The deconstruction is not the exclusive domain of the scavenger. It has long been a thriving enterprise in the world of academia. There, too, great structures are demolished with footnotes and jargon.

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In Turkish cities, there was a figure known as the çıkmacı. The word derives from çıkmak —”to come out”— and çıkma, that which comes out of a demolished building. The çıkmacı is the man who demolishes an old building, takes what comes out, and sells it. In a way, he is a deconstructivist.

But the deconstruction business is not the exclusive domain of the çıkmacı. It has long been a thriving enterprise in the world of academia. There, too, great structures are demolished — not with pickaxes and crowbars, but with footnotes and jargon. These are the intellectual scavengers. They move through the great edifices of critical thought —Marx, Lenin, Gramsci— extract whatever is marketable, strip it of its revolutionary content, and sell it under new labels: deconstruction, subaltern, multitude, technofeudalism. The building is gone. What remains is rubble dressed up as theory.

The Builder and the Scavenger

To understand what has been demolished, we must first understand what was built. Adam Smith and David Ricardo were honest surveyors of the capitalist surface. They described what they saw — wages, profit, rent, price. They mapped the terrain without descending into it. Marx went deeper. He did not merely describe the surface; he excavated it. From the great edifice of classical political economy, he extracted not rubble but gold — surplus value, the mechanism of exploitation, the true anatomy of capital. He did the same with Hegel. He did not demolish Hegelian dialectics — he stood it on its feet. He stripped away the mystical shell and rescued the rational kernel, transforming idealist dialectics into the most powerful instrument of historical and social analysis ever forged. His second great discovery was no less momentous: the concept of socio-economic formation — society grasped as a structured totality of productive forces, relations of production, and superstructure, all in dialectical motion. Marx did not demolish his predecessors. He stood on their shoulders and built something far greater. Because he was not a deconstructivist — he was a builder.

The scavengers, however, operate in the opposite direction. While Marx built, they demolish. While Marx extracted gold, they collect rubble. Among the concepts they stripped, repackaged and sold, one stands out: the subaltern.

The Stolen Concept

The concept of the subaltern deserves special attention — for it tells us everything about how the scavengers operate.

The concept of the subaltern was not born in the comfortable offices of Columbia University. It was forged in a fascist prison cell. Antonio Gramsci, the founder of the Italian Communist Party, was arrested by Mussolini’s regime in 1926. The prosecutor at his trial was explicit: “We must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years.” Gramsci spent the rest of his life behind bars, dying in 1937, his health destroyed by imprisonment.

It was under these conditions —censorship, surveillance, physical deterioration— that Gramsci developed the concept of the subalterno. The word was not chosen arbitrarily. Writing under fascist censorship, Gramsci could not freely use the language of Marxist class analysis. “Proletariat”, “revolution”, “class struggle” — these were dangerous words. Subalterno, borrowed from military hierarchy, was a coded term. It designated those groups who remained outside the hegemonic bloc — fragmented, disorganized, unable to write their own history or act as independent historical agents. But crucially, for Gramsci, this was a temporary condition, not a permanent fate.

The subaltern could become a historical subject through organization, class consciousness, and the construction of a counter-hegemonic bloc. For Gramsci, the subaltern was not a fixed identity but a historical position — and a temporary one at that. It encompassed all those who remained outside the hegemonic bloc: employed and unemployed workers, small landowners and landless peasants, the homeless, the dispossessed, the toilers of every kind. These were not passive victims of history. They could develop class consciousness, organize, raise their own voice, and pose a genuine threat to the hegemonic bloc itself. The subaltern, in Gramsci’s hands, was a revolutionary concept — a point of departure, not a point of arrival.

But then came Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

What Gramsci called subaltern out of necessity were not passive victims of history. They were the revolutionary candidates for political power. The workers and peasants of Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, Algeria —Spivak’s “voiceless” and “unrepresentable”— did not wait to be represented. They organized, they fought, and they took power. History has repeatedly and decisively refuted Spivak’s central claim. The subaltern not only can speak — the subaltern has spoken, in the only language that the hegemonic bloc truly fears: the language of revolutionary organization.

