethics–shaped hole — in other words, no development of a new approach
to the ethical — global capitalism, although it is not as embarrassed to talk
the ethical talk, will continue to live with the same terminal disease — an
ethics–shaped hole.
    Into this steps the World Economic Forum, wanting to turn capitalism
toward social justice with inadequate imaginative resources but an acknowl-
edgement of complicity in the narrow sense — we alone have done this.
Unfortunately, the strongest tradition of amelioration is what any serious
examination must call sustainable underdevelopment.
    And into this setting of the World Economic Forum steps the newest
Global Agenda Council: the Council on Values. Its name is completely
conservative. It is not as if the Council is unaware that what I professionally
know to be Marx’s definition of the value–form as the general commensu-
rability that serves commodity exchange continues to be preserved in the
idea of value–adding, although monetized. However, since I also believe that
one must know the language with which to enable a group to rearrange
its desires, I am convinced that this name is valuable for the introduction
of the unconditioned ethical to the working of the world’s business, the
gnoseology of the current hegemony instrumentalized as the epistemolog-
ical, welcoming the advent of the ethical as unanticipable contingent, as
improbable a task as Marx’s philosophy or Gramsci’s methodology. Where
did Derrida say: say “yes” “yes” to the enemy? Help me. I have aimé–mangé
too much.
    The Council on Values has thought out a Social Covenant that may
be compared to the 1837 People’s Charter in Britain which Marx took
altogether seriously and which, in spite of its nominal failure, is, by common
multi–partisan consent the source of reformed Britain, breaking into bits
today. Here is the 1837 Charter:

   —   A vote for every man over the age of 21;
   —   A secret ballot;
   —   No property qualification for members of Parliament;
   —   Payment for MPs (so poor men could serve);
   —   Constituencies of equal size;
   —   Annual elections for Parliament.

  45. J. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins, New York, Verso, 1997.
92      Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak


     And here the 2014 Covenant:

     — Agreement on basic, universal ethical values;
     — Agreement on the need for these values need [sic] to be reflected in
       the legislation adopted and regulations promulgated by individual
       countries, and in the international economic agreements that define
       countries’ duties to each other;
     — Education systems which are open to all and which foster equality of
       opportunity46 ;
     — A goal of providing enough “good” jobs. This requires a much greater
       focus on “good” jobs for non–graduates; strong technical education
       opportunities; apprentice schemes, a pro–active tax and incentive
       system and 21st century industrial strategy;
     — Fair rewards for hard work and contributions to society;
     — Adequate security for savings and assets;
     — A commitment to reduce inequality and to keep income and rewards
       within “fair” bands at the top and bottom of the scale;
     — Stewardship of the environment and a commitment to preserve
       natural capital for the benefit of future generations — even “the
       seventh generation” out as indigenous people use this as a moral
       metric;
     — Financial sectors that are widely perceived to be be [why isn’t this
       simply “are?”], socially useful, and accountable;
     — Strengthening the reality of both opportunity and social mobility;
     — The promotion of human well–being, happiness, flourishing and
       equality of freedom to live a valued life as key societal goals;
     — Adapting new measurement systems to measure progress at both
       national and company levels;
     — As we move more deeply into a digital and virtual world, infused
       with complex technologies, personal privacy and public transparency
       will become crucial to the trust we need;
     — Moving from a shareholder model of companies and a client model
       of other vital institutions (like schools and universities) to a stake-
       holder model;
     — Engaging the next generation in the designing new models and
       practices;

   “Discussion is not enough,” says the text, and continues, we must make
diVerent decisions. And this depends on transformational, values–based
    46. See my Humanities, Democracy, and the Politics of Knowledge in Higher Education, keynote
address delivered at the University of Kwazulu–Natal, September 25, 2014 for an extended critique of
this idea.
                                                       Derrida for the World Economic Forum               93


