Experimental nations: Or, the invention of the maghreb

Experimental Nations: Or, the Invention of the Maghreb

Volumn , Issue , 2009, Pages

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References (114)

1. Edward Said, "Figures, Configurations, Transfigurations," Race and Class, 32:1 (1990), in Neil Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 139-40; my emphasis.
2. See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone Press, 1994), 208.
3. Some of the chapters in this book have appeared previously in specialized journals, in French or in English. All have been revised, and only those parts of direct interest to the general problematic of this book have been included here.
4. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, foreword by Réda Bensmaïa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 18.
5. Jean Déjeux, La littérature algérienne contemporaine (Paris: PUF, Collection "Que sais-je," 1975), 75ff.
6. We could say the same for the other countries of the Maghreb, Tunisia and Morocco.
7. I rely on Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka, and Henri Gobard, L'aliénation linguistique. Analyse tétraglossique, quoted in Kafka, 23-4, note 19.
8. An expression in which we find words in French and Arabic, with a supposedly Kabyle pronunciation.
9. Quoted in T. Brennan, "The National Longing for Form," in Nation and Narration, 68, note 14.
10. And, to a certain extent, as we shall try to show subsequently, with filmmakers such as Merzak Allouache, Assia Djebar, and Amina Benguigui.
11. Quoted in Paule Thévenin, "Voir/Entendre/Lire," Tel Quel, 42-3 (1969).
12. See Jean Déjeux, La littérature algérienne contemporaine (Paris, 1975), 58ff.
13. The period, for example, of Djebar's Les enfants du nouveau monde (Paris: Julliard, 1962).
14. Quoted in Déjeux, La littérature, 72.
15. Nabile Farès, Un passager de l'occident, 35.
16. Because I cannot fully develop this point within the framework of this chapter, I refer to my article "L'exil est mon royaume ou les Devenirs de Nabile Farès. Idéographie et Politique," in Francographies: Création et realité d'expression française, Special Number 11 (1993) (New York: Publications de la Société des professeurs français et francophones d'Amérique, 1994).
17. Hélé Béji, Désenchantement national: Essai sur la décolonisation (Paris: François Maspero, 1982), 18.
18. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
19. Elias Canetti, The Voices of Marrakesh, trans. J. A. Underwood (New York: Continuum, 1978), 17-18.
20. Hélé Béji, L'oeil du jour (Paris: Maurice Nadeau, 1985), 127; my emphasis.
21. Claude Ollier, Marrakch Médine (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), 20.
22. This is the case for many writers from the Maghreb after the independence of their country from colonial rule, and in particular, in exemplary fashion, for a writer such as Hélé Béji in her Itiné-raire de Paris à Tunis (Paris: Noel Blandin, 1992) and Oeil du jour.
23. Here I have strung together passages from Claude Ollier, Hélé Béji, and Elias Canetti. I could have considerably added to these references to the "chaosmos" of the Medina by citing passages from A. Meddeb's Talismano (Paris: É ditions Christian Bourgois, 1979).
24. Claude Ollier, Marrakch Médine, 20.
25. Isaac Joseph, Le passant considérable: éssai sur la dispersion de l'espace public (Paris: Librairie des méridiens, 1984).
26. Deleuze and Guattari, Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: É ditions de Minuit, 1991), 67.
27. Nicholas de Cues created the Idiot and Descartes the Cogito, Nietzsche the dancer, Kierkegaard the seducer, and Pierre Klossowski the couple. See Deleuze and Guattari, Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? 68ff.
28. Chris Marker, Le dépays (Paris: Herscher, Format/Photo, 1982). See appendix: Le dépays: On Chris Marker's Lettre de Sibérie. I have included this text in my book because Chris Marker's notion of "dépays" has played an important role in the conception of the idea of "experimental" nations.
29. Talismano, 15.
30. L'oeil du jour, 103; my emphasis.
31. Chris Marker, Le dépays, np.
32. Emily Apter, Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 2.
33. Tahar Ben Jelloun, Hospitalité Française: Racisme et immigration maghrébine, 33.
34. Anne Donadey, Recasting Postcolonialism: Women Writing Between Worlds (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2001). I would like to thank Anne Donadey for allowing me to make reference to her work here and to use her excellent analyses in the pages that follow.
35. Donadey refers to this movement of thought in a passage where she clearly demonstrates the analogies between the almost total "forclusion" of "Vichy" and what I am calling here the "scotoma" or "blind spot" of Algiers.
36. See Jean Baudrillard and Paul Guillaume, Figures de l'alté-rité (Paris: Descartes et Cie, 1994), esp. the chapter entitled "La spectralité comme élision de l'autre," 19ff.
37. Paul de Man, "Autobiography as De-Facement," in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York, Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 75-6.
38. Martin McQuillan, Paul de Man, Routledge Critical Thinkers (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 77-9.
39. See Amin Maalouf, Les identités meurtrières (Paris: É ditions Grasse & Fasquelle, 1998).
40. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 291.
