The Algerian Works of Hélène Cixous: at the Triple Intersection of European, North African and Religious Nationalisms

Abstract

The theme 'Jewish conditions and theories of nationalism', relating particularly to the twentieth century, can be connected to Hélène Cixous the thinker, through her childhood experiences in Algeria during the Second World War. Thereafter, she would spend 10 years in a country on the verge of what some have termed a 'civil war' between 'European' inhabitants, settled multiple generations previously, and an increasingly angry, marginalised, and dispossessed (Muslim) indigenous population. Importantly, Cixous has also called on her experiences in Algeria after Algerian independence, which is extremely rare given that the vast majority of non-Muslim departures took place up until 1962. In this way, her early life history and her intellectual trajectory, positioned as a writer of gendered and then ethnic difference (from Paris), and the relationships she garnered with Algerian women in the 1990s during the dark years of violence in Algeria, as well as her subsequent process of return to Algeria against a backdrop of a narrowly defined French national identity, are at a triple intersection with the evolutions of Algerian, French and Jewish nationalisms. This paper engages with the ambiguities and tensions of Hélène Cixous' experience of and writing about Algeria combining close analysis of her literary production with our meetings in her Parisian home.Keywords Cixous . Algeria . France . Jewishness . Deconstructionism . Postcolonialism ...I would hold on to what I call Bmy algeriance^, a vast set of rather disparate reflections that arise around the notions of country, native country, country of origin, names of country and around this word 'country', which burrows into the mind's wax and, into the heart of whoever says it, spreads la paix et la pagaille, peace and chaos, the one as much as the Other.

Activating Jewish Women’s Bodies with Eugénie Foa (1796-1852) and Hélène Cixous (1937-)

“…In the case of Hélène Cixous, whose relationship to Judaism posed its own set of obstacles, as well as having an exceedingly complex lineage, her work takes on the task of revising the conflicting definition she inherits as part of her experience as a French-Jewish woman at the convergence of several unstable national identities. Throughout what has been referred to as her "Algerian works" (Everett, 2017), it can be seen how Cixous's political consciousness was forcefully awakened in these formative years where she witnessed, as a female Jewish body at once on the inside and outside of both groups, the control and manipulation of the two populations, the Muslim and the Jewish, pinned in opposition so as to be more vulnerable to internal dissolution and siege by France. In the decades preceding these works, the cause of women, what she herself has identified as her first cause (Cixous and Assouline, 2022), had been amply engaged with throughout her literary oeuvre and finds a cohesive place in this Algerian text as a strikingly nuanced attack on the control of women's bodies within this network of competing national interests and identities.…”