leadership in every field of human endeavour. We need to cultivate, encour-
age and honour the models, at the World Economic Forum and beyond. We
must engage the people who can respond to global challenges in eVective,
productive, healing ways — people who will build and leave behind a more
just, generous, and sustainable world.
    The demands of the 1837 Charter are clearly to the ruling class (the
state) and are structural — in other words upon prepared ground. Derrida’s
Mochlos asks us not to ignore the intending subject. And, in Rogues he asks
the amphibolic question: «How many votes for the unconscious?»47
    The commands of the 2014 Covenant involve the texture of the will, from
the corporate class to itself, an epistemological transformation to know
business and finance socially through moral means: not a legal regulation
of capital unenforceable by a decimated state, but a moral self–regulation
of corporate capital; the formation of a general will for social justice at
the top48 . (The vanguard role of the corporate sector is in place: job cre-
ation and equitable wages. This is largely and implicitly accepted by all but
armchair communists today.) The writers have an unexamined intuition of
unconditional ethics.
    This enormous “non–profit” is, as critic of the connection between
fundraising “non–profit”–s and the corporate world, trying to find a cure
for the auto–immunity of capital. (It goes without saying that the expanded
concept–metaphor of “auto–immunity” came to me, again, from Rogues.)
In this larger context, the word “non–profit” — educational institutions,
human rights initiatives, international watchdogs and large and small civil
society and philanthropic undertakings — has lost its meaning. The World
Economic Forum has realized that it is the “profit” sector that must be
shifted. “The realization of a hegemonic apparatus, in so far as it creates
a new ideological terrain, determines a reform of consciousness and of
methods of knowledge.”
    Yet we must also remember that Gramsci’s emphasis on education and
culture has been appropriated by liberal culturalists and has been separated
    47. J. Derrida, Rogues, op. cit., p. 110.
    48. Projecting such a change within the proletariat, Mikhail Bakunin’s “all–round education”
had been only scientific, only focused on the destruction of the state and the laws of inheritance;
as the transformers of capitalism have only knowledge management and digitalism. Yet Bakunin
the anarchist knew something at least of the necessary individual epistemic transformation for the
formation of a collectivity: “[. . . ] for the International really to acquire this influence, for a tenth of
the proletariat, organized by this Association, to be able to rally the other nine tenths, each member
of each section must be penetrated much more thoroughly by the principles of the International
than is now the case. Only on this condition will he [sic] be able eVectively to discharge the mission
of propagandists and apostle in time and peace and calm, and that of a revolutionary principal in
time of struggle.” The problem was that he believed that just association would bring this about.
M. Bakunin, From out of the Dustbin, trans. Robert M. Cutler, Ann Arbor, Ardis, 1985, pp. 142, 146, 136.
94      Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak


from his real–ization of Marx’s implicit project. And “on the left,” Gramsci’s
emphasis is sometimes dismissed as culturalist. Gramsci’s question on the
other hand was, how to purge liberal education of its seemingly inevitable
connection to the ideology of oligarchy.
    Now that the conjuncture has produced oligarchs interested in the ethi-
cal, it is time to remind ourselves that the ethical is not to be identified with
the rational choice between right and wrong (capitalist gnoseology) but
rather a slow training for the rearrangement of desires, for the ability to
respond to the unconditional, the contingent. “Knowledge management,”
which is currently the method, has speedy results as its goal. Summits are
planned on consensus achieved by simple collections of staggered multi-
ple–choice questions. In an extended discussion, I would parse out Derrida’s
practical remark: «Decisions are made in the night of non–knowledge»49 .
For the sake of time and space, we cannot undertake a thorough critique
of either the Covenant or the eVectiveness of knowledge management
techniques combined with a digitalized faith base. Yet it must be pointed
out that “agreement” leading to moral convictions that overturn previous
greed to a will to law will remain in the domain of enforcement if desires
are not shifted with careful patience. A lasting collectivity is formed by
individual attention. “How many are we?” And, when we talk of “basic, uni-
versal human values,” are we speaking only of the masters? In other words,
of people who can respond to global challenges in eVective, productive,
healing ways? Here one invokes the com–plicity — folded–togetherness —
of fund–raising radicals and the corporate world. These general adjectives
— basic, universal, human — call for the alternative broad based pedagogic
method that I am insisting on. Additionally, gender is still caught in family
values in the Covenant. It does not emerge into its manifest text. That also
involves future slow work of the rearrangement of desire.
    The slow work here is to acknowledge complicity, act the conjuncture,
with the real–ization of a broad “Marx”–ist tendency from gnoseology to
epistemology.
    By contrast and to repeat, within the Council on Value, the covering over
of the heteronormative — that the contingent, beyond programming, rises
in the diVerence between need and capacity to make — is now practiced
by knowledge management. The invaluable work that the Council on Val-
ues can do is undone by a complete confidence in so–called toolkits and
templates. The desire for such speedy solutions must be rearranged with
the training of the imagination to understand that to change gnoseology to
epistemology today, within the boundaries of the Council on Values, we

   49. J. Derrida, Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’, trans. Mary Quaintance,
«Cardozo Law Review», 11, 919, (1990), p. 967.
                                                    Derrida for the World Economic Forum   95


must understand that the toolkit closes oV the contingent. The readership
of this book will tease out the relationship between this understanding and
Derrida’s bold early move, repeatedly without “venturing up to perilous
necessities,” to show that grammatology cannot be a positive science50 . One
must teach how to make toolkits as halfway houses to be undone by the
contingent rather than oVer toolkits for a solution to the problem of action.
Some of us have been criticizing the UN for example on the use of platforms
of action in order to diVuse and manage violence against women. Some of
us have been criticizing the statisticalization of such things as development
and progress. All of this has to be integrated into a persistent critique of
knowledge management, so that meetings to achieve solutions do not work
as if for children, with leaders who divide collectivities into groups, with
instructions to produce lists of items that are collected as the groups are
put back together. (Do real policy decisions take such antics seriously?).
This is not the way that the imagination will be trained for epistemological
performance so that unconditional ethics can be introduced to move capital
into social justice.
    Today gender empowerment through micro–credits and financial inde-
pendence — taking employability as the bottom line of human dignity —
follows the same sort of autonormative agenda. Here gendering as the type
case of reproductivity must be acknowledged. Just as in the epistemological
project of Capital 1, the worker was invited to rethink himself epistemologi-
cally as agent of production rather than victim of capitalism, so also, and
on a broader base, women must understand that men take more and give
less and that they themselves are not the victims of phallocentrism but the
agent of production and the need for legitimate passage of property must
not be the excuse for keeping them in confinement.

