Patrick Crowley, Memmi and Béji: Decolonization and the place of the ‘human’ within...

IJFS 15 (3&4) pp. 415–433 © Intellect Ltd 2012 415

International Journal of Francophone Studies Volume 15 Numbers 3&4 © 2012 Intellect Ltd

Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ijfs.15.3&4.415_1

KeywordsFrantz FanonAlbert MemmiHélé BéjihumanismdecolonizationTunisia

Memmi and Béji: Decolonization and the place of the ‘human’ within ‘humanism’Patrick Crowley University College Cork

AbstractSince the 1950s and the period of decolonization, intellectuals in the franco-phone world have addressed the legacy of humanism. Frantz Fanon, amongst others, wrote on the possibilities of a new humanism and of ‘new man’ in a decolonized world. This humanism to be constructed, this humanism to come, was faced with the difficulty of how to negotiate the legacy of the European tradition of humanism and the conceptually constructed tension between particularizing experiences deemed proper to cultures outside of Europe and a notion of the universal, which, while an abstraction, was also characteristically French. In examining works by two Tunisian intellectuals – Albert Memmi and Hélé Béji – this article analyses what they try to do with the term ‘human-ism’. It is clear that both intellectuals advocate a better world and an end to human suffering, but their principal weapon – humanism – lacks sharpness and the kind of political edge (dialectical) that characterized Fanon’s notion of ‘new humanism’.

RésuméDepuis les années 1950s et la période de la décolonisation, la réflexion sur l’humanisme se renouvelle chez les intellectuels francophones. Frantz Fanon, parmi d’autres, se donnait à écrire sur la destinée de l’homme, et la possibil-ité d’un nouvel humanisme, d’un ‘homme neuf’, dans un monde décolonisé. Cet humanisme à construire se pose une question au moins: que faire de la tradition de l’humanisme européen et cette tension entre le particulier d’une expérience propre à des cultures hors d’Europe et la notion de l’universel, à la fois abstraite mais, dans un monde francophone, bien française? Or, par le biais de deux intellec-tuels tunisiens – Albert Memmi et Hélé Béji – cet article analyse le mode d’emploi de leur notion de l’humanisme, c’est-à-dire ce qu’ils essaient de faire du terme ‘humanisme’. Ces deux intellectuels luttent pour un monde meilleur, luttent pour mettre fin aux souffrances des gens, mais que leur arme principale – l’humanisme – manque de netteté et n’a pas la vigueur politique (dialectique) qui a caractérisé celle de Fanon.

Mohamed Larbi Ben M’hidi […]: You know, Ali, it’s hard enough to start a revolution, even harder to sustain it, and hardest of all to win it. But it’s only afterwards, once we’ve won, that the real difficulties begin.

La Bataille d’Alger (Pontecorvo, 1966)

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1. For example, M. Halliwell and A. Mousley offer eight categories: Romantic Humanism, Existential Humanism, Dialogic Humanism, Civic Humanism, Spiritual Humanism, Pagan Humanism, Pragmatic Humanism, Technological Humanism (2003). Wilder offers ‘four interrelated meanings of the term humanism’ approaching it from the perspective of epistemology, sociology, ethics and politics (2005: 23)

To evoke ‘the human’ and ‘humanism’ is to invite paradox: both terms initially appear to be semantically stable – we can point to the referent, we can appeal to a tradition – yet they carry such philosophical and historical freight that any definition involves radical selection and genealogical finesse.1 Indeed, the variety of humanisms is such that the term ‘human-ism’ is often employed in such a way as to act as an empty signifier, as a cypher, caught up in a rhetoric that marshals the term for ends that leave it empty of content, sometimes necessarily so. Indeed, it is in examining the rhetorical deployment of humanism that we can acquire a greater purchase on what can be understood as humanism’s function rather than on what humanism is. To evoke the ‘postcolonial human’ brings us from paradox to possible contradiction for it identifies a sub-category of that which is, in principle, a universal category. And yet this tension between a transcendental category and an empirically grounded sub-category is what has animated the thought of writers that have emerged from colo-nial contexts, or who think about the relationship between colonial expe-rience and the universal category of the human that is abstracted from context or history.

This article seeks to examine the function and scope of humanism within a postcolonial frame: that is to say one that is temporally aligned to what comes after the material fact of colonial control. Within this tempo-ral frame is a geographical one. The focus of the article is upon selected essays by two Tunisian intellectuals – Albert Memmi (1920– ) and Hélé Béji (1948– ) – who have written on decolonization and who, directly and indirectly, have engaged with the work of Frantz Fanon (1925–1961). Referencing a number of postcolonial texts by Memmi, but focusing on his critique of Fanon’s humanism (1971), along with Hélé Béji’s essays Désenchantement national: Essai sur la décolonisation (1982), Nous, décolo-nisés (2008a) and Islam Pride (2011), this article looks at how these two Tunisian intellectuals, from different backgrounds, have used the term ‘humanism’ to confront the challenges of postcolonial realities. As Béji’s work has received little attention her use of humanism will be examined in greater detail. Common to the work of both are the difficulties and ambiguities of articulating a humanist discourse in the context of decolonization.

These ambiguities are due, in part, to the legacies of a humanism embedded within France’s mission civilisatrice that was used to justify its colonial project. Gary Wilder points to the paradoxes that emerged in the inter-war period of the 1920s and 1930s, not so as to ‘uncover a contra-diction either between colonial humanism’s universalist claim to respect Africans as equal individuals and its ‘real’ racializing practices, or between its particularist claim to respect African society as a cultural equal and its ‘real’ assimilating practices’ but, he argues, to demonstrate how cultural humanism ‘enabled a (cultural) racism that was simultaneously univer-salizing and particularizing’ (Wilder 2005: 143). These tensions and contradictions between a constructed universal and the lived, particular experiences of the colony were to emerge ever more forcefully in the period of decolonization that began, in French North Africa, in the 1950s.

Fanon spent much of his time in Tunisia between 1957 and 1961, a period that coincided with the first years of Tunisian independence gained


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in 1956, and it was here that he wrote much of Les Damnés de la terre ([1961] 2002). Fanon’s references to humanism in Les Damnés de la terre offer at once a negative critique of French humanism and the affirmation of a humanism to come. His critique can be situated within a context of debates that came to the fore within France between 1920 and 1960. These debates and arguments were symptomatic of the critique of human-ism that occurred prior to the 1960s and that resulted in the ‘collapse of the humanist imagination’ (Geroulanos 2010: 21). The conflict of human-isms and the contemporaneous emergence of antihumanism, analysed and historicized by Geroulanos, irrevocably undermined, though did not – not at all – eradicate the intellectual and political premises upon which humanism had been constructed over a long period within Europe. Geroulanos identifies the chief strands of this humanism with Christian humanism, Renaissance educational humanism (based largely on inter-pretations of ancient Greek models of education) as well as forms of Enlightenment humanism that drew upon the writings of thinkers such as Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, Condorcet and others and which empha-sized human autonomy, political rights and the perfectibility of man and society based on reason (Geroulanos 2011: 19).

