In the preface Joan Aesthetic education in the era of globalization, her Remarkable collection of field-defining essays written over a quarter century, Gayatri Spivak recounts how she retrospectively “discovered” an informing motif: the “distracted theory of the double bind.” She briefly notes that “distracted theory” is a “poor but accurate translation” of théorie distraite, the term Derrida used in the preface to Psyche: Inventions of the Other to characterize the relation between that collection of occasional essays and his ongoing theoretical project (ix).

I never intended to write an adaptation of sophocles's ajax. I didn't think i'd ever be able to cope with the horror of that opening image—Ajax's crazed slaughter of animals and particularly his torture of them while he is in the grip of his delusion that he is killing and torturing the men he thinks have betrayed and shamed him: his generals, Agamemnon and Menelaus, and Odysseus, the man he thinks unjustly won his rightful trophy, the armor of the dead Achilles. Though we don't see Ajax at his butchery in that first scene—we only hear him obscurely in the tent center stage—I've always found the image of what he is doing in there more abhorrent than any other brutality the Greek tragedians conjured.

In death of a discipline, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak attributes the emergence of postcolonial studies to an increase in Asian immigration to the United States following Lyndon Johnson's 1965 reform of the Immigration Act (3). I would like to resituate her genealogy of the field in order to consider the “ab-use,” or “use from below,” of the European Enlightenment she asks us to cultivate in her most recent book, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. To perform this move, I will suggest that postcolonial studies began more than one hundred years before the legislation Spivak names in what has become a founding document for the field. I am referring to Thomas Babington Macaulay's well-known 1835 minute on Indian education, which proposed the creation of “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” (729). The class of Western-educated natives who would serve as liaisons between European colonizers and the millions of people they ruled came to be known in postcolonial studies as colonial subjects.

I am not only honored but instructed by these essays. Let me begin with Jean Franco's essay and acknowledge her moving expression of solidarity: “coming from Depression-era northern England, I too have early memories of, if not famine, seeing the skeletal bodies of a family starving in the dying heart of the empire[.] Meanwhile, at school we made daisy chains and were told that the yellow center was Britain and the petals the colonies. There is nothing subtle about empire.”

The text translated below is an excerpt from notes the Russian thinker Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin wrote in the mid 1940s as he prepared to revise the manuscript of his now famous book on François Rabelais. The notes were first published, posthumously, in 1992. A corrected edition with commentary, used for this translation, followed in 1996 (Coбpaни COчинений 5: 80-129). The part where Bakhtin focuses primarily on Shakespeare's tragedies is presented here (80-99). The omitted sections contain summaries of materials Bakhtin was reading (on Dante, Galileo and his contemporaries, Heine, and especially Gogol and Ukrainian folk culture), brief comments on various themes (the name and the nickname, Dostoevsky, Cinderella, riddles), and stand-alone philosophical remarks.