   How can intellectuals help? To repeat, the intellectual must learn to teach
how to make toolkits as halfway houses to be undone by the contingent
or unexpected rather than oVer toolkits for a solution to the problem of
action. This is not the way that the imagination will be trained for episte-
mological performance — or changing the way objects for knowing are
constructed for instrumental management — “Knowledge for Develop-
ment,” or knowledge understood purely quantitatively as a “growing stock”
— so that unconditional or uninstrumentalizable ethics can be introduced
to move the corporate world toward social justice. There is no other way to
intervene in the incalculable realm of human desire. This is why behavioral
economics, first conceived of as an alternative to rational choice, begins
to merge with it. This is the work that we must continue to do persis-

   50. J. Derrida, Grammatology, op. cit., p. 75.
96      Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak


tently, by suggesting, for example, that the usual turnover expectation that
the corporate sector must necessarily entertain will not work in the arena
of the establishment of lasting social justice. In order for this to happen,
the mind–sets of corporate leaders have to be changed, for sure, but the
intuitions of democracy have to be placed also within the largest sector
of the population. In democracies, this will be the grass roots electorates.
Speedy evaluation, one of the hallmarks of knowledge management, will
fall through the cracks in this sort of endeavor, for there the population is
no more than objects for investigation51 . If convenience is made a priority
here, the project should be given up, or will quickly transform itself into
fact–checking, with our toolkits as reference.
    I have already mentioned the future slow work of the rearrangement of
desire in the race–class diversified field of gender. Let me add a few words
on something I deeply care about.
    India and the Knowledge Economy is a meticulously prepared book. What
I am asking for here is a re–thinking of the bits I have italicized in the
introductory sentence in its “Foreword:” «Knowledge, as it is applied in
entrepreneurship and innovation, research and development, software and
product design, and in how people use their education and skills, is now widely
believed to be one of the key sources of growth in the global economy». What
“knowledge” “drives” “the supply chains and markets that now dominate the
global economy”? The Council and the Forum must realize that their bold
plan is to question such knowledge and it cannot be done in its own terms.
    If you need a Derridian formula here, how about the dangers of thinking:
«the idea of knowledge is knowledge about knowledge», especially when it
is instrumental for the securing of capital for capitalism?52

   This is a summary: I have spoken of philosophy as the philosophy of an
education that will attempt to access the epistemology of those who will
implement the Social Covenant, with corporations and institutions, workers
therein, and the larger world. I propose an expansion of the idea of knowing.

    51. Here is an example of the fact–checking style of assessment: «The most recent version of the
KAM [Knowledge Assessment Methodology], KAM 2008 makes comparisons based on 83 structural
and qualitative variables that serve as proxies for the four knowledge–economy pillars described
above. Some 140 countries can be compared — among them most of the developed economies of
the Organisation for Economic Co–operation and Development (OECD) and about 100 developing
countries. All 83 variables are normalized on a scale from 0 (weakest) to 10 (strongest), and all 140
countries are ranked on an ordinal scale. The KAM therefore reports the relative performance of
countries on the knowledge economy.* [*]: Some of the indicators used in the KAM are also used
in the benchmarking systems of other institutions, such as UNIDO, which measures countries’
potential to “catch up” with more developed countries, and the World Economic Forum, which
looks at competitiveness as the set of institutions, policies, and factors that determine a country’s
productivity», Measuring Knowledge in the World’s Economies, “World Bank Institute”.
    52. J. Derrida, University in the Eyes of Its Pupils?, op. cit.; Id., Mochlos?, op. cit., p. 5.
                                       Derrida for the World Economic Forum   97


This involves a change of mindset, in the intellectuals, in the corporate
sector, in the workers attached to it, extending to the general population,
with the help of intellectuals engaged in the work of transforming the
philosophy of education and its application. Measuring or evaluating terms
of prompt success are not appropriate to the interminable task of working
for a change in the desires of the highly diversified, incalculably gendered
populations of the world.
   The Council on Values cannot take this risk. And, this dangerous supple-
ment to the economy of the world will be ignored by those who resemble
us rather than them as our friend Jacques Derrida is niched back by scholarly
Sancho Panzas, with the best will in the world, into pushing the frontiers,
perhaps, of disciplinary literature and philosophy.
