>In other words, why has a claim to superior knowledge come to be
>based on saying that one's product is 'more nuanced with a productive
>acknowledgment of complicity'?
The other night Spivak made a couple of related points: 1) that she can't deny the great material advantages of being employed at a major metropolitan university; 2) that it's supremely "bad faith" to dismiss the Enlightenment as a fraud when one lives in a place where one does enjoy certain civil liberties (she said she's repeatedly reminded of this by conversations with human rights activists); 3) that even though Kant was a racist who claimed that serious thought requires the elimination of the aboriginal and who would have scorned a conversation with her, she still admires him immensely; and 4) the point should be not to junk Kant & Co., but to follow Marx's example, and use them "from below." I don't know if this is the complicity she has in mind, and I don't know what Ahmad's argument was, but that's what she said.
Doug