At the end of the previous chapter, hybridity was conceived of as a double articulation that would allow for a move beyond the hegemonic absorptions of identitarian thinking, or of a politics of subjective agency, and we saw the critical potential of Homi Bhabha's ‘savage hybridity’ in this regard. As Alberto Moreiras notes, Gayatri Spivak's ‘strategic essentialism’ provides one early model for such a double articulation, in this case one that would address the apparent logical impossibility of finding a way to give voice and agency to subaltern women, when all access is by definition denied according to the law of the discursive power of hegemony. He also alludes to Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx as another, more recent version of such a double articulation, albeit within a different context and in a different register, and thus suggests a certain theoretical consonance uniting the respective projects of Spivak and Derrida. Spivak's relationship to Derrida is clearly central to any understanding of a deconstructive postcolonial theory, and what I would like to do in this chapter is to test this hypothesis of a theoretical alliance. The traffic is admittedly one way for much of the time, since, while Spivak has continuously invoked and incorporated the lessons of deconstruction in her own work, Derrida has on only one occasion engaged directly with Spivak, and this was precisely in the context of the polemical exchange following the publication of Specters of Marx.