L 'Algérie en fie ': Remembering Colonial Algeria in the Works

151 Pages·2002·8.85 MB·English

L 'Algérie en fie ':
Remembering Colonial Algeria in the Works
of Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida
by
Christopher Churchill
A thesis submitted to the Department of History
in codormity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts
Queen's University
Kingston, Ontario
Aupst, 2001
O Copyright by Christopher Churchill, 2001
141 National Library Bibliothèque nationale
ofCamda du Canada
Acquisitionsand Acquisitionset
Bibliographie Services sewices bibliographiques
395 WeUington Street 395, rue Wellington
Ottawa ON KI A ON4 Ottawa ON KIA ûN4
Canada Canada
The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accordé une licence non
exclusive licence ailowing the exclusive permettant a la
National Library of Canada to Bibliothèque nationale du Canada de
reproduce, loan, distribute or seii reproduire, prêter, distribuer ou
copies of this thesis in microform, vendre des copies de cette thèse sous
paper or electronic formats. la forme de microfiche/film, de
reproduction sur papier ou sur format
électronique.
The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriété du
copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d' auteur qui protège cette thèse.
thesis nor substantial extracts fiom it Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels
may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés
reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son
permission. autorisation.
ABSTRACT
This study explores the formative influence of colonial Algeria upon Jacques
Denida and Hélène Cixous. Focusing on notions of identity within the history and
histotiography of French Algerian society, this thesis argues that Derrida and Cixous,
exiled Algerian Jews, attempt in their philosophic writings to grapple with a colonial
expenence of rnarginalization, assimilation and historical effacement.
Denida and Cixous are too rarely read From the context, if any at ail, of their
Algerian heritage. Their writings respond in iarge mesure to the ambiguities of French
assimilation in a colonial mtting. This thesis begins by establishing the history of French
notions of !inguistic identity and civility pnor to the invasion of 1830, pivotal to French
plans to absorb Algeria within l'Union Française. It then examines the profound
divisions of ~lgerianso ciety, between French colons, Algerian Moslems and Jews, and
the failure of French assimilation within a colonial Algerian context. This thesis then
examines historical representations of identity thtough Algerian colonialist and anti-
colonialist writing, and the marginalization of Jews and Moslems in this literature.
Demda and Cixous respond to, and repeat, many of these representations of othemess in
their own works. They produce philosophic wtitings on topics of identity, othemess and
language whose particular colonial heritage is not ordy clear, but clarifies some of the
interpretive challenges to their work.
1 am very fortunate to have received generous support over the course of this
study. My thesis supe~sorD, r. Harold Mah, has provided endless enthusiasm,
perceptive cnticism, and gentle humour. It has been a great privilege to work with him.
The Faculty of the History Department at Queen's provided valuable advice, too often to
single anyone out, on a host of subjects related to this study. The Department's
secretanes were patient and kind beyond any humanly possible expectation.
1 would also Iike to especially thank the faculty of Concordia University's History
Depanment. Several years ago, 1 tentatively enrolled in a few university night courses in
Montréal while working as a dishwasher. Thanks to the inspiration of Dr. Fredenck
Krantz, Dr. John Hill, and especially Dr. Robert Tittler, 1 have decided on slightly more
sanitary pursuits.
1 am mon fortunate to have in my life a group of compassionate people 1 proudly
cal] my friends and family. They know who they are. Special thanks go to Josh, len and
Kat for their helpful comments and inspiration. My mother Elaine, and siblings, Erika,
Peter, Kimen, Amalie, David and George, 1 love you dl.
DEDICATION
For Tyler, rny nephew, with love.
CONTENTS
Abstract
Ac knowledgements
Dedication
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Conclusion
Bibliography
Vita
Jacques Demda and Hélène Cixous are two of the leading French poststructural
theorists of the last half-century. Their works critique the self-evident. rational
assumptions that obscure the ambiguity of language. Derrida and Cixous are also
celebrated acadernics and instructors in the leading academic institutions of France. They
have much in common: both are Algenan Jews who grew up in the last desperate days of
the French colony. Both left shortly before the bloody end of French Algena: Demda, for
the fint time, in 1949, Cixous in 1955. Though they are exiles, their writing has fiom
time to time retmed to their origins. In fact, one may argue that their origins have much
to suggest about the aims and sirategies of their philosophies.
Demda and Cixous are often situated within an intellectual framework of other
modem philosophers, but their experiences as Mgenan Jews, and what influence this
may have upon their work, is undervalued. Christopher Noms dismisses histoncizing
Demda at ail:
these influences cannot be simply read off h m D emda's texts as so many
'themes' or motivating factors. They oniy become relevant to his writing
insofar as they take the form of a teleniles interrogation of philosophy by
one who- for whatever resson-shares rather few of philosophy 's
'
tradi tional beliefs.
The same argument could be offered for ignoring the context of Michel de Montaigne's
huis.C ixous is appropriately contextualiteci as a French femùiia philosopher, dtamatist
and writer, but her very attitude to being French, as well as the origins of her ieminism,
should be traced back furthet than her departure from Oran and arrival in Paris as a young
1 Christopher Norris, Derrida, Cambridge Mass.: Harvard Univesity Ress, 1987.
Mid-centucy AIgeria, for Demda, witnessed a wculturale ffervescence" due to the
precipitant of war.' It is an historical tradition to explore the connections between anists'
and philosophe& experience of a political crisis and their subsequent intellectual
expression. Whether in Renaissance Florence. Tudor and Stuart England, or fin-de-siècle
Vienna, scholars trace particularly fmitful intellectual and artistic movements to the
fertile grounds of political ~~heavaAln. ~en during problem in discussing intellectuals and
their relationship to their traumatic formative experiences is that their writing often erases
or displaces their origins.' Julien Murphy keenly suggests that the Algenan Civil War
provoked the wave of kench poststructuralism in the second half of the twentieth
century. Murphy has perceived that the Algerian Civil War was a crisis of identity as
much as a cnsis of politics. For Murphy, this instauration is manifested in de Beauvoir's
CO-authoredD jamifa ~ou~achaT.'h is is a rich observation. but too vague: Murphy paints
the entire French intellectual comrnunity with the same bmh.