Geroulanos analyses this ‘conflict of humanisms’, the persistence of such arguments into the 1960s, as well as the absorption of antihumanist tropes into literature, but concludes that ‘the need for some minimal humanism became necessary throughout the period and came to charac-terize not only philosophy but also a public opinion […] still concerned with problems of social policy, Catholicism, communist violence, colonialism, and so on’ (2011: 306). Colonialism, here tucked in at the end, had, since the beginning of the period examined so acutely by Geroulanos, prompted the sharpest critique of humanism’s manifest hypocrisy when trumpeted by advocates of colonialism. Indeed, Fanon’s remarks come long after those of Alioune Diop, who in the first issue of his journal Présence Africaine criticizes European humanism for its non-extension beyond Europe and Europeans and asks that: ‘Le noir qui brille par son absence dans l’élaboration de la cité moderne, pourra, peu à peu, signifier sa présence en contribuant à la recréation d’un humanisme à la vraie mesure de l’homme’ (1947: 13). Diop was following a line of argu-ment that we can trace to articles in L’Étudiant noir, Le Cri des nègres, Légitime défense and other journals written by Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Gilbert Gratiant and others throughout the late 1920s and 1930s (Wilder 2005). Fanon was immersed in this critique, much of which was written by writers from Martinique (Andrée, Jane and Paulette Nardal, as well as Gratiant and Césaire). However, at stake here was not the tradition that underpinned humanism but the limitations of its appli-cation. Fanon was concerned not simply with the hypocrisy but with the need for a regenerated humanism that would respond to the collapse of colonial dispensations and, critically, challenge the emergence of a postco-lonial ruling elite content to largely reproduce the inherited practices of colonial governance while retaining the scarecrow of the colonizer.

Like Césaire in Discours sur le colonialism (1950), Fanon, in Les Damnés de la terre, points to the disparity between European humanist thought and the practices of European nations: ‘Cette Europe qui jamais ne cesse de


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parler de l’homme, jamais de proclamer qu’elle n’était inquiète que de l’homme, nous savons aujourd’hui de quelles souffrances l’humanité a payé chacune des victoires de son esprit’ ([1961] 2002: 302). Fanon’s conclusion is a call to go beyond imitation. The last line of the book conveys the idealistic inflection of his humanism: ‘Pour l’Europe, pour nous-mêmes et pour l’humanité, camarades, il faut faire peau neuve, développer une pensée neuve, tenter de mettre sur pied un homme neuf’ (Fanon [1961] 2002: 305). Fanon’s humanist project, beyond the foun-dation of the nation, is without detail but could be defined as being in opposition to an exclusive European humanism compounded by intellec-tual disagreements between different strands of humanism and anti-humanism which, for Fanon, increasingly neglected man: ‘Toute la réflexion européenne s’est déroulée dans des lieux de plus en plus déser-tiques, de plus en plus escarpés. On prit ainsi l’habitude d’y rencontrer de moins en moins l’homme’ ([1961] 2002: 303). We could read this sentence as a rejection by Fanon of those forms of anti-humanist thought detailed by Geroulanos above but not to the neglect of Fanon’s insistence that Europe is not to be imitated. Fanon advocates a humanism that would sponsor new forms of inter-human connections and ‘réhumaniser les messages’ ([1961] 2002: 303). Fanon’s emphasis upon new thought, new connections, and a ‘new man’ is empty of content – empty at least of programme – yet the repetition of the ‘new’ acts as signifier of radical change for a collective human good.2 This ‘emptiness’ of programme and potential-to-be need not be thought of as two aspects of humanism that are entirely distinct but as relational possibilities: the emptiness is there to be taken up – or not – in the dialectical working out of something new. Fanon may not be proposing a content but he does advocate a method, a postcolonial working-through that would involve the continuation of revolutionary dialectics. This emphasis upon dialectics would allow a soci-ety to respond to the injuries and legacies of a colonial past and the construction of new social forms. Such a prospective, dialectical and radi-cal humanism would require an active engagement between the intellec-tual and the people. Fanon, to cite Nigel Gibson, ‘emphasizes a dialectical process […] a working through contradictions rather than a static subject/object identity. Because self-consciousness does not come about all at once, the intellectual’s role is to destroy the ideology that characterizes the masses as backward and incapable of governing themselves’ (2003: 199). For Fanon national consciousness was to deepen into an ideology – a new humanism – that would sponsor self-reliance and creativity after inde-pendence and that would counter the formation of new postcolonial polit-ical elites. Both Memmi and Béji were to put humanism to work after independence but without Fanon’s insistence upon dialectical engagement and his grasp of the ideological imperative.

Memmi’s views on the effects of colonialism were similar to those of Fanon. Memmi’s still pertinent and startlingly incisive critique, Portrait du colonisé ([1957] 1985), was an analysis of the objectifying processes of colonialization of which dehumanization was the constitutive feature. Colonized man, argues Memmi, had been dehumanized to the point where he was excluded from the universal condition of ‘Man’ ([1957] 1985: 107). Memmi asks ‘Mais qui est-il? Sûrement pas l’homme en général, porteur

2. On this emptiness of content see Martin Crowley (2009: 98) cited in Jane Hiddleston (2010: 127) who, in addition, emphasizes the importance of the body and the contingency of the moment to Fanon’s humanism.


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des valeurs universelles, communes à tous les hommes. Précisément, il a été exclu de cette universalité, sur le plan du verbe comme au fait’ ([1957] 1985: 148). The human was clearly central to this analysis and Memmi’s conclusion advocated forms of resistance that would not simply be mate-rial but psychological and which would result in the colonized subject becoming ‘un homme comme les autres. Avec tout l’heur et le malheur des hommes, bien sûr, mais enfin un homme libre’ (Memmi [1957] 1985: 164).3 Memmi’s final sentence of the Portrait du colonisé flags a return to the fold of the universal that would not involve a leap from history but rather a carrying forward of the mark of cultural difference and specificity. And it was here, in his projecting forward into a postcolo-nial world, that his work would sharply diverge from Fanon’s view of the ‘human’ after decolonization.

Memmi’s enduring text, Portrait du colonisé, was written in Tunis and Paris between 1955 and 1956. Fanon arrived in Tunis in 1957 the year it was published. We have no record of a meeting between the two anticolo-nial intellectuals but Memmi’s later work makes reference to Fanon’s if only to establish a difference between their views on a decolonized world. Memmi’s most extensive reading of Fanon appears in an article published in L’Esprit titled ‘La Vie impossible de Frantz Fanon’ (1971). Memmi’s arti-cle is iconoclastic throughout but leaves the reader with an image of Fanon that acknowledges him as a romanticized, prophetic figure – an icon, like Che Guevara, for revolutionaries – but whose work was flawed.

Memmi’s central argument links Fanon’s work to what Memmi sees as his psychological make-up. He cites the last line of Les Damnés de la terre – the call for ‘un homme neuf’ – in the opening page of his article and again on page 267. For Memmi this temptation to think in terms of the new is a product of Fanon’s assimilation: his ‘refus de soi’ (1971: 255), his denial of his Martiniquan roots, his rejection of Negritude. Memmi – who in his own work constantly grapples with his Jewish, Tunisian and French heritage – sees in Fanon’s proclamation of ‘un homme neuf’ a denial of human difference through the articulation of a universal. Ironically he observes:

on va s’évertuer à nier toutes les singularités, toutes ces maudites différences, qui font obstacle à la communion entre les hommes, qui vous empêchent, vous, d’être un simple humain parmi les humains: on les fond dans l’universel, que l’on déclare être la seule réalité, et la seule morale.

(Memmi 1971: 264)

Memmi’s view is that one cannot leave the past behind ‘par simple volonté, ni même au nom d’une éthique révolutionnaire’ (1971: 264). He depicts Fanon as moving through different stages of identification: as a French citizen, as an Algerian revolutionary, as an African, as a man, tout court, ‘dans un monde réconcilié’ (Memmi 1971: 264). Memmi critiques Fanon’s analysis of universalism by contrasting it with a view of colonial culture that is always already interiorized and split between French universalism and the particular cultural practices of the colonized region. Where Fanon looked towards a tabula rasa, Memmi sees only a palimpsest of competing texts. For Suzanne Gearhart, Memmi offers an image of the colonized ‘as split by a denial of self, because he has interiorized the law of a colonial

3. I examine in greater detail the conflict of legacies that unsettle Memmi’s work on colonialism and decolonialism elsewhere (Crowley 2009).


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society that rests on the devalorization of indigenous customs’ (1998: 184). As such, for Memmi the mark of the colonial subject is the asymmetrical conflict of cultures that have been interiorized: the colonial on the one side, the religious and the indigenous on the other. And where Fanon advocates a new man whose vécu is to be reforged in the future, Memmi’s work remains grounded in a vécu imbricated with the past and the contra-dictions to which this gives rise in the present. For Memmi, Fanon’s neglect of culutural specificity results in an abstract humanism that is false ‘car, enfin, l’homme universel et la culture universelle sont faits d’hommes particuliers et de cultures particulières’ (1971: 269).

Memmi does recognize that ‘la politique paroxystique de Fanon’ leads to a vision ‘d’une humanité totalement régénérée’ (1971: 272) but the touchstone of his thought always returns to the issue of identity: ‘Ce n’est pas un hasard s’il est promu saint patron par les Black Panthers: pour eux aussi le problème fondamental est probablement celui d’une identité troublée; et la difficulté de se reconstruire un passé et une culture où ils puissent se reconnaître’ (Memmi 1971: 273). Memmi’s reduction of politi-cal activism to ‘une identité troublée’ underscores his privileging of iden-tity over political action. It is clear that Memmi lays great store upon the acknowledgment of difference. However, in Memmi’s later work this question of difference and identity is increasingly subsumed within a view that promotes the universal. Humanism comes to offer Memmi a way of reconciling differences but in a way that brings them to brook within a very French paradigm of the universal that subsumes identities.

Applied to anti-racism, the thrust of Memmi’s argument is that activists should dispute the instrumentalization of difference for racist ends rather than affirming difference through identitarian politics. It is not surprising then that Memmi’s later work comes into conflict with differences linked to gender and multiculturalism. Wilder, in an interview with Memmi, notes that where in the fifties and sixties Memmi pointed to the limits of humanism, by the 1990s he had come to ‘affirm humanism without qualification’ (Wilder 1996: 162). Memmi’s response to Wilder draws attention to the place of the human within his conception of humanism:

I’ve never had reservations about humanism as a philosophy. I have had reservations about the uses of humanism. Humanism, fundamentally, is a philosophy that gives primacy to man. The most important concerns, for the humanist, are the suffering and happiness of man, which is more important than the affairs of groups or the health of various ideologies.

(Wilder 1996: 162)

Here the affective well-being of the human acts as a cornerstone for Memmi’s humanism.4 This emphasis on the happiness of the individual, over and above communitarian affiliation or demands based on gender and ideological position, is at once both utterly republican, in the French sense of the term, and weakly political. In Le Nomade immobile (2000) Memmi again returns to his views on the importance of humanism:

Contre les fanatiques de l’idéal […] je n’oublierai plus jamais qu’il faut défendre l’homme avant tout le reste, avant les idéologies religieuses ou

4. Wilder has no doubt translated Memmi’s use of ‘homme’ as ‘man’ which, traditionally, was the conventional generic term for ‘mankind’ even as it privileged the male gender. However, the translation seems especially apposite in the context of an interview that Wilder notes was ‘punctuated by a number of troubling digressions from Memmi on the subject of feminism’ (Wilder 1996: 162). These digressions form part of the published interview.


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profanes. Son bonheur est l’indice le plus sûr de la réussite d’une philoso-phie, sa souffrance celui de son échec. S’il fallait résumer encore plus, je dirais que j’ai décidé d’être humaniste, laïque et rationaliste: humaniste pour la morale, laïque pour l’organisation sociale, et rationaliste pour la pensée.

(2000: 258–59)

Memmi is drawing upon a very French tradition of humanist thought with its laudable horizon of human justice and happiness. And yet Memmi’s views suggest an uncritical view of the philosophes and the amalgamation of their thought into a single, dominating position that leaves no room for political activism structured upon the affirmation of difference. And the ideological implications are unaddressed: ‘man’ is presented as outside of ideology and so too is Memmi’s position.

Memmi’s emphasis on the ‘suffering’ and ‘happiness’ of the individual corresponds to forms of humanitarianism that first emerged on a global scale in the late eighteenth century. Lynn Festa argues that abolitionists ‘used tropes and figures borrowed from sentimental literature to delineate the parameters of the human. Sentimental texts furnished antislavery writers with the rhetorical tools needed to excite the “humanity” of metro-politan readers toward the suffering of enslaved people in distant climes’ (2010: 3). Festa is alive to the ad hoc nature of sentimentality, its focus on particular examples of suffering rather than on broader principles, and its extension of the idea of the ‘human’ on the basis of suffering and victim-hood. Nonetheless, she draws attention to its power to mobilize public opinion against slavery before concluding that, ‘the answer to the ques-tion “what is a human being?” should only begin with the notion that a human being is “one who is not made to suffer”’ (Festa 2010: 19). Memmi’s humanism has consistently been deployed in defence of those who have been dominated by others (such as his work on racism and anti-semitism in the 1970s and 1980s) but in focusing on the act of domina-tion he has neglected a politics that might envision the happiness of others in terms of the political integration of difference (based on gender, ethnicity or religion) into a wider polity. Or rather the assumption is that these marks of difference, while retained, would be subsumed within universal-istic categories without changing those categories. This pattern of subsumption maintains the hierarchy of universal over particularity. But it also constructs that universal on the basis of a humanism that privileges the individual human over the subject’s specified position in relation to ideology, or as a product of ideology such as gender construction, or race.