41. Regarding the status of women in Algeria and the different forms their struggles have taken, see chapter 5 infra on Assia Djebar's "prise de parole" in La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua.
42. For the "molar/molecular" paradigm, see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 292.
43. Rather, for Farès, they are contingent, which is obviously something else entirely.
44. Farès, L'état perdu: Discours pratique de l'émigré (Le Paradou: Actes Sud, 1982).
45. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 4.
46. Farès, L'état perdu; Farès's emphasis.
47. For example, the recourse to pictograms, drawings, Arabic letters, or ideograms.
48. See Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (London: Faber & Faber, 1938) (first American ed.). Rpt. New York: New Impressions, 1952; and ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960). See also Laszlo Géfin, Ideogram: History of a Poetic Method (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982). It is to Géfin that I owe the main part of the analysis proposed here of Pound's "ideogrammatic method."
49. See the special issue of Change devoted to "Montage" (Paris: Seuil, 1968).
50. Géfin, Ideogram, 36.
51. My emphasis. In order to simplify the point of my argument, I have omitted the additional case of Erigena that Pound adds to those of Gaudier, Leibniz, etc. For more details see Géfin, Ideogram, 36ff.
52. Pound, ABC of Reading, 22.
53. Géfin, Ideogram, 36.
54. "The multiplicity of numbers, the reversals (even: duplicity: X:10:5) is only the umbilical trajectory of a de-order of identity." Farès, L'état perdu, 17.
55. Quoted in Géfin, Ideogram, 40.
56. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 36.
57. See Farès, L'état perdu, 17, 21, 29, 41, 43, 53, 75, etc.
58. These last remarks, and everything that relates to the notion of the rhizome, are indebted to Deleuze and Guattari's wonderful text on the "rhizome" in A Thousand Plateaus, ch. 1, 80.
59. Fredric Jameson, "Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism," Social Text, Theory/Culture/Ideology (Fall 1986), 65-88.
60. See Albert Memmi, Portrait, and Réda Bensmaïa, "Traduire ou blanchir la langue," as well as "Nations of Writers," STCL Studies in Twentieth Century Literature, 23:1 (Winter 1999), 163-78.
61. See Bensmaïa, "Nations of Writers."
62. Tahar Djaout, L'invention du désert (Paris: É ditions du Seuil, 1987).
63. I am referring here to Tahar Djaout's journalistic political activism.
64. Paul de Man, "Semiology and Rhetoric," in Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 10.
65. While in certain passages it is evident that Djaout is referring to the Koranic "Text," there are many passages where it is a matter of the text that Western logic has superimposed on the history of the colonies.
66. Kateb Yacine, Le polygone étoilé (Paris: É ditions du Seuil, 1997), 10.
67. Thus the reference to Rimbaud and to the subtext to which it refers. See Djaout, L'invention du désert, 71, 103, 124, 151, 191-2.
68. Guy Gauthier, Andréi Tarkovski, FILMO 19 (Paris: É ditions Edilig, 1988).
69. See Victor Segalen, Essai sur l'exotisme (Paris: Livre de Poche, Biblio, Essais, 1986); English translation: Essay on Exoticism: An Aesthetics of Diversity, trans. Yaël Rachel Schlick, foreword by Harry Harootunian (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).
70. See Keith Answell Pearson, "Deleuze Outside/Outside Deleuze," in Deleuze and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 11.
71. The word to survey (baliser) recurs constantly in Djaout's writing. See, for example, "This is why nothing can be surveyed and we can manage to travel a good thousand kilometers with our eyes closed." (44) See also 104, 122, etc.
72. Interview with Ouassila Tamzali, Ciné-Arabe 10-11, 64.
73. "[T]o say that my film is a film about women is meaningless. I will always be drawn to making films. . . . [W]omen's bodies, women, are my subject matter. It's a little like being a sculptor: one uses one material, another a different material." Djebar, "Interview," 64.
74. See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), ch. 1: "Beyond the Movement-Image," particularly the section "Optical and Sound Situations, in Contrast to Sensory-Motor Situations."
75. Oxford English Dictionary, cited by M. Masud R. Khan, "On Lying Fallow: An Aspect of Leisure, "International Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy 6 (1977), 397.
76. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie, trans. William Cobb (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 167; cited by Martin Jay in Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 305, note 139.
77. Deleuze and Guattari, "1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible . . ." A Thousand Plateaus, 292.
78. "She is old," says Lila of one of the old women whom she meets. "She is 88 years old, she is young. I call her 'Aunt,' as if my mother had come back to life in her." This quest for an origin is a constant in the film. In the economy of the film as a whole, it may take on a very different significance.
79. Roland Barthes, "The Circle of Fragments," in Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 94.
80. Khatibi coins the word bi-langue in his Amour bilingue to distinguish it from the more usual bilingue (bilingual) situation. The literal translation would be "bi-tongue." Richard Howard, in his translation of L'amour bilingue, keeps the French bi-langue throughout. I have done the same here.-Trans.
81. In French the verb traduire means "to translate," of course, but it also has a legal sense, "traduire en cours de justice," which means to bring (someone) before a court of justice.-Trans.
