타자의 타자성에 대한 심문 : 가야트리 스피박 Gayatri Spivak = Questioning the Otherness of the Other

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Throughout the history of western culture and thought philosophy produces western subjects engendered by simultaneously including and excluding the other. The concept of the other signifies what is unfamiliar and extraneous to a dominant subjectivity, the opposite or negative against which an authority is defined. This essay will explore 'the other,' adopting the strategies of G. Spivak, and read texts of some colonial and postcolonial novels.
The problem of the other is distinctive of contemporary postcolonial studies. While Edward Said raises the question as to how otherness could become a genuine oppositional force and a useable value in Orientalism, he seems to describe the otherness only as the 'non-white, non-West.' Gayatri Spivak, however, tries to displace the fixed Self/Other dichotomy in favor of an ethical response to oppressed people in the Third and Fourth World.
We can distinguish two sorts of otherness in Spivak's works: a self-consolidating Other and an Other who is absolutely Other. The former is an imaginary other, a fantasy other through whom the self comes to know itself. In Jane Eyre and Robinson Crusoe, Bertha Mason and Friday appear as two representative figures of the self-consolidating Other; they are seriously distorted representations of the others as a result of the prejudiced and ideologically motivated stereotypes held by the West.
The concept of the Absolute Other that Spivak appropriates from the ethics of Levinas by way of Derrida is meant to shatter the mirror of narcissism in which the self confronts its other. In J. Coetzee's Foe and Mahasweta Devi's short story, "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha," we may find the figures of the absolute Other as well as allegories of the ethical relation. Especially in Devi's short story, the scene that Puran, the protagonist, sees the cave drawing of a pterodactyl, approximates ethical response to the absolute other that cannot be represented or grasped through the modern intellectuals.
By invoking the historical exploitation and oppression of the disempowered, Spivak gives us a message: an ethical affirmation which is described in terms of love. We, as a third-worldian, need to learn how to step out of the cultural essentialism and start experiencing otherness.