Memmi’s espousal of humanism, rationality and laïcité (as cited above) could be read as a form of false consciousness – the result of cultural assimilation that Memmi so brilliantly tracked in the 1950s. Such a read-ing might be harsh yet could be justified by his views on decolonized nations as well as immigrants in France. In Portrait du décolonisé arabo-musulman et de quelques autres he writes that ‘Le fils de l’immigré est ainsi une espèce de zombie, sans attaches profondes avec le sol sur lequel il est né’ (Memmi 2004: 140). In the same work Memmi writes that black citizens in the United States should not look to the excuses of history to explain poverty: ‘Comme les décolonisés, tant que les Noirs ne se seront pas débarassés de ce dolorisme, de ces pseudo-explications, qui sont des


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alibis, ils ne pourront pas analyser correctement leur condition et agir en conséquence’ (2004: 35). Memmi’s projection of false-consciousness seems ironic in the light of his own early work that analysed such formations with acuity. To reduce Memmi to his later work might produce a similar distortion but I do want to highlight Memmi’s neglect of ideology and his assumption of a humanism that is itself ideological.

Memmi’s work places the particularity of human experience within the outlines of human portraits – biographical in Fanon’s case; stereotypical in the case of the migrant and decolonized – that result in a way of contain-ing the tension between particular traits and the category of ‘human’. This tension does not lead to sublation but is held suspended in a form – not unlike a Kantian schema – that reaches towards a humanist universalism. The human in Memmi’s work is both referent (that which thinks, suffers and seeks happiness) and an abstraction (the universal category of the ‘human being’) that is necessarily beyond ethnicity, nationality, gender or sexuality. Memmi’s postcolonial humanism favours the human vécu as that which yields to the abstraction of the citizen. This French version of universalism is evident when he writes that la laïcité ‘est la condition première d’un universalisme véritable, celui qui, sans traquer les singulari-tés, les transcende’ (Memmi 2004: 165). The issue of secular humanism is very much to the fore in contemporary Tunisia but, as with humanism, Memmi, who has lived in France since 1956, gives no critical attention to his version of secularism.5 Thus his desire for an egalitarian world free of poverty and corrupt regimes (Memmi 2004: 162) is undermined by a version of humanist analysis where portraits have become stereotypes in which difference must yield to the Same, and where humanism’s capacity to prompt radical political agency has been replaced by an alibi for reac-tionary, rather than emancipatory, French republicanism.

The primary arena of any such politics remains the nation state. It is in this respect that I want to examine the function of humanism in the work of Béji. Her novels and essays have been largely neglected by scholars working in the area of postcolonial studies. Chris Bongie is one of the few scholars to cite Béji but only in passing. Drawing on Anthony Appiah’s argument about the ‘postoptimist’ African novel and its soured relation-ship with the nation, Bongie writes that ‘Béji’s Désenchantement national (1982) is an exemplary meditation on this loss of commitment and the dilemmas it provokes’ (1998: 150). Béji begins Désenchantement national: Essai sur la décolonisation with a reflection on independence that is read through Fanon’s L’An V de la révolution algérienne (1959) with its call for a ‘pédagogie révolutionnaire’ that would sustain the ideals of the national liberation struggle after independence. Fanon serves as Béji’s measure of the present: ‘Aujourd’hui peut-on renvoyer dos à dos l’univers colonial, méprisé, haï, l’anti-monde décrit par Frantz Fanon, l’anti-histoire, et la nation née de l’indépendance comme métaphore de la régénérescence, alchimie socio-politique de la libération?’ (1982: 13). Béji asks where the revolutionary effervescence has gone and her first chapter, like the conclud-ing chapters, are a reflection on ‘la conscience nationale’ as borrowed from Fanon. Bongie rightly points to Béji’s disillusionment with post-independ-ence nationalism and its ‘ideological corollaries – such as “national culture” and “cultural identity”’ (1998: 150) yet the disenchantment is

5. Pierre Kahn argues that supporters of la laïcité have presented it as a value that has become an end in itself. Against this, he contends that: ‘Elle est un moyen, et un moyen nécessaire, en vue d’une fin qui est la liberté égale pour tous’. By re-affirming laïcité as a means rather than as a value, Kahn seeks to undermine its instrumentalization by the political classes (2007: 36).


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with the confiscation and self-serving instrumentalization of national culture by the state rather than with national consciousness as such. Indeed, true to Fanon’s idea, Béji retains the idea of national conscious-ness as a dynamic attitude not to be conflated with national identity and it is upon this conception of the national that she constructs her critique of the post-independence nation state. She writes ‘La conscience nation-ale et le pouvoir nationaliste ne sont plus sur la même trajectoire historique, même si un discours similaire les confond’ (Béji 1982: 18). Her critique of the consequences of this decoupling borrows too from Memmi’s early work.

In her first chapter Béji remarks that her views on decolonization bring Memmi to mind.6 She writes that she tries to imagine:

un portrait du décolonisé [sic], version révisée du modèle mis au point par Albert Memmi. Mais la créature nationale que je croise n’est pas la dupli-cation du colonisé, une ombre portant le masque fatigué du colonisé. Ce masque a vieilli et derrière son contour abstrait on peut lire le vrai visage, fraîchement meurtri, du citoyen national.

(Béji 1982: 20)

Her Désenchantement national becomes that imagined text, or at least a version that is far superior to the one that Memmi would publish in 2004 and indeed to Béji’s own Nous, décolonisés (2008).

For Béji, the nation, founded upon the primacy of human ties, remains as a horizon to be reached. And humanism is the legitimating ideology to which she appeals. Béji’s humanism is a complex mix of French Enlightenment ideals first tested within the crucible of colonization and the struggle for national liberation and then by the realities of Tunisia’s new nation state: ‘Contre la “terreur” de l’humanisme européen, la conscience nationale interpellait sa différence. Mais dans le discours national, dans l’idéologie nationale, cette voix n’est plus audible’ (1982: 19). Where Fanon had hoped that a revolutionary pedagogy, through the use of radio, would maintain the impetus of the struggle, Béji, 22 years after, remarks how the airwaves have been taken over by the monological voice of the nation state resulting in ‘une nouvelle solidification historique’ (Béji 1982: 19).

Béji’s regret is that the new nation pays lip-service to the people whereas in reality ‘La perte éthique de l’attention à l’humain et au réel nourrit l’excès de la métaphysique de l’identité’ (1982: 124). Cultural identity becomes a state project resulting in an imposed identity, a cara-pace that presents a false image and serves to constrain the construction of a new postcolonial humanity. Béji regrets that forms of civility, toler-ance and care, along with ‘notre âme culturelle’ (1982: 79), which have been a part of everyday life, have not been transposed into state institu-tions. As a consequence, the institutions of the state constitute ‘un système inhumain’ that is indifferent to human suffering and removed from the primary human realities: ‘toute l’organisation nationale se développe parallèlement à lui, en le négligeant ou en le bafouant. Il y a un passage à la rationalisation de sa propre culture qui ne se fait pas. La réserve huma-niste reste là, comme un dieu caché’ (Béji 1982: 79).

