Narratives of Catastrophe: Boris Diop, ben Jelloun, Khatibi 9780823237999

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N A R R AT I V E S O F C ATA S T R O P H E

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N A R R AT I V E S O F C ATA S T R O P H E Boris Diop, ben Jelloun, Khatibi


Nasrin Qader

Fordham University Press New York 2009

Copyright 䉷 2009 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Qader, Nasrin. Narratives of catastrophe : Boris Diop, Ben Jelloun, Khatibi / Nasrin Qader. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8232-3048-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. African fiction (French)—History and criticism. 2. Diop, Boubacar Boris, 1946–—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Ben Jelloun, Tahar, 1944– —Criticism and interpretation. 4. Khatibi, Abdelkebir, 1938–—Criticism and interpretation. 5. Disasters in literature. 6. Storytelling in literature. I. Title. PQ3984.Q33 2009 843⬘.9140996—dc22 2008046782 Printed in the United States of America 11 10 09 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

For my parents

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

CHAPTER 1

Becoming-Survivor

16

CHAPTER 2

Suffering Time

51

CHAPTER 3

Shadowing the Storyteller

86

CHAPTER 4

Un-limiting Thought

121

CHAPTER 5

Figuring the Wine-Bearer

153

CONCLUSION

Engendering Catastrophes

188

Notes

193

Works Cited

223

Index

231

vii

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Acknowledgments

I do not know where to begin acknowledging all those who have guided my steps and propelled my thought as I made my way, often falteringly, through this project. While thinking and writing demand solitude from us, they simultaneously provoke us to converse, at times silently, and at other times loudly, furiously, humorously, and even with exaggerated theatricality. To all those named and not named here, who have shared with me the rich moods of their own thinking and have indulged and tolerated mine, I am forever grateful. Special thanks are due to He´di Abdel-Jaouad and Steven Winspur for their patient reading of the manuscript and judicious comments and suggestions. The final version of the book owes much to their insights. Their enthusiasm and commitment to this project have been a source of great encouragement for me. I want to extend my gratitude to all my colleagues in the department of French and Italian at Northwestern University for their interest in my work and for their unfailing support during my years in the department. I am especially grateful to my mentor, Michal Ginsburg, whose intellectual rigor and generosity with her time and patience have provided the necessary challenge and support for the successful completion of this book. Similarly, I offer my heartfelt gratitude to Jane Winston for her continued interest in the development of my work in general and this project in particular. Her careful and perspicacious readings of various versions of the manuscript have pushed my thinking and writing in valuable and fertile directions. Additionally, I wish to thank Ahmed Bouguarche, Penelope Deutscher, Doris Garraway, Jose´ Kagabo, Brenda Machosky, Alessia Ricciardi, Rainer Rumold, David Schoenbrun, Aliko Songolo, Christopher Yu, Akbar Virmani, and Samuel Weber for their stimulating and thoughtful feedback. Thanks to Mireille Rosello for her unfailing enthusiasm for this project from the beginning. I would like to extend special thanks to my dear friend, colleague, and mentor Souleymane Bachir Diagne, whose imprints have enriched my work in ways I cannot count. Domietta Torlasco has been an ix

x Acknowledgments

invaluable interlocutor and an inspiration. Similarly, Kevin Bell has generously shared with me the singular luminosity of his own remarkable thinking on questions dear to us both. Fariba Zarinebaf has been an incomparable source of support over the years. I am deeply indebted to these intellectual complicities and friendships. Thanks to Anil Lal for not only helping me disentangle some of the knots of my thinking and writing with his precise questions and illuminating suggestions but also for always reminding me of the pressing ethical demands of thinking, writing, and living in the world. I extend my deep gratitude to Abdelkebir Khatibi and Boubacar Boris Diop, who, as fortune would have it, were visiting Northwestern in the final phases of this project. It was a rare honor and a singular privilege for me to engage with them about their own work as well as on general questions about literature and politics. I am also thankful to my students in the two seminars organized around aspects of this work, ‘‘L’aimance, l’amour, le corps de l’e´criture’’ and ‘‘Sovereignty and African Literatures.’’ Their probing questions and assiduous readings have been indispensable in developing some of my arguments. Thanks to Tassadit Yacine at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales for allowing me to present several segments of this book to her seminar, ‘‘Domination et Ambiguı¨te´,’’ in the spring of 2006. The feedback from these conversations was immensely helpful to me. For my early intellectual formation, I am grateful to Pro´spero Saı´z’s individual guidance and many challenging and provocative seminars during the final years of graduate school at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The investigative paths of this project would not have been possible without the daring modes of questioning and subtle readings of literary and theoretical texts performed by students in these seminars under his supervision. My most heartfelt gratitude and affection go to my family. I dedicate this book to my parents, Abdul and Nooria Qader, who had the vision to allow me to pursue my passion for literature and made the conditions for this pursuit possible. Thanks to my sister Afsana, my brothers Mirwais and Timur and their families, Nassreen, Benafsha, little Xavier, Darian, and Shabnam for their encouragement, support, and, most important, for all the joyful play and laughter so utterly necessary for thinking. Last but certainly not least, many thanks to Helen Tartar, whose kindness and professional integrity and vision have allowed this work to finally see the light of day. I am deeply grateful to Philip Bansal for his meticulous and perceptive copy editing of the manuscript. Thanks to Eric Newman, Tom

Acknowledgments xi

Lay, Kathleen Sweeney, Miriam Exum, and the rest of the team at Fordham University Press for all their hard work and patience. The completion of this project was made possible by a faculty fellowship from Northwestern University’s Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities for the 2005–6 academic year.

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N A R R AT I V E S O F C ATA S T R O P H E

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Introduction From Re´cit to Catastrophe: Tracing Dispersions

This project is the culmination of years of thinking through some of my dissatisfactions regarding the field of African literature and its relationship with certain theoretical directions in literary studies in general. While African literature in general (and specifically Francophone African literature, the primary area of my study) has been, since the second half of the twentieth century, one of the most fecund fields of literary production, it remains on the margins of literary studies. Though many American and European universities have specialists in African literatures and though Francophone literature has gained a place of visibility for itself, the study of African literature still remains the business of the few: not incorporated into literary and theoretical discussions and developments in general, still framed primarily by the discourse of postcoloniality. Moreover, the critical and theoretical discourse on African literatures, both within and without the continent, has been dominated by the political, social, or anthropological, rendering texts documents. Even those who admit that the literary is not the same phenomenon as the social, the political, or the cultural have not always managed to escape the pitfalls of appropriating literature for these domains.1 The historical relationship of African literatures with anthropology has been difficult to debunk. Simon Gikandi, in a speech at the African Literature Association Conference in 2000, gave voice to the frustration of many in the field when he spoke about his experiences teaching Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. He explained the difficulties and the resistances he confronts in trying to break with the overarching tendency to render the main character, Okonkwo, immediately representative of the Igbo people and culture. Gikandi imputes the origin of the problem to the discourse of modernity, especially its valorization of rationality and universal reason, arguing that by repudiating difference from the center of its production, namely Europe, it did not eliminate difference but rather pushed it toward the margins 1

2 Introduction

of Europe, in this case, Africa.2 In Francophone African literature, Camara Laye’s L’enfant noir has had a similar fate.3 As a student of African literatures, I too went through the stage where I pored over texts from both Francophone and Anglophone traditions with focused ethnographical and anthropological attention. I read through these lenses writers as diverse as Camara Laye, Ayi Kwei Armah, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Bessie Head, and Cheikh Hamidou Kane. It may be true that some texts lend themselves to such appropriations and as a result circulate more easily, while others remain unread, untranslated, uncommented upon, or even unheard of and quickly go out of print precisely because of their resistance to such overarching assumptions of representation and documentation. This project turns to some of these sites of resistance and attempts to show the dynamics of these resistances. The aim is not to propose a literature devoid of political, ethical, or cultural import but rather to investigate how these dimensions find singular articulations in specific texts that may exceed documentation and overparticularization, that is texts that are more than documents of a culture.4 My interest in storytelling was prompted primarily by the centrality of this question in the context of African literatures. Orality versus literacy remains one of the central problematics in discussions in this field. It is undebatable that oral cultures have strong storytelling traditions and that these traditions of storytelling help develop the imaginations of writers from these cultures. And clearly there are differences between a scene of oral storytelling and one of writing, in the strict sense of these activities. However, it does not follow that an African literary text that features storytelling refers itself to the oral traditions or wishes to duplicate or mimic this tradition. In other words, while I do not wish to reduce the differences between the oral and the written (I do not deal with this specific problem in this project since I do not work with oral works), I contest the deeply rooted division between orality and writing as the primacy of one over the other in the context of writing by African authors. The notions of continuity between oral and written as well as the authenticity and the primacy of one over the other have been critiqued by African and non-African scholars. Eileen Julien, for example, with whom I agree, has consistently argued that one must neither conceive of the African novel as a linear continuation of oral traditions, nor see oral elements in the novel as signs of authenticity.5 I want to go further by showing through the notion of re´cit that a certain unfolding of temporality is the condition for the possibility of storytelling. The story comes forth from a turning and an overturning in thought and in language, both marked by a temporal rupture, a

Introduction 3

catastrophe. Because both genres (oral and written) have catastrophe as their condition of possibility, re´cit’s relationship with catastrophe puts into question any claims to the originality or authenticity of the oral tradition and to the continuity between the oral and the written. I have chosen several texts whose central scenes are constituted by storytelling. I assemble here five novels: Murambi, le livre des ossements (Murambi, the Book of Bones) and Le Cavalier et son ombre (The Rider and His Shadow) by Boubacar Boris Diop of Senegal, Cette aveuglante absence de lumie`re (This Blinding Absence of Light) by Tahar ben Jelloun of Morocco, and Amour bilingue (Love in Two Languages) and Le livre du sang (The Book of Blood) by Abdelkebir Khatibi of Morocco. I bring these texts together through a sustained investigation of the relationship between re´cit and catastrophe. If I could have, I would have given this book the French title Re´cits de catastrophes rather than Narratives of Catastrophe, for I use the word re´cit, which I translate as narration or story, in senses that exceed the traditional meanings of ‘‘narrative.’’ Generally, like ‘‘narrative,’’ re´cit refers to what is told, in speech or in writing, not limited to literary and epistemological categories such as the novel, the short story, the autobiography, history, philosophy, and myth. But more specifically, the genre re´cit distinguishes itself from the genres of fiction strictly defined as imaginary. In this sense, re´cit designates the story of an event in a life, a slice of life, and therefore gestures in the direction of veracity in ways that the novel, poetry, tale, and short story do not. However, beyond the delimitations of genres and categories, the verb re´citer indicates repetition as in recounting and reciting, thus allowing re´cit to resonate with these senses. Re´cit, as I will show, is not a simple telling but rather a telling once again. Even when a re´cit is told for the first time, it already implies repetition. Re´cit, therefore, foregrounds a temporality of repetition as the possibility of every narrative. We know that narrative is about time in its various modalities of linearity, circularity, and flashback. However, repetition refers not only to narrative structure per se—which often includes repetition within it—but also and especially to the initial impulse for narration, for storytelling. The repetition I associate with re´cit highlights the very possibility of repeatability as storytelling, where nothing can return to the same, where no recuperation of a life story can be possible by the subject. Perhaps it is better to say that in the re´cit the story of a life comes to the subject at a distance from the subject and by distancing the subject from his or her own story. With the notion of re´cit in the sense of recounting, I propose that storytelling does not set itself up against writing, nor

4 Introduction

does it return to an oral tradition that precedes writing; rather, it reveals the condition for the possibility of speaking, both orally and in writing. The self-reflexivity of the texts presented here makes the questions of storytelling and the story primarily literary questions. I relate re´cit to catastrophe for two reasons. First, because re´cit announces the distance of the subject from itself; subjectivity suffers a turn in the re´cit. Instead of coming back to itself, in the re´cit, the subject oscillates and loses its foothold. Re´cit in this sense does not annihilate the subject, but rather in it subjectivity becomes inscribed as distancing, as turning away, as refusal. Secondly, re´cit as repetition is catastrophic for thought and language because it introduces a turn in language and thought from the conceptual and the referential (we will see shortly why I associate catastrophe with turn). These two dimensions are clearly related since the subject thinks itself and speaks itself at a distance from itself. In other words, in the relation between re´cit and catastrophe, the whole question of the thinking and the speaking subject is at stake. I also maintain that since catastrophe as rupture within the thinking and speaking subject is the very condition for the possibility of re´cit as repetition, it is strangely affirmative.6 I similarly insist on the notion of singularity because there has been a tendency on the part of African and non-African scholars to speak of cultures, literatures, and philosophies in the context of Africa monolithically.7 In other words, I do not propose that these texts by these authors are representative of anything specifically African or even Francophone African.8 I would like to suggest that these works are singular instances of writing and storytelling, just as every story is always singular, even if it is told exactly the same way again and again. This singularity helps us think certain questions about literature, about writing, about speech, about thinking, and about their relationship with time. I approach these texts in Abdelkebir Khatibi’s terms of ‘‘e´criture pensante’’ (thinking writing), meaning that these scenes of re´cit think themselves and help us think. They are singular sites of thinking or thinking singularities that nevertheless engage with thinking in general. Thinking itself becomes the central question of the final two chapters of the book. In addition to these literary concerns, my turn to the question of catastrophe was a reaction to a certain political discourse on Africa and to theoretical and philosophical thinking on catastrophe. On a daily basis, we need not look too long in the media or the academy to find catastrophe related to Africa. The continent apparently is an endless scene of catastrophes. War, famine, and disease fill the pages of our newspapers and have become focal

Introduction 5

points of much of our academic concerns. Africa, as a whole, has become our most efficient metaphor for disaster. Organizations, policy makers, students, researchers, artists, primarily from the economically and politically dominant nations, are constantly scrambling to save Africa, often allegedly from itself.9 I leave the daunting complexity of these actions—at times helpful, ethical, and necessary, and at other times harmful and replete with hypocrisy, shortsightedness, racism, colonialism, and imperialism—for another time. I focus only on the fact that despite this preponderant relatedness of Africa and catastrophe, theoretical considerations of catastrophe as a problem, as a literary dynamic, and as a philosophical direction for thinking excludes Africa almost entirely. In other words, we somehow already know what catastrophe is and Africa is the scene of its reality. As a result, discussions of catastrophe in African literatures remain limited to those texts that represent real events and that allegedly confirm what we already know about Africa. The texts I study here address catastrophe in other ways than to simply represent the ‘‘catastrophes’’ of Africa and confirm preconceived, ideological views. I want to turn my attention to the catastrophic dimensions of storytelling and investigate how these literary texts from the continent of Africa contribute in singular ways to our thinking on catastrophe as a problem for speaking, thinking, and writing. In other words, I argue that in the texts gathered here we are pushed to grapple with the question of what kind of a thing, a dynamic, a movement is a catastrophe; what can be and cannot be said about it. The political and ethical dimensions are pressing in each of these works, and in very different ways, but these dimensions unfold in each work in ways that give us singular opportunities for thinking theoretically and philosophically.10 I investigate the relationship between re´cit and catastrophe by tracing the movements of each narration, for, as I have said, I insist on this singularity, which should not be confused with the traditional concept of singularity as the absolutely unique that can be said once and only once about one place, since this traditional notion does not allow for repetition. Rather, singularity in my work belongs to the temporality of repetition of always-once-more, as outlined earlier. Thus my notion of re´cit joins up with singularity, because in singularity repetition is thought of as the inscription of difference and the dispersion of the unique.11 This singularity as dispersion and difference rotates the more common uses of the concept of the singular toward openness. Absolutely unique singularity is exemplified most effectively by the concept of God, but it is not limited to this concept. The conceptual framework as such and the logic of signification partake of the singular in the sense of

6 Introduction

unique and unified because they gather and unify all differences and assign to thought and to language a metaphysical foundation to which diversity, plurality, and openness are secondary. In each re´cit, I show how this metaphysical logic undergoes a crisis and how this crisis may be another name for catastrophe. But catastrophe is clearly not always this affirmative turn in literary and speaking possibilities. There are political and historical catastrophes to which several of the texts I study bear witness. One must not become too jubilant about the possibilities of catastrophe for literature and forget the utterly destructive dimension of catastrophes for people and nations. I will show how the two dimensions of catastrophe communicate, that is, how and in what sense the inscription of catastrophic events in literature opens something affirmative in the heart of total destitution—not because destitution is affirmative, but because the story is. So long as there is storytelling, something remains, in spite of everything. This remainder must be thought because this literary possibility is ethically and politically necessary. In the end, when all has fallen into the abyss of annihilation, survival must be imagined, inscribed, thought. The re´cit resounds with the voice of this survival; it is the aftereffect of catastrophe that it cannot repeat except from a distance and at a distance and through distancing. The stories of survivors come to them from a distance; they repeat these stories in the re´cit but without the ability of ascertaining that these are indeed their stories. The survivor thinks and speaks in the re´cit in a faltering manner and with great uncertainty as to whether what happened indeed happened. The story becomes both the affirmation of a memory and the affirmation of a radical destitution leaving its marks within the subject’s language and thought. The Greek katastrophein (to overturn) is a composite of kata (down) and strophein (turn), which implies overturning, a shift in direction.12 Catastrophe is commonly thought of as synonymous with ‘‘disaster.’’ The first recorded meaning of ‘‘sudden disaster’’ dates back to 1748. The two senses of ‘‘suddenness’’ and ‘‘turn’’ inscribe the word within a temporality that implies a doubling back of time. The association with ‘‘disaster’’ as ‘‘star breaking,’’ to borrow Geoffrey Hartman’s words in ‘‘Holocaust and Hope,’’ is clearly connected to this ‘‘down turn’’ in two ways. First, ‘‘star breaking’’ implies a break in the course of destiny. This sense recovers the oldest use of the word in the context of tragic drama, where the break reveals an unexpected turn in the fate of the tragic hero. Second and equally important for this book, ‘‘star breaking’’ implies a break in the transcendental trajectory of thought and language. Hartman’s etymology is given to us in the context of

Introduction 7

a discussion of Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster, where writing, for Blanchot, is not limited to the strict sense of writing but rather to the very possibility of all telling and writing, in the sense of re´cit elaborated here. The sudden turn in trajectory and the break in the upward impulse—be it as meaning, concept, or divine—are located within language and as language. I use ‘‘catastrophe’’ in the sense of a rotation, sudden and unexpected, in language and in thought brought about by a rupture and dispersion. Catastrophe marks the moments of contact between language, thought, and the surfaces of beings, things, and events. In this contact, sudden and unexpected, thought and language cannot return to themselves as grounds for self-certainty and knowledge. Instead, with the touch of these surfaces, both language and thought refract, disperse, and change direction and orientation. These dispersions, refractions, and reorientations are not places of annihilation of thought and language. The re´cit retrieves something out of these dispersive contacts, but it does not recapture the instant of contact. In other words, the re´cit does not gather the event within itself, by naming and repeating it, but rather comes about because the event has always already dispersed itself. The instant, as singularity, resists capture and withdraws from its instantaneity so that time unfolds. In other words the singularity of the instant, singularity in the sense that I have outlined for this project, opens itself to relationality and thus the dispersion becomes the story. In this sense, catastrophe designates a singular crisis, in time, that is inaugural for each story; but a crisis that primarily disperses itself throughout the narration without interrupting its flow. The story comes forth as the aftereffect of this dispersive instant.13 Though the notion of catastrophe is old, its most provocative and insistent evaluations have come from recent studies on the Holocaust. These studies, from various disciplines, have been guided primarily by memoirs of survivors from concentration camps. The relationship between re´cit and catastrophe is not limited to the discipline of literature—indeed, it not only extends to but also forms the basis of many other fields of knowledge such as history, philosophy, myth, and theology. Years ago, Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard announced that grand narratives, that is, totalizing discourses of knowledge, failed to ground knowledge and understanding, a failure which he encapsulated as the ‘‘postmodern condition’’ in his book by this title. Translated into my terms, this condition is due to the conjunction between re´cit and catastrophe, because catastrophe prevents narratives from stabilizing and grounding themselves in certainty. The theoretical corpus related to the Holocaust helps us think the question of catastrophe without necessarily

8 Introduction

rendering the Holocaust the unique catastrophic event, nor making it the origin of catastrophe or the last word on it. My insistence on the particular notion of singularity and on temporality allows us to think against chronology and outside the absolutist discourses of exemplarity and uniqueness. It allows us to think catastrophe in terms of contiguity and supplementarity rather than in terms of hierarchy. Not only is catastrophe unexpected and shocking, it is also exceptional.14 This exceptionality is linked to the incalculable dimensions of catastrophe. Something immeasurable and incalculable is released in catastrophe. Because of this immeasure it cannot be reintegrated into the course of time, language, and thought. However, in spite of this immeasure, most of our modes of speaking and thinking about catastrophe, from the media to the academy, identify and qualify it. Some events are called catastrophic while others are not. Paradoxically, the immeasure of catastrophe becomes measured in numbers such as six million Jews, eight hundred thousand Tutsis and resistant Hutus, thousands displaced, millions of dollars in lost property. Therefore, there is an inherent contradiction in the discourse on catastrophe where immeasure ends up being measured in numbers of people or in monies lost or offered as reparation to survivors for their losses.15 In other words, catastrophe quickly falls into the logic of exchange and value. Furthermore, the paradox of measuring the immeasurable has given way to the ethical problem that Michael Rothberg aptly calls the ‘‘hierarchy of suffering,’’ that is, a discourse of equivalences.16 Comparing, for example, six million with eight hundred thousand relativizes catastrophe: the larger the number (of people or property), the bigger the catastrophe. Exceptionality becomes reduced to unique and incomparable. This is why singularity in the way that I have defined it is ethically important, for while it allows for the uniqueness of each event, of each instant of catastrophe, it is not satisfied with this as its sole condition. This singularity ethically opens itself toward other singularities and becomes relationality. We must not forget that the singularity of the catastrophic is not in its accumulative nature, the collective number of victims, but rather in its immeasurable effect on the subject, each and every subject. But this is not the only criterion for the catastrophic. Unfortunately, we now know all too well that the loss of some lives is considered, felt, and evaluated as less catastrophic than that of others.17 However, no matter what the number of victims, catastrophe remains both singular and immeasurable in its dimension. My notion of catastrophe as rotation and rupture, as a kind of unhinging that gives a sudden turn within thought and language in the

Introduction 9

subject relates singularity (each time, each subject), immeasure, and repeatability to each other. Re´cit, a story of life at a distance from life, a story of life at a distance from the subject, is turned toward the immeasure that the subject suffers. The tendency toward measuring and numbering catastrophe signals our anxiety when we are faced with a catastrophe whose effects are unbearable for us. The immeasurable is unbearable; it does not fit within any frame of reference and knowledge. It marks the limit of thought and language. It leaves us vulnerable and exposed, each and every one of us. It challenges our relationship with our destiny by rendering our future fragile and uncertain. In the aftermath of a catastrophe, we face our destiny with unbearable trepidation. Quickly, we turn to measures of self-protection. We search obsessively for causes and effects, reasons, logic. Each story in this book tells of this anxiety and unbearable quality of catastrophe. In addition, large-scale disasters require of us practical responses in political, economic, humanitarian, and legal ways. We must justify these responses in quantitative and qualitative manners, beginning by naming the event, because how we name an event qualifies and justifies it in particular ways. We know the debates about giving the name ‘‘genocide’’ to events in the cases of Rwanda and Darfur. It does not suffice that something be deemed a catastrophe; it must have a name that distinguishes it from other events and places it within a hierarchy. This frenzy toward naming is itself revelatory, because catastrophe also marks the catastrophe of naming, that is, the turning of the name from its own power. Not only do we refer to destructive events of history or nature as catastrophes, we also use this word to characterize the most trivial occurrences of our everyday life, such as the failed breakfast omelet. These two uses of the word reveal the degree to which catastrophe poses a problem for thought and language. Catastrophe shakes up the foundations of thinking and simultaneously marks a rupture within language’s powers of signification. The word ‘‘catastrophe’’ is not a stable referent and cannot name anything specific or a unified concept. We cannot answer the question ‘‘What is catastrophe?’’ but we can try to think how certain events may be catastrophic. This requires from us singular acts of thinking and speaking, each and every time. When speaking French, what do we mean when we say ‘‘Je suis catastrophe´(e)’’ (I am catastrophied) by something? By exposing a break and a turn in thought and language, catastrophe challenges our ability to stabilize our thinking and our speech as such. If the name is generally thought of as the site where aspects are gathered into an identity that would render referentiality possible, the immeasurable disperses this power of the

10 Introduction

name and empties it of referential possibility. The turn in the etymology of ‘‘catastrophe’’ may help us think the turn in language and in thought that dispossesses them of the authority to name and to conceptualize, including the name and the concept ‘‘catastrophe.’’ For this reason the literary becomes the privileged site for this investigation.18 The ways in which events resist understanding and the crises they open in all modes of speech about them testify to the dispersive and immemorial dimensions of catastrophe in two ways. First, events repeat themselves endlessly. By now, it should be clear that the indignant cries of ‘‘never again’’ after each historical event ring quite hollow; they mean nothing, or hardly anything. This collapse of meaning may be the effect of the catastrophic that the ‘‘never again’’ tries to contain. Forgetfulness and repetition belong intimately to catastrophe. Second, the endless singular speech of survivors, often faltering under the effect of urgency and despair about being able to say what it wants to say, bears witness in an oblique fashion—that is, via its failures—to the catastrophic dispersion and the turn of language and thought from the event that provide the impulse for their narration.19 The survivor’s most urgent desire is to say something about the event. She lives in the hope that trying once more will perhaps allow her to say what she wants to say. Survivors do not tell their stories once and for all. If they speak once, they will speak endlessly, each time differently. The survivor and the writer share in this double relationship of possibility and impossibility with language: possibility because after a catastrophic event what remains is the story, always haunted—but in this quality the story thinks and allows us to think the horizon of a relationship with the future, with time. Impossibility, because the story’s very possibility lies in the always already destitution of what it wants to say, of its own inaugural moment. Catastrophe turns from itself, from what it names. What remains of it, this quality of name without power, gives the story. The story can neither liberate itself from catastrophe nor recover catastrophe. In this sense, the story is a survivor that lives with an immemorial memory that gives it breath. Jacques Derrida has shown us for decades and in multiple ways how in repetition time has already entered division and dispersion. Nothing could ever be said if repetition were not the very condition of speech.20 I contend in this book that the texts gathered here come about under the effect of catastrophe. The literary registers catastrophe as an aftereffect. The re´cit does not refer to event as such but rather comes about as the aftereffect of its dispersion, an aftereffect that remains uncircumscribed by any cause.21 The catastrophic aftershock scatters itself in the re´cit and scatters the re´cit.

Introduction 11

Language breaks and turns, abandoning the project of bringing forth any event, that is, of gathering language back into the stability of the name and signification. The re´cit begins under the effect of this abandonment always already immemorial for the re´cit. The catastrophe of the re´cit lies in the fact that it undergoes the effect that it cannot localize. Whatever the re´cit relates, it does so as the aftereffect of this abandonment. This does not imply that what happens in the re´cit and what happens in what we call ‘‘the real world’’ are unrelated. Far from it. As I have said, language touches the surfaces of events, beings, and things, be they historical, personal, political, natural; the effect of this touch disperses language and thought, the way light touches water and refracts. This touch and dispersion offer the time of the re´cit. Time reveals itself in thinking and speaking within the movement of the re´cit and as this movement. It follows therefore that thinking the relationship between re´cit and catastrophe is also thinking temporality and historicity. I detect in each of these texts a catastrophic dimension that constitutes the pulse of the narration and its movement in two ways. First, each of the five texts is marked by a figure through which unfold the dispersive movements of the narration. In Murambi, le livre des ossements, it is the survivor; in Cette aveuglante absence de lumie`re, the prisoner; in Le Cavalier et son ombre, the storyteller; in Amour bilingue, la Bi-langue; and finally in Le livre du sang, the Androgyn. These figures do not simply define characters or personalities but also and more importantly mark dynamics of instability in thought and language, as well as surfaces of relationality. Second, each text doubles the scene of storytelling in a gesture of self-reflexivity, telling about storytelling and storytellers. This storytelling comes about each time under conditions of crisis, conditions in which storytelling becomes both a chance and a risk for life. This is to say that each time storytelling hovers at the point of contact between life and death, between the possible and the impossible. Something threatening disperses itself in the re´cit. This dispersion makes the re´cit possible; the re´cit responds to a threat. The re´cit does not reveal the source of the threat but begins as a response to something it cannot register. This response gives the re´cit a double orientation, creating a tension in it between a desire to turn toward the source of the threat and a gesture of self-protection from it. Therefore, the re´cit opens as the tension of the double gesture of self-exposure and self-protection. The re´cit comes about under the effect of a crisis, but it does not know this crisis a priori, or at least does not know it as such. The paradoxical nature of every re´cit resides in its impulse to say or to name, and this impulse allows it to begin. Something withdraws, and the re´cit follows in the trace

12 Introduction

of this withdrawal, wanting to say that which a priori escapes it. The re´cit is drawn toward excess by a kind of hopeless hope that belongs to its own condition of possibility. Each re´cit in this work begins with the dream or the promise of the possibility to say what it longs to say, but ends in uncertainty and in the suspension of the promise.22 This failure is not negative, for it belongs to the structure of promise from the beginning. I begin the book with a novel based on the genocide of the Tutsi. It is a reading of Boubacar Boris Diop’s Murambi, le livre des ossements, addressing the problem of what it means to become a survivor after the Rwanda genocide. This novel replaces the labyrinthine literary twists and turns in Diop’s previous works (we will see an example of this style in chapter 3 in Le Cavalier et son ombre) with a minimalist style and language, which, as Diop himself has explained, belong to the ethical demands of such a project of writing. The stripping down of language from its symbolic e´lan and the inadequacy of representation both ethically and in terms of language are central concerns of the novel. I maintain in my analysis that survival demands speech, but that this speech is different from the representative narratives that attempt to create a collective or identitarian logic to an event and in the aftermath of the event. I show the ways in which the novel, without denying the scale of the catastrophe in terms of numbers and the significance of these numbers, emphasizes the singularity of catastrophe and survival. Through a turn and rupture in the subject’s relation with his own story, Diop’s novel indicates a path opening toward survival, but this path also reveals the subject’s exposure to the effects of a catastrophe he cannot locate. Chapter 2 offers a reading of Tahar ben Jelloun’s Cette aveuglante absence de lumie`re, a novel based on the memoirs of a survivor of Tazmamart, a secret prison in Morocco. The title of this chapter, ‘‘Suffering Time,’’ underscores its central problematic, linking closely the question of surviving to that of time. The chapter investigates how a time that does not pass or rather a time that does not mark its passage can be survived. The catastrophic effect that the chapter explores is less the fact of imprisonment than the eliminated time of the world. How do thought and language contend with such conditions? How does a detainee, living in total darkness and isolation, without hope and without a future, in a fractured and depleted body, on the verge of mental and physical annihilation, survive this time without end? I argue that the imagination and the story offer the experience of temporality, which renders the experience of utter destitution bearable, in spite of everything. But the opening of story and of imagination requires a movement of distancing in the subject from itself. The story as survival does not come

Introduction 13

forth out of nostalgia for a past life, nor from a hope for a future life that would belong to the subject. Rather, it is released out of a memory in the subject that does not belong to him and within which he does not recuperate himself. Given that this story is told after the narrator’s release from Tazmamart, the necessity of distancing between the subject and his life becomes doubly marked. Not only, as I will show, does it allow for the prisoner to survive imprisonment as is told in the story, it also allows him to survive his release. The very telling of this story, as a story, enacts this movement of distancing between a subject and his life. The time of survival is neither the time of the world, nor that of the real, but rather the time of the image and of the story. Chapter 3, ‘‘Shadowing the Storyteller,’’ is a reading of Boubacar Boris Diop’s Le Cavalier et son ombre, which reverses the logic of the previous two chapters. Instead of beginning with a catastrophic event that can be historically named (genocide, Tazmamart), this novel foregrounds the catastrophic in the story and as the story. It foregrounds repetition as the ground for the story; the story of a life told from a distance and at a distance, coming out of a call. Once the space of storytelling has opened up, then the story of genocide, of imprisonment, of violence can be told. In this sense, the novel explicitly stages that at which Cette aveuglante absence de lumie`re obliquely hints. From here, the final two chapters of the book further foreground the literary dimensions of catastrophe and its philosophical and religious import, which have been broached in the previous chapters in terms of questions of transcendence and of law. They focus particularly on the effects of the re´cit on metaphysical modes of thinking, that is, modes of thinking that foreground the foundational thought of the one, of unity, and of identity. The texts studied in these two chapters bear no direct relationship to historical events. They show how Abdelkebir Khatibi’s novels Amour bilingue and Le livre du sang perform together the ‘‘double critique’’ proposed in his 1981 essay ‘‘Pense´e-autre.’’23 Chapter 4 carefully unfolds the arguments of this essay in relation to Western philosophy as well as to Islamic thought and mysticism. Catastrophe here is related to the overturning of categories of signification, knowledge, and identity and becomes linked to a complicated notion of freedom. This chapter engages with the dynamic of ‘‘pense´eautre’’ as relationality and the impossible closure of thought. Following this preliminary analysis, this chapter shows how Amour bilingue stages the catastrophe of thought as its relationship to itself and how the literary becomes the scene of the inscription of this devastation. My reading of Le livre du sang

14 Introduction

in chapter 5 shifts the emphasis toward the transcendental dimensions of Islamic mysticism. Catastrophe as ‘‘star breaking’’ and ‘‘turning’’ follows the movements of the orphic turn unbinding the subject from the nostalgic memory of metaphysical loss and morbid fascination with invisibility as the memory of monotheism. In this manner, the project moves from the historical to the philosophical while all the time insisting that the story and the movement of re´cit allow us to think the singularities of historical and philosophical catastrophes, always together, but always at a distance from historical and philosophical categories. In addition to the five novels I have named here, another literary work has guided my thinking and readings. My work is deeply indebted to A Thousand and One Nights and to its exceptional narrator, Shahrazad, whose footprints can be detected across several chapters as well as in the notion of re´cit as I have described it thus far.24 I engage primarily with the frame story of this work as King Shahriyar and the storyteller Shahrazad face each other within the space of the story and in order to bring about the story. This frame story is important for my thinking in several ways. First, I know of no other text where the self-reflexivity of the dynamic of storytelling is given greater prominence than in A Thousand and One Nights. Daunting questions in literary studies, those of beginnings, the continuity of narration, and the manner of its interruption or closure, are the consistent sites of reflection, not only within the text but also in the manner of its construction. With multiple origins (Persian, Arabic, Indian) and without an author, A Thousand and One Nights defies all notions of geographic boundaries by expanding itself daringly across regions, cultures, and languages.25 The frame story sets up this mobile and expansive character of the text. In her important structural study of A Thousand and One Nights, Ferial Ghazoul has shown the importance of the frame story for keeping the coherence of the narrative and for establishing the patterns of relation and repetition among enframed stories. She has also attributed to its obscure origin the unparalleled openness of this text to incorporate other stories within its body, for authenticity and belonging are not its concerns. We now know that many of the stories in the collection have been added by translators, beginning with Antoine Galland who was the first to translate it into a European language, French, in the early eighteenth century. Therefore, the metaphysically privileged notions of unity, origin, genealogy, and dichotomous relationships of inside and outside, and so forth are radically put into question by the text. This mode of putting into question is central to my analyses

Introduction 15

of each novel and my method of putting various works in conversation with each other. Second, the triangular relationship that the frame story establishes between death, storytelling, and law, which I explore in specific terms in chapter 3 in conversation with Franz Kafka’s ‘‘Before the Law,’’ offers a focal point for my thinking about the relationship I wish to elaborate between re´cit, catastrophe, and singularity throughout the project. With storytelling, Shahrazad interrupts the repetitive economy of death, while she is still threatened by this economy. So long as there is the story, the menace of death, though abated temporarily, looms large on the horizon. The reprieve every night, as she faces the king and tells her tale, remains uncertain and threatened. This fragile dynamic of Shahrazad’s survival constitutes the condition of singularity of narration, each and every time. A Thousand and One Nights sets up the scene of the singularity of each night and each tale, infinitely repeated (for the number 1,001 is not referential, but rather a signal of continuity), each night and tale threatened with annihilation and open toward the future. Therefore, the text of A Thousand and One Nights tells the story of a life, re´cit, at a distance from the subject. This life tells its story by telling about other lives. Shahrazad never speaks of herself, there is no I of narration, except in the formula balaghani (I have heard) or (it has reached me), which, by its formulaic structure, empties itself of signification. In my reading of Amour bilingue in chapter 4, I elaborate on the status of this dispossessed ‘‘I.’’ In this sense, the story of Shahrazad and Shahriyar is rendered possible in the double sense of catastrophe as a break and a sudden turn whose dispersive effects may be both threatening and affirmative. The relationship between the two figures points to a double dynamic of threat and self-protection as the law of the story. Third, while thinking about the five novels I have selected for this project, I take the opportunity to make certain brief interventions in the critical scholarship on A Thousand and One Nights. Although the goal of this project is not to read A Thousand and One Nights specifically, given the proximity of my questions with those staged by this text, I propose that we consider from a different direction such problematics as the condition of storytelling as it relates to the body, to time, and to space (chapter 2), the scene of sovereignty and law (chapter 3), and death as the condition of storytelling (chapter 5). Finally, in the conclusion, I open this project toward a future engagement with A Thousand and One Nights and with the figure of Shahrazad by putting into question the relationship between maternity and storytelling so often and at times too readily argued by scholars discussing this text.26

1.

Becoming-Survivor

Boubacar Boris Diop is one of Senegal’s most prominent contemporary writers. His literary production spans the period from 1981 to the present. In addition to being an author, he has been a journalist, a teacher of philosophy and literature, and an activist. He has written several political texts and has become an important voice in debates on the politics of la francophonie.1 After the completion of his novel in 2000 on the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda, he turned to Senegal’s other national language, Wolof, in Doomi Golo and returned to French with his powerful 2006 novel, Kaveena.2 Today Diop writes in both languages and is in the forefront of debates about the place of national languages in the literary landscape of Senegal.3 Unfortunately, my own linguistic shortcomings limit me to the works written in French, two of which I include in this book. Much of Diop’s work is written on the traces of catastrophic events, literary, historical, political, or mythical. In 1998, he was among a group of African writers who participated in a project funded by the Fondation de France in collaboration with the Rwandan government. The project was part of Fest’ Africa and entitled ‘‘Rwanda: Ecrire par devoir de me´moire.’’ The group spent two months in Rwanda, listening to survivors and visiting the preserved sites of massacres such as Nyamata, Ntarama, and Murambi. The participants produced a series of texts that reflected on the genocide and its aftermath through various modalities of writing (poetry, testimony, fiction).4 The results of these reflections bear more on the question of the aftermath and survival than on the event of the genocide per se. Several of these texts reflect on not only surviving genocide but also the ethical implications of constructing out of the traces of such an event a project of memory and remembering. This chapter engages with Boubacar Boris Diop’s Murambi, le livre des ossements (Murambi, the Book of Bones), the writing of which disrupted, in two ways, Diop’s own relationship with language and writing. In addition, to the change in language of expression—French to Wolof—a discernible shift in writing style distinguishes this book from his previous 16

Becoming-Survivor 17

works, as he himself has pointed out repeatedly. This shift has profoundly affected his writing, aesthetically and politically. The disruptive effects on language mark the text of Murambi throughout, culminating in the final scene of the novel that announces a turn in speech and language. In reading Murambi we are prompted to think about the complexities of the relationship between surviving, time, and language. We are pushed to think of survival beyond the commonly held notion of ‘‘not having died when one should have’’ and toward an experience of a turning in the subject’s relationship with language and with temporality. My reading focuses primarily on the central story of the return of Cornelius Uvimana to Rwanda and the vicissitudes of this homecoming. I show how his every encounter with people and events marks a moment of turning in his relationship with his own story and with language. These relationships are marked by a temporal singularity that belongs to the time of surviving and to the experience of the aftermath. I argue that the impulse toward historiography to explicate the causes and effects of the genocide displaces the issue of surviving. Similarly, the ideal of reconciliation and regained national unity, as if the genocide were an abhorrent moment of history that can be overcome and healed, turns attention away from the question of surviving, which has little to do with understanding the reasons for the event or with the ideal of recovering unity. By closely following the itinerary of Cornelius, I show that survival is a singular experience of a turn within the subject’s time and speech and that this experience is born in solitude. The turn offers the possibility of a future, necessary for surviving, but without a specific content or project. A catastrophe, a genocide, has taken place. It is an event in history. The effect of this event disperses itself across the narration in temporal modes of ‘‘before’’ and ‘‘after,’’ but the narration cannot recount the event.5 The narration registers the event obliquely as the relation between too early and too late, as we shall shortly see in the verb tenses and the narrative voices of the text. This impossibility of narration, at the heart of the narration, makes us consider the question of the relation between history and the event. While the genocide is a historical—that is, temporal—event, it does not offer itself to historiography, in that one cannot explain its causation or its origin with a reasoned speech. The time of history and the time of historiography diverge incommensurably in the event. This divergence is most poignantly registered when Cornelius comes into contact with the sites of the disaster. The narration follows the dynamic of this radical incommensurability and proposes the necessity for another kind of speech and another

18 Becoming-Survivor

relation with time. As the end of the novel reveals, this other time and this other speech, the time and speech of survival, are both catastrophic and the promise of survival. They are catastrophic because they do not allow for a clear distinction between life and death but rather point to a life that continues but is always carried away by death. Because Murambi thematizes the problem of the artistic project, we are called upon to think about the question of a project as a work and as a time in the sense of projection, of future determined from the standpoint of the present. Despite the well-deserved reception of the works generated by the project of ‘‘Rwanda: Ecrire par devoir de me´moire,’’ the very notion of ‘‘project’’ in this case has been the subject of debate and critique among scholars. Not only may ‘‘project’’ impart a teleological structure to the endeavor of writing, it also suggests coherence and unity, a program with a projected end. However, the project is marked by incompleteness, as indicated by the unpublished status of the text by one of Kenya’s renowned writers, Meja Mwangi, entitled The Great Sadness. I insist on this detail not in order to show up the ‘‘failure’’ of a writer, but only to point out how a project may resist its own end. This failure is the effect of catastrophe that cannot allow for projection. The temporal fissure that the turn toward such an event registers is so radical that the future cannot be the work of a projection, because in this turn futurity itself is at stake. Murambi inscribes this radical temporal turning. Moreover, Murambi tells the story of the writer, who visits there or returns there after all is done, in order to write about or around the event. This story is told in the contiguity between the figure of the writer who undertakes such a project and the figure of Cornelius. I say contiguity and not similarity because the two figures are fundamentally different in their relationship to the event, and, for ethical reasons, this difference must be maintained. The contiguity between the inside and the outside of the novel implicates the writer in particular ways. It reveals how ethics after a genocide cannot include an uncontaminated zone but must implicate everyone, including the writer. The emphasis the novel places on Ope´ration Turquoise and France’s involvement in the genocide implicates the project in this ambiguous ethical zone because so much of the project’s funding came from France, while at the same time it insists that there is no zone of innocence into which one can retreat.6 In other words, the point of the critique and self-reflection is not to determine whether the project is good or bad, legitimate or illegitimate, but rather to draw out the ethical complexities of speaking and writing after such an event. Certainly, ‘‘Rwanda: Ecrire par

Becoming-Survivor 19

devoir de me´moire’’ is ethically, politically, and artistically necessary; it is a debt and an obligation, in all the senses of devoir. It is so because Rwanda has not just happened but has happened to us, to all of us, in radically and incommensurably different ways. To be silent about Rwanda is therefore not an ethical, political, or artistic choice. Our implication in this catastrophe imposes on us a debt from which we cannot absolve ourselves. Furthermore, as Kenneth Harrow has argued, this obligation also requires that we be vigilant about the violences that are being committed in the postgenocide era, in the name of the genocide, justice, or vengeance, both within and without the borders of Rwanda.7 Murambi engages with all these questions in many ways, beginning with the structure of the novel. While it struggles to sustain the flow of the narration with the story, re´cit, of Cornelius Uvimana, this is not where the novel begins; and when the novel finally reaches this story, it remains haunted by others that fall to the side along the way in order to accommodate the story. Every narration is ethically implicated because in order to tell a story, it pushes aside multiple others that nonetheless haunt it. The novel is constructed in four parts. Part 1, titled ‘‘La peur et la cole`re’’ (Fear and Anger) tells in short, interrupted chapters and in the first-person narrative voice the stories of perpetrators and their victims at the beginning of the genocide. It tells the stories of preparations and the fearful anticipation of something unknown. Part 2, ‘‘Le retour de Cornelius’’ (The Return of Cornelius), tells of Cornelius Uvimana’s return to Kigali, four years after the end of the genocide, ending twenty-five years of exile in Djibuti. This part is told in one uninterrupted chapter, in the third person. This story is then in turn interrupted by part 3, ‘‘Le Ge´nocide’’ (The Genocide), which takes up once again the stories of the perpetrators and their targets. Part 4, ‘‘Murambi,’’ returns to Cornelius’s story that ends the novel. Murambi is thus the scene of multiple interruptions and multiple returns, which together create the network of relations between figures and places. Cornelius’s return to Rwanda provides the focal point of the dynamic of return that gives momentum to the narration. Within this general dynamic there are those who return in various ways and those who do not. Jessica, Cornelius’s friend and a survivor of the genocide, appears in part 1 and then again in part 2. She returns haunted by not only her experiences of the genocide but also the figure of her friend, Theresa, who appears alive in Jessica’s story in part 1 then as a cadaver in Nyamata in part 2. Ge´rard or ‘‘le Matelot’’ (the sailor) appears in part 2 in Kigali and then returns in part 4 in Murambi, as a limit

20 Becoming-Survivor

figure. Those who return ‘‘alive’’ (let us say so provisionally, for this survival, as we shall see, raises precisely the question of how to separate life from death), such as Jessica, Ge´rard, or the keepers of the bones on the preserved sites of the genocide, return as Cornelius’s guides toward the experience of survival. In the proximity of these returning figures a path toward survival opens for Cornelius, a path with troubling and difficult vicissitudes. He becomes a survivor through a complex relationship with the remnants of the genocide, the bones of the perished victims, and the ghostly presence of those who are still alive, just barely. The repetitive movements of appearing, reappearing, and disappearing endow the text with a haunting and ghostly quality that tells of survival. The novel foregrounds the struggle of narration to stabilize itself with the narrative voices ‘‘I’’ and ‘‘he.’’ This struggle prompts us to think that perhaps the only way in which this story can continue is in the anonymous third person: the one who cannot or does not write himself in the story but speaks only through the other as other; the one who writes herself as distance and at a distance from himself; the one who speaks obliquely. The voice that speaks in the first person cannot sustain the narration but shares its place with others, with other ‘‘I’’s, by allowing itself to break off and then get resurrected as the voice of another.8 The novel thus foregrounds in its shifting points of view the fragmented condition of subjectivity. There is a subject, an ‘‘I,’’ but fragmented, and shared out. The direct testimonial mode is unbearable for the narration, as if the project of giving testimony cannot bear the weight of this task and shatters under its exigency. Only when testimony becomes haunted, in the sense that it becomes the voice of another, can it allow for narration. The third-person narration does not occupy the position of the unimplicated observer, the model of the ‘‘beautiful soul,’’ but is the mark of a ghostly space. The haunted quality of the text leaves a temporal imprint on the narration. The victims speak in the future tense, anticipating death or hoping to survive in spite of everything. Rosa Karemera is among those hoping to survive: ‘‘I hope to survive this business [histoire]. Just to see Vale´rie Rumiya’s expression when she runs into me in the neighborhood’’ (119; 99).9 Vale´rie is the woman who betrayed Rosa to the soldiers. However, Rosa does not return and this leaves her status suspended and unknown. Is she among the bones or among the ghostly living? This suspended state of nonreturn also haunts the narration, for the haunting is not limited to those who do return but also includes those whose absence haunts. The beautiful anonymous woman, whose story is told by Jessica in part 3, has no hope of

Becoming-Survivor 21

surviving except as the voice speaking from the other side of death, urging Rwandans to unify after the atrocities. Her only hope for surviving the atrocities is transcendental: ‘‘I will be the sun. From up there, I’ll have my eye on you, you the Rwandans. Join together. Aren’t you ashamed, children of Rwanda? Whether someone is Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa, what is it to you? Then, after this awful business is over, behave yourself and be united, won’t you? In reality, she was already speaking to us from another world’’ (115; 95). She takes Jessica by surprise one day and insists on telling her the story of the violence committed by the priest against her and other young women hiding in his church. She insists on telling her the story because she knows she is going to die. Jessica becomes the bearer of this story and can never free herself from the effect of this woman’s absent presence, as if possessed by a ghost that cannot be exorcised. Jessica herself is physically on the verge of disappearance and filled with unending disquietude punctuated at multiple places in the text. Upon his return, Cornelius is struck by his childhood friend’s frailty: ‘‘She was very thin and seemed to be in bad health under her determined forehead and her deep and slightly sad eyes’’ (46; 36). While the victims speak in or of the future, the perpetrators speak about the event in the past and so do the survivors. By victim, I mean the absolute victim, the one who cannot bear witness to his own suffering, who is absolutely devoid of future as well as of past in relation to the event because he is annihilated. While the narration insists on the ghostly figures of survivors and victims, the difference between these two is registered temporally. For victims, future is an impossible future, perhaps a pure future that cannot turn into a past. Only the perpetrator and the survivor can speak about a past with regards to the event and turn toward a future as a possibility. But here too, the relation with the past and with the future is not the same thing for survivors and perpetrators. For the perpetrators in the story, the project of genocide was that of constructing a future, a projected future that justified the means. This future was well defined and had clear contours: a future purified from the contamination of the Tutsi, a future of a pure identity. But this project, despite massive destruction and violence, failed. The survivor, on the other hand, experiences an aporia that relates him intimately to a past out of which a fragile futurity may perhaps be offered. This future can neither be projected nor become a certainty. The survivor lives in attention toward the past and toward the dead, living and breathing in their proximity. The ghostly dynamic of this relation opens perhaps toward a future, as Cornelius’s itinerary slowly suggests.

22 Becoming-Survivor

Cornelius returns to Rwanda, four years after the end of the genocide, in 1998—the year of the Rwanda project—with the aim of finding how his family was massacred in Murambi and settling into his own history: ‘‘To come back to one’s country—to be happy there or to suffer—was a rebirth, but he didn’t want to become someone without a past. He was the sum of everything he had experienced. His faults. His cowardliness. His hopes. He wanted to know, down to the very last detail how his family had been massacred. In Murambi, Sime´on Habineza would tell him everything. He had to’’ (55; 44). Cornelius’s goal at this point is to recuperate a history that he could call his own, a ‘‘rebirth’’ that would allow him to reappropriate his past. Through this rebirth, he aims to recuperate subjectivity and a place from which he can declare himself an ‘‘I.’’ He arrives in Rwanda as a survivor—in the common sense—of the genocide, for even though he was not there during the events of the summer of 1994, his exile came about as a result of violence unleashed on the Tutsi prior to this fateful date. Even his birth is marked by survival, for, according to his uncle Sime´on Habineza, his Tutsi mother gave birth to him on the run during one of the violent episodes preceding this genocide. However, his birth and exile do not suffice to inscribe him in the dynamic of survival as I shall elaborate here, a dynamic that Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard has defined in the following terms: ‘‘The word ‘survivor’ implies that an entity who is dead or should be dead is still alive. With the thought of this ‘still,’ of a reprieve or a death sentence, a problematic of time is introduced, but not just any time. A problematic of time in its relationship with the question of being and not-being of what is’’ (Lectures d’enfance 59; my translation). This particular temporality of survival has at least two implications. First, ‘‘an entity who is dead’’ but ‘‘still alive’’ directs our attention toward the narration, where the voices of victims, always already without voice because they are victims, come to register themselves. Therefore what ‘‘is,’’ the presence of the narration, comes about in the relation between being and nonbeing. In other words, even if the narration comes about in the present and registers the voice of an ‘‘I,’’ it does not indicate presence. The present of the narration marks the effect of the fracture between the future and the past. In the relationality between the future and the past rises a ghostly present. Ghostliness thus becomes the general condition for the possibility of narration and all the voices in it. Second, this condition of narration reveals the problems that Cornelius’s project poses in terms of subjectivity and historicity. As a survivor he must come to terms with this ‘‘still alive’’ condition of the survivor, a condition

Becoming-Survivor 23

that reveals itself to be singular and solitary. As his quest for a historical subjectivity progresses, he faces the impossibility of recuperating an identity either on the national or on the personal level. Cornelius’s plan to recover this identity has a two-fold dimension. On the one hand, he wants to regain a personal story through the recovery of the story of his family and, on the other hand, he seeks a national and community belonging by staging a historical play about the genocide. The main character of this play is General Perrichon—a strong believer in human rights—whose cat has disappeared. His Ethiopian gardener, who has also disappeared, is the primary suspect for the crime. This is no ordinary cat as it is the bearer of classified information. The general seeks the assistance of Pierre Intera and Jacques Hamwe in finding the Ethiopian and the cat.10 The name Perrichon echoes of Perrin, the French colonel of Ope´ration Turquoise who appears at the end of the novel.11 The figure of the Ethiopian gardener resonates with the theory that the Tutsi came from Ethiopia. The genocidal rhetoric of the Hutu hardliners included returning the Tutsi back to Ethiopia via the river Nyaborongo. Gesturing toward this return, the perpetrators dumped thousands of bodies in the river during the genocide. Cornelius’s project of recuperating his past includes and indeed seems to necessitate a recuperation of a common national history. What he is consists of the personal history of his family and the general history of his nation, and he must find a way of representing them both to himself. While he hopes that Sime´on Habineza, his paternal uncle and the only other surviving member of his family, will help him with the first, the play will accomplish the second. In other words, Cornelius seeks the experience of a community through the theatrical presentation, a public event to share with others and share in the history of others. Cornelius’s desire is not only to give voice to the history of victimization, but also to share in this history through the representation of the events in the play. He thus wants to find a place for himself in a nation from whose experience he has felt excluded since the age of twelve, when his uncle Sime´on smuggled him into Burundi to protect him from the violence perpetrated against the Tutsi. A stranger both abroad and now in his own country, Cornelius wishes to find a place for himself within a community. The uncle, the agent of this estrangement, is now held responsible for bridging the gaps. In Djibuti, Cornelius played the role of the historian who explained the origin and the causes of the genocide. It was important to him that this genocide have a historical beginning, that it not remain the ambiguous and immemorial story of a violence without discernible origin. He consistently

24 Becoming-Survivor

sought to explain its origin in terms of cause and effect. Cornelius located this origin in the 1959 revolution, when the Mwami (King), a descendant of the Tutsi line that had ruled the kingdom since time immemorial, was killed. The Hutu took over, inaugurating the era of the republic based on majority rule, with independence from Belgium following soon after in 1962.12 For Cornelius, the narrative of the genocide must have a verifiable beginning, for without it the danger is that it may not have an end. This possibility appears to be Cornelius’s greatest fear. By privileging 1959 as the decisive moment of fragmentation heralding the genocide, Cornelius wishes to emphasize and affirm the original unity of the Tutsi, Hutu, and Twa. Only if such a unity existed in the past could it be imagined for the future.13 But, as he digs deeper into the historical documents, he finds that they offer him little assurance and fail to assuage his doubts about the reliability of his own understanding and convictions: ‘‘He was scared. Could he tell her [Zakya] in all good faith that things were as simple as that? What meaning could one give to the violence in his country? Maybe, it was perhaps absurd of the victims to keep proclaiming their innocence so obstinately. And what if this radical punishment—the genocide—was a response to some very ancient crime that no-one wanted to hear about anymore? ‘Now that I am in Rwanda, I’m going to ask Sime´on Habineza all these questions,’ he thought’’ (81; 66). Prompted by his fear and suspicion of contamination, he returns to Rwanda in order to recuperate and construct a coherent narrative for himself. Cornelius fears the indeterminacy of the categories of victim and perpetrator and the sliding movements of one toward the other. Clearly, ‘‘victim’’ refers to the survivors rather than the absolute victims, those who have perished and claim neither guilt nor innocence. Cornelius’s narrative of the genocide beginning in 1959 seems motivated by a desire to counter the mythical narrative of an original sin: an ancient, immemorial crime, which finds its retribution in the catastrophe, in a revenge wrought on a foundation of sovereignty that elevated the Tutsi and subjugated the Hutu and the Twa. How would Cornelius otherwise conceive of himself, a Hutu? ‘‘The documents prove that the Hutu and the Twa were oppressed long ago by the Tutsi. I am Hutu but I do not want to live with that legacy. I refuse to ask of the past more meaning than it can give to the present’’ (81; 67). The documents do not speak of an immemorial crime, but rather of the history of oppression. Cornelius wonders, however, if these ‘‘proofs’’ are not based on an immemorial crime that is repressed or forgotten in the historical accounts but still motivating the accounts, an immemorial crime that no one

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wants to hear but in the shadow of which a history of oppression produces itself. Cornelius fears the troubling possibility that the genocide of Rwanda may be the repetition of a violence that the myth of unity, in which he stubbornly believes, has consigned to forgetfulness. This line of questioning does not suggest, however, that the new mythology of essential division and absolute separation constituent of the ideology of Hutu purity, the foundational rhetoric of the genocide, is more original than the myth of unity. The violence may reside in the correlation between myth and foundation, in the violence that founds foundation, either as unity or division as law of pure identity. But Cornelius’s own identity cannot validate this double myth and may be the source of his anxieties and fears. He speaks of himself as a Hutu, unquestioningly adopting the patrilineal tradition of Rwanda, feeling secure in this identity category, and thus forgetting his mixed heritage (his Tutsi mother), and the fact that his very exile was due to his contaminated identity, neither an absolute division nor an absolute unity. To become a survivor, it seems imperative that he confront the implications of this mode of identity. Had he been in Rwanda, the violence of the genocide would surely have struck him from a very intimate place, that place that he now claims for himself, his Hutu identity, against that place that he forgets, his Tutsi identity. Cornelius vacillates between two positions regarding his identity’s relationship with history. While in the first instance what he is at present requires a recuperation of his past and all that he has lived and been, in the second instance he refuses that this identity receive its meaning from the past. In other words, while he first assumes that history could explain identity by telling him about his past and the past of his country, now he doubts the ability of history to give meaning. This doubt is motivated by his desire to escape the racial discourses that have explained Rwanda’s identity and conflicts. If historical documents speak of a history of oppression and division, then he doubts their reliability in order to bring to the fore a counternarrative of unity that transcends the discourses of division and dissemination. His aim is to supplant the narratives of division, be they historical or mythical, with that of unity and solidarity, and thus simultaneously resist the violence of the myth of purity. The move from the myth of purity to that of unity is mediated by a particular historico-political self-positioning. The insistence on 1959 sidesteps the mythical narratives of the genocide (the Tutsi are Hamites, Ethiopians) by privileging the political and historical, namely the revolution of 1959, and positing it as the origin for the deadly

26 Becoming-Survivor

politics founded on myth. Cornelius turns to historical documents in order to find a time that precedes division, a time in history, not myth. However, the documents reveal that history cannot recover this time, whether or not there was a time of unity. Only reverting to a mythic discourse would allow such a recuperation, which would imply the cancellation of the politicohistorical. The politics of genocide made this cancellation its goal. It eliminated the political frame of the republic by reverting to the mythical logic, and by creating a new mythology of unity based on exclusion. It then proceeded toward the total annihilation of the excluded element. Cornelius explains to his girlfriend in Djibuti, ‘‘We have the same language, the same God, Imana, the same beliefs, nothing divides us,’’ but she does not agree: ‘‘ ‘Yes, it does,’ responded Zakya spitefully: ‘between you there is this river of blood. After all, that’s not nothing. Stop making things up’ ’’ (81; 66). While the history of Rwanda in fact testifies to this sameness of language, customs, and religion, making of Rwanda an exemplary place on a continent where ethnic and linguistic multiplicity is the norm for the nation-state, it does not necessarily eliminate fragmentation. The river of blood between them, not mythic common blood, but the history of division according to blood, can no longer be sublated. It must remain the perpetually open wound of the nation. This is the ethical, political, and historical implications of Zakya’s cruel or ‘‘spiteful’’ words. The story can no longer be that of the ideal of unity and sameness but rather that of attention to a violence that has left nothing intact. In Rwanda, the metaphor of the river of blood is displaced by the very eerie materiality of the river Nyaborongo. Zakya’s spite lies in the ethical demand not to forget this materiality, not to efface it in favor of some mythical symbolic ideal of unity. How then can one create a politics of reconciliation and national unity? Cornelius attempts it through art. His play gestures toward the project of bridging the gap of blood. Through this staging, the community would share in the experience of gathering together and recognizing itself in the representation. This dynamic of self-reflection and recognition is mediated through a movement of distancing rendered possible by the figure of the French general. In other words, representational art becomes the political instrument that would close the gap of separation, rupture, and violence between the original myth of unity, on the one hand, and the politics of reconciliation, on the other, by underscoring their relation. Cornelius’s theatrical project seems motivated by the ethics of culpability without crime, for he suffers from the guilt of not having been there during the genocide. While his friends fought against it, risking their lives, ‘‘he had

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been leading a peaceful existence as a history teacher in Djibuti’’ (56; 45). Paradoxically, this guilt is also accompanied by a profound sense of innocence, made possible by his belief in the innocence of his patrilineal identity. His father, the famous and respected Dr. Karekezi, the champion of justice, the protector of the innocent, was a Hutu who dared marry a Tutsi and has reportedly died for his liberal ideas along with his wife and children. Cornelius has come back to learn about this great tragedy of self-sacrifice, resilience in the face of evil, and ideal of love and loyalty. Fully grounded in this innocence, Cornelius returns to appropriate this story as his own. Although his guilt is motivated by an absence of suffering, he suffers no implication regarding the genocide. He has a bad or guilty conscience, similar to the general’s conscience and the facile attitude of a liberal ideology, rather than the intimate sense of singular responsibility. Both a gesture of expiation and appropriation, his play responds to this particular mode of a guilty conscience. Cornelius adopts vis-a`-vis the genocide the position of an objective observer, one who seeks understanding through observation, so that he can explain better and understand more fully what has happened. However, he confronts the first signs of resistance to his objectivity in Kigali: ‘‘It was astounding [stupe´fiant] to Cornelius to note that the events of 1994 had left no visible traces anywhere. . . . The city refused to expose her wounds. . . . Cornelius didn’t even remember seeing any injured or mentally ill people during his walks. On the contrary, the country was intact and people were settled into their daily lives. . . . This disdain for the tragic seemed almost suspect to him. Was it out of dignity or habit of misfortune?’’ (61–62; 49– 50). What stupefies or astounds Cornelius is the fact that the story of the genocide does not readily ‘‘show’’ or offer itself up, that the city does not stage its tragedy. Cornelius wants access to the wounds, to the disjunctions and disruptions, and yet the city offers a scene of health and wholeness; it presents itself intact. This presentation does not reassure Cornelius but rather provokes a sense of discomfort and unease in him. He soon realizes that he has become the object of acute attention for the inhabitants of the city as he notices that some gazes confront him, while others purposefully avoid him: ‘‘The most unpleasant moments of his stay were the ones where he had to talk to strangers. He didn’t like to see all eyes converge on him. He would just as soon listen to the others, keeping in the background himself ’’ (63; 50). Gazes address him but he cannot respond meaningfully. In his unease, he dreams of occupying a divine-like position, present yet absent, hiding in the shadows, not called upon for response or to be responsible.

