Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Quotes

• Autobiography is a wound where the blood of history does not dry.

  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

  Blood, Doe, Dry

  34 Copy quote

• If one really thinks about the body as such, there is no possible outline of the body as such.

  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

  Thinking, Body, Ifs

  31 Copy quote

• When we seem to have won or lost in terms of certainties, we must, as literature teachers in the classroom, remember such warnings -- let literature teach us that there are no certainties, that the process is open, and that it may be altogether salutary that it is so.

  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

  Teacher, Warning, Literature

  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2005). “Death of a Discipline”, p.26, Columbia University Press

  32 Copy quote

• Deconstruction seems to offer a way out of the closure of knowledge. By inaugurating the open-ended indefiniteness of textuality-by thus 'placing in the abyss' (mettre en abime), as the French expression would literally have it-it shows us the lure of the abyss as freedom. The fall into the abyss of deconstruction inspires us with as much pleasure as fear. We are intoxicated with the prospect of never hitting bottom

  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

  Fall, Expression, Inspire

  38 Copy quote

• So capital is in fact borderless; that's the problem. On the other hand capital has to keep borders alive in order for this kind of cross-border trade to happen. So therefore the idea of borderlessness has a performative contradiction within it which has to be kept alive.

  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

  Hands, Order, Ideas

  41 Copy quote

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin