Algerian Disorders: On Deconstructive Postcolonialism in Cixous and Derrida

Abstract

This article explores Hélène Cixous’s and Jacques Derrida’s explicit revisiting of their Algerian memories, especially in their later work (mainly Reveries of the Wild Woman and Monolingualism of the Other). These texts offer a specifically deconstructive response to the colonial project in Algeria, attempting to think non-appropriative relations to otherness and processes of identification that exceed a self/other binary. Investigating the colonial principle that manifested itself in Algeria from the vantage point of their Judeo-Franco-Maghrebian situatedness, they derive from this position not accounts of cultural particularity, but analyses of (and alternatives to) colonial practices of identification: analyzing colonial and identity politics as harmful to a fundamental relationality to otherness and affirming a “spectral” zone without belonging that nonetheless carves out a life with, toward, and of the other, on the others’ sides, relational without being oblivious of antagonisms and violence.