sujet asymptotique et la filiation dans certains écrits d'Abdelkébir Khatibi

Cette étude propose une réflexion sur la figure asymptotique du sujet marginalisé dans certains écrits du romancier et essayiste marocain Abdelkébir Khatibi. Chez l’auteur de La mémoire tatouée, du Livre du sang et d’Amour bilingue, l’écriture témoigne d’une profonde rupture avec la famille et la brutalité de l’enfance. La question de la langue maternelle s’y pose de façon singulièrement marquée, faisant ressortir d’anciennes hiérarchies, et provoque chez l’écrivain une vision lyrique de l’origine perdue. La langue première est marquée par la substitution et l’absence. L’objectif de l’article est d’étudier ce qui, chez Khatibi, détermine ce deuil de l’origine et propulse l’œuvre dans une quête initiatique visant à légitimer la filiation rompue. Abstract This study offers a reflection on the asymptotic figure of the marginalized subject in certain writings of the Moroccan novelist and essayist Abdelkébir Khatibi. For the author of La mémoire tatouée, Le livre du sang, and Amour bilingue, literature testifies to a deep rupture with family and the brutality of childhood. The question of the mother tongue arises in a singularly marked way, bringing out old hierarchies, and provoking in the writer a lyrical vision of a lost origin. The first language is marked by substitution and absence. This article aims to uncover what determines, in Khatibi’s work, this longing for the origin and the attempts at legitimizing the broken filiation.

La bi-langue ou l’(en)jeu de l’écriture bilingue chez Abdelkebir Khatibi

“Quand j ’écris en français, ma langue maternelle se met en retrait: elle s ’écrase. Elle rentre au harem. Qui parle alors? Qui écrit? Mais elle revient (comme on dit). Et je travaille à la faire revenir quand elle me manque” (Khatibi 1978: 49). This statement made by Abdelkebir Khatibi, a Moroccan sociologist, poet and essayist, can clearly be seen in a number of his writings. In this article, we will attempt to examine closely the staging of this inter/trans-cultural experience that the author-narrator designates by a bilangue. Amour bilingue is a text in which romance and autobiography meet providing a suitable example of this peculiar, complex and priviliged situation which prevails in Morocco and on an extended scale, the Maghreb countries. The pro blematic (conceptual order) of bi/multi-lingualism coupled with a di/tri-glossia is treated by Khatibi under a fictional and poetic outlook. The bi-langue is considered by the author-narrated as a “between-two ”, a third language by means of which he succeeded in assuming the coexistence in him of a foreign language (the language of the other which no one still considers as a colonizing language anymore, the instrument of cultural uprooting) and of the mother tongue.

Abdelkébir Khatibi

Abdelkébir Khatibi (1938–2009) is one of the greatest Moroccan thinkers, and one of the most important theorists of both postcolonialism and Islamic culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This book introduces his works to Anglophone readers, tracing his development from the early work on sociology in Morocco to his literary and aesthetic works championing transnationalism and multilingualism. The essays here both offer close analyses of Khatibi’s engagements with a range of issues, from Moroccan politics to Arabic calligraphy and from decolonisation to interculturality, and highlights the important contribution of his thinking to the development of Western postcolonial and modern theory. The book acknowledges the legacy of one of the greatest African thinkers of the last century, and addresses the lack of attention to his work in the field of postcolonial studies. More than a writer, a sociologist or a thinker, Khatibi was a leading figure and an eclectic intellectual whose erudite works can still inform and enrich current reflections on the future of postcolonialism and the development of intercultural and transnational studies. The book also includes translated excerpts from Khatibi’s works, thus offering a multilingual perspective on his writing.

Excerpts from Abdelkébir Khatibi and Jacques Hassoun, Le Même Livre (Paris: Editions de l’Eclat, 1985)

In 1985, the Moroccan writer Abdelkébir Khatibi and the Egyptian Jewish psychoanalyst Jacques Hassoun published an epistolary book, Le même livre (‘The same book’), excerpts of which are translated here for the first time. Playing on the Arabic notion ahl al-kitab, the people of the Book common to Jews, Christians and Muslims, Le même livre centres round the twin figures of the Semite – the Jew and the Arab – as they have been articulated in theological, political and poetic discourses in order to question, and move beyond, the opposition naturalised in the expression ‘Judeo-Arab conflict’. Previewing the dialogue Khatibi would have with another Francophone Jewish exile, Jacques Derrida, in the 1990s, Le même livre is a deconstruction of identity, be it religious, ethnic, cultural or linguistic. Against sameness, Khatibi and Hassoun offer an ‘exercise in alterity’ written in the pages of The Same Book.

Reading Signs and Symbols with Abdelkébir Khatibi

This chapter considers the ways in which Khatibi’s practices of reading contribute to theories of meaning through his thinking on the deciphering of signs and symbols and of making sense of the world, and of the worlds of the text, in their multifaceted forms. It takes as its starting point what Khatibi terms, in his introductory essay ‘Le Cristal du Texte’ in La Bessure du Nom propre, ‘l’intersémiotique’, migrant signs which move between one sign system and another. Khatibi takes as his own project examples from semiotic systems found within Arabic and Islamic cultures, from both popular culture, such as the tattoo, to calligraphy and the language of the Koran, from the body to the text and beyond – including storytelling, mosaics, urban space, textiles. His readings reveal the intersemiotic and polysemic meanings created in the movements of these migrant signs between their sign systems. For Khatibi, this ‘infinity’ of the ‘text’ is linked also to a mobile and migrant identity refracted in the multifaceted surfaces of the crystal (hence the title of the essay – ‘Le Cristal du Texte’) rather than in one reflection as in a mirror. Moving from these concerns of Khatibi with which he develops his radical theory of the sign, of the word and of writing, the chapter goes on to propose new readings of a selection of other writers with a shared, but varied, relationship to their Islamic heritage. These are writers working with and through that heritage – and importantly, as for Khatibi, including the Sufi heritage – and whose writing is also resonant with Khatibi’s intersemiotic theoretical and cultural project concerned with the individual and the collective, the historical and the contemporary, the political, the social and the linguistic.

The ‘Souverainement Orphelin’ of Abdelkébir Khatibi’s Early Writings

One of Morocco’s most important sociologists, and certainly one of the first following Independence, Abdelkébir Khatibi occupied an unusual place in the new, developing discipline of post-colonial sociology. Both a poet and a novelist, Khatibi was also interested in history, philosophy and cultural theory; and this wide-ranging set of interests served him well when, barely thirty, he became editor of the Bulletin économique et social du Maroc. Here began a literary as well as sociological adventure which, little known in his œuvre, took Khatibi from Marx and Gurvitch to Lukacs and Lucien Goldmann. As well as leading research into sociological topics in Morocco and North Africa such as women’s sexuality, young people’s opinions or radical theories of social explanation, Khatibi began a study of the Moroccan class system in a synthetic analysis stretching back to earliest makhzen periods, using Ibn Khaldun, Marx and Durkheim to account for the açabiyya tradition of male lineage in tribal rulers. It is in this context that Khatibi wrote his Tattooed Memory in 1971, his sociology of the post-colonial self.