82. Here I am using for my purposes certain aspects of J. C. Milner's excellent analyses of the status of Ferdinand de Saussure's Anagrammes in L'amour de la langue (Paris: É ditions du Seuil, 1978). See in particular the chapter "Un linguiste désirant," 85-98.
83. See Alain Grosrichard, Structure du Sérail: La fiction du despotisme asiatique dans l'Occident classique (Paris: É ditions du Seuil, 1979), and especially chapter 3, "L'ombre du sérail," 153ff.
84. In Abdelkebir Khatibi, Figures de l'étranger dans la littérature française (Paris: Denoël, 1987), 203-4.
85. See the pamphlet "Francophonie et idiomes littéraires" (Rabat: É ditions "al Kalam"), published after the conference on the state of Francophonie held in Paris on December 11-13, 1989.
86. René Galissot, "Pluralisme culturel en Europe: Identités nationales et identités européennes. De l'intellecctuel métis au mé-tissage culturel des masses," in Information sur les sciences sociales (Newbury Park: Sage, 1992), 117-27.
87. Arjun Appadurai, "Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology," in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, ed. Richard Fox (Santa Fe: School of New Research Press, 1991).
88. Armand Mattelart, "Comment résister à la colonisation des esprits?" Le monde diplomatique, April 1994.
89. Khatibi, Un été à Stockhom (Paris: Flammarion, 1990).
90. Roland Barthes, "Les allégories linguistiques," in Roland Barthes, 127-8.
91. See Michel Serres, "Naissance du tiers," in Le tiers-instruit (Paris: François Bourin, 1991), 26-7. In English: The Troubadour of Knowledge, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
92. In Abdelkebir Khatibi, "Extase froide," La langue de l'autre (New York and Tunis: É ditions Les Mains Secrètes, 1999), 49.
93. Abbreviations used: LS, Le livre du sang; MP, Maghreb pluriel; OJ, Ombres japonaises;
94. In the French expression "nuit blanche" (sleepless night), several meanings resonate: whiteness, blankness, sleeplessness.
95. In Arabic, Muthna signifies effeminate, hermaphrodite, and androgyne. In spoken vernacular, at least phonetically, it also means "we are dead."
96. Concerning the problematics of history in the context of the mystical epic, I am indebted to Henri Corbin's studies on traditional Arab and Sufi philosophy of history, especially Face de dieu, Face de l'homme: Herméneutique et Soufisme, ch. 3, "De l'épopée héroïque à l'épopée mystique," 163.
97. In Khatibi's work the "Pensée-Autre" is certainly the "thought of otherness," the "thought (of the) Other" and also an "other thought."
98. Earlier in his essay, Khatibi first defines rationalism as metaphysics become technique and thus technique (technology) as "the ordering of the world according to a new will to power that derives its strength from scientific progress." (Maghreb pluriel, 25)
99. Cf. Francis Bertin, "Corps spirituel et androgynie chez Jean Scot Erigène," in "L'androgyne," Cahiers de l'Hermétisme (Paris: Albin Michel, 1986).
100. Mouloud Feraoun, Le fils du pauvre (Paris: É ditions du Seuil, 1954).
101. Christiane Achour, Mouloud Feraoun: Une voix en contrepoint (Paris: Silex É ditions, 1986).
102. Geneviève Mouillaud-Fraisse, Les fous cartographes: Littérature et appartenance (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1995), 11.
103. In fact it is in this sense that one cannot say that the book is merely a veiled autobiography, as Achour would have it. (Achour, 37) The veil is, as I have attempted to show, also a screen, a ruse, and a becoming-imperceptible. Behind this veil, if it is indeed a veil, there are yet other veils.
104. The Franco-Algerian word mtourni contains the idea of a person who is a "turncoat" and also someone who is a traitor who has "converted" (to the culture and customs of the other).
105. On the notion of the "spectral," see Derrida, Monolingualismu, 73ff, as well as Jean Baudrillard and Marc Guillaume, Figures de l'altérité (Paris: Descartes, 1994).
106. Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (New York and London: Routledge, 1998), 256.
107. "To live the totality-world ["Tout-Monde"] from the place that is one's own, is to establish a relation and not to consecrate exclusion." Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du divers (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 67.
108. Quoted in Loomba, Colonialism, 255.
109. See André Bazin, Le cinéma français de la libération à la nouvelle vague (Paris: É ditions des cahiers du cinéma, É ditions de l'étoile, 1983), 179-81.
110. Henri Michaux, Plume, précédé de Lointain intérieur (Paris: Gallimar, 1983), 75.
111. I am using a concept from Abdelkebir Khatibi's Maghreb pluriel. Also of interest in this context is Khatibi's Figures de l'étranger dans la littérature française, specifically the chapter devoted to Victor Segalen entitled "Célébration de l'exote," 17-59.
112. Marker, Coréennes (Paris: É ditions du Seuil), 15.
113. See Marker, Coréennes, ch. 4, "Les cinq sens," 70.
114. See Marker, Commentaires 1, 49.