É DOUARD GLISSANT ENTRE DERRIDA ET KHATIBI*

Boniface Mongo-Mboussa

From 23 to 25 April 1992, É douard Glissant and David Wills organizing a conference at the
University of Louisiana State in the United States. Jacques Derrida is present. It delivers a
communication, which became one of his most famous texts: monolingualism of the other.

This essay Derrida offers the opportunity to dialogue with his friend, Abdelkebir Khatibi, a
theme that haunts him: the mother tongue. At Khatibi claiming not without some assurance
bilingualism, Derrida opposes the singular experience of Jewish Algeria, became French
after the Cremieux decree, and stripped of his citizenship in 1942, before covering the
latest:

Abdelkebir Khatibi, he speaks of his "mother tongue". No doubt it is not French, but he
speaks. He speaks in another language. The French, in fact. It is this public confidence. He
published his speech in our language [...]. This contrasts. Smooth and probably almost in
silence, but decides. The edge of the feature sets just the story I tell the tale that I tell the
story I am here representing the witness, others would too quickly complainant. [...] While a
bad day my mother to me, in the last years of his life, became aphasic and amnesic as well
then she seemed to have forgotten my name, it was not "illiterate" no doubt. But unlike the
tradition in which Khatibi was born, my mother herself did not speak more than me, I
suggested above, a language we could say "full native" (1).

Despite his friendship despite their affinity Khatibi intellectual Jacques Derrida here seems
closer than Glissant Khatibi, about their relationship to the French language. Because,
although Creole is the mother tongue of virtually Martinique, Glissant has the absolute one
language, and it is not his: French. Hence the desire in him to "write in front of all the
world's languages." Desire, like an echo that meets the definition of elliptic deconstruction
proposed by Jacques Derrida, "more than one language." Where, on the contrary, the
presence of monolingualism threshold of this extract Other Speech Caribbean Glissant:

The authoritarian intervention and prestigious of the French language only reinforces the
lack of process. Claim this appropriate language through a critical review of the French
language. [...] This revision could participate in what could be called an anti-humanism,
insofar as the domesticage the French language works through a mechanism of "humanism"
(2).

Moreover, historical experience trauma experienced by Jacques Derrida at the time of

removal of the nationality under the Vichy government, through an across monolingualism
of the other and overlap to some extent (and only some extent) the experience, she also
unique unsustainable swerve of Africans to the Americas, mentioned by Edouard Glissant in
his Poetics of Relation. From this experience, it appears, according to Glissant, in that there
were three kinds of the Americas "peuplants." The armed migrant or migrant founder that
apart up the river on his boat with his weapons, the migrant household, that comes with his
family, oven, family photos, and finally the migrant naked slave, dispossessed of all, starting
with the language. For the latter, only the sea and the hold of the slave ship are real places of
memory and history. This is what distinguishes the experience of Glissant of Derrida and of
course that of Khatibi, insofar as Derrida and Khatibi are the eyes of the Caribbean É douard
Glissant, the son of the Mediterranean. That is to say, heirs "of a sea which concentrates
which, in ancient Greek, Hebrew and Latin, and later in the emerging Islamic thought has
imposed a" (3) . These differences do not exclude some points of convergence between
these writers. First, the spectrum of Sartre. Lorsqu'Abdelkebir Khatibi, Jacques Derrida and
literature come É douard Glissant, Jean-Paul Sartre is a reference capital. First novelist to
fulfill its desire of philosophy and literature, Sartre dominates the scene and French
intellectual world. However, the status of literary Proteus, Khatibi and Glissant Derrida
dream of accomplishing. Jacques Derrida is certainly a philosopher, but he remains in his
treatment of language writer. In the French intellectual field, if the novelist and playwright
theorist É douard Glissant is Emeritus relationship, we often forget to indicate he remains a
poet. About Khatibi, itself defined as a specialist language:

My specialty is language and language is the great question of man. My specialty is to

explore places of language or show me any questions, or structures, not just thought but
societal power. Through language, we can go very far in the knowledge of man. My area is
not of an academic discipline, as it no longer works for me for a long time, my specialty is to
explore the scene of the language, and I do not want to give any name to this exploration (4).

Or novelist or sociologist or philosopher, but master of language. His models Blanchot,

Mallarmé, Nietzsche, are eloquent in this regard. It is here that rises again, the imperial
figure of Sartre. If our three writers were captivated by the author of Nausea polygraph as a
writer, they parallel written against him, since, precisely what unites them is some concern
about the language. However, Jean Paul Sartre, although it was sensitive to the writings of
poets (Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Aimé Césaire) proposed a fundamentally apoétique
reading (5), very different from that of Hö lderlin and Rilke to Heidegger or by Quevedo
Marina Zambrano (6). This is because his literary project and design of the literature
summarizing the unveiling of the world.

The temptation of center

The second focal point is the relationship of these writers in the center. The concept of
center / periphery been scholarly economics, particularly the Franco-Egyptian Samir Amin
(7). But it is also relevant in the literary field. The World in Republic of Letters, Pascale
Casanova shows how Paris has long been the Greenwich World of literary modernity.
Several writers, and not least, have recognized. In the nineteenth century, Americans (North
and South) came in literary pilgrimage to Paris. Just read Paris is a feast of Ernest
Hemingway, Gertrude Stein's autobiography, testing Humphrey Carpenter (8) or the
testimony of Mario Vargas Llosa (9), Julio Cortá zar (10), Octavio Paz ( 11) ... From the
nineteenth century to the sixties, Paris was the capital of legitimisation and literary
consecration. It was in Paris that Faulkner was revealed by Sartre, Camus, and Malraux
Coindreau Maurice Edgar, his translator, it was in Paris that Borges has become, thanks to
Roger Caillois, before being celebrated in Latin America and Spain.

In the case of our three writers, Paris is the center for more than a title. This is the political
capital, economic, historical, mythical. But for each of them, this relationship differs center.

Become his own ethnologist: É douard Glissant

Lorsqu'É douard Glissant published in 1956 his essay, poem, Sun of consciousness, it is to be
seen as its own ethnologist. However, as an ethnologist ask oneself is immediately disqualify
any speech center, insofar as anthropology, it is precisely this false science generous, which
defines the Other from a center. Sun of consciousness is primarily a test thinking otherness
from the landscape, the landscape puisqu'É douard Glissant opposes the earthquake, which
he calls "the landscape irrué" than the pre and expensive to source Ernst-Robert Curtius
(12). He wrote:

We hate ethnography: whenever, ending Moreover, it does not fertilize the vow dramatic
relationship. Mistrust him we dedicate ourselves not from the displeasure of being watched,
but the obscure resentment of not seeing our turn. (13)

All É douard Glissant is already there. Sun of consciousness, which is a meditation on the
poet's encounter with the French landscape is a way of thinking about the relationship at
the center. During this first meeting, É douard Glissant finds that the landscape it is both
familiar and foreign. Close, because he is French after all and therefore has a certain culture
of French geography; distant landscape because it does not speak to him as he would talk to
a Norman or a Bordeaux. This shock opens his eyes on his antillanité. This leads him to
invest History. However, by reading the philosophers who are interested in this discipline,
Slippery soon realize that he has been relegated to the periphery of world history by Hegel
(14). Where African philosophers live this negation as an injustice, and spend a crazy
energy to repair (15), É douard Glissant console and Hegel faces obliquely. Based on Deleuze
and Guattari, Segalen and Leiris, he opposes the supposedly universal vision of history,
Rhizome, the Divers, Opacity and especially Relation. This rejection systems will,
throughout his life, his trademark. From a strictly literary, it leads to a radical subversion of
established genres. His poetry is meditative philosophy in verse, as it can meet in some texts
Mohammed Iqbal (16), his philosophical essays are designed as travelogues and long
poems. Glissantienne thought, which is an ode to the brotherhood, similar in some respects
to those of Derrida and Levinas (two thoughts of the other, but two speeches opacity) can be
read by the fragment and the radiance. In any case, his writings are hybrid texts in which
the "theoretical discourse alternates with socio-economic considerations as well as poems."
(17). As in the novel, the release of All-World was to Glissant's farewell to the novel, in that it
subverts until satiety. All this work has a range of anthropological manifesto challenging the
universal through the detour by opposing the Misc.

Derrida and "nostalgeria"

Jacques Derrida's relationship to the center is complex, multifaceted than that of É douard
Glissant. It is a relationship of inside / outside. As Martinican poet, Jacques Derrida is
certainly a French writer, but it remains Algeria. It is the argument of monolingualism of the
other. And this is not an intellectual spin. The origin of this identification with Algeria, there
is a wound: Derrida has never recovered from his "nostalgeria" to resume his formula. In an
article entitled "Autobiography and Jewishness in Jacques Derrida," Régine Robin evokes an
emotional scene, in which Derrida at a roundtable in Quebec in 1979, speaks in these terms
to French psychoanalyst François Peraldi, Quebecers face stunned: "If I am not mistaken,
none of the subjects who are at this table has French as their mother tongue, except perhaps
the two of us, and again, you are French, I do not. I come from Algeria "(18) Later, he
elucidate its intention:

Everything else for a small French for France, Metropolitan Elsewhere was both a fortress
and a different place. Since the irreplaceable location of this mythical there, he had to try, in
vain, of course, measure the distance or proximity infinite immeasurable home but invisible
radiant we arrived the paradigms of distinction, correction, elegance, the literary language
or oratory. The language of the metropolis was the mother tongue, the truth substitute
language (is there ever anything else?) As the language of the other. (19)

This situation inside / outside overlaps found in many Caribbean stories, and therefore in
Glissant. This feeling of being both French and non-French, Jacques Derrida has felt all his
life. He said the unloved French academic institution, and despite its international
reputation (20). Despite the Sorbonne where he was assistant to Paul Ricoeur, despite the
É cole Normale Supérieure in the Rue d'Ulm, where he was a "caiman", Derrida remained on
the margins of French universities. Marginality which is partly explained by the status of his
philosophical writing, which is in intimate companionship with literature, while viscerally
opposed to French classicism. Unlike Foucault or Gilles Deleuze, two philosophers but also
two literary, them, write in a language crystal, Jacques Derrida, he is like a jazz musician to
shake the language in a melee with permanent syntax. This struggle with the language,
which leads to deconstruction, originates in its problematic relationship to the Centre.
Which will lead Abdelkebir Khatibi to read deconstruction as a decolonization. Beyond its
autobiographical dimension, monolingualism of the Other "explicitly involved a
deconstruction of language as property and probably like home." (21) This further
accentuates the marginalization of the author. However, this leads to marginal status, as
reported by Marc Crepon well with a triple cut. Better, for a triple absence. Lack of access to
the Arabic language, the absence of an idiom within the Jewish community. Absence of a
total identification with the French language, which was, after all, the language from the
other side of the Mediterranean. Hence the famous phrase in the form of aphorism and
witticism that punctuates monolingualism of the Other: "I have only one language. And it's
not mine.". What is at stake here, the assumption behind the deconstruction of language as
the property of a people, it is hollow, a critique of nationalism in one country (France)
where all national ideologies, as has shown very well E. R Curtius, are developed by writers
and especially by top designers (22). It will be recalled that the injunction to rooting Barres,
André Gide had opposed, not without malice, the right to wander: "His father was a uzétien,
he wrote, and a mother Norman where do you want, Mr. Barres, I rooted? I therefore
decided to travel "(23). Monolingualism Derrida, who wants some respects a tribute to the
French language, is a plea for hospitality (24). To a certain extent, monolingualism of the
Other is a story of loneliness. This is ultimately one of theses beautiful book Peter Sloterdijk:
Derrida, an Egyptian. (25).