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Cornelius speaks to many and is addressed by those around him. The wounds of the city are not concealed as he imagines. The city is not intact. But he does not recognize this address. He only hears it belatedly, after the fact, when understanding and appropriation can no longer serve as his safeguards. One night shortly after his arrival, in Cafe´ des Grands Lacs, he is addressed strangely and indirectly by a man known as Matelot: ‘‘My friends, howl out your pain! . . . I have drunk blood. And now, listen carefully to me! . . . He announced his intention to finally reveal [faire e´clater] the truth, then came out with some enigmatic reproaches—toward whom? wondered Cornelius—in the middle of a heavier and heavier silence. . . . For a few moments, Cornelius had the impression that he was staring at him with a special intensity’’ (63–64; 51–52). Cornelius comes face to face with a resistance; events refuse to lend themselves to his understanding. The city and its inhabitants draw him in, demand his attention, without offering him the security of a meaning. ‘‘What does all that mean?’’ asks Cornelius, and his friend Stanley, who avoided Cornelius’s gaze during the Matelot incident, responds quickly: ‘‘Nothing.’’ ‘‘ ‘I am out of my depths,’ thought Cornelius, seeing his friend’s stony [closed] face’’ (66; 53). The closed face of the city and the closed face of his friend open a crack in his self-certainty. The intimacy of friendship keeps him at a distance and through this distance indicates the impossibility of the project of self-recovery and mastery. ‘‘For Cornelius, everything converged on this general malaise: the end of this evening in a city that he hardly knew, the half-light of the cafe´, the frozen faces, the raucous and lugubrious voices of Barthe´lemy and the Skipper’’ (65; 53). The voices that call to him come as if from the other side of the grave. They are the voices of those who have survived but carry death within them. Everything indicates the threat of disappearance: the frozen faces, as if in an image, on a statue or a phantom, devoid of expression and the reassurance of life, coupled with voices threatened with disappearance, low and unimposing, yet impossible to ignore, impossible not to listen to: ‘‘Reality had just been transformed, in a more or less worrisome way, into something that had already been experienced [ve´cu]’’ (65; 53). Reality as something already lived: an enigmatic thought! And why disquieting? Reality no longer belongs to the here and now, but to the past, a past that was never a present either. The scene is not a repetition of something actually lived, neither is it the surfacing of a repressed memory; rather, it is the return of a past that was never lived. In other words, the text seems to suggest a memory without anchor and foundation.14 Survival bears the memory of a death that has

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claimed the subject without having actually killed the subject. This memory mutates the experience of the present, rendering it ghostly: thus the disquieting quality of the instant that divides itself in this fashion.15 Cornelius suffers this mutation of time, a kind of temporality that opens a different relationship with the past and with the future. This mysterious relationship reassures him of neither recuperation nor belonging, but rather throws him into anxiety, disquietude, and malaise: ‘‘I am out of my depths.’’ In the heart of representation, in the sense of bringing the past to the present, be it historical or artistic—both modes are in question here—there is the disquieting inscription of a present without presence and of a memory without foundation. This memory is not the memory of a past actualized but rather the ambiguous experience of divisibility, a condition that repetition and representation require. The survivor speaks of the past and is directed toward the future, but he is under the effects of this mutated time and the weight of this memory. In this sense, the division or the rupture cannot be translated into a lack or a gap that can be filled or bridged. This other notion of memory in Diop’s novel indicates the rupture and the crisis of the present instant, implicating in turn both writing and speech because it inscribes silence in the heart of representation, erasure in the heart of repetition. The speech that speaks and writes and thus brings figures and narration to the fore does so under the effect of this silence. Cornelius’s experience of this temporal mutation comes about when Barthe´lemy, one of the silent clients of Cafe´ des Grands Lacs, interpellates him without really doing so. Up to then, Barthe´lemy has been content to smoke one Intore after another, his bottle of Primus in front of him, concentrating all his attention on Cornelius, who had been bothered by it. —‘‘In life,’’ said Barthe´lemy, ‘‘what is essential is for each one of us to be true to oneself [not to pass our truth by]. The rest . . . well, the rest doesn’t matter.’’ . . . From the way he unleashed his words, one felt he was a man sure of himself who—in solitary reflection—had formed very clear opinions on all subjects. No one answered him. It was as if each one of them was afraid to break the ambiguous charm of the moment [instant].’’ (65; 52–53)

Barthe´lemy speaks about truth and the essentiality of it, warning against wandering and erring. But the effect of this speech is not the recovery of truth but silence. No one responds. Barthe´lemy does not reveal a truth. He does not say what is this truth but rather that there is truth and that this truth is essential and must not be missed. Barthe´lemy’s speech is a call for an ethics

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of responsibility that is both ambiguous and necessary. The speech on truth does not produce truth but brings about silence and attention. The conjunction between ethics and survival comes forth in the speech and as the speech of a survivor. The speech of the survivor does not reveal truth; rather, it is the effect of a relationship with a truth it cannot reveal. It bears the memory of something both not yet lived and always already lived: death. Through this temporal modality, the survivor is bereft of any stable constitutive identity. She suffers from a temporal vertigo where the ground itself is the threat of losing one’s footing. The unsuitability of the instant for the constitution of any identity and certainty lies in the ambiguous position of the survivor, who belongs neither fully to life nor to death, but is rather caught at the point where one consistently passes into the other, invisibly and without a locatable mark or point of passage. This is also a place of passivity since no action can resolve the dilemma, no productive project can be calculatedly undertaken here. Passivity does not mean that the survivor is indifferent. On the contrary, the survivor is completely concerned and attentive, like the figure of Barthe´lemy and all those who listen to him. The survivor is the very figure of vigilance. Murambi is populated by many such figures. Among them are the guardians on the preserved sites, which Cornelius visits. The guardian is a limit figure. The one at Ntarama is neither old nor young, he is ambiguous and self-effacing: ‘‘The caretaker, a small man, had a flat nose and his hair, which contrasted with the apparent youthfulness of his face, was completely white. . . . He seemed intimidated by the visitors and stood there humbly, two hands crossed at thigh height’’ (87; 72). This guardian has survived by hiding in the marshes surrounding the church, listening to the sound of the dogs roaming in the vicinity.16 What about the sounds of the humans? The victims and the perpetrators? He says nothing about that. Another guardian, this time in Nyamata, can barely be recognized as a living being: ‘‘He had a terribly bony face and seemed to float about in his dirty shirt and his trousers patched at the knees and thighs. Cornelius was immediately struck by his lively eyes half hidden by the visor of his black cap. He spoke, a little bent forward, and his shrill voice had something unique about it’’ (90; 74). The eyes, keen and bright (vifs), stare out from under the cap, half-visible, with a gaze that has perhaps seen too much but that can reveal nothing of what it has seen. It simply shines forth as if from the other side of death. He speaks ‘‘in an overly succinct [elliptical, economical] style,’’ which gives

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very little, remaining obscure despite the exaggerated effort at being succinct. He too reverts to the historical mode of explanation such as how since 1959 one portion of the population kills another. He gives plenty of information, but his speech bears within it a quality of silence and muteness. A unique timbre characterizes his voice, perhaps because it is marked with the silence of an experience that cannot be represented, because something of speech has been carried away. The silence is not absolute; the voice bears silence within it, piercing through the silence without the ability to disentangle itself from its grips. What the eyes have seen the voice cannot bring forth. Perhaps the effort and the suffering that underlie the desire to translate one into the other deplete the body of its power and vitality, rendering it shadowlike and passive, offering it an interminable speech that says very little. The guardian belongs paradoxically to a space of excess of visibility that is the site of a profound withholding. There are remains everywhere, nothing is hidden from the eyes, and at no point does the guardian refuse to speak or withhold knowledge. He is perhaps the guardian of a secret that does not let itself be recognized as such, that is, a secret that cannot be named and revealed. Cornelius’s status as a survivor, therefore, is constituted not by his return and appropriation of his individual and collective history, by his ability to represent to himself and to others the catastrophic event of the genocide and to understand and explain both himself and his people. Rather, his becoming a survivor passes through a process and instants of contact, whereby he becomes dispossessed of both individuality and collectivity. In his proximity to the guardians and the bones at the sites of the genocide, Cornelius suffers a presentiment and an anxiety brought about by the experience of a profound ignorance. ‘‘Cornelius turned toward Jessica, hoping absurdly for the beginning of an on-site explanation. It was as if he’d never been aware of the atrocities committed in the country. He was about to let his rage explode at Jessica’’ (89; 73). Cornelius’s disquietude hints at a fissure in the continuity of knowledge and understanding that had given him an anchor until then and had defined the significance of his project of return. He suffers the impact of a strange ignorance that has little to do with lack of factual knowledge. Clearly, he has always known about the genocide, its history, its beginnings, its end, and its causes and effects. The disquieting quality of this ignorance lies in the opening of the experience of a certain unknowability, the experience of a truth without content. This unknowability does not negate information, nor does it forbid the search for filling the lacunae in

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information. In fact, it passes through knowledge, as discovery and revelation; it disperses itself there and thus provokes the collapse of the structure of meaning at the moment of the most significant revelation, which is to come. The exposure to the remains opens in Cornelius the experience of contamination that dispossesses him of his fantasy of occupying the position of an observer who can hide in the shadows only to observe others: ‘‘The acrid odor of decomposing bodies remained like a stinking little ball, diluting slowly in his blood’’ (91; 75). This experience of contamination recalls the earlier scene in Cafe´ des Grands Lacs where Matelot announces mysteriously: ‘‘And me, my blood is full of blood!’’ (64; 52). This infiltration of death and putrefaction, this state of contamination, opens in Cornelius the presentiment of a suffering to come: ‘‘There was no longer the shadow of a doubt: Jessica had something to tell him but she didn’t dare to. It must be very serious’’ (92; 75). Cornelius anticipates the disclosure of a secret, the discovery of something he does not yet know. Indeed, such a disclosure takes place: Jessica reveals to Cornelius what he came to Rwanda to find out. She tells him how his family was massacred. But this is not the story that Cornelius expected: ‘‘The carnage at the Murambi Polytechnic, that was his doing. You should also know that he had your mother, Nathalie Kayumba, your sister Julienne, your brother Franc¸ois, and all his in-laws killed there’’ (93; 76). His father, the respected Dr. Karekezi, had been the organizer and the perpetrator of one of the largest massacres of the genocide: forty-five to fifty thousand. To top this, he is not dead as Cornelius thought, but has been rescued by the French in Ope´ration Turquoise. He is assumed to be in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Cornelius does not respond to the revelation immediately, stupefied once again by the unexpected; but then ‘‘something amazing happened: he smiled’’ (94; 77), amazing because untimely and incomprehensible. The smile is not the expression of incredulity, nor of purposeful refusal, for ‘‘as stupefying as Jessica’s revelation was, Cornelius did not doubt her for a single instant’’ (94; my translation).17 The smile expresses the paradoxical event of both incredulity and certainty. It is the expression of a paradox both terrible and comical, comical because terrible. Cornelius expected something, but not this smile, this expression of release and openness. The smile does not break into laughter, that radical break with signification. Instead, it becomes the expression of both tension and release. Cornelius, from the beginning, expects that there will be meaning, explanation, revelation. The

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revelation comes but it does not offer meaning. Instead, it slowly undermines it. From this moment on, Cornelius’s belief in finding meaning in history—his own and his nation’s—crumbles. This history reveals itself to be the source not of reassurance or knowledge but suffering the absurd. What he knows now does not lead to better understanding but to the unknowable. With this smile, involuntary and perplexing, Cornelius is reminded of the many survivors whose stories he had heard, stories that had provoked peals of laughter in the survivors themselves as they told their own tales.18 This laughter marks the catastrophic more poignantly than most somber accounts, for it expresses an experience that cannot be internalized and registered, an expression that speaks of its own inability to express and laughs in the face of the effort to give meaning. Survivors do not laugh out of doubt or amusement; rather, they laugh because, like Cornelius himself, in their certainty they remain incredulous and uncertain. If we accept, following Immanuel Kant, that the imagination is the place of synthesis, giving form to the concepts of understanding, then the absurd is precisely the failure of the imagination to synthesize and consequently the failure of understanding. In other words, in the absurd, the imagination has reached its limit, which does not mean that we are now outside the imagination, since there is no such place, but it means that we must think and speak from the limit of the imagination, from the point where judgment is suspended.19 This limit of the imagination is also called the sublime, but, as Derrida reminds us, this sublime is not the place of absolute loss.20 When the faculties fail in their synthesis, the body registers this failure as the absurd. This instant also marks the singularity of the subject’s relationship with the event. Rather than subsuming it under the generality of the concept or understanding, the opening of the absurd points to a singular experience registered by the body. The singular is the emigrant, to borrow Søren Kierkegaard’s thought in Fear and Trembling, not only from the domain of the universal but also from the experience of absolute singularity in the transcendental sense of the Unique. The singular is instead the without-place. The only difference between Cornelius and the other survivors whose stories he has heard is that Cornelius still holds on to a possibility of signification and understanding and, because of this residue, continues his project of discovery. Cornelius shuttles back and forth between the universal and the singular. If the singular suspends the kind of speech that is in the service of understanding, it also does not allow absolute silence. ‘‘But to erase the bad impression that he believed he had made on Jessica, he said: ‘It’s hard for me

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to believe you’ ’’ (94; 77). The guilt of the inappropriate response throws his speech back into the logic of certainty in order to cover up the rupture, but this infected speech has lost all ‘‘essential’’ relationship with certainty; it does not believe in its own incredulity. The discourse of certainty becomes a simulacrum that tries to hide this too troubling and too incomprehensible experience: ‘‘ ‘But you know it is the truth,’ said Jessica softly.’’ ‘‘I don’t know why I smiled just then,’’ he finally admits. In this encounter between Jessica and Cornelius, Jessica somehow knows the simulacrum of incredulity that Cornelius performs. Contrary to his fear, she does not misunderstand his smile and does not judge it as inappropriate. The smile is the mark of a truth that Cornelius cannot integrate yet cannot deny. Barthe´lemy’s speech had imposed this ethical exigency, not as a choice but as a necessity (‘‘to be true to oneself ’’ or ‘‘not to pass our truth by’’). For Cornelius, this ethics of not passing by one’s truth does not offer stability but rather leads toward the aporia of the ethics of survival, the aporia of the conjunction between guilt and innocence, culpability without crime: ‘‘You must have found my idea of a play out of place, Jessica,’’ remarks Cornelius with despair (95; 78). But his friend’s response is neither a condemnation nor support; rather, it expresses the problematic ethical dimension within which Cornelius functioned, without knowing. ‘‘Not really. I simply took it as a sign of the extent to which you considered yourself innocent.’’ Jessica’s own persistent anxiety and disquietude point to the expression of an ambiguity in the delimitation between the categories of guilt and innocence. She, who spent her life fighting with the other side, risking her life every moment as a spy, impersonating a Hutu when in fact she is a Tutsi, also bears the guilt of witnessing the killing of a woman without raising a hand. At a roadblock, a Tutsi woman turns to her for help, asking her to convince the militia that she is not Tutsi. Jessica’s turn away from the woman creates a complicity between her and the guard who, joyously, says to her: ‘‘Ah, you’re hardhearted my sister, so you are! Come on, you should take pity on her!’’ (42; 32). This scene too is laughable. The man devoid of pity recommends pity to one whom he considers his accomplice. This is the scene of an impossible ethics. To practice pity is precisely that which a genocide does not allow, that which it eliminates while at the same time parodying it and emptying it of any meaning and consequence. With his simulacrum of calling Jessica to pity, he is celebrating the lack of pity, his own and hers, and this is the complicity. In order to stay alive and continue her work, Jessica could not betray her origin or even her sympathies, but precisely because of this she bears the burden of guilt.

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Cornelius suddenly finds himself implicated in this contaminated space that conditions his status as a survivor. He can no longer assume the representative voice of his people, nor the voice of the historian who clarifies facts and posits causes. ‘‘Now, his return from exile could no longer have the same meaning. From now on, the only story he had to tell was his own. The story of his family. He had suddenly discovered that he had become the perfect [ide´al] Rwandan: both guilty and a victim’’ (95; 78). The ideal of a unified Rwanda with a common origin, a common language, and a common God, which Cornelius has espoused all these years now, gives way to an indeterminacy that no ideal can resolve. The ideal Rwandan now is an ethically ruptured subject, a survivor. The assumptions about the unity of a community that he would reclaim as his own now give way to the experience of a singularity that can only be born in solitude: ‘‘ ‘You have a long path to take in your heart and in your mind. You’re going to suffer a lot, and that might be good for you.’—‘I’ll be alone,’ he said.—‘Yes, you’ll be alone’ ’’ (96; 79). The itinerary of the text sketches out this movement from the ethics of universality to the ethics of singularity. This movement belongs neither to the politics of the genocide nor to that of reconciliation in the postgenocide era, for both of these domains, drastically different as they are in their political and ethical implications, are teleological: a higher work of justice that would allow a recuperation of the unity of the nation-state. This is precisely how Dr. Karekezi, Cornelius’s father, justified his atrocities: ‘‘The sadistic way that things sometimes happen is just a detail. The ends justify the means. Nothing else counts’’ (123; 102). Truth and justice were the final objectives of Dr. Karekezi. How profoundly terrifying when the project of national reconciliation shares its vocabulary with the project of the genocide. Even the transcendental concepts of ‘‘truth’’ and ‘‘justice,’’ like that of ‘‘pity,’’ witness contamination. Nothing is left untouched. In order not to pass by one’s truth, the ethical demand is to remain vigilant toward language. What the genocide has revealed is that language has lost all essential relationship with truth in the sense of foundational concepts. This loss opens an abyss before the subject. What happens when words such as ‘‘justice’’ and ‘‘truth’’ can provide no ground upon which one can stand in conceptual certainty? The conceptual contamination dispossesses language of its authority and power to posit. However, language does not disappear but continues within this dynamic of disempowerment and as this dynamic of disempowerment, with a power that can no longer appeal to the authority of a will, to knowledge, to appropriation,

36 Becoming-Survivor

or to self-possession. We are reminded of Adorno’s well-known and provocative question about the possibility of poetry ‘‘after Auschwitz.’’ Adorno’s mordant critique is directed toward the kind of committed literature that seeks to represent victims and by doing so aestheticizes suffering. For Adorno, after Auschwitz literature reveals its paradoxical and aporetic nature: ‘‘The abundance of real suffering allows no forgetting. . . . But that suffering—what Hegel called the awareness of affliction—also demands the continued existence of the very art it forbids’’ (‘‘Commitment’’ 88). Boris Diop’s strategy of writing about Rwanda remains faithful to this paradoxical dimension of literature: disempowered but necessary. He belongs to the group of writers whom Adorno designates as the ‘‘most significant artists,’’ ‘‘the uncompromising radicalism of [whose] works . . . endows them with a frightening power that impotent poems about the victims lack.’’ In Murambi, the exigency of the ethics of survival imposes on the subject the necessity of another speech, one that can perhaps be best expressed in the words of Georges Didi-Huberman: ‘‘inadequate but necessary,’’ ‘‘inexact but true.’’21 In his play, Cornelius sought to expose the paradoxes of the genocide: the unholy alliance between the French believer in human rights and the genocide machinery. After all, according to Jessica, Ope´ration Turquoise built its bases on the very sites of the Murambi massacre: ‘‘The French were occupying the Polytechnic, on top of the mass graves of Murambi, and your father was the one who talked to them’’ (95; 78). Little did Cornelius know then that the story he had planned to represent resembled so strangely the story of his own father. Slowly, the similarities between these two stories, including the attachment to a pet, unfold in an uncanny fashion. But as it turns out in his family’s story, the central villain was not a foreigner, but someone very much intimate and at home, his father. Here, it was not the Frenchman who sought the help of the Interahamwe, but rather a collaborator of the Interahamwe who sought the help of the French. This reversal underscores the singularity of Cornelius’s relationship with the story. It appears that he was called by a story that he could not tell, yet a story that was intimately his. Cornelius returns from exile in hopes of recovering a lost meaning, a home, and a place of belonging. Instead, he suffers the acuteness of exile and of groundlessness at home. He returns to Murambi, the place of his birth, but it is precisely here that everything escapes him: ‘‘I know, Cornelius, it’s hard to come home after so many years and to think of one’s family without even daring to mention them by name,’’ remarks his uncle Sime´on

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sympathetically. ‘‘Yes it isn’t easy, I was just thinking about it,’’ responds Cornelius (168; 140). There are two reasons why Cornelius cannot name his family. First, every time he mentions them, he must confront the terrible legacy of his father and his own ambiguous position within this legacy. Second, naming no longer has the power to reassure and to establish the genealogy of belonging and a return to the self. Instead, naming those he has lost becomes a danger. The problem is not that he cannot name them but that he does not dare, which is not a question of power but of anxiety and fear. This impossible naming opens the question of mourning. If the purpose of the proper name is to refer to someone unique, that is, to the uniqueness of the one named, and to bring into presence this uniqueness in its absence, the very fact that the proper name can be and must be repeated undermines the uniqueness. This erasure of uniqueness comes about because the proper name not only enters temporality, but is also shared and divided among beings from the very beginning, never the unique name of a unique being.22 In other words, the proper name does not preserve the uniqueness of the one who has died—of the victims, and in Cornelius’s case, of his mother and siblings—but rather signals the death of the unique every time the name gives itself to repetition. The danger therefore lies not in reviving the dead by naming them but in losing the dead more profoundly.23 The impossibility of mourning is a function of this fundamental anonymity of the name that keeps the speaker attending to a singular experience of emptiness. Terror is brought about by the relationship of the ‘‘I’’ to this empty presence. ‘‘The anonymous after the name is not the nameless anonymous,’’ explains Blanchot. ‘‘The anonymous does not consist in refusing the name in withdrawing from it. The anonymous puts the name in place, leaves it empty, as if the name were there only to let itself be passed through because the name does not name, but is the non-unity and non-presence of the nameless’’ (Step Not Beyond 35). I argued at the beginning of this chapter that the third-person narrative voice opens the space of the anonymous as the ghostly possibility of narration. The irony of Cornelius’s itinerary lies in the distance between his project of self-recuperation and the anonymity by which he is already claimed. The relation with the anonymous nonunity makes the subject enter into a state of exile from which he cannot recover. Once the power of naming as bringing forth and memorializing withdraws, Cornelius loses the anchor of belonging to a genealogy that would ensure his return.

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Yet Cornelius remains tenacious in his desire for an anchor. The terror of the anonymous and the concomitant silent disempowerment of language provoke a resistance in Cornelius. Wanting to convert an impossible mourning into memorializing, he returns to the house where he grew up and retrieves articles that would help him construct a coherent narrative for himself. He cannot tolerate the abyss of meaning that has opened before him. Once again he collects documents and facts: ‘‘Cornelius organized several documents in a file. There were addresses and telephone numbers— including his own in Djibuti—as well as a notebook in which the doctor wrote down his appointments and quickly scribbled down his impressions. He also took some of his mother’s things. All these would help him, even if he didn’t know how yet, to do up the loose and frayed threads of his existence’’ (196; 164). In search of serenity and a sense of the future, he has to accept his past no matter how terrible; he must pay the price, but for what? Cornelius cannot escape the model of guilt and expiation of guilt, for which the play was the first, though less precise, gesture. But the nature of the survivor’s guilt and innocence cannot be reduced to such an economic formula. On the one hand, each survivor is inscribed in the indeterminate ethical dynamic of innocent, but guilty in singular ways: Jessica through political activity and Cornelius through filiation. On the other hand, the singularity of each case allows the survivor to share in an ethics of responsibility that repeats itself in each case and yet differentiates itself from the logic of legal proceedings and discourses of accountability. The difference between the survivor and the perpetrator lies in this double sense of responsibility: the survivor’s indeterminate ethical position excludes her from legal responsibility and accountability. Before the law, the survivor is innocent and this innocence creates the radical and incommensurable distance between the survivor and the perpetrator in terms of ethics. Cornelius continues to search for coherence and understanding because he imagines the future to be only possible in these terms. Yet he does not know how to recover his serenity and this sense of the future. He lacks the path that would lead him to meaning and an internalization of his own history. Earlier, his hope was in his paternal uncle, Sime´on Habineza, but his uncle has turned out to be the very figure of distance and impossible relation: ‘‘Despite his kindness, his gestures bore a stamp of reserve that commanded respect. In spite of himself, he imposed a certain distance. In his presence, Cornelius had the strange impression of being, once again, the twelve year old kid who left Murambi for Bujumbura, and then Djibuti’’

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(166; 138). In the proximity of this figure, a hint of the impossibility confronting Cornelius comes to the fore: ‘‘But maybe one doesn’t emerge from exile without becoming a child again’’ (167; 138). Sime´on too is a guardian. He is the guardian of his brother’s house because keeping a house is necessary for a family and helps in finding one’s way. But finding one’s way is a complicated and solitary affair, for it leads in the direction of the most vertiginous suffering. ‘‘You must be like the solitary traveler, Cornelius. If he gets lost, he looks up at the sky and the trees, he looks all around him. But the traveler could have said to himself, bending down toward the ground: ‘I am going to ask the path, who has been here for such a long time, he’ll surely be able to help me.’ Now, the path will never show him the way to go. The path does not know the way [path]’’ (200; 167). The path, be it the house, the uncle, objects, or the remnants cannot offer him direction. The solitude of the survivor lies in this impossibility of finding the ground that would guide him. Instead, he must give himself over to the experience of uncertain wandering. His search for meaning in things, in the objects of the past, or in history leads him nowhere, for things do not know themselves and do not offer themselves to knowledge just as the event does not know itself, and this is the problem that all discourses of knowledge want to overcome. To approach the event, one looks to the things that remain, but these things reveal neither themselves nor the event. They simply point to the detour that the path must take toward the event. The things at stake in Rwanda are primarily the remnants of the genocide, the traces of the atrocities displayed everywhere. Cornelius returns to the scene of the massacre of Murambi hoping for answers. Speaking and listening are the necessary conditions of survival. But how can one speak to bones and listen to them? ‘‘ ‘I cannot find words to speak to the dead,’ ’’ says Cornelius to Sime´on. ‘‘ ‘There are no words to speak to the dead,’ said Sime´on in a tense voice. ‘They won’t get up to answer you. What you’ll learn there is that everything is quite over for the dead of Murambi’ ’’ (201; 167). The dead do not speak, there is no resurrection, no transcendental voice from beyond the grave that can reassure the living. The dead will reveal nothing and offer no assistance in living with the aftermath of the event. Their silence forecloses the possibility of both resurrection and redemption. The dead promise us nothing and this is the terror of our intimacy with the dead. We are on our own, solitary and abandoned, without ground. The dead in Rwanda are not even cadavers but collections of bones, of skeletons, ‘‘des ossements.’’ If the cadaver bears any trace of the living being it once was, the collection of bones is the sign of

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the profoundest forsaking of the living. Murambi is not The Book of the Dead, nor is it the book of blood, Le livre du sang (chapter 5), but ‘‘The Book of Bones,’’ le livre des ossements, the radical abandonment of life toward which the living are turned. How to survive such a catastrophe? The figures of survival, Matelot (French for ‘‘skipper’’), Jessica, Sime´on, and the woman in black at the end of the novel, do not help Cornelius transcend and resolve the paradoxes of his existence but rather open in him the experience of singular solitude and suffering that becoming a survivor, in the specific sense I have been exploring, requires. The weight of the ‘‘still alive’’ reveals itself in the ethical aporias of guilty but innocent, life carried away by death, and the impossibility of resurrection, redemption, and conclusion. Matelot, the mysterious character from the cafe´ in Kigali who reappears in Murambi, turns out to be one of a dozen survivors of the Murambi massacre. Ge´rard Nayinzira, a.k.a. Matelot, dreamt as a child of becoming a sailor, in a landlocked country! When Cornelius points out the absurdity of this dream to Sime´on, the latter responds,‘‘ ‘So what? Isn’t that a real dream?’ ’’ (166; 138). The absurdity of the dream lies precisely in its being a dream, the dream of an impossibility that defines the relationship of the child with the future; not the future in terms of an actualizable project, but in terms of an impossible expectation that offered unlimited possibility.24 But Ge´rard no longer dreams of becoming a sailor; he used to dream (reˆvait). The suffering of survival chases the dream away. Through his connection with Ge´rard, Cornelius becomes aware of his own exile, which is double. The exile that he has lived for many years in Djibuti is now doubled by another, more profound exile, the one of not having suffered the sufferings that he could call his own: ‘‘He felt that he would never be able to understand the pain that had not been his. His return was almost becoming another exile’’ (181; 151). But is this the difference between Cornelius and Ge´rard? Is Ge´rard, unlike Cornelius, in possession of his suffering? Is it because Ge´rard has access to suffering that he can no longer dream of that impossible but affirming future that was the dream of his childhood, while Cornelius continues to remember nostalgically the idyllic image of the child with a flute on the banks of the river, an image from his childhood? The rupture in Ge´rard’s dream is juxtaposed to this continued nostalgia for childhood and its ideals in Cornelius. Ge´rard, however, never accuses Cornelius of not having been there to suffer with everyone. Rather, he accuses him of being ignorant of his own implication, which initially provokes such self-assurance in him. Even Ge´rard, this man who, as we learn slowly, has barely escaped death as if by pure

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luck, cannot escape the paradox of guilt and innocence that configures the ethical aporia of surviving. ‘‘You were there, in the Cafe´ des Grands Lacs, comfortable, sure of yourself, and you didn’t know that everyone was following your slightest gesture and listening to your words. . . . You started to talk about that pretty girl who gave you the eye in the bar in Abidjan,’’ said Ge´rard coldly. ‘‘You were making big gestures, your entire body was getting away from you, while we, because of circumstances, we’ve learnt to draw in our bodies, we’ve received so many blows, right? And there, at the GL, the only thing we heard was you, . . . in a word, you felt great.’’ (181; 151)

What Ge´rard accuses Cornelius of is that, in his ignorance, he is able to speak of beauty, of art, of return, and of possibility. He exposes Cornelius as turned upon himself in self-assured ease, while everyone in the cafe´ is turned toward him, listening to him, affected by his corporeality. Ge´rard is not mired in silence. In fact, he speaks ceaselessly. Cornelius remembers Ge´rard’s enigmatic words at the cafe´: ‘‘In the Cafe´ des Grands Lacs you said, ‘My blood is full of blood.’ You don’t realize it, but you talk about it all the time’’ (209; 174). Ge´rard no longer speaks of dreams and ideals, of love and beauty. Blood and losing blood have no teleological significance for him. His endless speech comes from the ghostly place of the one who is both dead and alive. Alive in spite of everything. Ge´rard has survived because he let himself be covered by falling bodies. Hidden by these massacred bodies, he inhaled, swallowed, and spat the blood of the victims that invaded his body and protected him. Ge´rard speaks from this site of contamination always and forever: Yes, I was obliged to swallow and then spit out their blood, it went into my whole body. During those minutes, I thought that maybe trying to survive wasn’t the right decision. I was tempted a thousand times to let myself die. Something was calling me, something with a terrible power: it was nothingness. A sort of dizziness. I had the feeling that there would be something like happiness to throw into the emptiness. But I kept splashing around in their blood. You know, blood’s nothing, the poets have ended up making it seem almost beautiful. Shed your blood for your country. The blood of Martyrs. You’re telling me! It doen’t mean anything [all that says nothing], Cornelius, of the urine and excrements spread all over the ground, of old women running naked, the noise of limbs shattering, and of all these hallucinating looks, strapping fellows who use the wounded as shields against the machetes, that

42 Becoming-Survivor doesn’t tell you anything about all those unfortunates who despise each other so much that they don’t dream of hating their torturers: on the contrary, I heard them begging. (209; 174)

And he goes on and on. In the ethical aporia resounds the call of the void, something immemorial, contentless, but threatening. Survival has the dual face of both resistance and response to this temptation and its call. How can such a being regain his balance and self-certainty? Ge´rard’s language refuses the ideal, refuses the inspiration of the beautiful and the noble; it even negates dignity and self-respect. We must remember that the story of a genocide is a story of blood. Not only because blood is spilled, but because this blood is spilled with the aim of assuring a higher purity of blood. Blood was spilled so that blood could be purified. Purity of race could tolerate nothing short of the absolute annihilation of all possibilities of contamination. Even fetuses were to be cut out of women in mixed relationships. Despite the fact that Hutu identity is patrilineal, many children of Hutu fathers and Tutsi mothers, like Cornelius, were annihilated. So were Hutu men of mixed marriages unwilling to turn on their own families.25 The first article of the Ten Commandments of Bahutu, published in 1990, expresses this anxiety of contamination through the Tutsi woman and considers a traitor any Hutu man who marries or takes as a secretary, concubine, or prote´ge´e a Tutsi woman.26 Therefore, the total annihilation of the Tutsi involves not only the massacre of those living, but also the destruction of all possibility for regeneration. This project of total annihilation was the extreme measure taken in order to safeguard both political power and ideal racial purity as constructed during the colonial and postcolonial eras.27 Instead of the ideals of blood, Ge´rard’s language is that of abjection and of the negation of transcendence marked by the materiality of bodies, excrements, and spilled blood. Even the hatred of the enemy is rendered impossible because the victims hate themselves more than they hate the perpetrators. He speaks of a fatality accepted by the victims with regard to their own victimhood. What an unbearable thought! Ge´rard is a survivor because he carries death, the death of others, within him and because he cannot transcend the aporia to which this experience has exposed him. We remember that when Cornelius, in his desire for national unity, tells Zakya that there is nothing separating the Hutu and the Tutsi, she reminds him of the river of blood between them. Now it is Ge´rard who reminds him of the river of blood that has contaminated life with death. Ge´rard is not from

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Murambi, but now he is Cornelius’s guide through not only the site of the massacre but also Cornelius’s childhood home. Ge´rard does not speak of future projects, nor does he speak of his own history or that of his family. He simply returns over and over again to the place where his bones should have been: ‘‘ ‘Sometimes, I go back to Murambi. I look at the place where my bones would [should] have been and I tell myself something is wrong. I move my hands and my feet because it seems strange to me that they’re still there, and my entire body seems like a hallucination to me’ ’’ (211; 176). Cornelius protects himself from the contamination of this speech with the hope of forgiveness. He hopes that the speech would be therapeutic for Ge´rard and would bring him closer to forgiveness: ‘‘He admired Ge´rard’s courage. He had needed it to be able to get to his confession. Cornelius just hoped that this secret he had shared with him would be Ge´rard Nayinzira’s first step toward forgiveness’’ (212; 176). Forgiving whom? Cornelius? The perpetrators? The victims? Himself ? A general pardon for everyone? But the possibility of forgiveness is nowhere posited in the text. This does not mean that there is no forgiveness but that if there is forgiveness, it does not manifest itself and cannot be known.28 The survivor’s ethical aporia of guilt and innocence renders his relationship with forgiveness aporetic as well. Given that in the case of the survivor, the categories of guilt and innocence cannot be delimited, forgiveness can remain at best the experience of an indeterminacy. The figure of Ge´rard repeats the figures of the guardians, who, in their singular relationship with this event, neither condemn nor forgive but rather are inhabited by a passivity that constitutes their relationship with death. Can an event like Murambi, like Rwanda, be forgiven? Is it forgivable? The impossibility of forgiving lies in the fact that one does not know whom to forgive and for what exactly. Forgiving is a form of address and a relation with the other: ‘‘I forgive you.’’ Furthermore, can one forgive by proxy, speaking for the victims who can address no one and have no subjective position that would allow them to occupy, even provisionally, the ‘‘I’’ of address? Much of the process of reconciliation has founded its logic on this practice of confession and hope for forgiveness, in view of national unity and political possibility. However, the extremely complicated scenarios of guilt and innocence signal the unforgivable conditions of the aftermath. Can one forgive oneself ? Nor does this impossibility open onto another form of justice outside the law, such as the justice claimed in vengeance. Sime´on gives voice to both the survivors’ culpability and the temptation for vengeance. He bars the path toward vengeance precisely by reason of culpability. His brother’s house, which he guards with such tenacity, embodies this

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aporia of impossible forgiving and impossible vengeance as the condition of justice. When people want to attack Dr. Karekezi’s house, he speaks to them: You have suffered but that doesn’t make you better than those who have made you suffer. They are people like you and me. Evil is within each one of us. I, Sime´on Habineza, repeat, that you are not better than them. Now, go back home and think about it: there comes a time when you have to stop shedding blood in a country. Each one of you must have the strength to believe that this moment is here. If someone among you is not strong enough, then he’s no better than an animal. My brother’s house will not be destroyed. It will be a home for all the orphans who hang about on the streets of Murambi. And I’m going to say one last thing: let not one of you try, when the moment comes, to find out if those orphans are Twa, Hutu, or Tutsi. (197; 164)

This discourse is political and ethical. It aims at unity and reconciliation, but this project is not based on any transcendental condition of forgiveness, vengeance, or justice in its judicial sense. It proposes that the ethical basis for the political be not an overcoming of this event but the consistent turn in thought toward the condition of culpability that contaminates everyone. Moreover, it does not eliminate or deny difference in general, but proposes that unity must and can only be established on the basis of a resistance to knowledge about particular differences. The injunction is ‘‘do not find out who is Twa, Hutu, or Twa’’ not that there are no Twa, Hutu, or Tutsi. This latter was Cornelius’s mythic ideal. According to Sime´on’s position, the politics of difference must remain suspended and this constitutes the ethical demand of the political. In Rwanda, the categories of Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa have such an ambiguous and unstable history that finding out who is Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa—that is, a purposeful investigation in these terms with the end of categorizing people—always risks repeating the genocidal logic and its violence. Cornelius becomes a survivor when he too becomes the guardian of the bones of Murambi. Unable to understand, represent, and resolve, Cornelius enters into a singular relationship with the dead of Murambi. He does not expect anything from the bones of Murambi: ‘‘He wanted neither to pray nor to cry. He expected no miracles in front of the petrified remains of Murambi’’ (216; 180). Like Sime´on, he no longer believes in the power of transcendence. For Sime´on, the unbridgeable temporal rupture that Rwanda has undergone offers no solace in history, in tradition, or in God. Contrary

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to Cornelius’s early position, Sime´on does not believe in myths and ideals but feels betrayed by them: ‘‘ ‘These days, Sime´on detests proverbs and everything else that they call ancient wisdom. . . . He thinks that our people were betrayed by Imana’ ’’ (197–98; 165). Sime´on refuses the notion that the genocide was announced, that there were signs predicting its coming. There was nothing. The genocide was the unexpected. All explanations after the fact necessarily forget this unexpected dimension of the catastrophe, the mark of its rupture. In this sense, the genocide was not an exceptionally significant event, an event filled with significance, and this is its terrifying quality; the banality with which it began and was carried out: ‘‘ ‘No, there was no sign, Cornelius. Don’t listen to those who claim to have seen spots of blood on the moon before the massacres. Nothing of the sort happened. The wind didn’t howl with sorrow during the night, nor did the trees start to talk to each other about the folly of men. It was all very simple’ ’’ (184; 153). There were no revelations, no natural warnings, no mythical ordeal. The supposed harmony between the world of men and nature did not manifest itself. Nature was not in synch with human suffering and neither was God: ‘‘Yes, the matter was a decidedly obscure one’’ (215; 179). In survival one must cope with this double quality of simplicity and obscurity. No amount of knowledge can clarify this affair. Cornelius gives up his efforts at historical explanation and mythical revival of unity. He feels himself ripped (de´chire´) by what escapes him and yet will not let go of him. So he thinks of a mad God, who, suddenly demented, descends upon Rwanda, ripping the harmony of cosmos: ‘‘That orgy of hate went far beyond the struggle for power in a little country. He dreamt of a God who had suddenly become demented, parting the clouds and stars with angry, sweeping gestures, to descend onto Rwanda’s soil’’ (214; 178). The betrayal and the catastrophe, this turn in the course of time, are the consequences of the failures of reason, for God is not absolute reason but sudden madness descending from the transcendental domain to wreak havoc on man, on time, on history, and on language. Now Cornelius knows the limits of his projects: ‘‘Those cruel days were like nothing that had ever been seen. Woven from flashes, they were threaded with all manner of frenzy. Cornelius was conscious of it, he would never be able to take this whirlwind, its bright colors, its howls and its furious twisting’’ (215; 179). The project of representation abandoned, Cornelius now turns to another region, another relation with language and with time. This too he learns from Sime´on, who had told him ‘‘a genocide is not just any kind of story, with a beginning and

46 Becoming-Survivor

an end between which more or less ordinary events take place. Without ever having written a line in his life, Sime´on Habineza was, in his own way, a real novelist, that is to say, when all is said and done, a storyteller of the eternal’’ (215; 179). The storyteller is turned toward this temporal rupture that neither speaks of the past nor predicts the future. Instead, he speaks in relation to this time without end and remains attentive toward this fracture that nothing can bridge. Eternity, no longer inscribed in the experience of a beyond, is the time of this storm of madness. It is the time of the instant of catastrophe, the instant that divides itself perpetually. The catastrophe is this simple and obscure event that does not know itself and cannot therefore offer itself to us as a moment of plenitude of knowledge and understanding. The novel ends with a dramatic turn in language. Cornelius continues to speak, in spite of everything; not the speech of historical explanation, mythical nostalgia, or symbols and artistic impulse, but a language opened by despair and powerlessness yet intimate with violence: ‘‘He wasn’t giving up his enthusiasm for words, dictated by despair, helplessness before the sheer immensity of evil, and no doubt a nagging conscience. . . . He would tirelessly recount horror. With machete words, club words, words studded with nails, naked words and—despite Ge´rard [with all due respect to Ge´rard]— words covered with blood and shit. This he could do, because he saw in the genocide of Rwandan Tutsis a great lesson in simplicity. Every chronicler could at least learn—something essential to his art—to call a monster by its name’’ (215; 179). Not speaking is not an option for Cornelius. He must speak, not only because not speaking is playing into the hands of the perpetrators, but also because the survivor must establish a relationship with the future. A different way of speaking, a different language, powerless and in despair, allows this turn toward the future. Survival is at stake. Survival depends on naming: naming the violence, naming the monsters, even if, as we have seen, naming assigns the thing to the anonymous. While earlier, he would not dare name, now he must name, in spite of everything. Surviving requires the courage to remain in attention toward the anonymous that reassures us of nothing. He will not speak of horror, but he will speak horror with words contaminated with violence, blood, and excrement. Language is no longer innocent and noble but implicated and abject. However, this condition of speech does not mean that speech must be abandoned as if we had a choice of speaking and not speaking; for not speaking, silence, already belongs to the operation of language as its ‘‘foundation and punctuation.’’29 If language, disempowered, does not guarantee the bringing forth of truth, that does not exempt us from the responsibility, and indeed the urgency, of

Becoming-Survivor 47

speech, not only for ethical reasons but also for survival. For this reason Cornelius is drawn toward the dead, finding himself at their side. His speech takes place at the edge of the possible, between the possible and the impossible. His impulse to speak directs him toward the dead, who neither reveal anything to him nor can hear him, for, as Sime´on reminds him, there are no words with which to speak to the dead. In the proximity of the dead, Cornelius experiences the profoundest silence. His language comes forth in relation with this silence: ‘‘Not a single echo remained of the thousands of cries of terror that went up one morning toward the sky’’ (216; 180). Out of this silence comes the call to speech, not a representational speech, nor the voice of the dead; rather, a speech intimate with shadows and with phantoms. This call to speech, which, in the aftermath of the catastrophe is disempowered and weak, directs Cornelius’s path toward the bones. There death can offer neither salvation nor explanation but only a turn in speech. In Murambi, the dead speak but there is no language with which to address them. Such is the catastrophic destitution of living as a survivor. The final scene of the novel, both a closing and an opening, marks the turning toward a speech to come. The final visit to the site of the technical school exposes Cornelius to a different mode of survival. Cornelius returns to visit the bones, as he has done before many times. But this time his visit is interrupted, and this interruption marks the instant of survival as a relationship with a different speech and time. The interruption comes from a familiar figure, a woman clad in black who visits the site regularly. The door opens gently and Cornelius, instead of turning and discovering the source of the interruption, gives himself over to the sound of approaching steps: ‘‘He let himself be soothed by their slight crunching on the sand. Soon, the sound started to wane before abruptly stopping’’ (216; 180). He feels the presence of someone who has stopped right behind him, ‘‘However, he felt a stronger and stronger human presence nearby. Someone was standing behind him and was watching him silently.’’ The figure moves past him and only then does he recognize the young woman in black who comes every day to the site. She clearly does not wish to be seen and therefore passes shadowlike near Cornelius without speaking to him and without allowing him to see her face. Both dead and alive, neither dead nor alive, she is the figure of the phantom survivor. How will those who give counts of Rwanda’s dead account for her, Cornelius wonders, ‘‘Maybe, there was less life in the veins of that unknown woman than among the remains [bones] of Murambi’’ (217; 181). The woman is a figure in terms of both her anonymity and the fragility of her presence. Dwelling in the zone of indeterminacy

48 Becoming-Survivor

between life and death, she is the figure of this indeterminacy, participating in both life and death and yet belonging to neither. The unaccountable dimension of catastrophe comes to the fore in this figure as death contaminates life while at the same time making it impossible to decide upon the line of demarcation between them. The approach and the gaze of the anonymous woman call to Cornelius, but he does not turn toward the one who approaches; he does not behold her, does not attempt to reassure himself. Instead, he allows himself to be exposed to the gaze without seeking protection from it by wishing to hide in the shadows and become an observer, as was the case when he first arrived in Kigali and felt himself the object of everyone’s attention at Cafe´ des Grands Lacs. Something has dramatically changed in Cornelius between this passivity as self-exposure and the first days of his return where he was either unconscious of the gazes of the others, as Ge´rard accused him, or wanted to protect himself from them. In this final scene, Cornelius neither wishes to hide nor impose his own mode of understanding on the events. He leaves himself open to this approach of the other. The obscure figure of this woman undermines the kind of clarity of knowledge that Cornelius came to seek in Rwanda, about himself, about his family, about his nation. She is a figure of the obscurity that belongs to the event and to the time of catastrophe: ‘‘The young woman in black was, however, the shadow that the early morning had been watching for a long time’’ (218; 181). She is the figure of the obscurity with which the text earlier qualifies the event: ‘‘Yes, the matter was a decidedly obscure one.’’ This is the menacing quality of the unaccountable. The obsession with numbers of victims and with determining the extent of the destruction expresses the fear of this obscurity, which threatens clarity and certainty. But this figure also offers the possiblity of a future and becomes the figure of hope, which ends the novel. Cornelius is now open to exposure and to waiting. This waiting signals a turn toward the future. He waits for the anonymous woman to return so that he can see her face, listen to her voice, and speak to her. This waiting is a necessity and the very condition for the possibility of a future speech, of a re´cit to come, and the ethical dimension to which the survivor must respond: ‘‘He had to see her face, listen to her voice. She had no reason to hide, and it was his duty to get as close as he could to all suffering. He wanted to say to the woman in black—as he would later to Zakya’s children—that the dead of Murambi, too, had dreams, and that their most ardent desire was for the resurrection of the living’’ (218; 181). The possibility of a future offers itself with this speech to

Becoming-Survivor 49

come, under the effect and in the proximity of profoundest sorrow. It will be a dream speech, both real and unreal, not the dream of the living, but that of the dead. He wants to speak of resurrection, not the resurrection of the dead, but of the living. A strange reversal binds him to this speech, the way a photographic image results from a reversed relation to both the projected image and the original object, except that here, there is no original object that may be recuperated in the image. Death has invaded life. Out of the jaws of this death, life detaches itself in order to continue, but phantomlike, as in a dream. And the dream no longer belongs to the domain of the ideal. These are the effects brought about by the radical turns and rotations of the catastrophe. Cornelius waits for the woman’s return in order to see, hear, and speak. He could have said something to her when she arrived, but he did nothing.’’ Only the turn of the woman, of the anonymous livingdead, more dead than living, inaugurates sight, hearing, and speech. This rotation provides direction for the senses and allows language to flow out.30 The power of naming belongs to this stealing away and turning that inaugurate speech. In other words, naming happens as a detour. To name the monsters by their names requires a turn away from the monster; to speak horror is taking a detour from horror. The turn does not mean repressing, ignoring, or denying, but rather it is the turn that makes speech possible while marking it with spacing, rupture, impossibility, silence, and obscurity. This is also why the speech of survival cannot be said once and for all but rather tirelessly and infinitely. The survivor speaks perpetually under the effect of this turn and the reversal that it indicates in the relationship between life and death, between the living and the dead. Speech gives the possibility of resurrection, and therefore of survival, but this resurrection belongs to the living and not to the dead. The proximity with the sites of massacre reveals the deadness of the living. At the same time, and perhaps somewhat more affirmatively, death is the void out of which the possibility of life comes forth. In this sense, death is not a negation but rather the very site of the possibility of something new: the event of resurrection.31 The solitude of the survivor is conditioned by the turn away from the dead, who have already turned away from us and offer us no reassurance. But in this emptiness a possibility becomes the stuff of dreams. The survivor can do nothing but speak, not the speech that results in resolution, reconciliation, understanding, or any other project, national or personal, but the speech of eternity, like Sime´on Habineza, an endless speech that only speaks of this turn. It is the speech of abandonment by both life and death in their limited biological definition, since the catastrophe of genocide reveals that this line of demarcation is no longer tenable.

50 Becoming-Survivor

Boubacar Boris Diop did not stop writing in French after this novel. Instead, he began writing in another language, Wolof, for the first time. The writer too writes in the aftereffect of the catastrophic, and his writing registers the dispersive effects of contact with the surfaces of beings, things, and events, in this case the remnants of the genocide. The final scene of the novel announces the birth of a storyteller, a re´citant, who will perhaps tell the story of a life, his life, but at a distance from himself, via the detour of the anonymous. The re´cit interrupts the repetitive return to the site of the bones in search of a proper story. Instead, the inscription of the turn gives the possibility of a story to come as the story of survival, a story as survival—a story that is a relation with the future.

2.

Suffering Time

Based in France, Tahar ben Jelloun is arguably Morocco’s most prolific and internationally known writer. While his career dates to the early 1970s, one could say his fame is due to his prize-winning 1985 novel, L’enfant de sable (Sand Child), and its sequel, La nuit sacre´e (Sacred Night). This fame has been accompanied by much controversy, inside and outside Morocco, primarily because he is seen as a writer who caters to the orientalizing gaze of the West. His success is often attributed to a perceived willingness on his part to offer to the Western reader portraits of Morocco and of the Maghreb in accordance with certain exotic expectations.1 Cette aveuglante absence de lumie`re (This Blinding Absence of Light), based on the memoirs of Aziz Binebine, a survivor of the secret prison Tazmamart, has received its share of controversy. For this novel, ben Jelloun is accused, among other things, of using the horror of a survivor’s story for his own fame and notoriety and of keeping silent and not protesting such atrocities during the reign of the former king, Hassan II, responsible for Tazmamart and other places like it.2 Despite ben Jelloun’s public self-defense, the reception of this book has been affected by his reputation, for, despite its immensely important subject matter and its recognized literary qualities, this novel has not received extensive commentary to date. While neither discrediting nor crediting the accusations, my purpose in this chapter is to investigate how catastrophe and storytelling become linked in this novel under conditions of extreme physical and mental suffering and isolation. I follow the modality of becoming a survivor that unfolds in Murambi by focusing on the duration of this becoming, the duration of surviving and suffering that constitutes the time of detention. Aveuglante takes our thinking further toward the exploration of the conjunctions between body, language, and the time of radical abandonment. Survival in this story is inscribed in the vicissitudes of the detainee’s relationship with time. Eighteen years of imprisonment clearly marks duration, but how to think, remember, and narrate a duration that belongs to a suspension of time, that is, of the time of the world? This question of the duration of surviving marks the difference between Murambi and Aveuglante, for 51

52 Suffering Time

in the former duration remains unwritten. While we know that the genocide lasted roughly one hundred days, this time does not unfold in the narration and as the duration of narration. Instead, Murambi is turned toward experiences of instants that punctuate the narration in the aftermath of the catastrophe. Despite its attempt at narrating the genocide, the ruptures in time and narration, the fragmentation in the narrative voices, and the consistent movements of return, of fading in and out of figures in the story, hint at the unbearable nature of duration, as if the narration cannot bear this duration. Though Cornelius’s story is told in a continuous mode, this continuity does not repeat the duration of the event, its beginning and end. Instead, this story tries to find its bearing in spite of the unbearable effect that the event has unleashed. Cornelius’s itinerary marks the vicissitudes of finding this bearing. After all, Sime´on has wisely said that a genocide is not like any other event, with a beginning and an end, during which more or less ordinary things happen. A catastrophe is such that its beginning and end are as indeterminate as its duration. In Murambi, the problems of explaining the origins and causes and effects already belong to this indeterminacy. When did it begin and has it ended? The survivor is the figure of this indeterminacy. We remember that Cornelius was not exiled because of the 1994 genocide but rather years before, during the violence that preceded it. How can the beginning of such an event be marked? In Aveuglante, there is a beginning, a coup d’e´tat that seals the fate of the detainees. But the time of imprisonment seems to be such that this kind of periodization loses its relevance. As I have already said, the catastrophic is instantaneous, even if it is repeated; it is repeated instants, each time singular. The instant is time without temporality or flow, where time does not move. It is the immobility of time, the time of death. Only after the fact, when the instant withdraws, does this time become translated as a duration, as temporal, in this case, as eighteen years. Aveuglante pushes us to ask whether eighteen years does not become the time of a life, a lifetime, rather than a parenthetical in the middle. It is not a slice of life but a life, as the text tells us: ‘‘Space shrunk to the dimensions of a tomb for the living, although whenever I say that word, I should use ‘surviving’ instead, yet I really was a living being, enduring life in extreme deprivation, the ordeal that could end only in death, but that seemed strangely like life’’ (11; 2). This passage links the experience of life at the extreme of destitution and suffering with the experience of surviving. Space was organized in such a way that the intimacy of life and death constituted the very experience of living, of what Lyotard has reminded us as ‘‘still living.’’ This

Suffering Time

53

life as surviving does not constitute a moment in a life, but is life. As we shall see, the subject has no before and no after. In fact, he must forgo all attachments to a before and to an after of this life. There is a subject, but a subject who cannot recognize himself in the stories of before Tazmamart and in its aftermath. A catastrophe marks this kind of rupture, overturning time in this radical fashion. This time of the catastrophe expands and stretches across the narration, exposing the reader to unbearable instances of suffering that rupture reading, thinking, and writing. Yet, the time of the narration is not the time of suffering, for the novel is a work of memory as the story is told in the past. Memory tries to find its bearing in the narration. There is an oblique correspondence, through repetition, between the time of narration and the duration of suffering and surviving, which is infinitely more and infinitely less than the 220 pages where this duration of eighteen years unfolds. Surviving and suffering unfold in the repetition of memory as re´cit. This unfolding comes about because memory itself is threatened. The final phrases of the novel tell of this threat, ending with it. When the narrator’s mother turns to him, asking, ‘‘ ‘Tell me . . . it seems that Tazmamart never existed?’ ‘So they say. It doesn’t matter. It’s true, it never existed. I have no desire to go see for myself. Apparently, a small forest of old oak trees has moved over there to cover the huge pit. They even say that the village is going to change its name. They say . . . They say . . .’ ’’ (229; 190). This passage clearly hints at the insidious political and historical project of eliminating the traces of Tazmamart, but it also reveals an effect that belongs to catastrophe. Life and memory are always threatened with devastation, given that one can never determine the beginning or the end of a catastrophic instant, and that the dispersive dynamic of catastrophe does not allow for any certainty or knowledge about what has in fact happened and whether it has happened. How to remember such an experience? Remembrance is ethically, politically, and existentially necessary, yet the experience is so fragile, so indeterminate, that even the survivor may begin to wonder whether this experience happened, whether it—without a proper reference—happened. The uncertainty has less to do with the verifiable fact of Tazmamart than with the experience of it, this duration of eighteen years. How could anyone have borne it? How could the ‘‘I’’ still be here, speaking about it as if it were one memory among many? I take the first paragraph of the text as my guide for thinking through the problem of temporality and its intimacy with body and language in the novel. The story of Salim—the narrator—opens as follows:

54 Suffering Time For a long time, I searched for the black stone that cleanses the soul of death. When I say a long time, I think of a bottomless pit, a tunnel dug with my fingers, my teeth, in the stubborn hope of glimpsing, if only for a minute, one infinitely lingering minute, a ray of light, a spark that would imprint itself deep within my eye, that would stay protected in my entrails like a secret. There it would be, lodging in my breast and nourishing my endless nights, there, in the depths of the humid earth, in that tomb smelling of man stripped of his humanity by shovel blows that flay him alive, snatching away his sight, his voice, and his reason. (9; 1)

‘‘For a long time’’ marks a duration without limit. It is a duration that inscribes itself in the body. Suffering the conditions of solitude and deterioration also contains within itself resistance as hope and as the search for the transcendental: the black stone of Mecca, the time of beginning. The subject must survive the flaying and tearing of skin, the voiding of the gaze, of the voice, and of reason. He must survive the devastation of the senses and of thought. The itinerary of Salim tells the story of surviving these devastations and of opening of movement within arrested time. It tells the story of a man bearing his own name—Salim means ‘‘whole’’ or ‘‘healthy’’—under conditions that are created to make of his name an irony. This story begins in 1971 on the 10th of July.3 Two failed coup attempts (in 1971 and 1972) against Hassan II, the Moroccan monarch, led by the highest-ranking military leaders, resulted in the condemnation of fifty-eight low- and middle-rank officers and soldiers, among them the narrator of this story, Salim, to eighteen years of the most unfathomable experience.4 While the leading generals were executed, these mostly unwitting participants were first sentenced by a tribunal to varying numbers of years of imprisonment. Salim was sentenced to ten years. However, soon it was revealed that this judiciary process was nothing but a simulacrum of justice, for after two years in a military prison, one fateful night in 1973, the prisoners were whisked away from their cells under the cover of darkness and thrown into cells especially constructed for them in Tazmamart. Excluded thus from the domain of the judiciary, they were to live on the edge of annihilation, lost to the world and to themselves. Deemed undeserving of the finality of an execution and of due process, they were condemned to bear the unbearable suffering of a time without end. When on October 3, 1991, the gates swung open as arbitrarily as they had closed upon them eighteen years earlier, they numbered twenty-eight, leaving us with the baffling and unanswerable question of ‘‘How the hell did they survive?’’ to echo the title of Trix Betlem’s 1993 documentary on the Bourequat brothers, Tazmamart survivors.5

Suffering Time

55

The mysteries of this survival may never reveal themselves, neither to us nor to the detainees themselves, for they may be neither of the order of revelation nor of understanding, as Ahmed Marzouki intimates in his memoir, Tazmamart: Cellule 10.6 But this impossibility cannot eliminate the question that keeps us turned toward the singularity of the event called Tazmamart and its unfathomability. Aveuglante reveals that perhaps the only mode in which we can be turned toward this event is through the story, a novel. While this novel is based on the memoirs of a survivor, Aziz Binebine, it does not present itself as a memoir, a testimony in the strict sense, but rather as a fiction, like Murambi. It is neither untrue nor follows the laws of verification. The move from memoir as testimony to fiction underscores the double and paradoxical condition of speaking of such an event, and even of every event: the inability of language to narrate this experience and the necessity for language to narrate this experience, a ‘‘devoir de me´moire’’ as highlighted by the Rwanda project. This mode of telling holds us responsible and attentive to questions of living, dying, and surviving in their political, ethical, and transcendental dimensions. Death invaded this place in forms both heard and unheard of. Thirty men died of starvation, disease, madness, and sorrow, but they also died of hope, a counterintuitive phenomenon to which Salah Hachad, also a survivor, bears witness in his memoir.7 Salim echoes this sentiment when he relates the incomprehensible phenomenon of detainees dying as they detect signs of possible liberation: ‘‘Meanwhile, as though the hope of liberation had provoked this paradox, men were dying’’ (171; 140). When the body, not knowing how to survive, how to combat the horror suddenly unleashed upon it, finally opened itself to its surroundings, then gangrene, cockroaches, maggots, and scorpions annihilated it. And when it closed itself off to protect itself, it died from constipation. Salim tells the story of eighteen years spent in the state of ‘‘pre´-mort’’ (fore-death), as neither dead nor fully alive. This time of ‘‘pre´-mort’’ marks the experience of a limit where everything is at stake: life, memory, humanity. Simultaneously, the incalculable risks of this time and space become the chance for the opening of the imagination as the possibility of surviving, that is, as the possibility of bearing this time, and along with it, a chance for life, memory, humanity, whose meanings have, however, undergone radical mutation. Tazmamart was built in the middle of nowhere, doubly cut off from the world by the high walls of the prison and by mountains. It was comprised of two cell blocks, A and B. Salim was an inmate of Block B, where only

56 Suffering Time

five of the twenty-three imprisoned there survived. Built partially underground, the cells were meant to condemn the men to a life of total darkness and isolation. Salim calls this place ‘‘un mouroir,’’ a place of death, where even death was to be apportioned in small and slow rations. ‘‘And death turned into a superb ray of sunshine. We had been dumped there to die. The guards’ mission was to keep us on the verge of death for as long as possible. Our bodies were to endure a gradual decomposition. Suffering had to be stretched out over time, allowed to spread slowly, sparing no organ, no patch of skin, rising from the toes to the hair, circulating among the folds, between the wrinkles, insinuating itself like a needle seeking a vein in which to inject its venim. May it come, death!’’ (20–21; 11). In this place where they are begrudged all things, even death, death is transformed into a hope, not only for the one who wants to be delivered from his suffering but also for the others for whom, at the beginning, the death of one detainee was the possibility of returning momentarily to life; it was the chance to step out of the obscurity of their cells and into the courtyard to bury the friend and absorb a few moments of sun and light. Death is thus the most welcome guest, but for this very reason the guards prevented and apportioned it. These eighteen years therefore are not the time of death, but rather the time of agony: the agony of death, the time of pre´-mort. Tazmamart was the space where time stretched out to the extreme limit without breaking. This was not the end of time but rather the slow and imperceptible time of the end. For Salim, when life came to an end, the world receded with all its memories, desires, and connections; there remained a time, not the time of life but the time of the end of life, the time that continued without stopping but also without passing. The endless details of this time registered itself on the body. It became an embodied time invading every organ, every vein, and every cell, and, thus, the time of agony became the agonizing body of the one who had to bear it all. How can one stay alive in this hole? Why bother dragging this body, broken and disfigured, into the light? We had been placed in conditions designed to prevent our instinct from envisaging the future. I realized that time had meaning only in the movements of beings and things, whereas we were reduced to the immobility and eternity of the material world. We were in a motionless present. The unfortunate soul who looked back or peered into the future rushed headlong into death. The present left only enough space for its own unfolding. You had to keep to the immutable instant, and not think about it. A realization that doubtless saved my life. (41–42; 29)

Suffering Time

57

This is the time of impossible paradoxes: abandoning the time of life to save life; abandoning the time of survival as the relation with the future to survive; accepting that there is no other way out except through death to continue to live. Losing all hope as the only way to hope for life. The time of the world inscribes itself in movements on the surfaces of things and beings. The face of the clock registers the passage of day into night and night into day; the face of man registers the passing of time in its lines and crevices. In the movements of things and beings within the world, the passing of time reveals itself as the movements of past into future. But in the darkness of this place where the distinction between day and night has been erased, where space, rendered minimal and emptied of things, no longer marks the passing of the time of the world; where man can no longer behold his own image, all that is left is the bare and unbearable present, this time of no time that must be endured in spite of everything. The paradoxical nature of this time constitutes suffering and is constituted by it. As Maurice Blanchot says, ‘‘The present of suffering is the abyss of the present, indefinitely hollowed out and in this hollowing indefinitely distended. . . . Suffering has simply lost its hold on time, and has made us lose time’’ (Infinite Conversation 44). ‘‘Suffering must be stretched out in time,’’ says Salim of the strategy of their jailors, and this is the mark of an impossible experience, or the experience of an impossibility that imposes itself on the subject without the promise of relinquishing, not even in death.8 Salim speaks of his ‘‘intuition’’ that he would not die in Tazmamart, that the empty graves he and his friends spy in the courtyard after the burial of one of their friends do not concern him and his companions. He speaks of his experience of death passing close by, even gripping him one night, without finally taking him. This experience and this intuition of survival paradoxically belong to the time of suffering, to the endless present that does not end with death understood as the limit of life. The ‘‘intuition’’ of this survival refers less to certainty about not dying than to the impossible experience of death, since with the withdrawal of the present, death as present, as something that can happen to a person marking the end of life, withdraws too. The enigma of this intuition lies in the temporality of this time, for in this time of the absence of time, life and death lose their distinction. ‘‘I no longer knew,’’ he says, ‘‘which poet had said, ‘Death does not put an end to life.’ That idea haunted me, however, and I did not know how to explore it and share it with the few companions I had left in this summer of 1991’’ (201; 166). Indeed, how to communicate such a thought, share such an experience? This is not a transcendental thought since it does not attach itself

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to the beyond, to a life after death. Rather, it concerns itself with the impossible distinction between life and death here, a distinction that the transcendental tradition requires, since to transcend this life toward the higher one, there must be a point of passage, a crossing of a frontier distinguishing life from death. Suffering and surviving share their temporality. One suffers survival simultaneously as one survives suffering. Surviving is marked by the unrelinquishing quality of suffering. Extreme pain is the intensified expression of this indistinction. In the pangs of the body, completely depleted yet still registering sensation, the subject occupies this ambiguous time that does not allow him to recognize and recover himself, nor to cross the threshold separating life from death. In other words, pain and survival are intimately connected in that in both the subject cannot recover his self-certain and protective interiority, and yet the body registers in its material folds resistances to the dangers with which its exposure presents it. In other words, the body refuses to relinquish itself, its own materiality, its senses, its pains, but this refusal is no longer the act of a will. Survival is punctuated by the vicissitudes of suffering and its reprieve. The body does not let go except in moments of reprieve, instances that open the imagination and thought. In Aveuglante, thought is intimately related to the imagination. This imagination becomes the most effective site of resistance against falling into the void from which return, even a ghostly one, would be impossible. The imagination allows the subject to open a world within which time is given over to movement. This world is not nostalgic, nor is it the imagination of a life that could have been one’s own. A certain movement of distancing and dispossession allows for this world of survival to emerge, a movement characterized by waiting and by patience without end, in both the temporal and teleological senses of ‘‘end.’’ This notion of distancing via the imagination is announced early in the story: ‘‘In my mind [by way of thought], I substitute someone else for me. I must convince myself that I have nothing to do with this image. I tell myself again and again: this memory is not mine. It is a mistake. . . . What I am now has nothing to do with that other person. Out of respect for his privacy, I do not meddle in his life’’ (29; 19); and later on in the text he tells us, ‘‘After I broke with the past and hope, I slept normally, except for nights of piercing cold when I had to stay awake to keep from freezing to death’’ (155; 126). Survival requires the operation of the imagination that separates the image from the ‘‘I.’’ It does not destroy the ‘‘I,’’ for the subject remains, yet it remains at a distance from the image. The ‘‘I’’ and the image do not correspond. In the image, the self becomes another, a stranger to the ‘‘I.’’ The image not only does not reflect the ‘‘I’’

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as an image, it brings the ‘‘I’’ into relation with that which does not belong to it. Differently put, the image as memory belongs to the ‘‘I,’’ but the ‘‘I’’ is not the same here and there. Image and thought are thus movements of the distancing of the ‘‘I’’ from itself. Here the relation with the world is not broken, for resisting total oblivion is necessary for survival. However, this relationship with the world becomes evocation rather than remembrance: ‘‘Outside, not only over our pit but above all far away from it, there was life. You could not think too much about it, but I liked to imagine it [l’e´voquer] so as not to die of forgetfulness. Imagine [e´voquer], and not remember’’ (69; 51). Two notions of memory are registered here. There is the memory as representation of one’s own life, the site of nostalgia and resentment. But there is also this other memory, an impersonal memory that subsists and keeps the subject in relation with the distant. This memory is a form of address, an evocation, and a bringing forth without appropriating. It is the memory of the world that does not belong to the subject. This imagining, remembering otherwise as the distancing of the subject from itself, becomes the condition of surviving. This imagination is intimately linked to a mutation in the temporal structure of hope. The time of suffering and surviving registers itself in this paradoxical nature of a hope whose base is not in possibility. At the same time, the impossibility of hope does not convert hope into absolute hopelessness, into an absolute negation. Instead, in Salim’s words, one must stop hoping so as not to fall into hopelessness and despair: ‘‘Hope was a complete denial of reality. . . . To overcome it [hope], we had to prepare for the worst every day. Those who did not understand this sank into a violent and fatal despair’’ (63; 47). To prepare for the worst without despair provides the condition for bearing it all. Perhaps it is possible to articulate this, following Blanchot, as the pure structure of hope that has nothing to do with any concept that we would recognize as such.9 In the time of negativity, a dynamic of affirmation persists as waiting, as pure opening of to-come. This affirmation constitutes the temporality of time per se, a temporality that constitutes itself in the impossible affirmation of the present, of ‘‘what is.’’ In other words, the interminable void of the present gives an orientation toward the future, toward a present to come, a`-venir, as Derrida would say. Ge´rard Bensussan characterizes this time as ‘‘messianic,’’ which is not the time of the arrival of someone, such as the Messiah, but rather that of time temporalizing itself.10 Salim’s notion of hope, without hoping, opens toward a future that temporalizes the time of detention differently, as neither an absolute immobile time, that of death, nor as a time of projection. This time is impersonal and distant. It is the time of the image and of the imagination.

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Survival is also political. The refusal to succumb to the logic of this detention or to the carefully crafted conditions that would deprive the men of their lives and their death, as well as of their senses and their reason—this refusal renders the survivor a consciously political being. The complicated process of saving one’s life becomes a political act with no other end but that of not becoming a victim. While in detention, Salim returns to faith through prayer, contemplation, and spirituality not because he expects liberation in exchange but in order to free himself from the binds of such a logic of exchange: ‘‘You have to pray without expecting anything in return. That’s the strength of faith’’ (106; 85). His refusal to succumb and his impulse to survive have a sharp political edge despite the strong religious imagery of the story such as the black stone of Ka’ba: ‘‘As for me, I wanted to remain conscious and to master the little that was left to me. I absolutely did not have the soul of a martyr. I had no desire to declare that my blood was ‘permissible’ and might be shed with impunity. I stamped on the ground as if to remind the madness stalking me that I would not be an easy prey’’ (100; 79). The refusal of martyrdom marks the distinction between religion and politics. For Salim, there is no confusion regarding their status as political prisoners; it is a fact that cannot be elided by religious sentiment. The men in this prison are indeed political prisoners. They participated in an attack against the sovereign. Their condemnation suspends them within the political. They are neither executed nor arraigned under a judicial process. Instead, they are doomed to remain in suspension within the political realm but outside the jurisdiction of laws. In this state, they are to testify to the sovereignty of the sovereign and to the pure state of their subjection to this sovereign. Furthermore, they are to exemplify and affirm this sovereignty, which is perhaps the reason why they were not executed like the generals who led the coup attempts. Rather, they are condemned in this singular and exemplary way. When news of Tazmamart and its prisoners reaches the outside world in the early 1980s, Salim understands the necessity of this leak. He understands that total secrecy would cancel out the goal of making an example of them and of rendering them sites for affirming sovereignty. This state of being suspended within the political yet outside the protection of laws resembles what Giorgio Agamben has called ‘‘bare life’’: the life that can be killed but not sacrificed.11 The men are not sentenced to death; they are exposed to imminent death, at all times. They are to be maintained at the edge of life, in the duration of pre´-mort, as long as possible. From within this suspended position, a resistance rises in Salim, fragile and threatened, but responsive in its fragility and resilience to the law imposed on him and

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his comrades. We remember that Salim refuses to accept that his blood be licit and allowed to spill. His resistance to becoming a martyr implies his refusal of the logic of sovereignty, which would affirm itself through sacrifice (creating a martyr who would bear witness to sovereignty) and through the kind of killing that cannot be condemned as homicide.12 These men, as bare life, are not subject to the juridical order that defines the crime of homicide. Salim clearly recognizes the conditions of their radical abandonment as a ‘‘state of exception,’’ in the sense of being excepted from law and suspended within the political, but without rights: ‘‘Could the army get rid of fifty-eight people, make them vanish into a mass grave? Who would stand up to defend us and demand justice? We were a special case [living a state of exception]. Anything was possible. It was better to stop speculating’’ (33; 22). ‘‘Anything was possible’’ because in the state of exception the force of law, disjointed from rights, is without limit.13 Salim’s mode of survival responds to the appropriation of his life by the religious logic of dying for God and by the sovereign’s absolute right over his life and death. The religious and the political are conjoined in the figure of the king, Hassan II, who draws much of his legitimacy from his descendance from the prophet Muhammad. This relationship between the religious and the political is underscored by the injunction in the text against the image of the king. One night, in a dream, Salim sees the king telling him that the duration of suffering was devised to teach him to regret. Then he issues the following command: ‘‘So don’t bring my image into this stinking dungeon anymore. I forbid you to think of me or to mix my image with others’’ (109; 87: italics in original). The injunction against idolatry, which is meant to safeguard the absolute uniqueness of the divine, repeats itself in this command not to mix the image of the sovereign with other images. The attacks against the sovereign, the invasions of his domain (I mean ‘‘domain’’ literally, for the first attack was on his birthday at his summer palace, and the second was on his plane), were transgressions against his person and the uniqueness of his place. The injunction against the image of the king in prison reinstates the pure place of the sovereign and his uniqueness. But given that this command comes in a dream, the imagination issues an injunction against itself, in the process revealing the relationship between the mythico-religious domain and the historico-political, to which Salim is exposed. This is the only dream in the story in which the king appears. The domains of sovereignty (political and religious) thus become linked in the image by the imagination. Thus the imagination imposes the law of forgetting on the subject: ‘‘Don’t think of me and don’t mix my image with others.’’ This law of forgetting, which must forget the sovereign, enables Salim

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to forget his abandonment in the mythico-religious domain. In order to survive, the memory of abandonment and violence must be suspended in both the political and religious domains. The story goes on to repeat this relationship with the law in a third way, through the personal domain. Salim’s father, a special companion of the king, who long ago abandoned his family for the splendor and glory of the court, disowned his son before the king for his crime against the king. Salim wonders whether his crime was regicide or parricide: ‘‘When I rushed into the summer palace with the rest of the cadets, whom was I trying to kill— the king or my father?’’ (39; 27). The correspondence between the king and the father, in terms of the crime and in terms of abandonment, relates them to the mythical Abrahamic scene of foundation. Having detached himself from his personal memories and installing another in his place through the effort of the imagination, Salim’s attention is held repeatedly by the image of the rock of origin and the myth of reconciliation between a father and a disavowed son. The Ka’ba was built by Abraham (or Ibrahim in Islam) and his son Ishmael (or Ismail in Islam), the lineage of Arabs and Islam (Qur’an 2:125–27). The stone of Ka’ba unites monotheism, as the absolute sovereignty of the divine, with patriarchy, that of Abraham who reclaims the one he had abandoned, Ishmael. For Salim, the mythico-religious trauma of abandonment and disavowal thus repeats itself within both the political (his sovereign abandons him) and the personal (his father abandons him). The Abrahamic story already inscribes bare life—that which can be killed but not sacrificed, as described by Agamben—with important differences. While in the Judeo-Christian model, Isaac is assumed to be the object of the sacrificial command, in the Muslim model it is generally accepted that Ishmael is the object of sacrifice though opinions diverge on this issue. While Ishmael is a ‘‘gentle son’’ (ghulamin Halim) for his stand against idolatry, Isaac may be Abraham’s reward for his unconditional surrender to divine command (Qur’an 32:83–113).14 Abraham is thus doubly rewarded. According to the Islamic version, one can argue that Ishmael embodies the double dynamic of bare life and the sacrificial offering. In other words, the Islamic version reveals the ambiguity of deciding between what can be sacrificed and what cannot be, between sacrifice and bare life, between the religious and the political. Either logic can claim the same body. The precariousness of the relationship between life and law is marked by this possibility of passage from one to the other. If sacrifice is response to a law that has an end, that of endowing death with transcendental significance, bare life exposes life to death but refuses to allow this life to become transcendental. In

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bare life death is stripped of the dignity of meaning. The twist in the Islamic version is that both the life that can be sacrificed and bare life are finally saved, just as the men are one day pardoned by the king and released. The miracle of the ram is doubled by the miracle of the fountain of Zam-Zam. In the two instances, where God first intervenes to save the life worthy of sacrifice (by replacing it with the ram) and again intervenes to save the life abandoned and dying of thirst in the desert with the miraculous fountain, Zam-Zam, the notions of sacred (as bare life) and of sacrificial are brought together. Abandonment is not a radical break with the law, but rather a relation to the law. It is perhaps this relationality that allows for the reconciliation that brings together father and son, namely Abraham and Ishmael, and finally establishes religious law. The double condition of the ethics of sacrifice and the politics of abandonment seems to be the necessary condition for the law of community. Let us remember that Salim’s political gesture of survival refuses to allow his life and death to be claimed by either of these logics: his blood is not allowed to spill and his prayers request nothing in return. This relation of unrelation conditions his politics and his faith. Only in this way, by breaking in this way with both domains, but without absolutely breaking, may survival become possible, barely. While the stone of Ka’ba, an image of reconciliation and foundation, holds Salim’s attention, his relationship with his father poignantly indicates rupture and unrelation. This relation of unrelation reveals itself in the final pages of the story, when, after his release, Salim sees his father for the first time. At a party organized by his sister, his father appears, perfumed and dressed in silk ‘‘like a king,’’ with his new young wife. ‘‘When he took a seat,’’ Salim says, ‘‘I got up and went over to him. I bent down and kissed his right hand, the way I have always done. He asked me how I was. I told him I was well. He said, ‘God bless you.’ I left him there, surrounded by his entourage, and returned to my place’’ (228; 190). This apparent submission to the law of the father is less an expression of respect for the figure of the law—the father and the king—than an expression of the narrator’s distance from his father, who embodies the authority of God through his benediction and that of the king through his self-presentation. Instead of recuperating a lost place with the father, the son returns to his place of no place, a location of exclusion and abandonment, which long had preceded his imprisonment.15 The father, ‘‘that man who was capable of not recognizing one of his own offspring if he met the child in the street,’’ had already abandoned the son when he left to become the pasha’s entertainer years ago (36; 25). Let

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us note the affirmative construction of this nonrecognition. It is not that he could not recognize but that he ‘‘was capable of not recognizing.’’ Therefore, neither a lapse of memory (according to Salim, this man is endowed with exemplary memory) nor an error can account for this nonrecognition. Rather, his father’s capacity to abandon his son places this nonrecognition clearly in the ethical dimension of the father-son relationship and relates their relationship to the Abrahamic scene of sacrifice and abandonment. This first instant of abandonment, when the father leaves his family, is doubled, as if to punctuate its dynamic, in the scene where, upon hearing of his son’s arrest for treason, the father disowns him before the king: ‘‘God gave me a son, twenty seven years ago. I ask God to take him back. May He summon him and cast him into Hell. In the name of Allah the All-Powerful, in my soul and conscience, in all serenity, I disown this unworthy son’’ (38; 26). The indifference necessary for survival, which Salim has mastered in detention, repeats itself in his relation of unrelation at his sister’s house as he retrieves his place after the formalities of greeting his father. If the stone of Ka’ba is the scene of a reconciliation between a son and a father, this reconciliation is put into question by the final scene of unrelation between the father and son in the novel. The flight of the imagination toward the foundational and metaphysical moment, therefore, may be nothing more than this distancing of the subject from his own story, the refusal of his own story, the refusal of personal nostalgia and political ressentiment. The duration of suffering and surviving registers the vicissitudes of resistance and refusal. Time finds its rhythm in the movements of this resistance, in its fragility and its resilience. The time of detention brings into focus the condition of bare life repeatedly with each death’s singular condition: dying from madness, from constipation, from gangrene, from loss of the senses, etc. Every time unique, each death rhythms the time of the state of suspension, punctuating it as bare life. But the dynamic of bare life as a particular mode of relationship with law and sovereignty reveals itself most poignantly in the episode of the dog: ‘‘We were dumbstruck. A dog condemned to five years of prison! It is perpetuity! Allegedly, he had bitten a general inspecting the barracks near the prison’’ (80; 61). The absurdity of this situation provokes peals of laughter from the prisoners, the laughter that they had lost since they entered Tazmamart. How can such contiguity be comprehended? The dog’s fate and the concomitant laughter of the prisoners underscore the absurdity of a juridical order that sentences the animal to a term but condemns the man and the citizen to perpetual uncertainty.

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The condemned gave the dog the name Kif-Kif, meaning both ‘‘similar,’’ ‘‘equal,’’ and ‘‘all the same,’’ expressing indifference as in ‘‘it is all the same to me.’’16 Kif-Kif was exposed to the same regimen as the men: same food, same cell. He would turn around in his cell like some of the prisoners as they paced. He would moan as if wounded, but not bark. Kif-Kif finally went mad and died of starvation. The dog presents an image of life and death for the men. He joins them in his crime of having bitten the hand that fed him and in the manner of his death: from starvation and madness. We read in the beginning paragraph of the text that destroying the men’s reason was among the studied conditions of this camp where everything was meticulously planned so that death comes to the men slowly. Madness is related to reason as both excess of reason and lack of it. In madness, reason suffers from a lack of measure, and this condition is shared by the men and by the dog. Relying too much on reason to explain, understand, or analyze one’s condition may prove as maddening as forsaking all reason, or giving up on it altogether. Instead, one must maintain oneself, at all cost, in the indeterminate state between unreason and reason. Even those who do not fall victim to madness survive in the shadow of its threat. Hamid was the first of the men to die, and he died of madness. This madness announced the horizon of the future for all the condemned. ‘‘Hamid was our probable future, even though we had been told over and over that we no longer had a future. Perhaps the doctors had driven him crazy with drugs as an example of what could happen to us. That was not impossible, because during the months spent underground enduring all kinds of torture, some of us lost our lives and others, like Hamid, our minds’’ (18; 9). From the perspective of the men, the dog’s fate differs from theirs in that his imprisonment has a term: five years. He is a prisoner while they are condemned: ‘‘Here, I am not in prison. Here, nobody is an inmate serving a sentence. I am—we are—in a dungeon from which no one ever leaves’’ (26; 15).17 While five years is basically a lifetime for a dog, a sentence which reflects the perpetual imprisonment that is the fate of the men (this parallel is reminiscent of the similarity between dog and man ‘‘like a dog’’ at the end of Kafka’s The Trial), the men and the dog suffer different relationships with the law. While the dog is the subject of a juridical judgment that has circumscribed the terms of his imprisonment, they reside in the state of perpetual limbo. The condemned live in the company of various animals, and these relationships map both the transcendental and the abject conditions of their lives, the constant shift from one to the other. They live with a sparrow and

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a dove who fly in unexpectedly and thus punctuate the calculated conditions of their suffering with chance, opening the dimension of surprise and the incalculable. The birds evoke the world for the men without the nostalgic memories of a previous life. With their flight in and out, the world infiltrates and marks the contiguity of this suspended time with a world of movement and the temporal dimension of life. But the men spend most of their lives in the company of the abject creatures of filth and darkness: cockroaches and scorpions. These venomous creatures, the scorpions, have purposefully been released upon them by the order of the Kmander, whom, in a Kafkaesque fashion, they do not see, but whose orders affect every instant of their lives. In order to protect themselves from the lethal sting of the scorpions, the men learn to listen to their movement, which requires perfect silence. The creatures fully absorb the men’s attentions, turning the men away from each other. Survival requires an intimate relationship with the abject conditions of one’s existence. The dog, also an abject creature, culturally defined as dirty and therefore unable to be sacrificed, can be killed. This animal illustrates not only the abjection of the men but also their indifference to this abjection. It is all the same to them, Kif-Kif. Robert Antelme has described the experience in the Nazi concentration camps as a contestation of the prisoners’ humanity that provoked an ‘‘almost biological’’ demand to belong to the human race.18 Maurice Blanchot remarks on this indestructibility of humanity in terms of the infinite possibility of affliction that man can bear. Agamben, following Blanchot’s notion of suffering without end, locates within the human the inhuman, defined as the ability of the detainees of the camps of ‘‘having borne everything that they could bear’’ (Remnants 78). This articulation of the inhuman underscores a notion of humanity in terms of excess of the human, as the inhuman possibility of bearing excess, of bearing what no human should be able to bear. The experience of abjection marks this ability of the men to bear the excess, but it also unequivocally signals the humanity of the men. Blanchot describes the human in terms of its relationship with its own abjection and need, not a need for satisfaction, which can be annihilated, but the empty structure of need, a lack that affirms humanity.19 For Blanchot, ‘‘human relation in its primacy’’ constitutes itself in a relation with unrelation; in the relation of attachment to the impersonal, to the radical other that announces itself in the destitution of the ‘‘I.’’ This kind of need, at its extreme limit, does not seek to eliminate itself with satisfaction but rather sustains the men’s relation to existence as attachment to the excess of life. In other

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words, existence affirmatively marks itself as lack in conditions of utter destitution from everything. In the final days of his ordeal, Salim’s survival depends on the feeling that he has reached the limit of his suffering; he has suffered all that he could: ‘‘In that instant I experienced a moment of great peace. Nothing more could happen to me. Go, stay, survive, die. . . . It was all the same to me’’ (209; 173). Kif-Kif. He does not know that freedom is around the bend; instead, he feels this limit as the limit of suffering. But this limit is not a termination; rather, it is the point at which he can suffer infinitely. It marks the infinity of agony that may not end but that he can nevertheless bear. In this sense, the indifference of the men to the contiguity and proximity of their condition to that of the dog does not imply indifference in an absolute sense, but rather the elimination of lines of distinction that allows them to bear the unbearable, to bear it all. Expressing this indifference, Salim goes further than blurring the distinction between abjection and dignity, the human and inhuman. He also recognizes that one must eliminate the distinction between friend and enemy in order to survive, for allowing the thought of the enemy to enter into this space would bring about his final doom. Ultimately, the injunction against the image of the king, which the imagination imposes on itself, belongs to this logic: ‘‘We are at war with an invisible enemy that is everywhere in the darkness. I have said ‘enemy’? Correction: here, I have no enemy. I must convince myself of this: no emotions, no hatred, no adversary. I am alone. And I alone can be my enemy’’ (26; 16). Given the conditions of extreme isolation, the enemy appears to have no external or objective reality. Instead, the enemy becomes the work of the imagination, one that would destroy the subject. The absent Kmandar figures the invisibility of the enemy. The distancing movements of the imagination, which render impersonal all that can be one’s own, including one’s adversary, safeguard the subject from destruction. Distancing himself from the intimacy of personal memory through the contemplation of the stone of Ka’ba, ‘‘thousands of miles away, at a distance of centuries from my cell,’’ is a fragile and uncertain endeavor, for it is not nostalgia that interrupts his imaginary flights; rather, he cannot erase the demand made by the materiality of his body (62; 46). This body affords reprieve less and less often as time goes by and threatens to shatter the flights of the imagination. However, as the weight and materiality of the body impose themselves with their greatest insistence, when self-protection can no longer withstand the pains that take the subject’s breath away, threatening

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to throw him to the bottom of the abyss, at this moment survival as resistance turns to the materiality of language: I had reached the limit of resistance. My body had already ceased to obey me. My head was swollen from going over and over the same prayers, the same images. And yet . . . I knew that soon we would be flooded with light. I was preparing myself by closing my eyes and imagining this reunion. I was giving in a little to this temptation [lie]. I was no hero, but a man who had managed, in spite of eighteen years of tribulation in that dungeon, to cling to his humanity, in other words, his weaknesses, his feelings, and his ability to confront seismic forces he had for a long time refused to acknowledge. My fortress was crumbling. I heard the voices of those who had left us. It was all whirling together in my head, which I could no longer hold in my hands. Vanquished by pain and sorrow, I had lost the protection of my solitude. I was not alone with my faith anymore. There were intruders in the inner domain. I had been invaded by evils [maux]. I refused to say the word ‘‘agony.’’ I preferred ‘‘madness.’’ [It sounded better.]20 (209–10; 173)

A strange double dynamic continues to give momentum to Salim’s speech. One moment of certainty is immediately overturned by what follows, indicating the constant precariousness of what is being communicated and testified to. While he knew that light was going to envelop them, signaled by the sudden change in the guards’ behavior, and while he prepared for this encounter, he immediately overturns this knowledge by inscribing it in the structure of lie, ‘‘ce´der au mensonge’’ (give into lying). At the point of extreme suffering, at the limit of resistance, all structures of knowledge and certainty fall away. Self-protection, self-enclosure, and absolute solitude give way to invasion. The depleted, materialized body with its incessant sensations destroys the subject’s residual illusion of mastery over itself and its environment. Pain is the experience of incessant openness to the outside and to the strange, against which the subject has no defenses. While in pain, the subject is ‘‘mired in itself,’’ as Alphonso Lingis suggests; this turn inward is no longer the turn of the subject toward itself.21 The solitary relation with the divine and self-exclusion from the materiality of the world fall away with the force of a demonic intrusion, breaking down the structures of the residence, ‘‘demeure inte´rieure,’’ and of resistance, so painstakingly erected. The intrusion annuls all oaths and alliances with Truth. This abandonment opens the possibility of infinite suffering, the invasion of pains and ghostly voices at the limit of resistance. Worn out, repeated prayers and contemplative sessions no longer erase the materiality that pain exposes. Demonic

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agony, or the agony of the demonic, the agony of intrusion, interrupts and corrupts the sublime solitude of quiet contemplation. With this demonic, the text modifies the notion of strangeness introduced earlier: ‘‘In my mind [by way of thought], I substitute someone else for me’’ (29; 19). Let us remember that in the earlier scene, Salim eliminates his memories and attachments one by one through thought. He puts a stranger in his place, assigning his life to this stranger, establishing his relationship with him not only through his imagination but also through the ethics of respect and timidity, ‘‘out of respect, I do not meddle in his life.’’ Now, in this later situation, the stranger breaks upon the scene without warning, no longer solicited through thought and contemplation to take up residence in the space that the ‘‘I’’ willingly vacates. While the earlier model tames strangeness by putting up the guest willingly, in the latter model the stranger intrudes, unexpected and uninvited; it intrudes as an exclusion. Jean-Luc Nancy expresses this necessary dimension of radical strangeness as the one who enters ‘‘by surprise’’ and ‘‘by ruse.’’22 The intruder is demonic because by necessity it shakes up the domain of residence and resistance. While earlier the subject preserved a mode of agency, now the demonic introduces passivity within surviving. Demonic thought breaks radically with subjectivity and agency but without letting go of thought and of the imagination. In its relationship with suffering, ‘‘agonie,’’ the demonic, is also the opening of language, not language as discourse but as materiality and physicality. The word ‘‘de´mence’’ sounded better, ‘‘c¸a sonnait mieux.’’ Between agony as physical suffering, ‘‘I had been invaded by evils [pains],’’ and the demonic, there is a complicity. While agony withholds itself, mired in the silences of the body, the demonic bursts out in a profusion of sounds and textures, invading the body and its senses. It instills itself in the breath of the body that suffers. The rhythms of this suffering passing between agony and the demonic give rhythm to the speech of suffering without explicitly communicating suffering: I climbed up on the capital ‘‘M’’ and stretched out my arms as if to dive into the blue water of a swimming pool. I clung to the firm roundedness of the d. I fell off and clambered back on. Grabbing the e, I looped it around myself and clutched it as though it were a life preserver. But what was happening to me did not correspond to the usual meaning of the word. Saved by the madness of nature, by the insanity of my imagination . . . I was in an ocean of words, a shifting dictionary of flying pages. The most comfortable word

70 Suffering Time was ‘‘astrolab.’’ I loved its pleasing sound, the song I sensed within it. Of course, that had nothing to do with the instrument that calculates the position of the stars. (210; 173–74)

The word happens to him, ‘‘what was happening to me’’ and this happening, this event, becomes the scene of survival as the relationship and place of communication between word and image. The event turns away from signification or, rather, suspends it. The word ‘‘astrolab’’ has nothing to do with the instrument that measures the stars. The event that turns word into image suspends instrumentality, measure, and transcendence with one stroke. Both survival and the imagination are possible in the aftereffect of such a disaster that afflicts language in accord with the affliction of the body. By hanging onto the word’s materiality, the sufferer saves himself from sinking to the depths of pain and despair, from disappearing into the abyss. He is not saved by the meaning of the word but by engaging with it physically. The word becomes a thing and as a thing it opens a world. In this world Salim strives and struggles to breathe and hold onto life. Materiality does not refer to the world as a reality one can posit; rather, the world comes forth in the image and as image. Like the figure of the stranger, this dynamic of the imagination also differs in its modulations from the earlier one described by our narrator. As the storyteller of the group, he would retell novels and films to his fellow detainees. In his rendition of Camus’ The Stranger he describes meticulously the famous sun: ‘‘I emphasized the words ‘sun’ and ‘glare.’ I thought that by repeating that sentence I would flood our dungeon with unbearable light’’ (137; 111). By saying the words, he wants to make the sun appear. The storyteller confuses the materiality of the word with that of the thing it names. The word sun is addressed to the sun as a kind of apostrophe. In ‘‘madness’’ (de´mence), the word also becomes a thing. However, now the materiality of the word, disarticulated from meaning and reference, becomes an image, and as image it becomes an event: the event of a passivity and abandonment to the movements of the word, to the shape of its letters: writing. In ‘‘madness’’ the word becomes the inscription of the event of survival. Therefore, in its very materiality, writing as the material inscription of the word, its survival, belongs to the demonic. It responds to the effusive demand of the demonic. But writing does not write the demonic in the sense of bringing it forth, making it present. Instead, it comes to the fore under the effect of the demonic; it draws its rhythm and its breath from the demonic. The profusion of the demonic paradoxically includes the deferral

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of the demonic. Writing marks this deferral and thus becomes the event of survival. In Tazmamart, this writing constitutes memory. Salim is the storyteller of the group because of his great memory, which he has inherited from his father. His father is a companion to the king because of his exemplary memory, which allows him to recite entire bodies of poetic works in Arabic. This notion of writing as the inscription of the event of survival is poetic in the sense that Georges Bataille gives to poetry: ‘‘It is also true that poetry which survives is always the opposite of poetry for, having the perishable as its subject, it transforms it into something eternal’’ (Literature and Evil 48). In other words, writing remains when the perishable, the breath that gives the word, retreats. The inscription survives with this retreat of the perishable. Writing as survival, as that which remains, does not distinguish between oral and written. Rather, it indicates both memory as inscription and the temporality of inscription and of memory, which is without presence. Survival as remainder and trace marks the difference between memory and experience, between experience and narration. The perishable breath that accompanies every word perishes with inscription, and thus gives way to writing as the most fragile trace. Breath marks the fragility of life commingled with the threat of death. While breath is the sign of life, it always already belongs to death because it perishes, each time we breathe. The remainder of this commingling of life and death, their indistinct border, their trace, becomes image and writing without depth. In other words, in this state of pre´-mort, to breathe or not to breathe does not suffice for survival. Only when something remains of the movements of the breath, of its coming and going, only then can survival become possible. In this struggle to keep with the word, the materiality of words opens figurally, in the sense of a surfacing of image in language, not to be confused with figurative language. Words become images and images become words in a movement of mutual provocation, which establishes the intimacy of image and language, that is, the visibility that belongs to words. Language and suffering find further articulation in the way in which Salim expresses himself about silence and absence of light: ‘‘The hardest, most unbearable silence was that of light. A powerful and manifold silence. There was the silence of the night, always the same, and then there were the silences of light. A long and endless absence’’ (69; 51). The silence of light for the condemned does not duplicate night, it is not nocturnal; rather it imposes itself when light engulfs the world. Night belongs to the order of necessity: ‘‘The silence of night. It was a necessity for us’’ (68). But this other silence does not belong to the orders of necessity, desire, or mourning, nor to that of the

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quietude of the body as life circulates through it, ‘‘that of blood circulating in slow motion,’’ nor to that of the familiar images, ‘‘the silence of images we ran and reran in our minds.’’ Different from these familiar silences, the silence of light as the perpetual darkness of the cells marks the interminable absence of presence and the endless retreat of the present, which characterizes the time of their detention. The silence of the night, in its repeated sameness, like the images that repeat themselves, is familiar, reassuring, calming, and necessary. But this other silence in its endless diversity, ‘‘les silences de la lumie`re,’’ is demonic since it is the very movement of unfamiliarity and strangeness. This silence is the constantly diversifying and modulating movements that prevent it from becoming familiar. It is this relentless strangeness that renders it terrifying. In the heart of this radical absence of light, words become image, become visible. They become the buoy to which the drowning man clings in order to catch his breath and his speech. Breath contains the potential for both word and image. In the cell, where all is rationed, air and light can no longer be taken for granted as the necessary materials conditioning life. Each small cell is equipped with two holes, orifices through which pass life and death: through the hole in the ground passes excrement, and through the little holes above the iron door passes air. But as the prisoners’ senses are assaulted, they can no longer distinguish between the high and low, between heavenly breath and lowly excretion. The commingling of these two domains makes breathing itself an act from which the prisoner must detach himself. ‘‘There was a hole for pissing and crapping. A hole less than four inches in diameter. The hole was a part of our bodies. We had to forget our existence fast, stop smelling the shit and urine, stop smelling anything at all. We couldn’t very well hold our noses, no, we had to keep them open without smelling a single thing’’ (12; 3). The sense of smell, so intimately connected to breathing, to the air that makes life possible, must absent itself from the activity of breathing. This absence cannot be the result of a blockage of the air passages; it is not that Salim cannot smell because he cannot breathe, but that he must breathe without smelling. Instead of blocking the smell, one must expose oneself to its incessant assault. This dungeon requires that the prisoners detach their bodies from their senses. The condemned men suffer from the loss of several senses. In the enveloping darkness, some have lost their eyesight, others their sense of taste, and yet another his sense of touch. Paradoxically, the absence of light offers the possibility of another visibility that is absent from the gaze, a visibility in excess of sight: ‘‘Never the slightest ray of light. But, even though

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we had lost our sight, our eyes had adjusted. We saw in the dark, or thought we did. Our images were shadows shifting about in the gloom’’ (10; 2). The separation between the senses and the organs normally assigned to each sense does not always eliminate sense but may allow the particular sense to circulate to other sites, through the operation of the imagination: ‘‘The cell reeked of vomit and mold. The odor had to have a color. I imagined it as greenish, with reddish-brown spots’’ (51; 37). In this space and time of invisibility, smells become visible, not as something but as possibility, color, light. Detaching oneself from what one smells is, therefore, less an elimination of one’s sense of smell and relation with the environment than a process of rendering scents visible. In this, the logic of the senses repeats that of the distancing of memories. Perhaps this transfer of senses makes survival possible by enabling the men to bear abjection, as the intimacy and proximity of smells is transformed to the distance of visions. Absence here does not imply a lack, a gaping hole of negativity, but a contamination across the indiscernible boundaries of the senses and the breakdown of distinction between the interiority and exteriority of the senses. Survival resists the prison’s logic of destroying the senses, a logic indicated in the first paragraph: ‘‘man stripped of his humanity by shovel blows that flay him alive, snatching away his sight, his voice, and his reason’’ (9; 1). In his book Gestes d’air et de pierre, devoted to the work of the psychoanalyst Pierre Fe´dida, Georges Didi-Huberman insists on the relationship between air, breath, and the possibility of speech: ‘‘No speech without breath, of course. Breath is less the suspension or the lack of speech; rather it is its condition. We forget this condition of saying every time our attention is drawn unilaterally to the said, as Le´vinas notes’’ (16; my translation). The relationship between breath and speech was already implied in the notion of perishability put forth by Bataille regarding poetry. Breath does not interrupt speech but rather provides it with the condition that makes it come forth. The silence of breath bears the potential for speech. Breath is the surface that becomes the material support of speech as the white page becomes the material support of writing, and the body becomes the material support of gesture and sound: ‘‘Void and absence became surroundings, matters, movements, organs’’ (21). Here, speech, ‘‘parole,’’ is not a particular utterance but the movements of utterance in general engaging the body in speech and in writing. The junctures of body and air, the points of passage from one to the other, which constitute breath, intricately and indistinguishably relate speech to breath.23

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Fe´dida calls the temporal interval that lets the image come forth ‘‘le souffle indistinct de l’image’’ (the indistinct breath of the image). He explains, ‘‘And that which the breath in one instant holds and immobilizes, air undoes, not in order to destroy it and make it disappear, but rather in order to put it at a distance from the face [figure]’’ (Site de l’e´tranger 208; my translation).24 The image then is the product of the collaboration between the interval of breath and its flow in and as air: the double movement of proximity and distance, the condition of figuration. To see one’s breath is precisely this relation between breath as interval and air as release where breath takes form. The movements of exhaling, ‘‘gestes d’air,’’ do not let us see air but see breath as it distances and withdraws.25 Fe´dida’s notion of the image in relation with survival resonates with Nancy’s notion of the image as the movement of surfacing: ‘‘We do not sink; rather, the ground rises to us in the image’’ (Ground of the Image 13). Fe´dida refers to this movement whereby depth becomes surface as ‘‘the backdrop of the silence of the indistinct’’ (199) or ‘‘the invisible support material’’ (201). Like the silence of the page and of the canvas, breath provides the material support for speech, image, and writing. The suffering that cuts off breath as well as the suffering that comes from the cutting off of breath weigh down the body’s gestures. They torment by annihilating movement, by stopping the time of the breath, its rhythmic intervals. Breath, seeking release, tortures the body being stifled under its own weight. Salim suffers one night from an overabundance of bile that cuts off his breath, filling his mouth with bitterness and weighing down his tongue: ‘‘I see myself drowning in a vat of bile. I plunge in, held down by unknown hands’’ (64; 48: my emphasis). The only cure for this ailment is to expel the bile, to vomit. In this effort to force the body to reject what it is holding onto and which stifles it, the body becomes the scene of an insistent corporeality. The weighed down and immobilized body tortures Salim as he attempts to raise his arm to his mouth in order to expulse the blockage. ‘‘My entire body is in this arm,’’ he says (65; 48). With his entire body concentrated in his arm, his arm imposes its materiality, precisely because movement is required of it. The effort of countering the weightiness reveals this very weightiness of the body, its refusal to lend a hand to release itself. No buoy presents itself here, no contour of letters allows the suffocating man to surface. Yet what saves Salim when his body is on the verge of becoming a corpse, resisting all movements and gestures, is his ability to still imagine, in spite of everything. He imagines his own state, ‘‘I see myself drowning in a vat of bile,’’ and tries to expel the blockage by way of imagining: ‘‘I imagine

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a tiny crane descending from the roof, grasping my hand and carrying it with precision to my mouth. I look at the ceiling; nothing. In the darkness, I manage not to see but at least to guess where things might be’’ (65; 49). The radical emptiness of this extreme solitude carries away the image, and with this erasure death threatens the subject. He imagines a crane, but this image is immediately annihilated; it has no anchor and provides none. There is nothing except the terror of solitude and emptiness. The immobilized body immobilizes time, or rather, the immobility of temporality registers itself in his paralyzed body: ‘‘Time is meaningless now. It seems to pass particularly slowly and serves, apparently, to paralyze the arms and hands.’’ The materiality of the body registers this time of the end as its own paralysis. In this sense, time becomes matter, becomes the body, becomes suffering. In this experience of extreme suffering, temporality of a present without end registers its threat. When the operation of restoring his breath, which lasts several hours, finally succeeds, with the contact of breath and air, imagination takes flight once again: ‘‘Light and famished, [I] prepare to attain ecstasy, that state in which nothing holds me back with any connection to either beings or objects. I leave everything behind, abandoning myself and my companions, who have no idea of the anguish I have just gone through’’ (66; 49). The immobile image of the crane is now replaced with the airy lightness of flight. The notion of the ‘‘several hours’’ of suffering, like the notion of eighteen years of imprisonment, which marks the passage of time, is belated. It belongs to the already-having-survived. Succession of temporal moments belongs to the aftereffect of the extreme experience and to the restoration of breath. Acute pain is threatening because it arrests the imagination and, with it, time. Solitude characterizes the time of suffering. None of the detainees knew of Salim’s agony or of his survival. The fractured, solitary, and spent subject of the time of suffering takes flight in the openness of breath: ‘‘I am in a superb solitude where only the breeze can still waft across the terraces of my isolation. . . . I fly like a joyous bird. . . . The body is breathing slowly, it is true, and does seem to be dead or in a coma’’ (66; 49). This scene registers the double movement of the image, which Didi-Huberman calls, following Fe´dida, ‘‘image-mourning, unilateral and despairing’’ and ‘‘image-desire,’’ which is born ‘‘of a form to give and a time to take’’ (Gestes 24–25; italics in original). In this place where relation with time has suffered a profound rupture, the ‘‘separation’’ from the body and the airiness that separates the subject from the body, depend on the openness of breath and its movements of proximity and distance. In other words, transcendence, in the traditional

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sense of separation from the body that makes up the scene here, depends on the movements of that very body as breath. In the passages between imagemourning (the suffocated, immobile, closed-up body) and image-desire, transcendence as a function of the imaginary becomes possible, not due to the obliteration of the body since the body cannot be subtracted from breath, but due to intimacy with it.26 The scene of flight, as the breath slows down to its quiet and imperceptible rhythm, is the scene of figuration as a kind of transcendence. In addition to the possibility of a transcendental experience belonging to the imagination, whose vicissitudes become the rhythm of Salim’s experience of survival, the relationship with breath determines two other moments of opening toward figuration: dreams and storytelling. These two dynamics are intimately linked to the face, ‘‘le visage.’’ The detainees have no access to their own reflection since they have no access to a mirror, nor can they see each other since they live in darkness and isolation. The absence of one’s face as the suspension of a mirrored reflection, which ordinarily structures the primary relationship with the face and constitutes the face-to-face of the ‘‘self,’’ offers the following image: On the night of July 10, 1971, I became ageless. I have grown neither older nor younger. I have lost my age. You can no longer read it on my face. In fact, I am no longer here to give my age a face. I came to a standstill over in nothingness, where time is abolished, tossed back to the wind, handed over to that vast beach of white sheet rippling in a light breeze, given up to the sky drained of its stars, its images, the childhood dreams that found refuge there, emptied of everything, even God. I crossed over there to learn forgetfulness, but I never succeeded in being completely within nothingness, not even in thought. (14; 5)

A peculiar ‘‘I’’ speaks here: a faceless subject on the edge of the void, but not a negativity, nor an absence. The loss of the face registers the affliction of a time that does not pass and does not reassure with ideals, memories, and otherworldly possibilities. There is no refuge, neither in the future nor in the past, and the skies have been emptied of their stars. In this sense, survival in the image belongs to transcendence but not to the logic of the Transcendent, for the emptiness has carried away even God. The catastrophe is this excess of loss that registers itself in the loss of the face. One of the detainees called Ustad dies precisely when he can no longer have any relation with the face, neither through touch nor through reflection or imagination. For Salim, this time of time, when time no longer exists, does not obliterate time nor does it destroy thought and memory. The

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image becomes the possibility for both, in spite of everything. Across the immensity of the void, a breeze passes. It does not give back the face for recognition, nor does it set time in motion again; rather, it offers breath as image and image as breath. In this time, ‘‘gestes d’air,’’ ‘‘le mate´riau invisible du support,’’ opens the possibility of what Didi-Huberman calls, following Bertram Lewin, ‘‘image-breaths,’’ which encapsulates this scenario better than ‘‘image-desire.’’ In ‘‘image-breaths,’’ breath and air become image. The ripples of the white sheet record the movements of air. These movements constitute the surface of the image, its rhythms, its time. Thus image and movement become each other’s condition of possibility. Survival is possible by the image and in the image because the surface of the image registers the contact of body and air as breath, movement, as time. Put more simply, the image and breath belong together. The surface movements of the image temporalize space and spatialize time with their rhythm. Thus time and space come to the fore in the joining of the materiality of air and body. Their communication gives breath and gives image. Survival depends on the possibility of images unfolding under conditions where the rhythm of one’s life is the incessant threat of the cutting-off of breath. Images bombard the survivor in order to defer and refuse that which cuts off the breath and which threatens the imagination. During confinement, Salim regains his ability to dream. Whereas he did not dream before his imprisonment, now he dreams abundantly: ‘‘All my nights were packed with dreams’’ (155; 126). What gives rhythm to much of his dreaming is the relationship between the body and space, between the confined experience of the body and air. His dreams, too, move between image-mourning and image-breaths, or from his confined and abject conditions toward movement. After being close to the ground, on hands and knees, he moves toward uprightness and mobility: ‘‘The millstone. The house. Head downward. I walk on my hands. I am rotting. In a hole, I should add. The head has fallen off. The ground is tilting. . . . I run into the house. My mother is calling me. My voice is locked up in my throat. . . . I am absent. I see all of them’’ (124; 99). Is this a dream? He does not know. This image comes to him the night after the death of Bourras, the one who died of constipation. His was an impossible death, for who could imagine, who could fathom, as one of the guards says, that constipation could kill? How can such an event be integrated, accepted, understood, translated, communicated? After such a death, can one still distinguish between nightmare and reality, life and death, wakefulness and dream? How to survive such a death? This is the kind of death that interrupts even the expression of any sadness. How can one

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mourn such a death? ‘‘The grotesque aspect of certain situations kept us from being despondent’’ (123; 99). This death, in its grotesque horror, also underlines something fundamental for these men: they have lost the privilege of sadness: ‘‘Basically, we did not have much use for sadness. We were not happy or sad. Sorrow rolled right off us. . . . A depressed [sad] person is lucky: he is living a normal life—because his depression [sadness] is a moment in his life, not a permanent state. . . . Down in our hole we had no right to weep [sob]. There was no one to dry our tears’’ (123; 99).27 Sobbing intensifies breathing by interrupting and releasing it; sobbing is the intimacy that defines the relationship between body and air. The sob also opens toward the other who is in turn open toward it. However, when one is cut off from this face-to-face relation living a time that cannot be interrupted and is without end, survival becomes possible in the absence of intense affect. However, Bourras’s death also reveals that the contrary movement of self-enclosure for self-protection, of rupturing the relationship between body, air, and surroundings, is not only unhelpful but deadly. Survival requires one to relate to one’s surroundings, despite one’s extreme isolation and solitude. Image announces this relationship in the very movements of its coming forth. To imagine a crane coming down from the ceiling when one is on the verge of suffocating marks a presistent relationality between the body and its environment. Nonetheless, what distinguishes an ‘‘image-breath’’ from an ‘‘image-mourning’’ in this setting is that the latter, the immobile image, bears the ominous threat of annihilation within it. On the night of Bourras’s death, Salim is exposed to such a threat. ‘‘That night,’’ he says, ‘‘I became disoriented. Was I awake or was it an absurd dream where everything was jumbled together? Death in a white robe, with butterflies—live butterflies—glued on? Something was wrong there [it was an image that smelled bad]. . . . Other images flitted through my aching head’’ (123–24; 99).28 The threat is inscribed in the image’s immobilities, or rather in its trapped mobilities. Yet in spite of everything, these images allow for time and memory, as they relate to other dreams and other images. Memory links images to each other: the whiteness of the sheet in the earlier image returns in the whiteness of the shroud; the breeze of the earlier image returns in the flutters of the butterflies, but this time captured and despairing. Memory opens as association between these images. The scent of the image, while registering the abject condition of Bourras’s death, simultaneously refers us to the color of the scent imagined by Salim as he was cleaning his other friend’s cell after his death. But here the relationship between image and scent are reversed. We go from the ‘‘color of a scent’’ to the ‘‘scent of

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an image.’’ The image is a site of repetition and memory; it is reminiscence without duplication and without meaning. Survival is marked by these repetitions that restore temporality in the heart of the image. In other words, even though this image is a bound image, an image of being bound, the relationship that it indicates with other moments and images opens it to temporality. The imagination temporalizes not only within each image (movements of the breeze on the surface of a sheet), but also by relating images to each other. Following his hallucination or dream after the death of Bourras, there is another scene of transcendence that mobilizes the first image of immobility and captivity. ‘‘In the exercise I was perfecting to achieve greater concentration, I would see a woman in the night. She always had her back to me, and when she spoke, I listened without trying to see her face. Moving slowly forward, she would ask me to follow her in her pilgrimage around the seven saints of Marrakech, the guardian spirits of survivors, the poor, and the dead’’ (125; 101). Whereas in the preceding dream he is unable to respond to his mother’s call—‘‘my voice is locked up in my throat,’’ ‘‘I am absent’’—in this scene, the relation with the faceless other brings forth a response: he listens and he follows (the image is reminiscent of the final figure in Murambi discussed in chapter 1). The face of the mother, the figure of familiarity and welcome, is now absent, unrecognizable, and rendered a stranger; but this strangeness also frees movement. This absent face of the other hints at the absence that marks the relationship of the subject with himself, with his own absent face.29 From ‘‘I am absent’’ in the previous scene to this facelessness of the other that draws the ‘‘I’’ toward it, the image unfolds its dynamic of absence and presence and its relationship to memory, recalling Jean-Luc Nancy’s characterization of the portrait as a face always in front, always ahead, and always absent. The image then ‘‘recalls in absence’’ (Regard du portrait 54; my translation).30 Memory, in this sense, is not that of the memorable but rather the memory of absence, as immemorial. This facelessness is different from that of Ustad, the one who has lost his sense of touch and therefore does not know if his face is where it is supposed to be. Whereas for Salim relationality is a function of a distance with his own face, with Ustad, the loss of his face signalled his severance with all relationality. Perhaps the image of the black stone can be read in this fashion. While Salim concentrates on the black stone as the memory of a reconciliation between a father and a son, Abraham and Ishmael, the memory of abandon in this mythical scene is an immemorial or absent memory haunting his memory of both his father and

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the sovereign. The face as surface, the surface of absence that precedes us, recalls this absence. The absent memory, not his own, is that which precedes Salim while turning toward him in order to put him into relation with his father and the king. This surface does not return Salim to himself. He does not recognize himself in it. The surface of the face exposes us to the other by always already turning away from us and thus directing us away from ourselves and toward the other. Didi-Huberman follows upon this notion and argues that we speak because we have a face. In the conjunction between image and speech, the face announces itself as absence or better as a surface turned away. Speech is constituted in the turn of the face away from the self and toward the outside. In this sense, the turn of the face is intimately related to that of breath and its contact with air. Figurality comes about in the distancing movement of breath. As breath moves away, it relates to the face as the surface that indicates the direction of breath. In the context of the prison, where the face is not only devoid of reflection but also is invisible to the others, breath becomes the movement that restores the relation with the face but without making it present or accessible. Relationality then becomes the faceless face of the other but foremost, it is the faceless face of the self as other: the relation of unrelation. Thus the face emerges, not as a reproduction or representation but as an image. Perhaps in this way, we can begin to glimpse the possible reason for the impulse toward narration under extreme conditions of confinement.31 Thinking in this direction, we may also glimpse why Ustad, the one who has lost the sense of touch, becomes a paradigmatic figure. His loss of sense of touch deprives him of any relationship with his face, which he cannot touch, and simultaneously, distances him from intimacy with words. Together with the loss of his face, words also no longer relate to each other for this man who could recite the Qur’an by heart. Instead, words are now heavy and suffocating: ‘‘I dive into the ocean of the Book, a boundless ocean. I am tossed around and I almost drown in the waves of words that all go in different directions now’’ (191; 158). Contrary to Salim’s buoy in his ocean of words, here the weight of the words suffocates the man. The lack of relation between words repeats the loss of relation between the subject and his face. ‘‘Tell me a story or I will die.’’ This is the law of the story in this novel, evoking A Thousand and One Nights, but with a difference. The formulation displaces the threat of death from the storyteller, the figure of Shahrazad, to the one who asks for the story. In A Thousand and One Nights, the one who asks for the story is Shahrazad’s sister, also invisible since she is hiding under the bed (see chapter 3 for an analysis of this scene of storytelling). Here, it is

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Abdelkader, the one who asks for the story, who finally dies from the absence of story. When the story is not offered, he commits suicide by swallowing a razor, cutting his silent organs of speech and breath. His desperate supplication for a story rings out hauntingly in the text: ‘‘Salim, my friend, our man of letters blessed with a magnificent imagination, give me something to drink. To me, each sentence is a glass of pure water, spring water. I’ll do without their beans and chickpeas, I’ll share my ration of water with you, but please, tell me a story, a long and fantastic story. I need one. It is vital. It’s my hope, my oxygen, my freedom. . . . My sickness can only be treated with words and images’’ (95; 75). As the primary source of vitality, the story displaces the detainee’s need for food and water. The body’s wellbeing requires that it be infused with this breath that offers the gift of the imagination. ‘‘Thanks to you,’’ Abdelkader says, ‘‘for a few moments I was Marlon Brando. In my head I walk the way he walks in films. In my head I look at women the way he looks at them in life. You gave me a gift’’ (95–96; 75). However, Salim the storyteller is suffering from another crisis: a high fever has thrown him into a state of confusion and delirium, cutting him off from the others. The supplication of the friend does not reach him. After a week, when the crisis passes and Salim is ready to respond to his friend’s request, he learns that Abdelkader has died. Vomiting blood. It was perhaps a suicide but no one would ever know. Abdelkader, whose name, in a gesture of cruel irony, allies him with power and possibility, succumbs to the mute violence of the inaccessible word and image.32 The storyteller is the guardian of time. Memory and story are constituted by relations to a temporality that offers memory and story in a space where nothing is given. Karim, whose name means ‘‘generous,’’ was the original timekeeper of the block. He was the talking clock, ‘‘horloge parlante,’’ whose punctual announcements created the rhythm for the daily activities of the detainees: prayer times, lessons, storytelling, quiet time, and so forth. The rhythm of his speech temporalized emptiness and absence. With the deterioration of Karim’s mental condition and his inability to maintain time, a crisis threatens the prison: pure exposure to time as absence. Karim’s speech was the speech of time and time as the necessary condition of speech; that is, Karim spoke time. The withdrawal of Karim’s speech announces the disruption of time and the disruption of the possibility of memory. Thus, as Karim’s condition deteriorates, Salim the storyteller picks up the thread of time and becomes its guardian. This process of temporalization outside a relation of imitation with the time of the world reveals the nature of the relationship between memory

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and storytelling. The time of the inside is not without relation to that of the outside, for despite the isolation the world does seep through the walls and the gates with the arrival and departure of birds, meals, and guards. However, the relation with the time of the world remains limited, for the interruptions and the comings and goings of animals and humans do not offer any connection to hours, days, and years. These are provided by the rhythm of the prison and the speech of the timekeeper. Similarly, the stories do not repeat stories told, for here too, memory weakens and falters. This faltering memory that cannot reproduce opens the possibility of a difference within memory. The experience of storytelling in this enclosed suffocating space reveals the operations of memory outside a logic of reproduction. When the mechanistic notion of memory fails to deliver time and story, another dimension opens up and becomes the site of the possibility of survival. Salim has inherited the gift of good memory from his father: ‘‘it was all our father gave us’’ (135; 109). A good memory is thus also the memory of a filiation. With the disruption of the relationship of belonging to the world and to its order of identity and filiation, the good memory too suffers a disruption. The loss of memory is therefore not the absence of memory but rather the inaugural moment of the other in memory: ‘‘If your memory deserts you, invent your own characters!’’ Salim says to himself (136; 110). Fatigue and overuse have weakened the machine and its ‘‘recording mechanism.’’ The condition of abandonment, analyzed earlier, comes back here through memory’s abandonment. Another detainee, Wakerine, no longer remembers how to write. One day, he asks Salim to write a letter to his wife for him because he has lost the memory of words, ‘‘le souvenir des mots’’ (168; 138). For Salim, the abundant materiality of words and of writing becomes memory: ‘‘Fighting back against darkness, I was like a well of seething words. I could not keep still. Reading and re-reading were not enough to keep us busy anymore. The story had to be invented, rewritten, adapted to our solitude. The Stranger was ideal for this kind of exercise. Without the urgency of our struggle to save our very being from degradation, I would never have dared to touch this novel. I took liberties with Camus and I reinvented Meursault’s story’’ (137–38; 112). However, this process of rewriting does not bend to the call of a will. Rewriting and reinvention do not reinstate the mastery of the subject but rather reveal a resistance to the will: ‘‘I soon realized that Camus’s novel was tamper-resistant. . . . I returned to my usual recitation until I was so tired I could no longer read the sentences running through in my head. They were vanishing into a kind of

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fog’’ (138; 112). In the process of rereading, within a ‘‘usual’’ reading, without the willful imposition of a new turn or an adaptation to the context of the prison, the other, or the stranger within memory, intrudes, contaminates, and displaces. In the process of remembering, memory falters from suffering and fatigue. Paradoxically, at this moment of failure it offers another possibility. The interruption of Salim’s reading/telling due to his weakness and fatigue allows the others to enter the space of storytelling and memory and continue the breath of the speech opened by Salim’s: Then, like a distant murmuring, I heard someone repeating the opening of the book: ‘‘Mama died today. Or maybe yesterday, I’m not sure. I received a telegram from the nursing home: ‘Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Deepest sympathy.’ The meaning isn’t clear. Maybe it was yesterday.’’ A voice continues: ‘‘Today, I am going to die. Or maybe tomorrow, I don’t know. My mother will not receive a telegram from Tazmamart, or any deepest sympathy. The meaning isn’t clear. Maybe it was yesterday.’’ Another voice: ‘‘Then, I shot four times at a motionless body. . . .’’ (138; 112)

The opening of Camus’ novel offers the detainees a relationship with time in which the present, ‘‘today,’’ finds a point of passage both toward the past, ‘‘maybe it was yesterday,’’ and toward the future, ‘‘I am going to die. Or maybe tomorrow,’’ as indicated by the second voice. While today is oriented toward the future—‘‘Today, I am going to die. Or maybe tomorrow’’—time doubles back and turns toward the past—‘‘Maybe it was yesterday.’’ The uncertainty of the future, ‘‘maybe tomorrow,’’ is echoed by uncertainty about the past, ‘‘maybe it was yesterday.’’ In this movement of return, something ghostly announces itself. The ‘‘I,’’ while speaking about his death in the future, also speaks about the possibility of always-alreadyhaving died, in the past. The inability to locate one’s death assigns the voice of the story to a ghostly realm of surviving, where meanings are not clear. The uncertainty of these relations underlines the state of pre´-mort, where pre´, ‘‘before,’’ ‘‘prior,’’ no longer simply refers to a chronological relationship between life and death, but also suggests near, pre`s, being-in-the-proximity of death. Therefore, being-toward-death here constitutes the horizon of being’s relationship with both the future and the past. The double dynamic registering itself in fatigue takes the storyteller’s breath away without annihilating it, for the story releases the breath of others as the possibility of survival in relationality. Storytelling thus becomes the dynamic of a community

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in the sense of a community of singularities where the speech of each ‘‘I’’ is that of his relationship with the time of death and of survival. The scene of an uncertain memory of death is simultaneously oriented in the direction of survival, that is, toward a future. The storyteller is called to the story by the need of the other for this breath, which in turn opens the breath of the other toward the story and thus shapes the dynamics of overflowing that renders both survival and the narration possible. Phantomlike, the prisoners narrate to each other and with each other.33 The retelling of the story opens a time and a space that do not belong to the world, nor to the space of the prison. Their breath is that of passage between inside and outside, here and there, present, past, and future. The storyteller is called to respond but not by the sovereignty of the law that reduces him to the state of exception, but by the law of excess that registers itself obliquely in the very movement of narration. Survival lets us hear what Nancy calls the ‘‘are´alite´’’ (having to do with area) of time and space of the voice of ‘‘Ecce homo’’: ‘‘voici l’homme,’’ which can mean ‘‘here is,’’ ‘‘see here,’’ or ‘‘hear man.’’ At the juncture where man loses his ground of certainty, about his own existence and about the world, about the past and about the future, at this juncture rises the story, always already the story of survival, intimately related to abandonment, wandering in the vicinity of death.34 The story of survival told after this period of detainment is also survival as story. If the dynamics of strangeness, distance, and proximity annulled themselves, there would be no story. The distance of the face, which opens a relationship with strangeness during the ordeal of the prison, does not fall back into familiarity. Upon his release, the first experience of terror for Salim was his confrontation with a face reflected in the mirror, supposedly his own: ‘‘That day will remain a historic event in my life; as I sat down in the dentist’s chair, I caught sight of someone above me. Who was that stranger peering down at me? . . . That face—worn . . . frightened and frightening—was my own’’ (219; 182). Not able to integrate this strangeness, the face threatens and pursues, but does not become familiar: ‘‘As I walked along, I looked for that other face that had taunted me. The soldier accompanying me said, ‘Don’t worry, lieutenant. No one is following us!’ ’’ While this story to which we listen is told after the fact, when all is done, it too belongs to survival in the sense that, in it and with it, survival tells its story. Thus the survivor catches his breath once again, perhaps always fearing that it will be cut off. The survivor carries this fear within himself, and so long as this threat remains, the story continues.

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I began with the first paragraph of the novel telling us of the kinds of deprivations designed to deplete the life and death of these men: the skin, the gaze, the voice, and reason. As the story unfolds, it shows how these dimensions mutate and become reconfigured for survival. Whenever this mutation and reconfiguration failed, survival became impossible. People did not die from hunger and thirst. They died from deprivation of their senses and mental faculties. The imagination prevented the subject from becoming mired in the immobility and abysmal time of pre´-mort. Within this immobile and unpassable time, it opened up another modality of movement. The body registered its life in the movements of the imagination. This is how under unbearable conditions, where suffering is beyond limit, man may bear the unbearable and survive, but barely. The name Salim—the whole, the sound of body and mind—names, perhaps ironically, this fragile state of survival.

3.

Shadowing the Storyteller

In chapter 1, I discussed Boubacar Boris Diop’s novel on the genocide in Rwanda and said that much of Diop’s work is turned toward catastrophe, be it literary, historical, political, or mythical. His 1997 novel, Le Cavalier et son ombre (The Rider and his Shadow), is written in the confluence of all these catastrophic dimensions, especially the literary and the political. By foregrounding the relationship between law and storytelling, this novel urges us to question where the law of the story comes from and how and why storytelling and figurality require an abeyance within Law, ‘‘Law’’ being perceived as foundation or groundedness. In Aveuglante, we saw that the demand for the story comes from the other as the urgent mode of survival: ‘‘Tell me a story or I will die,’’ one prisoner says to another. Whereas Aveuglante’s beginning is located in the political, the coup attempt against the sovereign, Le Cavalier begins by foregrounding the problems of beginning a story and becoming a storyteller and then moves within the story and through it toward questions of politics and justice by posing the question of the relationship between law and sovereignty. In this way, the novel relates literature to politics but without allowing us to forget or ignore that what we are dealing with is storytelling. The emphasis the novel places on storytelling does not weaken the political and ethical import of the work. Instead of becoming less relevant or less poignant by being inscribed in fiction, the political and the ethical, I argue, become more poignant when they are inscribed in literature. In destitute times, when violence has reached extreme limits and politics has fallen into the logic of the mythical, and when sovereignty has claimed for itself the absolute site of lawmaking, all that remains is the story. This remainder is both ethical and political for in the story perhaps a horizon of possibility for justice can still be imagined, in spite of everything. In this sense, I disagree somewhat with Diop’s own assessment of this work as ethically and politically less significant because it is too literary. While I agree, as I have already said, that with the novel that follows it, Murambi, le livre des ossements, Diop’s writing undergoes a significant shift for 86

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both aesthetic and ethical reasons, I maintain that Le Cavalier remains an important novel aesthetically, yes, but also, politically and ethically. In spite of its playful labyrinthine structure and its masterful metaphorical language, in sharp contrast with Murambi’s stripped-down style and rather straightforward narrative, Le Cavalier, in a desperate yet hopeful, critical yet promising mood, brings to the fore for literature important ethical and political exigencies. Following the double tendency in the novel toward the literary and the political, in the first movement of my reading I analyze the time and space of narration. Like Murambi, this novel too takes place between two catastrophic events. Whereas the story begins in the aftermath of a catastrophe, where a rupture has already taken place, it also announces the possibility of a catastrophe to come. Neither of these catastrophes is registered directly within the text. Rather, they are told in the temporal modes of always already and not yet. The story unfolds in the interstice that relates these modes to each other. In this reading, I show how in this novel narration constructs itself in the articulation between the time of catastrophe, which has the modes of always already and not yet, and of avowal, of re´cit, as storytelling. By ‘‘avowal’’ I do not mean confession, which can imply redemption, expiation of guilt, or justice in its strictly juridical sense. The sort of avowal I am thinking of is the avowal of something so dangerous and threatening that in the course of the avowal it may, paradoxically, carry the story and storyteller away to a realm from which there is no return to ‘‘reality,’’ the ‘‘world,’’ or ‘‘ordinary life.’’ In order for there to be an avowal, there must have been a catastrophe whose ripples still threaten, for as I have already maintained, we are never certain whether a catastrophe has indeed come to an end. The story comes forth as protection for the storyteller from these ripples and as exposure to an unknown path, an opening without content and without a projected end, which the storyteller futilely tries to define, order, and familiarize. In this novel, narration negotiates the space of this relation between danger and self-protection, a double economy of immeasure and measure. Once I have explored the time and space of storytelling, I will open the second movement of my analysis relating this scene to the political and ethical domains. I will emphasize that the construction of a genocidal politics is a problem of correspondence between law and sovereignty. I will make a distinction between Law and law: Law, with a capital ‘‘L,’’ denotes the foundation and source of law, while law, with a lowercase ‘‘l,’’ denotes an imperative without a foundation. This difference between ‘‘L’’ and ‘‘l’’ indicates the distance of law from foundation and from the logic of the absolute. I also differentiate between sovereignty and Sovereignty. The first,

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with a lowercase ‘‘s,’’ receives its legitimacy and authority from elsewhere than itself, while the second, with an uppercase ‘‘S,’’ is the absolute site of lawmaking and law-suspending. Sovereignty, the absolute kind, becomes the Law of law, and in this correspondence becomes foundational for law. In this case, Law and Sovereignty correspond and come to the same thing. I show throughout my reading how the fracture between Law and law, its unfoundedness, allows for figurality to surface and that it is this figurality that offers the possibility of a justice and a politics to come, perhaps. But this justice cannot be pure, transcendental, coming from elsewhere than the conditions of violence, ruin, and destitution. Justice, if such a thing can be imagined, must rise out of the ashes, come forth from extreme loss: implicated and impure, and already marked by death and violence. The novel begins with the story of the narrator’s (Lat-Sukabe´) arrival the previous night in a ‘‘little eastern town’’ (‘‘petite ville de l’Est’’), where he has taken lodging in Hotel Villa Angelo. The purpose of this trip is to find passage to the island of Bilenty to meet his ex-lover, Khadidja, who has summoned him to Bilenty with a letter. But first he must wait for an indeterminate period at the hotel until he finds the ferryman, Passeur. While waiting, Lat-Sukabe´ tells the story of his relationship with Khadidja in Nimzatt, the neighborhood where they lived together years ago. This is the frame story of the novel. Once he begins telling the story of Nimzatt, the time of his waiting in this town becomes more and more entangled with the story of his past relationship with Khadidja. As the novel progresses, the narration picks up momentum, reaching such a vertiginous speed that it becomes impossible to distinguish between characters, spaces, and times. Figures appear, disappear, reappear. Transfigurations move the story forward from one space to another, one storyteller to another, one time to another, dissolving boundaries with a dizzying momentum, even though the storyteller tries to differentiate between here and there, now and then, etc. We learn from Lat-Sukabe´ that after years of poverty and desolate existence, Khadidja finally had found employment in a mansion where her job consisted of sitting in front of an open door and speaking. Not knowing who was on the other side listening to her, Khadidja created interlocutors for herself while weaving stories to relate to these interlocutors. In fact, the novel suggests that her tales could only come about in accordance with the character of her interlocutors, who ranged from a sickly child, to a monstrous man, to a knight. Her final story is a tale called ‘‘Le Cavalier et son ombre.’’ In this story, the figures of Khadidja’s interlocutor and the character of her story, le Cavalier, merge, and thus le Cavalier

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steps across the various thresholds of separation—here/there, real/imaginary—as a shadow, ombre, a figure, and kidnaps the storyteller, taking her to the island of Bilenty, the imaginary setting for this same story. We learn all this from Lat-Sukabe´. The novel is therefore an intersection between Lat-Sukabe´’s encounters and experiences while waiting, and the multiple tales constructed by Khadidja but related to us by Lat-Sukabe´. The narrator of the tale ‘‘Le Cavalier et son ombre’’ is named by the narrator of the novel Le Cavalier et son ombre, who tells her story. Khadidja never appears in the novel except belatedly through Lat-Sukabe´’s renditions, which begs the question of whether Khadidja’s storytelling is anything but Lat-Sukabe´’s story. However, in order for Lat-Sukabe´’s story to even begin, he needs this other story and this other storyteller. Lat-Sukabe´ can recount because there is already a story and a storyteller but this story and this storyteller do not precede Lat-Sukabe´’s account. This other story and its storyteller seem to constitute the call of the story, giving it movement and direction. Le Cavalier et son ombre is therefore constructed as a complicated web of stories, one inside the other, imbricated, juxtaposed, one calling to the other, shuttling imperceptibly between the world of the everyday and the imaginary, effacing the distinguishable lines of demarcation between the two. Along with the stories, narrators similarly multiply, exchanging or even usurping each other’s positions and stories. Therefore, beginning to speak about Le Cavalier et son ombre, one runs into exactly the same problem as our first narrator, Lat-Sukabe´: where to begin and how to continue. The coiling and recoiling movements of my reading follow those of the novel as scenes roll out and roll up restlessly, creating points of contact between moments and scenes without ever falling into a straight narrative line. The novel begins with Lat-Sukabe´’s arrival in a town in the east. This easterly direction is perhaps the mark of the story’s orientation, its being oriented toward something to come: a time to come in the story and as the story. The urgent message of the letter he has received from Khadidja, eight years after her disappearance, prompts him to embark on this journey toward the future: ‘‘Lat-Sukabe´, come before it is too late’’ (13; all translations are mine). But in order to tell his story, our narrator needs another beginning because here he has begun at the end, where all has been said and done and all that remains is unbearable and necessary patience for a crossing toward the unknown. It is not clear whether a passage is even possible as it is not clear in the novel whether this place of waiting, the little eastern town, is real or imaginary. The novel therefore must unfold in the duration constituted by waiting and by the hope for a passage that may never happen. So he begins again, haltingly:

90 Shadowing the Storyteller It is impossible to sit down quietly and roll out in a straight line the thread of one’s life. As soon as you make this decision, emotions and images popping up from every side pull you along by the nose and very quickly you are floating on waves of fury. The kernels of corn crackling under my teeth, I barely have the time to see myself again retrieving Khadidja’s letter from my mailbox when chaos settles in my soul. I nevertheless succeed in getting a hold of myself. I make an effort to keep my cool. I say to myself: ‘‘There is necessarily a beginning to this story and you must begin again, very patiently, from zero. You should be able to do this.’’ So, certain sequences of our common life in Nimzatt come back to me. Is this really where it all began? (31)

He begins again. The scene not only performs repetition by beginning again, it also says this repetition: ‘‘revoir’’ (see again), ‘‘repartes’’ (begin again), ‘‘reviennent’’ (come back). This repetition inaugurates memory, for this is the story of a past life lived together. It is a re´cit. The necessity of repetition guides the story and becomes the imperative for the storyteller: you should (il faut, tu dois) be able to repeat and through this repetition give direction to the story. Sheer effort and decision make the story possible, but this decision does not know exactly what it has decided on.1 It allows a beginning, but in uncertainty and as reluctant questioning: ‘‘Is this really where it all began?’’ There is the demand of the story; it must be told. Therefore order must be imposed, consciousness must find solid ground to check its chaotic vagaries. Beginning from zero, at the cipher, a slow and patient de-ciphering is required. But the decision to tell the story is a leap out of the closure of the cipher. The story comes forth out of this decision, which comes not from a will but from the story, as its imperative. The story demands a beginning, but it does not require that this beginning be originary. If zero is the originary ground, the story requires a leap out of this ground; it can only be told at a distance from any ground, from any cipher where nothing is offered. The cipher here refers to the structure of a repetition that returns to itself, mired in its own circularity and inability to break free of this perpetual return. My notion of re´cit as a story of life distant from the life of the subject requires that this cipher be interrupted and that repetition no longer remain mired in self-enclosure. The imperative of the story foregrounded by this novel is the mark of this distancing and ungrounding. For this reason, the beginning is given as resemblance: ‘‘To find for this story something that resembles a beginning, it’s enough to tell the story of the terrible years spent

