Plural Maghreb

Writings on Postcolonialism

Abdelkebir Khatibi, P. Burcu Yalim

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350053977
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Abdelkebir Khatibi (1938-2009) was among the most renowned North African literary critics and authors of the past century whose unique treatments of subjects as vast as orientalism, otherness, coloniality, aesthetics, linguistics, sexuality, and the nature of contemporary critique have inspired major figures in postcolonial theory, deconstruction, and beyond. At once a philosophical visionary and provocative writer, Khatibi's impressive contributions have been well-established throughout French and continental literary circles for several decades. As such, this English translation of one of his masterworks, Maghreb Pluriel (1983), marks a pivotal turn in the opportunity to wrest some of Khatibi's most profound meditations to the forefront of a more global audience. Including such highly significant pieces as "Other-Thought, " "Double Critique, " "Bilingualism and Literature, " and "Disoriented Orientalism, " the ambition behind this volume is to showcase the true experimental complexity and conceptual depth of Khatibi's thinking. Engaging the cultural-intellectual urgencies of a colonial frontier (in this case, the so-called Middle East/North Africa) this book expands our contemplative boundaries to render a globally-dynamic commentary that traverses the East-West divide.

1

Other-Thought

On decolonization

Shortly before his death, Frantz Fanon made the following call: “Come, then, comrades, the European game has finally ended; we must find something different.”¹

Yes, to find something else, to place oneself according to an other-thought, a thought of difference, perhaps unheard of. Yes, such liberation is rigorously necessary for all thought that thus invokes its will, taking a risk, which in any case can only be great.

But what is the European game in question here? Or rather, must we not first postulate that this Europe is still a question that shakes us to the core of our being? This observation marks an interrogation, in other words, an inevitable event, which is neither a disaster nor a blessing, but the condition of a responsibility that remains to be taken, beyond resentment and unhappy consciousness.

This beyond is not a gift of the simple will to revolt. It is a working on the self, a constant work to transform one’s suffering, humiliation, and depression in the relationship with the other and others. Focusing on such questions marks a grief, and I would say, a grief without hope or despair, without finality in itself, but altogether a global necessity that life imposes on us only to abandon us to the same question, the first and the last: that there is no choice.

Let us clarify. In any event, the core of our being, touched and tormented by the so-called Western will to power, this innermost element that suffers from humiliation and violent and stupefying domination, cannot be resolved by a naïve declaration of a right to difference, as if this “right” were not already inherent to the law of life, which is to say, the insolvable violence, or yet in other words, the insurgency against its own alienation.

A right to difference that is content to repeat its claim without calling itself into question and without working on the active and reactive sites of its insurgency, this right here does not constitute a transgression. It is the parody of transgression, the parody of a life and a death that would be taken from us, behind our backs, against all crazy defiance. Then, to survive without weighing or knowing the consequences, therein lies the irreparable.

If therefore the West inhabits our innermost being, not as an absolute and devastating exteriority, nor as an eternal dominion, but really as a difference, a conglomerate of differences to be placed as such in every thought of difference and wherever it may come from; if therefore the West (thus named and thus situated) is not the reaction to an uncalculated distress, then everything remains to be thought—silent questions that endure in us.

Everything remains to be thought in dialogue with the most radical thoughts and insurgencies that have shaken the West and still do, in ways themselves different. Let us look straight away at what is realized before us and try to transform it according to a double critique—that of this Western legacy and of our very theological, very charismatic, and very patriarchal heritage. Double critique—we believe only in the revelation of the visible, the end of all celestial theology, and mortifying nostalgia.

Other-thought—that of nonreturn to the inertia of the foundations of our being. Here Maghreb designates the name of this gap, this nonreturn to the model of its religion and theology (no matter how well-disguised they may be under revolutionary ideologies), a nonreturn that can shake, in theory and in practice, the foundations of Maghrebi societies in their yet unformulated constitution by the critique that should disrupt it. This other-thought is posed before the great questions that shake our world today, where the planetary deployment of the sciences, techniques, and strategies makes way.

That is why here the name “Arab” is, on the one hand, the name of a civilization that is finished in its founding metaphysical element. “Finished” does not mean that this civilization is in reality dead, but that it is incapable of renewing itself as thought, except through the insurgency of an other-thought, which is dialogue with planetary transformations. On the other hand, the name “Arab” designates a war of naming and ideologies, which bring to light the active plurality of the Arab world.

Plurality and diversity, to which we shall return—with respect to the subversive element of an other-thought. For the unity of the Arab world is a thing of the past, if it is considered from the theocratic point of view of the “Ummah,” an ideal matrix community of believers on earth. Therefore, this unity is, for us, of the past, to be analyzed in its imaginary insistence. And besides, this alleged unity that is claimed so vehemently includes not only its specific margins (Berber, Coptic, Kurdish … and the margin of margins: the feminine), but also covers the division of the Arab world into countries, peoples, sects, and classes—and the divisions of divisions, up until the suffering of the individual, deserted by the hope of his god, forever invisible.