6. In biographical terms at least there are striking differences between Memmi and Béji. Memmi was Jewish and grew up in relative poverty in Tunis’s Jewish ghetto. Béji’s family participated in the nationalist movement led by Habib Bourguiba who went on to become Tunisia’s first president (1957–1987). Her father, Mondher Ben Ammar, was a lawyer, received ambassadorial postings in Europe before serving as a minister in Bourguiba’s cabinet until the mid-1970s. Mondher Ben Ammar’s sister, Wassila Bourguiba was Habib Bourguiba’s second wife. I draw attention to this background not to argue that Béji was an intellectual protected by position and connections but as a counterpoint to her criticisms of the system. Nevertheless, she exercises no self-protecting discretion when she writes that

Le 26 janvier 1978 a été la grande cassure entre la population et le gouvernement, le jour de la grève générale organisée par l’Union générale des travailleurs tunisiens. L’armée descendit dans la rue et tira sur des centaines de personnes, des jeunes surtout. Le chiffre réel des morts n’a jamais été rendu public.

(Béji 1982: 102)

In Islam Pride, Béji presents Bourguiba in a more favourable light on the issue


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Béji pursues this divergence between nation state discourse and a humanism grounded in the practices of the everyday. Seeking humanism within practices rather than abstraction, Béji’s concern is that the state manipulation of humanism serves to hide real concerns about the rights and liberties of the citizen: ‘Le nationalisme […] substitue à la personne humaine, dans la dignité de son anonymat, le personnage social ou poli-tique influent. L’inhumanité de la vie nationale consiste dans la person-nalisation excessive de tous les rapports politiques’ (1982: 86). Béji’s contrast between the personalization of power and the degradation of human relations and human rights constitutes her primary critique of Bourguiba’s regime and her concern is to analyse this from a humanist perspective. She names the causes: dehumanizing forms of colonialism, rapid modernization and a statist monopoly on ‘national life’. The combi-nation of all three result in the breaking down of pre-modern societal ties and brings us to one of her rare secondary references: ‘L’échec du nationa-lisme est qu’il n’a pas empêché l’effondrement de la vie sociale et de la culture communautaire, engagé par la colonisation, la destruction de cet “espace commun” des hommes dont parle Hannah Arendt’ (Béji 1982: 125). Béji’s brief allusion to Arendt’s ‘espace commun’ returns nearly 30 years later in her polemic, Islam Pride (2011), which is against not so much the veil as such but against the instrumentalization of the veil by radical Islamists. She writes ‘Au fond, le voile religieux est une image saillante, manifeste de la destruction du lien humain, de l’espace commun dans la société’ (Béji 2011: 121). The reference to the ‘espace commun’ marks the recurring theme of the destruction of ‘human relations’ that is to be found in both Islam Pride and the essay that preceded it Nous, décolonisés (2008). Both these essays call upon the legitimizing discourse of humanism while conveying a nostalgia for a pre-modern ideal of human relations.

Nous, décolonisés is largely a reprise of the themes that featured in Désenchantement national. In many respects the earlier book was stronger in that it made direct citational reference to Fanon’s work and in one of the better chapters examined Habib Bourguiba’s speeches before and after he became president of Tunisia. Untied from Tunisia, Nous, décolonisés, like Memmi’s Portrait du décolonisé arabo-musulman et de quelques autres, presents a portrait, in broad brushstrokes, of the decolonized. Like Memmi’s stere-otypes, Béji’s generalizations are driven by polemical need. On politicians: ‘L’homme décolonisé n’aime pas le terrain; il n’aime pas le fastidieux travail journalier. L’effort lui répugne’ (2008a: 75). The postcolonial critic might question the pithy generalization and the blanket accusation of lazi-ness, but this view might well have been shared by an overwhelming majority of those whose protests and struggles brought down authoritar-ian regimes in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt in 2011.7

Béji, however, does not argue for revolution in Nous, décolonisés but returns us to the regret expressed in Désenchantement national. She begins her essay by recalling the hopes of decolonization which, she contends, had signalled ‘l’annonce de la mort du vieil humanisme et l’avènement du nouveau’ (Béji 2008a: 12). Here the allusion appears to be to Fanon’s ‘nouvel humanisme’ but references to humanism, primarily that of the French eighteenth-century Enlightenment, occur throughout the essay pointing to its inhuman application during the colonial period and its

of the veil and women’s role in Tunisian society.

7. Béji, like Memmi, writes with conviction and often draws upon a vision of ordinary Tunisians. The Tunisian artist and cartoonist Nadia Khiari writes of similar issues – democracy, pluralism, freedom of expression in Willis from Tunis a self-published (February 2011), and very funny, cartoon chronicle of the Tunisian revolution. It has since been followed by Willis from Tunis 2 published by !Yaka Editions! in April 2012. Willis is a hard-living cat who comments on the lives of Tunisians with spicy humour, satire and cultural references that range from Apocalypse Now to the TV series Lost. Willis from Tunis was at first, and continues to be, a Facebook hit http://www.facebook.com/willis.fromtunis. For the background story on Nadia Khiari see video interview posted to the Guardian newspaper http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2012/jul/12/tunisian-cartoonist-nadia-khiari-video, accessed 12 July 2012) and an article that appeared in the online news and commentary site Tunisia-Live http://www.tunisia-live.net/2012/04/28/willis-from-tunis-%E2%80%93-chronicles-of-a-feline-dissident/, accessed 7 July 2012). Khiari, at the time of writing, continues to live in Tunisia and to post cartoons that


http://www.facebook

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/

http://www.tunisia-live.net/2012/04/28/


425Memmi and Béji

potential use as means to critique European hegemony. She’s quick to point to the instrumentalization of ‘les droits de l’homme’ as a means of justifying military intervention when it suits the West (Béji 2008a: 45–49) while at the same time recognizing that those same values (of democracy and human rights) have always, for her, been dissociable from a human-ism (Béji 2008a: 62) that nevertheless remains western: ‘Aucun human-isme non-occidental n’est venu relayer le modèle européen dont nous prétendions incarner la fin’ (Béji 2008a: 89). No new humanism has emerged. In Béji’s view the decolonized parts of the world have contrib-uted nothing new to humanity but instead have cultivated a dogmatic view of cultural identity that has led to the rise of religious dogmatism.

