Spivak's Death of a Discipline: An Anthropologist Tries to Respond

abstract:This article explores Spivak's long-standing engagement with anthropology, and reads Death of a Discipline as the third volume of a trilogy encompassing A Critique of Postcolonial Reason and Imperatives to Reimagine the Planet. In treating DoD as the third and "pragmatic" supplement to the first two texts, it explores the ways in which Spivak's thought engages the problems bequeathed by Immanuel Kant's own critical trilogy: the native informant, the regulatory ideal and cosmopolitical ethics, and the need to supplement the concept of "world" (or "globality") with a non-substantive intuition of the transcendental in the form of the earth and/or the planetary.