There is, moreover, a profound paradox at the heart of Spivak’s project. Who declares that the subaltern cannot speak? A tenured professor at Columbia University. In the very act of speaking on behalf of the subaltern, Spivak silences them — transforming living historical agents into passive objects of academic representation. Gramsci asked: how can the subaltern become a historical subject? Spivak answered: it cannot. One question opens a revolutionary horizon. The other closes it — and calls the closure theory.

But why? Why take Gramsci’s term, empty it of its revolutionary content, and refill it with something else entirely? The answer, purportedly, lies in the post-colonial condition. The proletariat, we are told, is a Eurocentric construct — forged in the factories of Manchester and Birmingham, ill-suited to the rice fields of Bengal or the slums of Calcutta. A new concept was needed, or so the argument goes.

Yet this argument collapses at the first contact with historical reality. For it was precisely the peasants and workers of Bengal, of Calcutta, of the rice fields and the slums —Spivak’s voiceless, her unrepresentable— who proved to be history’s most eloquent speakers. Not in the language of post-colonial theory. Not in the footnoted obscurities of academic journals. In China, Vietnam, Cuba, Algeria, Angola, Mozambique — they organized, they fought, and they took power. The Marxist categories Spivak declared inadequate had guided every one of these revolutions. The proletariat, the peasantry, the oppressed nations, the semi-colonial world — these were not Eurocentric abstractions. They were living historical forces. And they spoke.

They spoke — while the workers of the imperial centres, pacified by their share of colonial plunder, had long forgotten the language of revolution. Lenin had a name for this phenomenon: the labour aristocracy. The crumbs of empire, distributed through welfare states and trade union compromises, had purchased the silence of the Western working class. It was not in Manchester or Birmingham that the revolutionary fire burned. It was in the rice fields and the slums — among those whom Spivak, from her office at Columbia University, had declared voiceless.

There is a bitter irony here that Spivak never acknowledges. She dismisses Marxist categories as Eurocentric — yet it was precisely outside Europe, among those she declared voiceless and unrepresentable, that Marxist theory proved most powerful, most alive, most revolutionary. The rice fields of Vietnam, the Sierra Maestra, the mountains of Algeria — these were not Eurocentric landscapes. They were the landscapes of revolution. Spivak’s argument does not expose the limitations of Marxism. It exposes her own.

Spivak’s sole piece of evidence is telling. In “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, she cites the case of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri, a young Bengali woman who took her own life in 1926. “She could not speak”, Spivak concludes. Yet in the very same period, millions of Indian peasants and workers were doing precisely that — speaking, organizing, fighting against British colonial rule. Spivak chose one silent death over a million speaking voices. That choice was not accidental.

Let us, for a moment, deconstruct the word itself. Sub — below, beneath, under. Altern— other, alternate, different. The subaltern: the one who is beneath the other. But beneath what, exactly? Beneath the hegemonic bloc — that is, beneath capital, beneath the state, beneath imperial power. In other words: the worker, the peasant, the oppressed nation, the colonized people. Marxism had perfectly adequate names for all of these. They were not voiceless. They were not unrepresentable. They were the revolutionary subject — temporarily suppressed, but historically irrepressible.

The logic of the subaltern, once set in motion, has no natural stopping point. If the subaltern is beneath the hegemonic bloc, who is beneath the subaltern? The sub-subaltern. And beneath them? The sub-sub-subaltern. The margins of the margins of the margins. And above them all — defying both logic and gravity — the hypersubaltern. Each new prefix generates a new concept, a new journal article, a new academic career. The descent is potentially infinite — and intentionally so. For the deeper the excavation into sub-ness, the further we travel from the only question that matters: who owns the means of production, and how do we take them back?

Spivak did not work alone. In India, a group of historians and theorists known as the Subaltern Studies collective —Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty— embraced and extended her framework. India’s comprador intellectuals had found their theory. Gramsci had conceived of the organic intellectual as one who rises from the oppressed class itself, walks alongside it, and speaks from within its struggle. The comprador intellectual, by contrast, seeks to be anointed with accreditation by Western academia first — and then turns to the local oppressed to announce: “I represent you.” They spoke on behalf of the voiceless from the pages of Western academic journals. The subaltern, meanwhile, remained voiceless — by design.

The Master Demolisher

But to understand the demolition business, we must visit the master demolisher himself. Because Spivak was not the architect of this enterprise. She was its most successful franchisee. The franchise belonged to Jacques Derrida.

