> But was Spivak using "Kant" in that way ? I got the impression from
> your post that Spivak was referring to Kant himself. So, how does she
> read Kant from below ? The philosophical problem with Kant is not only
> racism but dualism and agnosticism. Does she address these ?
For one thing, Kant is the first philosopher to really wrestle with the notion of human rights and the national-juridical foundations of such in capitalist society; he's not a rationalist building a system, like Descartes or Spinoza, but is already, on a certain level, beginning to question that system. His answers are inadequate, but he at least asks the right questions. This is a big deal for Spivak, because her own position as an Indian expatriate means that she has to deal with Kantian contradictions all the time -- 1st world human rights activisms vs. 3rd world peasant struggles, transnationalism vs. allegiance to local nationalisms, etc. Kant's categories, properly historicized, are a useful tool for critiquing the moral claims of such proto-national structures (though not for building alternatives to such; then you need Hegel, Marx, 20th century Marxism, etc.).
I'd argue that neoliberalism is really an applied neo-Kantianism, actually. There's no movement in the neolib utopia: just the eternal recurrence of the Wall Street Bubble, the categorical imperative of a rentier past made future, over and over again. It fears the march of history. Hopefully, after Seattle, it'll start fearing much more than that.
-- Dennis