This division of the Arab world and being is not radically assumed. It is lived as such, between the nostalgia for a totalizing identity and a still formless, nonelaborated, in a word, unthought difference.

Yes, to look for something else in the division of the Arab and Islamic being, and to give up the obsession with the origin, with celestial identity and servile morality. To look for another thing and in another way—according to a plural thought—in the shaking of any beyond, whatever its determinations. The other, which would not be the being of transcendence, but the dissymmetrical eccentricity of a gaze and of a face-to-face—in life, and in death, without the help of any god.

This alterity—or this dissymmetrical eccentricity—is capable of shaking the metaphysics of a world still sustained by the order of theology and of a strong tyranny. No, we do not want to be its leftovers in the end of this century, if we consider this end in its process of devastation and naked survival.

Only the risk of a plural thought (with several poles of civilization, several languages, several technical and scientific elaborations) can, I think, assure for us the turning of this century on the planetary scene. And there is no choice—not for anyone. The transmutation of a world without return to its entropic foundations.

Fanon’s call, in its very generosity, was the reaction of the humiliated during the colonial era, which is never done with decolonizing itself, and his critique of the West (in his The Wretched of The Earth, the book that remained unfinished until just before his death) was still caught in resentment and in a simplified Hegelianism—in the Sartrean manner. And we are still asking ourselves: Which West are we talking about? Which West opposed to ourselves, in ourselves? Who is “ourselves” in decolonization?

Yet “we” who grew politically during the emergence of the Third World, we who belong to this decolonial generation, we are no longer fooled by such a challenge nor tormented by the pangs of this unhappy consciousness. For centuries, we have believed too much in idols and gods to be still able to believe in men. That is why we believe in nothing. This means that this realization (let us keep calling it that by granting it its disillusioned—which is to say, affirmative in its incomplete transformations—truth), this realization of an intractable difference (see below), remains open to all temptation of the unthought in us and especially to the reproduction of what the West would develop according to its own will, as if, extending this alien will, we had become the chained and unleashed slaves in a tremendous system of repetition.

We were so young compared to the world’s development, so vague in the face of the rigor of thought, and perhaps we had renounced many times a defenseless freedom, an unarmed thought (our only fate) given over to its real poverty.

When we talk of this Maghrebi generation of the sixties and focus our attention on the political considerations of the time, retrospectively, we find ourselves torn between Third-Worldist nationalism and dogmatic Marxism in the French manner. It should be borne in mind that in that regard we never accepted that the French Communist Party, with which we sympathized then, was so slow to understand the Algerian liberation movement, and through this event, the emergence of a politics whose ideological basis escaped it. This example of dogmatism is one among many, but apart from Marxism, no revolutionary theory seemed effective to us on a national and global level.

This critical inadequacy was worse than we thought, both on our side and on the side of the French left. For the conflict between Europe and the Arabs being age-old, it became, with time, a machine of mutual incomprehension. In order to be brought to light, this incomprehension required, and requires, an other-thought, independent of the political discourses of our time. What had we done, if not reproduce a simplified thought of Marx and, correspondingly, the theological ideology of Arab nationalism? But these two ideologies, and each on its own ground, are held by a moral and intellectual metaphysical tradition, whose conceptual edifice demands on our part a radical elucidation. We have failed before the exigency of this task. But this failure, which also has its regenerative forces, must be put into an other-strategy, which puts nothing forward without turning against its foundations—a strategy without a closed system, but which would be the construction of a game of thinking and the political, silently gaining ground against its failures and sufferings. To decolonize oneself is this chance of thought.

Some of us fell and gave into the servitude of the day; others continue to maintain, at all costs, the militant political task that is necessary within the framework of a party, a trade union, or a more or less secret organization. Others are dead or continue to survive the inflicted torture. But who among us—groups or individuals—has undertaken the effectively decolonizing work in its global reach of deconstituting the image we make of our domination, both exogenous and endogenous? We are still at the dawning of global thought. But we have grown up in the suffering that calls for the power of the word and revolt. If I told you, whoever you are, that this work has already begun and that you can hear me only as survivor, maybe then you will listen to the slow and progressive march of all the humiliated and all the survivors.

I call “Third World” this tremendous energy of surviving in transformation, this plural thought of survival whose duty is to live in its extraordinary freedom, a freedom without any final solution; but then, who ever said that the “end of the world” is in the hands of this technical and scientific system that plans out the world by subjecting it to the self-sufficiency of its will? Who ever claimed that new civilizations are not already at work, where everything seems inert, dead, flimsy, and absurd? Let us let all these professors of self-sufficiency proclaim the end of gods, the end of men, and the end of ends. Let us leave them to their self-sufficiency. We have lost too much and we have nothing to lose, not even the nothing. Such is the vital economy of an other-thought, which would be a gift bestowed by the suffering that seizes its terrible freedom.

On the margin

The thought of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Series Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Other-Thought
• 2 Double Critique
• 3 Disoriented Orientalism
• 4 Sexuality according to the Quran
• 5 Bilingualism and Literature
• 6 Questions of Art
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright Page