Passive Voice: Democratic Indifference and the Vibrant Matter of Literature

Abstract

Feminist, queer, and postcolonial/anti-racist theories have from their respective vantage points interrogated a perceived privileged nexus between subjecthood and agency (even if constructed, in the wake of Athusser and Butler, as subjectivity in subjection). In this emergent debate, the alternative notion of a ‘radical passivity’ that articulates itself in terms of evacuation, silence, and refusal not only offers up ‘a critique of the organizing logic of agency and subjectivity itself, but also opts out of certain systems built around a dialectic of colonizer and colonized’ (Halberstam). Interestingly, this paradoxically interventionist model finds its most eloquent formulations in the readings of literary texts (Gayatri Spivak’s essays on the stories of Mahasweta Devi, Judith Halberstam’s readings of Jamaica Kincaid, Sara Ahmed’s reflections on George Eliot). Is literature, then, the privileged site of articulation—if not ‘production’—of a radically passive form of subjectivity? This chapter aligns the polemical figure of radical passivity with currently influential theories of literature and subjectivity that also attempt to displace the superiority ascribed to action over mere existence but put a particular emphasis on the textual matter that enables such figurations. Drawing on the works of Alain Badiou and especially Jacques Rancière, the author suggests that radical passivity has strong affinities to the notion of democratic indifference that Rancière identifies as the hallmark of the ‘mute speech’ of literature.