Containing Sexual Violence: A Persistent Revolution

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

After rape and murder of a trainee Doctor of R G Kar Medical College and Hospital, Kolkata, on August 9, 2024, I heard a news item that bits of the perpetrators’ skin had been found under her nails. This item was not repeated, but I will never forget it. She was not a victim. She fought but brute force won. Her fight must be continued, is being continued. But for what was she fighting? To save herself from brutality no doubt, but also to let humanity win. I have been following the demonstrations, first from India, and now from New York, and through my sister’s reports from New Delhi. It is a worldwide struggle –in the US the collective voices in the street are for a woman’s right to her body. It is a nationwide struggle, as I realise, talking to my sister twice a day. It must be a continuing struggle. These protests are largely peaceful, and my sister told me yesterday that Alapan Bandyopadhyay’s wise words addressed to people in general against violence when trying to approach the chief minister, asking for better laws and better enforcement.

Also toward the beginning of the protests, I heard a woman doctor say–and one of the filmmakers about Nirbhaya echoed this–that laws have been passed and nothing seems to have changed. Yes, changing laws are essential but, as common sense tells us repeatedly changing laws does not change minds. Again, as daily experience all over the world tells us, the enforcers of the law themselves, mostly men, take pleasure in sexual violence. It is the norm.

We are fighting the fact that, as all teachers of the humanities in whatever form and of the qualitative social science from infancy to the post-tertiary level, from subaltern to the elite level know: pleasure in sexual violence is the (male) norm and belongs with the fact that fear, violence and greed are the basic human affects. I cite in my support Professor Margaret MacMillan of Oxford University, whose 2018 Reith lectures, entitled “The Mark of Cain”, made this point most convincingly. Basic family values–sometimes disguising caste –can be subsumed under this. Therefore, what we are fighting for is not just laws being put in place, but the production of human beings who will want to obey the laws because they are good or, better yet, socially just. This does not come from an education based on STEM–science, technology, engineering, mathematics. These are the necessary subjects on our way up the GDP, launched to the world to show how advanced and developed we are. But advancement and development are not only material but also mental, some would say spiritual and for those we need education of a different sort. Education in the practice of freedom, education in the practice of democratic values–which is the rights of other people, not just myself–education in the practice of being what you would like to call human rather than what happens to be human.

I have said it is a worldwide struggle and, very recently, in response to a piece requested by a global online journal, I wrote this:

“The English word “re-education” is most often associated with Mao Zedong’s Lao jiao, the camp for re-educating the lumpen proletariat through labour.... I am lifting the word “re-education”, literalising the phrase, reinventing it through transformation into a common noun. Let me move with this re-invented concept metaphor for a bit, and then I’ll bring up a Chinese institution – in order to make our relay-work understandable and inviting. “Up to the mountains, down to the countryside,” Mao is supposed to have said, at least in English translation. To abstract one way: from elite to rural subaltern.

Frantz Fanon, the Martiniquan-Algerian activist psychiatrist, spoke of “leaders” (using the English word) implicitly as uneducable, as he urges young working-class people in the newly independent state (which he did not live to see). What is important in what Tsikhanouskaya [the leader of the Belarusian opposition in exile] says is that leaders cannot be re-educated, offering a critique, again implicit, of the current oligarchic education available. In my view, we can only think of re-education, of the leaderly education of control and power through statistics, by going toward surrendering to the epistemology of the subaltern (“small social groups in the margins of history”—Antonio Gramsci) in order first to be able to think and at once to work for social justice through insertion into citizenship. All that change can be imagined. Subalternity from different areas is not generalisable but citizenship offers a rough generalisable model. Education is always a movement toward claiming the rights and responsibilities of the citizen.

The second part of Tsikhanouskaya’s remarks [made in an interview with MSNBC] states that when people have not been educated to want social justice for all, the law has to be enforced for them. Peter Hallward, a British leftist, cites an ignored French philosopher called Guy Lardreau and asks, “Why did the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions culminate in ‘disastrous and criminal failure’? What was it about these and related attempts to ‘bind political power to the highest ends of reasons’—the ends of freedom and equality of a world without oppression—that doomed them to ‘result in the necessary reversal of best into worst’?1 Tsikhanouskaya can offer the answer. So can Sharon Ife Church,who tries to turn gang members and drug addicts in the New York area epistemologically, Teodor Shanin in his Peasants and Peasant Societies and Plekhanov,in his general critique of Marxism; the example may be strongest in the case of Haiti. Unless every member of a society has its desires trained to want equality with other people, there can be no just society. Just following Rousseau will not do it; he is focused on one rational example not a diverse collectivity. One of the reasons for Haiti’s fall was that all Blacks did not become Jacobins in the absence of what Tsikhanouskaya would call “re-education”.