A scavenger’s biography is never accidental. It tells us where he learned his trade, which buildings he targeted, and why. Derrida’s life story is no exception.

Who was Derrida? Born in Algeria in 1930, to a Sephardic Jewish family, he grew up on the margins of French colonial society — neither fully French nor fully Algerian. One might expect such a biography to produce a thinker of anti-colonial struggle, in the tradition of Fanon. It did not. Instead, Derrida travelled in the opposite direction — not toward the colonized, but toward the most rarefied heights of French academic prestige. He failed his baccalaureate more than once. He failed the entrance examination to the École Normale Supérieure —France’s most exclusive intellectual institution— twice, gaining admission only on his third attempt. Once inside, Derrida found what he was looking for: the great edifices of Western philosophy — Plato, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger.

His textual world was built with material scavenged from Plato, from Hegel, from Husserl, from Heidegger, from Saussure, from Freud — and, most consequentially, from Marx — extracted, stripped of context, repackaged and sold as originality. Not a single brick was his own. Every beam, every tile, every doorframe — taken from buildings he did not build and could not have built. What he did was not a systematic and synthetic recreation — not the forging of new ideas from old materials, as Marx had forged Capital from the ruins of classical political economy. It was demolition. Pure and simple. The buildings came down. The rubble was repackaged. And the repackaging was called philosophy.

And what was this language he chose for this enterprise? It was not the difficult language of Marx — difficult because the subject matter demanded precision, because every concept carried the weight of historical and material reality. Derrida’s language was difficult by design — deliberately murky, deliberately entangled, deliberately discombobulating. In French theory circles, we are told, there was no agreed standard for exactly what percentage of a text should be incomprehensible. But incomprehensibility itself was non-negotiable. A text that could be understood could be criticized. A text that could not be understood could only be admired — or, more precisely, purchased.

To appreciate the full extent of this enterprise, one need not venture into the labyrinthine depths of Of Grammatology or Writing and Difference. A simple thought experiment will suffice. Let us take the most ordinary of human activities —having lunch— and subject it to the Derridean treatment.

“I had lunch.” Simple, clear, communicative. Now, the Derridean version:

“Within the biopolitical framework of my corporeal subsistence, I performatively completed the process by which my digestive apparatus —itself never free from the traces of colonial food regimes and the hegemonic inscription of nutritional normativity— metabolized externally sourced caloric matter, thereby re-articulating the subject-object boundary in a gesture that is at once consumptive and constitutive.”

Or consider sleep: “I slept.” And its Derridean equivalent:

“As a liberatory performance against the biopolitical accumulation of capitalist fatigue imposed upon the bodily subject, I enacted the temporary suspension of the conscious apparatus —a process inseparable from the Lacanian re-reading of the unconscious as it translates into bodily practice— not as an existential necessity but as an emancipatory act.”

Or tea: “I had tea.” Derridean:

“Within the postcolonial semiotics of botanical extraction, I enacted a corporeal ritual through which the metabolized residue of imperial plant regimes —never free from the hegemonic inscription of Eastern otherness as commodified by Western consumption patterns— traversed the boundary of the self in a gesture that is at once transgressive and reproductive of the very colonial structures it purports to resist.”

Or laughter: “I laughed.” Derridean:

“Through an involuntary mobilization of the diaphragmatic apparatus, I performatively announced the momentary triumph of the unconscious over the symbolic order — a rupture in the hegemonic fabric of meaning-production that simultaneously subverts and reinstates the logocentric structures of affective normativity.”

The method, as the reader will have noticed, remains consistent: take the simple, render it incomprehensible, call the incomprehensibility depth. This is not philosophy. This is the scavenger’s art — dressed in footnotes. Texts built with material scavenged from other, valuable texts.

Click here to read the full article on the author’s Substack.

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This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.

Özcan Buze studied Western Languages and Literatures at Istanbul University before completing his graduate education in History and Philosophy at the University of Oslo. His writing has appeared in newspapers and journals across Turkey and Scandinavia, and he has served on the editorial boards of the journals Teori and Bilim ve Ütopya, the latter of which he also edited. He has worked in radio in both China and Norway, produced and hosted television and radio discussion programs, and presented Papirüs, a book review program. His translations from English and the Scandinavian languages have been published in Turkey and China.

Featured image is from the author

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