Reinventing Community: Collective Identity and Cultural Difference In
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Reinventing Conunnnity: Collective Identity and Cultural Difference in Recent Theory and Literature in French Thesis Presented by Jane Hiddleston For the Degree of Ph.D. University College London ProQuest Number: 10015049 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest 10015049 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Abstract This thesis examines representations of ‘community’ in recent critical theory and literature in French. I argue that the theoretical discourses that emerged through the eighties and nineties affirming the extinction of community need to be rethought. Derrida, Lyotard and Nancy have all suggested that the notion of the ‘in-common’ be replaced with attention to radically diverse and dissimilar beings, arguing that consensus is usually both dangerous and illusory. However, while these conclusions serve to a certain extent to rescue particular cultural perspectives from appropriation by assimilative discourses, the emphasis on intractable difference also risks perpetuating fragmentation and marginalisation. By juxtaposing theory with socio-political debates on multiculturalism in France, I demonstrate how a conception of the coexistence of cultural specificity with various forms of dialogue constitutes a more accurate depiction of actual community formations, as well as providing a more effective means to counteract prejudice. I then use Nancy’s more recent work to show how singular beings continually converge and diverge within a wider interactive network. The rest of the thesis explores the complex mediations between singularity and collectivity represented in a range of texts written in French. The intersection of diverse cultural positions is enacted in representations of bilingualism and multilingualism; Khatibi and Glissant, for example, evoke the ways in which any language or idiom is unsettlingly shot through with traces of other dialects. Furthermore, literary works discussing North African immigrant communities testify to a shift from a reflection on cultural frontiers to a more unstable movement between particularity and relationality. While ‘first-generation’ authors reflect the emphasis on difference proposed in the work of Derrida and Lyotard, Sebbar and various Beur writers hover more uncertainly between exile and cultural or linguistic dialogue. These analyses convey the slippery relation between singularity and collectivity, problematising fixed models and blurring conventional cultural dichotomies. Fictional representation is shown to function as a locus where categories of ‘identity’ and ‘difference’ can be undermined, since its ludic and subjective form escapes the identification of any exemplary cultural position. Table of Contents Abstract 2 Table of Contents 3 Acknowledgements 4 Introduction 5 Chapter One: The Deconstruction of Community 16 1. The Socio-political Context 19 2. Derrida and the Aporia of Democracy 24 3. Nancy and Community’s Empty Frame 34 4. The Language of Community 41 5. The Connection between Theory and Politics 45 Chapter Two: Dialogues with the Singular Other 52 1. Racism and the Exclusion of Difference 53 2. Lyotard’s Theory of the Différend 59 3. Jacques Derrida: Hospitality and the Stranger 68 4. Relational Being in Nancy’s Recent Work 76 Chapter Three: The Identity of the French Language and the Language of French Identity 86 1. Historical Perceptions of the French Language 89 2. Derrida and Monolingual Alterity 95 3. Bilingual Confrontations in the Work of Abdelkebir Khatibi 102 4. Edouard Glissant and the Multilingual Imaginary 112 Chapter Four: Cultural Oppositions in ‘First-Generation’ Immigrant Literature 124 1. Reading Inunigrant Literature Politically 126 2. Solitude and Cultural Division 133 3. Linguistic and Narrative Subversion 144 4. The Possibility of Cultural Interplay 154 Chapter Five: Leila Sehhar between Exile and Polyphony 160 1. Autobiographical Displacements 165 2. Cultural Relations and the Generation Gap 169 3. The Shérazade Trilogy: From Orientalism to Métissage 174 4. The Reconstruction of Memory and the Force of Amnesia 182 Chapter Six: Resistance and Subversion in Beur Literature 190 1. The Trajectory of Beur Culture 193 2. Identity Constructions and Subversive Strategies 202 3. Inventions of Language and Form 215 Conclusion 227 Bibliography 232 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Board for their financial support during the preparation of this thesis. I am deeply