The work of many of the postcolonial thinkers discussed in this book has both ethical and political implications, yet most tend to privilege one approach over the other. Fanon and Sartre's militancy is underpinned by an ethical call for freedom and subjective self-invention, but their first objective is the decolonization of Algeria, whereas for thinkers such as Derrida and Bhabha it is the ethical awareness of the other's intractability that initially provides the basis for political liberation. Moreover, one can detect in Glissant's evolving trajectory, and in Said's movement between Palestinian politics or Islam and literary criticism, a distinction between writing that is first and foremost political, and that which insists above all on an ethical or cultural agenda. It is Spivak, Mudimbe and Achille Mbembe, however, who engage most explicitly throughout their work both with Marxist political theory and with a form of ethical thinking derived from deconstruction. Particularly in the work of Spivak, this duality can lead to contradiction, since at times she calls for a renewed understanding of subaltern political agency while at others the subaltern is a more intractable figure signifying the resistance of the other to concrete forms of representation. Such contradictions are never fully resolved in Spivak's work, although she comes up with the notion of “strategic essentialism” in an effort to argue that specific claims for agency might rest on the assertion of an identity, but that identity does not necessarily acquire permanence or “truth”.