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together in the neighborhood of Nimzatt’’ (32; my emphasis). If the law of the story is to begin from the beginning and slowly unfold the years of life spent together, this beginning can only resemble a beginning.2 The beginning that is a resemblance does not copy or duplicate another beginning since no other beginning is given. This dynamic of resemblance is underscored by the repetition of the two scenes of storytelling I emphasize here (although there are other storytellers and stories in the novel) and by the two main storytellers, Lat-Sukabe´ and Khadidja. While Lat-Sukabe´ is the first narrator, that of the novel, his arrival upon the scene of the story follows the footsteps of the other storyteller, Khadidja, who has already come and gone. In other words, the narration retraces the steps of a past story and its storyteller, and in this gesture the figure of the storyteller splits in two, one substituting for the other, neither occupying the privileged position of an original storyteller. The time of the narration is the present. This present is characterized by waiting for a future announcing itself both as hope (to find Khadidja) and as risk (crossing dangerous, unknown waters). But the story is also that of a past (a life spent together years ago) divided from the present both temporally and spatially. The status of the present as the time and space of storytelling is the most problematic thing, for as we enter the story further and further, we become less and less certain about the kind of place ‘‘this little eastern town’’ is. The narration takes place as the relationship between what is no longer (a past life) and, given the divided character of the beginning, perhaps has never been. Beginning in this fashion as a resemblance and a repetition, the text offers the possibility of the always already forgetfulness of memory, what Levinas calls ‘‘obliviscence.’’3 The story is not the memory of that which was forgotten and is now recuperated, but rather the reverse: because there has been forgetting, the story can begin. The remembered past entrusts the story to what Blanchot calls the ‘‘non-historical forms of time, to the other of all tenses, to their eternal or eternally provisional indecision, bereft of destiny, without presence’’ (Writing of the Disaster 85). The little eastern town is thus the time and space of the story’s orientation in two directions, the past and the future, without grounding its present. This spatio-temporal configuration distinguishes the story from a historical narrative. This double directionality of the story’s time—toward the past and toward the future—is perhaps best illustrated by one of Khadidja’s stories, where she imagines herself having a conversation with her interlocutor, the one to whom she speaks but does not see. This imaginary dialogue focalizes

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two problems: that of beginning a story and that of the story’s connection with a truth that cannot be verified, in the present as present. She begins with the formula ‘‘once upon a time’’ (180). The formulaic status of this beginning locates it both within the story and without, both within time and without. It does not, strictly speaking, belong to the story yet the story cannot begin without it. It is a generic marker of the tale. Shahrazad’s formula was balaghani (it came to me or I have heard). Because of this repeatability of the formula (it can attach itself to the beginning of any tale), Khadidja’s imaginary interlocutor is suspicious. He shouts, ‘‘Hey, my friend, so many people have sat in that same place as you to begin their long rosary of lies with the same words!’’ (180; italics in original). The listener expects the story to be true, but what is the status of this truth that speaks of thousands of years ago—‘‘a thousand years and another thousand years,’’ another version of a thousand and one, perhaps? Khadidja, the storyteller, acknowledges the difficulty of the status of this unverifiable truth: ‘‘Sure, the witnesses are no longer among the mortals’’ (181). Impatient and suspicious, her interlocutor longs for the time ‘‘when the storyteller paid with his life for each error!’’ When Khadidja threatens to leave, he softens somewhat, saying, ‘‘Speak a little more, we will see, but know that I am not fooled.’’ Khadidja tells her interlocutor, who exists only in her imagination, that she is not the character of her story, the Princess Siraa, whereas the novel increasingly confuses this distinction, as we shall see. The distance between the subject and the story is necessary for the story, which does not mean that the story is a lie but rather that it begins by abandoning its ground. The formulaic beginning, both belonging and not belonging to the story, marks this ungrounding of the story. It marks the singularity of the story ‘‘once,’’ its temporal indeterminacy, ‘‘a time,’’ and its generality through repetition. The task of reading consists in unfolding these modalities of speaking. While in this scene the story continues because the invisible interlocutor asks Khadidja to speak, in spite of everything, the novel itself has begun with another call. Out of the past and directed toward a future, this call has come in a missive: ‘‘Lat-Sukabe´, come before it is too late,’’ Khadidja has written.4 The command to come rises out of silence and absence, its ghostly quality underscored by the fact that for years Lat-Sukabe´ has assumed Khadidja was dead. With Khadidja having been claimed by the shadow in and of her story, l’ombre, her call opens toward an ambiguous absence, neither negative nor positive. The call to tell the story is not a call for resurrection or return, but rather for a contemporaneity, to share a time and experience of a suffering, the pain of an undergoing. The missive calls Lat-Sukabe´ onto the scene of

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the story, as a figure, who then, through the story he tells, allows for the figure of Khadidja to emerge as that of the storyteller, doubling Lat-Sukabe´. The present time of Lat-Sukabe´’s narration and the space of the little eastern town mark the time and space of this sharing and contemporaneity. What is shared in this space-time is storytelling, the condition of becoming a storyteller, where Khadidja’s story, ‘‘Le Cavalier et son ombre,’’ and Lat-Sukabe´’s communicate with each other from a distance, both temporally and spatially. More than the contents of the stories, the two scenes of storytelling communicate and expose the double condition of storytelling: self-protection and risk. Figures appear with the call of the story, but these figures are always already threatened with disappearance, as marked by Khadidja’s disappearance. Lat-Sukabe´ understands the risk of storytelling: ‘‘I am afraid it is too late to bring Khadidja back amongst us, I mean among people whom, right or wrong, one calls ordinary; but my place is at her side . . . I cannot bear the idea that for so long she has endured these atrocious sufferings all alone’’ (14). Khadidja belongs to the double-edged time of belatedness and fragile and threatened futurity. It is ‘‘too late’’ to bring her to the present, to pull her out of the other temporal order, that of the shadow, while her call to him is an opening toward a not yet belated, ‘‘before it is too late.’’ A woman warns Lat-Sukabe´ of the difficulty of the task before him: ‘‘To wrest Khadidja from the shadow, you must first reach her. It won’t be easy’’ (28). To reach Khadidja is to become her contemporary and to appear with her in this temporal zone of the always already and not yet. However, as the woman warns, there may be a fundamental difficulty or even impossibility: this temporal order does not allow for the present. Therefore, to be Khadidja’s contemporary may consist not in reaching her, but in being belated or not having yet arrived. To be her contemporary is perhaps to reside in the little eastern town, neither real nor unreal, neither here nor there. The time and space of the narration situate Lat-Sukabe´’s relationship with Khadidja: a present suspended between an indeterminate past and a threatening and uncertain future, at the edge of a catastrophe that is perhaps to come, for no one knows when it will in fact be ‘‘too late’’ for Lat-Sukabe´. This excessive tardiness announces the danger and the threat of a disjointed time that is perhaps to come and that has perhaps already arrived. ‘‘Before it is too late’’ is temporally indeterminate, suspending Lat-Sukabe´ between the possibility of arriving and its impossibility, for it might already be ‘‘too late.’’ The missive is not a call to the experience of a communality in the sense of bringing together estranged lovers in a happy or unhappy reconciliation after eight years. Instead, it seems to offer an invitation to the continuous

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suffering of a discontinuity. Lat-Sukabe´ had already decided that Khadidja was dead and so he had settled into the ordinary life of a merchant. But now everything is at risk and uncertain. Contemporaneity, in this sense, does not guarantee the experience of recuperating a lost presence, but rather invites Lat Sukabe´ toward the singular experience of suffering disjuncture, distance, and the impossibility of coming together. After all, as the old woman says to Lat-Sukabe´, ‘‘one does not go to Bilenty as one goes elsewhere’’ (29). This strange dynamic of suffering disjuncture as the condition of contemporaneity opens for Lat-Sukabe´ the question of his own destiny: ‘‘I ask myself whether, while believing that I am going to Khadidja’s encounter, I am not just accomplishing my own [propre] destiny’’ (30). Through spatio-temporal dislocations that characterize the impossible encounter with Khadidja, the complicated nature of this destiny reveals itself in the novel as impropriety of destiny, its fiction. One’s destiny must take distance from oneself so that the story, re´cit, of this destiny may be told. To use Jacques Lacan’s famous phrase, the letter arrives at its destination, since Lat-Sukabe´ is interpellated by it, but the letter also opens a destination and this destination is characterized by uncertainty.5 The impossibility of accomplishing a destined self is proposed to us as nonaccomplishment. The strange spatio-temporal disjunctions of the scenes of narration and the relationship between storytellers (Lat-Sukabe´, Khadidja) dislocate the ‘‘I’’ so radically that it cannot find itself, except perhaps in the story, as a shadow of a self, without origin. We know from Nietzsche that the shadow is always threatened by disappearance both in the absolute light of day (noon) and in the total darkness of night. The shadow indicates the point of contact characterized neither by full presence nor absolute absence, but by the contagion of one by the other. Khadidja dwells under the law of the shadow, l’ombre, but this shadow does not relate itself to an origin or proper identity. Since le Cavalier comes out of the story, he is already a shadow. Only as a shadow can he cross the boundaries between Khadidja’s imagined interlocutor and the character of her tale, between the space of storytelling (the mansion and its divided space) and the space of the story (Bilenty). Le Cavalier distinguishes between two different notions of togetherness: the ordinary community of people ‘‘one calls ordinary’’ and this other community where appearing together, or what Jean-Luc Nancy calls ‘‘comparaıˆtre’’ (to compear) does not imply the totality of individuals ruled by common laws but rather the contemporaneity of singularities always out of joint. The missive calls Lat-Sukabe´ toward a future possibility, also a risk. If

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going toward Khadidja points toward the fulfilling of his own destiny, as he suspects, this destination seems most risky because indeterminately open. The time of the story follows the openness of destiny toward the impossible, since finally nothing is fulfilled in the story folding over itself, story upon story, in perpetual deferral and wandering. The narration begins in this isolated, little eastern town, in relation to which there is Nimzatt, in the past, and Bilenty, in the future. This strange little town is characterized by a double quality of immobility and a place of passage dominated by the figure of the Passeur, the only one who can maneuver the mysterious waters toward Bilenty. This Passeur himself is quite a strange being. The passage depends not only on the state of the waters but also on the unpredictable movements of this singular Passeur. Lat-Sukabe´ waits for him to announce the ‘‘right time’’ for the crossing, when it is neither too early nor too late. However, soon we learn from the Passeur himself that there is no right time since Bilenty is nowhere. This little eastern town may most aptly be characterized by untimeliness, which is indicated by the figure of the Passeur whose appearances and disappearances are always untimely and unpredictable. But the revelation that Bilenty is nowhere comes too late, at the end of the novel, when Lat-Sukabe´ no longer has any choice but to follow the destiny traced for him by the call of the story and its movement. In the little eastern town, Lat-Sukabe´ suffers the double condition of estrangement and risk. He leaves his ordinary life as a merchant of Thai toys, and arrives in this town located between the capital and an island, only to wait until the enigmatic Passeur announces the right time to cross the waters toward a place that is ‘‘nowhere.’’ The story of the past togetherness in Nimzatt, with the hope of future togetherness in Bilenty, comes forth under this double condition. The narration moves forward by folding back upon itself and telling the story of togetherness and singularity, that is, contemporaneity, in the past. The story of Nimzatt is already a story of estrangement and risk. It was a destitute time, ‘‘terrible years,’’ years of misery that threatened the foundation of the couple’s being and Khadidja’s in particular. What threatened the couple were not necessarily hunger and pain, though these were the constants in their lives, but abjection as indicated by Khadidja’s fights with the neighbors over dog excrement and her traumatic response to finding a cockroach in the soup bought, one day, at the shop across the street. In this world of misery and disintegration, Khadidja battled against her own physical and mental deterioration with the obsessiveness of one who somehow

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knows she is teetering at the limit, threatened by an unfathomable and catastrophic experience. ‘‘Khadidja, whom I had known much more neglected, was spending long hours putting objects in the places she had assigned to them according to mysterious principles, from the beginning and once and for all. She grumbled as soon as she noticed a breadcrumb on the buffet or a towel on the bed’’ (35). With the experience of her body on the verge of disintegration—weakness, excessive loss of menstrual blood, malnourishment—Khadidja struggled to gain mastery over the objects of the world, objects which, despite all her efforts, did not guarantee the self ’s mastery over itself nor over the world. This impossibility of grounding herself conditioned Khadidja’s abjection in the literal sense of being jettisoned and excluded, thrown away. As Julia Kristeva explains in Powers of Horror, the abject is not an object outside and opposite the subject but rather the subject becomes abjected, that is, rendered radically unfounded.6 The abject world that surrounded Khadidja was both the indicator of the threat of disintegration and her safeguard against this threat with which her body presented her. ‘‘These fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as living being,’’ says Kristeva. ‘‘My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit—cadere [to fall], cadaver’’ (3). The abject does not eliminate the subject altogether, rather the abject condition marks the tension of the subject struggling to maintain itself, barely, at the border of annihilation. In a way, this struggle is the subject’s experience of itself, but without mastery. At this border, the subject thus abjected cannot localize itself, cannot place itself on a solid ground. The question of ‘‘where am I?’’ rather than ‘‘who am I?’’ which Kristeva proposes as the concern of the one suffering the condition of abjection, marks the itinerant and displaced condition of the subject. The abject object that draws the subject toward itself indicates to the subject that he or she is heading toward a great risk and a danger of total loss. The bug in the soup, the excrements, the loss of excessive menstrual blood from which Khadidja suffers, all protect and menace her, keeping Khadidja living at the limit, where the fall is always imminent. The abjection that weighs down upon Khadidja most threateningly is constituted by her own body. The corpse, as Kristeva reminds us, ‘‘is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life.’’ Khadidja’s body has become nearly the corpse that carries away her life and her identity, ‘‘skin and bone’’; ‘‘her gestures, punctuated by gentle tremblings, were less and less assured’’

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(Cavalier 36). Her constant rubbing clean of her body and loss of bodily fluids mark and safeguard a life threatened by death. In this novel, the abject is not the relation with the filth surrounding her, but rather the relation with the self, which slips away slowly and returns to itself as abjected through the hollowing out of the starving body. The depleted body, refusing to erase itself, draws all attention toward itself and its materiality; the body exposes itself as the space of contamination between life and death, as the limit. Shadowlike, abjection is the experience of the openness of the body, its exposure to the outside, its abandoned interiority.7 This being-body of the subject is an ontological state without certainty, without reassurance, and without a beyond. It is, instead, ‘‘gentle tremblings’’ at the limit of life and death, and an openness that perhaps allows a passage from one to the other without providing certainty that such a passage in fact took place. Abjection thus points toward the excess of the subject; the excess that the subject can neither bear nor contain. It is that with which the subject must live, at the limit of its life and death. Khadidja’s abjection has already infected Lat-Sukabe´. But the effect of this contamination reveals itself belatedly, years after Khadidja’s disappearance, now that he has become a storyteller. He becomes ill during his stay at Villa Angelo: ‘‘You vomited during the night and you’re beginning to be delirious.—You mean: me too?—Yes, Lat-Sukabe´, You too’’ (284). The condition of abjection marks the singularity of the subject and the disjointed contemporaneity shared by subjects. The togetherness of Khadidja and Lat-Sukabe´ in Nimzatt is marked by a double-edged relationship of fascination with and resistance to death. Khadidja’s intimacy with death, her cadaverous life, provokes her to resist it, ordering the world around her, insisting on bearing her physical deterioration and their financial destitution with dignity. Lat-Sukabe´, on the other hand, is fascinated by the thought of dying of hunger: ‘‘Sometimes, I was fascinated by the idea that we were going to die together of hunger. Dying of hunger was a tragic and interesting possibility, totally worthy of our relationship, which you will see how tormented it was at times’’ (36). For LatSukabe´, the togetherness of the lovers finds its ideal expression in dying together ‘‘lying side by side, hand in hand, remembering, perhaps, fantastic hours, at the same time tumultuous and gay . . . an end sublimated by a grandiose death’’ (36). But there is already a disjuncture between them hinted by the discord in their relationship. Khadidja already lives on the other side of the life and death divide, exposed to death without really having died. Lat-Sukabe´ inscribes their death within the logic of cause and effect. Dying from hunger assigns a meaning to death. Khadidja’s insistence

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on bearing it all gestures toward the refusal of a death with meaning. The suffering to which the figure of Khadidja is given over testifies to the withdrawal of the threshold between life and death, which have undergone transfiguration. Khadidja resides under the effect of this transfiguration without being able to reveal its time or place. The experience of suffering marks the singularity of the one who resides in relation to such a transfiguration, and which cannot be shared except as disjunction between those who appear together. Much later in the text, Lat-Sukabe´ suffers a similar condition while in the little eastern town, at the end of the novel. Khadidja and Lat-Sukabe´ continue to live a seemingly ordinary life together, but this togetherness is already under the effect of a profound discord. The narration registers the disjunctures as the difference between the time and space of Khadidja’s storytelling and that of Lat-Sukabe´’s storytelling, always belatedly. The past togetherness of Lat-Sukabe´ and Khadidja thus already points to a dislocated relationship between them. Each storyteller is singular, temporally and spatially, and thus always more and less than the other, always out of place and out of joint in relation to the other. This singularity is marked spatially as Nimzatt and ‘‘little eastern town’’ and temporally as the then and the now of the narration. As it did to Lat-Sukabe´, the call of the story comes to Khadidja in a missive that opens Khadidja’s destiny: a job ad in the paper to which she responds. But this turns out to be a strange job indeed. She is told by the guardian of a great mansion that her task is to sit before an open door and speak, all day long, until a bell rings, announcing the end of her day. —Speak about what, she says completely baffled. —About whatever you would like, Madame. When you hear the bell, it means that the session has ended. —I am not capable of it, says Khadidja without conviction. —Monsieur says that you can, says the guardian. —My studies . . . Let us say that speaking is not my specialty. —It is the specialty of no one, Madame. [...] —Speak, but to whom? —To Monsieur, responded the guardian, unperturbed, gesturing with his chin toward the door in front of Khadidja. —I would like to meet him before accepting, says Khadidja, gathering her courage. —You can never meet Monsieur. It is an impossible thing. (56–57)

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Storytelling becomes for Khadidja a space-time of encounter with law or, more precisely, with the enforcer of law, the guardian, who transmits to her the verdict of the Law and the impossibility of encountering it. However, this is not the first time that Khadidja is exposed to law. Just days prior to finding this job, the episode of the cockroach in the soup had led the police to the couple’s apartment because Khadidja seemed to have become the catalyst for a crime, though this is not certain since the victim, who had displayed large sums of money in this impoverished neighborhood, was wearing a green hat, stolen upon his demise. Inexplicably, this green hat appears to be endowed with supernatural powers indicating criminality, thus suggesting that the victim himself was already a criminal: ‘‘green hats with magical powers passed from assassin to assassin’’ (47). This green hat and the absurd retort of the investigating police officer that, according to the shopkeeper, cockroaches do not like this particular soup, ‘‘buraxe,’’ disrupt the order of meaning and the ‘‘ordinary’’ conditions of life. The reasoning based on the likes and dislikes of cockroaches is put forth in order to justify the shopkeeper’s claim that the cockroach must have come from the couple’s apartment and not from his soup. Absurdity marks the speech of the law both here and later in the mansion. Nevertheless, despite the ambiguities of cause and effect relating criminality to wearing the green hat, and the absurdities of the logic employed by the shopkeeper and by the police about the likes and dislikes of cockroaches, the couple is fully implicated in the murder. Because of Khadidja’s argument with the shopkeeper, bystanders had divided into two camps, one defending her and the other defending the shopkeeper. This face-off had ended with the homicide of the man with the green hat, which in turn had sent the police to the couple’s apartment the next day. Khadidja, still exhausted and immobile, ‘‘gazing vacantly, she had not moved from the bed since the night before,’’ does not speak with the police inspector, who advises the couple to stay away from the street for a few days until emotions cool. The couple is thus culpable without having committed a crime. A few days after this episode, the ad appears in the weekend paper for a job. This ad does not describe the job but simply says that it is half-time and well paid. These two moments, those in the house and in the apartment, suggest that the repetition of exposure to law conditions the movement between these two spaces. The two scenes are linked to each other and reflect each other in such a way that they seem to be necessary for each other’s coming forth. The law of the story, its imperative, seems to come forth in order to interrupt positive law confining the couple to their apartment and making

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them culpable for a crime they have not committed. From this point on, Khadidja shuttles back and forth between the abject conditions of the apartment and the luxury of the big house, between the poverty and disorder of Nimzatt and the clean and orderly residential neighborhood of the mansion. In addition to the clear economic disparities between the two neighborhoods, for which Khadidja becomes a link (she had studied the economics of development), there is another dynamic that overflows from one space to the other, relating them to each other while keeping them distinct and thus underscoring their difference. This other dynamic is the relationship with the law, which relates the two spaces while simultaneously revealing the differences between the two laws. The relationship between the ‘‘ordinary’’ (the everyday life of Nimzatt) and the ‘‘extraordinary’’ (the strange mansion) repeats itself throughout the stories told by our double narrators. The strategy follows that of A Thousand and One Nights, where a threshold is often crossed between ‘‘ordinary’’ life and ‘‘extraordinary’’ events where other laws of interaction and other relations of power and language are proposed.8 But we must be careful not to render this distinction synonymous to the opposition between ‘‘real’’ and ‘‘imaginary,’’ for both belong to the story. Moreover, this movement from the ‘‘ordinary’’ to the ‘‘extraordinary’’ also points to the movement of the subject away from her own life (Nimzatt) toward the story (the mansion), recalling Lat-Sukabe´’s movement from his ‘‘ordinary’’ life of a merchant toward that of storytelling and the ‘‘little eastern town.’’ Khadidja’s storytelling emerges as she passes from her silence in the face of the law’s inquisitors in Nimzatt to the surplus of response in the mansion. When the inspector comes to the apartment, Khadidja barely moves, remaining completely silent. However, in the mansion, her storytelling becomes more and more elaborate, her imagination overflowing in all directions, breaking all boundaries of time and space. This difference can perhaps be explained in terms of a difference in the law’s self-manifestation. The inspector appears as the representative of the law, speaking in the name of a tribunal and a judiciary that dispenses positive laws. But the distinction between the representative of the law and the Law, the place from which the inspector derives his authority, is effaced. In the house, on the other hand, the difference between the representative of the law—the guardian— and the Law—the source from which he derives his authority, Monsieur—is persistently maintained and figured in a way similar to the strategy of Kafka’s ‘‘Before the Law.’’9 Khadidja speaks under conditions where Law is related obliquely to the one who speaks in its name and where this distance from

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Law figures itself. The relationship between the guardian and Monsieur is indicated by the guardian’s movements back and forth between the two spaces. With these movements the two spaces open and become delineated and in the process figurality becomes possible. Through his comings and goings, appearances and disappearances, from one space to another, the guardian draws attention to his own figurality. In other words, Khadidja’s speech pours forth in the separation between the figure (the guardian) and the Law (Monsieur) rather than in their correspondence or their proximity that could erase distance (as, for example, in the figure of a king). This distance marks the law of figuration as the condition of storytelling. The guardian informs Khadidja of her task, and he informs her by relating to her the demands of the Law, ‘‘Monsieur,’’ on the other side of the mysterious, half-open door. He resembles the Passeur awaited by Lat-Sukabe´ in that he crosses the uncertain thresholds between here and there, between the possible and the impossible, yet Monsieur does not speak in his own name or on his own account. Clearly, this scenario hints at a religious dynamic, especially since Khadidja bears the name of the first wife of the prophet Muhammad. As such, the novel simultaneously recasts the scene of prophecy in two ways. First, if we equate the guardian with the angel Gabriel whose first command to the prophet was ‘‘Iqra!’’ (recite, read, speak), then prophecy seems to be bestowed upon the woman rather than the man. Second, this shift not only questions the privileged gender construction of prophetic religions but also recasts prophetic religions as storytelling. Neither true nor untrue, this speech refers itself not to a foundation, as the Law, but comes forth at a distance from foundation necessarily, inscribing the foundation within this distance. The job requirements that the guardian communicates to Khadidja come from elsewhere, and this elsewhere is inscribed in the guardian’s speech and movements. He leaves Khadidja alone twice in order to consult with Monsieur. Khadidja henceforth sits and speaks facing the space of impossible encounter and of the Law. She differs here from both Shahrazad in A Thousand and One Nights and from the ‘‘man from the country’’ of ‘‘Before the Law.’’ While in the former, the storyteller appears to speak in the presence of the Law, the king, whose deadly verdict she wants to postpone, in the latter, the man sits in silent waiting, in hopes of access to the Law. In Kafka, attention toward the space of the Law does not offer any story: ‘‘Before the Law’’ tells of the impossible story to come before the Law, as Derrida has shown in his essay bearing the title of Kafka’s parable. In other words, while in A

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Thousand and One Nights the story appears to come forth in the presence of the Law, in ‘‘Before the Law’’ no story can come forth in relation to the space of the Law. The contiguity between Khadidja and the ‘‘man from the country’’ is revealing about the dynamic of the Law. Whereas in Kafka access to the Law takes the form of a postponement, ‘‘not now but perhaps later’’—which in a way is the dynamic of A Thousand and One Nights, where Shahrazad is not killed now but perhaps later—in Le Cavalier the interdiction is categorical: ‘‘it is an impossible thing.’’ Here, there is no other Law but this impossible encounter that nevertheless requires speech. It requires speech without encounter. Moreover, while in Kafka the doorman is always present, standing before the door as if embodying the postponement of the encounter with the Law, in Le Cavalier, the guardian withdraws from the scene of storytelling. Khadidja does not speak in the presence of the representative of the Law. In Le Cavalier, the guardian is never present during the time of storytelling but withdraws once she enters the mansion. The proximity figured by the relation of the doorman with the space of the Law, which disallows speech in Kafka, is reconfigured by distancing between figure (guardian) and the space of the Law in Le Cavalier, which not only allows speech, but is the condition for its coming forth. Khadidja’s refusal to speak in the presence of the inspector and her surplus of speech in the absence of the guardian indicate the intimacy of storytelling and figuration with a double and simultaneous dynamic of distance and proximity. Clearly, the guardian of the house is intimate with the space of the Law, as indicated by his movements. But this intimacy is marked by an incommensurable distance and estrangement, which in turn allow for other figures to appear, multiply, and populate the space of the story. The final character of her story, le Cavalier, who kidnaps Khadidja, emerges out of this space. The three figures, Khadidja, Shahrazad, and the man from the country, are related to each other by their relationship to the silence of the Law, which is both different in each case and revealing of a shared dynamic. Khadidja experiences the pressing weight of this silence: ‘‘I see him, he is hidden in the shadows. I feel his presence. This rich, lonely abode is stifling under the weight of silence. So, I stop speaking and the silence is no longer the same. Silence becomes a pressing invitation to speech’’ (274). The silence of the shadows invades space and this silence can no longer be reduced to the absence of speech but rather invites that other speech that must go on without a response, ‘‘under the silence,’’ in Abdelkebir Khatibi’s terms.10 In all three scenarios, the Law says nothing. Others speak on its behalf, in

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its place, as if the silence of the Law provides the very law of division and substitution without adequation, figuration and speech without correspondence. Figures appear before the Law and in relation to the Law, including the figure of the storyteller, but these figures appear in response to an imperative that does not return to the source as Law. Rather, the imperative comes from the elsewhere of the Law, the guardian, a figure, who in turn designates its source elsewhere, in Monsieur. Khadidja and Shahrazad are not as oppositional to each other as may be suspected at first glance since the command to speak for Shahrazad also does not issue from the king but rather from another figure, her sister. In fact she is barely a figure since she is hiding under the bed when she requests a story to which Shahriyar grants permission. The king therefore is not the source of the command to speak but rather the condition of its realization as the deferral of a punitive law, in this case the law of beheading. Similarly, Khadidja’s job establishes a contrasting relationship with the punitive law that confined her to the apartment and threatened her with the tribunal’s call. The Law in A Thousand and One Nights is thus separated from the law of the story; they do not belong to the same space. The story comes forth in relation to a law that does not originate in the Sovereign. The story suspends the sovereignty of the Law or Law as Sovereignty; it opens a gap between law and sovereignty. This does not mean that the sovereign and the law are unrelated since it is the king who allows that the sister’s request be fulfilled. However, sovereignty seems to be a response rather than a source. Indeed, it is not clear that the king could have refused. The king in this sense resembles the man from the country who comes to the door of the Law, always already called by it, sitting in attention toward it, unable to leave. The king’s decree of violence aimed at securing his Sovereign place as the correspondence between law and sovereignty is suspended by this deferral brought about by the call to the story issuing from the feminine, the always already site of threat to the togetherness of law and sovereignty (we remember that the drama of A Thousand and One Nights began when two queens betrayed the two kings, the brothers). This suspension reveals the disjuncture between law and sovereignty. Despite the presence of the king in A Thousand and One Nights—in contrast to the absence of Monsieur in Le Cavalier—the place where the king sits may not be, and may never have been, the place of the Law but rather of its absence or, as Abdelkebir Khatibi has said, it may be the haunted place of the Law.11 This scenario in turn suggests that the principles of division and substitution as condition of law are not secondary but primary. In other words, in A Thousand and One Nights, the king’s place has been taken

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by others (through the infidelities of the queen) precisely because division is already the condition of law, the Law of law. The king and the law never belonged to the same place. Without this original division of the place of the Law, there would have been no substitutions, no impurities, no usurpation, and finally, no story. The distance between sovereignty and the law of the story reveals a distinction between law accompanied by punitive measures and the law that marks the condition of possibility of positive laws. This second modality of law, coming from elsewhere, cannot be the same as all other laws or one law among many. In A Thousand and One Nights, the decree of punitive violence proclaimed by the king is suspended by the story, but it is important to recall that the imperative for the story does not have, strictly speaking, a punitive measure attached to it. The demand is simply for a story without any condition of retribution. Initially, the king does not say, ‘‘Tell me a story or I kill you.’’ Only once the story has begun does this punitive condition become attached to it. So long as Shahrazad tells the story, the hour of her beheading is postponed. The oft-cited law of A Thousand and One Nights, ‘‘tell me a story or I kill you,’’ in fact does not define the primary relationship between law and story in A Thousand and One Nights. Given that the call to the story comes from elsewhere than from the sovereign, the site of the violent decree, the story has no punitive condition. In Le Cavalier, similarly there is no punitive condition linked to the imperative to speak. Instead, this other law as division within the Law allows for the story to be told. In turn, the story becomes the place where the possibility of justice, despite great injustice, may be imagined and announced. In other words, the possibility of justice does not arise out of punitive law but out of a law that suspends it and has its provenance elsewhere than in the Sovereign. As with Shahrazad, Khadidja’s storytelling takes place in the shadow of the threat of death.12 However, this is not the kind of death that declares itself as impending violence and punishment, the terms of a decree, but rather a death that comes from elsewhere and marks this elsewhere. Doubling the threat of death indicated by abjection and physical deterioration hanging over Khadidja in Nimzatt, in the mansion, this threat hangs over the story in the form of the figure of a dead woman, placed exactly over the doorway before which Khadidja must speak. This ghostly presence draws Khadidja toward itself, retaining her attention day after day: She proceeded to inspect the place again, in more detail, and her attention was drawn by something that had escaped it until then: a photograph hanging right above the door representing a young woman whose face was both

Shadowing the Storyteller 105 pleasant and a little severe. For some reason, inexplicable that day and the years following, Khadidja thought immediately that the person in the photo was dead and that, somehow, this death had been a formidable earthquake for this house. It was clear to her that the deceased had left a void that nothing could fill. Two handwritten lines diagonally crossed the upper right corner of the portrait. Khadidja tried to make them out but she couldn’t. (54)

The over-shadowing figure with its forbidding yet inviting dynamics keeps calling Khadidja back to itself day after day. The image indicates a void that cannot be filled. This indication is offered neither as absence nor as presence but as figure. The face of the woman in the photo is both severe and pleasant, both welcoming and hostile, or perhaps commanding. The severity of the figure seems to reflect the authority that this place communicates to Khadidja, depriving her of the courage to pick up and leave even though she finds her task absurd. Refusal has become impossible even though nothing is binding her to this space. The text unequivocally lets us understand that the decision to stay or to leave was not solely dependent on strict economic need. Something else kept Khadidja from abandoning this place: ‘‘Even the guardian was imposing to her, with his air of a stylish servant who hated vulgarity. She had nothing more to do there, but this house was also not the sort of place where you slammed doors screaming with anger. The only solution she had was to get up and leave excusing herself politely. She did not have the courage for it’’ (55). The salary is not negligible and the guardian knows that showing her the amount will weaken her protest. However, we learn that eventually Khadidja refuses to take any money from Monsieur. Therefore, the response to the situation is motivated by the economic and something in excess of the economic: ‘‘I think, however, that it was Khadidja’s excess of imagination that made her decide to take the job’’ (59). Khadidja decides that the photograph represents someone who was once alive but is no longer. The photo brings forth this past into the present, making of the image a site of recognition. Nothing indicates that this woman is indeed dead but Khadidja’s decision immediately offers this conclusion. Khadidja deciphers the photograph in the language of presence. Yet the photograph resists such an appropriation in at least two ways. First, the image immediately draws attention toward its borders, ‘‘upper right corner,’’ to the undecipherable inscription written in an oblique diagonal. This inscription is written by hand. Here writing touches death in its proximity with the figure who is assumed dead. This place of contact between writing

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and figure, between language and image, is not a place of meaning; rather, it points to the intimacy between word and image and between storytelling and death. The figure here does not refer to a being in the world, for nowhere in the text is it given that this woman has or has had a real existence or a real death. Even if photographic portraits generally assume the preexistence of a subject, here the story remains unconcerned with this referential dimension. Everything starts with the figure as exposure of death and exposure to death. We are always already before the image as it touches writing and vice versa. In the oblique contact of the two, a simultaneity seems to suggest itself. While writing does not coincide with the image, as it is related to it obliquely, pointing toward the corner of the photograph, the scene of this contact refuses the priority of relations, of one coming before the other. The lack of correspondence between the image and the inscription indicates an interruption in meaning that would make the image adequate to writing and vice versa. Here not only the two, figure and writing, relate obliquely, the writing is also undecipherable. The contact between the figure and writing creates a mutual effect whereby the figure is infected by the indecipherability of the writing—we cannot decide who she is—and writing becomes infected by figurality. Indecipherability underscores the materiality of both image and writing. In other words, this contact between image and writing offers nothing other than the interruptive effects of one mode upon the other’s ability to represent. Representation thus becomes marked by its own interruption, be it as writing or as image. The second way in which the photograph resists being appropriated for representation lies in the fact that the figure in the photo has no existence outside the image. The photograph may indeed be the portrait of no one, and therefore, the law of recognition that Khadidja imposes upon it has no ground. Khadidja’s story of the dead woman whose death has been catastrophic for the household is the only story offered. The enigma of the photograph together with the scene of contact between word and figure, neither negative nor fully affirmative in the sense of signifying, attract Khadidja. Her attention was first drawn by it while waiting for the guardian to return during her interview. By drawing Khadidja’s attention, the photograph exposes her to two dynamics. In addition to exposing her to an unverifiable death, it also opens an ethical zone by distracting the subject from her project of discovery and investigation, from her vigilance and alertness to the impending return of the guardian: ‘‘For a few seconds, all her attention was absorbed by the photo. In the meantime, the guardian had reemerged from the room. Standing in front of her, he was observing her

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with an impassible air. Khadidja felt very confused, as if he had surprised her snooping around in the drawers’’ (54). These few seconds of distraction and absorption foreshadow the trajectory of Khadidja’s adventures in storytelling. Absorbed by the absence/presence dynamic that the photograph exposes, Khadidja is taken by surprise by the emergence of the guardian from the space on the other side of the half-open door. The guardian describes her job to her after this emergence: she is to sit in front of that very door and speak. Taken thus by surprise, Khadidja suffers the effects of culpability, ‘‘as if ’’ she had been searching in the drawers. This is the scene of culpability without crime—also the condition of Shahrazad’s storytelling who comes upon the scene of storytelling because she is a woman and therefore culpable before the king without having committed a crime. This inscription of culpability as the inaugural moment of storytelling and as the inaugural relationship with the Law suggests at least two possibilities for thinking the relationship between storytelling and culpability without crime. First, storytelling recounts the conjunction between guilt and innocence, not only thematically in the story but also in its performance as story, revealing thus their ambiguities and indeterminacies as discernible categories. Consequently, storytelling’s ethical dimension is both inevitable and unverifiable within the factual. Secondly, thinking from the other direction, this scenario suggests that culpability related to storytelling is not foundational but fictional. While storytelling does not protect the innocence of the storyteller, it also does not fix culpability anywhere outside the story. Because in Le Cavalier the couple’s apartment and the mansion mark distinct spaces, we can see the difference between the positive law’s imposition of culpability without crime and the law of the story’s imperative. This difference is marked with the structure of ‘‘as if,’’ which opens an ethical dimension outside the juridical domain. No one has accused Khadidja of having violated a law nor has she in fact committed a crime. Her culpability is brought about by having forgotten herself and having become exposed to the gaze of another, who demands her attention. From this inaugural ethical scene it follows that Khadidja’s tale, ‘‘Le Cavalier et son ombre,’’ would announce an ethical dimension in the heart of the story where the question of justice would eventually be posed. The emergence of the guardian from the other space which opens the space of an ethical relation links figurality (the guardian as figure) to ethics, for the guardian’s crossing of the threshold between these spaces foreshadows the ways in which the character of Khadidja’s story, the figure of justice, also her interlocutor, crosses various thresholds

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that begin with that of narration and then move into the political, the mythical, and so forth. The impossibility of meeting Monsieur allows for figurality as a distance between the Law and figure. The figure of the guardian permits us to think that perhaps the interdiction against encounter comes from the figure and not from what precedes it as the Law. After all, the guardian does not say, ‘‘You must not meet Monsieur,’’ but ‘‘it is an impossible thing.’’ In other words, the gesture may be toward the impossible contemporaneity of figure and the Law. So long as there is figurality and there are figures, including the guardian and the storyteller, there is impossible encounter. Moreover, the guardian does not say, ‘‘it is not possible,’’ but rather ‘‘it is an impossible thing.’’ The affirmative impossible conditions figurality and storytelling. The law of figuration comes from the figure always at a distance from the ground as the Law. This distance allows the figure movement and circulation. The photograph is sepulchral, for it marks a zone, like that of abjection, where the subject comes into relation with death, which is first and foremost the death of the ‘‘I.’’ The gaze in a photograph is never the gaze of the living, for it does not see. The hollowness of the gaze that looks but does not see, that is directed but toward no object, is a seeing without sight. This gaze provokes both horror and fascination because ‘‘my’’ gaze that sees the other does not receive a returning gaze, neither as a reflection of ‘‘my’’ gaze nor as a recognition of it.13 While the I ‘‘sees,’’ the photograph ‘‘looks.’’ This difference marks the point where life is exposed to death. Khadidja’s absorption by the anonymous portrait of the young woman exposes her to death, her death, that never comes to pass because the face-toface with the figure, where Khadidja forgets herself and her environment, fractures the ‘‘I.’’ Consequently, the ‘‘I’’ can appropriate nothing, not even her own death as her own. The exposure to the gaze destines Khadidja in such a way that she as ‘‘I’’ cannot be there to receive her own destiny. The turn toward the photograph, which exposes Khadidja to death without dying, also exposes her to the space of figurality. She becomes a figure in her own tale, not as herself but rather as Princess Siraa. She also becomes a figure in Lat-Sukabe´’s novel. Finally, Khadidja as figure is neither dead nor alive, like the woman in the photograph. The portrait of the young woman hangs above the half-open door in front of which Khadidja sits to tell her stories. This deep silent interior, tomb-like, impresses upon Khadidja the quality of being haunted, where the possibility of any response from her interlocutor seems ghostly:

Shadowing the Storyteller 109 The man’s room was within earshot. But, in order to earn a living [gagner sa vie], she was condemned for a long time to throw her speech into the void, hoping at every moment for an echo, even if fugitive, or for the weakest sign of life from the other side of the room. The game was all the more cruel since, so often, it would seem to Khadidja that this room, thrown into obscurity and silence, was at the same time pulsating with a secret life. This impossibility of capturing the true identity of her universe contributed much, I believe, to the disorder in Khadidja’s mind. (53–54)

Storytelling presents a means to make a living as well as to win one’s life (gagner sa vie), wrenching life from death, at the edge of abjection. Khadidja is held captive by this expectation, this hope for a response to her speech. The cruelty of the situation in which Khadidja finds herself lies in the impossibility of establishing an economy of exchange, a give and take, between the narrator (herself ), and the interlocutor (the one on the other side of the door). Throwing her voice into the void and receiving no recognition and no response, Khadidja, in this absence of reciprocity, wastes her words, for she spends without return, except the salary she receives. However, this void is not the place of lack or absence but rather a possibility for a future, for Khadidja never ceases to hope for a response. By the end of the story, we learn that Khadidja hated the ‘‘man’’ on the other side so much that she would no longer accept any money: ‘‘It was now out of the question for Khadidja to accept money from a man she hated with all her might’’ (276). The dynamics of her relation (unrelation) with the other interrupts the system of exchange, exposing her further and further to the risks of this space, ‘‘a rectangle, cut out in the very darkness, that could be the threshold of a world populated by demons’’ (53). From the very beginning, Khadidja suspects and fears something in excess of life and death, which may carry away the distinction between the two, and this is the cause of her recurring feelings of vertigo and loss of balance. She imagines the forbidden, interior space deep and full of secrets, a life unavailable to her. The hope of access to this space brings her back day after day, while at the same time prevents her from penetrating it. One day, she decides to act and enter, but the passage is barred: ‘‘A faint dry sound: two inner walls slide one toward the other. . . . In a fraction of a second, the incident was closed’’ (277). The space closes like a tomb upon itself shattering her resoluteness (pas re´solu)—resolute step—and the decisiveness with which she approached it, for this is not (pas) a space of resoluteness but rather of uncertainty and instability. In fact, Khadidja does not feel herself prevented, strictly speaking, from entering, for after all, it is not the space that

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finally closes, but the incident: ‘‘Khadidja confessed, however, that with a little courage, she could easily have forced a passage. Only an illogical fear had stopped her at the edge of what, for her, could only be the void. Afterwards, Khadidja had remained standing before the closed door, casting her distraught gaze all around her. The door had reopened without a sound and she had docilely sat down on the chair again. Tamed’’ (277). Who or what power controls this door? No one knows. Only the guardian has crossed this threshold, and later, le Cavalier, her interlocutor/character, would emerge from it in order to kidnap her. But Khadidja herself never penetrates this other space; she is merely exposed to it. In this scene space opens and closes, both threatening and inviting. Once again, Khadidja lacks the courage to act. Something about this space holds her captive to its dynamic. Perhaps what ‘‘tames’’ Khadidja is the fear brought about by the danger of loss without return. What if forcing an entry deprives her of the possibility of return? She already resides at the edge of life and reason, threatened by the effects of death and madness. In fact, Monsieur may have chosen her for this job because of residual madness in her, as Lat-Sukabe´ suspects: ‘‘He too surely had felt her immense pride, the residual effect of her past madness’’ (276). Khadidja regains her seat, offering stories out of the anguish of this teetering position. Faced with the opening and closing of a tomb that offers no guarantee of resurrection but rather threatens engulfment, she seeks refuge in storytelling.14 But finally, it is the story that engulfs Khadidja and takes her to a place of no return. Khadidja imagines the world on the other side as belonging to demons (peuple´ de demons), reminding us once again of A Thousand and One Nights where no story can be told without the participation of demons and jinns. Even before Shahrazad’s arrival on the scene, Shahriyar has come in contact with a demon, who, betrayed by the woman he loves, reinforces Shahriyar’s conviction that all women are betrayers. After this encounter, Shahriyar returns to his throne and begins the cycle of violence that is interrupted by Shahrazad’s appearance and the start of a thousand and one nights of storytelling.15 Khadidja’s daily return to storytelling is prompted by her desire to make this other world, be it that of man, beast, or demons, appear, as Shahrazad returns to storytelling. This impulse becomes the central motif of her tale ‘‘Le Cavalier et son ombre.’’ In this tale, the governing body of an unknown African state decides to create a national hero to supplant the ones assigned to them by colonial rule. Not able to agree on a historical figure, they invent le Cavalier and commission an artist to create a statue of him for the city square. A petty administrator named Dieng Mbaalo is put in charge of the project. But on the night

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before its official unveiling, the statue disappears along with Dieng Mbaalo. The statue kidnaps Dieng Mbaalo, who accompanies it as its shadow. However, in a struggle between the two, Mbaalo succeeds in killing le Cavalier and taking his place. From then on le Cavalier is followed by a shadow who is at times Siraa, the princess he rescues, and at times Khadidja-turned-Siraa, the storyteller he kidnaps, and at other times, himself but different from himself. In other words, the shadow remains indeterminate yet constant. Instead of the hidden world appearing to Khadidja, the story turns Khadidja into a shadow, thus reversing the order of relations between real and imaginary, absence and presence. Like Dieng Mbaalo’s first becoming a shadow in order to become the timeless universal hero, Khadidja’s unknown interlocutor first becomes a figure in the story and then crosses the threshold in order to carry her away to the imaginary island of Bilenty. This island, sometimes imaginary and sometimes real (but how can we tell the difference?), appears as the space toward which everyone is directed, including the story, and along with it, us; a space no one ever really reaches but from which no one is safe. Moreover, le Cavalier was to be a statue symbolizing the nation, chosen by the national leaders. Silmang Kamara, the sculptor, had made the statue so that it resembled no one: ‘‘this work resembles no one because no portrait of your Cavalier exists,’’ says the artist (132–33). Like the photo above the door, the statue refers to no real figure. Here the text recasts the symbolic discourse of nationalism as imaginary and fictional. The genesis of le Cavalier is the story of the usurpation of one order by the other through a contaminating dynamic that further and further effaces the lines of delimitation and identification between one order and another. This is the catastrophe of narration as extreme movement. The story ‘‘Le Cavalier et son ombre’’ underlines the strange and multiple processes of substitution that move this story forward, rendering divisions between the inside and the outside of the story impossible to determine. Through the course of the novel, it becomes increasingly impossible to discern clearly who is the narrator, who is the character, and who is the interlocutor. This game throws the narration into a vertiginous confusion from which it does not recover. The void or the catastrophic is therefore not an absence but rather a space of excessive movement breaking down any ground upon which the narration may wish to stabilize itself.16 The Passeur, a singular figure of impossible passage, offers the gift of this ungroundedness to LatSukabe´: ‘‘I hand you the mirror. The other name for the mirror is the void, Lat-Sukabe´. Afterwards you will choose’’ (287). This mirror doubles the other mirror, the one at the beginning of the story, which is the mirror of

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dislocation and crisis: ‘‘I saw her lapsing slowly into a state of total delirium, to the point where she no longer knew which side of the mirror she was on’’ (15). The mirror offers a site where sight loses itself before the figure of the subject, that is, the subject as figure. It marks first and foremost the distance of the subject from itself, the disappropriated relation of the subject to itself. The Passeur offers Lat-Sukabe´ a choice as to which side of the mirror he wants to belong, as if a choice were possible; but this is the game of the void in which the Passeur excels. He knows the river and is the only one who can grant passage, a passage that may never take place since Bilenty is nowhere, as the Passeur unequivocally informs Lat-Sukabe´: ‘‘ ‘She [Khadidja] wanted to go to Bilenty and Bilenty is nowhere,’ I say with a tone of despair. ‘Nowhere,’ says the Passeur simply’’ (286). Yet like Khadidja, LatSukabe´ persists in his mad desire to go to this nowhere. The response to the call of the other space does not come according to the dictates of the will. The choice presented by the Passeur is the abyss of choice, not only because Lat-Sukabe´ cannot choose but also because the choice is not really a choice between two possibilities. It is rather the choice between two impossibilities. After all, how can one choose to go to a nowhere? Unless one simply chooses to go nowhere, which is not possible here either, for this little eastern town is a place of passage, an isthmus of sorts. To stay or to go have come to mean the same thing. Choice marks the abyss as a simulacrum of possibility. This void engulfs Khadidja at the point where the limit withdraws and the game of metamorphoses in the story no longer follows any law that could ground its movement: ‘‘I knew that we could do nothing more for her when she claimed to be called Siraa,’’ says the Passeur (287). Khadidja became completely engulfed by her story, her identity merging with her characters. This void now threatens Lat-Sukabe´, calling him toward itself. Lat-Sukabe´ tells his stories facing the island of Bilenty, directed toward the promise of encounter with Khadidja, whereas Khadidja tells her stories in hopes of encounter with the interlocutor in an inaccessible space. This space is inaccessible not because it is out of reach, a mysterious, hidden domain, but rather because its movements (opening and closing) are threatening. The threat of this space haunts both scenes of storytelling with death, marked by the photo for Khadidja and the prostitute Yande´ for Lat Sukabe´. On the night of his arrival, Lat-Sukabe´ encounters Yande´, whose body is found in the river the evening after Lat-Sukabe´ tells her all about Khadidja and she understands everything: ‘‘Yande´ had understood everything’’ (23; italics in original). Later the Passeur tells Lat-Sukabe´ that Yande´ too wanted to go to Bilenty. After telling her everything, he then begins recounting the story,

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after her death, in the night, facing Bilenty on the other side of the river, sitting on a bench where Khadidja had possibly sat years ago, prior to her crossing to Bilenty. Death carries away the ideal interlocutor, the one who has heard and understood everything. In the shadow of this death the story comes to the fore, again and for the first time, for the story is told before it is told. Like Khadidja, Lat-Sukabe´ wants to create order in his mind because he is afraid of no longer being able to distinguish between dream and reality: ‘‘Still completely dazed, I try to know what, nostalgia or anger, leaves me with such a sentiment of malaise. It appears to me that superior powers play with me and that I can no longer separate dream from reality’’ (94). This state of mind puts into question the existence of any such narrator as Khadidja, except as a figure in Lat-Sukabe´’s story, reminiscent of the figure of le Cavalier as both Khadidja’s interlocutor and character. Khadidja is the figure that draws the romantic artist toward herself and by doing so dislocates and fractures his ground. This is the madness of the storyteller: ‘‘Before my eyes and as time passes, Khadidja becomes that strange being whom every man invents one day or another and whom he calls the most beautiful woman in the world. When the fog settles, like all the young fools, I too am resolved to die for her’’ (295). In fact the relationship between Lat-Sukabe´ and Khadidja was inaugurated upon the scene of madness. With the appearance of Khadidja at their first encounter, Lat-Sukabe´ already is exposed to the risk of losing himself. On the beach, as Khadidja emerged from the sea years ago, her emergence became the birth of the imaginary and the opening of the artist’s madness: ‘‘She ran her hand delicately across her face to wipe off the water. At that moment, I think I lived an instant of pure madness, one of those moments where the stakes of an obscure destiny pack themselves into a woman’s body. This memory is, before everything else, that of an unveiling’’ (294). The story is once again inscribed in the time of after-the-fact. The instant of madness does not register itself except in the after-the-fact of the story, opening the destiny of a narration always already drawn by the movement of madness brought about by the body of a woman. Figurality becomes the movement of unveiling without ground, under the law of as if. Khadidja spoke as if there were someone on the other side and now Lat-Sukabe´ speaks as if this whole situation were normal: ‘‘All this is very strange. But I refuse with all my force to give into madness. . . . In a barely conscious manner, I decide that the only way of protecting myself is to act as if the situation were perfectly normal’’ (29; my emphasis). This ‘‘barely conscious decision’’ comes in the first few pages of the novel, and

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it allows the story to go on. Pretending that he resides in a normal space, the artist puts aside the radical strangeness of his situation and of his madness, not as a fully conscious act but as the exigency of the story and in order to bring about the story. Moreover, as we saw earlier, the inaugural effect of the as if linked storytelling to ethics through the dynamic of culpability without crime. Khadidja’s stories come forth under this double condition of as if, giving the possibility of both story and ethics. The story culminating in the figure of le Cavalier leads us in the direction of politics and justice. The violence of the statue’s killing from which emerges the figure of le Cavalier is followed by another kind of violence where the disjuncture between ethics and politics leads to genocide. The story of this violence goes as follows. In the imaginary kingdom of Dapienga, there is a king. Upon his arrival in this kingdom, le Cavalier is greeted by a curious state of affairs: he hears cries of distress issuing from every corner and sees sorrowful faces all around him. He asks a woman the reason for this generalized gloom. The woman explains that it is the day of Sacrifice. The beautiful Princess Siraa must be offered to the monster Nkin’tiri in Lake Tassele. This monster must devour yearly one of the daughters of the king. If the sacrifice is refused, suffering will descend upon the kingdom of Dapienga. Le Cavalier asks to be led to the palace, where he meets the king and offers to kill the monster, saving the princess and the kingdom from doom. In exchange, the king promises him his throne and his daughter. Le Cavalier succeeds in killing the monster, but the king breaks his promise by locking up the princess and deciding to eliminate le Cavalier: ‘‘My daughter is safe and so is my throne. I can therefore kill this stranger and keep my daughter. I will not give Siraa to a Twi, this man has jackal’s teeth’’ (176). Le Cavalier survives the attack on his life, but from that day on people say to each other: ‘‘The one who wanted to kidnap Siraa! Well, he is a Twi’’ (177). People had never heard of the Twi but they would respond: ‘‘Damned race. They should all be killed, to the very last one’’ (178). Nobody knows the Twi but everyone knows that they must be exterminated. From this day on, the division between the Mwa and the Twi takes hold in the kingdom. The king convinces himself that this stranger was both courageous and devious, scheming to dispossess him of his kingdom and his daughter. Clearly, this scenario gestures specifically toward the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda, as well as toward the general character of totalitarian rule in the era of independence, though neither limited to that era nor to the recently independent states. Lat-Sukabe´ tells us that the subject of Rwanda made Khadidja literally sick as he remembers the comments of a Rwandan

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friend who, having seen the coverage of the Rwanda genocide on television with that of the death of a race car driver, bitterly remarks: ‘‘One minute for our million dead and thirteen minutes for a race car driver’’ (74). Freedom from monstrous rule, instead of leading to the fulfillment of the promises of liberation, has fallen into the violent patterns of canceling those ideals in favor of centralizing power in the figure of rulers claiming for themselves the absolute position of Sovereign where they have consolidated their power.17 The story spirals back by retrieving in the figure of the king of Dapienga those of the national leaders who invented their own hero. The passage from myth to politics is mediated by the moment of ethical rupture, that of breaking a promise. While the repetitive violence of the mythic time linked sovereignty to a violence coming from elsewhere, with the end of myth, sovereignty itself became the place of violence and lawmaking. In the mythic order, the law of sacrifice specifically addressed sovereignty since the monster required the yearly sacrifice of the daughter of the king. However, given that Princess Siraa is the king’s last progeny, the threat of violence against the kingdom and the cancellation of the king’s sovereignty remain the horizon of the mythic, with sovereignty facing its own impending exhaustion. Le Cavalier, the figure of change and heroism, erupts onto this mythical scene and brings it to an end before it is too late (let us remember that Khadidja, who becomes Siraa, has written ‘‘come before it is too late’’). But instead of heralding an era of peace and hope, sovereignty becomes the place of another kind of violence to which le Cavalier himself falls victim. Revolution thus ends in terror. At first glance, this scenario seems to duplicate the relationship that the scene of Khadidja’s storytelling sets up with the Law by inscribing an elsewhere (the monster) within the very logic of sovereignty. However, the difference between this scene and that of the law of the story resides in the fact that here the law of sovereignty has punitive conditions attached to it: if the king’s daughter is not offered in sacrifice, disaster will descend upon the people of Dapienga. Le Cavalier, the figure of justice here, who emerged out of that other space, interrupts this order of law and opens a horizon of possibility for a political order. However, the recovery of the mythic within politics cancels or closes this opening and the possibilities offered by it. As in A Thousand and One Nights, here too the feminine body becomes pivotal in the shifting movements of sovereignty. While le Cavalier, prompted by his search for universal justice, does not demand a reward for his deed and refuses the offer of the king’s throne, he accepts the king’s offer of the princess as a gift, with an important stipulation: that she agree. This

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stipulation suspends momentarily the logic of rights over the life and death of the woman. The conjunction between the political and the mythical, or the correspondence of the political with the mythical in the figure of the Sovereign, comes about through the cancellation of the gift and of the circulation of the body of the woman, as well as through the recovery of the right of sovereignty over her body. Sovereignty seems to imply the absolute appropriation of the body of the woman and the absolute right over her life and her death. The father and the monster share in this condition of Sovereignty and thus myth and politics join hands. The cancellation of the circulation of the body of the woman bears upon the future with the weight of a catastrophe, for the fairy tale motif of this story, which opens a love story between the heroic knight and the distressed princess, also opens a hopeful horizon for the future. At the feast in honor of le Cavalier’s success, we are witness to the burgeoning love between him and Siraa: ‘‘Princess Siraa is the most radiant. She does not take her eyes off le Cavalier and often le Cavalier looks for her in the crowd. He thinks of the happiness awaiting them. For a long time now, he has wanted to have a son as brave as himself, whom he wants to name Tunde’’ (176). The king’s cancellation of his promise announces the cancellation of the future as possibility and of hope, for Tunde means ‘‘the one who keeps hope intact.’’ While le Cavalier escapes from Dapienga and continues to fight against injustice elsewhere and in other times, the princess remains chained to this absence, speaking toward it without receiving a response, living in hopes of his return. Thus the future remains suspended and so does the possibility of politics to come, one that would coincide with justice. Le Cavalier and Siraa find each other at the end of the genocide when disaster has carried everything away. Even the body of Tunde falls victim to this violence, for the scene of his birth is also the scene of his violent death. However, his phantom remains as the excess of both life and death: ‘‘His name is Tunde. It was him,’’ says a man, indicating the corpse of a newborn, blown to pieces by a militiaman at the moment of his birth. ‘‘He neither had the time to live nor to die: Tunde is among the smoking ruins of the country. Look for him, Princess Siraa and you’’ (200). The story continues because hope remains, in spite of everything, as a phantom. This is why the story is necessary. At the end of disaster, where all hope has been destroyed, temporality becomes the relation with a future that has no certainty. Dapienga finally collapses and now the goal is to find the ghost of the child who keeps hope intact and who would save this land of Dapienga and its people from destruction and servitude. Bilenty, this nowhere of the story,

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perhaps a utopia, becomes the space of Tunde, for the goal of le Cavalier and Siraa/le Cavalier and Khadidja/Lat-Sukabe´ and Khadidja, all converging toward Bilenty, is to give to its hill the face of Tunde. Future as hope becomes both figure and the very movement of figuration. The politics to come thus gets inscribed in a messianic dynamic, and this messianism is located in the imaginary and the movement of the story. So long as there is the story, there remains the possibility of a future. When all has been lost and disaster has devoured all signs of life, even hope as life and in life, there remains the time to come, not as a project to be realized but as hope to be imagined. The ethical imperative of the story is that this time to come, this politics, must be imagined. It does not suffice to remain mired in the silence of disaster or loss but rather one must imagine, in spite of everything. —You know Khadidja, has the moment arrived then for the tale to cast itself off into the sea? —Yes, and I will not be the last to inhale its perfume . . . —I have not heard you say that they have found Tunde. —The fable is infinite. (264–65; italics in original)

This exchange takes place between Khadidja and the double figure of le Cavalier: the interlocutor who does not speak and the figure in her story who does speak and with whom she goes to Bilenty: ‘‘I come with you to the foot of the hill. We will give to the hill the face of Tunde’’ (265). It seems from this dialogue that Khadidja might not have been kidnapped after all, but rather have gone with le Cavalier to keep hope and the possibility of justice open. Only others claim that she has been kidnapped, duplicating the discourse of the king of Dapienga about le Cavalier wanting to usurp his place. The episode of the killing of the statue performs the function of a hinge that articulates the double direction of the figure of le Cavalier: the statue and the one who takes its place. The leaders of the country want a national symbol reflecting upon the heroism of the nation, primarily of its leaders. The killing of the statue, perhaps also an instance of culpability without crime or rather culpability based on an impossible crime since a statue cannot be killed, displaces the symbolics of nationalism by offering the figure of a universal hero; one who traverses all the boundaries of time and space in search of universal justice. However, this ideal figure is hampered by the singularity of a time and a place where heroism no longer has any validity: the condition of modernity. While the killing of the monster marks the quintessential mythical heroic deed, the hero is rendered impotent by what

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follows. At the end of the genocide, when le Cavalier finds himself incapable of affecting change because ‘‘no one wanted to listen to him,’’ he resolves ‘‘to return to the centuries where his heroism had a meaning’’ (196). This collapse of meaning as the condition of modernity renders distinction between friend and enemy impossible. We remember that the distinction was imposed by the Sovereign and the new genocidal politics, an arbitrary decision that finally could not guarantee the sustainability of the lines of demarcation it had drawn. When the militia mistakenly kill members of the ‘‘wrong’’ group, they hold training sessions in the skills of correct enemy recognition and ashamedly admit that if the king were still alive, he would have been displeased. Le Cavalier too becomes implicated in this confusion, no longer knowing where to place himself in this war: ‘‘ ‘Yes. You, Cavalier, I have watched you during combat,’ says the man. ‘You have never known which side to take in this war.’ ‘Alas, I have had my share of crime . . . However, I have crossed this war without understanding it. In my other lives, things are much simpler. It’s enough to face the monster, Nkin’tiri and defeat him’ ’’ (199). The impossible determination of the categories of good and evil, friend and enemy implicates le Cavalier himself in the atrocities. In this sense, even justice cannot claim purity or innocence. Le Cavalier’s dilemma of, on the one hand, searching for universal justice and, on the other hand, being impotent to respond to the singular situation of this time and this place hints toward the ethical aporia that Derrida, following Kierkegaard, has addressed, though in a reversed form. Ethics seems to always be tinged with irresponsibility, which in turn implicates the ethical subject in the failure of ethics. In other words, if the turn to the universal requires that one turn away from the singular, this singularity nonetheless draws the universally oriented subject toward itself, thus revealing in this turn and return the always already contaminated condition of ethics.18 The repeated ethical scenario of culpability without crime underscores this always already implicated ethical subject, as we have already seen in Murambi. Justice as the horizon of the political announces itself as a justice to come, an impulse and a hope engendered by the story and with the figure of Tunde. Khadidja’s letter to Lat-Sukabe´, the missive telling him to come before it is too late, speaks explicitly of hope and of the future: ‘‘Khadidja prophesied an era of happiness and freedom, adding mysteriously: ‘. . . because as you know well, things cannot continue as they are. If we are not impatient, our hour will never come again. We must have the strength to start again: this will be Tunde’s message to future generations’ ’’ (77; italics in original). Khadidja’s message is then suspended between the always already and not yet of

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her own death and the birth of Tunde, future as hope and possibility. This politics to come becomes the horizon of narration, both of Khadidja’s ‘‘Le Cavalier et son ombre’’ and of the novel Le Cavalier et son ombre. The title Le Cavalier et son ombre foregrounds figurality by specifically referring us to Nietzsche’s ‘‘The Wanderer and His Shadow,’’ which, in addition to the famous dialogue between the wanderer and his shadow framing part 3 of Human, All Too Human, had introduced us to these two figures in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In this appearance of the shadow, who surprises Zarathustra during his wanderings, the shadow characterizes its own wandering. The relationship between the shadow and the world is not one of reciprocity or exchange, rather it is based on imbalance and asymmetry. The shadow is profuse and excessive, falling upon all surfaces and spaces, giving endlessly of itself but receiving nothing in return: ‘‘I have sat on every surface, like weary dust I have fallen asleep upon mirrors and window panes: everything takes from me, nothing gives. I have become thin—I am almost like a shadow’’ (Thus Spoke Zarathustra 285). And a little further, the shadow continues: ‘‘I have broken up with you whatever my heart revered. I have overthrown boundary stones and statues, I have pursued the most dangerous desires—truly, I once went beyond every crime.’’ Le Cavalier et son ombre tells the story of this itinerary of the shadow as a figure replete with overthrown boundaries in the forms of statues, land borders, watery borders, textual borders, and dangerous desires that lead nowhere but to catastrophe. In ‘‘The Wanderer and His Shadow,’’ the shadow insists on its freedom despite its attachment to the heels of another. The point of contact where the shadow touches the other does not subject the shadow to the will or whim of the other. The other does not choose the shadow nor can it will its disappearance. The only way in which this other can free itself from the grips of the shadow lies in the other’s rejection of light. The light to which the shadow attaches itself differs from the absolute light of high noon that accepts and allows no shadow. This shadowless light, with its blinding effect, has something in common with darkness: it does not allow for figuration. Shadows are figures because they too receive the law of their appearance from elsewhere than from the perfect correspondence between thing and the source of light. The shadow comes forth as the relationship with the elsewhere of light. When the other aligns itself with absolute light or absolute darkness, then the figure retreats. Yet, the figure does not disappear but lies in waiting: ‘‘And yet you called us ‘importunate’—us, who know one thing at least extremely well: how to be silent and to wait—no Englishman knows it better. It is true we are very, very often in the retinue of men, but

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never as their bondsmen. When man shuns light, we shun man—so far, at least, we are free’’ (Human, All Too Human 364). The shadow’s ability to retreat renders it terrifying, for it becomes aligned with death: ‘‘For when Zarathustra inspected him with his eyes, he was as terrified as if he had suddenly seen a ghost, so slight, dark, hollow, and spent did this follower appear’’ (Thus Spoke Zarathustra 284). The abject body of Khadidja, weakened and spent, withdraws further and further until it dissimulates itself in the depth of the story, without a body, properly speaking. Khadidja too had passed through Villa Angelo on her way to Bilenty. Yet no one in Villa Angelo knows Khadidja except as a phantom, a shadow. Her body used to disappear in the morning and she told her stories roaming around town, without a ‘‘body’’ properly speaking: ‘‘They [the clients] saw with fright that Khadidja did not have, as it were, a body. Around dawn, she would disappear (285). Khadidja is a shadow that belongs to the heart of darkness and not to the light of day. Like the space that she faces during her storytelling sessions, ‘‘cut out in the very darkness,’’ she remains without a source (53). While Lat-Sukabe´ struggles to keep order and relegate Khadidja’s story to a past that can be recuperated, Khadidja withdraws from her stories and his, leaving Lat-Sukabe´ bewildered and floundering, his story without a center. This withdrawal leaves Lat-Sukabe´ with no other option but to follow in the heels of Khadidja into the unknown. However, only because Lat-Sukabe´ already belongs to the shadowy domain, he can follow her, attempting to cross the boundaries and risking the most dangerous desire. Thus the only hope for survival and return remains in the shadowy folds of yet another story to come: ‘‘Finally, all this is nothing but the follow up to Khadidja’s story. She awaits her shadow, and it will be you,’’ says the Passeur to Lat-Sukabe´. ‘‘—I like this. To be Khadidja’s shadow is a good destiny,’’ responds Lat-Sukabe´ (288).