Derrida in Khatibi

The relationship between the periphery and the center, if it is not meditated, transfigured by
the writer device can lead to a cultural provincialism and a parroting outdated literary
laughable (26). However, Abdelkebir Khatibi, who hated literature "to underdeveloped"
escapes this defect. He enters a literary autobiography that "demobilize the story," famous
dialogue East / West deconstructs the genre by turning their backs on the autobiography as
confession and juxtaposes three speeches in his narrative: the narrative, reflexive and
poetic. Compared to other autobiographies of contemporary Maghrebian literature, as Son
of poor or Mouloud Ferraoun For Bread Alone by Mohamed Choukri, literary modernity
Memory Khatibi tattooed is brilliant. And this desire to locate Khatibi always appears in a
dialogical perspective in his essay, Figures abroad in French literature (1987), which is not a
literary study imagological, as was written in the years seventy and eighty (27), but a
meditation on the relationship with the Other. Already, the title focuses on the figure and not
the image. In doing so, Khatibi moves the issue on the aesthetics and ethics rather than on
ideological analysis of stereotypes from the center to the periphery. Figures from abroad
shows how some French writers transform their travels in the outskirts of initiation quests.
This leads them to reveal themselves. An extreme example is that of Segalen, who discovers
the Miscellaneous Orient. The various segalenien, which is also at the heart of the theory of
Relation glissantienne will be pondered by Abdelkebir Khatibi. Exegetes of Khatibi, who
scrutinize Figures from abroad, usually linger on the analysis of Genet's Prisoner of Love
(probably because it is among other issues of Palestine) or the study Khatibi dedicated to
Roland Barthes, and underestimate the test of Aragon Khatibi, especially his commentary
Fou d'Elsa. However, this reflection on courtly love in Aragon is crucial for Khatibi: it
embodies in his eyes this dialog East / West Maghreb claimed in plural. Dialogue that takes
its meaning here, because Aragon is the action of his collection in Grenada last battles of
Islam against the Catholic Monarchs. And "the form of his book, which alternates so virtuoso
passages of prose and free verse poems more or less long, to verse, with poems and rhymes
to count reflects his assimilation of Arabic poetry "(28)
What is interesting in this imaginary exchange Khatibi / Aragon is that Khatibi lead to
rehabilitate an old French word, "aimance" which reappears strongly in some pages of his
correspondence with Ghita El Khayat (29). This dialogical thought, he later called thought-
another Khatibi called all his vows in the Maghreb itself, where it reiterates its Greco-Roman
and Judeo-Christian. Moreover, it cuts the work of É douard Glissant on the relationship, or
that of Jacques Derrida on deconstruction. Here's qu'Abdelkebir Khatibi wrote about this in
The Scribe and his shadow:

Nietzsche is my initiator thinking pluralistic perspectival, always at work. Jacques Derrida in

his wake. Since the seventies, I tried to find a significant relationship between the
"deconstruction" and "decolonization", especially near a historical situation (he was born in
Algeria and grew up eighteen) encouraged a desire to revolt, but a revolt thought and
argued against a past we suffered. [...] During my research, dialogue with the thought of
another, I kept building a programmatic thinking ahead. Make the empty, it is a step forward
for healthy before building a thought-another. (30)

If the child appears to Derrida, claimed the relationship É douard Glissant is underground. It
is present throughout this desire for both writers to be, in their own way, ethnologist
himself and it is reflected in their commitment to Segalen, the inventor of Various, manifests
itself in terms of speech by the use of the fragment, this back-and-forth between fiction,
essays and poetry, he is also reflected by the willingness of the two authors of each act in his
place while thinking with the world, according to the formula of É douard Glissant. Basically,
that constantly tell us in their respective approaches to these three thinkers Other Thought-
through, deconstruction and the relationship, it is precisely this: not the universal language,
to resume again Sliding a nice formula and therefore should cease to be confused with
Eurocentrism.

To the Whole World

This new humanism, Khatibi summoned in all his works from his autobiography Memory
tattooed, where he invites the reader to decolonize "identity and difference crazy" through
the Maghreb plural where back to back Frantz Fanon and Europe to better celebrate what
he called universalism polycentric

Geopolitically, in the vicinity Arab-European may be born the new Mediterranean space
where, utopia, each partner contribute its share of humanity and civilization. Yet will he
build this space on the laws of hospitality should, beyond utilitarianism their way to a
polycentric universalism. (31)
For its part, É douard Glissant opens his mind (in the poetic Intent) with opacity (we do not
have to understand the Other to live with him) and ends with the Whole World, as a
eponymous essay, where all mankind, however small it may be, should be, according to him,
taken into account. As for Jacques Derrida, Marie-Louise Malet better than anyone, I think
he defined deconstruction. Here is what she wrote:

One could say, for example, that "deconstruction," far from what has sometimes been
accused of being a destructive thought is instead of opening a practice, she works to unlock
fixed on the basis constructions that are more respondents, open to the future, to make
them more hospitable to what is coming to the event. Deconstruction, "this is what
happens," he liked to say. Or, deconstruction is "more than one language." (32)

This idea of "more than one language" has resonances in É douard Glissant, which means "to
write in the face of all the world's languages," when Abdelkebir Khatibi is defined himself as
a professional abroad.
Boniface Mongo-Mboussa

