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Lyotard's Algeria: Experiments in Theory: ANE Iddleston
Lyotard's Algeria: Experiments in Theory: ANE Iddleston
in Theory
JANE HIDDLESTON
Abstract:
This article explores the changing position of Lyotard’s writing on Algeria
within his corpus. The essays gathered together in La Guerre des Algériens: Ecrits
1956–63 (The Algerians’ War: Texts 1956–63), and published much later in
1989, are certainly among his most overtly politically engaged. These pieces
track the progress of the War of Independence from the early signs of unrest
in 1952 to what Lyotard perceives as the divisive effects of FLN ideology
in the aftermath of independence, and the collection as a whole underlines
not only the conflict between coloniser and colonised but also that between
the rural masses and the bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, despite his commitment
to Algerian independence at the time of writing, Lyotard later lamented the
failings of these essays. He also alters his stance on his own use of Marxism,
and condemns his attempts to offer a Marxist revolutionary critique. He
then chose to republish the work in 1989, yet this volte-face testifies to the
author’s ongoing ambivalence towards his own writing on decolonization. At
one moment, Lyotard mocks and undermines his own efforts to understand
and systematize the mechanics of the liberation movement. Yet he then goes
on to suggest that the Algerian conflict exemplifies his later concept of the
‘differend’. This unease both within and towards the volume La Guerre des
Algériens will be the focus of this article. The essays’ eclecticism, and Lyotard’s
own altering response to them, can be understood as an early testimony to
an increasing scepticism towards Marxism in French critical thought, and, at
the same time, towards what Lyotard conceived as dogmatic ‘theory’, in the
context of decolonization in Algeria.
NOTES
1 Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, translated by Iain Hamilton Grant
(London: Continuum, 2004), 112.
2 See Jean-Paul Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, translated by Azzedine
Haddour, Steve Brewer and Terry McWilliams (London: Routledge, 2001),
and Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Constance
Farrington (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967).
3 Jean-François Lyotard, La Guerre des Algériens: Ecrits 1956–1963 (Paris:
Galilée, 1989), 48 (henceforth GA). Translations from this text are my own.
4 See Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought in the Postcolonial World: A Derivative
Discourse (London: Zed Books, 1986).
Lyotard’s Algeria: Experiments in Theory 69
5 See James Mowitt, ‘Algerian Nation: Fanon’s Fetish’, Cultural Critique (1992),
165–86.
6 Frantz Fanon, ‘Pitfalls of National Consciousness’ and ‘On National Culture’
in The Wretched of the Earth. Also, see the essays in A Dying Colonialism,
translated by Haakon Chevalier (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970).
7 See James Williams, Lyotard: Towards a Postmodern Philosophy (Cambridge:
Polity, 1998).
8 See James Williams, Lyotard and the Political (London: Routledge, 2000),19.
9 Stuart Sim, Jean-François Lyotard (Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall, Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1996), 2.
10 See Suzanne Gearhart, ‘Kant in Algeria: Lyotard’s Philosophy of Affect and
La Guerre des Algériens’, Esprit Créateur 39:4 (1999), 101–11.
11 In their brief introduction to Lyotard’s political writings, Keith Crome and
James Williams go so far as to perceive the Algerian essays as paving the way
not only towards anxiety but towards a sort of political nihilism, since they
suggest that: ‘since society can be seen as a multiplicity of shifting wrongs and
claims, the political had to be flexible enough to respond to this variation,
rather than hide it under larger groupings better suited to party politics and
to revolutionary movements allied to new parties and forms of government.
The complex and changing variety of wrongs can never be rectified simply
through revolution, yet they still place a responsibility on us. What are we to
do?’ The Lyotard Reader and Guide, edited by Keith Crome and James Williams
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 171.
12 Jean-François Lyotard, Le Différend (Paris: Minuit, 1983), 9, The Differend:
phrases in dispute, translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1988), xi (henceforth D).
13 John Rachjman, ‘Jean-François Lyotard’s Underground Aesthetics’, October
86 (1998), 3–18 (7).
14 James Williams, Lyotard and the Political, 11–12.
15 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,
translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1986), 5 (henceforth PC).
16 For a more detailed discussion of the problem of performativity in The
Postmodern Condition, see Colin Davis, After Poststructuralism: Reading, Stories
and Theory (London: Routledge, 2004), 72–3.
17 Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming, translated by
Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 100.
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