In addition, she argues that decolonization – in the form of the nation state – has facilitated the advancement of an unrestrained modernity: ‘La décolonisation a été un génocide culturel. Elle a tué sa propre richesse anthropologique, défait l’urbanité de ses vieilles villes, nivelé ses forces créa-trices, brimé ses personnalités originales, pourchassé ses esprits libres’ (Béji 2008a: 98). Béji’s contradictory views on culture are worth noting as here the reference to ‘cultural genocide’ suggests that culture – ‘richesse anthro-pologique’ – is good while yet other references suggest that culture is complicit with anti-Enlightenment practices: ‘les droits de l’homme sont des droits naturels, selon la terminologie classique. Ils fondent l’humain en arrachant justement l’homme à ses déterminismes, à ses préjugés culturels. Ils s’imposent dans le retrait de la différence culturelle’ (Béji 2008a: 123). Culture allows for the transmission of good forms of social practices but it also acts as an impediment to the exercise of human rights. This latter view of the human as an abstraction from its cultural and religious matrix draws from French republicanism and at times appears to be used by Béji to chal-lenge both the instrumentalization of cultural identity by the state and the advance of Islamism in Tunisia since the 1980s.8 Béji’s view of the rights of a citizen can here be understood in a broadly Jacobin sense as ‘made up of all those who, whatever their cultural origin or “way of being”, collectively decide to assert (or reassert) the right to self-determination’ (Hallward 2001: 127). However, her work is more strongly influenced by her view of every-day cultural practices as repositories of a common good. This becomes apparent in her work on Islamism and the veil.

The wearing or non-wearing of the veil is part of the cultural and polit-ical struggle between the decolonized state and traditional Islam, and between the contemporary state and Islamism. It has a long history in Tunisia. Lamia Ben Youssef Zayzafoon traces debates on the veil and women’s emancipation in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Tunisia and looks in particular at the evolution of such debates in the work of Tahar al Haddad (1899–1935) and Habib Bourguiba. The former’s social essay Imra’atuna fi al shari’a wa al mujtama/Our Woman in the Shari’a Law and Society (1930) advocated an end to the seclusion of women and argued against the imposition of the veil and against the practice of al jabr/compul-sion to marriage. Many of his positions were taken up by Bourguiba when he came to power in 1957. Zayzafoon, whilst recognizing the liberating aspects of some of the reforms, concludes that: ‘Despite their revolutionary ideas, al Haddad and Bourguiba often tend to reinforce Tunisian women’s roles as wives, mothers, and guardians of Islamic tradition, as assigned to

comment on the rise of new practices of social repression informed by Islamic conservatism.

8. Béji’s view of the state and of Islamism offer, indirectly, a critique of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities ([1983] 2006). In his reflections on the emergence of nationalism Anderson does not consider in any great detail the dynamic persistence of kinship networks and religious practices within, and alongside, post-independence structures. Anderson does not seem to recognize that what a nation state (one that draws upon ties of kinship) and Islamism cab offer are alternative, if often competing, forms of affective community to alienated citizens.


426 Patrick Crowley

them within a patriarchal system’ (2005: 95). Béji’s work can be situated within these debates on colonialism, the formation of the independent nation state and modernity.

Béji’s work is marked by its ambivalence towards modernity and this is clear in her most recent work Islam Pride (2011) in which she confronts the rise of Islamism by challenging the wearing of the veil. Whilst recog-nizing that for some women the veil is a mark of religious choice, Béji, as always framing her argument with reference to humanism, writes that:

La crise du voile, la guerre intestine des femmes, est donc la crise de l’hu-manisme tout entier, qui ne sait plus faire parler le passé avec le présent. Ce n’est pas le passé qui produit des figures barbares, c’est la modernité qui ne sait plus traduire la tradition autrement que dans un langage barbare.

(2011: 123)

Here Béji links the project of modernity and the ideals of humanism, argu-ing that neither have been able to mediate between past practices and the societal transformations brought about by capitalism. And the stakes of the crisis she identifies are played out within a vector composed of women as read through Béji’s views on feminism: ‘La femme sait qu’il n’y a pas de liberté sans lien, que le lien humain est constitutif de sa propre liberté’ (2011: 123. Emphasis in original). As this argument for a circumscribed liberty for women progresses, Béji continues to stress the importance of human ties and adopts a language that alludes to Fanon’s evocation of l’homme nouveau but is also freighted with Fanon’s phallocentricism: ‘[la femme] ‘ne peut plus faire marche arrière, elle est une sorte d’homme nouveau. C’est là que la femme doit se comporter non pas comme une femme qui pleure sur soi, mais comme un homme qui pense pour les autres’ (Béji 2011: 128, original emphasis). So, the new woman needs to be like a new man and to think of others …: old wine but in a peculiar new bottle. At times Islam pride reads like a pamphlet directly addressed at Muslim women and urging them to generate a new humanism that would draw from the European humanism of the eighteenth century in its rejection of the tutelage of religion. Such a humanism, Béji argues, should be founded upon a sense of confidence born of women’s experience yet her evocation of the homme nouveau would seem to undermine the appeal to self-confident agency. Moreover, her appeal to her own vécu comes with its own ideo-logical assumptions that appear to be unexamined even though ideology is itself, and explicitly so, part of the enjeu that engages Béji. She writes:

Dans le féminisme le plus avant-gardiste, il y a cet écho ancien du désir de relations indéfectibles qui ont toujours constitué la force de l’univers fémi-nin. C’est là que le féminisme puise son humanité, et non dans son discours idéologique. C’est dans sa pratique, son vécu joyeux, familiale, affectif, socia-ble qu’il m’est le plus sympathique. J’y retrouve le climat heureux des assem-blées familiales autour de ma grand-mère.

(Béji 2011: 112)

To make the case for human relations is laudable but here, at least, it appears to be suggestive of a nostalgia for forms of matriarchy confined to


427Memmi and Béji

a home where the affective centre may have been the grandmother but where the rules were patriarchal. Feminism has had to battle such forms of ideology that made the constructed appear natural and in this ideologi-cal critique has been central to unmasking ideology. Béji’s appeal to ties based on happy families, and here I am simply paraphrasing Béji, seems to situate her appeal to humanism in terms that return it to normative models (here the heteronormative family) that could just as easily find support within conservative nation state or traditional Islamic views on the family. Béji’s appeal is not to the justificatory principles that inform human rights but to ‘human relations’: a term so vague as to satisfy the rhetoric of state and Islamism.