1. Jacques Derrida. Monolingualism of the Other, Paris, Galilee, 1996, p. 63-65.

2. Ibid. ibid, p. 12.
3. É douard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, Paris, Gallimard, 1990, p. 46.
4. Interview quoted in the work of Abdelkébir Khatibi, Rabat, Marsam, 1997, p. 26.
5. In this regard, read the foreword by Yves Bonnefoy testing of Gaëtan Picon, 1863: Birth of
modern painting, Paris, Gallimard, coll. Folio, 1996, Annie Lebrun, Sun shot off, Jean Michel
Place, 1995 and Octavio Paz, Laughing and Penance, trans. from the Spanish by Claude
Esteban and Jean Claude Masson, Paris, Gallimard, 1983.
6. Maria Zambrano, Philosophy and Poetry, trans. from the Spanish by Ancet Jacques, Paris,
José Corti, 2003.
7. Samir Amin, The Disconnect. To exit the global system, Paris, La Découverte, 1986.
8. Humphrey Carpenter, the appointment of Genii: American writers in Paris in the twenties,
trans. of English by Jean Claude Lullien, Paris, Aubier, 1987.
9. Albert Bensoussan, Claude Couffon and Dodi Gegou Interview with Mario Vargas Llosa,
Land of Mist, 2003.
10. Julio Cortá zar, Interview with Omar Prego, Paris, Gallimard, coll. Folio.
11. Octavio Paz, Route, trans. from the Spanish by Jean Claude Mason, Paris, Gallimard,
1996.
12. E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. from the German by
John Bréjoux, Paris, Presses Pocket, 1991.
13. É douard Glissant, Poetic Intention, poetic II, Paris, Gallimard, 1997, p. 128.
14. On this subject, read: Hegel, Reason in History, Paris, 10/18, 1965.
15. Read Benedict Okonda Okolo, Hegel and Africa. Theses, reviews and overruns, pref.
Bernard Stevens, Paris, Le Cercle hermeneutics Editor, 2010.
16. On Iqbal, read Abdennour Bidar, Islam face the death of God, Paris, François Bourin
Publisher, 2010.
17. Jean-Xavier Ridon, The trip to the mirror, test a few attempts reinvention of travel in the
twentieth century, Paris, Kime Edition, 2002, p. 125.
18. Régine Robin, quoted by Evelyne Crossman in "Belonging, according to Derrida," in 52
Rue Descartes, PUF, 2006, p. 7
19. Jacques Derrida, op.cit, p. 74.
20. On this plan, read the excellent biography that devotes Benoit Peeters, Derrida, Paris,
Flammarion, 2010.
21. Marc Crepon. "What we're asking these languages: around the monolingualism of the
Other", in Political, No. 2.2001, p. 30.
22. E. R. Curtius. Essays on France, trans. from German by J. Benoist-Méchin, Paris, Editions
of dawn.
23. André Gide, pretexts. Reflections on some points of the literature and morality, Paris,
Mercure de France,
24. Read about it, Marie-Louise Mallet, "A thought of hospitality", in Derrida in Algiers,
Paris / Algiers, Actes Sud / Barzak, 2008
25. Peter Sloterdijk, Derrida, An Egyptian.
26. On this issue, read Antonio Candido, the front and back. Testing literature and sociology,
trans. Portuguese (Brazil) by J. Thiéricot, Paris, Métailié, 1995. Read especially the last
chapter entitled "Literature and underdevelopment."
27. Léon-Fanoudh Sieffer, The Myth of the negro and black Africa in French literature from
1800 to the Second World War, Paris, Klincksieck 1968; Alloula Malek, The Colonial Harem,
Séguier, 2001.
28. Martine Broda, Love the name. Test lyricism and the lyrical love Paris, José Corti, 1997, p.
157.
29. Ghita El Khayat, Abdlkébir Khatibi, open Correspondence, Rabat, Marsam, 2005.
30. Abdelkébir Khatibi, The Scribe and his shadow, Paris, La Difference, 2008, p. 61-62.
31. Abdelkebir Khatibi, Complete Works: Essays III, Paris, La Difference, 2008, p. 339.
32. Marie-Louise Mallet, "A thought of hospitality", Op.

* Revised version of a speech in May 2010 at the University of Meknes at the conference
"thinking and strategies of hybrid Khatibi"