Of course, it is impossible to produce a full collectivity of “re-educated” individuals for the operation of a socially just world. Impossible but necessary. Necessary though impossible. And therefore, if we want every revolution not to fail, “re-educating” must keep on. Every generation must be “re-educated”, for the “natural” education of the human gives it fear/violence/greed. This re-education, in the interest of social justice, is usually exactly what leaders do not practice: self-effacement, in order to be able to inhabit the mindset of the target sector of the electorate so that their needs, imagined gendered, can be the principle that dictates the structure of the state. In other words, accessing the epistemic texture of the citizen at the bottom in order to imagine a structural dynamic that keeps up with the dynamic of preserving equality. To think this happens by binding power to high reason is a mistake. We should rather realise, through re-education, that reason, our best instrument, is also tremendously fragile, and should be supplemented by the imagination. Hallward suggests that Lardreau, baffled by the decline of the revolutionary spirit, had at first faulted the emotion lodged in philosophical systems: stoicism, but moves on to locate the reason for stoicism, unwittingly, to an absence of activism: “The more unconditional the affirmation that sustains it [insurgent freedom], the more distant it becomes from the conditions that might enable its implementation. The more Lardreau contemplates freedom, the less he becomes a partisan of actual emancipation”. (p.14)

What is needed here, for Professor Louis Althusser’s elite students, is a sense of training for activism as “re-education” called, “thinking in the other’s head” by Bertolt Brecht, “prayer to be haunted” by Derrida, “producing the subaltern intellectual” by Gramsci, and “teaching differently by learning to learn from below”. by myself.2 

Since this task of individual/collective re-education is as impossible as it is necessary, enforcement must continue. But if our task of undoing of class apartheid in education is elaborated with any success at all, the enforcers of the law will not be invariably ill-educated. Otherwise, if we have nothing but enforcement, loopholes will proliferate and we will continue to secure a vigilante state’.

I believe I have now given a briefish outline of the need for a humanities-style re-education–learning the practice of freedom –to go beyond the disciplines, engaging society texturally, to supplement the structural work of education departments that teach the production of knowledge. Put as much emphasis on this sector, continuously rethought, as you do on defense. A mindset change that is almost impossible to achieve on a full scale. And that is why we continue rather than give up.

Will we be continuing to bring about this change in mindset? It is a persistent effort, a permanent revolution. Marx and Engels, an upper-middle-class doctorate and physician respectively, before they had seen a revolution, wrote confidently in The German Ideology: “Liberation is a historical and not a mental act”. A middle-aged Louis Althusser, a professor at the most elite normalising academy in France as well as a member of the Communist Party of France, saved it for the intellectuals by writing: “’ thought’ is a peculiar real system.” It is Gramsci who recognises thinking as a practice. He had not only seen revolutions–including the apparent success of the Bolshevik but also the failure of his beloved Olivetti strike in Turin–and he was daily experiencing the agony of a low-grade political prison on a terminally diseased body, so he knew that the Marxist project could only be sustained by an accompanying knowledge-activity that could be called “epistemological”. A mindset change alone will not work, of course; the point is to change the world and the most important change in the world is indeed change in a mindset that can then desire the law, rather than simply obey it or enforce it. (After all, in Capital I, Marx is asking the implied reader, the worker, to change their self-representation from victim of capitalism to agent of production; and also fight capitalism.

Marx and Engels ask, in the very same theses where they talk about changing the world: “Who will educate the educators?” We cannot keep that open just as a rhetorical question. We must answer: we will, and realize that responsible education can take place beyond the academy. Now, humanities education, or education in the qualitative social sciences will not generate as much money as STEM. But it is healthcare for society, and, as one of its major and most fundamental items, it has the task of containing and re-directing the pleasure in sexual violence, transforming that pleasure into consensual desire–many years ago, before I had met the Subaltern Studies group, my title for what became “Can the Subaltern Speak?” was “Pleasure And Desire”. This transformation takes its place with education into equality with other people who do not resemble me; for when desire is located within the individual –separated from need or want–it can be thrust towards respect. Even if the violence is acted out within transphobia or homosexuality, the narrative model, implicit with children (invoking parents, for example) must be within reproductive hetero=normativity. My life’s experience tells me that universal class apartheid in education and embedded corruption in the entire range of education is the equivalent to the impossibility of being heard, of accessing a genuine public sphere rather than a complicit public sector. And therefore, I can hear Martin Luther King, jr.: “Violence is the response of those who are not heard”.

I do what I can to put my money where my mouth is and I urge my readers, in order to continue to fight R G Kar’s young doctor’s fight, walk the walk, don’t give up, do not just talk the talk. Even when it takes the shape of demonstrations, as you can see, it can be reduced to party conflict– Trinamool and BJP in India, Republican and Democrat in the United States. If you have children, change their minds. If you don’t, let your talk become a walk, radiating from your own home as far as it will go. The persistence of rape is imbricated with a corrupt public sector. Our task is not vigilantism alone, as is usually suggested; it is also taking responsibility for education into equality,

1    Peter Hallward, “Reason and Revolt: Guy Lardreau’s Early Voluntarism and Its Limits”, Radical Philosophy 140 (March/April 2015), p. 13.
2    After I learnt from a general circular from the Fondazione Gramsci that Patrizio Rotondo, a former student of Philosophy, now a teacher of History and Philosophy in a high school in Rome won the “Alberto Cardosi” international prize given by the Gramsci Foundation in Rome for a work entitled “Dai margin-Della Storia, del testo, dell’immagi-nazione. I subalterni in Spivak e Gramsci,” with a translation into Italian of the Introduction to my n Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization in the appendix, I have felt confident enough to put my name here. The late Gregory Baratta, who knew Gramsci, wrote to me a number of times that I really understood Nino, in that I emphasized the theme of education quitein that way. But since he did not mention my name in two pieces on Gramsci’s reputation in the U.S., I naturally do not cite him.

[Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor at Columbia University. Humani­ties for social justice is her obsession.]

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