CAN THE SUBALTERN BE WITNESSED?

Abstract

Abstract Following Jacques Derrida’s reflections on witnessing and testimony, this article proposes a discontinuous economy between human witnessing and the nonhuman (de-)framing of any such instituted work of judgement, clandestinely calling the latter nonhuman witnessing. It then shows that nonhuman witnessing can be understood with what Derrida terms the poetic – a transitional inscription between legibility and illegibility – with which he complicates the legal understanding of witnessing, especially in dealing with the problem of the singularity of testimony. Confronting this idea of poetic writing with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s notion of the literary staging of singularity, the article argues that this particular deconstructive trajectory can be turned towards an ethical mapping of the events of singular subalternity. In its latter half, the article makes two speculative moves in exploring the work of nonhuman witnessing in the postcolonial context. It first offers a critical note on Spivak’s auto-analytic method that she paradigmatically performs in situating the postcolonial woman intellectual in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” It then discusses her juxtaposition, of the account of the suicide of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri, with the analysis of the epistemic conditions of production of the satidaha, concluding that Bhaduri’s post-mortem exposure inscribes the contours of a radically nonhuman witnessing.