This essay is a version of the text presented as a paper in Kolkata in February 2003. This was the first day of the two-day S. G. Deuskar lecture delivered by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Fifteen years after that event, this essay finds its place among a new CSSSC lecture series titled Social Science Across Disciplines.
Spivak's essay on ethics and politics is infused with a concern to bring forward the way the 'literary' works in the production of ethics and politics. The notion of ethics that she uses here is far removed from an...