| Abstract: | Gayatri Spivak’s response to the attack of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2011, the event otherwise known as 9/11, was one of many responses that denote the event’s traumatic impact. In psychoanalytic terms, the psychic condition of trauma, identified by Lacan as the encounter with the real, is a shock which the subject initially misses; as such, the subject is compelled to make intelligible what was missed through what Lacan calls ‘fantasy.’ According to Zizek in Welcome to the Desert of the Real, the cinematic quality of the planes crashing into the towers, iterating the fantasies of Hollywood disaster films (16), pointed to a haunting in America of some historical trauma that returned in the real of 9/11 (17). Zizek’s reflection on 9/11 as a haunting in cinematic terms, pointing to a confluence of his scholarship and the event, sets a precedent for this paper’s focus on seeing in Spivak’s response to the suicide acts of 9/11 a haunting of the suicide rite of Sati in her earlier scholarship. This paper reviews Spivak’s representation of suicide in “Can the subaltern speak?” (1988) and “Terror: A Speech After 9/11” (2004), noting the non-coincidental echoes between these projects with respect to secularism and silence, affirming this paper’s proposal that in Spivak’s work, a trauma shared by western secular society is evident as a fantasy of silence. |