4.

Un-limiting Thought

Abdelkebir Khatibi’s thought haunts this project from its first pages. Therefore, it is only fitting that the last chapters be dedicated to direct and sustained engagement with Abdelkebir Khatibi, as a writer and as a thinker. This double engagement is made necessary by Khatibi’s oeuvre, which seldom distinguishes, in clear lines, the literary from the nonliterary. He calls his own literary work ‘‘une e´criture pensante’’ (a thinking writing), thus highlighting the conjunction between writing and thinking. I have adopted this framework of ‘‘e´criture pensante’’ in my approach to all the texts so far. Yet the question of thinking remains to be explored and thought. This chapter is dedicated to such an exploration. Khatibi is Morocco’s most renowned contemporary thinker and writer. His work, which has been translated into numerous languages, has received critical attention from philosophers and literary critics in his own country and on the international scene, especially in France and among scholars of Francophone literature in the United States. Therefore, his intellectual concerns regarding writing and language, his constant questioning of metaphysics, and his critical engagement with the Islamic traditions are well known, though less so in the English-speaking world due to a lack of translation. Much of the criticism on Khatibi has taken as its central concern the issues of translation, bilingualism, and writing. However, the question of thinking, recurrent in Khatibi’s oeuvre, and the relationship between thinking and literature in his work, have received cursory attention at best. In this chapter, I will turn my attention to the movements of thought in his best-known text, Amour bilingue (Love in Two Languages). I will show how the vicissitudes of thought are marked by the relation between thought and catastrophe, that is, the irruption of an event, the disruption and intensity of which thought cannot register in the narration, except obliquely. This relation between the movements of thought and those of language provide the momentum for Amour bilingue. In this reading, the primary figure of the story, la Bi-langue, becomes the fading and dispersive center 121

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of a narration, struggling to sustain the unsustainable and engendering the story of an impossible love and of a failing encounter. However, I will first take a detour from Amour bilingue in order to elucidate the problematic of thought for Khatibi as put forth in his 1981 essay ‘‘Pense´e-autre’’ (‘‘Thought-Other’’). This detour is necessitated by direct modes of mutual address between the two texts as well as by the fact that any displacement of thought from the conceptual, or philosophical, register to the literary requires engagement with both these modes of presentation, for it is not given that the confines of these modes of speech are distinguishable. Therefore, when we argue that pense´e-autre moves the question of thought from the philosophical to the literary, the terms of the distinction between the two domains must be clarified. In ‘‘Pense´e-autre,’’ Abdelkebir Khatibi outlines a way of thinking that challenges and destabilizes the metaphysical tradition that has oriented Maghrebians’ and Westerners’ thinking about the Maghreb. This metaphysical tradition founds itself on concepts of origin and identity, such as Arab and Islamic, and thereby has positioned the Maghreb opposite a well-defined and identifiable Occident. Ironically, the Maghreb and the Occident share the name of disorientation, or ‘‘sunset.’’ This name refers to both the region, the Maghreb, and to the country of Morocco (al-Maghreb). While discussing the makeup of a Moroccan colonial city in his essay ‘‘A Colonial Labyrinth,’’ Khatibi rather dreamily says: ‘‘Three communities, that is, three gazes graduated according to the principle of light and shade, in a country called one should remember the ‘Sunset.’ I fall asleep in the dreams of this beautiful name’’ (5). Gharb and Maghreb (the West) are also related etymologically to ‘‘strangeness’’ and ‘‘otherness,’’ ghareeb, and ‘‘exile,’’ ghurba. Khatibi’s pense´e-autre proposes a different direction for thought, ‘‘a perhaps unheard of thought of difference,’’ insisting that ‘‘such a liberation is rigorously necessary’’ (Maghreb pluriel 21; all translations of this text are mine). He proposes therefore a thought of difference that is not founded in the Islamic or Arab identity, because he considers discourses of identity infected with an obsession with origin: ‘‘Yes, to search for something else in the division of the Arab and Islamic being, and to detach oneself from the obsession of origin, of celestial identity, and of a servile morality. Something other and otherwise—according to a plural thought—in the shaking of any beyond, whatever its determinations’’ (21). He thus proposes a direction for thought that inscribes an instability, ‘‘e´branlement,’’ in the hearts of Islamic metaphysics and Western metaphysics ‘‘as two radical formulations of being, of the one, and of totality’’ (21). This dual direction, which Khatibi calls

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‘‘double critique,’’ does not oppose Islam and the West but questions the one and the other at the same time, in their distance and in their proximity. Double critique must not forget that while Islamic metaphysics is fundamentally theological, based on the notion of an inimitable language (Arabic, the language of revelation), this theology is closely connected to the foundations of Western metaphysical thought, namely Aristotle. He thus reminds us that ‘‘the God of Aristotle entered into Islam before the latter’s arrival. . . . Arabs had invented the famous Theology of Aristotle in order to erase, in a way, Greek paganism and to get around Greek thought by the monotheistic circle’’ (22). This history of a double translation—of Islam by Aristotle and of Aristotle by Islam—disorients thinking about the interaction between Islam and the West and destabilizes the clear-cut axes of East and West, Orient and Occident.1 Double critique takes account of this intimacy between East and West, as well as of their differences, but it does not displace one with the other, nor does it move within one or the other as a foundation and therefore a privileged site of identity. The constant movement between the two renders oppositional discourses of resistance impossible. Khatibi accuses those who forgo the vigilance of double critique of remaining within the logic of metaphysics; their discourses, he says, far from resistant to this logic, are often its parody. In order to challenge this overdetermining logic and thought, one must consistently resist the desire for reappropriation of origin and authenticity. Pense´e-autre takes place instead at the margins or limits of the metaphysics of origin and authenticity as ‘‘a wakeful margin’’ (17). The notion of otherness in Khatibi’s work, especially in ‘‘Pense´e-autre,’’ has been the topic of many insightful critical studies. These studies articulate the relationship between thought and otherness as the thought of or on the other and thinking the other, often in historical, linguistic, or cultural terms. However, this critical scenario does not fully address the question of the relationship between the two terms ‘‘thought’’ and ‘‘other.’’ The hyphen in pense´e-autre remains unthought or becomes effaced or translated into an ‘‘of,’’ ‘‘on,’’ ‘‘about,’’ or some other more harmonious reformulation that may facilitate thinking, such as ‘‘other-thought,’’ or ‘‘thinking-otherwise’’ rather than ‘‘thought-other.’’ Such moves run the risk of subsuming the other under the dominion of thought, as its object, and of making it seem as if ‘‘thought’’ itself were self-explanatory and unproblematic, whereas the other, in its strangeness, in its alterity, excess, resistance, and radical otherness, requires our critical attention. While ‘‘thought-other’’ implies, as we shall see, a notion of other-thought and other thought, the repositioning of

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the relation between the terms erases certain complexities and ambiguities that pense´e-autre requires us to think through. Khatibi himself argues that in thinking the other, particularly in historicism, there is a confusion between ‘‘autre,’’ ‘‘autrui,’’ and ‘‘Autre’’—that is, there is a confusion between anthropology, theology, and the thought that thinks the other and thinks otherwise: the thought of difference. This thought that thinks the other differently must necessarily undergo a modification or a different modulation itself. In fact, the relation that Khatibi establishes between these two terms, ‘‘thought’’ and ‘‘other,’’ indicates no subordination, but rather exposes a relation between them defined by proximity marked by distance. No grammatical decision or reformulation (other-thought is more grammatically harmonious) can resolve this complex relation between the two terms. Thus nothing is to be taken for granted and nothing is to be privileged, for pense´e-autre is a formulation where everything is at stake. ‘‘Thought-other’’ is both ‘‘chance de la pense´e’’ (chance of thought) and its ‘‘risque implacable’’ (implacable risk). Thought as pense´e-autre links chance and risk, possibility and threat. In a way, in order to undertake the task of thinking about pense´eautre in these pages we too must be willing to take a chance and risk something, like not having the last word and falling short of total coherence. Pense´e-autre: how to understand the logic of this interaction? Both terms, ‘‘thought’’ and ‘‘other,’’ perform ambiguous grammatical roles: both are nouns and both are adjectives. This relatedness includes all the logical possibilities without settling on any in particular. For this reason, ‘‘other’’ cannot be determined as the geographical, political, ontological, theological other. I suggest that ‘‘other’’ is related to ‘‘thought’’ as the relation of thought to itself. This relationality in turn points to a crisis of thought and by implication a crisis within thought thinking the other and thinking otherwise. This relation of inexhaustible signification and the endless interaction of the two terms provide momentum for Khatibi’s work. ‘‘Pense´e’’ and ‘‘autre’’ are not two separate and independent entities; rather, the two always belong together, are always drawn together without appropriating one under the dominion of the other. The notion of poverty, both political—the economically poor, the socalled Third World—and philosophical for Khatibi, relates pense´e-autre to poverty as this possibility and indeed the necessity of resisting appropriation. Poverty is articulated as a dispossession that also dispossesses thinking of the metaphysical basis for identity: ‘‘A thought that is not inspired by its own poverty is always elaborated in order to dominate and humiliate; a thought that is not minoritarian, marginal, fragmentary, and incomplete, is always a

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thought of ethnic cleansing’’ (18; italics in original). Poverty belongs to thought and must become its inspiration, its chance and its risk. Only when thought forgoes its assumptions of authority and foundation can it then become a relation with the other that is not that of mastery, and this relation with the other foregrounds first and foremost a relation to itself. In pense´eautre, thought cannot consume the other because the other does not offer anything for consumption nor consummation, for it too is dispossessed and displaced, without a home. This impossible appropriation is at the base of the asymmetric economy that characterizes pense´e-autre throughout Khatibi’s essay. ‘‘Pense´e’’ and ‘‘autre’’ contaminate each other’s domain through the conduit of a relation, of a hyphenated connection, that keeps them together without making them one. With this relationship between ‘‘thought’’ and ‘‘other,’’ Khatibi’s thinking allows for a radical notion of difference. What he calls ‘‘la diffe´rence intraitable’’ (uncompromising difference) inscribes itself in the exchange between ‘‘thought’’ and ‘‘other’’ (38). Khatibi calls upon all those engaged in discourses of identity, starting with historians, to take on the philosophical questions of temporality, being, and subjectivity in order to approach the questions of history and identity. ‘‘Some may object, however,’’ he says, ‘‘that a historian is not obligated to refer to philosophy. I do not see what history a historian can practice if not that of languages translating facts, events, and all the traces to be deciphered’’ (35). For this reason his critique in ‘‘Pense´e-autre’’ is directed specifically toward a kind of historicism, represented here by the Moroccan historian Abdallah Laroui, which employs the metaphysical logic of continuity: ‘‘Wanting mainly to explain history by continuity, Laroui lets slip between his fingers the other movement, no less active, that of distance, discontinuity, disorder, and asymmetry. In the violence of (historical) being, there is always a loss and a nonreturn’’ (32). ‘‘Historial thought’’ (la pense´e historiale) is differentiated from ‘‘historical thought’’ (la pense´e historique) according to two modes of temporality: the first is that of nonreturn and the thought of retreat that marks being in the Derridean sense of the trace, that is, the retreat at the heart of presence; the second is that of the continuity and totality of being without distance, a kind of self-presence and immanence. Khatibi distinguishes ‘‘historial’’ from historicism. Metaphysical historical discourses forget the other movement, namely that of retreat, always already there in the heart of language, in the heart of the ‘‘question of being and beings’’ (question de l’eˆtre et de l’e´tant) (34). Pense´e-autre is thus emphasized as a thought on time and of time, and therefore a thought that is always already historical, but not in the sense of

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historicism. For Khatibi, the elaboration of the conjunctions between thinking time and thought as temporal that would escape the frameworks of metaphysics takes place in the literary. Thus Amour bilingue becomes the scene where movements of thought unfold slowly and patiently, while so much of the essay ‘‘Pense´e-autre’’ and other philosophical essays remain condensed and unelaborated in all their implications. The problem for Khatibi lies perhaps in the facts that the language of elaboration remains too framed by metaphysics and that one can imagine a possibility of sidestepping this trap through the movements of narration, re´cit. This dilemma concerns all critical enterprises that seek to show the limits of metaphysical discourses, including the present one. Projects of elucidation are irretrievably bound up in this contradiction. Fully aware of the traps of discourse, Khatibi moves the problem of thinking to another scene. However, in order to contend with the repetitions of the question of thought in Khatibi’s oeuvre, the implications and the stakes of the philosophical essay must first be elaborated. This excavation of the essay will show the connection between pense´e-autre and the notion of re´cit as deployed in other chapters so far. Khatibi’s pense´e-autre calls attention to an oscillation within thought where thought distances itself from itself, or in Jean-Luc Nancy’s terms, ‘‘thought weighs at the point where reason, being (present) to itself, ‘e´tant a` soi,’ distances itself from itself and does so with whole distance of this to’’ (Gravity of Thought 77). Like Nancy (with whom my reading of Khatibi is consistently in dialogue as a way of describing the various folds of Khatibi’s very condensed essay), Khatibi wants to take thought, in its traditional sense of reason, to the limit and there point to the fracture within thought that, by fragmenting it, opens thought up. He also indicates that it is only because thought is always already threatened by the limit that it turns toward reason as a gesture of self-protection. ‘‘Thought’’ is related to ‘‘other’’ through a double movement of proximity and distance, moving toward the other and retreating from the other. This relation is first of all that of thought to itself, where the self is articulated not through a closure or completion, but through an uncompromising distance that keeps it open and welcoming. This openness of thought is not directed toward an objective world; rather, it is an openness that allows thought to happen, endlessly.2 The relationship between ‘‘thought’’ and ‘‘other’’ in Khatibi follows this dynamic: ‘‘other’’ is not the object of ‘‘thought.’’ It is rather that within thought that puts it in relation with its own limit over and over again. Khatibi calls this thought ‘‘une pense´e plurielle’’ (a plural thought). This plural

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quality, which consists of division but without individual and separate identities, is more fundamental than any notion of cultural or linguistic plurality. This plurality must be thought otherwise if we are to take the task to which Khatibi invites us seriously. When thought turns toward its own limit, registering this limit within itself as the limit of thinking, trying to think this limit as its own impossibility, it does so by opening itself and by forgoing the logic of closure and self-sufficiency. In this way, thought becomes the site of a relationship with freedom. This notion of freedom, however, remains in excess of the predominant ideologies of freedom: ‘‘Let us leave those professors of self-sufficiency to proclaim the end of gods, of men, and the end of ends. Let us abandon 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 a pense´e-autre, which would be a gift accorded by a suffering that seizes its own terrible freedom’’ (17). Pense´e-autre is that in thought which inscribes a disruption in the heart of self-sufficiency as thought. The metaphysical basis of self-sufficiency, be it philosophical or theological, that is, based on the primacy of the unity of the Idea or of the Divine, is a thought of closure, or rather thought as closure, which has nothing further to offer. It is an exhausted thought, returning eternally to itself, to its own completion and exhaustion. Thought as self-sufficiency is the thought of the end, in the sense that the economy of self-sufficiency allows for no remainder or excess in the flow of loss and gain. The discourse of self-sufficiency, be it economic, philosophical, or something else, professes this end as it thinks it. These discourses offer thought and, at the same time, the correspondence between discourse and thought asserts closure as end, in both senses of teleology and of completion. However, ironically, from within this movement of closure and this constant return of thought to itself, the system is undermined. In the process of achieving the end, the return of thought to itself becomes a question for thought. This question becomes the excess, pense´e-autre, within the movements of thought and within thought’s correspondence with discourse. For this reason, Khatibi’s thought in ‘‘Pense´e-autre’’ and the other essays collected in Maghreb pluriel, as well as in his other work, is fascinated by Roger Caillois’s reflections on asymmetry, the model of an economy to which poverty, as the impossibility of appropriation, belongs.3 The symmetrical and stable appearance, in its closure upon itself, is possible only through the movements of asymmetry. The equilibrium that belongs to the stability of closure has its provenance in a disequilibrium, which provokes it and thus allows it to come to the

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fore. Conceptual thought grounded in self-assured totality has necessarily forgotten this imbalance that makes it possible. Khatibi’s pense´e-autre turns toward this disequilibrium and asymmetry in thought. The economic model is no longer that of exchange without loss, which determines the logic of self-sufficiency, but rather that of the supplement in the sense of both too much and too little: ‘‘We have lost too much and we have nothing to lose, not even the nothing’’ [meˆme pas le rien].’’ This articulation has a temporal structure wherein both the past and the present escape the logical efficiency of the economy of exchange, thus escaping any possibility of nostalgia or fulfillment. Even the past was never a fulfilled past, for the dynamic that defined it was that of imbalance and asymmetry. The relation between the two parts of the statement is not based on a logical connection of cause and effect, which would unify the thought. It is not because ‘‘we have lost too much’’ that ‘‘we have nothing to lose,’’ but rather ‘‘we have lost too much’’ and ‘‘we have nothing to lose.’’ The structure reserves a fracture, a disjuncture in the conjunction and the unifying ‘‘and.’’ Poverty returns in this economy as vitality. Khatibi’s thought of poverty is not satisfied by saying ‘‘we have nothing to lose’’ but adds ‘‘not even the nothing.’’ With this addition, poverty, at the extreme, becomes an affirmation in the sense that poverty is not simply a question of losing what one has but more profoundly of losing that which one has never had—therefore, losing that which one can never really be dispossessed of. Out of extreme poverty and dispossession arises something akin to a surplus of necessity as the possibility of an affirmation. Here it is less a question of valorizing poverty than of refusing that the condition of dispossession becomes dispossessed of all possibility. The asymmetrical relationship between loss and gain, articulated as a gift, ‘‘un don,’’ makes of pense´e-autre a vitality, ‘‘e´conomie vitale,’’ that exceeds the economy of life and death, presence and absence, as framed by theology and by ontology. Khatibi expresses his critique of theology and ontology most succinctly in his pronouncements on mysticism: ‘‘We have arrived at a place where the invisible emerges in the visible, and where the absence of Allah gets absorbed in a mortifying experience: hypostatized unity of a body turned cadaver offered to God, Text, and Love’’ (23). The vital economy is that of surviving theology and ontology, an economy that no longer separates the body from its life. Life, Khatibi contends, remains incalculable for theology as well as for all metaphysics: ‘‘Now, the hierarchy of the visible and of the invisible separates the believer’s body from his life and death,

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concrete and incalculable for all theology and in all its forms (dialectic, negative, mystical . . . )’’ (21). Pense´e-autre is a vital thought because it does not close in upon itself in a gesture of self-extinction and self-sacrifice. Instead, it turns toward a body and a materiality that no god can claim.4 Pense´e-autre is catastrophic for philosophy and theology, but it does not foreclose the possibility of thought. It belongs to a dynamic of immeasure within thinking, and this immeasure allows thinking to continue but without the power to name that toward which it is directed, except perhaps via a detour that empties the name of meaning. The other in ‘‘thought-other’’ does not mark the site of the possibility of a name. It does not substitute for the name, the other as a name. Rather, it constantly poses the question of the other movement within thought. We will see soon how Amour bilingue recounts this relation. Khatibi characterizes the dynamic of the disjuncture within thought as a suffering that the subject undergoes at the limit of metaphysics. The thought of too much and too little can guarantee no fulfillment but gives the gift of thought, liberating it by allowing it to open up. In the exchange between life and death, the visible and the invisible, what remains incalculable becomes pense´e-autre. If the mystical phantasm proposes a unity between the annihilated body of the believer and the divine, in the gift of death as the condition of unity (as I shall discuss in the next chapter on Le livre du sang), pense´e-autre is the excess of this give and take. This is the ‘‘terrible freedom’’ (terrible liberte´) of an undergoing (souffrance) whose economy is that of too much and too little (17). Khatibi’s pense´e-autre is the thought of freedom and freedom as thought, for ‘‘such a liberation is rigorously necessary’’ (21). This notion of freedom differentiates itself from the ideological discourse of freedom from that belongs to the discourse of identities and to that of a right to difference, ‘‘un droit a` la diffe´rence.’’ Pense´e-autre is also a thought on law insofar as the law of freedom is incommensurable with the discourse of rights that do not question their own limits: ‘‘A right to difference that is content to repeat its claims without questioning itself and without working on those active and reactive sites of its insurrection, this right does not constitute a transgression. It is its parody’’ (12). The freedom of pense´e-autre is outside and beside the discourses of revolt, for it belongs to no one and therefore no subject or ideology can appropriate it. This freedom is terrible because it cannot belong to any political or individual entity and because it has no proper domain. Thus pense´e-autre is not the proper name of anything. Instead, it is the mark of a

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relatedness that no conceptual framework or discursive authority can exhaust. One cannot do away with the freedom of pense´e-autre; neither can this thought of freedom be seized by the will. These are the conditions for its necessity. If I argue that pense´e-autre plays out its dynamic on the scene of the literary as the movement of re´cit, it is because I conceive of the literary as that which is without domain, without a proper place. Khatibi distinguishes between the freedom implied in the concept of selfsufficiency and that which belongs to pense´e-autre. In self-sufficiency, freedom belongs to the absolute: the absolute freedom of the absolute subject. But this freedom, as Jean-Luc Nancy has taught us, remains subservient to the necessity of a foundation, which is the being of the necessary being. In other words, the absolute being must necessarily be a free being, but this freedom is bound to the closure that defines the absolute.5 Instead, Khatibi emphasizes the vitality and the materiality of the body, that is, its visibility, not annihilated by the phantasm of an infinite beyond. Thought as opening is the thought of freedom that exceeds the bounds of the foundation of the absolute. It is unfounded thought and this unfoundedness constitutes its character of errancy and oscillation. By inscribing distance within thought, Khatibi, like Nancy, undoes immanence as the relation of the subject to itself. Nancy’s ‘‘oscillation from oneself to oneself ’’ seems to be translated in Khatibi by the hyphen. Defined in this manner, pense´e-autre as freedom is neither a rebellious thought nor a thought of rebellion. Rather, it rises from within thought and belongs to thought intimately. In other words, it is not opposed to the absolute—the concept or the Idea—but rather is that which belongs to the absolute absolutely. It is the thought of the absolute at the limit. ‘‘To be absolute is to be detached from everything,’’ says Nancy. ‘‘The absolute of the absolute, the absolute essence of the absolute, is to be detached from every relation and every presence, including from itself ’’ (Experience of Freedom 109). This ‘‘including from itself ’’ inscribes a rupture in the heart of the foundation. To speak of a foundation is to forget the provenance of the foundation, which is not another foundation but rather its other. What founds the absolute (its self-founding) cannot be another absolute but rather that in the absolute that exceeds it, that separates it from itself. Pense´e-autre is this ungraspable thought of the open. It is ungraspable because it is not present to itself, but always turned aside, offering itself in thought as an aftereffect, deferral, and rupture. Pense´e-autre is plural thought (pense´e plurielle), precisely because it is the thought of being in relation and thought in relation. Pense´e-autre is thought

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toward, or thought with, where ‘‘toward’’ and ‘‘with’’ do not designate another subject or an object toward which thought is teleologically oriented. Perhaps we can say it is directionality in the sense of the French ‘‘sens’’ (meaning, direction), in excess of signification; a kind of directionality and orientation that is the condition of possibility of signification but that cannot be contained by the logic of signification.6 Given this relational character, pense´e-autre is also thought as community. This is not to say that it is a particular thought that we all have, or that we share with each other. It is not a unifying thought, and it is not a concept that can be multiplied and communicated among members of a community while keeping its inherent unity. For Khatibi, any unitarian notion of community is nothing short of tyrannical. ‘‘The ‘we’ that I name is this new, unthought disturbance in the face of all tyranny. The thought of this ‘we’ is the historial linking that weaves being and which being weaves—at the margin of metaphysics’’ (18). Instead, pense´e-autre as relationality is the thought of difference, each and every time, ‘‘a perhaps unheard (of ) thought of difference,’’ where neither ‘‘thought’’ nor ‘‘difference’’ can be fixed conceptually (240). Khatibi’s articulation displaces the traditional link between knowledge and thought by allowing the latter to respond to the ear instead of to the eye. However, this shift must be considered less as the primacy of one sense over the other and more as a shift in the mode of knowing per se. It sends us toward unfamiliarity, difference, and strangeness, always implied in ‘‘unheard’’ (inouı¨e). It is an unheard-of thought perhaps because it is too strange and too disorienting. This is not a known or unknown thought, nor is it precisely heard or unheard, but is rather a ‘‘perhaps unheard.’’ The inscription of the ‘‘perhaps’’ changes everything because it no longer allows the two terms ‘‘heard’’ and ‘‘unheard’’ to function within a pure dichotomy. The ‘‘perhaps’’ introduces a mobility between the two terms, and this mobility undermines the determinations within which each sense traditionally functions. But if it is unheard, inouı¨e, nevertheless it may call us toward listening, a` l’e´coute. L’ouı¨e is the sense of hearing, as la vue is the sense of sight. The sense of hearing performs two functions—entendre (to hear), and, metaphorically, to understand, and e´couter (to listen)—just as the sense of sight has the double function of seeing, voir, which metaphorically means ‘‘understand,’’ and looking, regarder. Therefore, the shift from sight toward hearing may also indicate this division between the senses and within each sense as organs of knowledge and something else; especially since inouı¨e means ‘‘unheard of ’’ in the sense of ‘‘unknown’’ or ‘‘unfamiliar.’’ In other words, the shift in the senses first and foremost may indicate that their relationship with

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knowledge is divided. Pense´e-autre thus becomes the thought of difference between sense as meaning and signification as meaning, between the body’s materiality and the metaphysical erasure of this body. The materiality of the body indicated by the senses is not simply located in the physical organs, the ear or the eye; rather, it is located in sense as directionality of the body and its openness. The body’s openness is not only directed toward the outside of the body, toward the world, but also, first and foremost, it allows the body to be open to itself, which would allow the senses to slide toward each other. Khatibi calls this space of sliding between the senses and within senses literature, and nowhere does he articulate it more clearly than in his ‘‘Lettre a` Eric,’’ addressed to his friend, the critic Eric Sellin: ‘‘Often, I listen to music while writing, but very rarely when reading, I mean serious texts. But perhaps, there is underneath this silence, the possibility of an unheard [of] literature’’ (28; my translation). From one text, ‘‘Pense´e-autre,’’ to the other, ‘‘Lettre a` Eric Sellin,’’ a movement occurs between thought and literature, a spacing that brings them together or that makes one approach the other. ‘‘A perhaps unheard (of ) thought’’ of pense´e-autre becomes the ‘‘possibility of an unheard (of ) literature’’ in ‘‘Lettre a` Sellin,’’ under the auspices of ‘‘perhaps.’’ The perhaps, like the hyphen, reconfigures silence as no longer the dividing line between the heard and the unheard, or a place of negativity, an absence. Instead, it marks the space of contamination between present and the other. In other words, in silence language speaks otherwise. In silence something subterranean speaks or rather registers its timbre and its rhythm, that is, its music: another language, another thought, the space of an uncompromising difference. Perhaps. Reading ‘‘serious texts’’ silences music and relegates it to the nether regions, to the other side of silence, ‘‘sous le silence.’’ But this region is not really subterranean in the sense of present and absent, secret and given, for this silence is the time and space of sliding in and between senses. Silence here is not annihilating but rather promising a possibility: the possibility of literature. Silence is thus related to the notion of poverty as that which is not content with lack or absence but is marked with an affirmation and a possibility, in spite of everything. This ‘‘in spite of everything’’ points to the surplus in the vital economy of pense´e-autre. The attentiveness required by reading serious texts directs attention toward the other sense, toward hearing. An important relationship is established here between reading and writing since reading directs attention toward writing, toward literature, and writing is in rhythm with music. Writing finds its rhythm in listening and not in seeing.

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Through this sliding movement between sight and hearing, from ‘‘textes se´rieux’’ to ‘‘litte´rature inouı¨e,’’ Khatibi undermines the authority of the conceptual domain as that of thought, ‘‘se´rieux,’’ by allowing it to be contaminated by the literary, through one of his typically Nietzschean moves. In Daybreak, Nietzsche says the following about the ear: ‘‘Night and music.— The ear, the organ of fear, could have evolved as greatly as it has only in the night and twilight of obscure caves and woods, in accordance with the mode of life of the age of timidity, that is to say the longest human age there has ever been: in bright daylight the ear is less necessary. That is how music acquired the character of an art of night and twilight’’ (143). Nietzsche privileges music because it escapes the philosophical in the conceptual sense. What appeals to him in music is that which conspires with obscurity, ambiguity, and uncertainty. Music is the element in art that can no longer respond to the appropriating demands of knowledge to make it its object. The eye wants to know, it recognizes, it posits; the Nietzschean ear destabilizes the tyranny of sight and opens up the way toward the possibility of equivocation in thought, as characterized in Khatibi by the inscription of ‘‘peuteˆtre’’ governing the dynamic of pense´e-autre. Out of fear and timidity, condemned within Nietzsche’s thinking as weakness, develops the ear; but this ear brings with it the very possibility of hearing something other than certainty and truth. The ear that develops thus in solitude and in the night heralds the very possibility of liberation. The shift in Khatibi’s writings does not inscribe the two senses, seeing and hearing, in a dichotomous structure of writing/speech. Instead, it allows the one to contaminate the other and vice versa: one listens to music while writing and listens to writing while reading. The twilight aspect of the Nietzschean ear and of music underscores this overturning of the dichotomy of the senses. As Gary Shapiro argues in his reading of The Wanderer and His Shadow, ‘‘This is Nietzsche’s way of suggesting that thought occurs neither in the glaring Platonic sunlight nor in its all-too-facile negation, but in the flickering twilight play of light and shadow. The authorial voice becomes a function of this play, embodying the wandering and nomadic life of the mind and of writing’’ (319). This auroral thought disorients both the Occident—in its double sense of the West and Maghreb—and the Orient. Neither of these, as categories of identity, can ground itself in the certainty of solar knowledge.7 Auroral and nuptial are two temporal dynamics that dominate in Khatibi’s oeuvre.8 They signal the privilege accorded by Khatibi to the interval between night and day, the point of impossible definition, and to intimacy as implied by the nuptial space. Khatibi particularly privileges

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the night of nuptials, the wedding night, which is neither the night of sleep nor the light of day, but a wakeful night.9 We shall see in Amour bilingue how pense´e-autre is a ‘‘pense´e en e´veil’’ (a wakeful thought), a vigilant thought. The sliding movement in and between the senses also undermines the tradition of writing in Islam, particularly its calligraphic tradition, which has made of inscription the place of unity between the visible and the invisible. On the one hand, calligraphy moves writing away from meaning as signification (to keep the distinction from meaning as sense) and toward the image, moving sight in the direction (sens) of vision and visibility. On the other hand, it recuperates this move back within the metaphysical desire for unity between the visible and the invisible. This transfiguration of writing reinforces the notion of language as the metaphysical site par excellence. Christine Buci-Glucksmann points out in her essay on Khatibi, ‘‘Fitna ou la diffe´rence intraitable de l’amour,’’ that calligraphic writing in the Islamic tradition continues to participate in a nostalgic relationship with the Divine and is therefore primarily theological or mystical. It is nostalgic for a ‘‘signifiant a` l’e´tat pur’’ (signifier in its pure state) (21). Calligraphic writing longs for fusion and unity, for the erasure of distinction and of difference. This is why for Khatibi, calligraphy remains grounded in Islamic metaphysics, which privileges writing and the letter at its foundation. The relation between the senses in Khatibi is not that of fusion but rather of confusion. The distinction is crucial: while the first may connote a unity where the two terms lose themselves and achieve a state of communion, or oneness, the latter term implies a complication in the relation, destabilizing both terms. The in-between of two terms is not a presence that relates the two elements to each other, or bridges the gap between the eye and the ear, the past and the future, the ‘‘I’’ and the ‘‘you,’’ ‘‘pense´e’’ and ‘‘autre.’’ It is rather the site of the suspension of all that is decidable. In the space and time marked by the hyphen, not only is identity not discernable, but also discernability, as the process of coming into knowledge, is suspended. Now, keeping this landscape in mind, we turn our attention toward Amour bilingue to see how this text responds, reinscribes, and complicates the relation between ‘‘thought’’ and ‘‘other.’’ In its second part, Amour bilingue (Love in Two Languages) announces its own project: ‘‘But what I am trying to put back together no longer obeys those laws which are so universal that they’re absurd. . . . Speaking of a singular ordeal demands an otherthought [pense´e-autre]. I wanted to be more accurate, more faithful, in crossing these incidents’’ (104; 93). Amour bilingue thus directly addresses the passage from a theoretico-philosophical framework, in its universal import, toward

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the literary as the site of singularity, yet the inscription of the theoretical gesture eliminates any opposition between the literary and the theoretical. Instead, Amour bilingue performs the movements of sliding from one to the other. Therefore, passing between the two texts, ‘‘Pense´e-autre’’ and Amour bilingue, is not an arbitrary leap but is rendered necessary by their address to each other’s mode of presentation. The ‘‘I’’ of the narration calls attention to the singularity of the subject of narration as well as to the theoretical question of subject and subjectivity. The ‘‘I’’ of this citation reminds us that the problematic of thought cannot be separated from the question of the one who thinks, from the question of the subject, and that this ‘‘I’’ does not draw its breath from a universal concept of subjectivity; rather, it comes about through the dynamic of singularity occurring in the narration and as the narration. The ‘‘I’’ that thinks and the ‘‘I’’ that narrates enter into a relation that performs in a singular way the dynamics of pense´e-autre. Let us be reminded that singularity does not recuperate any notion of the absolutely unique; rather, it directs thought toward a mode of relationality that is both singular and plural, and, therefore, repeatable. This repeatability is the mark of distance. Every thought and every narration begins with the subject of thought and the subject of narration, but it does not follow that this ‘‘I’’ is then grounded in the closures of metaphysics. The ‘‘and’’ that relates thought and narration is the sign of neither difference nor the same; rather, it is the double mark of disjunction within conjunction. The catastrophic dimensions of thought and narration are closely related to this turn of the subject from its closure, both in thought and in language. In its first pages, Amour bilingue foregrounds the problematic of the states and the stakes of the subject not with an ‘‘I’’ but with a ‘‘he’’: He shut his eyes and saw again, with his internal vision, that commanding presence of the [du] outside which attracted and excluded him at the same time. . . . Seen from outside and a distance, he appeared to be sleeping. Appearing to himself in this position from the outside [du dehors], he hoped that that was the index of some event. . . . He kept his eyes closed, studying himself with a steady empty look. His concentration was such that he suddenly had to calm himself, freed from all necessity to understand. Nothing had happened but this stasis. (47; 39–40: translation modified)

Under the sway of excess, the outside, the subject, no longer finds his place, no longer locates himself except through the conduit of a distance that separates the subject from himself. This movement resembles the ‘‘oscillation

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from oneself to oneself,’’ with which Nancy characterizes the distance separating signification from sense, both as direction and as meaning. This oscillation and this ‘‘mobility’’ of outside and inside toward each other indicate the temporal relationship of the subject with the other: ‘‘Thinking of this state, he wanted to tell his life’s companion—absent now, going about her own occupations—that this apparent casualness, that this provocative idleness was not a refusal of reality at all but was, rather, his great joy; but that this external and internal mobility in the bilingual body (a simulated split), didn’t exclude her, didn’t limit her to a time set by the clock of her [his] inspirations’’ (47; 40). The divisive spaces of the outside and the inside undergo a mobility infecting the spaces of the split opening a space no longer opposed to reality. Rather, it is a site that contaminates the division between reality and fiction or dream. Thought is no longer bound to a project. Instead, in its idleness, it remains open to what comes toward it. The narration registers this movement in the indefinable boundaries between him and her that no logic of signification can fix.10 The hyphenated relationship between the ‘‘I’’ (who thinks) and the other, between ‘‘thought’’ and ‘‘other,’’ contaminates both terms. Yet in it nothing really gets inscribed, nothing happens there. The hyphen is the fictive space that does not allow the subject to find his or her truth, nor find that of the other. The figure of la Bi-langue, the name of this bilingual body marked by mobility and idleness, opens a difficult relation between life and death.11 A strange speech constitutes the genealogy of la Bi-langue, locating her between two deaths. She was born between two dead children: ‘‘To finally speak between two deaths while she tore herself from her real death had certainly destined her for a very dark adventure. I mean to say that the night which bore her—this denial—sensitized her early on to the immemorial, to the emotion of a non-genealogical time in revulsion, in its strict necessity . . . she made herself unsuitable to any legal family relationship’’ (123; 112). La Bi-langue is the mark of this strange space opened up in the intimacy of death: not the death that is the boundary of life, in the ordinary sense, but the other death related to the impossible, the impossibility of a proper death, of one’s own death. It is here that a historical notion of time passes into the historial. She tears herself from her ‘‘real’’ death, the one that belongs to her genealogy as continuity of past and future, in order to form a relationship with the other death, the one that does not belong to her and that she cannot claim as her own. This condition of being between two deaths has made her a phantom, a false presence that offers the appearance of continuity. Born between two deaths, her past is the death that has already come and her

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future the death that is to come. La Bi-langue belongs to the present, but a present that cannot make death present. Rather, it allows the past to pass into the future and vice versa. This is what Blanchot calls the ‘‘dead present.’’12 La Bi-langue marks the site where time moves in both directions but discontinuously. The problem is not determining whether she is alive or dead, which assumes demarcation between the two, but that death cannot become present and thus demarcated, and consequently neither can life. La Bi-langue inherits neither her death nor her life; instead, she exposes genealogy (inherited life and death) as a fiction. The ‘‘dead present,’’ this nongenealogical time of the genealogy of la Bilangue, is the time of catastrophe. It is the time of the abyss of time, the time where the apocalypse writes and recites itself. Amour bilingue inscribes the announcement of this apocalypse in the form of the ninety-ninth sura of the Holy Qur’an, ‘‘al-Zilzal’’ (The Earthquake), early in the text: ‘‘On the day the earth is shaken by its earthquake, and she throws off her burdens, and Man asks: ‘What’s wrong?’ on that day, earth will tell her tales’’ (16; 10). The narrator knows not what made him think of an earthquake. After all, nothing has happened. There is no earthquake. All is calm. Yet, in the heart of this calm something has registered its passing, and it is this something that makes him think of this sura. Something has happened in the heart of the night, in a state between dream and wakefulness. The repetition of the sacred text within this fictive space, normally unequivocal in its truth and its origin, opens it toward equivocation, contaminating its sacred status. The spatio-temporal dynamics within which this inscription takes place are characterized by intricate movements and subtle shadows: That night was very strange. He had slept so light-heartedly that it was as if he was directing thought to stay on the alert at the very heart of his dreams. Perhaps that is the illusion of these fugitive dreams, something so speedy and upsetting that even naming them cannot tear them from the night. Devastated memory, words smashed up, torn apart, flying off in pieces. A devastation which developed—this was what was so engrossing about the feeling—according to thought itself, a thought which was being built in an order with no foundation. Marvelous thought, vigil of the unsaid, thought of the void which kept him awake in the midst of sleep. (15; 9)

It is night, but not just any night. This is a strange night, not the familiar, ordinary night, the one that comes at the end of the day constituting the inbetween space of two days, demarcating the past and the future. This is not the night that ends with dawn, when light shines upon the world and allows

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the world to move into presentation and into the realm of understanding. Indeed, here we are no longer dealing with an ordinary night, for this night is strange and uncanny: it is perhaps that ‘‘unheard (of )’’ under the silence. This is a challenging and risky night where knowledge falters and loses its foothold. It is another night wherein night suffers a rupture, is doubled. In the manner of Blanchot’s double night, a dynamic of difference registers itself here.13 The ordinary and common night is the night of oblivion and peaceful slumber, but this other night is the playground of dreams, the nocturnal scene of appearances: ‘‘he had slept so light-heartedly that it was as if he was directing thought to stay on the alert at the very heart of his dreams.’’ On the dream scene, the drama of thought takes place in the space of confusion between consciousness and sleep. A scene comes to the fore: the stage of a relationship between thought and dream. Blanchot has told us that apparitions are not the presence of the other night but rather allusions to it: they allude to something that has no presence. In their strange presence as phantoms, apparitions, and dreams, they allude to their own unreal presence and, in this manner, point in the direction of the emptiness of all appearance and presence: in the direction of their fiction. The temporal mode of la Bi-langue, which makes it impossible to enframe her, seems to follow this dynamic of the apparition. She is always beyond reach, for the temporal space to which she is assigned is not attainable; it has no truth. One can only go toward her but never attain her: ‘‘To prolong time, to pass through the different stages without stopping, this was not enough to support her, to frame her under a different temporal law. Time! Time! She was still staggered by it, neither day truly, nor the absolute night in these upsets. She continued her quest, without interrupting the speech of everything which invaded her’’ (120–21; 109). This strange temporal zone bears the character of shock and instability, ‘‘side´re´e,’’ that does not interrupt movement but threatens it with annihilation, like the phantom time between two deaths that marks her history. The re´cit of Amour bilingue goes on under the threat that may annihilate it at any moment. In the heart of the dream scene something happens. Fast and overwhelming (rapide) (bouleversant), it rises out of the night, disrupting the order of thought and language and their power to grasp and express the event of this occurrence. This nocturnal space is the scene of language’s powerlessness as it loses its powers of naming and becomes devastated: ‘‘words smashed up, torn apart, flying off in pieces’’ (15; 9). This devastation, or catastrophe, however, opens another possibility for thought. Liberated from the domain of the conceptual, thought turns toward the unnamable and holds vigil

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there. The dream scene is perhaps a thinking relationship with the other. It is a thinking relationship with powerlessness in language. ‘‘Marvelous thought, vigil of the unsaid, thought of the void which kept him awake in the midst of sleep’’ (15; 9). Dream as the thought of the void is a wakefulness exceeding consciousness. Suddenly the scene complicates itself. At the heart of the relationship between thought and the other, there is the double movement of a threat of annihilation and resistance: Straight away, his thought turned back on itself. It devoured itself with incredible speed. Heart beating at a greatly accelerated rate. Recoiling in terror, once again thought tore itself away from sleep. In its least little tremors—he felt them pulse through him [suffered its beats]—thought persisted, now in one language, now in the other, in giving names: precise words, neat phrases, rigorous, point blank. Yes, thought struggled with sustained vigor. Must he go on this way? Sleeping but not sleeping, dreaming and not dreaming, in order to get nearer to the unsayable? And what was it like to dream in the two languages simultaneously [how did he dream in the bi-langue]? (16; 9–10)

The threatening, singular thought, ‘‘sa pense´e’’ (his thought), turns against itself. But this singular thought already belongs to ‘‘la pense´e’’ (thought), which, registering the threat of annihilation, resists the movement. The singular other that draws thought toward itself is not an outside, something unrelated to thought, but is rather that which allows a turn within thought. Thinking, while turned toward the void, strives to protect and safeguard itself by naming the unnamable and thus inaugurating the movements of translation. The struggle opens up the path for the possibility of expression: ‘‘thought persisted . . . in giving names: . . . Yes, thought struggled with sustained vigor’’ (16; 9). To name and to make appear belong to the struggle within thought to sustain itself. The singular and the universal are related in this struggle without either assuming the privileged status of the absolute. The relationship between thought and other does not constitute a system. Rather, in the movements of this struggle, constituting and interrupting thought, an unnamable, unsayable ‘‘something’’ may insinuate itself. Once again we hear the relationship between reading ‘‘des textes se´rieux’’ (serious texts) where thought is attentive to that something unheard (inouı¨e), something strange and out of the ordinary. In this movement between distance and proximity, or constituting and interrupting, time and space undergo a modulation depriving the senses of

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their sovereignty. They are no longer reliable: ‘‘Before long, he will be invisible, deaf and dumb’’ (16; 10). This is an experience that allows for neither a thinking mastery nor an aesthetic mastery, though the two are not necessarily separate. In this state of suspension something catastrophic announces itself as an always already: ‘‘He woke up shivering. What had made him think of an earthquake? He got up and touched the bed; nothing had moved. He touched the wall; nothing. Opening the window, he looked out at the city, covered by the night, perfectly calm. He recalled a phrase on the Apocalypse from the Koran’’ (16; 10: my emphasis). The senses can identify and ascertain nothing that has taken place. They only register a temporal rupture. The structure of time, indicated by the tenses, moves between the future ‘‘il sera’’ (he will be) and the past ‘‘se re´veilla’’ (awoke), ‘‘toucha’’ (touched), without a present to bridge the gap. Something does announce itself in this disjuncture. This is not a negative space. But the announcement bears no relation with reality; it is rather the expression of a relation of unrelation, or unrelation as relation whose rhythm is that of a beating heart, the organ that preserves nothing passing there: ‘‘Heart beating at a greatly accelerated rate. . . . He felt them pulse through him [suffered its beats]’’ (16; 9). Night is emptiness, and the echoes of this emptiness can perhaps be heard in the rhythms out of which dreams are constituted: the second night, the beating heart of the night. The other night is the annihilation of thought as the movement of appropriation. While thought attempts to render the other an object of thought and to reign upon it, the other devours this movement of thought’s attempt at mastery. Therefore, catastrophe is the excess of thought, where thought exceeds its own limits, threatening to consume itself in the process, at the moment of ecstasy. This is the moment where thought as well as the thinking subject, the self or the ‘‘I,’’ are beside themselves and lose themselves in the terror of the night, dispossessed of both life and death. But this dispossessed state affirms thought, affirms pense´e-autre. Thought is related to re´cit in its movements to name and to unname and in its relation to the space of dream and figuration. Catastrophe as thought insinuates itself at the moment when language and death communicate in an ecstatic sob or cry that cannot be heard: ‘‘The word for ‘word,’ mot, is close to the one for ‘death,’ la mort; only one letter is missing: the succinctness of the impression, a syllable, the ecstasy of a stifled sob’’ (10; 4). The sob registers a retreat as it spaces and cuts off the breath. This retreat is the instant of suffering as the very materiality of the body inscribes the sob as a retreat. Catastrophe opens toward thought at the moment when the word

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(mot) is quietly contaminated by death (mort). This contamination allows the word to go on but say or reveal nothing, especially reveal nothing about death. It conditions communication between two words as the spacing between them, as well as between language and death, and between body and words. To say it differently, the distance between the word ‘‘death’’ and death is the space of a difference that does not negate intimacy but disallows the fullness of meaning. In other words, the word ‘‘death’’ does not present or say death. But this detour in naming is remarked and registered within language as the relationship, which is also a difference, between the words mot and mort. The materiality of this relatedness is inscribed in the body as a sob, which does not leave a mark. In the relationship between ‘‘death’’ and death, the intimacy between catastrophe and narration is played out in the sense that narration does not bring forth catastrophe. Instead, it remarks this detour by recounting. The distance between catastrophe and narration is the distance of the ‘‘r’’ that both relates and separates ‘‘mot’’ from ‘‘mort’’ as well as the word ‘‘death’’ from death. The catastrophe of the body that suffers inscribes itself in thought and in writing obliquely as spacing, as silence, as temporal rupture, and thus requiring that the thought of catastrophe be always an open, fragmentary, and unfinished thought: pense´e-autre. The suffering body belongs to ‘‘la nuit blanche,’’ the insomniac night. ‘‘La nuit blanche’’ does not protect against the terror of the night; it is not ‘‘welcoming.’’ It is the night that exposes the subject to the dangers of annihilation, to the void where no oblivion is allowed. ‘‘La nuit blanche’’ hides nothing; everything therein is visible, but nothing appears. It is that within visibility which allows nothing to be seen, a visibility without sight. We find the articulation of this dynamic scattered throughout Amour bilingue and indeed most of Khatibi’s texts. For instance, in De la mille et troisie`me nuit (On Thousand and Third Night) we find a succinct expression of this dynamic of ‘‘la nuit blanche,’’ which sets up for us the scene of writing in Amour bilingue: ‘‘The sleepless night [the white night] again and again doubles day and night, prolonging itself between dusk and dawn, there where all beginning and all end fade. . . . The sleepless night, interval [duration] without time: is it conceivable [thinkable]?’’ (26–27).14 This night, in its immensity and in its hyphen structure, is the night of Shahrazad and that of the story told under the threat of a death that never actually comes. This ‘‘immense nuit’’ of Amour bilingue is the time of the disruption of time, rendering it a ‘‘duration without time,’’ resembling Ste´phane Mallarme´’s midnight, the hour at which the movement of night as impossibility of appearance appears. As Bataille has elegantly put it, the experience of this

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night is catastrophic for the subject and conditions his or her ex-stasis.15 Under the immensity of such a threat, thought struggles to maintain itself and to safeguard something of the subject on the threshold of annihilation. A resistance gets registered in the heart of the catastrophe. Annihilation is a threat that inaugurates a turn within thought: ‘‘Straight away, his thought turned back on itself.’’ The turn of this threat marks the movement between singularity and generality, between ‘‘sa pense´e’’ and ‘‘la pense´e,’’ where the latter before the threat of the former distances itself, and this distance is the effort of naming as a way of safeguarding: ‘‘Recoiling in terror, once again thought tore itself away from sleep. . . . Thought persisted . . . in giving names.’’ Neither an absolute singularity nor a generality, narration, ‘‘neat phrases, rigorous, at point blank,’’ comes about as the passage of one into the other. Thought wrests itself from sleep, and this double movement of threat and resistance gives the dream. Naming under such conditions protects and yet remains within the space of fiction. It comes about on the dream scene. Similarly, the speech that this struggle gives so urgently and rigorously is a dream speech. Pense´e-autre is the thought of ecstasy—not in the mystical sense but in the literal sense of ex-stasis: ‘‘At that instant, thought was ready to collapse. In its fall, as it broke apart, it cast away its tatters with surprising carelessness. A scream in the middle of the night. . . . What had made him think of an earthquake?’’ (16; 10). This is perhaps the moment of ecstasy where thought touches its limit. With this touch thought is suddenly no longer concerned with retention or with safeguarding but gives into excessive expenditure and exposure to the depth of the night. Thought’s sudden carelessness was going to lead to total collapse of thought—allait s’effondrer— which was still to come. Thought suffers an instant of rupture, and this suffering becomes the silent cry in the heart of the night, the retained sob: the noise of the catastrophic. The foundation of thought gives way with the draw and the weight, with the gravity of this immensity. Experience registers this fracture as an aftereffect within thought, as the thought of an earthquake. But let us remember that this earthquake has no reality. There are no signs of it having occurred. The earthquake registers its effect in the recitation of the sura. Something akin to a tautology is at work in this dynamic of ecstasy: ecstasy cannot belong to knowledge and certainty and therefore cannot be described in order to be understood. Ecstasy therefore is always ecstatic, that is, it is always already beside itself. This is tantamount to saying that ecstasy is not, it does not occur. It cannot be experienced as knowledge. We know

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no such thing as ecstasy, which Amour bilingue shows through the elision of the present tense in the passages cited, where verb tenses shuttle between the past and the future. Even speaking of it under the sign of the ‘‘perhaps’’ is problematical, since it does not lend itself to language except obliquely. This dilemma is aptly formulated by a little question, pregnant with a sense of exasperation: ‘‘How to describe the unnameable element in killer [devastating] charm?’’ (17; 11). How to name that which escapes and exceeds the nameable? How to think ecstasy as the movement of thought itself ? It is perhaps only possible as the story of an earthquake provoked by the experience of the body in sleep. Khatibi articulates the relation between the self and the other in terms of an approach, of a movement toward: ‘‘Must he go on this way . . . in order to get nearer to the unsayable?’’; and, ‘‘Instead of stunning him, this novelty came toward him with lightness, according to hospitality’s lovely law’’ (16–17; 10). Once again, the impossibility of accomplishment is underscored. The self can never attain the other; it can only hold a relationship with it in terms of an approach, or perhaps in terms of being attentive, in the manner of the one who reads serious texts in order to perhaps approach literature. This is because between the self and the other there is a temporal void. The two do not belong to the same time. Where there is the other, the self cannot be simply because the other never is. Pense´e-autre marks the constant movement of approach toward the unsayable. The approach is never continuously a moving forward but also a step back, a retreat, a sob. It is both exposure and self-protection in the manner of the body that suffers and survives. The approach toward the other is marked by passivity, which is the mark of death’s communication. It is an interruption of breathing without real interruption. The entire dream scene that we have just analyzed takes place under the sign of this passivity. This notion of passivity is not opposed to activity because dream scenes emphasize the futility of such oppositions. Passivity, which announced the dynamic of the text from the beginning, undermines the notion of a calculated project. We read on the very first page: ‘‘The night watched him dozing, feeling him, taking his breath. The fear of being lost forever,’’ and, ‘‘Get up? He couldn’t: instead of the fragments of a word, there was room for nothing visible: the sea itself had sunk in the night’’ (9–10; 3–4). Passivity is the fascinating effect of the ‘‘devastating charm’’ of this strange nocturnal space, a devastation that fractures without reconstituting: a space that approaches by keeping its distance. Once again the loss of breath threatens. The very materiality of the body is under

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attack without any visible signs. In his article entitled ‘‘Danse de la toupie,’’ Abdesselam Ouazzani remarks upon the gyratory movement within Khatibi’s work by underscoring such scenes as the narrator’s struggle with the whirlpool while swimming, which foreshadows our discussion of the double movement of thinking. ‘‘L’attrait du vide’’ (the attraction of the void) and the concomitant resistance to annihilation allow narration to come to the fore, but at the same time, they announce the doom of Khatibi’s ‘‘I,’’ which persistently attempts to assert itself throughout the text. The relationship of intimacy between ‘‘elle’’ and ‘‘il’’ is interrupted by the interference of the ‘‘I,’’ which desires self-protection and closure, but whose destiny is dissolution. Seduction and fascination constitute the relationship between ‘‘il’’ and ‘‘elle.’’ In the epigraph to her aforementioned essay, ‘‘Fitna ou la difference intraitable de l’amour,’’ Christine Buci-Glucksmann offers the definitions of the two terms ‘‘seduction’’ and ‘‘fitna’’ in order to show that these two notions include one another in the energy that they create between the lovers: ‘‘Seduction: to trouble, to fascinate, to perturb. Feten [the root to the Arabic word fitna, which means seduction]: the devil, therefore to mislead, to open to madness’’ (Imaginaires 17; my translation). Seduction and fascination imply wandering, disruption, and loss of reason. Amour bilingue is explicit in this regard: ‘‘Both of them were extremely lively, both immoderately loved and practiced an aesthetic of fascination. Fascination they took to a higher level with fascination’s own tricks, even to the point of conflict, of anger. . . . And seduction is all-powerful energy, a hallucination which comes from the beauty of the void. Metamorphoses whose flash and effect cannot be predicted, whose sparkle comes and goes, losing itself in the other one, giving itself away in what will have existed only for the moment, an ecstasy of enchantment’’ (17; 11). Fascination, seduction, and enchantment constitute the energy of the relationship between the two. This energy does not belong to a being that can be beheld but rather to the void. The beauty or the ‘‘aesthetics of fascination’’ belongs not to a form, to an object in the world, but rather to the movement of the withdrawal of form. This is the beauty (l’e´clat) of the void in its unlimiting movement whose ebb and flow is a coming and going. The ‘‘aesthetic of fascination’’ is the movement of the withdrawal of limit, of the emptiness behind all form. Even the sea can no longer be. This emptiness is not a lack but rather excess, an explosion of energy, the dynamic of which is the relation between the lovers. ‘‘Bi-langue? My luck, my own individual abyss and my lovely amnesiac energy. An energy I don’t experience as a

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deficiency, curiously enough. Rather, it is my third ear’’ (11; 5). La Bilangue is a chasm in time, a forgetfulness. Fascination, as the energy of the relationship with the other, renders nothing accessible, not even fragmentation: ‘‘a` la place d’un mot en de´bris, plus de lieu pour aucune chose visible.’’ Blanchot’s paradoxical notion of ‘‘incessant’’ or ‘‘continuous interruption,’’ which interrupts nothing and allows everything to flow, as if nothing had come to pass, articulates this impossible recuperation of the logic of completion. The explosion of energy belongs to the temporal structure of the relation, of this instant that ‘‘will not have’’ existed (il n’aura e´te´), except in the space of an ecstasy, that of the future perfect. The double death of the genealogy of la Bi-langue is the performance of this future perfect: a past death and a future death, a death that will have been hers. The unexpected nature of this temporal metamorphosis, ‘‘suddenly’’ (soudain), ‘‘abruptly’’ (brusquement), obliquely registers the disruption of time. The coming and going movements within the text are marks outside manifestation. Her departure at the end is not really a departure since she never really was here, never really came, but was always already a phantom, genealogically. Throughout the text, she belongs to the night and to the passivity of sleep as the effect of catastrophe: ‘‘As you slept, I felt for a moment as if my breath was lost in your own. Dozing at your side, I was staggered’’ (60; 52). Her sleep and her passivity open up ‘‘la nuit blanche,’’ the night of insomnia. In this instant the ‘‘I’’ loses itself with the touch of the other, at the limit of its relationship with the other. The ‘‘I’’ loses his breath, not because the other demands it or wrests it away, but rather because the ‘‘I’’ is destabilized by this passivity and by the fascination that holds him in its proximity. The phantom ‘‘I,’’ which appears and disappears, undergoes the effect of this passivity and thus surfaces in the text with fragility speaking in the past, in the after-the-fact: ‘‘Having headed off with you in this linguistic direction, I was disoriented by the inability to speak about it without looking away from you, in the forgetfulness of any reconciliation. I found that I hadn’t the confidence to accompany you from the other side. Perhaps one must continue with this adventure called wandering before possibly encountering what people call love’’ (93; 83). The relationship with the other is characterized by disorientation, wandering, the impossibility of reconciliation, and a difficult notion of love (all of which recall the relationship between Lat-Sukabe´ and Khadidja in Le Cavalier). The sentence ‘‘one must continue with this adventure called wandering before possibly encountering what people call love’’ is mysterious. Does the finding of love put an end to the wandering or does it belong to this wandering?

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What is the relationship between this so-called love and love? Or is love always so called? And what is the nature of this encounter? The problem is posed in terms of a language that allows for no resolution. Wandering does not lead to reconciliation and this dynamic is sovereign in the relation between the lovers. The ‘‘I’’ loses its certainty of reaching across and closing the gap, and it is within this uncertainty that it loses its footing. Nothing seems to reassure the ‘‘I’’ of coming back to itself, dialectically, and reflecting itself while appropriating the other. The other and the ‘‘I’’ cannot be companions because of the limitlessness of the void that separates them while keeping them in relation. The ‘‘I’’ dwells in the domain where neither negative nor positive certainty can hold ground and this domain of the ‘‘without assurance’’ or ‘‘without confidence’’ constitutes the encounter with the other, the self ’s otherness, its incompletion. No union occurs on the other side, on the other shore, since there is no other side, beyond the space or time of wandering. Love is always uncertain. Love is thus constituted in missed encounter between the ‘‘I’’ and the other. In love no encounter is possible, since the lovers partake of no communion, no moment of fulfillment. The encounter with love only occurs under the guise of love in the same manner that the present always presents itself in the guise of presence. In other words, love is ghostly. The so-called love is the failure of love’s appearance in the moment of encounter. The moment love is recognized, named and appropriated, it is not there; it slips away and hence is not love.16 The name love unnames itself, misses its being, and under this sign of failure an encounter takes place. However, nothing is really taking place.17 Love belongs intimately to wandering. There is no love that can place itself outside of this slipping away. The relation between love and the socalled love is not that of truth and untruth. Love is always beside itself, always ecstatic. It belongs to failure and to the not-taking-place of love, and perhaps for this reason love is linked to suffering and its place of inscription is the heart. It does not lend itself to being, except through this missing of the mark, this sidestepping. ‘‘This last word [love], which I am taking advantage of, I mean to keep it close to my heart. It’s not for you, it’s not for me, it’s everything it does not communicate: this extreme modesty, this parsimonious humility’’ (93; 83). Love speaks with a speech that is utterly futile, communicating nothing since it reaches no one. Love constitutes the gulf between the lovers. It communicates nothing but the disintegration of relation in terms of encounter. In the relation between the lovers, the encounter is always missed. This radical break and disintegration are the violence of love. However, this is not a violence that disrupts and breaks

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asunder, but one that is gentle, hospitable, and intense. It is the apocalypse at the heart of the peaceful night: ‘‘Yes, keep for oneself this violence, so gentle, so intense, belonging finally to no one.’’ Love, in its profound otherness, is catastrophic. This is so because of the incommensurable and abyssal temporal dimension to which love belongs: ‘‘Love eliminates chance, obliterates time and eternity, and for a splendid finish, asks for a pluri-langue, a mad thought and unmeasurable desire. This is how I translate you in my various transports’’ (92; 81). Neither the felicitous temporal mode of a chance encounter, nor the eternity of the instant, where time would gather as a cipher, can preserve love. The catastrophe of love is an immeasurable explosion and is dispersive. The excessiveness of this temporal mode of the beyondmeasure is beautifully articulated within the text: ‘‘Time irrevocably flowed, luxurious expense and painful generosity. No thought (our own) (la noˆtre) was capable of stopping the breakup, no spectacular action was capable of thwarting the impossible’’ (93; 82). Love as the thought of fragmentation is also fragmentary thought in the sense that thought has no appropriating power over love. In other words, thought and love relate to each other as unrelation, they belong to each other as unbelonging. The possessive ‘‘our own’’ does not eliminate the proximity between thought and love. Rather, it undoes the mode of appropriation that might fix the dispersive mobility of love as well as of thought. The thought of love, as well as love as thought, and even love of thought, require the dynamic of pense´e-autre. Paradoxically, the generosity of love’s expenditure without return is also its threat, for the time of love cannot be interrupted; it flows—‘‘flowed’’ (s’e´coulait)—and is rendered welcoming. No willful act can interrupt its approach. Love draws thought toward itself. In a gesture of self-protection, thought attempts to name love, but in this attempt loses its own ground; or better yet, it becomes exposed to its own groundlessness. Love’s disseminating movements frustrate the lover in Amour bilingue: ‘‘I loved love for itself and didn’t begrudge it my adoration [but it didn’t want my adoration]. It cast me off, consigned me to wandering, unreason [non-raison] and forlornness’’ (87; 77).18 The ‘‘I’’ goes toward love, or rather is drawn by love, but love shatters it and sends it into wandering. Love rejects the adoration of the ‘‘I,’’ not because it wants to withhold itself and its secrets, but rather because there is no ‘‘itself ’’ of love. Therefore loving love is impossible, and this impossibility constitutes the truth (if one can speak in such terms) of love. The shift of pronouns from ‘‘he’’ to ‘‘I’’ indicates this mode of wandering. The ‘‘I’’ constantly struggles

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to recover a place for itself, but this place is always haunted by the impossible recuperation. In Amour bilingue, the dilemma of love is that of the inevitable impossible, and this quality hints at the intimacy between love and death. The other as love, as death, always arrives endlessly, but the rhythms of this approach announce distance—not that which is distant, but distance per se: the distance of inappropriation. But this distance offers the possibility of speech, that is, of narration, which takes place under the effect of this strange condition, unable to understand its dynamic but also unable to interrupt its flow that gives speech: ‘‘The incident which remained incomprehensible was a blow to the heart. That’s what a blow to the heart is: an untreatable distress. . . . A blow to the heart without palpable origin, an immense shout, a grip of fire. He burned all over, from his head to his feet, not knowing why. He was speaking, speaking in the void’’ (61; 53). Love consumes the lover and offers him a burning speech. The blow to the heart, this material suffering of the body and its immeasurable despair, leaves no marks except the speech of aftermath, a totally futile aftermath without destination (sans but): ‘‘These pieces of information seem futile. However, when everything collapses, echoing in the void, it is necessary to continue loving with no fixed purpose’’ (86–87; 76). The imperative of this love is the mark of ethics: ‘‘to love.’’ The intimacy that the lovers share keeps them in relation at a distance from each other: ‘‘And yet, the more he listened [to her], the more he was elsewhere ’’ (70; 60: translation modified). The ear is the organ of this relationship. Listening takes the ‘‘I’’ elsewhere, puts it beside itself. The unheard (of ) literature is perhaps then always a love story: ‘‘He was listening and his exhausted body was stumbling, sensitive to the least breath, the weakest heartbeat. In this grasping emptiness, he was still looking for a blackout from exhaustion for his haunted body. His words, his speech were the signs of this enchantment’’ (21; 15). This adventure of thought and love exhausts the body, brings it to the verge of annihilation, but keeps him attentive, turned toward another speech that gives rhythm to his own. The rhythm of this speech is offered by the overextended body, by its attention. Narration comes forth in the exhaustion of this adventure of love that enchants but does not release the body; a shared exhaustion between the storyteller and the listener, at a distance from each other. The speech between the lovers, far from asserting the self-consciousness and mastery of the subject, puts the ‘‘I’’ into question. Therefore, questioning is the mode under which the ‘‘I’’ and the other enter into communication: ‘‘How to speak, how to speak to her? Everything was moving along

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with the speed of the unsaid. . . . I questioned her. Yes, at times we were surprisingly insouciant, when the conversation went its way. Casual conversation, and yet so urgent’’ (36; 29). This questioning is strange in that it neither requires nor receives a response, and in this sense it differs from interrogation, which always implies power, violence, authority. Questioning in this way is the sole mode of speech in which the lovers communicate and enter into alliance: ‘‘Give a name to this conversation? It maintained the joy of a confused alliance between two languages.’’ This mode of questioning as a form of address requires no correspondence, but rather goes on under the sign of missing the response. The bilinguality of love that Amour bilingue stages describes the split of love, every time and in every story. Here, there are two characters, a man and a woman, with a love story between them. However, this story of love between two people is haunted by the story of the impossible love, the one that escapes them. Amour bilingue thus tells the story of a double love, the one that ‘‘doubles and divides’’ (double et de´double), the so-called love and the one that accepts no nomination: ‘‘Perhaps he loved two women in her,’’ the text wonders, ‘‘the one who inhabited their common language and another as well, the one he inhabited in the bi-langue’’ (26; 20: translation modified).19 La Bi-langue is the figure of this plurality and division of love. The first woman is the differentiated individual with whom he has something in common, a common language, or perhaps a common life, a re´cit in the more strict sense. The other is no longer differentiated as this or that kind of woman, but is rather presented as a space, an expanse, that one inhabits without locating and recognizing it, a ‘‘perhaps’’ at best. The bi-langue is this space of excess and a bilingualism that does not let itself be recognized. Throughout the text, Amour bilingue refers to the re´cit, while the title page identifies it as a roman—a novel. Like the question of subject, this issue of the genre is taken up explicitly in the epilogue: ‘‘If I were asked: ‘Is your story a new nouveau roman? Or better, a bi-novel new novel (nouveau roman)?’ I’d reply that the novel never had any affection for me. We don’t have the same history’’ (127; 115). How is it then that despite the fact that the novel and the ‘‘I’’ have nothing to do with each other, the text still gets identified as a novel? Furthermore, and perhaps more important, what kind of history does the novel have that would make it different from the re´cit? The inscription of the problem within the text clearly indicates that this is not simply a problem of categorization external to the work but somewhat belongs to the work.

