11 | July | 2016 | fleurmach

The Institute for Creative Arts is proud to present internationally renowned theorist, Professor Gayatri Spivak.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is one of the most significant and influential literary theorists of our time.

Having first come to prominence with her translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology in 1976, Spivak has since applied deconstructive readings to theoretical engagements and textual analyses including feminism, Marxism, literary criticism and postcolonialism – capturing complex theories that transgress disciplinary boundaries.

The Institute for Creative Arts (ICA, formerly GIPCA) in collaboration with UCT’s Black Academic Caucus (BAC) is honoured to present this esteemed academic and philosopher as part of the ICA’s Great Texts/Big Questions lecture series.

Of her address, entitled “Still hoping for a revolution”, Spivak writes:

Now that the first wave of “revolution” against decrepit empires, leading to state capitalism and vanguardism, is showing its deep fault lines, I reopen the question of Marx’s real project and focus on holistic education into citizenship – as the conjuncture has moved from the central agency of the industrial proletariat – as a robust substitute for both vanguardism and techniques of pre-party formation.

This is particularly interesting for me because I have myself learned from many mistakes made since 1992, when I presented the T.B. Davie Memorial Lecture in Cape Town on “Thinking Academic Freedom in Gendered Post-Coloniality.” The general response, as I heard it reported, was “we already do this.” Yet, in 2002, Joan Vincent included the piece in her The Anthropology of Politics: A Reader in Ethnography, Theory, and Critique, commenting that I had been “prescient.” I therefore hope that my audience, which will be different, will also have learned from past “mistakes.”

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is currently professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University where she founded the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Her critical writings include Of Grammatology (1976), In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987), The Post-Colonial Critic (1990), Thinking Academic Freedom in Gendered Post-Coloniality (1992), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), Death of a Discipline (2003), and Other Asias (2005).

The lecture, followed by an open question and answer session, will take place from 17:30 – 19:00 on Friday 22 July 2016 at Jameson Hall, University Avenue, University of Cape Town Upper Campus.

Refreshments will be served from 17:00.

No booking is necessary and all are welcome.

For more information, contact the ICA office: +27 21 650 7156 or ica@uct.ac.za

The Coming Insurrection, a notorious 2007 ultra-left polemical tract written by a collective of French anti-state communists writing under the group-moniker The Invisible Committee, posits a conception of insurrection as the creation of new collective ontologies through acts of radical social rupture. Eschewing the orthodox Marxist line that revolution is something temporally removed from the present, towards which pro-revolutionaries must organize and work, The Invisible Committee’s use of insurrection claims it as an antagonistic challenge to late-capitalism firmly grounded in its own immediacy. Communism is therefore made immediate, and it is willed into being by insurrectionary acts of social rupture.

While much has been written on the debt that The Invisible Committee owes to French strains of ultra-left anti-state communism, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben, Situationism, and the Italian Autonomia movement of the 1970s, their implicit nod to the sociopolitical themes of music has been largely ignored. By subtly claiming that insurrection spreads by resonance and that such proliferation “takes the shape of a music,” The Invisible Committee allows for the interpretation of its “coming insurrection” as an inherently musical act. Using a historical reading of the shift from tonality to atonality in Western art music, as exemplified by Arnold Schoenberg, Alden Wood’s interpretation of The Coming Insurrection aims at imbuing its explicitly political premises with a more thorough exploration of its implicit musical qualities.

Published in Interdisciplinary Humanities Vol. 30 pp. 57-65, 2013.

Read this essay HERE, and The Coming Insurrection HERE.