indebted to my supervisor, Dr Nicholas Harrison, for his attentive readings of my work, his insightful comments, his extraordinary efficiency and his unfailing support. Thanks are also due to Dr Azzedine Haddour and to Dr Suzanne Raitt for their helpful and perceptive advice on various drafts of the project. Leila Sebbar and Azouz Begag were kind enough to allow me to interview them on matters related to the thesis; I am grateful to them for their thoughts and for their time. I would also like to thank Prof. Timothy Mathews for organising the research seminars, and Dr Francesco Manzini and Jonathan Carr-West for the many thought-provoking discussions on relevant issues. On a more personal note, I am immensely grateful to my family for their love and encouragement, and to Jonny Brown, whose companionship, support and patience have been invaluable. Introduction Je n’aime pas beaucoup le mot de communauté, je ne suis même pas sûr d’aimer la chose.* Aujourd’hui, le caractère général de l’art occidental, ce qu’il partage entre les artistes, c’est l’absence de communauté.^ An increasing mistrust of the very notion of ‘community’ has characterised much recent theoretical and literary writing in French. Towards the end of the eighties and the beginning of the nineties, a spate of texts emerged in which ‘community’ was deconstructed, as writers expressed their loss of faith in many forms of collective framework, drawing attention instead to anomaly, to singularity, and to incommensurability between diverse standpoints. For these writers, community in the traditional sense is created by an illusory, mythical discourse that inevitably fails to take into account differences that remain irreducible. As a result, the collective is seen as an empty signifier that is unable to encapsulate the impossibly fragmented perspectives of which it is apparently comprised. Among those thinkers pronouncing the extinction of community are names such as Nancy, Derrida, Lyotard, Blanchot, Badiou, and the Italian theorist Giorgio Agamben. All these writers in various ways emphasise alterity or difference in order to signal the end of straightforward communal identification. Collective identity is broken down and incommensurable singularities are privileged. Traditional or conventional communities are described as ‘désœuvrée’ or ‘inavouable’, the modem collectivity is renamed the ‘communauté sans communauté’, and conceptions of resemblance and belonging are replaced with gestures of negation and dissemination.^ Nancy, for example, explores the traditional association of community with myth and the impossible quest for innate essences and origins. He then replaces these associations with a reflection on the empty frame of community, perceiving the term as the open signifier of the spacing or coexistence of finite, singular beings. For Agamben, this in turn implies that the experience of belonging is ‘the * Jacques Derrida, ‘Une “folie” doit veiller sur la pensée’.Points de suspension: entretiens choisis et présentés par Elisabeth Weber, (Paris; Gallimard, 1992), 349-375 (p. 366). ^ Edouard Glissant, Soleil de la conscience, (Paris: Gallimard, 1997) p. 75. ^ See Jean-Luc Nancy, La communauté désœuvrée, (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1986) and Maurice Blanchot, La communauté inavouable, (Paris: Minuit, 1983). The phrase ‘communauté sans communauté’ is used by Nancy and also by Derrida in Politiques d ’amitié, (Paris: Galilée, 1994). relation to an empty and indeterminate totality’ / Derrida goes so far as to suggest that the very term ‘le commun’ needs to be abandoned, and democracy is seen as the impossible reunion of irreducibly singular beings. Furthermore, political thinking for writers such as Nancy, Derrida and Badiou must entail a rejection of any all-encompassing, sovereign position and of national, ethnic or cultural essence. Community instead always contains some form of internal difference. I want to analyse these discourses first of all in order to identify their relationship with contemporary socio-political debates in France and with the ways in which community is perceived and experienced today. Theoretical discourses such as these frequently appear abstract, and they have been criticised for their disengagement from contemporary social issues. Writers such as Derrida, Nancy and Lyotard seem to operate on a generalised philosophical level, questioning meanings and models while paying scant attention to particular historical events. But I want to show that these sorts of theory do have the capacity to comment