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In his essay ‘‘The Siren’s Song,’’ Maurice Blanchot describes re´cit as a fascination with and a resistance to the encounter with the other, the sirens. Their song calls the navigators toward the depths, to the source of the song, where they find nothing but the absolute absence of song. The more the song is approached, the more it is distant and removed. Being imaginary, since it has no source, the song provides movement and direction but not toward a goal. This directionality, however, requires a certain resistance on the part of the sailors in order to prevent drowning in the sea. Khatibi’s reading of the tale ‘‘L’oiseau conteur’’ in his essay ‘‘La voix du re´cit,’’ part of the collection La blessure du nom propre, refers to this notion of re´cit. In one version of the tale, two brothers go to find a marvelous talking bird for the king; in another version, they seek it for their sister. When the brothers find the bird, it tells them their own story, the true story of their genealogy, which they do not know. Upon hearing the story, each of the brothers pronounces only one word, ‘‘yes,’’ and is immediately devoured by the earth. Their sister ventures to rescue her brothers and capture the bird. Upon hearing her own story, she says ‘‘no,’’ and thus fulfills both her goals. Khatibi reads the repetitive ‘‘yes’’ of the two brothers to be interrupted by the no of the sister, arguing thus against the common notion of the tale as a closed structure. Indeed, he suggests that this story tells us about the dangers of closure. The sister’s ‘‘no’’ signals a leap out of the cipher as she distances herself from her own life story. According to Khatibi, the first version of this story appears in A Thousand and One Nights. There, the sister resists the song of the bird by blocking her ears, as in the scene of the sirens in the Odyssey. Her resistance and refusal to hear her own story break the cycle of violence, allowing her at the same time to capture the possibility of storytelling by capturing the speaking bird. By his own admission, Khatibi’s deconstruction of the traditional notion of what a tale is converges with Maurice Blanchot’s notion of re´cit in ‘‘The Siren’s Song.’’ The space they both finally want to describe is that of literature. My notion of re´cit comes close to this notion of tale (conte) because the tale becomes the scene of a break with the repetition of one’s life, with the scene of hearing one’s life story over and over. The notion of repetition Khatibi is criticizing is different from the repetition I have underscored in this project, and the distinction is crucial. Through his reading of the tale, in its double versions, Khatibi wants to undo a repetition that ends up devouring the subject because such repetition leaves no openness and because it says the same thing over and over again. This repetition implicates the subject, which, in the story, accepts the repetition rendered by the speaking

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bird as his own story by saying yes to it. This mode of repetition is broken when another subject arrives on the scene refusing to accept the story as her own. The power of storytelling resides in the possibility of a repetition that does not close in on its own movement but rather opens the subject and the story toward others, toward relationality with other stories and with other subjects. The re´cit is then the story of the failure of encounter with one’s own story, one’s own genealogy, and it insinuates itself in the heart of the novel in Amour bilingue. Amour bilingue is a re´cit not because it tells the story of a life, as the laws of genres sometimes define it, but because it constantly disrupts the time of possibility: ‘‘This event plays havoc with time,’’ says Blanchot ‘‘yet imposes time—a particular manifestation of time, a time peculiar to narration which inserts itself into the narrator’s continuity in a manner that transforms him; the time of metamorphoses where, in an imaginary simultaneity and as the space art tries to represent, different temporal ecstasies coincide’’ (‘‘Siren’s Song’’ 65). This metamorphosis shatters the ground upon which the narrative ‘‘I’’ is founded. The ‘‘I’’ continues to speak, but its speech is no longer that of an ordinary subject. The ‘‘I’’ crosses the time of narration and is transformed by it without knowing. The ‘‘I’’ can only speak about it belatedly. The ‘‘I’’ and its speech no longer have the same history. In the second section of Amour bilingue only the ‘‘I’’ speaks, apparently with regained stability. But this ‘‘I’’ has lost all authority, it is no longer the ‘‘I’’ that can assert itself as a self-certain subject. This loss of authority is due to the movement of the re´cit: ‘‘I realize that I am saying ‘I’ in the present tense. He? He fell down. But where? In his strict anonymity? I don’t dare draw the strict conclusion. He is, he is the teller, and what I built he has already destroyed; that which I bring into being, he ceaselessly drives it away. I am he without being either him or me. And you? Irreplaceable you? Now I ask you. Are you happy with my new declaration of love, rather late in terms of what has happened [so belated in relation to the events]? You’ll know nothing. that is precisely unnamable’’ (91; 81). The ‘‘he’’ is the storyteller (re´citant), but who is this re´citant? Does he have an identity? Can the re´citant be anyone but the re´cit reciting itself ? The word ‘‘reciting’’ is used here in both its senses of telling and repeating. If the re´cit is divided between an account of a ‘‘real life event’’ and the dynamic of a failed encounter, this division dispossesses the re´cit of any identity, and therefore the repetition cannot be that of a self-same re´cit. Rather, it repeats its failure to repeat itself, despite the efforts of the ‘‘I’’ who speaks in the present. We remember the last sentences of the epigraph: ‘‘(This beginning of text seemed to consume

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[de´vorer] the storyteller, who read it ceaselessly. Each time, he approached this beginning which excluded him: a story with no protagonist: or if there was one, it was the story itself, which heard itself utter this lone command: Start over)’’ (12; 5–6). The re´cit says one thing and one thing only: repeat. This command is the sole law of the re´cit here, a law that it obeys ceaselessly. In the re´cit nothing happens, not even the re´cit, but this failure belongs to it. This is why the re´cit can only be the space where love abides and where the movements of thought in excess of comprehension take place. The re´cit of love cannot take place in satisfaction, because speech is tardy in its declarations of love: ‘‘Are you happy with my new declaration of love, rather late in terms of what has happened?’’ (91; 81). The re´cit is this failure of love’s declaration, allowing it to start over again, in hopes of arrival. Nothing can be constructed in the re´cit since everything has already begun to dissipate and to withdraw before it even began. The threat of this withdrawal calls the re´cit forth. The anonymity of the third person, ‘‘he,’’ carries away the identity of the ‘‘I.’’ Even when the ‘‘I’’ declares itself, it is already under the effect of the anonymous. This ‘‘I,’’ already dispossessed, then addresses the other, ‘‘tu,’’ the familiar ‘‘you.’’ The tripartite relationship between ‘‘he,’’ ‘‘I,’’ and ‘‘you’’ does not define subject positions. Rather, the relationship between ‘‘I’’ and familiar ‘‘you’’ (tu) comes about when anonymity and distance, that is, a certain relinquishing of authority and identity, have taken place. The re´cit of love recounts the story of this dispossession of the subject as it opens toward the other. Love as thought, in the sense of pense´e-autre, tells the story of the relationality between thought and other as love. This relationality, instead of granting thought safety and certainty, shatters its ground with the force of a ‘‘perhaps.’’

5.

Figuring the Wine-Bearer

In chapter 2, I opened the question of the relationship between transcendence and the imagination, arguing that the movements of transcendence are related to the distancing dynamics of the subject from itself through thought and imagination. I showed how the very possibility of survival requires this kind of distancing. In chapter 4, I further emphasized the necessity of this distance for the re´cit by highlighting the genealogical rupture that characterizes la Bi-langue and the story ‘‘L’oiseau conteur,’’ as interpreted by Khatibi in ‘‘La voix du re´cit.’’ In this chapter, I turn my attention to the mystical tradition of Islam through Abdelkebir Khatibi’s Le livre du sang (The Book of Blood) in which catastrophe is inscribed as the impossible attainment of unity with the Divine. Khatibi’s engagement with this tradition is no secret, as it traverses the entirety of his oeuvre, and neither is this engagement unique to him. Many writers of the Maghreb inscribe Islam in its mystical mode in their work, writers such as Abdelwahab Meddeb of Tunisia, Tahar ben Jelloun of Morocco, Mohammad Dib of Algeria, to name a few. This inscription is never a simple repetition but is a rewriting and rethinking of the tradition itself, every time, in a singular way. Khatibi’s engagement with this tradition is interpretative and affirmative. Distinguishing often between ‘‘mysticism’’ and ‘‘mystical’’ (la mystique), Khatibi conceives of the mystical as a special kind of opening toward the self and the other, an opening that the rules and prescribed structures of mysticism may prohibit. In an interview with Isabelle Larrive´e and Junjar Mohammed Seghir, Khatibi hints at this difference: ‘‘The question is not whether I am a mystic or not, but rather how I translate the mystical in my writings, which are far from being a negation of the body’’ (Oeuvre de Abdelkebir Khatibi 38). The mystical, in Khatibi’s understanding, requires a kind of interior experience, which echoes Bataille’s ‘‘expe´rience inte´rieure’’ that can only come about in relation to others. The mystical is therefore a relationship between the singular and the communal. In this sense, the mystical indicates the point of passage between the singular and the common, the 153

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singular and the universal. It points to the experience of relationality, without the enclosed structures of identitarian communities in the sense of identities determining themselves through a process of closure.1 Khatibi’s relationship with the mystical is not limited to Islam, but is rather open to other traditions and sites of relationality between the subject and the other where the interior and the exterior pass into each other. These traditions are not limited to the religious domain, but exist as poetic and mythic domains as well. Therefore, while his thinking about mysticism begins with the singularity of the Islamic tradition, it leads to a kind of universality that would put the Islamic mystical tradition in relation to others, thereby opening the mystical in Islam to the outside and the other, breaking down the barriers that would stabilize the identities of the inside and of the outside, of the I and of the other, and so forth. My reading here suggests that Khatibi’s Le livre du sang inscribes a catastrophic dynamic in the heart of mysticism in order to liberate it from its predetermined structures, frameworks of nostalgia, and ethics of mourning and loss, opening the tradition to an affirmative dynamic that celebrates the material and the visible without nostalgia for the immaterial, for the invisible, and for lost unity. The story follows the vicissitudes of a mystic brotherhood’s efforts at turning away from the materiality of the world and the body in order to achieve the goal of unity between the visible and the invisible. Tracing the movements of the re´cit, I show the ways in which the dynamics of la Bilangue and of pense´e-autre, as articulated in the previous chapter, become reinscribed in this text so as to reveal the failures of the transcendental impulse that provides the central thread for the story. The materiality of the body that informed much of the movement in Amour bilingue fills the scene with such insistence here that no transcendental project can erase it. I argue that this insistent weight of the body—primarily cadaverous, because it is both heavy and excessive—as well as the heaviness of the things of the world, bring forth figuration and narration. The weight of the body allows it to remain in the world in spite of the transcendental desire, and this excess of the body allows figures to take form and opens the path of narration. While the transcendental mode of mysticism aims at the erasure and forgetting of the body in order to attain the nonfigural and to fuse with the unfigurable, the story here must refuse this erasure of the body’s materiality and of the figure because this refusal is the condition of the story’s possibility. This notion of body and materiality as the possibility of narration inscribes itself in the novel as excess, thus avoiding the fall into the traditional dichotomies of body and soul, earthly and heavenly, and so forth. Le livre

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ends with a violent scene of disaster consuming the brotherhood and its dreams of mystical unity. However, this finale is the effect of a catastrophic dimension that is inaugural and necessary for the story because fragmentation and the ruin of totality are the very conditions of surfacing for both writing and figure. Something remains as the aftereffect of the catastrophic, and this remainder becomes the body of the narration where figures rise to the surface. Whereas in Amour, narration unfolded around the figure of la Bi-langue, in Le livre, the Androgyn becomes the dispersive center of narration. This ancient figure—mythical, philosophical, and foundational for monotheism, at least Islamic monotheism, in the figure of Adam—becomes both the risk and the chance for the story. While the Platonic myth of the Androgyn gives us the fantasy of union as the search for an original unity of being, around which the brotherhood constructs itself, in Khatibi’s text the Androgyn slowly unravels this fantasy by revealing its dispersive dynamic and effect.2 In the Adamic scene, as Khatibi reads it in Par-dessus l’e´paule, the androgynous principle permits for the division between man and woman, a division that no theology and no philosophy can erase. Instead, this division, or this instant of separation, becomes the site of the inscription of the body of Satan and of evil, in the heart of transcendence.3 The inscription of the indelible body of Satan affirms the principle of visibility and materiality that cannot be effaced. Thus, although the story begins with the dream of union, its movements more and more reveal the intimacy of the Androgyn with disintegration, not as a secondary process but a primary one. In this sense, narration reveals the conjunction between mythic unity and unity as mythic.4 The brotherhood persists in its transcendental project in spite of everything, but this in spite of everything finally heralds an explosion of violence that no fantasy can contain, no project of forgetfulness can tame. On a basic level, Le livre du sang is the story of a twin brother and sister, both androgynous, navigating in the interstices that mark the difference between the sacred and the profane. Echanson (cupbearer) is the traditional figure of Arabic and Persian mystical poetry (the text refers to this latter tradition through multiple references to Rumi and the Mawlawi order— commonly known as the whirling dervishes—founded by him). He is the brother who becomes the beautiful site of contemplation for the brotherhood in search of transcendence in the divine. Prior to his arrival in the brotherhood, Echanson worked as a wine-bearer in the tavern where his twin sister, Muthna, prostitutes herself. Driven by jealousy toward the brotherhood and by desire for her brother, Muthna first kidnaps Echanson during the carnival and then disguises herself as her brother and enters the

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brotherhood, taking his place as the wine-bearer. After poisoning the First Disciple, she seduces the Master and provokes the final scene of the violent destruction of the brotherhood by baring her body to the gaze of the disciples at the time of prayer, interrupting thus their turn toward the Unique and toward the foundational site of Islam and monotheism, the Ka’ba. Unable to determine Muthna’s gender, the members of the brotherhood become enraged and frenzied and cut the throats of both brother and sister under the gaze of the Master, who then cuts his own veins in a gesture of self-annihilation that violates the self-annihilation (fana) required by the project of mysticism. Suicide displaces and cancels the transcendental aim of the brotherhood striving to attain it through contemplation and the symbolic erasure of the materiality of the body. In suicide, the fragmented and fractured material body bars the path toward the higher order of a unified ultimate Self and Reality. From its first pages onward, Le livre juxtaposes community and singularity in such a way that the latter repeatedly interrupts the former, revealing its insufficiencies. The narrative ‘‘nous’’ (we) is consistently interrupted by the singularity of ‘‘tu’’ (you), an open singularity, always interpellated by the other and interpellating the other. When the story begins, Echanson is already there, addressed by the narrator as ‘‘tu.’’ This second person forms the basis of the narration as the ‘‘you’’ multiplies, becoming now Echanson, and at other times Muthna, the Disciple, the Master, and the Divine. The story is told as the encounter between a collective ‘‘nous’’ and a ‘‘tu,’’ divided and multiplied. It unfolds between community and singularity, or rather between the desire for community and the singularity that interrupts and violates this community. The notion of community here is bidirectional, horizontal and vertical, for it refers to the space of the brotherhood—its common project, the relationships between the members and their master—and to the project of communion with the divine, which is always singular. In this sense, the community of brotherhood can be displaced only by the communion between the mystic and the divine, on a vertical axis. The narrator(s), whose ‘‘nous’’ indicates possible belonging to the brotherhood (but nothing is ever certain here), refer(s) to Echanson as ‘‘enfant inoubliable’’ (unforgettable child). It is perhaps because of this unforgettability that transcendence becomes impossible! How to forget this beautiful child in order to move to the beyond? How to forget or erase the figure in order to lose oneself in the unfigurable? The notion of community thus interrupted refers to the closed-in community of a brotherhood structured, as in this text, by the logic of enclosure. Singularity, on the other hand, refers to

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the experience of a subject in solitude. Yet, it is a solitude that at the same time opens the subject toward the other and puts him or her in relation with others. The dialectics at the heart of the mystical experience and the literary traditions that have given expression to its trials and elations form the tensions of the narration from the first page as it juxtaposes the brotherhood and the brothel, the mosque and the tavern, earth and heaven, beauty and evil. Slowly these dichotomies lose their structure as the story moves forward, and spaces begin to vacillate and oscillate, moving toward each other and appearing together. Structures and spaces thus set in motion give rise to the story and its figures, moving the notion of singularity and community toward each other without reducing one to the other. In other words, the story is the affirmation of neither an absolute singularity nor an absolute community, but the possibility of one in the other; it is the scene of the exposure of one to the other. The story opens with the enclosed structures of the brotherhood and its fantasy of communion. It begins with a gaze that slides across the architectural space of the brotherhood, where the fantasy of flight is inscribed on the weighty walls of marble and columns, bearing down upon the earth. This weightiness of things of the world is juxtaposed with the heavenly desire of transcendence: ‘‘Let us allow the gaze to slide for an instant on the surfaces of walls; let it jut out of the marble, the stucco, or the wood, upon all matter that makes nostalgic effervescence sparkle. The mosaic advances, it too, in this finery of the sunset. On the mural calligraphies, a precious sumptuousness is bestowed, for all time, upon these garlands formed by subtle hands. Where does this high fantasy lead? This movement of stone between heaven and earth? Grandiose is the favor of dreaming that walls, columns, and domes would uproot themselves in order to go toward the sky’’ (13; all translations of this text are mine). The thought of transcendence literally inscribes itself in the very materiality and weightiness of matter, bearing into the ground and yet drawing the gaze upward toward the height of fantasy, moving heavenward with the desire to take flight. Solar light illuminates the inscriptions. The light is that of the setting sun, the time when the sun hovers on the horizon, orienting the gaze toward a region beyond while announcing the arrival of night, illuminated by fantasy and dream. The body of the child Echanson presents the promise of this weightlessness, the winged thought of transcendence, an angelic thought: ‘‘Unforgettable child, advance toward us, smiling. . . . As if the weightiness of the earth only obeys the enchanted steps of the Beloved. Come! Free us in the luminous body of a living angel’’ (13). Enchanted by the movements of the beloved

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as the angel who, according to tradition, occupies the intermediary space between the lower world and the higher, the earth responds to the demands of this movement in which the hope for transcendence materializes itself.5 However, it is precisely this materialization of body and face that fragments the structure and forces it to collapse. The brotherhood is haunted by the thought of the same as the law of transcendence and identity. The myth of the Androgyn as ideal unity is doubled by the desire for unity with the absolute, the erasure of the uncompromising difference of which Khatibi speaks in ‘‘Pense´e-autre.’’ Upon Muthna’s entrance into the brotherhood in the guise of her brother, the narrator exclaims, ‘‘O stream of the Same, of which spring are you the thought? Of which unheard (of ) miracle? . . . And here we are falling, vacillating, into the Joy of the Unique. In everyone’s eyes, Muthna is Echanson’’ (124). The myth of unity, the Androgyn, serves here as the mirror for the fantasy of transcendental unity and identity, the transfiguration desired by the mystic. While the danger of this fantasy and the risk of this desire allow the story to go on, they do not, however, hide the principle of simulacrum at work at the heart of the narration: ‘‘But we forget too easily that resemblance is a supreme betrayal of its own law and of all law.’’ In other words, the brotherhood forgets too easily that Echanson is not Muthna, and this forgetting brings about their doom. The myth of the Androgyn as unity is juxtaposed to and questioned by that other figure of androgyny, Dionysius, the figure of rupture, unstable identity, and dangerous and threatening forgetfulness. The story announces its own game early on in the text: ‘‘The story moves on, illuminated by the Myth’s mirages, traces without traces on the sand, erased by the wind’’ (46). The mirage of the Myth, as an absolute, offers the possibility of a narration that reveals the fragmentation at the heart of the Myth. The story is drawn by the disaster that it announces from the second page: ‘‘Unforgettable child, we ask of you the necessary law of silence, forever—before your slaughter’’ (14). The violence that draws the story takes place at the confluence of several myths—Orpheus, Androgyn, Dionysius, Narcissus, and Osiris—juxtaposing them with the founding myths of Islam, as in the verse from the Qur’an where God’s intimacy is asserted: ‘‘We are nearer to him than his jugular vein!’’ (50:16). Le livre cites this by underscoring the threat that the Qur’anic verse hides: ‘‘Ripping open of the jugular vein! Explosion! Explosion [e´clat, e´clat]!’’ (30; italics in original). It is perhaps inevitable that the impossibility of transcendence, due to the rupture of relations with the divine, expresses itself in the severing of that same jugular vein at the end of the story. Thus, the text juxtaposes the Islamic

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and the mythic, the Qur’anic and the orphic, for it is the orphic dynamic that dominates the scene here. ‘‘Muthna! Our homage salutes the two faces of your being, and what gushes out in this frantic ordeal is still the splendor of your voice. Yes, Muthna, may your name illuminate us! May the happy sin burn! We will stand and will sing for you the prayer of your annihilation and ours, until the head is detached from the neck—reincarnated’’ (30). The story is this song that survives decapitation, as its aftermath. The story marks the strange temporality of this survival: while it tells of the disaster in the future as a disaster to come, the very act of the announcement implies that it has already arrived in the story. The possibility of the story lies in the disaster’s having already arrived. Le livre constructs itself around the double figure of the Androgyn: each Androgyn as double in itself and doubled by each other. This logic of duality does not focalize the text around a center, but rather disperses and destabilizes the narration as it radiates in multiple directions without a fixed center. All the luminous sites of the story, such as the sun and the candle, illuminate this dispersive dimension of the story. In Le livre du sang, mythic repetition is anything but totalizing and closed. It indicates rather the impossibility of the absolute and of self-immanence, including in the mythic. Let us remember once again that Khatibi recalls, ‘‘Arabs had invented the famous Theology of Aristotle in order to erase in a way Greek paganism and to get around Greek thought by the monotheistic circle’’ (Maghreb pluriel 22). The monotheistic circle is by definition tautological, for it cannot tolerate internal division. While Islamic mysticism resisted the rationality of Aristotelian philosophy by turning to the ideality of Platonic thought, where myth and mystery remain, in its cosmology and ontology it still affirms the absolute unity and uniqueness of the divine. In Le livre monotheism per se suffers dispersion as the story becomes the scene of interplay of plural myths. This simultaneity of myths undermines the totalizing attributes accorded to them as foundational for community and identity and points to the fractures and dispersion at work in the mythic.6 In other words, in Le livre, myths enter literature as plurality and dispersion. Narration here does not reveal the truth of myth, that of monotheism or otherwise, at its origin, but rather points to the condition under which the mythic may inscribe itself in literature. Thus, narration shows that which may perhaps belong to the mythic: resistance within myth to the foundational discourses held on myth—but narration shows this without claim to truth or origin. It shows the intimacy between myth and fiction as a movement. Fiction reinscribes myth. This reinscription reveals the being-fiction of foundation and the foundational character of fiction, which cannot be as

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such since the concept of foundation cannot allow for fiction conceived as distance from origin and truth, as re´cit. In Le livre, narration requires dispersion of any thought whose structure is illuminated from above, from the source of knowledge and truth as foundation: Sometimes, strange visions of absolute anarchy come to me, of capital anarchy: the head—before flying off on other heads—walks toward the dilapidation of all thought, of every law of thought. Because such a law participates in the architecture of a cardinal being. Every stone joins another in accordance with the sun’s rotation. The sun reflects, in thought, the shards of gods forever lost. The sky and the earth retain their carnal finery, which founds the ecstatic being. What we desire since then, with the underground complicity of the dead who speak to us, is to orient thought toward a supernatural place where it raises everything to which it aspires so as to entomb it better. What we desire is always to lift up Being from all its invisible finery, and which, in any event, weaves our destiny and our double death. Double, because one does not live v i s i b l y but once. (68)

This beautiful and difficult segment seems to identify two moments that mark the passage from polytheism and visibility of the gods to monotheism and the invisibility of God. It tells of the retreat of the gods, of the withdrawal of their presence (echoing Ho¨lderlin, perhaps).7 On the trace of this retreat, ecstatic being is founded. This being is thus perhaps always a nostalgic being singing of this loss. The retreat of the gods, henceforth, turns us toward the invisibility of Being as the logic of monotheism. Since this retreat, the desire for transcendence has taken the shape of wanting to draw Being out of its invisibility, for, with monotheism, we are no longer in the presence of the gods in their multiplicity, but rather live in the nostalgia of an invisible God in his indivisibility. This retreat of the multiplicity of gods hints at both Islamic and non-Islamic traditions. As the inaugural stories of Islam tell us, the first gesture of Islam was to destroy the idols inside Ka’ba, this quintessential site of monotheism since Abraham. However, here is the twist that Khatibi proposes: the desire toward visibility does not render the invisible to the visible but rather buries it more profoundly, ‘‘pour mieux l’ensevelir.’’ This movement suggests two pathways for thought. First, it suggests that as God has retreated definitively and is God in this invisibility, all efforts toward visibility only bury him more profoundly. In other words, through the desire to render God visible, the retreat of Being becomes the

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extreme dispossession of Being. Second, in a sense that is more affirmative but nevertheless related to this first movement, the desire to make God visible opens the possibility toward the world—the material, the story, the song, and so forth. In other words, invisibility becomes so radical that it can no longer hold any claim on life. The story draws the invisible toward the visible as figures and as writing, not in order to return us to the foundation but to reveal its untenability. This thought sends us back to the architectural scene that opens the text and orients us toward the sites of transcendence in Islam that organize thought and structure it according to a design and to the logic of the sun. Not only does the architecture turn the gaze and thinking upward, it also orients them toward a privileged site and its architecture: the Ka’ba, as the reference point of orientation, is present throughout the text.8 Radical fragmentation, ‘‘anarchie capitale,’’ that the passage proposes, displaces the thought that responds to structural laws of ‘‘one stone upon another.’’ The becoming invisible of Being directs thought toward another place that marks our destiny. The orphic turn in thought is that which, by an effort of lifting invisibility toward the visible, buries both the god and his or her retreat more profoundly. Henceforth, visibility inscribes itself in materiality, on the surface of things. This materiality implicates writing as spacing and surfacing of inscription. The word v i s i b l e m e n t (visibly) thus underscores its own visibility. This surfacing of writing as distance from foundation challenges the metaphysical status appointed to writing, in particular Qur’anic writing. The mystical experience is characterized by a double death: the physical death of the body and the mystical death as annihilation, fana, the interval between consciousness of self and that of the Divine, which has the telos of eternal life in the unity with the divine. The orphic turn offers an affirmation in this double death. In the myth of Orpheus, Eurydice too suffers a double death. The first death of the body is doubled by the radical death of life on the other side of death. The turn of Orpheus registers this repetition. The second death does not repeat the death of the living but affirms that of the dead. Le livre celebrates this turn in thought: ‘‘Praised be to this music of the soul that is radical thought when, irrigated with the forces of nature, it says ‘yes’ to the devastating light of Time!’’ (89). The intimacy between thought and music lies in the rotation of thought toward that which devastates it, and in this devastation thought finds its affirmation. This turn frees thought from the dichotomies of presence and absence, light and darkness, night and day, and opens within it a different kind of vision, the light of a

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radical affirmation. In this sense, Orpheus perhaps does not sing out of nostalgia for the lost Eurydice, but rather sings out of this radical double withdrawal that gives impulse to his song. Orpheus’s song, like the story here, comes forth in the aftermath of this turn that eliminates the possibility of recovery, both of presence and of absence. In the turn, even loss loses itself and thus opens an economy of affirmation which recalls that notion of radical dispossession that Khatibi elaborates as the dynamic of pense´e-autre.9 Echanson gives the narration its vacillating movements. Given the unstable quality of his identity and the movements of his appearance and disappearance, the structure is always threatened, ready to fall into ruin and become exposed. The story takes place in the light of this risk: Yes, unforgettable child, keep the town at the horizon of this narration, before its collapse into my lonely memory. Does it not vacillate since forever under the ardor of arid winds! Is it not maddened by the solar light! Similar to those ephemeral plants devoured by their roots, the foundations of the town, already falling to ruin, reappear on the surface of the earth. . . . Strange identity of heaven and earth, of wind and sun, figured in a simple swaying of dunes! From there emanates the cry of the desert in the ecstatic heart of the man called by wandering. . . . But who can live on these roots of sand without trembling? Who can walk on the threshold of the desert without terror? (38)

The structure’s ephemeral and shifting foundations, already in ruins, appear on the surface of the earth, reminiscent of orphic fragmentation. Appearance is neither foundational nor nostalgic for lost foundation; rather, it is the movement toward visibility of swaying foundations already in ruins. Appearance is the movement of surfacing, where surface becomes a foundation without foundation. In other words, things appear on the surface of the desert but this surface itself is moving, vacillating, shifting. Things remain close to the ground and on the surface of the earth but without grounding themselves. Because foundation is thus unstable and fragmentary, appearance can take place. A shift occurs here from architectural light to desert light and to the movements of the dunes that have nothing to do with nostalgia. These are not opposed spaces but rather shifting foundations. The town has its foundation in the sands of the desert. Within the architecture of the story, thought and identity vacillate under the sway of this strange dynamic of appearance. The ecstatic cry emitted in the desert comes forth under this condition of nonfoundation: ‘‘It is on the threshold of the desert that the possessed being cries out: I am Love, I am the Lover, I am the Beloved’’

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(38). In this ecstatic cry of the mystic, Love, its Subject, and its Object merge into a unity dispossessed of foundation. The turning movements of the whirling dervish repeat perhaps nothing other than this impossible orientation in the desert, or rather, the constant movement of orientation that cannot be fixed upon a horizon. If the cry of the mystic belongs to the desert, ‘‘cri du de´sert,’’ as such it can only say ruin. The mirage of the double myths of the One (Divine) and the Same (Androgyn), which enchant the narration and design its architecture with the promise of encounter, also draw the mystic toward a wandering without return, but a wandering and nonreturn that affirm visibility and free being from nostalgic mourning. Echanson figures this game of appearance at the edge of ruin, while, simultaneously, ruin is the condition of his appearance, the condition that allows him to become a figure. This double game keeps the story going: ‘‘Unforgettable child, appear! Appear once again! Inundate us with your light. We saw you fall into a secret melancholia, then your face unexpectedly disappeared, removing our gaze. We are turned toward the secret of Appearance, while you lead us irresistibly toward the Night of Time’’ (38). Echanson’s game of repetitive appearance and disappearance does not deliver any secrets. Rather, it eliminates the gaze and directs the brotherhood toward the ‘‘Night of Time,’’ toward the void. The scene is two-directional: while their desire turns them toward the secret appearance of the divine, toward ‘‘Appearance,’’ Echanson turns them toward the temporal void. His disappearance does not offer a higher, fuller appearance, but rather the abyss of appearance. Time thus divides itself between transcendence and its impossibility. The light of Echanson’s beauty does not provide the vehicle toward a transcendental vision, but rather, like the vision of Eurydice, disperses itself into the void of time. Echanson’s appearance and disappearance open the brotherhood to the domain of Muthna: ‘‘Unforgettable child, now little by little you are divided and we walk toward your sister. She will wait for us in her tavern where she dominates the scene’’ (39). This ‘‘little by little,’’ the slow enchantment of the story toward another dynamic and another kind of space, provides the pace of the story. Echanson’s appearances and disappearances divide the scene, thus exposing the division and the ruin of the brotherhood. Muthna comes forth under the effect of this division, to which Echanson already belongs. Le livre du sang opens with an epigraph, which immediately introduces us to Muthna, whose name is explained as ‘‘effeminate,’’ ‘‘hermaphrodite,’’ ‘‘androgynous’’ (9). But there is more to the story. Muthna is the figure of both duality and femininity, all at once, for in Muthna, not only do we hear

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‘‘muthanna,’’ the dual form in Arabic grammar, but also a kind of anagram of ‘‘mu’annath,’’ the grammatical feminine.10 Within this constellation of relations between dual, Androgyn, and feminine, the Androgyn becomes another name for la Bi-langue. The enigma of the Androgyn as a figure is always already inscribed within the feminine, whose duality allows for the double figure of Muthna-Echanson to emerge.11 The Androgyn, therefore, is not an original unity but rather a duality. Hassan Wahbi has already indicated the relationship between the feminine and the Androgyn in Le livre du sang: ‘‘It is therefore Muthna who accomplishes the androgyny of Echanson, her brother, her reflection’’ (‘‘Le Corps double’’ 92; my translation). This principle of androgyny related to the feminine and figured by Muthna, allows Echanson to appear now as a girl, now as a boy, appear and disappear. The Androgyn is feminine, and the Androgyn is a reflection, a figure, an image. But as the text has told us earlier, reflection as resemblance does not follow the law of identity as return to the same, for resemblance, which is a repetition, betrays its own laws and all laws. Echanson and Muthna are not the same. But neither do Echanson and Muthna have fixed and verifiable identities. In other words, there is no self-sameness that defines these figures. The doubling inscribes difference within the self and with the other. Only when we forget the excess of resemblance are we fooled by the illusion of reflection as the logic of identity. The confluence of these three dimensions—namely feminine, Androgyn, and figure—constitutes the re´cit and the ruin toward which it is headed. In Le livre, the Androgyn and the feminine, instead of belonging to higher realms of reality and light, are always already fallen angels, in ruin, appearing on the surface of the earth. In an interview with Adil Hajji, Khatibi has said the following about the feminine: ‘‘Woman is not a theme. It is a principle that cannot be liquidated ‘just like that.’ It always works. It is always at work in the text’’ (Abdelkebir Khatibi 139–40; my translation). Khatibi’s articulation offers a notion of the feminine that distinguishes between woman as a literary dynamic and woman as representation of the real woman. Here woman as the feminine dynamic exceeds and destabilizes the concept of woman as a gendered, appropriated, and perhaps even silenced individual. In Par-dessus l’e´paule he highlights the intimacy of Satan—as the figure of division—with femininity. In Le livre du sang, the figure for this double dynamic is the Androgyn. Khatibi intimates the link between the feminine and the Androgyn in his articulation of the feminine in the same interview with Hajji: ‘‘The feminine principle . . . it is that which is common to man and to woman. In short, it is somewhat a universal component. . . . It is not a symbiosis, nor a harmony.

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There can be seduction, war, but then violence is said: it no longer carries on as a wild element’’ (139). The feminine is a gathering place of male and female, but not in harmony, in symbiosis, in totality, as the inherited tradition of Androgyn would have it. It is a place of identity that dissolves neither difference nor violence. The universality of this principle, therefore, cannot derive from that of the concept, but rather from the figure that does not refer us back to the stability of a truth. The feminine is both more and less than male and female, and this constitutes its alignment with the Androgyn. In Le livre, the alliance between the Androgyn and feminine as excess and division inaugurates the space of the narration: ‘‘So, you my story, you reappear at the end of every embrace, every petrifaction; I met you as a mythic figure and lost you as a real figure’’ (149). Neither mythic (Androgyn) nor real (woman), the Androgyn and the feminine perform the passage from one to the other. In this movement, the figure can no longer belong to foundation nor to an identitarian logic, but rather to fiction.12 Echanson is the ‘‘male’’ counterpart of Muthna, her twin brother. In his double capacity as wine-bearer and figure for contemplation, Echanson is the very figure of hospitality and offering. He is both the gift and the gift bearer: ‘‘You came . . . according to the rites of an ecstatic hospitality’’ (17). The offering is visibility, since Echanson surfaces in a vision, or a dream. This vision belongs to the mystical experience and not to an outside. In other words, the mystical scene gives the figure that reorients it. ‘‘The Master remembers his first vision. It was the pure dream of an Apparition. We will never know at what moving distance the Master saw you while seeing himself in the public bath, you, yourself, lying in your naked form, immobile, wrapped in vapors, head turned toward the hot water basin. And if each room reflects the others—like a play of misty mirrors—it is that Beauty should burn off the vapors that floated on our bodies. We flitted about, dispersing here and there in whispers and unexpected deductions, so as to hide you. The scene was torn when you rose’’ (17). The scene of this appearance, of figuration, is inaugurated by the dream of the Master dreaming of himself in the public bath, and it is precisely this himself that is at issue and at the heart of the dynamic of this vision. The Master dreams of himself, but this self is interrupted by the figure of Echanson. Lying in a state of complete passivity, Echanson tears away the gaze that is turned toward the self and directs it elsewhere. This is no longer the domain of the mastery of selfconscious contemplation, but the scene of its dissolution. What is the object that the gaze beholds? Where is it directed now that it can no longer turn back upon itself ? The gaze is diverted, but not toward another object that

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can be posited, nor toward the unity of a self. Instead, a much more radical movement is at work here: the gaze is turned toward distance; not what is distant but rather the movements of distance and proximity: ‘‘distance mouvante’’ (the moving distance). The other toward whom the gaze is turned is already turned away. An inaugural refusal marks the scene. No face announces itself at the other end of the expanse of separation, for the child’s face is turned away toward the water basin, reminiscent of Narcissus’s turn toward the pond and the image therein. Thus, appearance here is intimately related to refusal. The nakedness of the form lying in the bath is veiled within the folds of the vapors. What is the effect of such a strange dynamic of appearing? Dispersion. This is no longer a measurable distance. It is rather the space of a dispersion, one marked by the movements of here and there—‘‘c¸a` et la`’’—distance and proximity; differentiation as the very possibility of appearance, dispersion as the coming into space of space. This dispersive dynamic is the condition of spatiality as such. Nothing can be figured, no presentation can occur without it. He rose (‘‘tu te levas’’), and thus figuration came upon the scene. While the passivity of his repose opens up space, his movement allows for something to emerge from that space: the figure, the spacing of space. The vaporous, veiled quality of this space disqualifies it as the space of truth or reality. For this reason Echanson cannot be subsumed under the category designated as male, for he always appears under the effect of the feminine. His androgyny always already inscribes him within the domain of Muthna, Androgyn and feminine. Le livre du sang plays out the tension between these two different logics throughout. On the one hand, Echanson and Muthna are gendered and differentiated, as male and female respectively; on the other hand, neither can be contained by these categories. While discourse claims and categorizes them, another logic disperses and destabilizes these same categories. This ambiguity due to the excess of the categorical destroys the brotherhood. What does the veiling behind the thick vapors of water mean for the question of truth? Does it mean that once the vapors are burnt off, once the appearance asserts its full presence (la Beaute´), then the veiled form would emerge in its truth, would be exposed in all its depth and secrets? The use of the conditional ‘‘should’’ (devrait) in the passage must be accounted for as the ‘‘should’’ aligns beauty (la Beaute´) with the conditional imperative (devrait). In other words, this ‘‘should’’ does not dictate any truth nor any possibility but a simple and naked imperative, which the narration does not respect. The efforts at hiding the naked, passive figure of Echanson do not

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hide an appearance; rather, they hide so that appearance can come forth, that figuration can take place. The figure rises simultaneously as the disciples flit about trying to hide it. The scene inaugurates an ethical imperative, ‘‘devrait,’’ but does not guarantee its realization. In other words, the inaugural moment of the law on the scene of figuration does not simultaneously offer the conditions for its respect, since refusal and turning away are its inaugural movements. Within the circle of the mystic brotherhood, Echanson is defined as masculine, but it is the feminine dynamic in him that fascinates the gazes turned in his direction. It is the androgynous, the distant, and the undecidable that enchant: ‘‘A detached gait [allure], the appearance of torn lace in a quivering light, placing him beyond his pure real person. Luxurious substitution! It is the unreality—the vision of a body that divides itself under the gaze—that renders the beauty of the real visible. Yes, I call Androgynous this ecstatic contour of being, appearance in the appearance of man and woman in an infinite effacement. Yes, the Androgynous is eternally the fiance´ of all women and the fiance´e of all men. Our angel, does he not resemble a young masculine adolescent girl?’’ (52). The aim of the brotherhood in introducing Echanson into their midst is to find transcendence through the contemplation of the beautiful face, the figure. He is to provide a means to that exalted end where unity with the divine can be achieved. They seek self-annihilation in the hope of reaching eternity and oneness. Through the contemplation of this figure, the desire is to go beyond him and beyond the world. The materiality of the world must be transcended by Reality. He is the dividing line between here and there, the limit between death and eternal life. In him and through him, they seek their death so that they can come to life in the eternal plane of the absolute beyond: ‘‘We will be your companions on the road toward the intoxication of death’’ (15). For the brotherhood, Echanson is to provide the visibility through which the invisible may be attained. Positioned in front of the group, lit up by a candle placed at an equal distance between him and the contemplators, he becomes the path to transcendence. Through the figure of Echanson, truth can perhaps be accomplished, but this accomplishment can only take place if a profound forgetting accommodates it: the light of the flame renders the figure visible, but it also casts deep, impenetrable shadows, which do not annihilate vision, but rather call for a different kind of vision. The echo of what Zarathustra says to the Dwarf reverberates in this thought: ‘‘Is seeing itself not—seeing abysses?’’ (Thus Spoke Zarathustra 177). Distance divides the gaze and offers the unreal—not the false. The contemplation by the brotherhood of the figure is blind to the

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night behind the appearance: ‘‘The Night of Time.’’ However, figurality as the sign of visibility rises out of this abyss that the figure both hides and indicates obliquely. While Le livre du sang undeniably draws much of its energy from the figures of the Androgyn and Orpheus, where one points to the dispersions of the other, the figure of Narcissus also offers much of its momentum. The beautiful young Narcissus deeply marks the text without being named. We know the tragic story: Narcissus fell in love with his own image. Out of the depth of his grief death struck, but his body metamorphosed into a flower that became the eternal symbol of death. Narcissus fell in love with his own image, but without recognizing himself in the image. While Narcissus does not recognize the resemblance he bears to the image, the brotherhood is fooled by the ruse of adequation in resemblance that hides difference (Muthna equals Echanson). It is fooled by the substitution that keeps difference within it. This constitutes the betrayal of resemblance: it is the simulacrum of the same, not its truth, the simulacrum of identity, not its reality. Nevertheless the implications are the same, for, in both stories—Narcissus and Le livre—the desire for appropriation and for union heralds a catastrophic end. Narcissus’s love is not for the self but for the other, who, alas, is not attainable. Not only this, but the other is not even there; it is not a presence but a figure. No union can resolve the distance that separates the self and the image. On the contrary, the image is nothing but the movement of distance—‘‘distance mouvante.’’ The impossibility of this resolution announces death in its most radical form: the death of an immortal. After all, Narcissus is a demigod, partaking of both mortality and immortality. How to fathom such a death? Blanchot explains: ‘‘Narcissus is said to be solitary, but it is not because he is excessively present to himself; it is rather because he lacks, by decree (you shall not see yourself ), that reflected presence— identity, the self-same—the basis upon which a living relation with life, which is other, can be ventured’’ (Writing of the Disaster 127). Narcissus has never lived, for he has never known himself. He can die in the story precisely because he has always already been claimed by death. This is the condition for his immortality. His grief is not caused by the realization that there is a self and not another, but rather by the prospect of the impossibility of life, the impossibility of union with the loved object, the impossibility of adequation, of truth. His love is the anguish of this abyssal distance. Love is a deathly catastrophe that consumes the divine with the depth of its unfathomable distance, the illusion of its proximity. The image plays the ruse of life only because it belongs so intimately to death—once again, the ruse of

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Eurydice and the agony of Orpheus. The decree that disallows Narcissus a relation of self-sameness and self-recognition repeats the division that gives the Muthna-Echanson division and also opens the law of resemblance that betrays identity. The figure is always related to death. Not the death that distinguishes between here and there and allows one to pass into the realm of the beyond, life after death, but rather the death that is the openness supporting appearance; the death that is withdrawal and division of time and space. Out of this temporalization and spatialization the figure comes forth, faltering, threatened by dispersion and loss. Le livre du sang tells of such a dynamic in the epigraph: ‘‘The Beloved is always, for the impassioned Lover, an unheard (of ) thought, preceded by the figure of Death. I speak of the Lover who, through inexorable acts, celebrates his own eulogy’’ (9). The beloved is always already claimed by a death whose ruse is to draw the lover toward itself. Are we not reminded of la Bi-langue’s nongenealogical death? This is the enchantment of every figure that draws the gaze so that sight is dispersed more radically. How can this unfathomable death be figured? It can only be figured on the scene of a fiction. Every figure is the figure of death because it tells of the impossibility of any relation to life. The figure in the pool does not tell of life, but rather of the illusion of life to which death can then be opposed. The image or the figure does not tell of its source of reflection, it does not guide us toward its origin. Khatibi’s text poses in simple terms the profound question of the image: ‘‘Does one ask of an Appearance the origin of its brilliance?’’ (22). This is a question that does not require a response, for the relation between the appearance and origin is not that of mutual response. The image is indifferent to the question of its origin; the question does not concern it. The question asks for a truth; the image tells, not of a lie, but of an illusion. The question and the appearance are not of the same order. ‘‘Beautiful and already assassinated, beautiful and already crossed out by destiny. your beauty is your death: it penetrates me, like a cadaver in another cadaver. Is it still you? Is it still me?’’ (56). Beauty is the special domain of the feminine. It is that quality which constitutes her fascinating attraction: ‘‘Like feminine finery concealing stubborn depression,’’ says Julia Kristeva, ‘‘beauty emerges as the admirable face of loss, transforming it in order to make it live’’ (Black Sun 99). The loss with which beauty is in relation is not of the order of negative representation. It is not the loss of something that was there, that was present at one point. Beauty is not nostalgic, for loss is foundational. Nostalgia is the fundamental pathos of mysticism, as

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encapsulated by the famous poem by Rumi about the reed that complains and mourns its lost origin.13 Narcissus’s grief or depression, on the other hand, may not be due to the realization that he has lost something, but rather because he has never had that which he has lost: a self, a truth, a life. The beautiful as image or figure is the undermining of the claims of the aesthetics of representation, for its relationship is not with presence, that is, life, but rather with death as excess of the life and death divide. Its dynamic is not that of a division between an interior and an exterior, but rather a contamination of both spaces by each other. In the relation between death and image, no interiority can be posited. ‘‘your beauty is your death: it penetrates me, like a cadaver in another cadaver’’ (56). Beauty as image is cadaverous, for the cadaver, like Echanson, is also an offering. It is both the gift and gift-giving. In the cadaver, the profusion and the generosity of such an offering plays itself out. Something is given in this strange space, but this something is inseparable from the movement of giving itself.14 The offering is the scene of the division of the present, where presentation becomes the scene of figuration. It is the mark of the division within presence, of presentation without presence. In this offering, space opens up, presentation takes place, but this presentation has no relation to life. The cadaver is born by such a space. It is supported by the openness of spatiality as such. This presentation is the space of the figure. The cadaver is also carnivalesque, for the carnival is the strange space defined by excessiveness. In the carnival, life and death, reality and fiction, commingle, and limits are effaced. Excessive simulation, characteristic of the space of the carnival, allows the presentation of death to take place. But the mask does not refer to death, for death is not hiding behind the mask, nor is the mask equivalent to death. Rather, the mask points to the simulacrum that constitutes death’s presentation: ‘‘The Carnival has begun since dawn. . . . Arise, o, lawless man . . . we are too dead not to suspect that man has definitively effaced himself at the origin of origins. . . . Through a prodigious reminder, the Carnival renews this unheard (of ) memory, which inhabits us and overwhelms us in ecstasy’’ (93). In the sounds and plays of the carnival, something unheard can perhaps be heard: the erasure of origin, of truth, and of life. The carnival belongs to death; it is the space of excessive death, ‘‘too dead,’’ of effacement of limits, of the impossible presentation of both life and death, of their identifying boundaries. Like the desert, where the already ruined foundations become the very possibility of visibility, the carnival reveals that figuration has as its condition an immemorial fracture.

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The carnival brings forth the memory of this fracture not as truth but as fiction, with the mask and with the story. The cadaver is carnivalesque because it is unconcerned about limits and boundaries; it does not recognize them. Blanchot articulates the play of this principle as follows: ‘‘No matter how calmly the corpse has been laid out upon its bed for final viewing, it is also everywhere in the room, all over the house . . . it is an invading presence, an obscure and vain abundance’’ (Space of Literature 259). This is because the corpse does not know its place, or in Blanchot’s terms, knows no ‘‘dwelling place.’’ If one could say that a cadaver resides, it does so in this space of impurity and violence of excess. Despite the efforts of discourse to divide and establish spatial boundaries between inside and outside, the cadaver and its carnivalesque dynamic seep through. The impossibility of spatial determination makes any protection against its invading violence impossible. The materiality of the corpse, as Nancy would say, weighs at the limit of inside and outside and forces it to open. In Le livre du sang we can see this tension in the spatial divisions between the sanctuary of the brotherhood and the sensual world of the brothel, that is, Muthna’s domain of debauchery and excess against Echanson’s world of mystical contemplation. The walled-in structure of the brotherhood is assumed to be fully defended against the contamination of the outside. The project of transcendence is possible within this delimited space where there is protection against infiltration by the impurities of outside, which of course include women. This is indeed impressed by the Master upon the disciples on their way from the carnival to the sanctuary: ‘‘So long as Being is in ecstasy, the Carnival will take place, says the Master on the way back to the Sanctuary. But this barbarity is not our lot. We have founded our brotherhood upon other principles and we have turned our thought toward the Passion of the Gaze, toward a gradual annihilation, toward an inexorable rigor—flight of souls traveling toward the heaven of Angels’’ (101). This principle of pure transcendence exempts itself from the exuberance and profusion of the barbarous space of the carnival, where being is beside itself, exstasis, divided and in excess of itself. However, unbeknownst to them, this dreamt-of purity has already been contaminated: they realize much too late that Echanson has disappeared. He has been kidnapped during the course of the evening by his sister, Muthna. The principle of contamination has already infiltrated their space and disrupted their fixed gazes upon the desire for a beyond. They have been exposed. What happens to the gaze when the object of contemplation withdraws? When Beauty has retreated, leaving

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a void behind? What becomes of truth and unity? They become exactly what the title of the next section announces: we enter the ‘‘nuit de l’erreur’’ (Night of Error), at which point the text opens up onto Muthna’s space. The disappearance of Echanson is not the first instance of spatial contamination. The brotherhood has never been safe from the threat of what it has constructed for itself as an outside, for contamination is not a willed principle. It belongs to space and spatiality as such. Just as there is no pure and a priori time, there is no pure and a priori space, since spatiality and movement belong together. The architectural design of the brotherhood, its walls and barriers, are simulations of the idea of division. The figure of Echanson—as figure—belongs to spatial mobility and the contaminating movements of outside and inside, as attested to earlier in the text by the departure of the First Disciple from the brotherhood. Under the effect of the contemplating se´ances, he goes mad and leaves the brotherhood for the brothel. His madness becomes the call of this other space. The First Disciple is an enchanted figure drawn by the fascination of the other space. He is the figure foreshadowing the fate of the brotherhood. With his madness and departure, something threatening announces itself to the brotherhood, but as with the carnival, the brotherhood continues in its project by turning away and by attempting containment. The First Disciple is a wandering cadaver: passive, powerless, fascinated, and claimed by a certain type of death, not one that announces itself at the end of life (thereby drawing the limit of life), but is always already there. He is the figure of this exposure and openness crossing the boundaries between the brotherhood and the brothel, between the world of Echanson and that of Muthna. The claim of this exposure renders him a figure. Figuration has as its condition this kind of exposure that provides movement: ‘‘The Disciple faints during the course of this dance. A premonitory weakness: he faints more and more, during the prayer or the contemplation of the Face. . . . Fainted, the Disciple retains a cold gaiety highlighted with monstrous laughter, while his stretched out body seems to jut out of the emptiness that claims it. . . . Awake, he looks at us every time for the last time, as if death had paralyzed the time of his burial. It is a desolate soul in search of its tomb, says Echanson laughing’’ (57). What enchants the Disciple is the figure’s relationship with what exceeds it. Unlike the other initiates, his contemplative gaze is drawn away from the object of contemplation toward that other space behind the figure, toward the obscurity and the abyss that supports it. The Disciple is profoundly narcissistic, not in the sense of a lover of self, but in the sense of

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always being turned toward another space that cannot be appropriated. The Disciple cannot die, for he does not belong to life. Rather, he is caught in a temporal mode that does not allow him to cross the limit between life and death, here and there. He belongs to the paralysis of time that allows for no movement forward, no passing beyond the emptiness, but this is not a time without movement, for the scene describes repetition, ‘‘he looks at us every time for the last time.’’ It seems ‘‘as if ’’ this were a paralyzed time. But the repetitions mark another movement toward which he is turned. He faints during the sessions of contemplation, for his gaze wanders toward the emptiness. His body seems to emerge out of this emptiness that is not elsewhere but already here. When he has fainted, the Disciple’s body does not withdraw; rather, it becomes visible through its weakness and passivity. The contemplation of the face (of Echanson) and Face (of the divine) has no hold upon this gaze; it does not fill the gaze, but rather exposes it to an emptiness that does not afford him unity on a higher plane, but rather exposes him to dispersion and wandering. The search for an impossible dwelling marks his madness, his excessive laughter. The Disciple seems to reflect the figure of Echanson. Just as the latter, lit up by a candle, emerges out of the obscurity, indicating the obscurity with visibility, so the Disciple rises out of the emptiness, marking this emptiness with the comings and goings of his spells, his weakness, and his passivity. The one reflects the other, the one figures the other, the one resembles the other without identity. The Disciple is a figure, for the scene unfolds within the structure of the as if, without which he would be engulfed by the emptiness. The brotherhood holds fast to its project. Its search for transcendence must continue in spite of the threats of deterioration under the force of impurities. So the Master decides to exorcise the Disciple’s madness. He must be purified as if he were alive, as if he were real. To save the brotherhood, the Disciple must be buried, alive. His threat must be contained: ‘‘The demented must be washed, dressed, and perfumed like a cadaver in Islam. Then, he is lowered into an underground granary. . . . Being reborn to himself and to the light of day, the demented must sacrifice to the Earth its possessed substance. An incredible resurrection that transfigures an invisible cadaver into a wandering cadaver’’ (72; my emphasis). In this rather Christlike scene of resurrection, which is also satanic, since Khatibi qualifies Satan as a ‘‘living cadaver, desymbolized, suffering and damned in eternity’’ (Par-dessus 103), the Disciple is already a cadaver; but in order for the exorcism to function, he must be assumed alive. The cadaver must be given the illusion of life, must be familiarized. The effort is to allow the cadaver to be reborn to

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life, as life after death, a felicitous resurrection, not in the other life but in this one. But this exorcism turns out to be quite strange. The demented substance, which is to be shed into the ground and buried, does not release the living being but rather reveals the cadaver. In other words, the resurrection does not belong to life but to the cadaver. In the exorcism, the cadaver is resurrected and becomes a haunting, ambulating figure. Even though the Disciple is exorcised, he cannot remain in the brotherhood; he must be sent away from the protected structure. Like the ruins of the foundation (which are the foundation) exposed on the surface of the desert, the cadaver too becomes the very principle of visibility as excess. The excess allows for the invisible cadaver, always already there, to become the visible cadaver in its wanderings. However, the departure of the Disciple changes nothing for the brotherhood. The distance between them does not neutralize the dangerous effect of this figure. The Disciple has a peculiar relationship to language: ‘‘During this voyage . . . you will stop at each place to speak to the people. But no one will listen to you. Only children, playing, will throw rocks at you’’ (Le livre 73). This speech is indeed strange: incessant but powerless. It is a speech that cannot be heard, since it addresses no one in particular and says nothing specific. It is not a speech that refers to the objects of the world and to the logic of signification. This lack of concern about the world constitutes its powerlessness. Once again, our attention is drawn to the tenses: the condition of speech here bears the mark of the future, ‘‘will listen’’ (e´coutera), ‘‘will throw’’ (jetteront), rendering it a speech of destiny or destined speech without a telos. The Disciple’s speech too is narcissistic, for it repeats the predicament of Echo in the story of Narcissus, where Echo’s speech comes forth out of a curse. Echo’s speech is not a present speech but always delayed, always missing the mark. Echo is Narcissus’s speech fallen on unhearing ears, for this speech is always and forever unheard. Echo repeats Narcissus’s empty words, but Narcissus does not recognize this speech as his own, for the speech has no power of presentation, no relation to meaning. It is a speech that is turned away from the source of utterance. Such is the speech of the figure—not figurative speech—it is the speech of fascination: ‘‘And I will have said farewell to this entire wandering narration—if the word rapture were not keeping me with you, above my tomb—my language—open’’ (73). This narcissistic speech (which we must remember, like the image, is not about the self ) is in a relation of intimacy with death but is not a dead language, for it is a speech that has never been concerned with life. Rather, it bears the sign of survival, in excess of life and death, and for this reason it

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cannot be entombed. It brings forth a relation between ‘‘I,’’ ‘‘je,’’ and ‘‘you,’’ ‘‘toi,’’ that exceeds dialectics, for the ‘‘you’’ is not there to receive the speech. Rather, one is fascinated by the other, and the effect of this fascination allows the ‘‘I’’ to wander, cadaverous and uncontainable, without any ability to refer to itself except in the mode of missing the mark. This speech is a gift that comes about under the effect of a curse. It is the aftereffect of a catastrophe. Echo is never silent; her speech is incessant. The excessiveness of her speech brings about the curse of the goddess. She talks incessantly, not in order to reveal a truth, but in order to deter attention from the very question of truth, and for this she falls from the company of the gods. But this changes nothing since Echo’s speech has never belonged to the order of truth; it was always devoid of essence, and this allowed it the game of playing now this role and now that. The curse of the goddess echoes the decree that conditions the life of Narcissus and his story from the beginning. He must not know himself, neither in the image nor in speech; resemblance as the betrayal of the laws of identity is inaugural in the story and for the story. Therefore, the curse of the goddess repeats what has constituted the condition for the possibility of Narcissus’s life, the story of a life, never a life. The catastrophe of the curse lies in the turn of the goddess away from Echo’s speech, which also deprives the speech of the power to summon a response. From now on, no dialogue, no exchange can take place, not even as a simulacrum. While before the pronouncement of the curse, Echo would carry on as if saying something, distracting the goddess from noticing the transgressions of the god, in the aftermath of the curse, even this structure of the as if is carried away, carrying away with it the body of the figure and rendering it a disembodied voice.15 Speech here loses all powers of summoning, recognition, and return; this speech is a generosity (a gift without return) that is also a curse. There is this generosity because there is the curse; the ‘‘accursed share’’ to which Bataille alerts us. In Le livre, the speech of the Disciple, despite the fact that it will not be heard, will continue to summon a response but one that is inscribed in play, revealing thus the conjunction between violence and play, innocence and guilt, as children throw rocks. The turning of the transcendental and the turn from the transcendental fragment the ground of signification and the logic of delineation that safeguard the identity of such categories and dichotomies as violence and play, innocence and guilt, speech and silence without eliminating the figure, because the story continues, in spite of everything. This condition of the Disciple is the mark of his destiny as belonging to the space of Muthna, for the ‘‘accursed share’’ is also the gift of Muthna, the pearl that

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she offers to her brother, the fallen angel, as a seal of their alliance, their love: ‘‘She does not demand an exchange. She gives—the supreme sign. Deprived of his power of exchange, the brother is enchanted’’ (111–12). Because no exchange can take place, because the logic of the gift is not based upon a decidable and determinable value, because this characteristic of the gift assigns it to the open, no escape from the powers of its enchantment is possible. It claims fully without making a claim, and without making a declaration.16 The aim of the exorcism was to allow the Disciple to be reborn through the sacrifice of the substance that possessed him. He was to be reborn ‘‘to himself and to the light of day.’’ Instead, his destiny draws him toward the ‘‘Nuit de l’Erreur,’’ which opens with Muthna asking Echanson, ‘‘Am I not your Night of Error?’’ and Echanson responding despairingly, ‘‘Yes, you are an error, you are my error’’ (108). ‘‘Nuit de l’Erreur’’ is the white insomniac night of ‘‘la nuit blanche,’’ the night of lovers and the time of storytelling. Both Muthna and Echanson belong to the night of the lovers, not lawful lovers, but rather monstrous and outside the recognition of law and by law. ‘‘Nuit de l’Erreur,’’ ‘‘nuit blanche,’’ is the time of the suspension of law, or rather the time of its excess. It is the time of violation of the law; the time of incestuous love between a brother and a sister, the violation of the laws of genealogical affiliation: ‘‘I imagine that Counter-nature requires a supernatural ecstasy, incomprehensible to the laws of common life . . . and I voluntarily bestow on the Androgynous—monster of monsters—the finery of an event that, when it arrives, overturns the love of man on this earth. Brother and sister one in the other, dream in dream. In the middle of the night—the Night of Error’’ (119). Androgynous love is catastrophic for laws because it exceeds temporal and spatial delimitation. The time of this love is outside the calculable time that organizes the world.17 It is the deepest night, the time of dreams, where confusion and not distinction reigns, ‘‘dream in dream, in the middle of the night.’’ Within this space, incest is no longer of any consequence, for the incestuous relation, as transgression, still requires that there be law. By going beyond the law, it identifies itself in relation to this law. Therefore, incest belongs to the world because it can define itself only in relation to it. The law of man recognizes incest, albeit negatively, according to the moral laws of society. But this other relation, the androgynous relation, the one that takes place on the scene of the other night, is morally unconcerned. Incest has no meaning here. Monstrous and immortal, the androgynous character is the appearance of such a monstrosity, of such an excessive strangeness and not of the ideal of unity as the nostalgic desire of divided man. The Disciple is infected by this radical excess,

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and in him ethical determinations between play and violence, innocence and guilt, become confused. Similarly prostitution, which inscribes Muthna within an economy of exchange, does not indicate the erotic and sensual excess, for we are told that Muthna is frigid: a kind of radical refusal of law. The transgression of prostitution does not break its relationship with the law, for it is precisely the law that makes it a transgression. This kind of transgression can be recuperated by the economy of exchange. The only orgasm that Muthna has ever experienced was with her brother, with whom—as indicated by the episode of the pearl—no economy of exchange can be established. While we might agree with Bataille that the ‘‘prostitute is dedicated to violating taboos,’’ this relationship with taboo, as Bataille himself writes, still inscribes her within the laws that define her femininity (Erotism 132). On the other hand, this androgynous relationship cannot be named, and for this it is monstrous. Incest is bound to genealogy, to origin. Androgyny undermines these concepts. As Blanchot tells us, such an undermining can only take place on the scene of the simulacrum.18 Khatibi’s Androgyn is not a unity but rather the scene of a ‘‘false unity,’’ a simulacrum that points to its own fractures. The night of error cannot end, and this renders those who dwell in it immortal. Narcissus too lived in the night of error, for he could not know himself. This night is the space of appearances that are always already withdrawn from presence and, therefore, from the possibility of death: ‘‘Let us focus on this suspended instant, during which vision turns away from itself, faltering. Unreality of a scene, which, little by little, takes shape in the very radiance of the mirror, as if, by retreating to the extreme tip of vertigo, appearance was going to shatter. At these limits, Echanson sees himself without seeing himself, sees his sister without seeing her. They are therefore alone, immortal’’ (105). In the inauspicious ‘‘Nuit de l’Erreur,’’ the gaze suffers a strange vacillation between seeing and not seeing. The figure emerges in this vacillation: at the limit of vision, the gaze was threatened by its shattering. Under the effect of annihilation, the gaze recovers but sees without identifying, without recognizing. It sees without seeing. This impossibility constitutes the profound solitude of Echanson and Muthna, echoing once again that of Narcissus. Beauty is the domain of the solitary. Excess. Death. Solitude. Beauty. These are the characteristics of Muthna’s space, and these are the conditions for the unfolding of the narration wherein figures double each other, multiply and reflect each other, and thus the story continues. Other figures make their appearance and enlarge the scene.

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Muthna’s figure seems to divide itself yet again. Yaqout and She´he´razade are two virgin prostitutes whom Muthna must initiate to the rites of the brothel. She´he´razade, the prostitute, reminds us of yet another She´he´razade, the Shahrazad of A Thousand and One Nights, also a virgin, and also a dweller of the space of the insomniac night of the story. Yaqout—‘‘ruby’’— reminding us of the pearl that Muthna offers to her brother, is the figure of beauty, the image and its fascinating hold: ‘‘Yes, every precious stone incarnates the absolute being of beauty, and its radiance provokes a terrible fascination’’ (111). A disharmony seems to mark or divide the scene and the thought that expresses itself here. While the thought makes a gesture toward the mystical domain through the association of beauty with absolute being, the scene elaborates the fracture within the absolute as totality. In this scene, the virgin and the prostitute mirror one another. One is the image of the other without being identical to the other. They respectively belong to the sacred and to the profane, to the inside and to the outside. The impurity of the one must be kept from corrupting the purity of the other. Yet they both belong to impurity and reside in the brothel. The prostitute figures the double dynamic of forbidden and allowed, navigating the space in between law and transgression, purity and impurity. Like the virgin, she is the space between desire and consummation, lack and fulfillment. The virgin is coveted by many cultures for the purpose of establishing genealogies, for the empire of the name. Ironically, here, in her association with the space of prostitution, she cannot guarantee the fulfillment of such a demand placed upon her; she cannot respond to the requirements of the laws of genealogies. Dweller of the night where nothing can be asserted, the prostitute marks the abyss of all identity. As Khatibi tells us in Amour bilingue, ‘‘To make a woman a prostitute, yes, and to prostitute the giving of a name: that was the leap his thinking made’’ (30; 23). Yaqout, the beautiful, dark virgin-prostitute, pure and impure, appearance and withdrawal, fulfillment and lack, is figurality unfolding in ‘‘Nuit de l’Erreur.’’ She shines in the dark, without an origin to her glow. Her presence within the story is an image reflected in Muthna’s mirror while Muthna gazes at herself. In the reflection, we only see Yaqout and not Muthna. Yaqout thus appears as the image of Muthna, where both Muthna and Yaqout remain unidentifiable and unrecognizable. The image and the ‘‘source’’ do not correspond. The image here is ‘‘inadequate but true,’’ to borrow once again Didi-Huberman’s phrase. Yaqout appears only in this image, in this reflection without origin.