At this stage it might be helpful to draw a few strands together. In her conclusion to Désenchantement national, Béji claims that the legitimacy of a regime depends upon ‘le pouvoir de communication’ invested in its people (1982: 154–55); the diagnosis of postcolonial malaise in Nous, décolonisés is that while these new nations had ‘entered’ History in claiming inde-pendence, they had not made use of this liberty to create a new human-ism. She writes ‘Cet humanisme second, j’ai beau le chercher, je ne le trouve nulle part’ (Béji 2008a: 208, original emphasis). Yet, in Islam Pride she returns to European humanism in order to add legitimacy, by allusion, to an argument that is rooted in a vision of familial relationships and that suffers from aphorisms such as: ‘Derrière le voile, il y a de l’humain. Mais le voile, lui, est inhumain’ (Béji 2011: 113, original emphasis). One senses that throughout her essays since 1982 the mark of her style, aphorism, is a form of shorthand that captures her thought only too well: the succinct-ness of the synthèse leaves one wanting a closer engagement with, a read-ing of, the thought of others on humanism and its relation to Islam. Moreover, her appeal to humanism, like that of Memmi’s late work, deflects from the political. Béji would appear to subscribe to a view of the democratic nation state ‘as the vehicle of a collective good or universal interest, as distinct from the consolidation of privilege or particularity’ (Hallward 2001: 127) yet the political implications and the justificatory principles, which would serve to support the nation state as a form that would act as both agent and facilitator of the humanist project of emanci-pation, are neglected in favour of an appeal to a jaded notion of humanism – which she defines as ‘la mesure humaine de toute chose’ (Béji 2008a: 152) – and an anthropological good inscribed in past traditions.

There are at least two ways in which one might respond to Béji’s work and the first, initially, is the more tempting. Jean-Luc Nancy, writing on the return to ‘man’ and ‘narrative’ in philosophy and the social sciences in the 1980s, analyses humanism’s role and concludes that ‘L’humanisme est la postulation du sens de l’homme, et ne confère peut-être pas d’autre sens à l’homme que celui de son infinie postulation. En un sens, l’huma-nisme en reste délibérément (volontairement) à la volonté de l’homme’ (1986: 35–36). For Nancy contemporary humanism is a commonplace constituted by terms such as ‘the subject’, ‘liberty’, ‘communication’ (his terms) and which together form transcendental categories that regulate meaning through forms of iteration that are tautological i.e. it is through their repetition that meaning is determined and it is this meaning that reinforces the structure of thought that is humanism. For Nancy this


428 Patrick Crowley

humanism is founded upon will (volonté) rather than the uncertainties of exposure and the senses that he presents as alternative, anti-foundational positions situated at the limit:

Rester exposé, aujourd’hui, à la limite de “l’homme”, de l’“Occident”, de l’“histoire”, de la “philosophie”. Cela n’a rien d’une contemplation béate, c’est un ensemble difficile, complexe, délicat, de décisions, d’actes, de positions, de gestes de pensée et d’écriture. C’est ça qui fait sentir le poids.

(1986: 103)

Béji’s work, in particular Désenchantement national and Islam Pride, seem to offer a perfect illustration for Nancy’s argument. Her critique flags as the loops of the argument are motivated by the repeated refrain of decoloniza-tion’s failure to bring about a new humanism based on the incorporation of tradition into a modern, democratic state. The constant repetition of the term ‘humanism’ as well as the privileging of ‘liberté’ and ‘communication’ without any reflection on their meaning suggests a semantic exhaustion, a making do with the husks of a tradition.

And yet Béji, despite being in a privileged position – an intellectual linked by birth to the Tunisian political elite prior to the Arab Spring – does write from a commitment to realities that she sees and experiences in Tunisia, even if in attenuated form: political authoritarianism, Islamist dogmatism, the degradation of social relations brought about by capital-ism and the attendant uncertainties wrought by the rapid introduction of modernity. Nancy’s critique is, argues Geroulanos, constructed in response to a humanism that ‘postulates a meaning for man and identifies this meaning with the system that produces meaning in the community, with the “we” through which the community speaks’ (Geroulanos 2010: 21. Emphasis in the original). It could be argued that Béji uses terms such as ‘espace commun’ and ‘communication’ not so much to shore up a system of thought but to draw upon humanism’s battered legitimacy to make a case once more for a version of ‘the human’ that is that of the “we” that identifies neither with Islamism nor with a state mired with corruption. If this is a return to the subject then it is in many ways no different to that of the Tunisian rapper El Général whose songs, such as ‘Rais Lebled’ articu-lated popular grievances against political and police corruption and high unemployment and who was arrested in the dying moments of the Ben Ali regime.9 In other words, Béji’s philosophical humanism may be contradic-tory and derivative of a French Enlightenment tradition channelled through Tunisian secular nationalism, but she attempts to put it to use as a resistance against rigid monological formations – whether statist or Islamist.

This is also evident in her in critique of the Union pour la Méditerranée launched by President Sarkozy of France in 2008. Béji makes a brief refer-ence to the Mediterranean in Nous, décolonisés where she notes that once the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989, Europe began to construct a new iron curtain along its southern flank: ‘Les démocraties, celles-là mêmes qui me tancent et me menacent de “redressement” démocratique, sont celles qui me retirent le premier droit humain: la liberté de circuler à ma guise sur la terre’ (2008a: 197). Béji adds that travel had always been

9. Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was Tunisia’s second president from 1987 to 2011. See Vivienne Walt’s article for Time ‘El Général and the Rap Anthem of the Mideast Revolution’ (Time, 15 February 2011) http://www.time.com/time/ world/article/0,8599, 2049456,00.html#ixzz23Eq4btEP. Last consulted 20 May 2012. El Général, like Béji, is from a middleclass background. It raises the old question of representation, of who can speak for the subaltern, in what kinds of contexts. Tahar Ben Jelloun’s récit, Par le feu (Gallimard, 2011) is a fictional recreation of the last days of Mohamed Bouazizi, the street vendor who on set himself on fire, in protest against his treatment by Tunisian police, on 17 December 2010. Many identified this act with the beginning of protests that led to the popular rising in Tunisia.


http://www.time.com/time/

http://www.time.com/time/

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essential to the humanist. These reflections are given greater depth of field in an article that appeared in an issue of Revue des Deux Mondes that focused on the Mediterranean. Here Béji pursues that same link between humanism and travel and cites Montesquieu in an epigraph: ‘Toutes les unions sont fondées sur des besoins mutuels’ (2008b: 110) before restat-ing the link between the control of migration and the colonial legacy as a mark of the continuing asymmetry of power and development that exists between Europe and the nations that lie on the southern coastline of the Mediterranean. She firmly makes the point that the youth of North Africa and the Middle East are prisoners of a difference that restricts travel to Europe. For Béji the antiquity and layered complexity of the Mediterranean – she references the Roman and Punic ruins that remain in Tunisia – have the potential to act as antidotes to Europe’s hegemonic claims and postco-lonial grievances against Europe. She argues that it is to this Mediterranean antiquity that those who live on its shores need to return if ‘humanism’ is to be salvaged.

