Cosmopolitan Locations

Abstract

When Terry Eagleton, in a review of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, declares that Spivak’s ‘flamboyant theoretical avant-gardism conceals a rather modest political agenda’¹ he rehearses the allegation, made repeatedly since the late 1970s, that poststructuralism indulges in a ludicism that prevents it from offering a compelling critique of the social, the political, and the cultural. Poststructuralist theory, Eagleton tells us, is caught up in a ‘selftheatricalizing’² introspection; its notion of resistance permits little more than a vigilant complicity with dominant institutions, and its theory of cultural power fails to provide a convincing analysis of social systems and the injustices embedded within them. These claims tellingly reiterate other work — by other critics, as well as Eagleton — that excoriates poststructuralist theory for being unsystematic, ahistorical, rarified, abstruse, or banal; for being, in other words, a diversion from properly effective forms of radical critique.