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The other prostitute is named She´he´razade—another name for narration. Constituted by shahr, Persian for ‘‘city,’’ Arabic for ‘‘month,’’ and azad, Persian for ‘‘free,’’ Shahrazad/She´he´razade belongs to a space-time of freedom that knows no laws, not even those that guarantee freedom.19 This is the kind of freedom that characterizes wandering and error. It is not the freedom to act, to be, for no will can be asserted in this night. It is simply the freedom of the extreme limit that draws the fascinated storyteller toward itself and then sends the story in dispersed directions. Shahrazad offers the principle of storytelling. ‘‘Tell a good story and I will kill you’’ (46): this is the principle of the story in Le livre where the ‘‘and’’ returns us to the earlier suspended state of the fascinated ‘‘I’’ above the tomb. The story takes place in the threat of death and not in its reality, but this time the threat takes a different turn. It is no longer the principle that moved A Thousand and One Nights forward: tell a good story or I will kill you, as Khatibi tells us in his De la mille et troisie`me nuit. While there the story was the condition for the deferral of death, here it is its accessory; it accommodates death. But is the Shahrazad there different from the She´he´razade here? Do the spaces that draw them function according to different exigencies? The principle of deferral is the impossibility of coming to pass. Here, death remains a futurity, an event to come, a waiting. It is the coming of that event which will never arrive, which will never be here. This waiting gestures toward a future that has already passed and the story comes forth as an aftereffect. Deferral can only be possible within this dynamic of a future already past, or a past announcing itself as a future. Death can be deferred only because it has already come to pass, as we have seen in relation to the question of immortality. While the narration of Le livre du sang is dominated by the future, the story could not have begun if there were not already the attraction of the catastrophe. ‘‘Tell a good story and I will kill you’’ simply tells of the necessity of this intimacy; it tells of the conjunction between story and death. The story is always already under the effect of death; and marks the site of this relation; it expresses the concomitance of death and story. In Le livre du sang, one no longer has a choice about death. It is inevitable. In this sense, Le livre overturns the long-held principle that allegedly dictates the logic of deferral constructing A Thousand and One Nights.20 During the carnival, in the midst of the play of masks and simulation, a storyteller weaves the tale of the prince and the fool, the story of the conjunction between story and death, for ‘‘every enchanted story must awaken the dead—in us’’ (84). The First Disciple has been carried away by this principle, transfigured from an ‘‘invisible cadaver’’ to a ‘‘wandering cadaver.’’ The

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story is the place of encounter with the dead and takes place among the dead. It is the playground of phantoms, of the already dead, of figures. The story of the prince and the fool goes as follows. A prince, abandoned by the inhabitants of his kingdom, buries himself. This abandonment and desolation of the kingdom result from a principle of contamination that has invaded it. People leave, ‘‘seeing the desolation of the Prince struck by the principle of a b s o l u t e c o r r u p t i o n, not only through fits of crime, debauchery, foul sensual delight, but—through and through—by a hallucinated deterioration of heaven and earth’’ (84). A fool comes by. Picking up the tomb, he carries it on his back across town shouting, ‘‘Who wants to buy a prince?’’ When the fool stops to rest, the prince comes out and buries the fool in his place. In this manner, the prince and the fool substitute for each other as they travel across the desert. Exasperated because he can find no buyers for the prince, the fool is ready to abandon the whole game when suddenly they see a man approaching. It is a dying man. He agrees to buy the prince as his final act on this earth. He has no money, but he tells the fool that if the prince kills him, they can open his stomach and find the most precious jewels therein as payment. As for the prince, he remains indebted to the man until he performs the impossible: ‘‘He must cut the throat of Death if he wishes to be freed from his debt toward me—dying (and he takes his last breath)’’ (97). But this dying man is already dead, his body is already decomposing. He is a walking or wandering cadaver. Perplexed by the man’s last words, the prince remarks bemusedly: ‘‘Here I am sold to a dead man!’’ The fool advises the prince, ‘‘Beware of the dead. . . . Sooner or later, they wake up at unexpected moments. Especially, the dead who have never lived’’ (98). Suddenly a group of ‘‘beggars and exiles— nameless wrecks’’ emerges crossing the desert, crying and moaning. The prince designates himself as the guide and the sacrificing priest of this horde made up of wandering cadavers. The prince says, ‘‘O sun, be more propitious! If you continue in this way your unrelenting rotation, we will all rot like this cadaver. Between kings, why not understand each other? You, king of the universe, and me king of all these wandering cadavers’’ (99). Following this he jumps upon a beautiful child and sacrifices him. He then addresses the crowd: ‘‘Savage horde! I have sacrificed for you. Follow me!’’ So they follow him day and night. One day a disciple asks him: ‘‘Where are you leading us, o Master?’’ ‘‘To death to resurrection,’’ he responds (100). Another asks him about inheritance, and he responds, ‘‘No inheritance, no more genealogy because i w i l l e a t y o u a l l.’’

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In this intricate scene of multiple exchanges unfolds the relationship between death and beauty, death and figuration, death and story: kill me and I will give you beautiful jewels. Beauty (yaqout—rubies, pearls) is the gift that offers itself in exchange for death. But instead of a death that happens, it is a death that is given. This is the scene of a give and take. The death that must be given also becomes an indebtedness. The prince must kill Death in order to free himself from the debt he has toward the man. But the prince does not understand what this means, especially since the man dies after pronouncing his terms. The indebtedness in this exchange is precisely that which cannot be absolved. It is an impossible debt, for it cannot be repaid. It is a debt in excess of all possibilities of exchange and repayment. The situation is further complicated because this seems to be already death’s space, for everyone in it is already dead. But Death is duplicitous. It presents itself under the guise of the possibility of exchange: death as if life, image as if real, while all the time, behind the scene, it has always already undone this logic of possibilities—we are on the scene of the repetition of the cadaverous dynamic of the First Disciple and his destiny. This is exactly what Blanchot tells us of the dynamic of the image: ‘‘The image is the duplicity of revelation. The image is what veils by revealing; it is the veil that reveals by reveiling. . . . The image is image by means of this duplicity, being not the object’s double, but the initial division that then permits the thing to be figured’’ (Infinite Conversation 30). People appear on the scene of the story, but they are not real; they are figures. They are not alive, they are cadavers. In this sense, the sacrifice of the child cannot be a sacrifice. This scene is clearly premonitory of the final scene of the novel where the disciples cut the throats of Echanson and Muthna, reminiscent of sacrificial rituals, particularly of the Abrahamic scene. But in the carnival there is no command from above, for there is no God. The story simulates sacrifice, but it does so without reference to a divine. For this reason, only the carnival can facilitate the coming forth of this story. In the carnival, space has already divided itself and this division belongs to the movements of figuration, to the relationship between thing and image. The figure indicates division between space and space, between death and death. It neither belongs to the world nor to death but marks the site where one space passes into another: the hyphenated space. The figure is confusing and this confusion allows it to appear now real now unreal, now alive now dead. The prince to whom the exchange is offered is also dead but he does not know it. Like Narcissus, it is this fundamental ignorance that draws him toward the figure, toward the walking cadaver, like the members of the

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brotherhood whose ignorance of the laws of resemblance and the lure of the myth of unity draw them toward catastrophe. The wanderer does not know of his own wandering, does not recognize the error to which he has succumbed. This is the danger of the figure, which the brotherhood itself may have released upon the world as the First Disciple. It draws us toward itself, it engulfs us, it effaces our being without us knowing it. We continue under the illusion of life and identity, presence and possibility, and the recognizable distinction between fiction and reality, truth and lie, anchoring our beings in knowledge and consciousness, when in fact nothing has remained of us but the illusion. The face-to-face with the figure is not a faceto-face with the truth of our being, but rather with the impossibility of such a face-to-face and the inevitability of our error. The figure follows the exigency of the necessary ruse. It makes us believe in life and its representations within the world, all the while drawing us into the endless abyss to which it a priori belongs. Echanson belongs to this double dynamic of the figure. A story can only take place under these conditions. The ruse is not a lie but neither is it the truth. It rather allows for substitution, for one thing to take the place of another without really being able to do so. It is the art at which Muthna excels. After kidnapping Echanson, Muthna, substituting herself for her brother, enters the brotherhood. This deadly substitution brings about the final explosion of violence. The breach of fixed boundaries enables her to enact her plan to poison the brotherhood. The Disciple, who has taken the place of the expelled First Disciple, is the first to fall victim. He is in fact the only one poisoned. But was this poisoning not already announced through the destiny of the First Disciple? Contamination had already corrupted this space; the poison had already been released. Through the figure of Echanson, Muthna had already entered the space. Echanson was Muthna in the guise of a remedy, and this marks their difference: the division within the gift as a poisonous offering, a cursed generosity. By taking the place of Echanson, Muthna is not her brother. The substitution between the two terms activates the experience of excess and doubles the story of the prince and the fool. One substituting for the other in the tomb, they share a death that belongs properly to neither. This very possibility of substitution affirms difference, since the same cannot be substituted because in its tautological structure it has to return to itself by definition. Death never returns to itself but always sends the subject elsewhere, to another death. Because every singular death divides itself in this way, it can be figured on the scene of the story. The substitution between brother and

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sister, Muthna and Echanson, between the two terms, is a disproportionate substitution. A reserve always remains that renders one more and less than the other. This remainder is at the heart of all divisibility, disrupting identity and announcing singularity, the singularity of that which refuses to allow itself to be subsumed by the laws of identity and knowledge. In other words, substitution does not imply the erasure of singularity through multiplicity but rather highlights the multiplicity of singularity. Singularity singularizes itself outside the logic of the unique and the same. Figuration is the play of this excess. Every figure is a cadaver that is both more and less than the dead and, thus, unable to represent. Poison releases the profuse effect of this excess. In the story of the prince and the fool, as in the story of the brotherhood, the sovereign domain of the Master is already under the sway of the forces of contamination and corruption. The prince and the Master mirror each other, for, at the end of the story of the prince, the vocabulary retrieves that of the brotherhood so as to reap confusion between the two stories. The story at the carnival tells the story of the brotherhood. It tells the story of the perpetual wandering in the domain of death, eliminating any possibility of passing into transcendental life of the beyond. The brotherhood is such a space, but the Master cannot recognize the story. So he goes on with his project: ‘‘But this barbarity is not our lot. We have founded our brotherhood on other principles . . . flight of souls traveling toward the heaven of Angels’’ (101). This necessary misrecognition of catastrophe belongs to the story, for it allows it to continue under the illusion of possibility toward the depths of disaster. Unlike the famous story of the sirens in the Odyssey, where, once the ears are plugged and the body is restrained, the ship sails on and arrives at its supposed destination, here the destination is nothing other than the unheard catastrophe. There is no escape. By juxtaposing the myth of Androgyn with the mystical tradition of Islam, the text not only inscribes the notion of mystical union within the structure of myth, but also shows the degree of entanglement between Western metaphysics (philosophical, theological, mythical) and Islamic metaphysics regarding the questions of origin and foundation. Mystical nostalgia and the desire for union with the Beloved find their foundation and their vocabulary in philosophy, more precisely, in Platonic thought, as this thought appropriates the mythical. The catastrophic in this text is insinuated by the interplay of myths, their simultaneous plurality, as they come to supplement each other. The ruptures of this interplay and supplementarity, where one myth points to the other, destabilize the totalitarian logic of the

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mythic as foundational for any community or identity. Repetition displays difference and rupture within transcendence: pure transcendence as the desire for an absolute beyond, as the desire for the Transcendent, becomes undone by movements of repetition. This repetition is marked by that of various myths in the story and by various repetitions within the story, one reflecting the other in a game of bent mirrors. By inscribing the mythic in this way, Le livre does not present us with the nostalgia for a mythic past recoupable in literature; rather it repeats the mythic on the scene, and as the scene, of the literary. The repetitions here reflect, bend, disperse, and multiply. This mode of repetition renders the text ‘‘unlocalizable,’’ as Suzanne Gauch has indicated.21 The mirroring effect of Le livre recovers the central symbols of mystical Islam while simultaneously undoing the logic of the symbolic by reconfiguring the movement of the symbol. The reflecting surfaces of the text, encapsulated in the thought of resemblance as betrayal, rotate the movements of these symbols from their longitudinal logic to a latitudinal one. Thus the movements of narration relate to each other latitudinally rather than longitudinally, in other words, temporally. This move does not by itself question transcendence since, as already pointed out, the angelic dimension is both longitudinal and latitudinal. Angels are related longitudinally to the lower world but latitudinally to each other. For this reason, the domain of Muthna must contaminate the space of the brotherhood and claim Echanson, since, for the brotherhood, the latter is the figure of the angelic realm. The fallen angel is the figure of a corpse, a cadaver deprived of the light that is life and that culminates in its purity in the divine, the absolute Orient (see note 5). The invasion of the space of narration by death has the death of the angel as its precondition. If corpses reflect each other, it is precisely because the symbolic order has been interrupted, because disaster has befallen. It only follows that these reflections do not recover any identity but lead to wandering and error. This condition relates to the depleted state of symbolic knowledge known in Islamic thought as ta’wil, the vertical movement in language and image toward the First Principle (ta’wil is derived from ‘awwal, meaning first).22 At the same time, given that the cadaver here is always a mobile cadaver, ‘‘cadavre errant,’’ and not a sedentary corpse, the text inscribes verticality as the condition of its own movement. Without the ambulating cadavers across the spaces of the narration, no narration can come forth. This becoming vertical is announced in the early scene of the bath where Echanson, lying and turned away, rises. However, the verticalities

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that this text presents, resembling uncannily the foundational scenes of resurrection in Christianity (Lazarus, Christ), interrupt the verticality of ta’wil, of the symbolic order, which announces a rising toward a higher plane of Reality.23 The figures that populate the scenes of narration here are mobile and wandering cadavers, remaining on the ground but without grounding themselves. Figuration in this text requires the conjoining of the two conditions: cadaverousness and verticality, here and not in the beyond. As I have argued throughout this analysis, this conjunction conditions the very possibility of hereness as the spatio-temporal dimension of presentation. The narration comes about in the coming forth of directionality (both horizontally and vertically) on this side of transcendence, as turning away from Transcendence. The satanic, in Khatibi’s thinking, constitutes itself in this movement of desymbolization, for ‘‘what God commands, Satan continues it by turning it away’’ (Par dessus 94).24 The mirror, which both characterizes the movements of the narration and appears as a thing in the story, particularly in the scene bringing together Yaqout and Muthna, is among the primary symbols of mystical thought. The mirror is the surface of presentation intimate with truth because it is the surface where the face of the beloved is reflected. The cup of wine repeats this function of the mirror and symbolizes the heart as the receptacle that receives the image of the beloved. Gnostic knowledge has its seat in the heart of the mystic, thus the heart is the mirror in which the divine aspect presents itself. The clear surface of the mirror symbolizes the purity of the heart as the receptacle for gnostic knowledge. Therefore, the surface of the mirror is not a barrier to unity, but rather, in its clarity, allows for unity with the Beloved. The clarity and the reflective surface of the mirror relate it to the imaginal world, where Reality presents itself. The mirror’s quality of purity is also related to memory, since the mirror is essentially forgetful. In this forgetfulness of the mirror lie the joy and the pain of the mystic: joy, because the forgetfulness of the mirror reflects the mystic’s forgetfulness of the world and of the self, allowing him or her to turn toward the other, the divine; and pain, because this very forgetfulness as impossible retention and permanence renders the search for the Beloved a repetitive and endless endeavor. Its joy is accompanied necessarily by the pain of loss. This is why the mystic is always nostalgic. The presence of the divine does not remain but always retreats and thus requires that the mystic begin again. The presence of the divine, the absolute identity of the Divine, manifests itself repeatedly, each time unique, different, but a difference that belongs to the Same.

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The scene of Muthna’s reflection as Yaqout repeats the dynamic of forgetfulness of the mirror in the sense that the reflection gives the other and not the same. However, given that this dynamic is inscribed in a brothel, it is dominated by the law of impurity. Unlike Ibn ‘Arabi’s mirror, where the smudged, unpolished mirror imposes the materiality of the mirror upon the viewer, while the act of polishing it shifts the perspective in such a way that only the image (and no longer the mirror) is beheld, here the materiality of the surface of the mirror as the instant of division without recuperation inserts itself in the division between the subject and the reflection.25 The image thus does not become recovered by a master Self in which the self dissolves itself; rather, the surface of the mirror divides the subject without allowing it to be recuperated by any absolute. While in the mystical tradition, the tavern becomes inscribed in the movement of transcendence, here the brothel does not allow for such incorporation. Instead, the brothel becomes the threat against which the brotherhood attempts to protect itself. The futility of this project culminates in the final scene of catastrophe. I have attempted to show in this study the manner in which Khatibi engages and exceeds the transcendental turn in Islamic mysticism. This engagement highlights not only Islam, but also the articulations between Islamic mysticism and Platonic thought. The figure of the Androgyn marks the dynamics of this articulation. Simultaneously, however, Khatibi’s deconstruction of the mystical turn ruptures the mode by which Platonic thought has appropriated the mythic. The ruptures within the transcendental domain reveal at the same time the proximity between the myth of unity par excellence, as inscribed in philosophy, and mythic ruptures and divisions that cannot be appropriated by any philosophical project that aims at grounding and unifying meaning. This proximity comes about neither as myth nor as philosophy, but rather as the literary, as the movements of the re´cit. In addition, Le livre is a thought on the political and is a political thought, for as I have argued in chapter 4, Khatibi’s pense´e-autre and his double critique are always political. The brotherhood as a model of community, a community of subjects turned upon themselves and their own project, a community bent on protecting itself against the contamination of the ‘‘outside’’ is obvious. Le livre proposes that this community is an impossibility; it is an impossible community, for the more it attempts to safeguard itself, the more it is threatened by disintegration coming from within. Thus community (in the sense of self-closure and division between inside and outside) flounders under the effect of disintegration of integrity and identity. But this relation

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is not unidirectional. The catastrophic provides the community with the impulse toward self-assertion while all the time and a priori it belongs to dispersion. The story of the brotherhood begins when Echanson is already there. In other words, there is not a community that secondarily gets interrupted by a dispersive dynamic invading it. Rather, because a dispersive dynamic has already marked it, the community constructs itself as selfprotection against the constant arrival of the other that refuses to let itself be absorbed within the structure of totality. The aftereffect of this catastrophic dynamic gives us both the brotherhood and its final dissolution. The narration traces the interrelatedness of this double dynamic. The double movement of community repeats that of thought in Amour analyzed in the previous chapter.

Conclusion Engendering Catastrophes

A dynamic that haunts this book from the very first pages comes through explicitly in the final chapter. This dynamic is the question of the feminine: as excess, as madness, as satanic, in short, the feminine as catastrophic. It is perhaps necessary to highlight briefly the character of this notion of the feminine, with full awareness that the varying facets of the feminine in literature is a subject that requires a thorough study of its own, which I hope to undertake in future projects. For now, I wish to reiterate that the notion of the feminine deployed throughout these texts distinguishes between woman as a gendered being, biologically and socio-politically, and the feminine as a dynamic, or as Khatibi says, as a principle. Le livre du sang shows the extent to which the feminine is the mark of the excess of gender identity, allied with the Androgyn as the principle that confounds and confuses, that threatens and destroys, and that opens structures. The feminine becomes the dynamic of impossible closure, another name for excess. The alliance between the feminine and catastrophe in thought and language is marked by the contact between them, and from which neither language nor thought can regain their bearings. Rather, they become directed otherwise and to another place than to safety and assurance of concepts and established discourse. This does not mean that there are no relationships between the position of women within historical, cultural, and ideological landscapes and this principle of the feminine. However, what interests me most immediately in the context of this project is the ways in which femininity is inscribed in re´cit and as re´cit and what the figures of femininity do for the story and as the story. In the texts I have read, the feminine is often inscribed as engendering. The possibility of the story, as well as the movements of the turn in language and thought, which I have characterized as catastrophic, are intimately related to the feminine. But this engendering, which may come close to 188

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gendering in the sense of metaphorizing women’s childbearing capacities, is in fact marked by the suspension of the biological framing of women as child-bearers. In an oblique way, we have perhaps inherited this suspension from A Thousand and One Nights, where it appears that the childless woman becomes the menacing force. It is this woman who must either be destroyed or contained so that laws may be safeguarded and sovereignty may keep its place. We must remember that Shahriyar has no heirs to reassure the continuity of the place of sovereignty. The infidelity of the queen puts into question the possibility of this genealogical reassurance; and the protective measures taken by the king to contain the possibility of impurity give rise to the violence of the law of beheading. The childless woman who speaks becomes the possibility for the story and the condition for the suspension of the law of beheading, the madness of containment. But the childless woman is not the impotent woman. She is not the woman who cannot have a child, but rather the woman who is suspended as child-bearer. Shahrazad is such a figure. She brings forth the story that comes about in a double suspension: of violence and of childbearing. But she no longer tells stories once the story registers the birth of her sons and the concomitant recovery of the king’s genealogical line. We are finally told that in the course of her storytelling she has given birth to more than one son, but we do not know about these births until at the very end, at the point where the story stops, with the inscription of these births within it. The happy ending, where motherhood and patriarchy join up as the logic of sovereignty, brings about the silence of the story and of the storyteller. A Thousand and One Nights warns us against this happy ending with its implications for the questions of politics, law, and gender. This suspension of motherhood is perhaps the mark of the catastrophic. When the genealogical model can no longer frame woman and the discourse on woman, as we see with la Bi-langue, femininity becomes the dynamic of the story, or the re´cit. It is released in the story with the threat that silence may be imposed on it at any moment, when the story registers the birth of the child, the reinscription of motherhood. Both the writer and the storyteller speak under this threat. In Le Cavalier et son ombre we remember Tunde, the child who has always already died, and who is the child to come. Khadidja went to Bilenty to give to the hill the face of Tunde, an engendering that does not recover motherhood. Rather, the storyteller can give the child as a figure, at a distance removed from motherhood. Thus Tunde ‘‘keeps hope intact.’’ This scenario does not necessarily doom motherhood. It simply displaces the relationship between the feminine as the dynamic of

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the story, as its engendering principle, and biological engendering, the capacity of women to give birth. The feminine is another name for the excess that gives the re´cit because of the movement from the real, biological woman to the figure, to the feminine. In fact, in this movement we may glimpse the contours of the relationship between the real, the biological, and the figural. Even if the writer or storyteller is a mother, the story still requires the distancing of the mother from motherhood, and its suspension. In short, motherhood is not the condition for the possibility of the story, its suspension is. In This Blinding Absence of Light, this suspension as the possibility of the story and of survival is registered not only in the distancing of the subject from its most intimate relations (the mother being the figure of intimacy per se), but even more poignantly, in the scenes of the two dreams. In the first, Salim sees his mother’s face, he cannot speak or move, remaining mired in silence and inertia; but in the second dream, he does not see the face of the woman (she remains anonymous) and thus follows her, restored both to movement and to breath. It is perhaps not insignificant that the opening of Camus’ The Stranger is about the death of the mother, and that this is the story that is retold by the prisoners. Murambi, the Book of Bones figures the turn that the feminine opens in speech most succinctly. In my reading of the final scene of this novel in chapter 1, I foregrounded the relationship between the turn in speech and the anonymous, a feminine figure. This anonymity of the feminine is among the connecting threads of the five literary texts analyzed here. As a reminder, they are in addition to the two figures noted above in chapters 1 and 2, the photograph in chapter 3, la Bi-langue in chapter 4, Muthna and Echanson in chapter 5. This last case perhaps requires more elaboration since clearly Echanson and Muthna are named. However, the anonymous does not necessarily indicate the nameless but also the name that is emptied out and cannot attach the subject to a genealogy that she can claim as her own. Echanson and Muthna are brother and sister but they have no history that would ground their filiation. They seem to be born out of time, in the manner of the nine Egyptian gods, among them Isis and Osiris, the incestuous brother and sister born during the intercalated days won from the gods. But contrary to the myth of these gods, their birth remains without genealogy and their death without resurrection (unlike that of Osiris).1 This double condition marks their relation to the catastrophic. This alignment of the feminine with the anonymous, and its distancing from motherhood, have significant political implications. In his essay ‘‘ ‘Too

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Much in the Sun’: Sons, Mothers, and Impossible Alliances in Francophone Maghrebian Writing,’’ He´di Abdel-Jaouad draws attention to the exploitative aspect of the appropriation of the woman by writers, and in particular male writers.2 He argues that as they challenge the discursive practices of patriarchy that have excluded women, these writers fall into the contradictory practice of appropriating the woman back into a logic that belongs to the patriarchal model, namely langue and writing. This division is based on the relegation of women’s speech to the domain of orality and the idiomatic, parole, while langue indicates writing and discourse. In other words, while the sons critique the exclusionary practices of the fathers, they co-opt women’s speech within discourse, which as writing remains langue and male. In this sense then, the death of the mother indicates this appropriative practice of the mother’s mode of speech by that of the sons.3 The notion of re´cit as I have employed it in this project does not keep to this division between oral and written, as gendered modes, since what concerns me is the very condition for the possibility of storytelling, and the story as the aftereffect of catastrophe. However, the sliding movement I have outlined here communicates with Abdel-Jaouad’s critique in the sense that a serious questioning of patriarchy, which is always a question of the name and genealogy, cannot come about if the terms are simply reversed: that is, if the name of the father is replaced by that of the mother, the voice of the father with that of the mother. As we have seen briefly with A Thousand and One Nights, motherhood does not automatically release us from the binds of the law, sovereignty, and the father, even if this relationship with the law comes forth as imaginary. The feminine’s alliance with anonymity and its break with the biological function of motherhood mark a radical departure from the logic of the name and filiation, which includes monotheism and metaphysical modes of thought.4 In this sense, the feminine is the radical affirmation of a turn and of a rupture. I have maintained throughout this project that the catastrophic in the re´cit is affirmative. This thought may seem at worst unethical and at best oxymoronic nonsense. It is neither. I do not say that catastrophes, in their historical and political senses, are good. Rather, I emphasize that in the conjunction between catastrophe and re´cit something affirmative is given. Once again, this is not because the story can justify atrocities that give birth to it, but rather the reverse. Because the story is possible, because after the catastrophe something remains as story, because the movements of destitution have not carried away language, imagination, and thought, there remains a possibility for a future and for survival. In this sense storytelling, re´cit, is the

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name for that resilience, which, after an extreme devastation, rises out of the ashes, out of the ruins, and says something, haltingly, obliquely, but something that gives movement to time and opens up a space toward the future. This opening is the most uncertain thing in the world; it does not promise anything, since catastrophe carries away the foundation of certainty for thought. The promise is always ambiguous, both threatening and hopeful, always mindful that possibility may be carried away by the impossible. But in spite of this fragility, the affirmation remains. The very possibility of survival, personal and collective, comes from the story; not from the one that is told once and for all, but from the story that repeats itself, starting over and over again, always differently and from different times and places. The movements of this project have followed this over-and-over-butalways-differently dynamic of the story and of survival, and this conclusion does not punctuate it with an end, despite the fact that the project and the book require such a punctuation and closure. I have argued that pense´e-autre is the site of a certain unthought and that it points to the movements of thought from the domain of the conceptual toward another site and place. In this sense, pense´e-autre is a thought in movement and a migrant thought. The return to the tortured, violated, fragmented, resurrected body, which has insistently marked these pages with mythical figures (Orpheus), historical-political-religious figures (Christ, Hallaj, Ishmael), and, closer to our time, the victims of Rwanda and of Tazmamart, pushes my thinking further along these questions in more explicitly political and ethical terms. It opens for me a path to think the conjunctions between the political and the ethical conditions of our time that have seen, among other things, a resurfacing of the discourses of justified torture and violence in the name of politics and justice. Many works of fiction construct themselves around such bodies, almost always political bodies, and often feminine. The unthoughts of the project offer directions for thinking again, repeating with difference, because the exigencies of our time are such that nothing can be said once and for all, but rather over and over again.

Notes

1. Introduction 1. I use ‘‘African literature,’’ in the singular, when I refer to the field, but ‘‘African literatures,’’ in the plural, when I refer to the study of various literary traditions from Africa. 2. This speech was subsequently published with the title ‘‘Theory, Literature, and Moral Considerations’’: ‘‘For rather than eliding African or black difference from its economy of debate, modernity—and hence modern criticism—have tended to foreground the continent’s character and location as the site of radical alterity. Modern criticism may have sought to suppress difference within its imagined Europe, but it anchored itself on the presence of the Other. While modernity was premised on its invocation of universal reason, this rationality was srtuctured by counterpoints located elsewhere’’ (11). 3. As Adele King in Rereading Camara Laye shows, this novel was loved by some, primarily Europeans, for its anthropological and ethnographical aspects and critiqued by others, primarily Africans, for its lack of reflection on the colonial situation. Despite this diversity of response both groups seem to valorize the text as document, either cultural or political. 4. Ato Quayson, in his important book Calibrations: Reading for the Social, undoes this trend by proposing to rethink the relationship between the literary and the social in a multifaceted and multidirectional dialectical fashion rather than in a straightforward representational and binary mode. By marrying together trauma theory and Marxist theory, he proposes that the dialectical relationship between literary works and reality is neither unidirectional (from reality to art) nor clear, suggesting that ‘‘the representational surface whether whole or fragmented, always generates the anxiety that it will produce something else. The something else might be an excess, a distortion, a dangerous supplement, or even a complete overthrow of how reality is normally felt and experienced’’ (xxiii). While I admire this book greatly and consider it an important intervention in scholarship on African literatures, I have two reservations as to its goals. I do not share in its enlightenment project of ‘‘using the literary as a means toward social enlightenment’’ and I strongly disagree with its designation of literature as ‘‘a transitional object-process, a representational oasis to which we constantly return as we negotiate our alienation from reality’’ (xv, xxv). While I do think that the literary reveals ruptures and points of disintegration within our social and political discourses, I do not think that these

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194 Notes to pages 2–4 ruptures necessarily lead us to enlightenment, that is higher understanding and progress. Rather, they may reveal the irreconcilable divergences between the social and the literary. And while I agree that the turn to literature may imply a withdrawal from the world as reality, or rather a suspension of it, I do not see the literary as an ‘‘oasis,’’ if this word is meant here as a safety zone, or a place of escape and comfort. On the contrary, the texts I read in this work radically shatter our comfort zones in thought and in language and show how dangerous the story can be. 5. See African Novels and the Question of Orality, where Julien critiques among others Claude Le´vi-Strauss, Paul Zumthor, the griot Mamadou Kouyate´, and Le´opold Se´dar Senghor highlighting that the notion of a privileged orality has been proposed by them all. 6. This notion of catastrophe as temporality is deeply indebted to the thought of Maurice Blanchot. I am unable to cite all the various articulations of the affirmative dimension of the turn in thought and in language throughout his work; however, one of the most significant glances on this thought is offered to us in The Infinite Conversation through a reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘‘eternal return of the same’’ as the very possibility of repetition that undoes the return to the same as identity. Blanchot argues that the same can only be affirmed in repetition, but in order for repetition to occur there must be deferral and interruption. There must be a turn in language and in thought that would allow the repetition to take place: ‘‘The deferral therefore does not mark the waiting for an opportune moment that would be historically right; it marks the untimeliness of every moment since the return is already detour—or better: since we can only affirm the return as detour, making affirmation what turns away from affirming, and making of the detour what hollows out the affirmation and, in this hollowing out, makes it return from the extreme of itself back to the extreme of itself, not in order to coincide with it, but rather to render it again more affirmative at a mobile point of extreme noncoincidence’’ (278). 7. Though it has persisted, this monolithic tendency has been critiqued by thinkers. One of the first pioneering works on this issue was Paulin Hountondji’s African Philosophy: Myth and Reality. 8. See Ato Quayson’s well articulated critique and analysis of Christopher Miller’s Theories of Africans in ‘‘Orality—(Theory)—Textuality,’’ an essay that can be found in Steward Brown’s collection Pressures of the Text. Miller critiques, on the one hand, the ethnocentric stance of Western scholars who speak of Africa without taking pronouncements by Africans into account; and on the other hand, he promotes a kind of anthropology that would not essentialize but instead be dialogic between the ethnic and the universal. Quayson’s critique is directed toward this latter move, where Miller equates reading according to ethnicity with ethics. In Quayson’s terms, ‘‘[Miller] seeks to engage with a sanitised ethnicity, to plough an African pre-colonial past amenable to a Western gaze and to show that it is indeed ethnical [sic] for the Western critic to focus on such a category’’ (99–100). In this sense, the move has not been away from ethnicity but rather attention to ethnicity

Notes to page 5 195 as particularity and specificity has been valorized as ethical. I have already mentioned Simon Gikandi’s critique of discourses of differences in ‘‘Theory, Literature, and Moral Considerations,’’ where he too specifically engages with Miller’s work. I contend that however laudable this attention to specificity might be, it still works according to categories of culture as oral and precolonial. In other words, the ways in which theories of difference are deployed in African literature do not take on the labor of thinking difference radically. The notion of singularity, which I wish to elaborate, following closely the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, does not assign difference to the cultural or geographical other; rather, it tries to think singularity in terms of the relationship between time, subject, and speech and outside the logic of particularity. This notion of singularity requires that we think each text and each figure within the text singularly, resisting as much as possible categories of culture as colonial, postcolonial, precolonial, etc. 9. It is undeniable that there are specific kinds of violences from which the continent has suffered and continues to suffer today. I agree with both Achille Mbembe and with Ato Quayson that the postcolony is and has been a place of violence. For this reason, Quayson insists on the study of trauma in the context of Africa, beginning with the trauma of the nation-state imposed by colonial powers. See Mbembe’s De la postcolonie (On the Postcolony) and Quayson’s Calibrations. However, as we have seen in recent years, the nation-state reveals the violence of its foundational structure within the West in such a way that its insufficiency as a political model is becoming one of the daunting questions of our time. In addition, the discourses, issuing from outside Africa, that insistently turn their vigilance against violence toward Africa, often serve to distract from the profound violence that this outside itself hides within. The rise in the discourses of nationalism, of patriotism, and of binary us/them self-definition in the West point to the fragility of the nationstate model. Therefore, the constant identification of Africa with violence continues the model of self/other, where the other reassures the self of its stability, not to mention its superiority. 10. I am often taken to task by colleagues about my tendency to read literary texts by African authors alongside those of European thinkers. I am accused of repeating a colonial gesture, subjecting African literary productions to modes of thinking coming from elsewhere and especially when this elsewhere is the excolonial power. This critique seems to echo, in different terms but with similar import, a kind of resistance to theory expressed by some African colleagues and writers who see theory as a European import and an imposition on African artistic forms. While I appreciate the historical necessity of such vigilance, my methodology resists both of these assumptions in at least two ways. First, I do not privilege theory or philosophy over literature. The whole basis of this project is that literature helps us think differently and that this difference opens challenges in our very assumptions about knowledge. Literature informs theory in important ways and is not secondary to it. Second, both these positions assume that writing and thinking are subservient to overtly political lines of demarcation and faithful to ideological positioning. My contention remains that even if a writer were hoping to promote certain ideologies,

196 Notes to pages 5–7 writing takes directions that may in fact do violence to these intentions. I consider it an ethical and political demand to follow the paths that this writing opens for thinking and not do violence to powerful works by imprisoning them within preconceived ideological frameworks. I am clearly not the first to take on this position. Philosophers, theorists, and writers across generations from various parts of the African continent have already taken these investigative paths. I have already mentioned Mbembe, Quayson, Hountondji, and Gikandi, and the list goes on with names such as Mudimbe, Bachir Diagne, and innumerable others. Therefore, this method of reading already belongs to African intellectual traditions of speaking and thinking. 11. In Absolutely Postcolonial, Peter Hallward interrogates the notion of singularity as the logic of absolute transcendence in the work of postcolonial thinkers such as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak among others, as well as in the work of poststructuralist thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. North African writers such as Mohammed Dib and Abdelkebir Khatibi also are included in the critique. As a way of escaping the absolute transcendence of the singular, which is rendered equivalent to the unique, he proposes the notion of ‘‘specific,’’ different from the contingency of the particular and the transcendence of the singular. I turn primarily to Jean-Luc Nancy’s work on singularity, which consistently shows how singularity is incompatible with any notion of the absolutely unique. I part ways with Hallward when he flattens the differences between the absolute as singular and singularity as relationality, differences which Nancy has elaborated throughout his work. In fact, Hallward does not engage with this second articulation, singularity as relationality, at all and rejects Nancy’s position with only a few brief mentions without accounting for its specificities. I also do not reject transcendence per se but rather argue with Derrida and Nancy that the very notion of temporality as repetition requires a transcendental movement. Derrida distinguishes between the purely Transcendent (in the sense of the Divine or the Idea) and the ‘‘quasi-transcendental,’’ as that which gives movement and repetition. For a clear exploration of this difference in Derrida see John Caputo’s study of deconstruction and religion entitled The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida. 12. See Online Etymology Dictionary, s.v. ‘‘Catastrophe,’’ http://www .etymonline.com (accessed February 21, 2006). 13. This notion of catastrophe comes closest to the mathematical notion employed by catastrophe theory. Here is a scenario that explains this theory: ‘‘A simple example of the behaviour studied by catastrophe theory is the change in shape of an arched bridge as the load on it is gradually increased. The bridge deforms in a relatively uniform manner until the load reaches a critical value, at which point the shape of the bridge changes suddenly—it collapses. While the term catastrophe suggests just such a dramatic event, many of the discontinuous changes of state so labeled are not. The reflection or refraction of light by or through moving water is fruitfully studied by the methods of catastrophe theory, as are numerous other optical phenomena’’ (see Encyclopedia Britannica Online, s.v. ‘‘catastrophe theory,’’ http://www .britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/99235/catastrophe-theory [accessed January 10, 2008]). In The Writing of the Disaster, Maurice Blanchot refers us specifically to the

Notes to page 8 197 breaking of light: ‘‘Light breaks forth: the burst of light, the dispersion that resonates or vibrates dazzlingly—and in clarity clamors but does not clarify. The breaking forth of light, the shattering reverbration of a language to which no hearing can be given’’ (39). Language then breaks forth in the turn of catastrophe but does not tell us of the break, does not clarify its own event of coming forth. 14. Catastrophe has been the topic of intense philosophical and literary thinking since the Holocaust, which has been deemed the catastrophic event par excellence. As philosophers such as Theodor Adorno, Blanchot, Lyotard, and others have repeatedly pointed out, the catastrophic dimension of the Holocaust lies in the impossibility of overcoming the kind of ruptures that this event has inscribed in time, language, and thought. Since the 1960s there has been a push toward the uniqueness and incomparability of the Holocaust in terms of its catastrophic dimensions and implications for the future. This tendency has been criticized as a sacralization of the event and hierarchization of suffering. For example, in ‘‘The Work of Testimony in the Age of Decolonization’’ Michael Rothberg discusses the ethical and historical importance of a comparative approach to catastrophic events. Though genocides are not the only catastrophes, most theoretical and philosophical discussions have focused on these historical events. In the context of Africa, scholars of the genocide in Rwanda have turned to comparative approaches. In her article ‘‘Mone´nembo’s L’Aıˆne´ des orphelins and the Rwandan Genocide,’’ Lisa McNee engages with the debates on Auschwitz and particularly the work of Primo Levi to analyze Tierno Mone´nembo’s novel on Rwanda. In addition, like Rothberg, Kenneth Harrow, in his article ‘‘ ‘Ancient Tribal Warfare’: The Foundational Fantasies of Ethnicity and History,’’ warns against facile comparison between genocides and demands attentiveness to the particular contours of each event, arguing that genocides must be historicized, which ultimately necessitates comparison and specificity. This emphasis on historical specificity is another articulation of the exceptionality of each catastrophic event without reverting to the discourse of uniqueness or absolute exceptionality. 15. In his book The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness, Wole Soyinka argues for the necessity of reparation as the ‘‘missing link between Truth and Reconciliation’’ (35). He asserts that reconciliation must have a moral and economic dimension, which he calls ‘‘remorse’’ and ‘‘repentance,’’ respectively. While he does not suggest that these exchanges would erase the history of violence and injustice of apartheid, and while his focus is on regaining social order and a national political program, his formula does suggest that these conditions would render the catastrophic dimensions of apartheid containable and manageable. It also implies a possibility for national unity and regained community. These are the pragmatic conditions of catastrophe management. 16. See ‘‘The Work of Testimony in the Age of Decolonization.’’ In another essay, ‘‘Between Auschwitz and Algeria,’’ Rothberg argues, via his reading of Charlotte Delbo’s Les Belles Lettres, for a juxtaposition of memories without equating them. He defines the political domain as a space opened up by these juxtapositions. Writing against the model of ‘‘competitive memory,’’ which asserts that memories

198 Notes to pages 8–10 compete for the public space and that the emergence of some memories pushes others to the background, Rothberg promotes the notion of ‘‘multidirectional memory,’’ arguing that the political sphere emerges out of these multiplicities rather than preceding them: ‘‘The model of multidirectional memory . . . supposes that the overlap and interference of memories help constitute the public sphere as well as the various individual and collective subjects that articulate themselves in it’’ (162). 17. As I write this section, the tragedy at Virginia Tech University is still fresh in our memories. This event was clearly a shock because it was unexpected and inexplicable. However, many could not help but feel outrage the following day when over two hundered people, also innocent, were killed in a bombing in Iraq as they were going about their quotidian lives in a market and these two hundred lives constituted a news flash in the course of prolonged discussions, analyses, and mourning in all forms of media about Virginia Tech. The outrage was not meant to diminish the catastrophic dimensions of the Virginia Tech shooting; it was provoked by the hierarchy of suffering and of the value of lives. But this problem is not new. Even in the context of the Holocaust we should be struck by the fact that the number we most commonly cite (six million) forgets others: gypsies, homosexuals, the handicapped, etc. 18. This notion of disempowerment finds its most radical articulation in Maurice Blanchot’s work: in his theoretical work on language and in his style of writing fiction and philosophy. See Geoffrey Hartman’s essay ‘‘Holocaust and Hope’’ in Catastrophe and Meaning, edited by Moishe Postone and Eric Santner, for an elaboration of this practice of language in Blanchot. In addition, as Hartman points out, Sarah Kofman’s Paroles suffoque´es returns to this question of the necessity of speaking without power and under the threat of suffocation. For her, as for Blanchot, this necessity is the condition for survival and for ethics. Moreover, in her reading of Dorian Gray in L’imposture de la beaute´, Kofman argues that art is the masque that prevents one from dying from truth. Returning to the Nietzschean Apollonian/ Dionysian divide, she insists that art, in our case the story, conditions survival but is always threatened by excess: ‘‘It is also the masquerade of the ‘author’ of the text who plays at fooling the reader by throwing at him the portrait of Dorian Gray in order to dissimulate better the other portrait that haunts secretly’’ (48; my translation). I argue in this project that the re´cit does not hide in order to trick the reader, it does not hide a secret that it knows, a truth that its wants to keep from us; rather, it perpetually wants to say what language in its disempowered state cannot say. In The Space of Literature Blanchot tells us that the writer writes out of naivete´ and ignorance. The writer does not know that the work is impossible, that what he wants to say is always in withdrawal. 19. Titles such as Catastrophe and Meaning, The Writing of the Disaster, and The Holocaust of Texts bear witness to the intimacy of language and catastrophe. 20. The Derridean notions of trace, diffe´rance, singularity, idiom are all articulations of this notion of repetition.

Notes to pages 10–16 199 21. I owe much of my thinking about the aftereffect as catastrophe to trauma theory, in particular the work of Shoshana Felman and Cathy Caruth. See for example Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony, and Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience. 22. This notion of ‘‘promise’’ refers us to Derrida and particularly his notion of singularity and idiom in Monolingualism of the Other: ‘‘Each time I open my mouth, each time I speak or write, I promise . . . ‘I promise a language,’ ‘a language is promised,’ which at once precedes all language, summons all speech and already belongs to each language as it does to all speech. It is not possible to speak outside this promise that gives a language, the uniqueness of the idiom, but only by promising to give it’’ (67–68). 23. See Maghreb Pluriel. 24. I will refer throughout this work to A Thousand and One Nights rather than to the Arabian Nights, first introduced by Richard Burton in his translation of this text. This translation has ethnographical implications that A Thousand and One Nights, a closer translation of Alf-Layla wa Layla (A Thousand Nights and a Night) avoids. The original title also registers the endlessness of stories and storytelling with 1001, which Burton’s translation erases. 25. For details of this historical trajectory see the introduction by Muhsin Mahdi in Alf Layla wa Layla, Ferial Ghazoul’s Nocturnal Poetics, Suzanne Gauch’s Liberating Shahrazad. 26. See, for example Malek Chebel’s La fe´minisation du monde, where he writes that in addition to the figure of the desirable mother that Shahrazad represents, with ‘‘culture, pedigree, wisdom, authority, beauty, memory, fertility, gentleness toward her young sister,’’ she is also the figure of the mother for the king: ‘‘Shahrazad reconciles the king with what he wished most secretly and most strongly: his mother’’ (156; my translation).

1. Becoming-Survivor 1. This term encapsulates the cultural, historical, political, and linguistic complexities of French-speaking peoples, primarily other than the French, including Canada and Switzerland. Recently, it has been proposed that la francophonie cannot be divided along national borders because within France a large portion of the population speaks French as a second language. This category is not limited to the relatively recent immigrant groups, such as Arabs and Africans, but includes other groups such as the Breton. The debates on this issue are much too complex for me to elaborate here. 2. Diop has explained that his position was never to abandon French altogether. See L’Afrique au dela` du miroir. 3. For a study of his literary oeuvre, see Jean Sob’s L’impe´ratif romanesque de Boubacar Boris Diop. In this study, Sob reflects on the relationship between politics and literature in Diop’s work and locates his singular importance within the context of African literatures.

200 Notes to pages 16–18 4. The ten writers who participated in the project and the texts produced are the following: Koulsy Lamko, La phale`ne des collines; Boubacar Boris Diop, Murambi, le livre des ossements; Tierno Mone´nembo, L’aıˆne´ des orphelins; Monique Ilboudo, Muraketete; Ve´nuste Kayimahe´, France-Rwanda, les coulisses du ge´nocide; Ve´ronique Tadjo, L’ombre d’Imana:Voyage jusqu’ au bout du Rwanda; Jean-Marie Vianney Rurangwa, Le ge´nocide des Tutsis explique´ a` un e´tranger; and Abdourahman Wabe´ri, Moisson de craˆnes, textes pour le Rwanda. Meja Mwangi’s Great Sadness has not yet appeared. Kayimahe´ and Rurangwa were the only Rwandans in the group, and they did not produce fictive narratives but rather historical documents. Diop explained in a discussion of this novel with my students that when the writers arrived in Rwanda, they were asked by the survivors not to write fiction but to document. He explained his own reasons for writing fiction saying that while many volumes have been written on the causes and history of the genocide, there remain singular stories that only literature can bring out. The singularity I propose in this project has much to do with the space that literature allows for silence and uncertainty. 5. Philip Gourevitch tells us in We Wish to Tell You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families that the survivors refer to the time prior to the genocide simply as ‘‘before.’’ To say ‘‘before’’ without making any reference suggests not only the impossibility of making any reference, due to the immensity of the event, but also the singularity of this event, at its eventness, which renders it not one among many other historical markers but rather the rupture that opens radically onto another epoch; when time and speech have suffered a profound mutation. The ‘‘before’’ of the survivors, their past, is contrasted with the future of the victims in the title of Gourevitch’s book. The victims, those who have been killed, can speak of the event only in the future. They cannot say, ‘‘yesterday, we were killed’’ except as ghosts. The stories come to us in the past, after they have been killed, but in them we hear the the terrible echo of their future annihilation. This title’s terrifying implications are twofold: not only does it indicate a time before the catastrophe, but it also hints toward a future catastrophe, forbidding us from feeling secure in our present, believing that the past has carried away the threat of destruction. 6. Ever since the end of the genocide, France has been accused by Rwanda and others of being implicated in the genocide (see for example Andrew Wallis’s Silent Accomplice and Mehdi Ba’s Rwanda, 1994: Un ge´nocide franc¸ais. Reciprocally, France has been accusing the current Rwandan government, notably President Paul Kagame and the Rwandan Patriotic Front, of having masterminded the downing of President Habyarimana’s plane in April 1994 and thus creating the spark for the genocide. In November 2006, a French antiterrorist judge, Jean-Louis Bruguie`re, convicted nine high-ranking officials of the Rwandan government, including President Kagame himself, of having participated in this crime. This decision led to the severance of diplomatic ties between Paris and Kigali on November 24, 2006 (see, for example, ‘‘Rwanda Cuts Relations with France,’’ BBC News, November 24, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6179436.stm (accessed August 20, 2008).

Notes to pages 19–28 201 7. See ‘‘ ‘Ancient Tribal Warfare’: Foundational Fantasies of Ethnicity and History.’’ 8. In her review essay on this novel, ‘‘Rwanda’s Speaking Subjects: The Inescapable Affiliations of Boubacar Boris Diop’s Murambi,’’ Catherine Kroll suggests that these multiple voices create a kind of interrelatedness in spite of the fragmentations, which she proposes can serve the cause of ‘‘re-membering’’ the Rwandan entity. While I agree that there is a double dynamic of relationality and fragmentation in this novel’s narrative strategy and that its movements bear the marks of being haunted, I am not convinced that the novel in the end suggests a solution for or becomes a means for the reconstitution of a Rwanda as a collective entity within or without the nation-state model. 9. All the translations of Murambi are taken from the English version. However, at times, I have indicated certain nuances or corrections in brackets. The first page number, 119, locates the quote in the original French text, and the second locates the translation in the English version. This system will be used throughout the book to refer to foreign originals and published translations. 10. Interahamwe, meaning ‘‘those who attack together,’’ was the name of the militia that organized and led the genocide. This notion of togetherness clearly points toward a communitarian and communal relation as the goal of the project. 11. Given that ‘‘Rwanda: Ecrire par devoir de me´moire’’ was funded by Fondation de France, and given France’s pre-genocide coalition with the extremist Hutu government, and given the questionable ‘‘humanitarian’’ purpose of Ope´ration Turquoise, whose apparent goal was to help refugees flee the genocide while helping many perpetrators of genocide escape to Zaire, the writers testify to the irony of the project—for which questions of culpability are central. However, it should be mentioned that Fondation de France, initially established by Charles de Gaulle and Andre´ Malraux, is a nonprofit private organization whose objective is to carry out philanthropic projects. 12. According to Josias Semunjanga, despite the myth of inheritance whereby the Tutsi were selected to rule, it was only in the early twentieth century that the Tutsi king became the total sovereign under Belgian racial policies. He cites Gamaliel Mbonimana, who describes the process of the cancellation of Hutu royalty: ‘‘The kingdom of Bukunzi, whose last king was destituted in 1922, suffered military occupation from 1924 to 1925; similarly, the neighboring kingdom of Busozo was occupied from 1925 to 1926, the year when the king was deported by the officials of the mandate (Belgians). These Hutu kingdoms were organized into chiefdoms, placed under the orders of the Tutsi chiefs, Rawagatarak’’ (Pre´sence Africaine 181; my translation). 13. Countering the genocidal myth that Tutsis are foreigners and contaminants, the unity party, Union National du Rwanda (UNAR), promoted the precolonial myth of Rwandan fraternity. Therefore, the political discourse became, as Semunjanga points out, the battleground of myths (Pre´sence Africaine 185). 14. This is the kind of memory that Derrida proposes in his Memoires: for Paul de Man:

202 Notes to pages 29–36 ‘‘The memory we are considering here is not essentially oriented toward the past, toward a past present deemed to have really and previously existed. Memory stays with traces in order to ‘preserve’ them, but traces of a past that has never been present, traces which themselves never occupy the form of presence and always remain, as it were, to come—come from the future, from the to come. Resurrection, which is always the formal element of ‘truth,’ a recurrent difference between a present and its presence, does not resuscitate a past which had been present; it engages the future’’ (Memoires: for Paul de Man 58). 15. ‘‘What if there were a memory of the present,’’ asks Derrida provocatively, ‘‘and that far from fitting the present to itself, it divided the instant? What if it inscribed or revealed the difference in the very presence of the present, and thus, by the same token, the possibility of being repeated in representation?’’ (Ibid. 60). 16. In Shooting Dogs, a BBC film on the genocide in Rwanda, director Michael Caton-Jones emphasizes the failure of ethics and the absurdity of the international strategy in Rwanda by focusing on the dogs roaming among the cadavers. The Western forces, concerned with health risks, were ready to shoot the dogs but refused to use their weapons against the Interahamwe forces waiting behind the fences, machetes in hand. 17. There is an error in the translation of this sentence in Murambi, the Book of Bones: ‘‘so stupefying was Jessica’s revelation, that Cornelius didn’t doubt it for a single instant’’ (77). The French phrase implies ‘‘although,’’ or ‘‘in spite of ’’ rather than the ‘‘so . . . that’’ structure. 18. Derrida tells us, ‘‘Laughter alone exceeds dialectics and the dialectician: it bursts out only on the basis of an absolute renunciation of meaning, an absolute risking of death, what Hegel calls abstract negativity. A negativity that never takes place, never presents itself, because in doing so it would start to work again. . . . What is laughable is the submission to the self-evidence of meaning, to the force of this imperative: that there must be meaning’’ (Writing and Difference 256). 19. In her reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgement, Eliane Escoubas explains, ‘‘The imagination is therefore, strangely, the faculty of producing the unimaginable, and it is this unimaginable, as the effect of the imagination, that the sublime designates’’ (Imago mundi 49; my translation). 20. ‘‘The ideal topos for the experience of the sublime . . . will be a median place, an average place of the body which would provide an aesthetic maximum without losing itself in mathematical infinite’’ (Truth in Painting 140). 21. In Image malgre´ tout, Didi-Huberman describes the difficult ethics of the image suspended between possibility and impossibility: ‘‘To imagine in spite of everything, which requires of us difficult ethics of the image: neither the impossible per se (laziness of the esthete), nor icon of horror (laziness of the believer) nor simple document (laziness of the scientist). A simple image: inadequate but necessary, inexact but true’’ (56; my translation). As I will show, the movement of narration directs Cornelius toward a speech that does not fall to absolute silence, but neither represents nor documents. I call this the speech of survival.

Notes to pages 37–49 203 22. In ‘‘Shibboleth’’ Derrida has explained this dynamic with regards to the date, specifically in the context of Paul Celan’s poetry. He showed that the date of an event, the unique instant of a unique happening, must be repeated if there is to be memory in the sense of commemoration and anniversaries. But this date, already at its original instant, is both singular and plural since every date is the gathering point of multiple events. The same dynamic applies to naming, for the unique name of a unique being is impossible. 23. ‘‘The name is stable and it stabilizes,’’ Blanchot tells us, ‘‘but it allows the Unique instant already vanished to escape; just as the word, always general, has always failed to capture what it names’’ (Infinite Conversation 34). 24. For further discussion of childhood, see the analysis of Tunde in chapter 3. 25. L’aıˆne´ des orphelins by Tierno Mone´nembo describes the extremes of love, loyalty, and the uncompromising refusal of the genocidal machinery by Hutu men in mixed marriages. Similarly, the two films made on Rwanda, the well known Hotel Rwanda and Raoul Peck’s film made for HBO, Sometimes in April, depict this difficult scenario. 26. Semunjanga argues that the image of the Tutsi woman as the ‘‘traitor’’ is derived from the interpretations of the story surrounding Princess Bwiza, who, with her legendary beauty, had conquered many princes and betrayed others. The author insists that this figure remained a positive figure in the Rwandan imagination until the ideological discourses that led to the genocide focused on the traitor rather than the conqueror (‘‘De la construction’’ 189). 27. For a detailed historical description of this process of racial construction in Rwandan society see Mahmood Mamdani’s famous work When Victims Become Killers, Josias Semunjanga’s Re´cits fondateurs du drame rwandais, and Nigel Eltringham’s Accounting for Horror: Post-Genocide Debates in Rwanda. Eltringham argues that even in post-genocide Rwanda, not only scholars but also the judicial system, namely the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), continue to reify ethnicity and race. In addition, Kenneth Harrow’s ‘‘ ‘Ancient Tribal Warfare’ ’’ outlines the multiple narratives of power, division, and unity populating historiography. 28. Derrida has articulated the aporia of forgiveness as that which does not let itself be recuperated by law, knowledge, or the logic of possibility. He distinguishes between forgiveness as institutionalized by discourses of redemption, expiation, and law and forgiveness as it engages singularities. This forgiveness can neither inscribe itself in discourse nor in a third domain of authority: ‘‘where it [forgiveness] should engage only absolute singularities, it cannot manifest itself in some fashion without calling on a third, the institution, sociality, the trans-generational heritage, on the survivor in general; and first on that universalizing instance which is language’’ (On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness 48). 29. See Infinite Conversation, 25. 30. ‘‘The obscure, in stealing away,’’ Blanchot tells us, ‘‘offers itself to the turn that originally governs speech’’ (Ibid. 31). 31. See Alain Badiou’s Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism and Eric Santner’s discussion of Badiou, Agamben, Benjamin, and Rosenzweig in his essay ‘‘Miracles Happen’’ in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology. In this essay

204 Notes to pages 51–54 Santner sums up Badiou’s notion of the possibility of the event as the emergence of the new, that is, the unexpected and the incalculable: ‘‘Badiou’s claim that death is the construction of the evental site means just that our death-driven singularity is the very point at which the possibility of new possibilities can emerge. As Badiou writes, ‘resurrection . . . comes forth out from the power of death, not through its negation’ ’’ (122).

2. Suffering Time 1. L’enfant de sable is organized around the story of a girl raised as a boy because the father was in need of a male heir to his fortune. After the birth of several girls, the last child was raised and presented to society as a boy. The result is a tragic tale of exploitation and sexual violence. However, as the novel develops we realize that the story of this girl is primarily a story that others tell. La nuit sacre´e, the sequel, includes the theme of clitorectomy. Clearly neither of these practices is representative of Morocco, and critics have charged ben Jelloun for offering to the West what sells. There is much merit to these accusations, especially since the dominant approach to non-Western literature in the West is to read literary texts as cultural and anthropological documents. However, focusing exclusively on plot lines drastically reduces the complexities of the structures of narration that have provided a fertile ground for criticism of ben Jelloun’s work. Careful critics have shown the originality of ben Jelloun’s storytelling techniques revealed through the writer’s consistent fascination with public storytellers, public scribes, and modes of artistic production. See He´di Abdel-jaouad’s article ‘‘Sacrilegious Discourse,’’ in which he defends and highlights the originality and the mastery of Tahar ben Jelloun as a storyteller. 2. See George De Lassalle’s ‘‘Le petit doigt de Tahar ben Jelloun Arab Arts; Mona Hachim’s ‘‘Qui en veut a` Tahar ben Jelloun’’ in Maroc Hebdo International; Stephen Smith and Jean-Pierre Tuquoi’s ‘‘Une pole´mique oppose Tahar ben Jelloun au te´moin principal de son dernier livre’’ and Jean-Pierre Tuquoi’s ‘‘L’e´crivain Tahar ben Jelloun au centre d’une double pole´mique’’ in Le Monde; and ben Jelloun’s letter ‘‘Une lettre de Tahar ben Jelloun’’ in Le Monde. In addition, the writing of this novel has itself become the theme of a novel by another Moroccan, Belkassem Belouchi, called Rapt de voix. 3. The attempted coups of 1971 and 1972, along with the king’s crackdown after the second attempt, were the culmination of an era of extreme political repression in Morocco known as les anne´es de plomb (the years of lead). This era began in 1965 when students rioted in Casablanca, which led to the suspension of parliament by the king, who then took over the executive and legislative branches of the government. The protests were fueled by disenchantment with the regime, and, later, by frustration over international events, such as the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. According to Driss Ksikes, Maria Daı¨f, and Re´da Allali in their article ‘‘La re´volution perdue’’ in Tel Quel online magazine, in the aftermath of the attempted coups, the king declared himself ‘‘eˆtre preˆt a` sacrifier les deux tiers des marocains’’ (to be ready to

Notes to pages 54–59 205 sacrifice two-thirds of Moroccans). General Oufkir, the mastermind behind the 1972 coup attempt, had gained the powerful and influential position of the minister of interior in the 1960s. In 1977, the Moroccan state demonstrated its robust power with the ‘‘Green March,’’ which annexed Western Sahara. The challenge presented to sovereignty by the two coup attempts was countered by this show of sovereignty. This annexation was called the ‘‘Green March’’ because it was claimed to have taken place without violence. Also see Brian Edward’s Morocco Bound on the violence of this decade, 1965–1975, and its relationship to international events. 4. The coup attempt of 1971 was organized by the army, which, on the king’s birthday, attacked the palace of Sakhirat. The second, in 1972, was led by the air force trying to destroy the king’s plane in flight. The group of detainees in Tazmamart consisted of officers in the army and the air force. In addition to these longterm prisoners, others came to Tazmamart for short-term imprisonment including members of the Polisario and a group of sub-Saharan Africans whose identity remains unknown since they did not speak any of the languages that the Moroccans could understand. According to Ahmed Marzouki, the members of Polisario, after their release, used Radio Polisario to broadcast the existence of Tazmamart and denounce its conditions. 5. The Bourequat brothers were not in the military. They belonged to the aristocracy, and the reasons for their arrest have never been completely clarified. According to Ali and Midhat’s memoirs, Dix-huit ans de solitude and Mort vivant, respectively, their only crime was to have warned the king of the possibility of a coup d’e´tat brewing against him. Because of the Bourequat brothers’ personal relationship with the king, especially through their mother, they claim to have been used by government officials who knew of or perhaps were involved in the plot. Approaching the brothers, they had pretended that the safest and surest way to let the king know would be through direct connection, without the intermediary of an official. They spent the first eight years of their terms in military prisons before being transferred to Tazmamart. They began their terms in Block B, but were transferred to Block A toward the end of their ordeal. Of the twenty-eight survivors, twenty-three were from Block A and only five from Block B. Aziz Binebine was among the latter. 6. ‘‘Fundamentally, Tazmamart was a veritable lottery where the survival of each detainee depended on the most total arbitrariness’’ (222; my translation). 7. ‘‘Dying, thus, at every instant, of deprivation, of disease, of hunger . . . but dying also of hope at every moment’’ (68; my translation). 8. ‘‘Suffering is suffering when one can no longer suffer it and when, because of this non-power, one cannot cease suffering it. A singular situation. Time is as though arrested, merged with its interval. There, the present is without end, separated from every other present by an inexhaustible and empty infinite, the very infinite of suffering and thus dispossessed of any future: a present without end and yet impossible as a present’’ (Infinite Conversation 44). 9. Blanchot, following Yves Bonnefoy’s notion of ‘‘poetic hope,’’ characterizes hope as follows: ‘‘Hope is most profound when it withdraws from and deprives itself

206 Notes to pages 59–63 of all manifest hope. But at the same time we must not hope, as in a dream, for a chimerical fiction. It is against this that the new hope appoints itself. Hoping for the probable, which cannot be the measure of what there is to be hoped for, and hoping not for the fiction of the unreal, true hope—the unhoped for of all hope—is an affirmation of the improbable and a wait for what is’’ (Infinite Conversation 41). 10. ‘‘One can speak of a messianic beyondend [outrebut], a beyond of the end that is not confused with a pure and blind without-end but transmutes its ontological correspondence qualified as the contents of the ‘end.’ In the beyondend, the end, ceasing to be the end, signifies itself as beyond itself in ‘this world,’ from time temporalizing itself ’’ (Temps 47; my translation). 11. In Homo Sacer, Agamben defines ‘‘bare life’’ as the in-between of natural life and political life and describes homo sacer as the life abandoned by the law but also to the law, or, in his reading of Jean-Luc Nancy, as a relation of unrelation to the law. Homo Sacer, which he traces to Roman law, is given as the model for bare life, which he argues is the basis of modern politics. In the case of Tazmamart, as Salim describes it, the condition is such that the prisoners are maintained in the state of pre´-mort, exposed to the threat of death. The enforcers of law—be they the Kmander (the commander of the guards) or the guards—are not allowed to kill them. Rather, they are to keep them living on the edge of death. This scenario renders the distinction between killing and dying impossible since men die in prison under the terrible condition of imprisonment. The state of exception in this case can perhaps be characterized in this way: the men are to be kept alive, barely, yet no one will be held accountable for their deaths. The requirement of keeping them alive is not accompanied by accountability for their deaths. They can be killed without being killed. 12. Like ‘‘martyr,’’ the Arabic word for martyr, ‘‘shahid,’’ also means witness. 13. See Agamben’s State of Exception, in which he traces the history of this notion from the medieval period through Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin, elucidating along the way Derrida’s articulation of ‘‘force’’ and ‘‘law’’ in ‘‘Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’ ’’ in Acts of Religion. 14. The story of Ishmael tells us that after the expulsion, Hagar wanders in the desert with the infant Ishmael on the verge of dying of thirst. As Hagar runs from hill to hill in despair, the child taps his heel on the ground and miraculously a source of water appears, today called Zam-Zam, symbolizing the water of life for Muslims. The trauma of Hagar’s running between the two hills, al-Saffa and al-Marwa, has become one of the rituals performed by Muslims during the pilgrimage of Hajj. One could perhaps argue that the generalized bare or sacred life as political life in the secularized world is the indication of the retreat of the divine, which no longer intervenes to save either the life that can be killed or the one that can be sacrificed. 15. In her address at the 2004 African Literature Association Conference in Madison, Wisconsin, Assia Djebar highlighted the repudiation of Hagar as the problematic law of Islamic societies continuing into the contemporary era. This address was based on the preface to her play ‘‘Filles d’Ismae¨l dans le vent et la tempeˆte.’’ However, given that Hagar was never Abraham’s legitimate wife, hers is less the story of repudiation than of the abandoned status of those without protection: namely, the

Notes to pages 65–68 207 body of the female servant. It can be easily argued, though, that repudiation is itself a mode of abandonment within the law. The only wife of Abraham whom the Qur’an mentions is Isaac’s mother, though she remains unnamed throughout the text (Qur’an 2:71–72). Abdelwahab Meddeb, in his book La maladie de l’Islam (The Malady of Islam), argues that one way of dealing with the marginalization of Islam in contemporary politics is through revisiting this myth of exclusion and illegitimacy that reenacts itself in oppositional discourses to Islam establishing it as the enemy of the West and of the Judeo-Christian traditions. 16. The English translation of the novel, This Blinding Absence of Light, translates Kif-Kif with ‘‘Ditto.’’ Such a translation, done to favor meaning, effaces the fact that Kif-Kif is used here as a proper name. While Kif-Kif in fact does mean Ditto, I prefer to retain Kif-Kif to signal its status as a proper name and therefore as the humanization of the animal by giving him a name, which by definition cannot be translated. 17. In the United States, a corresponding terminology occurs in the case of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners. As Judith Butler points out, they are not called prisoners, but ‘‘detainees,’’ for ‘‘whom waiting may well be without end’’ and for whom ‘‘the protection of law is indefinitely suspended’’ (Precarious Life 64). However, in the case of Tazmamart such distinctions were never made part of the official discourse. Officially, Tazmamart never existed. 18. ‘‘The calling into question of our quality of men provokes an almost biological claim to belonging to the human race. After that it serves to make us think about the limitations of that race, about its distance from ‘nature’ and its relation to ‘nature’; that is, about a certain solitude that characterizes our race—above all—it brings us to a clear vision of its indivisible oneness’’ (Human Race 6). 19. ‘‘When man is reduced to the extreme destitution of need, when he becomes ‘someone who eats scraps,’ we see that he is reduced to himself, and reveals himself as one who has need of nothing other than need in order to maintain the human relation in its primacy . . . the experience of man reduced to the irreducible, is the radical need that relates me no longer either to myself nor to my self satisfaction, but to human existence pure and simple, lived as lack at the level of need . . . an egoism without ego where man, bent on survival, and attached in a way that must be called abject to living and always living on, bears this attachment to life as an attachment that is impersonal’’ (Infinite 133). This notion of the human may communicate with Eric Santner’s more overtly political notion of ‘‘creatureliness’’ that ‘‘will thus signify less a dimension that traverses the boundaries of human and nonhuman forms of life than the specifically human way of finding oneself caught in the midst of antagonisms in and of the political field’’ (On Creaturely Life xix). 20. ‘‘C ¸ a sonnait mieux’’ has been omitted in the translation. 21. ‘‘In pain,’’ says Alphonso Lingis, ‘‘one is backed up into oneself, mired in oneself, in-oneself, materialized; pain announces the end of sensibility through a conversion into nothingness, annihilation, but at the limit of prostration, conversion into passivity, materialization’’ (Sensation 81).

