Brad
Evans: Throughout your work, you have written about the conditions faced by the
globally disadvantaged, notably in places such as India, China and Africa. How
might we use philosophy to better understand the various types of violence that
erupt as a result of the plight of the marginalized in the world today?
Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak: While violence is not beyond naming and diagnosis, it does
raise many challenging questions all the same. I am a pacifist. I truly believe
in the power of nonviolence. But we cannot categorically deny a people the
right to resist violence, even, under certain conditions, with violence.
Sometimes situations become so intolerable that moral certainties are no longer
meaningful. There is a difference here between condoning such a response and
trying to understand why the recourse to violence becomes inevitable.
