Judith Butler has noted that Spivak's supposedly inaccessible language has, in fact, resonated with, and profoundly changed the thinking of, "tens of thousands of activists and scholars." And Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton, who has called her writing "inaccessible," noted nevertheless that "there can thus be few more important critics of our age than the likes of Spivak.... She has probably done more long-term political good, in pioneering feminist and post-colonial studies within global academia than almost any of her theoretical colleagues."

Her recent work, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, published in 1999, explores how major works of European metaphysics (e.g., Kant, Hegel) not only tend to exclude the subaltern from their discussions, but actively prevent non-Europeans from occupying positions as fully human subjects.