208 Notes to pages 69–81 22. ‘‘The intruder forces its way, by surprise or by trickery, in any case without right and without having been admitted. There must be the intruder in the stranger, without which he loses his strangeness. If he has the right to enter and remain, if he is expected and received and welcomed, such that nothing in him remains out of reach, he is no longer the intruder, he is also no longer the stranger’’ (L’intrus 11; my translation). 23. ‘‘But thanks to Binswanger and beyond him, to a certain structuralist vulgate, speech left its pure ‘enonciative’ state to become something like a gesture engaging the whole body, a gesture of air, creator of signified and signifiers, but also of flux, of intensity, of suspense, of impalpable events, however well incarnated’’ (Gestes 21; my translation). 24. The word ‘‘figure’’ in French means both face and figure. Therefore, in my use of this word, both face and figuration, image, should be heard. The relationship under discussion is precisely the relationship between the proximity and distance of breath from the face as the movement of figuration. 25. I would like to point out the close connection between the words for air and surface in French, air/aire. The image comes to the fore as the dynamic of this relation that does not confuse them, yet makes one impossible without the other. Fe´dida is clearly highlighting this nuance. 26. Didi-Huberman notes this relationship already in Freud, who intimately links breath to spirituality: ‘‘He [Freud] is not content with reminding us simply of the indissociable link between the physical breath and the metaphysical spirit, both contained in the same word, spiritus. He notes especially that it is precisely ‘air in movement’ (die bewegte Luft) that permits passage from one sense of breath-spirit to another: . . . this is to say the exchange between the visceral and the atmospheric’’ (Gestes 32). 27. I prefer to keep the words ‘‘sad’’ and ‘‘sadness’’ in this context to avoid the clinical nuances of ‘‘depression.’’ 28. We are perhaps inevitably reminded here of the butterflies in Gabriel Garcı´a Ma´rquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Much has been said about ben Jelloun’s relationship with magic realism. See, for example, John Erikson, ‘‘Metoikoi and Magical Realism in the Maghrebian Narratives of Tahar ben Jelloun and Abdelkebir Khatibi.’’ 29. ‘‘Perhaps we imagine because our face has a reverse side that escapes us, and because this reverse side of the face appears itself as the imprint, on the inside, of faces that have caused us to be born and that we have lost: the faces of our dead’’ (Gestes 56–57). 30. See chapter 3 for a more developed analysis of the portrait. 31. In chapter 3, storytelling will be discussed in its relationship with the law. In both contexts, the dynamic of absence and presence and the relation to the gaze and the absent interlocutor remain the determining features of storytelling. 32. Al-Kadir (The Powerful One) is among the ninety-nine names of God. Abdelkadir therefore means the servant or slave of the Powerful or Able One.

Notes to pages 84–91 209 33. ‘‘Surviving overflows both living and dying,’’ Derrida reminds us, ‘‘supplementing the one and the other with a jolt and a suspense, stopping death and life simultaneously, with a decisive sentence, the sentence that puts an end and the sentence that condemns with a verdict. . . .’’ and further on, ‘‘the storyteller . . . is also and first of all a survivor. This surviving is also a spectral return (the survivor is always a phantom) that marks itself and puts itself upon the scene from the beginning, at the moment when the posthumous, testamentary, and scriptural character of the narration begins to unfold’’ (Parages 153, 182; my translation). 34. Speaking about the question of the humanity of the human, Bernard Stiegler argues that humanity is linked inextricably to ‘‘technicity,’’ which he defines as the process of exteriorization through technique: ‘‘the prosthesis is not a mere extension of the human body; it is the constitution of this body qua ‘human’ ’’ (Technics and Time 152–53). The process includes memory as well as the use of tools, which is the very first gesture of upright man, whose hands and face are freed. This freedom, which permits the use of tools and language, is also the experience of openness toward temporality as anticipation of a future: ‘‘There is no anticipation, no time outside of this passage outside, of this putting-outside-of-self and of this alienation of the human and its memory that ‘exteriorization’ is’’ (152). He is careful to point out that ‘‘interiority’’ does not precede ‘‘exteriority’’ but that they arrive simultaneously. A prosthesis is a supplement, but not the kind that replaces something that has been lost, such as an interiority. It is, first, ‘‘set in front, or spatialization (deseverance [e´-loignement])’’; and second, ‘‘set in advance, already there (past) and anticipation (foresight), that is, temporalization’’ (152). Anticipation is always already there; it is there with the first gesture of standing. Therefore, becoming human, as becoming technical, is nothing but this process of temporalizing and spatializing. In my analysis, the opening of the imagination and thought resembles this process of temporalizing and spatializing within a space and a time where the condemned person is constantly threatened with annihilation, and where all efforts are made at bringing about this annihilation. The prison’s mode of punishment is based upon this destruction of humanity through the elimination of time and space, to which the biological death of the detainee is secondary.

3. Shadowing the Storyteller 1. See Derrida on decision in ‘‘Force of Law’’ in Acts of Religion and in ‘‘Nietzsche and the Machine’’ in Negotiations: ‘‘A decision, if there is such a thing, is never determinable in terms of the knowledge. One cannot determine a decision. . . . A decision is an event that is not subsumable under a concept, a theoretical judgment or a determinant form of knowledge. If it could ever be subsumed, there would no longer be the need for a decision’’ (Negotiations 229). 2. I will return to this law of resemblance in the final chapter of this work on Khatibi’s Le livre du sang, where we are told that resemblance betrays all laws, including its own. 3. See Basic Philosophical Writings, page 69.

210 Notes to pages 92–96 4. I have thought often about the possible relationship between this notion of a call to the story, coming from afar, and the theory of ‘‘Bendrology,’’ or the ‘‘talking drum’’ proposed by the scholar and poet from Burkina Faso, Toting Frederic Pace´re´. A ‘‘talking drum’’ is a kind of drum used to convey messages to the community. As Christopher Wise explains in his essay ‘‘The Word Beyond the Word: Pace´re´’s Theory of Talking Drums’’ in The Desert Shore, this theory’s important gesture is toward undoing the hierarchy of writing and speech, and the priority of one over the other. Against Walter Ong, who assimilates the talking drum to the logic of orality, Pace´re´ refutes the orality of the talking drum, insisting on its autonomy from the human voice. The drum phrase comes from afar, from the drum, and not from a subject. Wise proposes that drum language may in fact ‘‘be said to create its subjects or to ‘speak’ them’’ (34). In his introduction to ‘‘Saglego, or Drum Poem (for the Sahel),’’ ‘‘Pace´re´ says that ‘‘there is imbedded within the talking drum a language that differs from current (More´) language, a language that is shared among the ancients’’ (Desert Shore 46). Often this language, coming from afar, is fragmentary and does not follow the rules of grammar, syntax, and so forth. I wonder if the theory of re´cit cannot be enriched and elaborated further in relation to certain articulations within this theory. Clearly, this theory contains strong metaphysical implications that require careful thinking through. In addition, the notion of re´cit is first and foremost literary. Any move toward Bendrology, which takes as its object of study a nonliterary mode of expression, requires much work and elaboration. Therefore, I suggest this possibility for now and hope to return to it in the future. ˇ izˇek’s Enjoy Your Symptom! for a discussion of this notion in 5. See Slavoj Z Lacan and his polemic with Derrida over the latter’s reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘‘The Purloined Letter.’’ In his reading of this story, in ‘‘Le facteur de la ve´rite´,’’ Derrida, thinking of Lacan, asks whether the letter sometimes misses its destination ˇ izˇek argues that Derrida’s reading of Lacan is too traditionally and does not arrive. Z teleological. Instead, he privileges Barbara Johnson’s reading that the letter always arrives, because wherever it arrives, that is its destination. See Barbara Johnson’s ˇ izˇek, the letter is related to ‘‘The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida.’’ In Z the excess in the subject, the repressed, that returns and shatters the subject’s symbolic order (in our novel, that symbolic order is the ordinary life of a merchant). In Le Cavalier, the subject is both the destination of the letter and is destined by it. This double destiny opens the temporality of destiny, again as an always already and not ˇ izˇek argues, the letter always arrives because we always die, therefore the yet. If as Z missive is that of fate; in this novel the subject is so disjointed that this death can never be his. In this sense, being destined becomes the impossible appropriation of destiny. The letter is suspended between arrival and impossible arrival. But the arrival opens the subject toward the nonarrival of destiny. 6. ‘‘When I am beset by the abject, the twisted braid of affects and thoughts I call by such a name does not have, properly speaking, a definable object. The abject is not an ob-ject facing me, which I name and imagine . . . what is abject is not my correlative . . . The abject has only one quality of the object, that of being opposed

Notes to pages 97–108 211 to the I. . . . What is abject, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses’’ (1). 7. ‘‘All its life,’’ says Nancy, ‘‘the body is also a dead body, the body of a dead person, of this dead person that I am living. Dead or alive, neither dead nor alive, I am the opening, the tomb, or the mouth of one in the other’’ (Corpus 17). 8. See for example, the story ‘‘Three Ladies and the Porter.’’ 9. In an interview with Yolande Bouka and Chantal Thompson, Diop explicitly refers to the influences of Kafka, Camus, Juan Rulfo, and others on his writing. Specifically about Kafka he says: ‘‘I think that The Trial is a particularly limpid text. The Metamorphosis also’’ (my translation). This influence is significant not only on the level of style but also with regards to subject matter. 10. See chapter 4 for an in-depth discussion of this notion in Khatibi. 11. In his reading of A Thousand and One Nights, Abdelkebir Khatibi says the following: ‘‘Watching the orgy, the king witnesses [assiste] in his death and he can do nothing about it: his place is already occupied, already haunted, and in this empty and shocking [saisissant] place, in this appalling, yawning [affolante] void, the thousand and one nights will construct themselves’’ (9–10; 23). I insist on the more literal translation of certain words in order to direct the reader’s attention to the relationship between fascination and captivation (saisissant), madness (affolante), and the story. 12. In an interview with Charles Sugnet, in response to a question about why there were so many corpses in his writing and whether this meant that Senegal is a nation of killers, Diop explains the necessity of death for a writer: ‘‘No, no. But in the imagination of every writer, whether in Senegal or elsewhere, death is always there. Sometimes I think the events of life develop a little bit like a detective novel. When you start with death, you put things in perspective. That’s why novels are filled with madmen, corpses, sick people, and children. With characters like that, you can go beyond received ideas. After all, a writer wants situations and characters that will permit him to say the strongest things. When you start with someone who is dead, you lay down your cards from the start, you create a situation where everyone has to respect the gravity of what’s happened’’ (‘‘Dances with Wolofs’’ 147). In Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, He´le`ne Cixous similarly discusses the inaugural scene of death as the necessity for every beginning: ‘‘To begin (writing, living) we must have death. I like the dead, they are the doorkeepers who while closing one side ‘give’ way to the other. We must have death, but young, present, ferocious, fresh death, the death of the day, today’s death. The one that comes right up to us so suddenly we don’t have time to avoid it, I mean to avoid feeling its breath touching us. Ha! . . . It’s true that neither death nor the doorkeepers are enough to open the door. We must also have the courage, the desire, to approach, to go to the door’’ (7). 13. A book title of Georges Didi-Huberman’s, Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (That which we see, that which looks at us), encapsulates beautifully this difference between seeing (voir) and looking (regarder).

212 Notes to pages 110–115 14. Didi-Huberman elucidates this link between the tomb and the fall, le tombeau and tomber: ‘‘Watching the tomb, I myself fall, I fall into anguish. . . . It is the anguish of looking into the depth—at the place—of that which looks at me, the anguish of being delivered to the question of knowing (in fact: of not knowing) that which my body will become between its ability to make volume and its ability to give to the void, to open itself ’’ (Ce que nous voyons 18; my translation). 15. In A Thousand and One Nights, this world of demons, creatures on the other side of both life and death, constitutes the space of the story. The first demon in Nights appears soon after the death of the unfaithful queen, preceding the narrator, Shahrazad. In this story, Shahriyar vows never to return to his kingdom unless he finds someone more wretched than himself, which he finds in the fate of the jinn on the banks of a river, having been betrayed one hundred times by the woman he loves, deception in which Shahriyar himself participates. With the violence of the first death and deception, the world of the imaginary opens up as a supplement to that of Shahriyar through its excessive power, for the jinn is more wretched, more betrayed than Shahriyar, for not only has he been betrayed one hundred times, he will continue to be so. Upon Shahriyar’s return to the palace, after this encounter, the saga of 1,001 nights begins. But let us not forget that this beginning already belongs to the story, A Thousand and One Nights. The experience of excess and the imaginary world of jinns and demons restore Shahriyar to the throne, but a throne already haunted and always threatened. The opening of the world of demons invites the narrator to come upon the scene in order to make this world appear in the story. Like the song of the sirens toward which narration is always drawn, as Blanchot argues in Siren’s Song, the jinn rises out of the depth of the river and then falls asleep while the woman he carefully contains and conceals in a box betrays him, by calling the two brothers to her and threatening them if they do not give in to her desire. Betrayal as the power of excess and the failure of containment constitutes the economy of the narration. It opens the imaginary as endless tales and simultaneously restitutes sovereignty in the imaginary and through it, that is, the return of Shahriyar to the throne at the beginning and the birth of his sons at the end of the saga, but always within it. ˇ izˇek’s analogy between ‘‘objet petit a’’ and the notion of photon in 16. I find Z physics interesting. He describes the photon as an object that only has mass in movement. If it is quieted down and rendered immobile, it dissolves (see note 39 of chapter 1 in Enjoy Your Symptom!). This notion is useful in thinking about how Le Cavalier et son ombre begins and continues its momentum. Movement as deciphering, as the leap out of the cipher, discussed at the beginning, gains velocity as the story continues. It can be argued then that the end of the story as movement toward Bilenty indicates that the movement of narration has reached such a velocity that it can no longer sustain narration and must stop. It may mark the collapse of the spatio-temporal dimension of narration. 17. While this scenario directly refers to the independent ex-colonies, the dynamics at work regarding the question of the relationship between sovereignty and law is not limited to the African continent, nor to the so called ‘‘non-west.’’

Notes to pages 118–126 213 Giorgio Agamben’s work on the state of exception is of course an important guide for considering these issues and has directed much of my thinking here. Additionally, recent political developments in the United States and the critiques of the suspension of rights in the United States, together with what these suspensions reveal for the question of sovereignty, both within and without the United States, should caution us against any tendency to limit our scope to the African continent. 18. I owe much of my thinking here to the critiques of Carl Schmitt’s work on Sovereignty. My analysis particularly shows the relationship between Derrida’s engagement with and critique of Carl Schmitt’s categories of Friend and Enemy in Politics of Friendship and his engagement with Kierkegaard in terms of general ethics and singular ethics in The Gift of Death. My description here reverses the scenario discussed in this latter work, since in the Abrahamic scene it is the turn toward the absolutely Singular that marks irresponsibility toward the general. Le Cavalier, as a universal hero for justice, is implicated in the opposite direction, but no less implicated.

4. Un-limiting Thought 1. In her essay ‘‘Toward a Postcolonial Revolution in Poetic Language,’’ Ziba Rashidian aptly points out this movement of dis-orientation and re-orientation in Khatibi’s thought: ‘‘The thinking-otherwise that Khatibi pursues in Maghreb Pluriel replaces the antagonistic, distancing spatialization governing the decolonizing imaginary with a host-parasite or symbiotic paradigm. The ‘Occident,’ that inhabits the depths of the ‘Orient’s’ being at once upsets the unitary closure of that being and is itself nothing but difference and thus neither a ‘maıˆtrise e´ternelle’ nor a catastrophe’’ (42). She is using ‘‘catastrophe’’ in its negative political and historical sense. My notion of catastrophe in Khatibi relates it to the ontological and metaphysical downturns and ruptures and is primarily affirmative. 2. Khatibi’s thinking dialogues with Nancy’s thinking on the double movement within thought. Nancy’s distinction between ‘‘signification’’ and ‘‘sense’’ brings us closer to understanding Khatibi’s displacement of the question of thought from the philosophical to the literary. For Nancy, while signification belongs to the structure of closure, sense opens up thought at the limit of thinking. For this reason, thought at the limit ‘‘oscillates from itself to itself,’’ it distances from itself in order to allow thought to come endlessly. This implies that within the structure of signification, there is always another movement that allows it to happen while at the same time exceeding it constantly: ‘‘This is not an openness [ouverture] of thought, as one might say of liberal or conciliatory intellectual attitudes. It is, rather, thought as the opening to which and through which what belongs to meaning is able to happen, precisely because it happens—with all the force of its declaration, call, or demand. . . . The dimension of the open, then, is the one according to which nothing (nothing essential) is established or settled; it is the one according to which everything essential comes to be. It is also that dimension according to which thought has nothing—neither things, nor ideas, nor words—that would simply be at the disposal of

214 Notes to pages 127–133 its (supposed) mastery’’ (Gravity of Thought 10). For Nancy this is the problem with the Kantian model that has dominated philosophy’s thinking on thought and reason. ‘‘This is why in Kant, signification or meaning designates that which takes place as presentation. The force or ‘sleight of hand’ that constitutes this presentation are [sic] declared by Kant to be forever ungraspable, the ‘hidden art’ of what he baptized the ‘schematism.’ It suffices to leave this ungraspable to its obscurity. . . . It suffices to ignore that which nonetheless is thereby revealed, namely, that signification in no way yields the ‘meaning’ of its own production or its own advent (which cannot itself be a signification, but the act or movement in which the possibility of meaning rises—which has sometimes been called ‘signifiance’). All this suffices to make the whole of philosophy into a general enterprise of signification and presentation. One could say that the open and shut enigma of schematism was necessary in order to engage modern philosophy in the explicit will to, and systematic project of, total presentation: sensible, moral, logical, aesthetic, political, metaphysical’’ (23). 3. In ‘‘Dynamique de la Dissymetrie’’ Caillois makes the following distinction between symmetry and asymmetry: From now on, asymmetry allows us to foresee the properties of bodies, to conjecture on their intimate structures, their remarkable qualities. Symmetry, on the contrary, appears, as the inertia that halts the production of phenomena, while asymmetry launches it. ‘‘What is necessary,’’ writes Pierre Curie, ‘‘is that certain elements of symmetry not exist. It is asymmetry that creates the phenomenon.’’ In truth, it does not create it; it renders it possible, perhaps it provokes it, but it itself results from unequal pressures whose precarious equilibrium topples, when the moment comes, and provokes the advent of a model of organization. (87; my translation) 4. I have discussed the dynamic of the body and suffering as excess in chapter 2 and shall return to it again in chapter 5. 5. ‘‘Only the finite being can be free (and a finite being is an existent),’’ says Nancy in the Experience of Freedom, ‘‘for the infinite being encloses the necessity of its freedom, which it seals to its being. It is therefore a question of nothing other than liberating human freedom from the immanence of infinite foundation and finality and liberating it therefore from its own infinite projection to infinity, where transcendence (existence) is transcended and therefore annulled’’ (13–14). The thought of freedom and the thought of finitude belong together in this intimate sense. 6. See Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Sense of the World. 7. In ‘‘Orientalisme de´soriente´,’’ Khatibi undermines the notion of a total identity afforded to East and West by relating them to each other through an interval, which, without reducing one to the other, leaves the excess of one in the other: ‘‘The Orient and the Occident are not reduced to a geographical division, or to some cultural difference. But they call, in their interval, every cardinal question of Being, according to an auroral and nuptial protocol. A protocol that does not refer to some illuminative philosophy that would come to transfigure, through a solar

Notes to pages 133–138 215 imagery, the unthought birth of every Orient and every Occident’’ (Maghreb pluriel 143; my translation). 8. Nuptial recalls Rene´ Char’s famous poem Visage Nuptial, wherein the night is the central temporal turn of the poem. 9. I refer the reader to Khatibi’s De´dicace a` l’anne´e qui vient and my article on this work entitled ‘‘From Poetry to Writing.’’ Amour bilingue was first published in 1983. Therefore a certain trajectory of thought can be traced on this temporal dynamic of nuptiale and aurorale from 1979 onward, with the publication of Le livre du sang. 10. See Jennifer Gage, who in her work on Khatibi and the problem of translation, points to this confusion: ‘‘The outside moving simultaneously with the inside taking leave of itself; the subject beside himself ’’ (‘‘Translator Translated’’ 82). 11. I retain the French form of bi-langue throughout because it performs several tasks in the French (noun, adjective, proper name), which would be impossible to give in English. Furthermore, its possible status as a proper name within the text, though not capitalized, makes it untranslatable, as convention requires. 12. ‘‘The impossibility of making any presence real—an impossibility which is present, which is there as the present’s double, the shadow of the present which the present bears and hides in itself ’’ (Space of Literature 31). 13. In The Space of Literature, Maurice Blanchot describes the enigma of this double night: In the night, everything has disappeared. This is the first night . . . but when everything has disappeared in the night, ‘‘everything has disappeared’’ appears. This is the other night. . . . Apparitions, phantoms, and dreams are an allusion to this empty night. . . . Here the invisible is what one cannot cease to see; it is the incessant making itself seen. The ‘‘phantom’’ is meant to hide, to appease the phantom night. This night is never pure night. It is essentially impure. . . . It is not true night; it is not without truth, which does not lie, however—which is not false. . . . In the night one can die; we reach oblivion. But this other night is the death no one dies, the forgetfulness which gets forgotten. In the heart of oblivion it is memory without rest. (163–64) The first night is the one that arrives at the end of the day and into which day disappears. This night still functions within the logic of day and night, still following the pattern of truth and falsehood, presence and absence. It is the night that forbids sight but allows for oblivion and sleep. It is a restful, ‘‘welcoming’’ night. However, within this first night, another registers its movements without leaving a mark, without tracing itself, without really registering. This is the appearance of the movements of the night, the rhythm of its appearance. It is an empty night belonging neither to truth nor to falsehood, neither to fullness nor to lack, but rather to an emptiness making its appearance, an appearance that is neither a concealing nor a revealing but a flow of one into the other in a movement of mutual contamination and of impurity.

216 Notes to pages 141–155 14. ‘‘La nuit blanche’’ means a night without sleep, a sleepless night. I have kept the literal sense here to underscore the relationship between night, visibility, and the white page. 15. ‘‘Something immense, exorbitant, is liberated in all directions with a noise of a catastrophe; this emerges from an unreal, infinite void, at the same time loses itself in it, with the shock of a blinding flash’’ (Inner Experience 73–74). 16. ‘‘Love is always present but never recognized in anything we name ‘love,’ ’’ Nancy tells us in The Inoperative Community (93). 17. Much of the vocabulary employed here refers to the mystical tradition of Islam, which Khatibi relentlessly rereads and rewrites. In chapter 5 of this work, I will directly address this aspect of Khatibi’s thought. However, it suffices to say that despite the presence of the mystical tradition, it is imperative to remember that the unity as the ultimate vision and goal of the mystical tradition finds no possibility here. 18. There is a significant error in the translation here. The text says: ‘‘j’aimais l’amour pour lui meˆme, et lui ne voulait pas de mon adoration.’’ ‘‘Lui’’ here refers to ‘‘l’amour.’’ The translation changes the subject from ‘‘it’’ to ‘‘I’’: ‘‘I loved love for itself and didn’t begrudge it my adoration.’’ 19. There is a significant error in the translation. The French structure ‘‘cette autre qu’il habitait dans la bi-langue’’ distinguishes between ‘‘this other’’ (feminine) and the subject of ‘‘inhabit’’ (masculine).

5. Figuring the Wine-Bearer 1. This distinction became clearer to me in conversations with the author during his visit to Northwestern University in April 2007. 2. In her insightful essay ‘‘Fantasies of Self-Identity: Khatibi’s The Book of Blood,’’ Suzanne Gauch suggests that Khatibi’s Androgyn is indeed the same as the one we have inherited from Aristophanes, that is, the figure of sameness and of unity. She locates the questioning of this tradition in the language of the text and not in the figure of the Androgyn. I propose that Khatibi in fact rewrites the figure of the Andgrogyn itself in this novel. 3. ‘‘We remember: the being of Adam was androgynous. By self-engendering, he separates himself into man and woman. Iblis [Satan] grafts himself in this separation, initial fracture and dispersion of the Androgyn. He is always in the interior and the primitive shadow of the Adamic body: no theology will be able to dislodge him from there. It is the very notions of the One, of the double, and of the human that would have to be reevaluated in monotheism. . . . [Iblis] refuses this double submission, before God and before man. The double is him, and it is up to him to make up his mind in the stakes of duplicities, to confound all origins, all identities, every copy by a game of appearance’’ (98–99; all translations of this text are mine). It is important to note that the body in Khatibi does not oppose itself to the spirit, but

Notes to pages 155–159 217 rather points us in the direction of thinking about what cannot be appropriated, as discussed in the hyphenated relationship of pense´e-autre. 4. In Le livre, Khatibi brings together the two most marked influences on the development of Islamic mysticism: the Platonic and the Zoroastrian, as conceived by the philosophers or mystics of the Illuminationist tradition, ishraquiun, going back to Suhrawardi (1155–1191 c.e.), the founder of this school of thought. The disciples of Suhrawardi are designated as ashab afltun (Platonists, or more literally, companions of Plato). Similarly Ibn ‘Arabi, the Andalusian mystic thinker, whose clear influences on Khatibi’s oeuvre have been pointed out by critics, has been known as ibn aflatun (the son of Plato). See Henry Corbin’s Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi. All this serves to underscore the intersections that Khatibi is highlighting in Le livre. 5. What is generally called ‘‘angelology’’ in Islamic mystical thought is too complex to elaborate here, since this tradition dates back to the tenth century if not earlier. It includes philosophers such as Avicenna or Ibn Sina (b. 980), the Illuminationists or Ishraquiun, and various mystical traditions, including Ibn ‘Arabi’s important cosmology of the imaginal world. The angelic is considered to be the intermediary world between the earthly and divine essence, which is pure light. According to the Illuminationist school, there are hierarchies among angels, the highest being Bahman (the Archangel—not to be confused with the archangel Gabriel who seems to belong to the order of angels not archangels). For the Illuminationist (whose root is the Arabic sharq [east]), the Orient is light and Occident is dark (these are cosmological categories, on the vertical axis, not geographical or political ones). The materiality of the body is corpse and darkness. Light endows it with life. The angels are endowed with varying degrees of luminosity and are considered the ‘‘lords of the species,’’ following the Zoroastrian tradition. The Divine is pure light, absolute Orient. The image participates in this dynamic of the angel as the intermediary. The dream-image, like the angel, is thus a more intimate reality than the perception of anything real, that is, in the world. See Henry Corbin’s Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, Seyyed Hussein Nasr’s Three Muslim Sages, and William Chittick’s Imaginal Worlds. 6. In a brief text on the relationships between myth, literature, and philosophy, entitled ‘‘Un Jour les dieux se retirent. . .’’ (One Day the Gods Withdraw), Jean-Luc Nancy argues that the withdrawal of the gods is the condition for philosophy and its discourse on myth. It is therefore not surprising that the myth of the Androgyn as the rupture of intimacy between the gods and man comes to us in philosophy. Literature comes about in this rupture between truth and saying: Truth and narration thus separate from each other. Their separation is traced in the very stroke that withdraws upon the withdrawal of the gods. The body of the gods is what is left between the two: it remains there as its own absence. There remain painted bodies, figured bodies, told bodies: but there is no longer the sacred hand to hand [corps a` corps]. Between literature and philosophy lacks

218 Notes to page 160 this embrace [enlacement], this joining, this sacred entanglement [meˆle´e] of man with god. . . . Their distinction is exactly their disembrace [de´senlacement], their disjoining. The entanglement [meˆle´e] thus untangled [de´meˆle´e] is the sharing via the most cutting of edges: but the cut itself carries forever the bonds of the intermingling [emmeˆlement]. Between the two, there is the undisentangleable [inde´meˆlable]. (8–9; my translation) Narration marks this hyphenated relationship between myth and philosophy, between muthos and logos. Literature as figure and as narration comes to the fore in the destitution of saying’s truth and the impossibility of truth’s affirmation. The ironic gesture of philosophy is therefore to appropriate the truth that belongs to myth but without the power that made that truth possible. But, as Nancy reminds us in ‘‘Myth Interrupted,’’ this characterization of myth as ‘‘immanence’’ and ‘‘full speech’’ is given to us by the philosophical discourse on myth. We only know of myth via this discourse, because the discourse results from an interruption, the interruption of that which we now call myth. In fact, we have no access to a mythic time or a mythic life, except through this discourse of the aftermath. ‘‘It is true that we do not know very much about what mythic truth was or is for men living in the midst of what we call ‘myths.’ But we know that we . . . have no relation to the myth of which we are speaking, even as we fulfill it or try to fulfill it. In a sense, for us all that remains is its fulfillment or its will’’ (Inoperative Community 52). In politics, the nostalgic discourse has recuperated the mythic through a will to totality and to immanence: a totalitarian myth. The repetition of myths therefore does not return us to a ‘‘mythic’’ past, but rather registers the mythic as a repetition at a distance of origin. This repetition becomes the condition that cleaves myth into foundation and fiction: ‘‘mythic thought—operating in a certain way through the dialectical sublation of the two meanings of myth—is in effect nothing other than the thought of a founding fiction, or a foundation by fiction’’ (53; italics in original). In short, the belatedness inherent to the discourse on myth, the belatedness that allows for repetition, also allows us to say, ‘‘Myth is a myth.’’ This seeming tautology does not indicate the self-sufficiency of myth, in the sense that myth says itself fully and every time in a closed circle, but rather points to mythic fracture in the sense of ‘‘foundation is a fiction’’ and ‘‘fiction is a foundation.’’ Let us be reminded once more that in this sense fiction does not mean a lie, but rather the untruth of truth, its indeterminacy. The indeterminacy and divisibility inherent to the concept of myth open it toward philosophy and toward literature. Thus, mythic narration becomes the foundation of narration as fiction, and the movements of narration in turn reveal the fiction at the foundation as myth. 7. This thought rings rather loudly of Martin Heidegger’s description of what poets are for: ‘‘Poets are the mortals who, singing earnestly of the wine-god, sense the trace of the fugitive gods, stay on the gods’ tracks, and so trace for their kindred mortals the way toward the turning’’ (Poetry, Language, Thought 94). In her dissertation, ‘‘Sketches of Fantasia,’’ Suzanne Gauch reads Le livre as an allegory for poetry: ‘‘The body of poetry here eludes entombment in a literary grave where it would be

Notes to pages 161–170 219 classified once and for all. No sooner are readers assured that poetry is here, than it is re-qualified as ‘the remains of an angel’ and flies out of reach, an undefinable half presence at best’’ (21). 8. Muslims turn toward the Ka’ba during prayer. In the first days of Islam, Muslims, in a gesture of unity with Christians and Jews, turned toward Jerusalem. However, given that Ka’ba was built by Abraham and his son by Hagar, Ishmael, who founded the Arab lineage, and that Muslims were looking for specificity as a minority community, the Prophet made the decision of turning toward Mecca. In addition, the Prophet and some of his followers, exiled from Mecca, had a special attachment to this site. The turn toward Ka’ba by Muslims can perhaps be seen not only as a turn toward origin but also as a gesture of homage to, and a reminder of, exile and estrangement. The name Hagar also reminds us of this estrangement with its echo of hajara (to migrate) and Hijra, the Islamic calendar, derived from hajara. 9. In Par-dessus l’e´paule, Khatibi assigns a similar economy to Satan (Iblis): ‘‘Being the Loser, Iblis must lose everything. In order to survive in his malediction, he must win losing if one wants to burn the oppositions of the terms’’ (104). Khatibi argues that contrary to Saint Theresa’s appeal, one does not pray for Satan, so that he be saved. His loss is so extreme that it becomes the very possibility and affirmation of divisibility without the possibility of elimination of evil and return to unity. 10. In addition to singular and plural forms, Arabic grammar has a dual form for all nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs. The dual, like the singular and the plural, is gendered feminine or masculine. This dual form is called muthanna, derived from ‘ithnain, the numerical two. 11. According to Suhrawardi, the visible heavens are the materialization of the angelic substance and arise out of the feminine side of the longitudinal order of the archangels. Angels, belonging to the latitudinal order, are fixed stars and therefore infinite in number. Avicenna, on the other hand, limited the number of angels to ten heavens, which corresponded to the hierarchy of intellects, beginning with the First Intellect, the highest Archangel. The latitudinal order rises from the feminine dimension of the longitudinal order. In the longitudinal order of the Archangels, there seems to reign a principle of androgyny: a coming together of domination, qahr, and love, mahabbah, the first emanating from above and the second from below. Different from the order of angels, who subsist side by side, in this longitudinal order, Archangels generate each other. See Nasr’s Three Muslim Sages. 12. In Par-dessus l’e´paule, Khatibi insists on the fact that Satan tricked Adam and Eve by lying to them, knowing full well that by lying he would be lost forever. Given Satan’s radical loss, this lie is not the opposite of truth; it is rather an excess of truth that properly belongs to Satan: fiction. 13. ‘‘Now listen to this reed-flute’s deep lament/ About the heartache being apart has meant: ‘Since from the reed-bed they uprooted me/ My song’s expressed each human’s agony,/ A breast which separation’s split in two/ Is what I seek, to share this pain with you:/ When kept from their true origin, all yearn/ For union on the day they can return’ ’’ (‘‘Exordium: the song of the reed’’ Masnavi, book 14).

220 Notes to pages 170–185 14. In ‘‘The Sublime Offering,’’ Jean-Luc Nancy explains this dynamic of offering: ‘‘The offering retains of the ‘present’ implied by presentation only the gesture of presenting. The offering offers, carries and places before . . . but it does not install in presence’’ (Of the Sublime 47). 15. If Orpheus’s song comes forth from a fragmented body, Echo’s voice marks a radical disembodiment. Perhaps the difference between these two figures indicates the difference between music and storytelling, where ironically, Orpheus figures the storyteller and Echo the song. 16. This notion of the gift and its economy clearly has a long history that cannot be reviewed here. It must suffice at this point to mention that the trajectory from Bataille through multiple sites in Derrida in terms of general and restricted economies, hospitality, death, and Jean-Luc Nancy’s notions of offering, community, and singularity, provide the background for my argument. 17. Here we are reminded of the five intercalated days during which nine Egyptian gods, among them Osiris and Isis, were born. According to Plutarch, Osiris and Isis already consorted in the womb, therefore, are always already within the structure of an incestual relationship, which, however, given the temporality of their birth cannot be defined as such, since it does not belong to history and to laws. 18. ‘‘ ‘False’ unity, the simulacrum of unity, compromises it [unity] better than any direct challenge, which, in any case, is impossible’’ (Writing of the Disaster 2). 19. This name has been transcribed as Shehrazad and Shahrazad. In Persian, both pronunciations are common, while in Arabic the latter is the most used. The semantic value underscored here only works with Shahrazad. Scholarship on A Thousand and One Nights tells us that Shehrazad or Shahrzad means of ‘‘noble birth.’’ This etymology does not forbid the possibilities of other semantic values. 20. In chapter 3 of this book, I showed how A Thousand and One Nights may actually resist the argument that storytelling defers the death of the storyteller. I argue that the storyteller can tell the story precisely because she is already claimed by death. 21. See ‘‘Sketches of Fantasia.’’ However, she does refer to this text as ‘‘postcolonial,’’ which localizes it in a particular way. ‘‘Postcoloniality’’ cannot be the signifier for the unlocalizable. 22. See, for example, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, where Henry Corbin elaborates on the relationship between the imaginal worlds and the symbolic and esoteric knowledge in the thought of the Andalusian mystic. 23. See Jean-Luc Nancy’s Noli me tangere, where he analyzes Christ’s famous saying upon resurrection, ‘‘Do not touch me’’: ‘‘Between the scenes—outside the text—of resurrection and the scenes of encounter with the resuscitated, there is the entire difference that separates an imagination mixing the traits of the symbolic, the allegorical, and of mysticism, soliciting representation, and a story that invites us to understand that which no representation can sustain, that is, to understand that no presence presents the distancing where the very truth of presence distances itself ’’ (42; my translation). In Le livre, the movement figured by the First Disciple marks this difference in the transfiguration from cadavre invisible to cadavre errant, the

Notes to pages 185–191 221 becoming vertical of the cadaver. We are given the description of the preparation of the cadaver for burial and its sending away, without the scene of entombment and that of resurrection per se. 24. ‘‘Satan will take definitively the side of the body against language through a duplicity, a frenzy of desymbolization. He who symbolizes evil must separate himself from all symbols. . . . It seems to us that this desymbolizing frenzy does not want to situate itself simply inside language but in the wrenching of language from itself, in the corruption and the decomposition that murder, in a manner of speaking, every word’’ (Par-dessus 94). The fallen angel, which refers to Satan, who, as Khatibi points out, is both an angel (fallen) and a demon, a jinn, may refer to this desymbolized body of language, the poetry that refuses to entomb itself, as Suzanne Gauch argues in ‘‘Sketches of Fantasia.’’ The affinities between Khatibi and Bataille’s thought on the relationship between literature and evil seem clear. 25. See Michael Sells’s article ‘‘Ibn ‘Arabi’s Polished Mirror: Perspective Shift and Meaning Event,’’ which uses Ibn ‘Arabi’s image of polished mirror at the beginning of Fusus al Hikam (Bezels of Wisdom) to reveal the shift in perspective within Ibn ‘Arabi’s own writings and construction of meaning.

Conclusion: Engendering Catastrophes 1. In the myth of Osiris, Seth, Osiris’s brother, cuts Osiris’s body into fourteen pieces and scatters it across Egypt. Isis, Osiris’s wife and sister, finds all the pieces except the phallus, which is supposed to have been eaten by the fish in the Nile. Osiris is the god of fertility, as well as the god of the underworld. 2. ‘‘The mere evocation of Maghrebian maternity as a creative space consecrates the triumph of the spoken word and oral lore as parole over written work or langue, the traditional privilege of males. Ironically, the son-writers will, however, coopt the maternal creation by capturing parole for the written langue’’ (15). 3. I am aware of the conjunction between this mode of femininity and the male gender of the authors I have chosen for this project. In Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, He´le`ne Cixous equates in very strong terms writing and childbirth. She too privileges the dream scene as the inaugural scene of writing, but unlike my argument here, she maintains that ‘‘the unconscious tells us a book is a scene of childbirth, delivery, abortion, breast-feeding’’ and that ‘‘a woman who writes is a woman who dreams of children’’ (74). This intimate relationship that she establishes leads her to wonder: ‘‘I don’t know how men dream when they start writing, though I do wonder about it. I cannot imagine they dream that they bear children. So it must be something else. I’d like to know what the equivalent or substitute is’’ (78). She uses this distinction between gender in writers to argue for the difference between Clarice Lispector’s writing style and Jean Genet’s: ‘‘Cuts keep interfering in Genet’s texts. Inside the pieces there is no cut since he has a double economy: while the text is clear-cut, inside there is a circuit of the order of ‘feminine’ continuity. In Clarice’s texts it is impossible to make a cut. The whole of her text is so necessary, she has descended so exactly to the place of writing that no matter where we are,

222 Notes to page 191 we are always in the midst of writing’’ (133). I am not convinced of this difference as a general theory, though it may be the case when speaking of Genet and Lispector. First, I hesitate to designate masculinity in terms of a double economy and femininity in terms of a single economy of continuity. Second, I am not convinced that this difference directly corresponds to the gender of the writer, and that all this is related to the difference between women and men with regards to childbearing. The only relation that at this point I see between childbearing and femininity as a dynamic of writing is a distancing relationship. In other words, I suspect that the question of childbearing is crucial to the question of literary engendering, but as distancing rather than intimacy. 4. In Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, Derrida discusses the kind of displacements that the feminine introduces into the philosophical discourse on truth. The alignment between femininity and divisibility, that is, between femininity and that which resists appropriation by the foundational structures of metaphysical thought, renders truth a question of surface, a question of style (in Nietzsche), suspending the foundational claims of philosophy’s discourse on truth, including the truth of woman and of femininity. ‘‘The question of the woman suspends the decidable opposition of true and non-true and inaugurates the epochal regime of quotation marks which is to be enforced for every concept belonging to the system of philosophical decidability. The hermeneutic project which postulates a true sense of the text is disqualified under this regime. Reading is freed from the horizon of the meaning or truth of being, liberated from the values of the product’s production or the present’s presence. Whereupon the question of style is immediately unloosed as a question of writing. . . . The stylate spur (e´peron style´) rips through the veil. It rents it not only in order to see or produce the (same) thing, but undoes the self-opposition, the opposition of veiled/unveiled (sailed/unsailed) which has folded over on itself; truth in the guise of production, the unveiling/dissimulation of the product in presence, is dismantled’’ (106–7; translation modified).

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Index

abandonment, 207n15; Aveuglante and, 63–64 Abdel-Jaouad, He´di, 191 abjection, Cavalier and, 95–97 Abraham, 62–63, 219n8 absolutes, pense´e-autre and, 130 absurdity: Aveuglante and, 64; Cavalier and, 99 Adorno, Theodor, 36 African literature, 1, 193n1; overemphasis on catastrophe in, 4–5; theory and, 195n10 Agamben, Giorgio, 60, 66, 206n11, 213n17 Amour bilingue (Khatibi), 11, 121–52 androgyny, Le livre and, 155, 158–59, 164–67, 176–77 angels, 217n5, 219n11 annihilation: Amour and, 142; Le livre and, 167 anonymous, feminine and, 190–91 Antelme, Robert, 66 anthropology: and literary studies, 1–2; pense´e-autre and, 124 anxiety: and catastrophe, 9; Murambi and, 31, 34, 37 appearance, Le livre and, 162–63, 166– 67, 169 approach, Khatibi on, 143 Arabic, Khatibi on, 123 architecture, Le livre and, 157, 161, 172 Aristotle, Khatibi on, 123 art, Murambi and, 26–27 asymmetry, pense´e-autre and, 127–28

Avicenna, 219n11 avowal, term, 87 Badiou, Alain, 203n31 banality, Murambi and, 45 bare life: Aveuglante and, 60–64; term, 60, 206n11 Bataille, Georges, 71, 141–42, 153, 175, 177 beauty, Le livre and, 163, 166, 169–70, 181 beginnings, Cavalier and, 89–92 bendrology, 210n4 ben Jelloun, Tahar, 153; Cette aveuglante absence de lumie`re, 11, 51–85, 190 Bensussan, Ge´rard, 59 Betlem, Trix, 54 bi-langue, 136–37; term, 215n11 Binebine, Aziz, 51, 55 Blanchot, Maurice: on anonymous, 37; on cadaver, 171; on catastrophe, 196n13; on disempowerment, 198n18; on hope, 205n9; on humanity, 66; on image, 181; on interruption, 145; on naming, 203n23; on Narcissus, 168; on night, 215n13; on obscurity, 203n30; on present, 57, 137; on re´cit, 150; on repetition, 194n6; on simulacrum, 177; on time, 91, 151; on writing, 7 La blessure du nom propre (Khatibi), 150 blood, Murambi and, 26, 28, 32, 41–42 body: Amour and, 136, 140–41, 143–44, 148; Aveuglante and, 74; Cavalier and,

231

232 Index 96–97, 115–16; Khatibi on, 130, 132; Le livre and, 155–56, 158; Nancy on, 211n7 bones, Murambi and, 39–40, 44–45 Bourequat brothers, 54, 205n5 breath, Aveuglante and, 71–75, 77–78 Bruguie`re, Jean-Louis, 200n6 Buci-Glucksmann, Christine, 134, 144 Burton, Richard, 199n24 Butler, Judith, 207n17 cadaver, 96; Amour and, 154; Le livre and, 170–71, 174, 179–80, 184–85 Caillois, Roger, 127, 214n3 call, Cavalier and, 89, 92, 98 calligraphy, Khatibi on, 134 Camus, Albert, 70, 82–83 carnival, Le livre and, 170–71 catastrophe: Amour and, 121, 137, 140– 41, 147; Aveuglante and, 51, 77; Cavalier and, 87, 96, 111; dimensions of, 5–6, 191–92; Diop and, 16; gender and, 188–92; Le livre and, 153, 175, 183; mathematical theory on, 196n13; Murambi and, 17, 46; and mysticism, 154; and re´cit, 1–15, 191–92; term, 6–7, 9 Caton-Jones, Michael, 202n16 Le Cavalier et son ombre (Diop), 11, 86– 120; feminine and, 189–90; structure of, 89–90 certainty, Murambi and, 34 Cette aveuglante absence de lumie`re (ben Jelloun), 11, 51–85; feminine and, 190 chance, Aveuglante and, 66 Chebel, Malek, 199n26 Cixous, He´le`ne, 211n12, 221n3 coherence, Murambi and, 38–39 community: Aveuglante and, 83–84; Cavalier and, 94–95; Le livre and, 156, 186–87; Murambi and, 23, 26; pense´e-autre and, 131 continuity, Khatibi on, 125 Curie, Pierre, 214n3

date, Derrida on, 203n22 dead present, 137; Le livre and, 161, 181 death: Amour and, 136–37, 145, 148; Aveuglante and, 55–58, 65; Camus and, 83; Cavalier and, 97–98, 104–6, 108, 113; Diop on, 211n12; Le livre and, 168–69, 179–80; Murambi and, 28–29, 32, 39, 42, 47–48; Nancy on, 220n23 decision, Derrida on, 209n deferral, Le livre and, 179 demonic: Aveuglante and, 69–71; Cavalier and, 110; A Thousand and One Nights and, 212n15. See also Satan Derrida, Jacques: on date, 203n22; on decision, 209n; on ethics, 118; on feminine, 222n4; on forgiveness, 203n28; on future, 59; on Lacan, 210n5; on laughter, 202n18; on law, 101; on memory, 201n14, 202n15; on repetition, 10; on sublime, 33; on survival, 209n33; on transcendence, 196n11 destiny, Cavalier and, 94–95, 113, 120 Dib, Mohammad, 153 Didi-Huberman, Georges: on breath, 208n26; on face, 80; on image, 75, 77, 202n21; on language, 73; on speech, 36; on tomb, 212n14; on vision, 211n13 difference: Le livre and, 164, 182; pense´eautre and, 122–32 Diop, Boubacar Boris: background of, 16–17; Le Cavalier et son ombre, 11, 86–120, 189–90; Murambi, le livre des ossements, 11, 16–50, 190 disaster, term, 6–7 disempowerment, 35–36, 38, 198n18 disorientation, Amour and, 145 dispersion, Le livre and, 166 distance: Aveuglante and, 58, 64, 67, 73; Le livre and, 166, 168; pense´e-autre and, 126 divisibility: Derrida on, 222n4; Murambi and, 29

Index 233 Djebar, Assia, 206n15 Doomi Golo (Diop), 16 double critique, Khatibi on, 123 double movement, 74–75, 126, 139, 142, 213n2 doubling: Cavalier and, 93; and storytelling, 11 dreams: Amour and, 137–39, 142; Aveuglante and, 61, 76–77; Le livre and, 165; Murambi and, 40, 48–49 duration: Amour and, 141–42; Aveuglante and, 51–85; Le livre and, 177; Murambi and, 52 Echo, 174–75, 220n15 ‘‘e´criture pensante,’’ term, 4, 121 ecstasy, Amour and, 142–43, 146 Eltringham, Nigel, 203n27 endurance, Aveuglante and, 66–67 L’enfant de sable (ben Jelloun), 51, 204n1 error, Le livre and, 172, 176 ethics: and catastrophe, 8; Cavalier and, 107–8, 114, 117–18; Murambi and, 18, 29–30, 34–35, 38, 44 exceptionality, and catastrophe, 8 excess: Amour and, 135–36; Aveuglante and, 65–66, 84; Cavalier and, 97; and feminine, 188; Le livre and, 171, 173– 77, 181–82; pense´e-autre and, 123, 127; re´cit and, 12 exchange, logic of: Aveuglante and, 60; and catastrophe, 8; Cavalier and, 109; Le livre and, 176–77, 181; pense´eautre and, 127–28 extraordinary, Cavalier and, 100 face: Aveuglante and, 76, 79–80, 84; Le livre and, 166–67; Murambi and, 27– 28. See also figure: figuration failure: Amour and, 152; Murambi and, 18 fascination, Amour and, 144–45 father. See patriarchy Fe´dida, Pierre, 73–75

feminine: and catastrophe, 188–92; Cavalier and, 101, 113, 115–16, 203n26; Derrida on, 222n4; Le livre and, 155, 163–66, 169; Murambi and, 34, 47–48; writing and, 221n3 fiction: Le livre and, 159–60; versus re´cit, 3 figure, figuration: Aveuglante and, 74, 76, 80; Cavalier and, 88, 100–103, 106, 108, 113–14; Le livre and, 153–87; term, 208n24 forgetfulness: Aveuglante and, 59, 61–62; and catastrophe, 10; Cavalier and, 91; Le livre and, 167, 186; Murambi and, 25 forgiveness: Derrida on, 203n28; Murambi and, 43–44 fountain of Zam-Zam, 206n14; Aveuglante and, 63 fragmentation, Le livre and, 161 France, 200n6; Murambi and, 18, 32, 36 francophonie, 1; Diop and, 16; term, 199n1 freedom, 214n5; Le livre and, 179; pense´e-autre and, 127, 129–30 Freud, Sigmund, 208n26 future: Aveuglante and, 56, 59; Camus and, 83; Cavalier and, 109, 118–19; Le livre and, 179; Murambi and, 48–49 Gage, Jennifer, 215n10 Galland, Antoine, 14 Gauch, Suzanne, 184, 216n2, 218n7 gaze: Cavalier and, 107–8; Khatibi on, 122; Le livre and, 156–57, 165–66; Murambi and, 48 gender, and catastrophe, 188–92 Genet, Jean, 221n3 genocide: Cavalier and, 114–17; term, 9 genre, Amour and, 149 Ghazoul, Ferial, 14 gift, economy of, 175–76, 220n16 Gikandi, Simon, 1–2

234 Index God, gods: Le livre and, 160; Murambi and, 45; Nancy on, 217n6 Gourevitch, Philip, 200n5 guardian figure: Cavalier and, 98–103, 107–8; Murambi and, 30–31, 39, 43–45 guilt: Cavalier and, 107; Murambi and, 26–27, 34, 38, 41, 43–44 Hachad, Salah, 55 Hallward, Peter, 196n11 Harrow, Kenneth, 19, 197n14 Hartman, Geoffrey, 6–7, 198n18 Hassan II, king of Morocco, 51, 54, 61 haunting: Amour and, 138, 145–46; Cavalier and, 108–9, 112; Le livre and, 174; Murambi and, 20–21 hearing, pense´e-autre and, 131 Hegel, G. W. F., 36 Heidegger, Martin, 218n7 history (historicism, historicity): Amour and, 136; Aveuglante and, 53; Khatibi on, 125–26; Murambi and, 22–26 Holocaust, 197n14; and concepts of catastrophe, 7–8; and literature, 36 hope: Aveuglante and, 55–57, 59; Blanchot on, 205n9; Cavalier and, 109, 116–19; Murambi and, 48 hospitality, Le livre and, 165 humanity, 207n19, 209n34; Aveuglante and, 66 Ibn ‘Arabi, 217n4 identity: Khatibi on, 122, 125; Le livre and, 158, 162; Murambi and, 22–26, 42 ignorance, Murambi and, 31–32, 40–41 image: Aveuglante and, 74–75, 77–79, 202n21; Le livre and, 181 imagination: Aveuglante and, 58–59, 61– 62, 67, 74–75; Cavalier and, 100, 105; Murambi and, 33 immeasurable: and catastrophe, 8–9; pense´e-autre and, 129

impossibility: Murambi and, 17–18; and survival, 10 incest, 220n17; Le livre and, 176–77 indeterminacy: Amour and, 137; Aveuglante and, 52, 58, 65; Cavalier and, 109; Murambi and, 47–48 innocence: Cavalier and, 107; Murambi and, 27, 34, 41, 43–44 Isaac, 62 Ishmael, 62–63, 206n14, 219n8 Islam, 216n17; Amour and, 121; Khatibi on, 123, 134; Le livre and, 153, 158, 160, 183–86 Johnson, Barbara, 210n5 Julien, Eileen, 2 justice: Aveuglante and, 54; Cavalier and, 88, 118–19 Ka’ba stone, 219n8; Aveuglante and, 54, 62, 67, 79–80; Le livre and, 161 Kafka, Franz, 65, 100–101, 211n9 Kagame, Paul, 200n6 Kant, Immanuel, 33 Kaveena (Diop), 16 Khatibi, Abdelkebir, 102–3, 211n11; Amour bilingue, 11, 121–52; background of, 121; Le livre du sang, 11, 153–88 Kierkegaard, Søren, 33 King, Adele, 193n3 Kofman, Sarah, 198n18 Kristeva, Julia, 96, 169 Kroll, Catherine, 201n8 Lacan, Jacques, 94, 210n5 Lamko, Koulsy, 200n4 language: Amour and, 138–41, 149, 151; Aveuglante and, 55, 68–72, 80; Cavalier and, 87; Didi-Huberman on, 73; Le livre and, 174–75; Murambi and, 17–18, 20–21, 35–36, 38, 42, 45–47; of survivors, 10. See also narrative Laroui, Abdallah, 125

Index 235 laughter: Aveuglante and, 64; Derrida on, 202n18; Murambi and, 33 Law: Cavalier and, 86–87, 100–103, 108; term, 86 law: Aveuglante and, 61–63; Cavalier and, 86, 99–100, 115; Le livre and, 177; term, 87; A Thousand and One Nights and, 103–4 Levinas, Emmanuel, 91 Lewin, Bertram, 77 life, Khatibi on, 128–29 light, Aveuglante and, 71 Lingis, Alphonso, 68, 207n21 Lispector, Clarice, 221n3 literary studies, 1 literature: Nancy on, 217n6; term, 132 Le livre du sang (Khatibi), 11, 153–88 love: Amour and, 145–49, 151; Le livre and, 163, 168, 176; Nancy on, 216n16 Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois, 7, 22 madness: Aveuglante and, 60, 65, 70; Cavalier and, 110, 113; Le livre and, 172–74 Maghreb, Khatibi on, 122–23 magic realism, 208n28 Mallarme´, Ste´phane, 141 Marzouki, Ahmed, 55 Masnavi, 219n13 materiality: Aveuglante and, 68–70, 74; Le livre and, 158, 161 Mawlawi order, Le livre and, 155, 163 Mbembe, Achille, 195n9 McNee, Lisa, 197n14 Meddeb, Abdelwahab, 153, 207n15 memory: Aveuglante and, 53, 59, 71, 78– 79, 81–82; Derrida on, 201n14, 202n15; Murambi and, 28–29; Rothberg on, 198n16 metaphysics: Khatibi on, 122–23, 134; Le livre and, 183–84 Miller, Christopher, 194n8 mirror: Cavalier and, 111–12; Le livre and, 185–86

modernity, Cavalier and, 118 Mone´nembo, Tierno, 200n4, 203n25 Morocco, 51, 122, 204n3, 205n4 mourning: Aveuglante and, 75; Murambi and, 37 Murambi, le livre des ossements (Diop), 11, 16–50; feminine and, 190; structure of, 19–20; and survival, 52 music: Khatibi on, 132; Le livre and, 161; Nietzsche on, 133 Mwangi, Meja, 18, 200n4 mystical, term, 153–54 mysticism, 216n17; Khatibi on, 128; Le livre and, 153, 161, 163, 183–86; term, 153–54 myth: Le livre and, 159; Nancy on, 217n6 naming: Amour and, 142, 146; Blanchot on, 203n23; and catastrophe, 9; Le livre and, 178; Murambi and, 36–37, 46, 49 Nancy, Jean-Luc: on body, 211n7; on community, 94; on death, 220n23; on demonic, 69; on double movement, 213n2; on freedom, 130, 214n5; on love, 216n16; on offering, 220n14; on portrait, 79; on singularity, 196n11; on thought, 126; on withdrawal of gods, 217n6 Narcissus, 166, 168, 170 narrative, narration: and catastrophe, 1–15; Cavalier and, 92, 111; Le livre and, 159–60; Murambi and, 17–18, 22–23; term, 3. See also re´cit narrative voice: Amour and, 135, 140, 146–49, 151–52; Aveuglante and, 58– 59, 76; Cavalier and, 89, 94, 108; Le livre and, 156; Murambi and, 20–21, 37; in A Thousand and One Nights, 15 nature, Murambi and, 45 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 119–20, 133, 167, 194n6 night: Amour and, 137–38, 140–42;

236 Index Blanchot on, 215n13; Khatibi on, 133–34; Le livre and, 172, 176 novel, Amour and, 149 La nuit sacre´e (ben Jelloun), 51 ‘‘obliviscence,’’ 91 obscurity: Blanchot on, 203n30; Murambi and, 48 offering, 220n14 ‘‘L’oiseau conteur’’ (Khatibi), 150 Ong, Walter, 210n4 oral storytelling, 2; re´cit and, 4; and talking drum, 210n4 ordinary, Cavalier and, 100 origin: Aveuglante and, 62; Khatibi on, 122; Le livre and, 169, 177; Murambi and, 23–26, 35; A Thousand and One Nights and, 14 orphic turn, 14; Le livre and, 159, 161–62 oscillation: Khatibi and, 126, 130, 135– 36, 213n2; and re´cit, 4 Osiris, 158, 190, 220n17, 221n1 otherness, thought and, 122–32 Ouazzani, Abdesselam, 144 Pace´re´, Toting Frederic, 210n4 pain: Aveuglante and, 68; Lingis on, 207n21. See also suffering Par-dessus l’e´paule (Khatibi), 164 passivity: Amour and, 143–44; Le livre and, 165; Murambi and, 30 patriarchy: Aveuglante and, 62–64, 82; Cavalier and, 116; and feminine, 191; Murambi and, 25, 27, 32, 42 pense´e-autre, 122–32, 142–43; and Amour, 134–35; and love, 147–48; term, 123–24 perpetrators: Murambi and, 24; term, 21 philosophy, Nancy on, 217n6 photography, Cavalier and, 105–6, 108 pity, Murambi and, 34 Platonic thought, 155, 159, 183, 186, 217n4

plurality: Amour and, 149; Murambi and, 26; pense´e-autre and, 126–27 politics: Aveuglante and, 53, 60; feminine and, 190–91; Le livre and, 186–87; Murambi and, 26–27, 44; overemphasis on, 4–5 possibility: Aveuglante and, 59; Cavalier and, 118–19; Khatibi on, 132; Murambi and, 41, 48–49; and survival, 10 postcoloniality, discourse of, 1 postmodern condition, and re´cit, 7 poverty, pense´e-autre and, 124–25, 127–28, 132 pre´-mort, Aveuglante and, 55–56, 60, 71, 83, 85 present: Amour and, 137; Aveuglante and, 57; Cavalier and, 91 prison, Aveuglante and, 51–85 project, artistic, 18 prophecy, Cavalier and, 101 prostitution, Le livre and, 155, 177–78 Quayson, Ato, 193n4, 194n8, 195n9 Rashidian, Ziba, 213n1 reading, Khatibi on, 132 re´cit: Amour and, 149–52; Blanchot on, 150; and catastrophe, 1–15, 191–92; Cavalier and, 90; Diop and, 50; feminine and, 188–89; Khatibi and, 150–51; term, 3–4; and thought, 140–41 reconciliation, 197n15; Murambi and, 26–27, 35–36 relationality, ethics and, 8 religion: Aveuglante and, 60, 62–63; Cavalier and, 101; Le livre and, 159– 60. See also Islam repetition, 194n6; Amour and, 135, 152; and catastrophe, 10; Cavalier and, 90; Le livre and, 159, 184; and singularity, 5 representation: Cavalier and, 106; Le livre and, 170; Murambi and, 26–27, 29

Index 237 resemblance: Cavalier and, 90–91; Le livre and, 158, 164 resistance, Aveuglante and, 58, 60–61, 64 responsibility: Cavalier and, 99–100, 107; Murambi and, 27, 29–30, 38 risk: Cavalier and, 113; and pense´eautre, 124; and storytelling, 93 river, Murambi and, 23, 26, 42 Rothberg, Michael, 8, 197n14, 197n16 Rumi, 155, 170 Rurangwa, Jean-Marie Vianney, 200n4 ‘‘Rwanda: Ecrire par devoir de me´moire,’’ 16, 18–19, 200n4 Rwandan genocide, 200n6; Cavalier and, 114–15; Murambi and, 16–50 sacrifice: Aveuglante and, 62–63; Cavalier and, 114–15; Le livre and, 173, 181 sadness: Aveuglante and, 78; term, 208n27 Santner, Eric, 203n31, 207n19 Satan: Khatibi and, 155, 164, 173, 185, 219n9, 219n12, 221n24. See also demonic Schmitt, Carl, 213n18 seduction, Amour and, 144–45 self-protection, and storytelling, 93 self-reflexivity, A Thousand and One Nights and, 14 self-sufficiency, pense´e-autre and, 127, 130 Sellin, Eric, 132 Semunjanga, Josias, 201n12, 203n26 senses: Amour and, 139–40; Aveuglante and, 73; Khatibi on, 134; pense´eautre and, 131–32 shadow: Cavalier and, 86–120; Nietzsche on, 119–20 Shahrazad, 14–15, 220n17; Cavalier and, 103 Shapiro, Gary silence: Aveuglante and, 71–72, 81; ben Jelloun and, 51; Cavalier and, 102–3; Khatibi on, 132; Murambi and, 29– 31, 39, 46–47

simulacrum, principle of, Le livre and, 158, 168, 177 singularity, 195n8, 196n11; Amour and, 135; Cavalier and, 117–18; concepts of, 5–6; ethics and, 8; Le livre and, 156, 183; Murambi and, 33–35; and re´cit, 4 sliding movement: Amour and, 133–35; and feminine, 191; Khatibi on, 134; Murambi and, 24 smell, Aveuglante and, 72–73, 78–79 smile, Murambi and, 32–34 sobbing: Amour and, 140–42; Aveuglante and, 78 solitude, Aveuglante and, 75 Sovereignty: Cavalier and, 115; term, 87–88; A Thousand and One Nights and, 103 sovereignty: Aveuglante and, 61; Cavalier and, 115–16; feminine and, 189; term, 87–88; A Thousand and One Nights and, 103–4 Soyinka, Wole, 197n15 space: Aveuglante and, 52–53; Le livre and, 157, 171–72 speech: Amour and, 142, 148–49; Murambi and, 29, 47, 49–50. See also under narrative spirituality, Aveuglante and, 60 Steigler, Bernard, 209n34 storytelling, 2–3; Amour and, 150; Aveuglante and, 70–71, 76, 80–81, 83–84; and catastrophe, 5, 191–92; Cavalier and, 86–120; feminine and, 188–89; Le livre and, 179–82; Murambi and, 46; and re´cit, 3–4; A Thousand and One Nights and, 14, 104 strangeness, Aveuglante and, 68–70 subjectivity, and re´cit, 4 sublime, Murambi and, 33 substitution, Le livre and, 182–83 suffering: Amour and, 142; Aveuglante and, 51–85; Cavalier and, 94, 98; hierarchy of, 8; Murambi and, 40; pense´e-autre and, 129

238 Index Suhrawardi, 217n4, 219n11 suicide: Aveuglante and, 81; Le livre and, 156 surfaces, Le livre and, 162, 184–85 survival: Aveuglante and, 51–55, 58, 60, 71; Derrida on, 209n33; Murambi and, 20, 28–30, 41–42, 47, 49–50; re´cit and, 6 survivors: Murambi and, 16–50; speech of, 10; term, 21–22 symbolism, Le livre and, 184–85 Tadjo, Ve´ronique, 200n4 talking drums, 210n4 Tazmamart, 51, 53–56 temporality: Murambi and, 37; and storytelling, 2–3 theory, and African literature, 195n10 thought: Amour and, 121–52; Aveuglante and, 58; Le livre and, 161–62; and re´cit, 140–41 A Thousand and One Nights, 14–15, 103–4, 199n24, 212n15; Amour and, 150; Aveuglante and, 80–81; Cavalier and, 92, 100–101, 110; feminine and, 189; Khatibi on, 211n11; Le livre and, 178–79 time: Amour and, 137–38, 140, 147; Aveuglante and, 56–57, 81; Blanchot and, 151; Camus and, 83; Cavalier and, 91, 93; Murambi and, 17–18, 29, 45–46; pense´e-autre and, 125–26; and survival, 22. See also duration tragedy: and catastrophe, 6–7; Murambi and, 27

transcendence, 196n11; Aveuglante and, 58–59, 61–62, 67, 74–75; Le livre and, 153, 157, 160, 167, 171, 186 truth, Murambi and, 35–36 turn, and catastrophe, 4, 6–7, 9–10 unity: Le livre and, 158; Murambi and, 25–27 verticality, Le livre and, 184–85 victims: Aveuglante and, 60; Murambi and, 20–21, 24; term, 21 violence, 195n9; Cavalier and, 114–15; Le livre and, 158, 182 Virginia Tech tragedy, 198n17 visibility, Le livre and, 161, 165–66, 168 voice: of Echo, 220n15; Murambi and, 31. See also narrative voice Wabe´ri, Abdourahman, 200n4 Wahbi, Hassan, 164 wandering: Amour and, 146–47; Le livre and, 163, 179–82 Western metaphysics, 122–23, 183 whirling dervishes, Le livre and, 155, 163 Wise, Christopher, 210n4 Wolof, 16, 50 writing: Aveuglante and, 70–71; Cavalier and, 105–6; and feminine, 191, 221n3; Khatibi on, 132, 134; Murambi and, 18 Zam-Zam, 206n14; Aveuglante and, 63 ˇ izˇek, Slavoj, 210n5, 212n16 Z Zoroastrianism, 217n4