Béji’s deployment of humanism within debates on culture, religion and the postcolonial suggests an emphasis upon material, lateral, inter-relationships, whereas Memmi’s later work is more vertical, more shaped by his thought on the universal as an organizing paradigm for humanism. Both could be said to be at odds with the thought of postcolo-nial theorists. Iain Chambers, for example, self-identifies as a postcolonial critic. Against western humanism, he writes that the ‘epoch of modernity can be characterized as the epoch of occidental humanism, of a world centred on the continual confirmation of the observing subject’ (Chambers 2001: 2). Chambers advocates a radical post-humanist questioning of formations and practices based on modernity and humanism and ‘in seek-ing to displace the hegemonic ratio, proposes a differing subject, and a diverse ethics of understanding’ (Chambers 2001: 3. Emphasis in the orig-inal). He critiques what he sees as the abstract universalism of western humanism by drawing our attention to what happens when ‘an inherited universalism comes to be located in a precise historical and cultural land-scape’ (Chambers 2001: 3). He provides few examples of non-western intellectuals whose work challenges the presumed abstraction of the (European) universal subject. Yet his claim is that the point of departure for post-humanism comes with an encounter with the ‘[postcolonial] other that refuses to be the other for me’ (Chambers 2001: 26). For Chambers, only through this encounter with the colonial other can the limits of west-ern notions of justice and freedom be rethought. The irony is that if we place the work of Béji and Memmi before Chambers we do indeed have an other that refuses to be the other, and this is so because they wish to further the project of western humanism.

Chambers has developed his positions in stimulating texts that have followed Culture After Humanism (2001), in particular in Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (2008) to remind readers of European humanism’s relationship to the cultures beyond Europe that it has appropriated or othered. Chambers’s version of European (post) humanism is prompted by a concern to look again at forms of humanist discourse that idealized the Roman and Greek world in shaping European thought (2008: 150). His work on the Mediterranean looks to restore the


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Arab and Islamic cultures to a narrative that excluded Europe’s margins and peripheries. And it is this tradition that seems singularly lacking in Béji’s essays: Islamic works from across the centuries, as well as those of her Tunisian contemporaries, are absent.

This is all the more striking given that she is not alone in referencing Tunisia’s past. A number of contemporary thinkers in Tunisia who have aligned themselves, in one way or another, with Islam in Tunisia, are, argues Nadia Marzouki, returning to history. For Marzouki the cultural project ‘promoted by Tunisian Nahdawi leaders today can be described as a historicist, hermeneutical project of cultural reformation’.10 Her examples include Abou Yaareb Marzouki, a professor of Greek, German and Arabic Philosophy who is also an elected member of parliament representing the Islamist party, Nahda,11 and the philosopher Ajmi Lourimi, who is a member of the Executive Bureau of Ennahda and a Levinas scholar. These scholars, writes Nadia Marzouki, are returning to history in an effort to elaborate a Tunisian pathway into an uncertain future and a community to come. That this project might not be dissimi-lar, in form at least, to Bourguiba’s version of national identity is not considered. However, Marzouki’s reference to a hermeneutic turn brings us back to a version of humanism to which Edward Said returned in his late work:

Humanism is the exertion of one’s faculties in language in order to under-stand, reinterpret, and grapple with the products of language in history, other languages and other histories […] humanism is not a way of consolidating what ‘we’ have always known and felt, but rather a means of questioning, upsetting, and reformulating so much of what is presented to us as commodi-fied, packaged, uncontroversial, and uncritically codified certainties.

(2004: 28)

Said’s view of humanism is contingent upon an intentionality that he constructs; an ideal reader who would ‘grapple with the products of language in history’. This idealism might also inform his brief reference to ijtihad (the Arabic term used to denote the effort involved in extracting meaning from a text) and which Said presents as an interpretative tradi-tion within Islamic scholarship (2004: 68–69).12 And while the return to the Mediterranean, the return to history, the return to textual interpretation might well seem to strengthen Nancy’s argument that such returns relate to will rather than exposure, this ‘return’, these forms of ‘return’, are also a reminder that if humanism is a signifier that appears empty, it has a philosophical history that possesses content. It is primarily a hermeneutics that insists upon an encounter with the texts of the past rather than an acceptance of categorical certainties. In that sense, humanism as practice has the potential to expose will to uncertainties.

Both Memmi and Béji use humanism to signify the possibility of alter-natives to racism, to authoritarianism, to dogma. True, for Béji, the trope of ‘humanism’ is never the subject of direct interrogation, as a way of thinking it is taken for granted and is subservient to her articulation of nationalist disenchantment and a prelapsarian view of community. For

10. See Nadia Marzouki’s blog ‘The politics of religious freedom: Nahda’s return to history’ posted on 30 April 2012 ihttp://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2012/04/30/nahdas-return-to-history/. Accessed 10 July 2012.

11. For the background story see http://www.tunisia-live.net/2011/12/01/whos-who-abou-yaareb-marzouki/.

12. The broader context of this hermeneutic tradition – its complexities and its traditions – and its relation to Islamic legal theory is the subject of Robert Gleave’s work in which his focus is on us. ul al-fiqh: literal meaning and literalism (2012).


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Memmi, humanism is contained within universalism, and the struggle between the particular (difference) and the general came, in his late work, to be played out on a vertical plane with the commanding position being that of the universal inflected by its French tradition. Béji’s configura-tions of aphorism and Memmi’s resort to stereotype (in his late work) demonstrate the absence of an active hermeneutics that might promote a critical, dialectical, humanism. It is replaced with a rhetorical, if well-in-tentioned, employment of the term ‘humanism’ which, as a result, appears politically inadequate to the pressures placed upon the ‘human’ by economic devastation and exclusionary religious and authoritarian discourse. In the work of both Béji and Memmi, instead of dialectical thought and ideological reflexivity we find a version of humanist commit-ment marked by contradiction, conservatism and assimilated forms of European thought that are freighted with normative narratives. It is clear that both thinkers see humanism as a potential leverage as they seek a point of purchase in the debates relating to contemporary global, national and religious formations that compound human suffering. Regrettably, the versions of humanism to which they hold seem barely adequate to the task.13

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Suggested citationCrowley, P. (2012), ‘Memmi and Béji: Decolonization and the place of the “human”

within “humanism”’, International Journal of Francophone Studies 15: 3&4, pp. 415–433, doi: 10.1386/ijfs.15.3&4.415_1

Contributor detailsPatrick Crowley teaches literature and cultural studies at University College Cork. His book, Pierre Michon: The Afterlife of Names (2007), examines the place of canonical writers and avant-garde French thinkers in the work of the contem-porary French writer Pierre Michon. He has completed three co-edited volumes: Formless (Peter Lang, 2005); Mediterranean Travels: Self and Other from the Ancient World to Contemporary Society (Legenda, 2011) and Postcolonial Poetics: Genre and Form (Liverpool University Press, 2011). He has written on Assia Djebar, Eugène


http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ijfs.15.3&4.415_1

http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ijfs.15.3&4.415_1

433Memmi and Béji

Fromentin, Albert Memmi, Pierre Michon, Nadir Moknèche, and Kateb Yacine amongst others. At present he is General Editor of the Irish Journal of French Studies and a Government of Ireland Senior Research Fellow awarded for the project ‘Algeria: Nation and transnationalism 1988–2010’.

Contact: Department of French, O’Rahilly Building, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland.E-mail: [email protected]

Patrick Crowley has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.


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