The struggle for identity within the context of Algerim decolonization never
threatened the identities of ethnically French intellectuals. It provided Camus, de
Beauvoir or Jean-Paul Sartre a contrasting heterogeneous, dystopian landscape by whose
'
Jacques Derrida, Monolinguolism of the Other; or. The Prothesir of Origin, translateci by Pamck Mensah*
(Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 50.
3 Sec for example, Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Poltics and History in Simeenth Cenq
Florence, New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1984; Christopha Hill, nte World Turned
Upside Down: Mical Eyes Duting the EnlglLrh Revolution, Penguin Book, 1975; Car1 E. Schorske, Fin-
de-Siècle Kenna, (Vintage Book, New York, 198 1).
For example, see Schorskc's essay 'Poiitia and Pamcide in Freud's Interpretation of Dreum," in Fin-
de-Siècle Kenna, (Vintage Book, New York, 198 1).
5 Julien Murphy's "Beauvoir and the Mgcrian War: Toward a fo stcolonial Ethics,- in Ferninisr
Interprerations of Beauvoir, pp. 263-97. The essay is concemeci with de Beauvoir's championhg of a
Muslim wman torturtd by French forces. Murphy demonstrates considerable élan, but the conclusions are
a perfect example of displacement. It is an incredibly machernus route Murphy sets out upon, as he
controversially labels Beauvoir an anti-humanist post colonial writer, then briefly quates such a stance
with Demda's deronsmictionism! Nonethcles, Murphy exceilentiy diagnoses the importance of Algena as
a formative experience in the writings of podtSanrtan &ch intellecruais. S ea iso Sorum, Inteliecruais
and Algeriwz War: Schalk, War and the Ivory Towr.
proximity one could contrast and thus refom French identity, but never jeopardize it .6
Their wtiting on Aigena exists within a long French tradition that lads back to
Montaigne's essay, 'On Cannibals'. For others, like Demda and Cixous, their coloniaI
origins within Algeria offered a more troubling relationship to notions of identity. They
were raised in the dangerous middle ground of the Jewish community of Algena, which,
in its one act of unity, fled North Af'rica at the end of the War. Jews in Algeria were never
easily placed within the French society of Algerian colonizers or the colonized Algerian
Moslem society; even the mernories of a Jewish Algena, afier the rupture of
decolonization, are now tentative and vague. Demda and Cixous witnessed the
destabilized final decades of the Manichean and violent world of French colonial society.
Their ambivalent colonial identities-assimilated francophones, qualified citizens of
France, but not French-are reconstnicted and sublimated within their later work and
textual criticism.
This study will examine a number of assumptions underlying French colonialism,
beginning with Enlightenment ideas about language, culture and civilization, upon which
the French based their strategy of colonization, for the creation of a transnational 'Union
Française '. The ambivalence Derrida and Cixous express in theu philosophic oeuvres to
these very themes may be understood as developing h m a n ambiguous position in
French Algerian society, and from an uncertain relationship to French culture and
language and European civilization. The ways in which Derrida and Cixous organize
their critiques of identity, a central theme to each of their works, are informed by colonial
'
Sonun Intellectrrals a dD ecolon&tion in France, Chapl Hill: The University of No& Carolina Press,
1977; Schalk, War and the Ivory Tower, passim.
representations of identity, and by the displacement and effacement of different
comrnunities within colonial histories.
French beliefs in the inherent vinues of civility present in their lanpuage
deterrnined the main thmt of French coloniaIim: it sought to assimilate indigenous
Algerians by displacing religious identities for linguistic ones. Key to French efforts for
assimilation in Aipria, was an assumption that a French identity was, by means of its
deveioped and civilized language, most able to partake in univeml values of reason. This
belief was iterated and developed in the growth and consolidation of Fiance as a nation-
state, expressed in Eniightenment philosophy, and informed French notions of colonial
assimilation. There was the belief that colonized peoples, if made French-speakers, would
become civilized, and would join a 'Greater Ftance' that would manifest the highesr and
most universal values of civility: such as liberté, egalité,f raternité.
The 1830 invasion of AIgeria introduced, for more than a century, this French
project of acculturation. Algeria was France's fim and most vital colony, Iying just
across the sea. The French divided Algena into three déparrements, making it legally part
of metropolitan France, yet few Algenans were granted French citizenship. The structure
of colonial Algeria was recognized legally, and distinguished by native Algerians, as
three distinct communities: Christian settlers, kws, and Moslems. Moslems were
eventually allowed the benefits of assimilation, if they renounced their religion, while
Jews were granted W c hc itizenship in 1870, to have it revoked under the Vichy regirne.
Moslem Algerian resistance to French de, never extinguished, flared up with the Sétif
massacres of 1945. By 1962, the French dream of assimilation, never Mly implemented
or pursued, yet promised nonetheless, was over. With it, fled the substantial populations