> Yoshie, I don't understand the point Spivak, Eagleton or you are making
> in the excerpt and comment below.
That's because it makes no sense without Yoshie's opening line which read: "Unlike Daniel and nearly all other postal scholars, Spivak took one strand of Eagleton's criticism of postmodernism rather seriously...".
So, we get Yoshie resorting to Spivak's apparent endorsement of Eagleton's crit of 'postmodernism' (with a bit of Foucault -- 'technologies of self' -- thrown in) in order to give a sense (if not an argument) of 'Why Daniel and Posties Are Wrong'. But it's difficult to be at all sure about what Daniel is wrong about exactly, since Yoshie imagines, rather than shows, his position to be that which she describes, or hints at, here. I, for one, have no recollection of Daniel insisting either than metaphysics or predication can be refused, and I'd be surprised if anyone can find in either Spivak (or Derrida for that matter) an occasion where this is their position either.
Some familiarity with deconstruction would assume the fairly standard deconstructive formula of the simultaneity of impossibility and necessity: ie., that metaphysics and predication are both impossible (they do not work) and necessary (ie., objective, in the sense that Dan remarked on in another post). The question, as always, is how. If I do recall correctly, Spivak mentions someplace in her earlier writings that predication is unavoidable, perhaps this in her discussion on 'strategic essentialism'.
I haven't read Spivak for a long time as well, but I'd wager that her remarks are intended for those who believe that a deconstruction of something (say, metaphysics) is the same thing as a 'denial' of same, much like I'd be surprised to discover anyone who seriously believed that a critique of something abolished it.
A couple of other remarks:
Spivak's phrase "such a refusal would merely mark a site of desire" is taken right out of Lacan, and in this instance refers to a desire for distinction and superiority by comparison. Much like what Said means when he writes of the orientalist gaze; and Zizek has occasion to refer to in discussions on Yugoslavia. This is not, for all that Yoshie (and Ahmad) want to make of it, the ritualisation of 'acknowledgements of complicity'. One could take a direct route to assertions of personal distinction (as in "I have never been a right-winger"), one could even suppose that superiority can be assured by the claim that "marx was not metaphysical" (though it remains to be asked what 'the spectre of communism' is if not, as well as being an indication of emergent movements, a speculative and indeed metaphysical claim since those movements were not precisely communist); but the insistence that THEORY is not capable of transcending the conditions in which it finds itself should be par for the course for a materialist conception of the possibilities and impossibilities of theoretical practice.
To put it another way, either there is something to be said for historical materialism, and thereby also an historical and materialist account of historical materialism, or else there really is an indistinction between historical materialism and ideology, where histmat is only allowed to function as histmat where everything OTHER than histmat is concerned -- ie., a claim to the accomplishment of epistemic transcendence, idealism par excellence parading as its opposite.
Angela