Letter to Zohra Drif

Cixous, Hélène; Prenowitz, Eric

doi:10.1353/lit.2003.0007

Cited by 7 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Contrary to the addition of languages in bilingualism or multilingualism (a structure Derrida called "two + n"), he instead underwent a "double interdict" 102 that barred him (in different ways, with different stakes) from straightforward identification with both French (as his "mother tongue") and Arabic (as the predominant native language)-a structure that resembles Cixous's account of her liminal position in Clos Salambier and the Lycée Fromentin, put in a nutshell by her as: "I survived between the bars." 103 It was a position that meant at once being between sides and on both sides of the "traumatizing brutality of what is called the colonial war, colonial cruelty-some, including myself," Derrida writes, "experienced it from both sides." 104 A narrative of ownership and self-presence in relation to one's language or identity had therefore been made impossible because the twofold ban on French/ Arabic correspondingly "interdicted access to the identifications that enable the pacified autobiography."…”

Section: Algerian Disordersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Algerian Disorders: On Deconstructive Postcolonialism in Cixous and Derrida

Kaiser

2015

Postcolon. Lit. inq

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This article explores Hélène Cixous's and Jacques Derrida's explicit revisiting of their Algerian memories, especially in their later work (mainly Reveries of the Wild Woman and Monolingualism of the Other). These texts offer a specifically deconstructive response to the colonial project in Algeria, attempting to think non-appropriative relations to otherness and processes of identification that exceed a self/other binary. Investigating the colonial principle that manifested itself in Algeria from the vantage point of their Judeo-Franco-Maghrebian situatedness, they derive from this position not accounts of cultural particularity, but analyses of (and alternatives to) colonial practices of identification: analyzing colonial and identity politics as harmful to a fundamental relationality to otherness and affirming a "spectral" zone without belonging that nonetheless carves out a life with, toward, and of the other, on the others' sides, relational without being oblivious of antagonisms and violence.Modes of life inspire ways of thinking; modes of thinking create ways of living. Life activates thought, and thought affirms life. Of this pre-Socratic unity we no longer have even the slightest idea... -a unity that turns an anecdote of life into an aphorism of thought, and an evaluation of thought into a new perspective on life.-Gilles Deleuze 1Of all the cultural wealth I have received, that I have inherited, my Algerian culture has sustained me the most.-Jacques Derrida 2In 1990, Robert Young was one of the first to note a wider relation between the emergence of poststructuralism and "Algeria"-a term in quotation marks here to Birgit Mara Kaiser teaches comparative literature at Utrecht University.

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Section: Algerian Disordersmentioning

confidence: 99%